There's a dance party in a club behind that dollar theater. It came from 1987 and it won't leave until you get too drunk to no longer feel the groove.

Also, they made the album while on LSD on a strange island off the coast of England's collection of exiled failures.

score:

 

 

A circus is happening in your dreams. It is haunting, unnerving, and uncomfortably comfortable. Colors flash by on the dark canvas of your mind. How did this happen? It will all be gone when you wake up.

score:

 

 

Someone apparently thought combining urban culture with ancient Japan, despite being completely different and anachronistic in almost every way imaginable, was a cool idea. They were wrong.

Mugen: Hi, I'm the protagonist of this show, and all I ever do is start fights with random people and kick their asses using my stupid breakdancing sword style, then brag about how awesome I am. Needless to say, you're going to be fucking sick of me by the end of the second episode. Also, the director apparently has a huge boner for Spike Spiegel, because I look exactly like him and even have the same voice actor.
Jin: I have no personality whatsoever. Despite this, I am the other protagonist. We must fight for no reason.

The battles are slow, drawn-out and animated at a constant 3 frames per second, which they desperately try to cover up by wobbling the camera all over the place during them. But even if they were decently animated and lacked the cheap Braveheart shaky-cam effect, they'd still be boring because they all center around the two most forgettable heroes in any anime, ever, and you simply don't care who wins or loses. Their fight gets interrupted when some ugly bastard burns down the building they're fighting in (for no adequately-explained reason) and they get blamed for it.

Fu: I decide to rescue them because nobody else will help me in my quest to find my father. Then all I have to do is find something to bitch about every single time I'm on camera, and I'm set! Oh, and you two aren't allowed to kill each other until this happens.
Mugen: You do realize we're just going to throw down anyway the second you turn your back, right?

At least one episode steals a script from Cowboy Bebop practically line for line, but aside from that absolutely nothing happens for most of the rest of the show; it's all just bland filler that has fuck-all to do with finding Fu's dad. To try and offset this, the show paints the protagonists as some important, unwritten figures in history to make them seem more interesting.

Spoony: I hope they only impact they ever have on history is as a textbook example of how NOT to write interesting characters.

As the show goes on, it only gets stupider and stupider. One episode features baseball. Yes, baseball. A game that wouldn't take form as we know it until the early nineteenth century, which this show is set roughly two hundred years before. And they're playing against a team of bad American stereotypes a century before America was even founded. Wow.

Another features guys beatboxing into a sword hilt and impromptu rapping.

Spoony: He's beatboxing into a fucking sword hilt. Beatboxing. Sword hilt. Why? Why would anyone, in the history of the world, ever beatbox into a fucking SWORD HILT? Seriously. I cannot begin to even articulate how completely and utterly stupid this all is. I can't even explain why I'm still watching it; it's so god damned boring and doesn't have a single unique idea or interesting character in it anywhere. Even the battles are about as exciting as watching bread grow mold.

On with the show. More coma-inducing fights ensue with a guy wielding a six-shot revolver (who gets built up as some enormous badass, only to get wasted in less than thirty seconds) and every stereotypical villain from every swordsman hero movie you've ever seen anywhere. It quickly becomes apparent that the only original fighting style in the entire show is Mugen's combination of break dance and ape spasm.

Spoony: The worst combination of anything since a lousy Tim Allen sitcom and the Super Nintendo, I might add.

The last episode comes, and the crew, realizing that they spent the entire budget writing and animating filler while drinking heavily, have little choice but to hamfistedly resolve everything in the last fifteen minutes of the last episode. Fu finds her dad, he dies, Jin and Jerkoff duke it out, their swords break, they collapse on top of each other like the end of Rocky II. They both mumble about how they didn't want to kill each other anyway, then go their seperate ways. Hooray for another lame-assed, copout ending that doesn't satisfy on any level.

Spoony: If only Spike's obnoxious clone had died, this show may have had one redeeming factor. Two if it was a horrible, gory demise. Forget this crap.

 

 

I'd say "Transformers" was the only decent toy/cartoon/movie franchise, but even that's been systematically ruined with one terrible remake after another.

