Retronauts - 563: Fist of the North Star

Episode Date: October 2, 2023

YOU WA SHOCK! Diamond Feit, Kurt Kalata, & Brian Clark combine their strength for an overview of the manga/anime/game franchise Fist of the North Star. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This Week in Retronauts, you want to know how I got these seven scars? 563, and today we're talking about another mega topic, a topic that is actually larger than video games, although don't worry, we'll talk about some video games, because we're here to talk about Fist of the North Star, aka Hokhton Okken, aka Big Dipper Punch. You call what you want to call it, but you can call me Diamond Fight, because that's my name, I'm living in the 80s, and I've got two guests today with me to talk about the Holy Church of Hokka Shinkan. Let's start, actually, I don't really know where anyone actually lived.

So we'll start with the East Coast of the United States. Yes, Kurt Kalata from Hardcore Gaming 101. I write a lot about old video games, including Fiss and North Star. Excellent. And I know you've been on our program many times before. Welcome back. And somewhere in the central time zone. Hello, everyone.

It's tough boy Brian Clark from One Million Power. I also write about video game stuff, translate video game stuff, including some Fiss of the North Star stuff a while ago on One Million Power.com. That is excellent. And one million power. That's a good website name for someone who talks with a fist on our server because this is a very powerful media property. This is about, let's be honest, mostly men and they're incredibly muscular and they're very, very strong. And when they punch each other, things happen to the earth. You know, it's not just about punching someone and you knock a tooth loose. You know, these are men who punch each other and buildings fall down. That's the kind of property we're talking about today. But before we get into the who's and the what's and the hows, I'd like to know the whys and the whens. First of all, I want you to tell me, please, when did you discover the ways of the Fist of the North Star? Brian, I think this is probably your first time back in the longest time. So why don't you start off and tell us about your first taste of the Fist? Sure, sure.

So my first taste, and this is probably a fairly common story, I would assume, of people my age. I encountered the streamlined pictures dub of the film, which I'm sure we'll talk about later. I was extremely confused by it. I haven't actually revisited that film since, so I'm not sure if the film is just confusing or if the age at which I watched it, which was my late teens, I just wasn't somehow capable of understanding it, but like I sort of set down the property for years and then kind of of later in the 2000s, I decided to just go through and watch the TV series, and I absolutely fell in love with it consuming it that way.

You know, Brian, I'm going to say a little bit of both. You know, I think it's probably like it's when you see that movie at a certain age, you're confused, but also the movies, you know, as we, as we're going to discuss, the movie's compacting a gigantic storyline down to just 110 minutes, so some edits are going to be a little confusing. That sounds fair. Kurt, how about yourself? So I accidentally sort of became a fan of it when I was five years old. Wow. What an accident. Indirectly. So this is about 1986 or so. I had a cousin who gave me a Sega Master System, and one of the games there was Black Belt, which was my favorite of the bunch. And that game just blew my mind because you were a karate dude and you would

punch characters, and they would just explode and shatter across the screen. And there were these cool boss fights where you did these just incredible super attacks that just pummel them, you know, way off into oblivion. I mean, it was cool enough that it made me want to take karate lessons, which I was bad at because I accidentally punched another kid in the face and made him cry and didn't go back. Well, at least he didn't explode. So you're, yeah, at least he didn't explode. Or was it disappointing that he didn't explode? Yeah, I was like, I didn't understand why karate wasn't this cool. But anyway, it wasn't until 15 years later.

where I learned that this was actually a conversion of a Hokkonokinokin game for the Mark 3. And I just, you know, they did the same thing with that Genesis game last battle. I guess they didn't have the license or they didn't know what it was at the time. So they just changed the characters. And it was basically the same thing. But it wasn't until like maybe 2005 or 2006 when the PS2 game came out, the support of the arcade game made by the guys who made Guilty Gear. And, you know, I was really into the import stuff.

So, you know, I saw the characters and watched the intro and like, this is just incredibly cool. And it wasn't a bad time to sort of learn about it because here in North America, Fisland North Star has kind of had a rough time with the manga coming out. Yeah. Because I think Viz came out with the version and they only got so far before it got canceled. The second one was a company called Gutsune and they were actually colorizing all of it. And that was how I first started reading in. They only got like seven or eight volumes into it before it got canceled also. So that was kind of my limited exposure for a long time until a couple of years ago where Viz, I'm pretty sure, tried again.

And now they've almost got through all the first arc in these nice 10 hardback volumes. So that's mostly how I've experienced it outside of some of the other games and occasionally watching some of the anime. Excellent. I had a similar road in that I did play, I played that Genesis game, which we'll get to later, but I played that game and I was sort of intrigued by what was happening, even though it was rather difficult, and we never really got very far in that game. But then a couple of years later, you know, as Brian said, I saw the streamlined dub movie, and this was one of the first anime things I ever saw, you know, not the first, but definitely

like the first, I'm going to say amongst like the first five things I saw, you know, from from that time, and it was just, it was just mind-blowing. Like, I couldn't believe it, especially, you know, in the early 90s, you know, American animation was improving from the 80s. Like, you know, we had a rough time in the 80s where everything was a toy commercial, and it was all cheaply produced, and it kind of looked like crap. And in the 90s, cartoons started to get a lot better, you know, like, you know, Tiny Tunes and Animaniacs.

You can talk about the jokes, maybe the jokes don't hold up, but the production of those cartoons was, you know, light years ahead of what was going. on even just five years earlier. So, but I was still used to a very, you know, safe, family-friendly animation. So to see this movie with, you know, blood and guts and just like visceral and gore and some weird nudity also, like out of nowhere, you know, it just, it was a really mind-blowing stuff for me. And it helped, you know, it helped me lead down a path that, you know, probably eventually

got me to move to Japan, let's be honest. I'm not going to say it's a one-to-one. Like, I saw that movie and decided to move to Japan, but, you know, it's one piece of straw that eventually broke the camel's back, you know? No, Ken, Fis the North Star, where do we start with this? Well, let's start at the beginning, which was September 13th, 1983. So as it's recording, it just celebrated its 40th anniversary, you know, happy anniversary. It began as so many things do as a manga in Shonen Jump. And Shonen Jump, and Jump, you've probably heard of Shonen Jump. That was the weekly magazine that so many famous properties came from, Dragon Ball's Shown and Jump. Joe Joe is Shon Jump. I mean,

dozens, dozens, dozens of, I mean, one piece is Shon and Jump, so many things. And we can really cite Fist the North Star as coming from three brains. We can cite three brains. The first of whom Tetsuohara is the credited illustrator. The second is Bronson. Bronson is the writer. Now, that's a pen name, obviously. His real name is Yoshuki Okamura.

He also used some other pen names over the years. He took that pen name because supposedly he looks like Charles Bronson. So he just started calling himself Bronson. Has anyone actually seen a photo of him? Like, is that actually true? I've seen pictures of him, but they're like, they're recent, so, you know. Oh, okay.

He doesn't look like Charles Bronson anymore, but I suppose, you know, at the time, also you think about late 70s, Bronson was definitely in sort of his tired but, you know, burly action guy phase. And he was also doing a lot of advertising work in Japan at that point. He was doing those mandum stuff. So I think a lot of guys, especially in Japan, probably looked at Charles Bronson as sort of like,

Oh, yeah. That's like a man's man. He works out. He slaps on some aftershave, and then he just, you know, hits the whiskey, you know. Or bourbon. I don't know what Bronson drank, personally. It's okay. And one of those English translations is the manga. He's just like, yeah, it's totally just sucking down bourbon and whiskey. You're writing this stuff. I believe it. But there's one more name we need to highlight here, and that is Nobuhiko Jorye, who was an editor at Choninjump. He had been the editor since 1979, I believe. and according to Hara, Horier was really deeply involved in the process of creating a Fis the North Star. We have a quote here from a fairly recent interview who said,

My very first editor has worked in tandem with me since my debut work, helping to fill in for my weaknesses and further develop my strengths. He also says, Horriet, my editor, worked as a go between with Bronson and brought out the best in both of us.

So even though his name doesn't usually get mentioned in the big two on this property, we should really mention that Hortier was a part of this thing from the start as a Shonen Jump editor. So he was there. He was pitching ideas. He helped do research. He was like, he's just, he's there.

So we have no idea, you know, all the things he did, but we know he was involved on a storytelling level. So we have to give him his props for sort of unofficially co-creating this story. If I remember correctly, I think he was the guy that came up, the idea was like, oh, acupuncture, pressure points. Well, that's a good idea for something. That's what Harrah said. Harrah said he did that research and came up with them. He specifically said he was doing research at the used bookstores in Jimbochol, which is a district in Tokyo, which has a lot of used bookstores. And, by the way, a lot of really good curry restaurants.

Just a tip for you next time you're in Tokyo, boys. But yeah, so that's, yeah, exactly. If he didn't pitch that idea, who knows how different this story would have been. It's pretty integral to a success. Very. But it started 83. It ran weekly through 1988. So that's, you know, that's about five solid years of comics, 245 chapters, eventually collated into 27 little books of manga. So, you know, pretty sizable. Obviously, that's not, that's not one piece, you know, size manga. But on the Shonen Jump Scale, it's not huge, but still respectable. Yeah. It's, you know, it's a sizable tale of a, of, well, what is, yeah, I mean, what is the story? Well, we can start. start off by explaining that the story begins in the year, 1990X. And this is all very, I want to say iconic.

I think the initial words and phrases used in this manga have been parodied and quoted again, again, again. I wouldn't be surprised if Mega Man's use of 1980X and 2000X is partially influenced by the fact that Fifth and North Star takes place in 1990X, or at least that's where the disaster takes place. As they put it, the sky was kakunohonohanit. As I would translate that is, the world was enveloped in a nuclear inferno, aka we bombed ourselves. We blew it all up, you know, us bastards. You know, so the world basically destroyed. Almost every city destroyed.

Billions of people are dead. You know, oceans are gone. Forests are gone. Most animals are gone. People survive, but just barely. And it's a real sort of, you know, chaotic, chaotic realm. You know, life is cheap. I think the movie has a scene.

where people are, you know, hunted in the open, like, just hunted to the open plains and they're brutally murdered. And when they're looting their positions, they open a suitcase full of money and they just throw the money away because who needs money? Like, it's, you know, it's barely worth it as toilet paper at this point. Like, that's, society is done. And yet, martial arts endure. We'll get back to that. But I think, from description alone, I think you can tell already, there's a lot of heavy influence here from Mad Max. Mad Max, and especially the Road Warrior, which I think was 81, like, those two movies in particular have a huge influence on the way this, you know, the way this world looks, the way everyone dresses, especially.

I mean, if you go, if you watch Road Warrior and you look at Vernon Wells in that movie, you know, he's got the Mohawk, he's got the big, like, football shoulder pads that just have feathers on them for some reason. Like, that's like 80% of the guys you see in Fisthor Star. I think I once saw a skit on the Daily Show where Rob Riggler, was dressed up like that. And, you know, and the host is like, what do you wear? It's like, this is just, you know, this is standard post-alysis, you know, fashion, you know, I don't know, what do you wear, John? You know, like, but the other element at work here, besides Mad Max,

which is, you know, a cartoonish post-apocalypse, the, um, the author, you know, co-author Bronson, he said that he had spent some time in the killing fields of Cambodia. And I've never been there, but I've heard that even if you go there today, it's quite possible you could stumble on human remains. Like the number of people who were just absolutely murdered and just left to rot is like uncountable. So even today, you can find, you know, bones and parts of clothing and just things left over. So he took those experiences and what he saw at the movies and mixed them together to create this world where, you know, life as we know it is basically over, but people are still around. And more importantly, martial arts are still around. And if you

know the right martial arts. Well, baby, you got an itch. And Brian, you had a note here about the Mad Max thing. Yeah. So obviously you're right. It is incredibly influenced by Mad Max. And feel free to tell me I'm wrong because I'm not a, I think I've seen every Mad Max thing, but I'm also not like a huge aficionado. But I feel like there are takes on Mad Max where he's a little bit heartless, uh, when it comes to society. Like, there are definitely ones where he is helping defend people and whatnot. But I feel like Kenchido, our main character who will get to in a moment is like always a man of the people and like always cares most about defending people and like, you know, bringing justice for them and whatnot. So I feel like he's held up as a little bit

more of a, you know, very directly. Uh, they even call him this like a savior, you know, to figure than maybe someone like Mad Max is. Yeah, I would say in the movies, Max goes through a lot of, a lot of phases. You know, he tries to avoid people. He tries to, you know, break out on his own. But usually eventually he comes around and decides, oh, the best thing I can do right now is, you know, drive this truck for justice somehow. Whereas Kencho is more like, you know, he walks the earth, kind of like Kane and Kung Fu. And if he sees anything amiss, if he sees anything amiss, if he sees.

anyone who can't help themselves, if he sees anyone bullying another person, he won't hesitate to get involved. And he goes, he doesn't want to, he's one of those guys, he doesn't want to fight. He doesn't want to kill you. But he will give you basically one warning. He's like, go away. And if you don't listen to him, well, that's the last mistake you'll ever make. So let's talk about some of these major characters. Let's talk about our hero, who is absolutely the lynchpin on which this entire series rests. Like, there's plenty of characters who appear in this property, again, again in different adaptations and different forms.

But Ken Shiro is always at the center. And as Hara puts it, I love Bruce Lee and you Sakamatsara and wanted to create a character based on the coolest parts of both of them. Now, I think Retro's listeners don't need to know who Bruce Lee is. I think you already know who Bruce Lee is. You might not know who Yu Sakamatsara is because

he was a huge, a capital H, huge movie star in Japan in the 70s and 80s. He did action movies, but he did dramas. He he worked a lot. And as, as fate turned it out, he got a break. At the end of the 80s, he got a big break. He was going to star in Ridley Scott's Black Rain, a Hollywood movie shot in Japan. This was going to be his ticket to the big time. But he also was diagnosed with cancer. And he opted to do the movie and not do the chemotherapy. So he finished the movie. Everyone says he's, you know, you can watch the movie today. He's great in it. Everyone says he was. Everyone says he was great on the set, but he's also quietly dying the entire time. And indeed, once the film wrapped, he died shortly after.

He was only 40 years old. But even though he's, you know, he's been dead now for, you know, over 30 years, I would say his name still comes up on Japanese television. He is still a known property. His face still appears, you know, on posters and things. So he's still really big. And I think you can also see parts of his sort of, not his personality, but sort of his look. I think if you look at Cowboy Bebop, like,

Spike, Spike and Cowboy Bebop very much looks like Yusaku Matsuda. Like, he's got sort of the wildish hair, and he's kind of like, you know, kind of a little lanky. Like, he's, like, he's, like, he's, like, he's not, like, ripped, but he's, you know, he's fit. You know, am I, am I talking crazy here? No. So I can, I can see where, I can see where Harwood would do that, because, you know, this is early 80s, so Matsuda is pretty big time. And you've got the Bruce Lee aspects because, you know, Ken Stro is a martial artist. He absolutely, he screams like Bruce Lee.

And he's, you know, punching people. His outfit is very much based on Max's outfit from those movies. He's very much, he's like he's got the leather jacket with sort of one shoulder pad, only one. The other side is just no shoulder pad. So the way his martial arts works is it's called, it looks, it kind of looks like Jikundo, but indeed it's called Huktu Shinkan, which is a deadly martial art, supposedly with a 2,000-year history. And he is the latest, or I suppose last of the disciples of this martial art. And the way it works, as we mentioned before, is it's all about action puncture. So the idea is he's fighting you and he can press these points of your body and it does stuff.

And it's not necessarily bad because there's plenty of cases in this manga or show where he will hit somebody or touch somebody and he will actually help them. You know, he can, I wouldn't say like cure disease, but he can sort of fix, you know, psychological ailments. he can undo trauma I think he does he make someone like a blind man see at one point like he does like the powers are always sort of varied right that sounds right and there's a whole character also

basically based around healing people as well so I mean there's that aspect of it too right but let's be honest as a as a lone warrior walking across the wasteland he doesn't get to heal as many people as he gets to fight a lot of people and as I said before

he's not he's not eager to co-people, but he will give you one warning. He's very frank. He's like, get out of my way. Like, you're no match for me. I'm literally invincible. Like, he's very, he's very frank. And usually all it takes for him is to deliver one punch

and his opponents will literally explode. Maybe their head, maybe their guts, maybe their arm will flap the wrong way. Like, it's always up to the artist what exactly happens. But it's usually sudden and

rotesque. And final. You don't really walk away from these battles unless you're a major, unless you're also a major character, in which case you have some kind of plot armor or you, like, you know a technique to, like, touch your own pressure points. I know in the movie at one point, Jaggy gets punched and he, like, pushes his own pressure points to stop himself from exploding, which is always pretty cool. There's also, like, a recurring joke where there's a lot of scenes where bad guys are doing bad things. And then Ken Shiro just kind of burst on the scene in increasingly ridiculous ways. at one point in the manga where I'm at there then there's some sort of fort and one of the guys

hears something coming from the wall so he puts his ear up to listen to what it is and then Ken Chiro smacks the block and knocks his head right off and it's just there's just variations on this all throughout everywhere and it's always hilarious so we should also mention that Kenchro has a few distinct features

first of all I would say his head his head he looks again because his outfit it looks like Mad Max. I think he has a lot of... He has a bit of Mel Gibson to him, but he also's a bit of Stallone to him. Like, you know, he's Burnett. He's got short hair. He's got the big eyebrows. But again, also, Yusaka Mats at all, so it'd be some big eyebrows. So there's some

of that there too. But his chest, if you see his chest, and you see his chest a lot, because when he gets mad, he literally bursts up his own clothes. He screams and tears his own clothes off. We never talk about why he gets dressed again, because there's no stores. I don't know how he manages to get. the exact same very distinct jacket every single time. But he does. We don't ask what. It's also no point if it's

just going to be torn off the next time he gets angry. So like, I don't know, save yourself some time, man. I swear, I think there are, there are episodes of the anime where he tears himself tears out as close off like more than once per episode. I'm pretty sure that's true. Yeah, like it can happen fast if he gets mad again.