Kiyo: Grr angst angst angst, I am a child genius who became an asshole because everyone made fun of me in middle school.
Zatch: I come out of nowhere with a pair of boxer shorts clumsily Photoshopped onto myself! Somehow this is a huge source of contention for the show's fans, which would seem to indicate that they are all pedophiles!
Kiyo: Who the fuck are you?
Zatch: Gash Zatch Bell. I'm a mighty demon even though I look like some kind of retarded wooden puppet, am named after slang for female genetalia and wear a dress. Here, have this book that lets me shoot lightning out of my mouth when you say some magic words.
Kiyo: What kind of worthless demon has to get some random kid to activate all his powers for him?
Zatch: Every demon on the show, of course.
Kiyo: Great. They could have made this show halfway entertaining by just writing out all the human characters that never do anything but stand around and shout magic words back and forth, but no, of course not.
Zatch: Oh yeah, there's about a billion other stupid-looking demons with slightly different powers running around too, and we have to kill them all so I can become the demon king.
Kiyo: Oh, so it's another formulaic collect-them-all anime that's little more than a vehicle to sell toys and merchandise.
Zatch: Pretty much.

Within the span of two episodes the entire "angry teen" characterization is forgotten and the show turns into another villain-of-the-week anime where every single battle is exactly the same. Then, once everyone is tired of the coterminous storyline and toy sales fall off, it gets canceled without even a proper conclusion and ten more worthless copycat shows take its place. Fucking lame.

 

 

Well holy dog shit, Vinic's finally started to program the site again after nine months of sitting on his thumbs and playing shitty browser games. Hooray! Have a Nutshell for another unflushed Square Enix turd to celebrate.

"Combining elements of Eastern and Western RPGs" shouldn't mean that you're just recycling the worst and most boring cliches from TWO sources instead of just one.

The setting is a world that looks extremely similar to Final Fantasy XII; in fact, it looks like they just transplanted almost every character model and texture straight from that game without even bothering to make any improvements for the Xbox 360 hardware. The only thing that doesn't look like it's copied straight from a Playstation 2 game is the menu text, which like every Xbox RPG in existence is so small that it's barely readable.*

*I'm sure it's crystal clear on an HDTV, but come on, I don't have a thousand bucks to burn. Besides, is it really that hard to increase FONT SIZE? This is the most basic of low-level game programming here, guys - if you make a text-heavy game, make the text fucking READABLE.

The game immediately takes a page from the Hero's Book of Generic Motives and has the protagonist's sister get kidnapped by monsters. But that's not enough, oh no - he also has a magical Plot Coupon Amulet that unleashes cataclysmic superpowers whenever the story writes itself into a corner, which it invariably will. Many times. As Plot Coupon's first act, it glows and vaporizes all of Rush's assailants sans the one that has his sister trapped (of course).

Spoony: And it's all done with shiny aurora effects surrounding spheres of light. That sort of thing was visually impressive back when Final Fantasy X was released, but it's 2009 and glitter isn't fashionable anymore. Maybe you should focus more on your character modeling and less on graphical gimmicks; giving them more than one facial expression and mouth movement with a wider range than a hand puppet's would be a good start. I mean, when online-only first person shooters have more believable facial expressions than the cast of an emotionally-driven console RPG, that doesn't speak very well for you.

Some unspecified amount of time later, Rush stumbles upon a battlefield, where we're treated to our first glimpse of the game's underwhelming combat: riddled with excessive load times, graphical errors and a bunch of mechanics that ultimately have little to no effect on the overall strategy (or lack thereof). I suppose they justify it by saying that it's meant to mimic a bad PC RPG from the mid 90s running on an underpowered computer.

Thinking he sees his sister down there for some reason, he charges right into the middle of the fight, somehow never losing an arm or an eye in the process. Hooray for the plot shield!

It seems everyone associated with Square is only capable of thinking in cliches, because one side of the war unleashes a cacaclysmic superweapon that sends the hero plummeting into a dungeon of some description. Despite the distance of the fall and the fact that he lands facefirst on solid rock, he manages to sustain no noticable damage.

Spoony: Didn't Final Fantasy III open with a scene just like this too? And IV? And Secret of Mana? And Secret of Evermore? And VI? And VII? And IX? And X? And Blue Dragon? And Lost Odyssey?

The collapse is also a clumsy excuse to introduce a new party member; this time around, it's a really bitchy female knight. Pointless bickering ensues, wherein Rush is accused of being a spy (because, of course, all spies run headlong into the thick of combat with no weapons while being as conspicuous as possible). We also quickly discover that even the dialog scenes have background textures appearing and vanishing at random intervals.