But when you see his chest, he has seven large scars, and they're in the shape of the big, big dipper, right on his chest, hence the name, you know, Hoke the Shiggin. Now, how he got those, this story we'll get to in a second, but, you know, in a society that's been collapsed, no, no one has any pictures anymore, there's no cell phones, there's no wanted posters, you know, his reputation starts to spread based on his rough appearance, like, oh, I heard a man, so people who don't know his name will often refer to him as, oh, the man

with the seven scars was here. Did you hear about the man with the seven scars? I heard he's, you I heard he lives forever, like that kind of stuff. He quickly becomes a legend. And as Brian mentioned, you know, people talk to him like he's a savior. Many games or adaptations literally include, what was it, Sekimatsu no Kiu-Saysha or whatever, yeah. Right, like savior at the end of the millennium, savior at the end of the century. Like he is, you know, because there is some sort of millennial, millennial panic work here, too. but this idea of a man who's, you know, wandering the earth and he can't be killed by

normal means, he can do whatever he wants, he seems to be invincible, but he fights for good and therefore he helps people. And sometimes he managed, just from winning a really good martial arts fight, he will change the course of like hundreds of lives, which is, you know, pretty impressive. So Kenchiro, well, Kenchro, well, Kenchro, is Kenchro straight? Probably, because he's usually hanging out with a lady named Yudia. And Yudia, he, Kenchro and Yuria are supposedly in love. They, they hang out. a lot together. She's always with him. She's always introduced as the girlfriend in most of these properties. She gets kidnapped a lot. She might be tapped into nature. Sometimes you see her like

holding seeds or spreading seeds. Like, somehow she's going to be the one to restore the earth to natural beauty. Sometimes she ends up being a quasi-villain. It's, it's kind of a weird, like, what's your take on your idea? Because depending on the adaptation, she either disappears completely or she turns out to be like a secret, like last boss. Like, what's your take on your idea? I think it's fairly telling that you can sort of make her disappear some adaptations. I mean, her name will absolutely be burned into your brain if you watch the anime because you have so much of Kenshinos saying, Yudia, like all the time. But I don't know.

I'm having a bit of trouble recalling like some of her other, you know, her like you mentioned Diamond. and she was like a secret villain, I, I can't recall off the top of my head what that's from. But I just think of her as like, okay, she's the, she's the girl that Shin kidnapped, and Kenchito gets her back, and then she's just sort of around back there doing things. And they just sort of don't give her a lot to do, at least in the anime, I don't think, except be kidnapped by Shin or Rao or whoever. I wonder how much of this was plotted ahead of time, because there's this. a lot of stuff that it kind of pulls out of its own ass. I think a lot of the stuff with Uria definitely kind of felt that way, but it's not always bad. Like, a lot of it's done for maximum drama. And I do enjoy those sort of twists, even though they don't entirely make

sense. She's definitely integral to the sort of the canon event of the series, wherein that she and Kencho are together. And basically, Kenchoo's rival appears, and he decides that, no, he loves Yurya more than Kenchro, and to prove it, he's going to fight Kenchero and maybe kill him just so he can have Yurya as his queen. And that man's name is Shin. And Shin is not a practitioner of Hokdo Shinkan. He's part of a rival faction, which is called Nantoseken, which is someone translated as Southern Cross or South Star. Kanji-wise, it's really like South Star to Hokto, which is North Star. But, you know, if Kenchro is sort of the stoic quiet type.

Shin is more like, I'm here to rule the earth on my throne. You know, like he usually, he's usually shown wearing a cape. He's, you know, he builds thrones for himself. You know, he laughs. He's got an evil laugh. Like, he's very, you know, he's very in your face kind of

villain guy. But supposedly it's all for love. And, you know, supposedly he loves Yuri so much. He attacks Ken, and in their, depending on the, depending on the version, their fight is usually very, very quick in that they attack each other once and then somehow

shin falls down and, you know, maybe gets one cut whereas Kencho falls the ground and suddenly is bleeding from all his orifices. And just to prove that Shin's merciful guy, he is the guy who gives Kencho his scars because he stabs Kenchro in

his chest seven times with his fingers. And this is a in the movie, this is a brutal scene. It is. Because it is slow. He does it like one finger at a time. Indeed, part of the quotables of here is like, as he's stabbing him, he's like, how many more times can I do this?

Like, he's joking. He's taunting this man who is basically bleeding to death. And he keeps doing it until basically Uri says, no, no, please stop. I'll be with you. That's his power move. It is a very impactful scene, like, no matter which version you watch it in, like, the voice actor for Shin, like, really just is absolutely just like chewing the scenery in this part, too. It's very entertaining. Right.

And you can make the argument that if Shin doesn't do this, then maybe Ken Shro doesn't become the hero that we need him to be because we don't really see a lot of this pre-scar Ken Shiro in the manga. Like, we don't get a lot of pictures of that. But to hear Shin tell it, Ken Shiro is like too gentle. Like he, you know, he's not cut out to be in this world. You know, this world, you know, there's lots of lines that Shin delivers that are very, they're very villainous.

Like, there's a sort of like, you know, the villain is the hero of his own story kind of thing where it's like, you can tell he's, you could, you understand his motivation. He's not evil for evil's sake. He's, he believes he's doing the right thing. He believes he's the right person for this crazy world. So he thinks Ken, like, just isn't strong enough. And to prove it, he almost kills him. So maybe if he doesn't do that, Ken Stroh doesn't wake up and doesn't become a, you know, a human badass who can walk through rubble like it's nothing. But it's kind of funny because if you look at the, original manga especially, and even the anime, Shin's story doesn't last that long. He's like, he's the, you know, he's introduced as the primary antagonist, but Ken Shro, you know, meets him relatively quickly, and when

they, when they fight, Kenchro wins, Shin dies, and they move on. But because Shin is so iconic and because Shin is so tied to sort of Kenchero's sort of, you know, awakening, like, I don't think there's an adaptation out there that doesn't include Shin to some degree,

And often, you know, certainly in the case of the movie, Shin is like the main antagonist of the movie. You know, even though Rao is like right there and 10 times his size, like, Shin is presented as the primary foe until he just dies. Oh, wait, you know, he's the real bad guy. The real bad guy's over here. And he's massive. One reason, Xor took me to a while to get into the TV series was like the first arc in the manga with Shin. It's almost like a prolog. Like, it's over pretty quickly, like you mentioned.

But it takes like 22 episodes in the TV series to get from because they added a lot of filler there. All of his generals and you, Kendryo basically has to fight every person imaginable under the sun before. At least it seems like that when you're watching it anyway. Yeah. So I definitely sort of skipped over a certain point just to get through it. But they're, I would say, their clash is really, I don't know, I think it's pretty top tier. Like, it's hugely, you know, it's huge or dramatic, you know, they, they trade blows, they trade barbs. Again, depending on the adaptation, their fight works slightly differently, but, you know, generally speaking, Kencho is the winner and Shin is sort of left dumbfounded by how much Kencho has changed.

Famously, in the original manga and the original anime, Shin decides not to, you know, because of the way Kencho's attacks work, I guess we didn't, we didn't say the famous line. I can't believe we didn't say the famous line. Oh, no, you're right. The way Kintra's attack works is he touches your pressure points, and there's usually a few seconds where he's hit you, and he knows that the fight is over, but you don't. So he often released, he often says this one line, which is, again, iconic in Japan to this day,

which is, oh, my, we're more shindater. Literally, you are already dead, and then you explode. Often followed by a, if it's a nobody, saying something like, Nadi, or some, you know, some version of that. Oh, there's so many of those, like, death rattle noises, I guess they call them, and a lot of them are just, like, gibberish, but they, like, obtained their own sense of infamy. I was, I mean, this is just a Japanese Wikipedia article, so this is arguably apocryphal, but I guess when they were originally writing it, the editors thought they were typos. Yeah. Because it was just nonsense.

They're like, no, this is just what they say when they explode. There's one famous one was Hidebou, which in Perodeus for the MSX, whenever you kill a bad guy, like there's a little hiergonda that flashes by real quick, and they're saying that. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, that's one character particular who's very obese. And when he dies, yeah, Hart Sama, aka Mr. Hart. And because, you know, he explodes, I've heard that Hidebu is supposed to be like part Iti, like it hurts, and part of it just the sound of a fat man exploding. That's how I heard explain to me. And somehow that just became Hidebu, and like that is just, it's always there.

Any adaptation, you know, kind of like Joje adaptations will always include, like, the exact phrasing because, because Hiroshi Hiroaki writes such particular Japanese and all his lines become famous. Like, Hidabu itself is such a famous way to die. Like, it appears in everything. Video games will use it. We'll get to it later. But in some cases, the video games will use it, and it, like, the animatopoeia itself becomes a part of the game. Like, it's really, it's massive. And as you mentioned, Kurt, it's so popular, it becomes, appears in other games just because it's so well-known at this point.

But, as I was saying, because they fight and Kenshin wins, Shin has a moment where he realizes he's been killed already, and he decides to take his own life rather than actually die due to Ken's, you know, Ken's blows, which is, you know, emotional as hell, which I want to say one of the cooler features of the one-on-one fighting game, which we'll get to a little bit later, there's actually a way to basically kill yourself rather than die by your opponent. Like, if you run out of, like, if you run out of hearts or whatever, like, or if you could be one-hit K-oed, you can one-hit K-O yourself and trigger a special animation where you somehow throw yourself off a building, even though most of those fights take place on ground level, it doesn't matter. He just,

he suddenly teleports and jumps off a building. It is, oh, it gets me every time, though. So we got Kenchro, we got Yurria, we got Yoriyo, we got Shin. But Ken Shro is not the only practitioner of Hokka No Ken, because he has quote-unquote brothers. Now, I don't think these are brothers in the blood sense, but they're, I think they're brothers more in like in the sort of like martial arts set. Like, they all, they all practice together. So, like, they've been through a lot so they call each other brothers. And my personal favorite is, what do you say, is he the black sheep? What is favorites calling the black sheep of this, of this quote?

That's a kind way of putting it, I think, yes. A man named Jaggy. So he is, you know, as much as Ken Trow, is. is a hero and a noble figure, Jaggy is an outright villain. Like, there is no spin to Jaggy to make him sound like he's got something going on. He is just a ruthless, vicious bastard. Depending on the adaptation, he either kidnaps Yudika or convinces Shin that she has to

kidnap Yudia, or he even gives his shin to try and kill Kahn, or he tries to kill can after Shin kidnaps. Like, he's always involved in that initial setup. He knows how to use Marshall. arts. Like, he is a martial arts expert, but he also doesn't care about martial arts because he loves guns and bombs. You know, there's a famous line where he just says, I don't care about karate. I'll just, I can blow you up just as well. Like, it doesn't matter. It's all the same. Um, he's also very infamous because at one point, Kentrow tried to kill him by making

his head explode. But Jaggy was so quick thinking, he managed to stop himself by welding plates to his head. So when usually, when you meet Jaggy, he's wearing a big mask and the mask will crack off. And then you see he's just sort of a disfigured hideous man underneath who's got kind of like, I don't know how many of our listeners remember Circuit Breaker from the old Transformers comic book, but he's got like sort of these straps of metal around his head to sort of hold everything in place. But he also eventually gives himself seven scars so he can walk around the, walk around the wasteland and tell everyone that he's the fifth the north star, because look, I've got these seven scars on my chest. And all this really, you know,

let's put it, you know, to put it in a more modern sense, Ken took that personally. You know, he doesn't, Kent does not abide by Jaggy's, say, callous approach to life and killing people. You know, Jaggy loves torture people. Jaggy loves, Jabby loves human slavery. He does not care. He will, he will like people on fire. He is just, just an absolute monster.

I don't know why I like him. I just, I guess because he's, I guess because he's so unapologetically evil. It's sort of refreshing. You know, it's a good counter to Kent Shero, who is always good. And Jaggy is always evil. And in most adaptations, Jaggy dies painfully and brutally. And at least in the fighting game that we mentioned and maybe in others, like he's, he's interestingly just an absolutely nothing character. Like if you look at tierless for that game, he is always at least extremely close to the bottom.

So I wonder if that's intentional or if that's just sort of the way it played out. Well, I mean, he's never, he's never really a threat as far, like, when, when it comes to martial arts, you know what I mean? Yeah. Like, whenever, whenever Kenchoo and Jaggy face off, there's very little, like, Jackie almost never has the upper hand. Yeah. You know, at one point, he'll point a gun at Kencho, and Kencho will somehow use his martial arts to make Jaggy point the gun at himself. Like, that's how, that's how one side of the fight is. Like, you can't even shoot a gun at me.

I've, I've controlled your arm, you know, magically. It's like, it's not even close. The other brother, who comes up sometimes, but also sometimes just disappears, is Toki. And Toki, I would call him, he's the hippie of the, he's the hippie of the family. Absolutely. Because he's all about peace. He doesn't want to fight people. He wants to use Hokto Shinkan to heal people.

He wants to help people. He's kind of like Jesus, but not in a sacrilegious way. He's got the beard. He's got the long hair. Famously in the movie, he's just not there. The movie cuts him out entirely, at least the 86 movie. And I think the 95 movie does, too. But other video games, other adaptations will always include Toki because he is a fan favorite, I guess because he's so different than everybody else.

You know, it's the end of the world and Toki just wants to help people, which, you know, it's nice. It's nice that he does that. I think he's more, I haven't seen the movies, but did they have Ray in there? I would say Ray appears way more often than Toki. Yeah. See, I mean, I feel like Toki's more important than Ray is. I agree, even though Ray is my favorite character. I think that's an accurate statement.

Yeah, I would say usually Ray appears first and plays a bigger role, but because Toki's one of the brothers, it's sort of like, I would say most, unless you're talking about a movie, Toki almost always shows up and he's usually a major player in there. Sometimes he used to fight Rao, I think, so it's, he's often there, and he's often very different. And also certainly, certainly in the fighting game, which we'll get to later, Toki is incredibly powerful. Oh, yeah. but, um, so he's, he's a name to know, but he's also kind of like this weird outlier in that he doesn't, you know, he doesn't want to fight people, but like Ken Cheryl, if he does fight you, he knows how to destroy you. And then like so many other characters, he, he has sort of this tragic element to him because, also because he's, like, sickly from the time that you meet him and, you know, things end up happening. Right. Somehow he looks like he's much older than everybody. I don't think that's, like, I don't think that's the truth. I think he just, like, he's, like, his illness has left him sort of like eight more aged. Like, he's just tired all the time. Like, Kintra Jagi and Rao all look like, you know, adults or maybe even young adults, whereas Toki looks like he's 60-ish, you know, and it's supposed to apocalypse. So, like, you know, he's got no moisturizer. Like, he's, he looks really, you know, he looks really worn out. Ashy, if you will. And the biggest brother of them all, we have to talk about Rao.

Rao, who later calls himself Kenil, literally Fist King, you know, interpret that as you will. But Rao is basically the eyebrowless Schwarzenegger to compare to Kencho's semester Stallone. I would say you can look at close-ups of Rao in the manga or anime, and you can tell the artist was just looking at Schwarzenegger in, like, towards the end of Terminator, because he's got no eyebrows. He's just this, this huge menacing face. He's just, you know, Rao is much taller than everybody else. He's much, you know, this is the manga and anime all about muscular men, but Rao is on another level. like Rao is so muscular and so massive his horse is like three times the size of a man like he's got his own horse and he often fights people without even getting off his horse like that's how much his abilities are compared to the other people he encounters he doesn't like if he gets his horse to fight you you must be especially powerful otherwise he can just sort of like jab his finger at you and like knock you knock your breath out from from afar it's it's pretty ridiculous but yeah Rao as I don't want to call him like a Thanos type, but like he's very much a villain who's like,

might makes right, I'm right because I'm the strongest. You can tell though he does have, he has some hint of, of actually being a decent human being in there somewhere, but he also does not care and he will kill anyone who gets in his way. You know what I mean? Like he, he does not, he will not hesitate to use his powers to kill people, but there are occasions where he will decide, no, now is not the right time to kill. Like, whereas Jaggy would not hesitate to kill people or any reason. reason, Rao will occasionally not kill you for some reason.

There's a lot of flashbacks that try to humanize him a little. He's like, well, at one point, he was an all right guy, but he went down the bad path. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he certainly, as we said, he calls himself Kenno, Fis King. He's got the horse. He's got a cape. He's got a massive helmet.

Certainly in the animated movie, he goes from a background character to being what seems to be an emperor, like ruling every inch of earth that he can find. which makes, you know, his showdown with Kintra pretty epic. But again, his fight with Kintra is pretty huge. It's usually the climax of most adaptations, be the video game or animated. It's a big deal. Rau's eventual death, again, depending on the adaptation, some of as he dies, sometimes he just walks away. But in canon, Rao does die.

And his death scene, and especially his last words, are iconic in Japan to this day, if you allow me. He holds up one fist to the sky and says, which I would translate as I have no regrets, not even one regret in my life and then drops dead. And that is just, that's a pretty bold move considering that, you know, up to that point you've seen him commit almost genocide.

As much genocide as one muscle man can commit. So in the master system game Black Belt, like when you beat the last guy who's just some schmuck name Yang, he sort of just like reaches up. into the sky and it looks like he turns to stone, which was just like a leftover of, yeah, from the Mark 3 Hokodono Ken, where he does the exact same thing. Mm-hmm. Except they took out of the dialogue, so it doesn't make far less sense.

Also, for those of you in America, at least in the grocery stores around me, there is, many years ago I saw in the pasta sauce aisle, Rao's homemade marinera sauce sauce. Yes. So I guess there's a side thing going on, too. Yeah, I see that for sale at Costco here in Japan all the time. And every time I say it, I'm like, row. I just say it quietly to myself. Yeah, me too.