Spoony: No, really, what is with all of this pop-in? I'm having flashbacks to time spent trying to play Deus Ex on my crappy old Pentium 166 with the software renderer and no sound card support. It ended... badly.

A rescue party comes down moments later. It's established that Rush is the son of two prominent scientists researching Remnants, and because of that the Marquis offers his help in seeking his sister. Upon hearing this, Rush completely breaks character to hop around and giggle like an eight year old. Yes, really. Nothing says "compelling" like a war epic starring a tragic hero who acts like a kid in a candy store. And Square fans, after sitting through all of Final Fantasy 8's dialog and now witnessing this scene, still have the nerve to bash Disgaea for being too "immature and silly"; simply amazing.

Marquis Dickhead: Behold, the generic quest list!
Spoony: Oh, fuck you. Quest list RPGs are an outdated relic from the fucking Apple II era.
Marquis Dickhead: That's the point, this game combines EASTERN and WESTERN RPG elements!
Spoony: ...Fine, fine. If you're going to replace story flow with a chore list, can you at least tell me what ones advance the plot and what ones are just meaningless busywork?
Marquis Dickhead: Of course not. That would be doing something innovative and convenient to the player, and we're clearly trying to avoid that.
Spoony: Another throwback to the days of archaic and clumsy interfaces, I suppose.
Marquis Dickhead: Of course.
Spoony: *Sigh* Fine, I'll just grab a few at random and hope that something - anything - within them convinces me that this game wasn't a complete waste of money.

A few quests are played. It quickly becomes apparent that the battles we witnessed weren't trimmed-down versions for the sake of early game demonstration; you quite literally spend three seconds choosing what moves to use and then the next three minutes watching them animate. You have almost no interaction with every single battle in the entire game.

Spoony: I knew Square loved having monster summons and limit breaks be excessively long, noninteractive movies, but every turn? That is simply unacceptable. Especially when there's this much load time and graphic pop-in between EVERY SINGLE CAMERA CUT.

At the very least the quests don't take fucking ages to finish, because while battles drag on for way too long, the dungeons are quite short. Still, it's only a matter of time and a lot of effort wasted on dead end quests before you get bored of it and desperately wish for a game where you know you're making some kind of actual progress.

Spoony: Okay Square, I've had enough. I liked Final Fantasy XII because it was completely unlike the last few games in the series. I liked The World Ends With You because it had a unique graphical style, original gameplay and several interesting characterizations; again, unlike pretty much everything else you've made in the last decade. So why in the hell would you come back to cliched, mediocre dreck like this? Was that bold new direction just your moving van's pit stop on the road to Blandville? Or do you think you can just live forever off your "cutting edge" graphics? I've got news for you, boys; they're not impressive anymore now that games like Bayonetta, Bioshock and Resident Evil 5 are out. Hell, even Muramasa: The Demon Blade has a fresher and more appealing visual style, and that's on the Wii. The Wii!

So how about this: If you must insist on making nothing but forgettable shovelware from this point on, at the very least you should optimize it for the platform you're releasing it on. There's absolutely no excuse for all of this popup and load time in an Xbox 360 game when games like Dead Rising could have hundreds of autonomous enemies onscreen at a time without even any slowdown. If a few college-age dorks on the Internet can make an emulator for the PSP that runs Nintendo 64 games almost flawlessly, there's no reason why you, with your vast programming staff and inside knowledge on the system and its hardware, can't get a Playstation 1 game running properly. I shudder to think of how badly the Xbox port of Final Fantasy XIII is going to operate; I won't be paying a dime to find out, by the way.

---

Spoony had planned to trade the game toward the Phantom Brave remake on the Wii, but unfortunately it was delayed at the time. So instead it was put toward Devil Survivor, a game which, within its first hour, manages to present a believable, detailed cast of characters, a story whose every element isn't recycled from a dozen better games, and a unique spin on the standard grid-based tactical combat system. It also doesn't take three full minutes for each combat turn to complete and graphics don't randomly drop in and out during every single camera cut; imagine that!