My wife is tired of this joke, but I'm not telling you. It will never get old. Actually, speaking of Japan, I should also mention that in, as a member of the reigning champs, the orix buffaloes, they've got a slugger named Yutato Sugimoto, a youngish guy. He's 190 centimeters tall, so pretty, you know, taller than most Japanese players, for sure. And he's got the nickname of Rao. So usually after he hits a home run, he'll pump his fists in the air as a pose. If it's a big game, if it's a win, you know, if he wins the game with the home run, you know, he'll do like the post-game interview. And someone's, you know, he'll shout, you know, he'll shout Raul lines to the crowd and they'll love it.

So he's, you know, he's a real fan favorite. I love that. And, you know, as it's recording right now, the Honcha Tigers won their league and the Buffaloes are probably going to win their league, so we could have some exciting Rao postseason action this year. Obviously, there's many more characters to run down. I mean, maybe, Brian, do you want to talk about Ray? I think we should probably talk about Ray.

Ray's pretty cool. Yeah, just briefly. So he is a practitioner of Nantosui Chokin, which is, there's so many offshoits of these martial arts. It's a little bit hard to keep track. But basically, he ends up aligning with Kenchi. lying with Kenchito after finding out the man who the, that the man with the scars who destroyed his village was Jaggy, which we talked about earlier, like Jaggy impersonating him and like kind

of dragging his name through the mud and whatever. And Ray falls in love with Mamia, who is another kind of character who accompanies Ray and Kenchudo sort of throughout parts of the story. Later ends up challenging Rao on Kenchido's behalf. Fails absolutely miserably to the point where like he has like a day to live because of something Rao does to him and gets his life extended just long enough by Toki to hunt down and challenge another martial artist that he trained with named Yuda to offend Mamia's honor. And Yudah is a very interesting character as well because he's like he's sort of like a beautiful man who basically keeps a harem of women around to continuously tell him how beautiful he is, if I remember correctly.

And that fight ends up resulting in the end of both Yuda and Ray. And, like, his death scene is just sort of very tragic. Like, I don't know. I've got a real soft spot for this character. I feel like if there was, I don't know what the drag scene is like here in Japan, to be honest. I know there, I know we have drag queens. But I feel like if there's not people out there, drag queening as Yuda, I feel like, that's a misopportunity. Because Yud has very strong drag queen energy. He's usually wearing a lot of makeup. He's got big hair.

He tends to, you know, he wears very flashy colors. I mean, considering at the end of the world, he wears very flashy colors. Yes. And he is also giant and mussely, to be clear. Oh, yeah. That part does not change. Absolutely. Yeah.

It's, you know, the fact that it comes down to a fight between him and Ray, like, at that point, you've seen Ray totally murder people without breaking a sweat. So the fact that he and Yudah actually have a fight gives you a sense that Yuda is quite strong as it is. He just is not as strong. Right. Yeah. But there are, yeah, there's a lot of side characters. I should probably also mention real quick.

There's usually two kids who hang out with Ken Chor a lot. And I guess it's sort of like they represent the innocence of the, Innocent Return of the World. Like you got one little boy named Bat or Bart, depending on the localization, who's like a, he's like a gearhead. Like he usually has like a dune buggy. He drives them around. Yeah. And a little girl named Lynn. who, depending on the adaptation, either can't talk or barely talks, but, you know, Ken Chiro

helps her talk, and they're sort of very pure heart. And then over time, they grow up into adults. But it's telling that most adaptations include them in kid form, even though there is a whole chunk of the story where they are grown adults and they're doing like adult stuff, most adaptations and cartoons and video games include them only in their youth, because that's like, that's the popular version, if you will. Oh, oh, standing in my head of darkness Oh, oh, give me my life, give me my energy Oh, oh, fighting in my head of my nest

Oh, is my pay, is my wrongliness Oh, standing in my head of darkness, Oh, give me my life, giving my energy, Oh, oh, fighting in my head of my nest, Oh, is my pain, is my wrong with it. Whoa. So speaking of adaptations, we should probably talk about the big one, the one that really turned this comic book into a phenomenon.

As Setsu Ahorra put it, as more people were exposed to Hookedo No Ken via the anime, awareness as a guru, and as such, the manga gained many more fans as well. I think the children in particular found it easier to get into anime via the sound and animation, which is, yes, that's how anime works, Setsu O'Hara, but still, I mean, I just think, you know, it's just, it's a simple matter of fact, you know, you can put as many comic books as he want to on the shelf, but if a cartoon is airing for free on television, that's going to get so many more eyeballs on your character. That's just the way it is.

And sure enough, one year later, they did not, I didn't hesitate, one year later in 1984 on Fuji TV, which is a major broadcast channel here in Japan, that's when the anime started. I think you got a shout out right away. So the opening, the original opening theme song for Hokton Okin is a song called I-O-Torimodose. And that is like, I want to say top five anime songs all time. Yeah, that is like instant classic. Yeah. And I would say it's one that most Japanese people still know. And it's still like, it's in every Karolkai machine.

It's very popular in every Karolki machine. Like, you do not have to look to find that song. That song is there. I'll be honest, that song is so popular. If you go to a karaoke machine in the U.S., somewhere in its guts is probably this song, complete with, like, cutscenes from the motion picture. So, like, if you hunt down the, like, the phone book size, like, songless and type this in, you will probably get cartoons and, like, no other song is going to have cartoons, but this one will. And it's just like, it's an incredible experience to sing this song in America. And everyone's like, wait, what the hell is this?

Why do you have cartoons for yours, you know? but that's just the level of popularity that's going on here. Yeah. The artist, by the way, is called Crystal King. And it's funny, it's a duo of two men, but you wouldn't know it because one of them sings so high. I think a lot of people, myself included, just assume it's a woman, but no, it's actually two guys.

Yeah, it is. And they're an interesting band. They're like sort of, and this was sort of a product of the era that they came out and to a certain extent, but they're a bit almost of like a rock, like Enka hybrid. they debuted in 1979 and like in Japan anyway their debut single

Dai Tokai is basically as big as this like it's very well known it's very well covered but yeah I don't know that too many people internationally know them for anything other than

Ayo Torimoto-Morose Yeah and this the song I'm gonna say the song is so big that you know as other adaptations come and go as other video games come and go as other anime spin-offs come and go

this song will be covered and covered and covered again and again again. Like, you can't, you cannot escape this song. If they've, uh, you know, as of this week, they've already announced as a new animation coming, you know, they haven't revealed anything other than a teaser image, but you could you could almost guarantee that even though they'll

obviously be some modern pop song attached to the new anime, because that's, that's what anime does these days. There's going to be a cover of this, of the classic song, in there some way, or on a single, or it's going to come back in some form one another. It has to. Yeah. Can't escape. But it's certainly in most video games as well, if they're going to afford the license.

So we got the anime. Obviously, you've got to have your lead has to have a strong actor. And Ken Shro is played by Akira Kamiya, who was already fairly famous because he was the voice of Kinikuman as Kinikuban, you know, so he's the lead of that one. People nowadays might also know him as the star of City Hunter. That's a role he's played for many more years. that's a little more friendly like he's kind of a sillier goofier guy in that one but as Kentro

he is sort of a deadpan and it's you know he's really good at it but he also is a scream which he's really good at screaming I think I think the reason Kamiya stopped doing the role about 20 years ago

just because he probably hit 16 and it's like I can't do this role anymore because it's so much screaming you know as much like much like any actor who plays a Jojo character has to scream you know like Kamio

for years with screaming, like, for minutes at a time. Yeah, exactly. In fact, it's funny, he's influenced, he ended up influencing Ken Stro in a way because during one of the recording sessions, and apparently a very long one, allegedly, he just said, oh,ata, at the end,

literally like, that's it, the end. And because he did that, and they kept it in the show, that just became a thing that Ken Stro did. So, like, he just sort of modified Kenchro to fit his delivery, which is pretty bad. That's great. Yeah.

But as it was recording, Kamiya, still working today. Still a big name amongst video, anime actors. He's still working. I would say most of the cast of the original show remains fairly well known. I do know that the actor for Ray actually tragically passed away very young, so they had to recast him in later adaptations. But the original voice of Ray was one of those guys who was like a big deal and then became kind of like Matsuda. He became a bigger deal because he passed away so young. Yeah.

But because the anime was so popular, these actors would return again and again to voice these characters, you know, in video games, once video games started talking. In one amazing case, they actually dubbed over their characters in the Japanese release of the live action film, which we'll talk about in a minute, which is just, that's such going the extra mile. You have to respect that, even though, you know, the actors on screen are absolutely not Japanese. It's like, well, we've got Kentro in here. Let's get Kami in here and have him scream, yeah. But the anime, yes, the anime ran from 84 to 87, and it climaxed with the Kensero, Ken-O fight. And obviously, it's a TV show, so you have to, you know, Japanese TV does have different broadcast standards than American TV, but, you know, you can't have, like, blood and guts exploding on TV. You can't.

So they kind of obscure it. A lot of the, a lot of the people are still exploding, but they turn to sort of like this milky white substance or, Like, a bright light will come and they'll sort of fade out as they sort of, you know, turn into like spaghetti strings. Like, it's very sort of abstract. So, like, you can't hide the fact that people are exploding and dying, but they try to give it a sort of artistic flair to sort of get past the fact that people are dying, you know, by the hundreds. In the manga, since most of it's black and white, it doesn't feel as gory as it is, even though there's people that are obviously getting sliced apart and body parts that are flying everywhere. I think they adapt that pretty well. I mean, they cut away to, like, silhouettes and stuff a lot.

But, I mean, there's still dismemberments and things. It's just, you know, not, not whole lot of blood. Absolutely. And they made a, it's funny, they made a second series, other than they continue the series and just go, because, like I said, the manga ran, the manga was still running at this point. They decided to end the first series and made a second series,

which only ran one more year. And it didn't actually, it didn't actually run into the end of the manga. So they didn't actually, they never actually animated. to the end of the manga, at least the original manga. And the second series had its own opening and its own closing. And like I said, some of the characters aged up.

So it's kind of a different saga. And I really think, certainly based on adaptations and I would say cultural awareness, I feel like the second series just isn't really a big deal. I think would you agree, Brian, like second series is not, doesn't hit as well as the first? I think you can honestly just not even engage with it at all. And you'll be fine talking to anybody else who's like a, to the North Star fan. Like, it's, I, I went, back when I was watching through all these in the 2000s, I went

right from the first series into the second because I was really excited to see where they were going to go after Rao. And like, it really disappointed me. Like, it's kind of retreading a lot of the same territory. There's this thing where, like, Bard and Lynn are older and, like, they're trying to almost like get Kenchudo out of retirement, so to speak or something, if I'm remembering this correctly. like he's he's sort of done the Mad Max thing where he's like a hermit and like he's not really interested in, you know, being what he was. And they go to this whole different area.

And it, the whole thing just sort of starts again, but with way less memorable characters. Everything I heard about it, like you just said, was like, they made me very excited to not read it. Because I mean, there's so many of these manga where like it finishes, like Ra was the final boss. This is where it should probably stop. But it's so popular, it just has to keep going. And whenever there's a time skipping any of these things, it's usually a hmm sort of deal. I mean, there's another bigger, badder boss that had never previously been mentioned, but, you know, we need something to show how much more powerful he is. Everything I read about what they did with the adult linen bat just made me not want to read it.

And like there's no real personal investment in it for Kenchino anymore like there was in the first one, which I think really takes a lot out of. of it. Yeah, that's why, you know, when I run down the list of characters, like, Ken Chiro's brothers appear time and again in so many different adaptations and spinoffs, whereas most, I think most of the guys from the second series are just never heard from again. I guess Kayo appears sometimes, like, Kayo is introduced late in the run as some sort of, like, Rao's Longlo's brother or something.

So he's like, he's like the last, last final boss, but he just looks like Rao with, like, more scars, you know? He is. And, like, they do, if I remember correctly, they do this thing where they kind of, like, evoke the spirit of Rao to like drive the point home and they're sort of like look care about this guy look he's basically Rao but but no he's not

I think for anime fans there's only one Kyle and he's a little tiny toad man who helps Goku you know it's true one bit of trivia that I must share because when else I'm going to share it so this was a weekly show on Fuji TV which means as with both

animations it would end with a little preview of the next episode and the narrator of the show is an actor named Shigeru Chiba, who still works today. He's a really big actor in Japanese anime. He's done a ton of character work. But in the case of Fisnero Star, he was the, he was the narrator. And for whatever reason, according to him, he just did this on his own. Each time he ended the episode and talked about the next week's episode, he got more and more excited. But the series ran for over 200 episodes. So when you listen to it and you listen to like the first few, you know, he sounds like a human being. But when he, when he gets to the end,

he is basically screaming at the top of his lungs about how the next episode is going to have, you know, Ken Stroh, Fight, Ra, or whatever. And it is, it is, it is hilarious. You know, years ago, a Japanese program called Trivian Oizumi, Spring of Trivia, sort of cut them together into a montage. You can still find this montage in YouTube today. And you can hear the transition. And it is, you know, even if you don't speak Japanese, I think it's hilarious when you hear this man, you know, the toll of his voice as he just goes from speaking to shouting to wailing. It is, I watch it every few years just to make myself laugh. It is just amazing.

So this absolutely blew my mind when you included it in the notes because like I'm sure many people, even though I watched the entire series, I skipped the next episode previews because what do I care? I'm going right to the next episode. I don't need to know, you know, what's happening in it. I'm just about to watch it. And so I, shockingly knew, I mean, I knew he was the narrator, but I knew absolutely nothing about this. And it's amazing.

Yeah. Also, as the narrator, we should mention, usually in the anime, when someone does one of their super secret techniques or whatever, he's, his voice will come on and sort of shout the name of the technique they use. Yeah. And I don't think Fist the North Star like started that, but that's certainly, it's certainly one of the more well-known instances of that happening, you know, like a martial art story where when they. when the people do their special move, everything freezes and a voice tells you what the move is called, you know? And in the case of Hokto No Ken, like,

they've got a million of these techniques, but the one that's most famous is Kenchro's so-called 100-cracked fist, Hokto Hechakuritsken, where he basically punches someone 100 times, and then they explode. Which is funny because in most fights, he only needs one punch to make you explode,

but if he punches you 100 times, like you explode extra hard. I guess it's like putting some stank on it. Like, he means it. Yeah. I mean, he's only human, right? Like, sometimes you just need that satisfaction of hitting someone more than once. And I assume he's susceptible to that, too.

That narrator is a really good bit. Because in the manga, like, the character just says the name of their attack and then briefly describes it. But I think having the guy, the disembodied voice come out and say it, it adds some more drama. Absolutely. And, of course, once video games started talking, they absolutely would include the voice there too. Not always Shigar Chiba, but they would have someone say it. The anime, watched it the manga was a hit. The anime was also an immediate hit. So the same team behind it produced a feature-length animated film in 1986 in Japan. It came to America a years later. But what's amazing to me is that, you know, besides the fact they try to condense all these characters and all this story into just one movie, which is why they cut out Toki entirely. The movie, because it's a movie, they didn't have to hold back when it came to the gore. So all the all of a sudden, and again, this is 1986, compared to most other productions, this is a blood-soaked

extravaganza. It is, it's almost hideous. Honestly, it's, depending on your personal proclivities, it might even be stomach churning. I don't know. Like, it's, I mean, for me as a teenager, I loved it, but I could see some people might see, might watch this and almost be, like, repulsed. It's, like, it is gross. This is one of those shows, because it still came out, even though it came out later in the U.S.,

It came out fairly early in the life of anime, at least that you could go to a store and buy. It was absolutely one of those things that people used to be like, have you seen anime? You know, it's so bloody and gory and people are exploding. Like, this was like for a while, I feel like the poster child for that sort of like mentality. Yeah, the body count is off the charts. And again, because there are scenes where people are just dying left and right, and not just dying, but like being splattered. Like, it's really messy. I know one of the big conflicts early on in the story is when Kentro takes down a giant man named Zeed.

And it's always a big deal. It's usually when you first see him use the, the Hekkerritskanment technique. But in the movie, you get shots of his, like, internal organs rupturing before his body explodes. Like, it is nasty. But, yes, this was one of the earliest movies to get the streamlined dub treatment. So it came out in America in 1991 alongside movies like Akira or G. Google 13, some of the

Ronma TV show. That wasn't the streamlined, but that's about the same era. And the streamline dub is very strange because you get the impression

they either didn't have the actual translation or they didn't care because a lot of the dialogue, if you try to watch the two and compare them, a lot of the dialogue does not sick up at all.

They change a lot of stuff around. They actually edit it, it's kind of a weird thing. The movie ends with Kencho versus Rao. In the Japanese version, it basically ends them to draw.

They basically stop fighting each other and just walk away. But in the American version, they edit it so that Rao knocks down Kenchero and is about to kill him, but then Lynn stops him, and then he walks away and just says, ah, he'll live. But they had to edit that. Like, they had to edit the video. Like, they added Kenchro's body to the ground. Like, it's, it wasn't just, not just a dubbing thing. Like, they actually cut the image to make it, like, change the story.

It's, it's a really wild change. And I don't know what possessed them to do that, because I guess they didn't want to. wanted to end on an outright tie. I guess, you know, Americans hate ties. Let's be honest. That's true. Yeah. It's why baseball games can last six hours. You don't happen to know if that's available, like, in English and modern, like on DVD or Blu-ray. Do you? I've never seen this one. I mean, you can watch the whole thing on YouTube, that's for sure. Yeah. I mean, like... There is an old DVD, I think, but I don't think there's

been, like, a more modern release, at least not that I've seen. Because nowadays, from disco check. I have a gigantic box set, which has, I don't know, like 20 or 30 DVDs of the whole TV series. And they release that on SD Blu-ray also. But I'm not quite clear, because there's a lot of other OVAs and movies, which are like various adaptations, I guess. But I'm not sure exactly what's available at the moment. I think streamline in general doesn't have the best reputation. Even though it was groundbreaking at the time, a lot of their dubs sort of didn't age well. Like, I know, like, Akira is, like, a hugely famous, you know, influential animated film. But if you buy it today, it's dubbed in English, but it's not the stream might dub. Like, they re-dubbed it, like, 20 years ago. And, like, that's the only, that's the only dub you can get now. So, I mean, I'm part, again, as we said, as Brian and I both said, like, we watch this, you know, when I watch this movie as a young person, I found it very influential.