 

 

Bearholk
A 3-foot wide mass of knotty fur sporting a multitude of wet, goopy eyeballs atop four nasty bug-legs tall enough to bring it up to eye-level, so you just cant look over the thing and pretend its not the grossest thing ever as you throw a Molotov at it. Hanging from under its hair and eyeballs is a jawless mouth that contorts and flops around like a black leathery tentacle. Its bite is harmless, but once the mouth touches something edible it begins to pour out approximately a bucket-full of nasty smelling digestive fluids. While not acidic enough to cause any permanent damage under normal circumstances, Bearholks do hunt in packs of about 4 to 12 and approximately 3 could overwhelm an Adventurer and drown him in bugpuke.

Also comes in Polar, Grizzly, and Circus varieties.

Froggum
A race of exceedingly annoying frog men that nest in three to six foot deep holes that they dig wherever they damn well please. When possible, they will steal garden hoses and use them to fill their pits with water. They stand about four feet tall and wear ratty human-made clothing, purchased from garage sales whenever they can afford it. They fiercely defend their pits when anything comes too close, but mostly just ask questions and follow you around when you encounter them outside of their territory.
They have been known to use small weapons and makeshift armor, but these are usually rusty pieces of shit due to being stored in a mud pit.
Froggums often breed in their pits before leaving for a new one, with the potential of breeding up to a hundred more Froggums. This can be prevented by pissing in the Froggum hole.

Rumblesnake
A species of rattlesnake whose rattles contain compressed lead filings, so heavy that when it shakes its tail, it causes a small earthquake in the immediate area. When its target is off-balance, it then springs out and "punches" them. Adventurers hit by this "punch" have all claimed to see a gigantic fist coming at them like a rocket and terrible nightmares of soaring through the air as their faces swell up. The Rumblesnake's bite is nearly fatal, but it never bites its targets because it considers that cheating. In the case that you DO get bit by a Rumblesnake, the only cure is to kill the snake that bit you.


Silverback Cougar
Imagine the speed , piercing roar and tearing bite of a cougar, but in the terrifying muscular frame of a silverback gorilla, complete with hands that can grab and tear off limbs. Silverback Cougars, unlike their close relatives the common Tree Gorilla, live primarily to beat the living piss out of everything they meet. They are not to be fucked with. Even if you manage to hold off the assault from its tree-trunk arms, you have the snarling face of a pissed cougar snapping at your neck as it slowly overpowers you.

Sub-Ops Groundhogs
Highly skilled groundhogs that work as a group to quickly dig tunnels underneath threats and erupt from the dirt to kick off-guard adventurers in the head. They live underground, and also are hoggers, so watch any valuables you happen to set down on the ground. They wear tiny little army helmets and speak this hilarious little rodent version of combat orders to one another. Despite their appearance they can and chances are will kick your ass and send you packing. They prefer not to kill their targets, because they know that living with the shame of being pushed around by a handful of furballs is more than enough to keep most adventurers away.

Sub-Ops Groundhog Captains are also highly skilled in hand-to-hand combat, disarms, and submission holds.

Pine Goblins
Tiny little men coated in pine sap and needles, they attack their prey by jumping on them and slowing them to a crawl by turning the sap in to amber almost instantly. When their victim is completely encased in amber, they drink its blood by driving a syrup tap into the victim's leg.
Pine goblins also mark their property by coating it in their sap. In their society, anything not caked in gunk is up for grabs, and this means anything. Some adventurers have awoken from camping at night to find that every square inch of their tent had been claimed by one pine goblin. These stories are also accompanied by the same goblin attempting to lay claim to the campfire

 

 

While it's not the worst anime ever, it's arguably the most boring!

Ichigo: Hi, I'm Ichigo, for reasons that are never really elaborated on I have the power to see ghosts, which are apparently huge retarded-looking things with two mouths and gaping holes in their chests.
Rukia: I conveniently show up and let you turn into a ghost, then give you a comically oversized sword so you can kill the stupid-looking bad guys. Also, somehow you can wield the thing like a katana or a rapier even though it's taller than you are and looks to weigh hundreds of pounds.
Ichigo: I'm pretty damn strong for a fifteen year old, apparently.
Rukia: You're fifteen? You look and sound at least thirty, dude.
Ichigo: Okay, I'm really thirty, but I go to high school just to cover up the fact that I have no friends, no job and still live with my dad.
Rukia: Ah. So you're connecting with the show's target audience.