So, of course, I have some affection for it because the lines are so weird. Like, in particular, the one that I'll never forget is when Rao and Ray fighting, each other. Basically, Rao completely, you know, blind-sized Ray, he covers, he throws his cape on him and stabs him with his little finger. And whatever he says in Japanese, whatever,

I don't care what he says Japanese. I know he says in English, so I memorize it. He's like, Ray, you smell it? It's a smell of death. And he also, like, before that, he threatens, like, death should not be rushed. It should be savored, like, a fine wine. Like, it's all this mad, like, his madness. Like, it's, you know,

God bless Carl Masek, you know, RIP, he must have been on, I don't know if he was on Coke or just having the time of his life, but the lines they came up with for that dialogue were just out there. And so I do have an affection for it. And I'm sure, I'm sure I bought a DVD at one point that had that streamlined dub on it. But at this point, I've got to assume it's out of print. But I know, as I said, it is absolutely on YouTube if you want to watch it today. You can go ahead. And as a film, I feel like a lot of films of Shonen Jump properties, like, this is almost best watched if you know what you're looking at first, as opposed to just being like, well, let's see what this Fist of the North Star thing is about. Like, I feel like it will just feel a little too rushed or disjointed if you're just coming into this trying to get the story of Fist of the North Star.

I mean, I think it certainly had a, it had an amazing sort of shock and awe feeling when I saw it as a teenager, but also because, like, as I said, it was so violent and so different than anything else I had seen in my life. So, like, if you watch it today, it's not going to have that impact, and it'll just be confusing because so many characters sort of come and go. Like, you see Rao early on, and then Rao disappears for a long time, and then he comes back and people are calling him Kenno for some reason. Like, wait, why is his name change? Like, they don't explain that at all. he's just, he's just bigger and angrier now. Yeah. Um, but I gotta give a shout out.

At one point in the original dub, there's a big, like, metal man who fights Rao and I mean, Rao, Rao kills him easily, but the giant metal man is voiced by everyone's favorite uncle, um, James, oh my God, Uncle Phil and, and Shredder. Oh, wow. I forgot his name. Oh, God. Avery? Is it James Avery?

Yeah. Avery, I mean, Avery was Shredder. So Avery did a lot of voiceover in the 80s, so you can still hear him if you find that streamlined dub. He plays a giant Iron Man who explodes. Speaking of YouTube, though, we got to mention... Oh, boy. In 1995, for whatever reason,

there was an American-Japan co-produced live action film that was released in the U.S. direct-to video. I know I saw a premiere in HBO, but I'm sure it was also released on VHS. And just a cast of grab-bag character actors, cable TV stars. Kentrow was played by Gary Daniels, who you've probably seen in some martial arts movies of the 90s. He was a decent actor, performer. I got to love Costas Mandelor, who, like, did a lot of erotic thrillers, Skinimax-type movies.

He plays shin in the most ridiculous blonde wig I've ever seen. For reasons known only producers, Chris Penn, is Jackal. Not Jaggy. Jackal. And it's Chris Penn. Like, Chris Penn is a lot of things, okay? I recently watched Best of the Best, where Chris Penn played a racist cowboy karate enthusiast, and very believable in that role. Absolutely, I believe he would go to a bar and call someone, you know, call someone a slur and then fight with them. I do not believe he is capable of

leading a gang at the end of the world and, you know, fighting his, you know, his ripped-ass brother. I don't believe that's going to happen. I don't believe it for a second. Also, downtown Julie Brown is in the movie. I have to, that's such a weird trivia point, but it is absolutely downtown Julie Brown is, plays one of like the villagers or whatever. I forgot about that. I forgot about that completely until I saw the notes.

I watched that because I had seen the anime, I was super excited to watch this. And I watched it exactly once and I was like, oh, God, this is no. So, yeah, it's on, it's on YouTube at this point because no one cares. No one, I think, I'm sure someone owns it, but no one cares about it. so the copyright is basically lapsed. Who cares? So, obviously, there's more, there's more spinoffs, there's more adaptations, but I think it's time we start to talk about video games, because it's a sense of a video game podcast, right? We should do some video games.

Seems reasonable. Absolutely. I do you'd say that. So, in going on video games, I'll say it right now, we are not going to cover all the video games because no one can cover all the video games. There are probably hundreds of video games and, like, mobile phone games, and Pacinko slot machines and, you know, flash games and browser game, like, there's so many games we couldn't possibly get them all. We're trying to touch on the big ones. And the big one, because it's the very first one, we have to mention, you got to love this title, Hokedonokken, Violence Gikigga Adventure.

Like, that's the name of Violence Adventure, debuting in May of 1986, only for Japanese PCs. This was the very first fifth and north store video game produced by Enix. And it's sort of a graphical adventure game. It's got, you know, it's got full-color art pretty good, I think, by 86 standards. You know, the characters are very recognizable. And it's a lot of, you know, text-driven commands, you know, do you want to open your inventory? Do you want to move somewhere? Do you want to talk to somebody? And the fights are very much like energy bar-based. You can watch playthroughs on YouTube if you want. Obviously, it's all Japanese. As you'd expect, it ends with Ken versus Shin, because it's 86, so there's not that much material even to work with at that point. So that's a good point. to end it, I would say. But certainly, it ends just like the manga. They fight. Ken wins. Sheen throws himself off of the building, and it's a semi-happy ending.

Yay. I'd never heard of or seen this one before. I knew pretty much every other game we had on our list, but this one. It is quite nice looking. Annex did a lot of these adventure games, especially the command-based ones after Portopia. I think it pretty much just existed to show off, like, how good it could replicate the manga graphics on the computers at the time. Absolutely.

I mean, at this point, you know, early 80s, mid-80s, a lot of companies that we associate with one kind of game were trying anything they could think of. You know, I'm pretty sure this is also the same year that Square made an alien game for PC, you know, or aliens. Yeah. Or alien, no, Alien 2, I think they called it, but whatever. Aliens, Alien Part 2, yeah. Right.

But in any case, it's just like a PC action game, you know, based on the alien movies. Just a few months later, though, you get the first proper Fist the North Star game, a side-scrolling beat him up, which most games are going to follow the formula of being a side-scrolling beat-up, because let's be honest, the way the story goes, as we've explained, is there any better use of the property than to have someone walk left or right and punch people and make them explode? Like, I can't think a better way to do it.

None. But in Japan, it was just called Hooked Unokken Fist the North Scar. Excuse me, Fist of the North Star, not Scar. It was released in the American. but it was called Black Belt, so they didn't have the license, and they just changed Ken Shro to a basically generic karate man. They chate, even on the title screen, they cheat, it's the same face, but they change his outfit from his distinct clothes to like a karate ghee. But other than that, and I think maybe taking out some blood sprites, it's basically the same game. Like they read, you know, the characters, the characters obviously, you know, don't know the same names, but like, it's basically the same, right?

it's like it's it's drastically changed and also the same like they changed almost all the graphics like all the backgrounds of everything all the the boss sprites it's mostly different um they kept some of the minor characters like there's still mr hart in there as a mid boss there's still some of the other you know like better than the stronger than the zakos but some of the low level grunts they show up as mid bosses they're still in the game uh they did change a couple of things like there are these flying uh like sushi that you can jump up and get the air and black belt They changed the music. One of the boss battles changed a little bit because in the Japanese version, he's fighting devil, you know, the big dude, whatever. And they changed him to a sumo guy. But like I mentioned before, they kept weird stuff from it, like Rao's death scene is still in the game. The music is different. I would say it's slightly better, but of course, having the Fists of North Starz gives it a little bit of extra context. But even without the license, I think a lot of people seem to, you know, this game has a fairly good reputation, I would say.

Certainly, Kurt, you liked it, but I think other people online have talked about it positively. So it seems to be decent of the time, certainly. It's like Kung Fu Master, but better. Like, everything about it controls better. Like, it's still very demanding in the timing that you have to get everything right. But, again, the fact that the bad guys shatter whenever you hit them is very satisfying. From a technical perspective, it's extremely impressive. Like, there's a lot of parallax scrolling for a master system.

game. And when you get to the boss battles, they're one-on-one fights. And the character sprites are different. It zoomed in a little bit. And they're not like a standard strike-fire sort of battle because a lot of them have strategies that you need to uncover. And I guess it's sort of to replicate the idea of, oh, you need to do a special technique to beat this guy.

Like I think Souther, there is like some sort of special thing that he had that made him invincible. So when you fight him and his black belt version, Rita, like regular attacks won't do anything. So you have to, I think, hit them when they're jumping in the air and that causes damage. And of course, that's not the way that worked in the original story, but it's sort of trying to get across that same idea. And each of them also have their own, like, super kills, whenever you kill them, like, when they beat Souther. Like, you're just, like, juggling them in the air with his fists and then knocks them off the screen. And in the Japanese version, even in the American version, they have what the attack is supposed to be.