Retarded lion thing: I'm some kind of stuffed animal or something that takes possession of your body while you're fucking around as a spirit. Apparently I'm supposed to be the comic relief character with a big important role to play later on, but no one cares because I'm obnoxious as hell.
Orihime: I'm here too. Oh, hi, the only reason anyone watches this show is because of me. Mostly because I'm a ditzy airhead and I have bigger tits than Tifa.

A few boring villains-of-the-week are defeated.

Rukia: Random drama injection! I've violated some sort of law by making you a Soul Reaper and now I'm going on the chopping block for it. And just to milk the gravity of this situation a little further, my executioner is apparently also my brother.
Ichigo: Just like in a million other animes, this bit of family politics conveniently causes me to immediately change from an unwilling anti-hero into a stern and righteous fighter! Now we must fight!
Asshole Brother: You cannot stop me, for my power level spiritual pressure is greater than yours!
Ichigo: So souls are like helium tanks or something? You just have to compress them and then you get weird superpowers?

The fight is over in one blow. Of course.

Ichigo: Ow.
Asshole Brother: Now instead of doing the smart thing and finishing you off while you're completely helpless (or at the very least giving you an injury you won't be able to recover from in time to stop me), I'll just leave you here.
Lame supporting characters nobody cares about: As some kind of ridiculous formality, they wait two weeks before actually killing criminals in the Soul Society. In anime terms, this is enough time to not only train you enough to put you on even footing with the big bad guy, but to establish a whole bunch of other stupid subplots that will come up sporadically throughout the next several seasons and eventually become the focus of an entire one, potentially dragging out this show forever.
Ichigo: Great, I guess...

The training commences. Within the span of about five episodes Ichigo becomes powerful enough to singlehandedly conquer all of the Soul Society's strongest soldiers, who are all swordsmen that rely on a single gimmick to keep their enemy off guard. Of course, none seem to realize that by EXPLAINING OUT EVERY SINGLE ATTACK THEY USE they're telling the hero exactly how to defeat them.

Asshole Brother: Behold my big wall of swords!
Ichigo: GRR, my only defense is doing the exact same charge-and-slash attack while yelling a lot over and over again! Yet somehow I'm still beating you.
Asshole Brother: Wait! We have to stretch out our remaining animation budget over the course of fourteen episodes by stopping and discuss our every thought and action in painstaking detail every five minutes.
Ichigo: Couldn't we just copy notes from Evangelion by avoiding any real conclusion and closing the series with a collage of crappy scribbles and still frames from previous episodes?
Asshole Brother: Of course not. That would just be stupid.
Ichigo: Can't be much worse than what's to come on THIS show.
Asshole Brother: Touche.

Two hundred frames of animation are successfully dragged out over three and a half months of airtime.

Asshole Brother: You win. Rukia is free to go.
Ichigo: Finally. Let's get out of here, if I see one more swordsman with a gimmicky fighting style I'm going to puke.

Typical boring filler episodes ensue.

Forgettable Villain: I AM THREATENING THE SOUL SOCIETY, DARE YOU STOP ME?
Ichigo: Grr, I must stop him even though they spent the entire last season trying to kill me! Boring array of heroes, assemble!
Mr. Plasticarm: I punch stuff and mumble a lot. Yeah, that's pretty much all I ever do. Deal with it.
Cocky Jerk: I have a sword that splits apart and flexes like a whip, an idea which was clearly NOT stolen from Soul Calibur. Also it seems to randomly quintuple in size.
Furry Magnet: I turn into a cat. As in a housecat. It's about as useful as it sounds.
Orihime: Apparently I somehow gained the power to manipulate reality. In other words, I'm the ultimate lazy plot device; I can pull another power out of my ass any time the story calls for it!
White-haired swordsman: I'm even more bland than the guy who punches things. Hell, I can't even remember what my superpower was.
Jugs: I have the exact same abilities as White-haired swordsman, only my tits are hanging out all the time.

The show has officially become Dragonball Z at this point, only instead of cutting to the supporting cast prattling on about nothing every five minutes, it cuts to another fight every five minutes. Only not really because every "fight" just consists of trading blows for a few seconds followed by twenty minutes of idle chatter, ending anticlimactically when the hero spots a minute flaw in their attack pattern and exploits it for a quick victory.

Forgettable Villain: Beware, for I actually stand a chance against Ichigo!

Digging more notes out of the Book of Cliches, Ichigo gets bloodied up for a while, then the villain does something stupid (like stabbing his ally in the back) that gives the hero the exact push he needs to win. Even then, though, it's never exciting to watch because they always cop out with an offscreen clash of swords or both characters vanishing into a ball of light with the hero invariably emerging the winner. Then, of course, the fact that he's brutally injured and his clothes have been torn to shreds are always forgotten in the next scene, where he's walking around in a clean new suit and showing no sign of pain or injury.

One or two episodes pass without event before another array of forgettable villains shows up and more boring fights/filler talk ensue. Rinse and repeat for eleven more goddamn seasons and counting, the character designs getting progressively more and more stupid until they're literally fighting talking shoulder pads and a guy with a lava lamp for a head. I am not making this shit up.

 

 

I tried writing a full review for this game FOUR times, people. Four times. And I couldn't because every time I tried I would go "fuck this I just wanna play the fucking thing". So here's a quickhit.

You just moved in and the graveyard across the street is constantly pouring zombies into your lawn that want to eat your brains. Plant special anti-zombie plants in your lawn to blow their heads off. It's tower defense where your success relies more on the strategy and placement of your towers (plants i guess) rather than how many you can plunk down to make a gigantic maze. with fifty campaign mode levels, two minigames with ten levels each (including endless modes for both), and two difficulty levels of survival mode for each of the game's five areas means you get a whole lotta game for ten bucks.

score:

 

 

While lacking in imagination, devoid of a single memorable character or scene and having less plot - and yet paradoxically more more plot holes - than Valkyrie Profile, at least the writers can say "hey, we didn't make Wolf's Rain."

The setting is a devastated wasteland presumably near Japan, which apparently got leveled by a meteor. Instead of helping to rebuild, though, the government pretty much just closed the place off and let the surviving inhabitants fend for themselves. What a nice bunch of guys.

Useless Girl: Where is Kazuma? He said he was going to work today.
Kazuma: Doo de do, I'm driving around the wasteland looking for random people to fight instead of doing anything useful to help rebuild my homeland.
Generic Rival: ROAR Fight!
Kazuma: SUMMON METAL FIST ARMOR! Oh yeah, everybody in this show has the power to create weird robots out of rainbows. Kind of like Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, only they all look like preschool toys and their powers are all incredibly lame.
Generic Rival: SUMMON BIG FUCKING ROBOT!

Kazuma easily wins the fight since his last bullet attack invariably destroys anything he fires it at. Kind of makes you wonder why he even bothers using the first two.

Ryuho: I am from HOLY, a group that wants to conquer this wasteland for reasons I never really bothered to ask. I'm here just to fuck your shit up with my one-eyed, armless mannequin thing. No, really.


Only Bleach has worse character designs than this show

Ditz: I just tag along with this asshole so I can cheer him on. And yes, Spoony didn't even bother remembering my name because I have no personality at all.

After kicking Kazuma's ass, they simply leave, only to send their pitifully weak flunkies after him for the next few episodes, including a guy who fights with metal balls that give people headaches and a mind control villain, which are always boring because the hero invariably breaks free of their powers by the end of the episode anyway. It becomes painfully clear after five or six episodes of this crap that they were just throwing in filler to meet a 26-episode quota.

Kazuma: Grr, I must become stronger! To the Forest of Fucked Up Things!
Star Platinum Ripoff: EEEUUUUUAAAAAA
Kazuma: I punched a hole in you and tore a chunk out of your spine, which apparently didn't kill you but did give me a crazy propellor on my back and spikes coming out of my face. Now eat shit, Ryuho!
Ryuho: Hahaha, you fool. Much like Dragonball Z, I too can pull a more powerful Alter form out of my ass any time the plot calls for it! Mannequin, become Retarded Snake Beast!

Big explosion occurs and they get lost in a rainbow.

HOLY: Hahaha, we are now free to conquer the wasteland now that Kazuma is gone!
Ryuho: I am now back without any explanation, and don't expect one because I've lost my memories. Now I'm going to kick your ass with my barehands and without using my Alter. Yes, HOLY really sucks THAT MUCH without me.
HOLY: The irony!

In the very next episode his memories return; despite this, he does not return to HOLY, making it look like he went turncoat for little to no reason at all. But it's okay, see, because HOLY is really run by this corrupt asshole who wants to steal the power of Alter and rule the world, and his Alter conveniently allows him to steal other peoples' Alters... gee, we've only seen that in about fifty to a hundred other works of fiction!

(But all that said, It's still pretty stupid because that fact never seemed to bother Ryuho until RIGHT NOW)

Elsewhere...

Emo Girl: I must fight you to save my brother, lame mermaid powers GO!

Kazuma seems to be at a major disadvantage, at least until Emo Girl learns her brother's already dead and commits suicide over it.

Kazuma: GRRRRRR, even though I barely knew her and she tried and nearly succeeded to murder me, I am hell-bent on avenging her death!
Asshole: I was the one who put her up to this! And no, you can't kill me, we still have to drag this out for about ten more episodes.
Kazuma: Even though you're protected by the Plot Shield, I'm going to attack you anyway! GRRRRRR!

Needless to say, it doesn't work. A few more fights with lame villains ensue on both ends of the story, most of them recycled from previous episodes.

Asshole: I have kidnapped Useless Girl, because she apparently has some incredibly powerful Alter ability, which invariably means she can either see the future or travel time! Are you bad enough dudes to rescue her?
Kazuma and Ryuho: Apparently, yes!

They go to his big tower of doom, where they confront even more recycled villains. Hooray.

Star Platinum Ripoff: BWWWOOOOOO
Ryuho: My god... I remember now... YOU KILLED MY PARENTS!
Kazuma: So the most uninteresting, generic villain in the entire show is ironically the only one with any real role in the story?
Ryuho: Yes, and now I must fight it!

Ryuho gets his shit ruined, mostly because he's retarded and sent in his weak-ass mannequin to do the fighting instead of its powered up form.

Ditz: Oh shit. Now I have to sacrifice my life to heal you to full and give you another Dragonball Z Powerup.

Yet another pointless character death ensues. Throw one more in as Kazuma angrily blasts Generic Rival off a cliff to his doom after six consecutive episodes screaming and bitching about how much he hates the guy, then gets all teary-eyed about it.

Boss-man: RYUHO, WE MUST FIGHT NOW. ONE-ARMED TURD GO!

Even though Ryudo's reached Super Saiyan 3 his Alter's ultimate form, Boss-man is able to fend him off, at least until it becomes apparent that his alter makes him age about ten years every time the camera cuts back to him; within five minutes he's over 130 years old... and dead.

Boss-man: Worst... Alter... ever...

They go on to confront Asshole himself.

Asshole: Check it out, I use light attacks with one hand and darkness attacks with another, which is another unique concept that totally hasn't been done a million times already!

In spite of his complete and utter blandness, they're at his mercy until Useless Girl manages to escape his control without any real explanation.

Asshole: BEHOLD, I AM NOW A GIANT TUMOR WITH 400 ARMS!
Kazuma: Oh, fuck off already, you lame-shit douchebag.

Kazuma's metal arm expands into a giant tacky suit of metal armor and he reduces Asshole to a fine paste with one punch

Kazuma: Well, now that that's over, there's only one thing left for us to do.
Ryuho: Have a horribly brutal battle with one another that encompasses the entire final episode even though we're on the same side now?
Kazuma: Yep.

They do just that; the ending is one gigantic copout since it doesn't show who actually wins the fight. Oh, and the "ruined land vs HOLY" plotline that the whole series is based around doesn't get resolved either.

Kazuma: ...Wait a minute, what the hell does s-CRY-ed mean anyway?
Ryuho: In the original manga it was the word of power that allowed an Alter to reach its highest form. Funny, though, it never really came up in the anime adapation, did it?
Kazuma: Nope. Nice job omitting a major plot element that's in the damned title of the series, guys. That's like leaving Naruto out of the anime adaptation of Naruto!

Another crappy Bandai anime comes to a close, and the viewer is left with nothing to think about and no feeling of satisfaction. Big surprise.

 

 

Yeah its trying to do this new thing with being all 70's grit but when it comes down to it, this game makes a weakass effort to warrant being a console game. i wouldnt spend more than 50 cents on this bitch, being an arcade game and all. I reccomend only renting this game if you are in a dollar-a-night situation, and even then only if you could bring it back later that evening and get fifty cents back.

Buying is for suckers.

Three middle fingers out of five.
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