In Black Belt, it's Chinese, so it's a little bit different. I have no idea what they say, but it's still really cool. Yeah, and this was kind of like them establishing a thing that would run through a lot of these other games, which is like not necessarily requiring you to, but incentivizing you to beat the bosses in sort of an approximation of the way in which they were beaten in the source material. Like, this was not the last we see of that. Oh, yeah, the Dragon Ball games, like, especially one of the ones to the PlayStation, like, they had this whole system where you were supposed to beat the same bad guys with the same characters, and it would, like, lead you down a certain path, or like, that's how you advance through the game. Actually, I have to go shout out to Thouther, Souther or Thouther, depending on the romanization. He's got, he's got one of the weirdest stories. The reason he's supposedly invisible to, you know, Kentra's attacks is because he was born with his pressure points reversed.

That's the twist. Yes. So Kencho realizes he's got to attack the body on the other side, but he's to use a special technique first to like soften him up, and then he can hit him with this bizarre attack that makes him regret his actions. He kills him by making him regret his words and deeds. Maybe one of the best villains, the thing where like he was just like enslaving people to make them build a pyramid? Like, what? It's just so silly. And, Kurt, because you mentioned that,

look, it's a good-looking game with Let's scrolling, we should shout out, you know, convicted criminal Yuji Naka because he was a programmer. He was a programmer. So it's funny, for some reason, I could not explain why. But in the, you know, in reporting the recent news about Yuji Naka's court conviction, a fan was outside the courthouse holding a copy of a black belt for the mark three it was on twitter i swear it this is on twitter you can look you can look it up it's like my gosh he's just holding a black belt car he's holding a you know hoctin o kent cart outside the courthouse you know talking about the news i don't was he hoping to get his was he hoping to get a autograph from i don't know

And in the case, just a few months later, honestly, later that's later the same summer, you have the very first Hooked On Okenn game for the Famicom, which is also just called Hooked Onokane. This one was not released overseas. And by all accounts, this one's pretty bad. I mean, I would say, you know, there are so many Fist the North Star games, the batting average is probably not that great. But for a first game on the Famicom, I would say this one is kind of notable. bad. Would you agree, Brian? Like, this is not great. I think worst of the bunch

easily. And I mean, there are some bad games in here, but this, it's incredibly obtuse. Like to go through a door, you have to hit up and A and B in order to even enter the door. And the whole game is based around a door maze. So you never really know if you're entering the correct

door or not, so you can potentially just be looping. I don't know. It's pretty horrible. Uh, its high point is that on the, uh, screen where it, you know, shows the stage and your life counter and things after you die and you're going back into it, it does call your life Ken's. It will say Ken left three, for example, on the screen. Uh, but it's, it's inscrutable and like, thank God it, it, it wasn't released here, honestly.

And also not, not to throw shade at the Atari 2,600, but it looks like an Atari 2,600 game. And, like, graphically, it would not be out of place on that hardware versus on the Famicom. So, Kentro looks very stick-figurey. Like, he's, like, almost monolored, too. Like, he doesn't have, like, the, like, his clothes don't really have details. He's just like, like, an all-blue body, you know, with, like, a certain colored head. It just is not, does not look good. Certainly, Pails in comparison to the, again, just a few months earlier, the Mark III game or the, or the, you know,

Master's some game. Like, whatever hardware you want to call it, like that game looks way better and plays better, too, from what I've heard. Oh, yeah. Very much so. But they would start pumping these out because it must have sold well. I think by the end they got maybe like seven or eight games on the Famicom

before they stopped, before they moved on to the Super Nintendo. But the second game, which was released in 87 in Japan, that was the first one to come to America. And it came to America in 1989 for the NES. And that was the first one that came to America as a, fifth the North Star video game. So it actually was licensed because I think it probably coincided with one of like the earliest attempts by Viz to get the manga out. So you can actually

play, you know, people who had NES could actually play Fist the North Star for their NES. And because the second game is based on the latter series, so things are a little different. You know, you don't get as many I kind of characters in there. I don't think it's as bad as the first game, but it's also not great. I don't know. What, what? Do we think the second one's any better, or what do you think? I definitely think it's an improvement in terms of how it plays. It's more of like a standard side-scrolling action game that doesn't particularly try to, you know, make you figure out what doors to go through and things like that. It still has kind of a weird system with, like, how you get certain power-ups and whatever, but they kind of all do.

But it's just a pity. It's based on the second series, to be honest. Like, that's the biggest thing it has going against it. Maybe it's the toy logo in the beginning, but this reminds me of that that Puss and Boots game that came out here. It feels like they were made by the same company, and just everything about it just looks and sounds ugly. The only thing I like about is that they sampled the la ha! It sort of sounds kind of cool coming out of the NESPCM. Coming off the first Famicom game, though, this is like basically the best game ever by comparison.

But yeah, in a vacuum, it isn't fantastic. but certainly when you compare it to the first one. We should also mention because 1989 was the year the Game Boy launched, they also had a Game Boy game, both in Japan and the U.S., and again, they kept the license. So in America, they called it Fist the North Star, 10 big brawls for the king of universe. And this one was less of a brawler and more of a one-on-one fighter.

You picked your character, and then you pick, you know, you fight another character, and it's one-on-on-one. one, but of course it's 89, which means it's pre-Street Fighter 2, so it's pretty rough. I actually have a quote here from Jeremy Parrish. Some of this up for a second. It sucks.

Thank you, Jeremy. You know, Jeremy covered it in his Game Boy work, so you watch a whole video about what this game is and why it's not great, because it does not look good. It probably controls pretty poorly. It's obviously, it's a two-button fighter, so, you know, it's got the odds sactics it anyway,

but, yeah, I don't know. Did anyone here play the game? the game-boy game? I certainly did not. Nope. Yeah, not at the time I didn't. Years later, I played it briefly, and I basically came to the same conclusion that Jeremy did. But on, I would say, sunnier shores, there was the Sega game made for Genesis or Mega Drive, depending on the territory you lived in. So in Japan, it was just a Hope Don't Okin game. In America, it was called Last Battle. And even though they changed, you know, they changed a little bit, you know, They had to sort of soften the violence and change the color or bloods or whatever.

And they certainly change all the names to what seems like random, almost random characters. The basic look and feel the game hasn't changed that much. And it's basically you controlling, Kencho, it's sort of a weird map screen, but basically you're going from stage to stage, fighting guys. You beat off, should fight away, just sort of punks. And then you have a one-on fight with somebody who's much larger and much stronger. but you know, you get angry, you rip off your shirt, you can deal, you know, you can punch faster, you can kick faster, you get stronger slowly over time, and eventually, you know, you save the world or whatever, but I mean, I certainly never got very far in this version, but I would say compared to the Famicom games, it certainly looks and felt better, like, I would say both in hindsight and probably at the time, but obviously at the time I was not playing the Famicom games, so. Yeah, better version of the second Famicom game, I feel like. I think it really tried to show off, you know, like a lot of early Genesis games, like the Sprite-sized character.

But I don't feel it's as good as the Master System game. Agreed. Yeah, I think in America, it was actually a launch title for Genesis, I believe. Yeah, if it didn't come out in the first day, it's definitely like launch window. Right. Very early. Whereas, you know, by that 89, of course, the system came out in Japan at 88. So it was a little bit later in the system's life.

Japan, but for America, I believe it was one of the earliest titles. So it probably sold well enough for that reason alone, because there weren't that many games for it. So from a timeline here, it looks like I'm skipping ahead. It's not they didn't make games in the 90s. I just don't think they're particularly memorable games in the 90s. I don't know. If there's any 90s games that you particularly want to shout out, by all means.

Otherwise, I'm happy to skip ahead to the year 2000. They shifted to being RPGs for a lot of Famicomom. ones did, yeah. And then the super Famicom ones were all just very sort of nondescript boring fighting games. Well, certainly, yeah, 90s, obviously, once Street Fighter 2 hit, everyone was

making fighting games based on everything. So, you know, again, much like the beat of a formula fit this game perfectly, once everyone loved fighting games, like, well, this is a manga, all about fighting, right? They just didn't, they didn't have any personality. Like, there were, there were basically like four of them, and it was like,

okay, here comes Hulktono Ken 5 with characters X, Y, Z, and now in 6, you know, because it's this cross section of the story, you've got these characters and it just, I don't know, it's hard to imagine anybody really having that good of a time with those, when

Street Fighter 2 is right there. I mean, you could argue the Dragon Ball went through the same phase, right, because there were tons of Dragon Ball fighting games, especially during the Z era, especially on Superfirmicom, just an uncountable number of games that just are mostly forgotten today. And then you get the PlayStation game, which is

basically memorable because it was received so poorly. But not poorly in Japan was a Japanese-only PlayStation game in the year 2000, and it's basically a 3D brawler, and it's very closely based on the anime. They have the theme song there. They basically retell the anime story pretty closely, except in between the big fights, you get to run around and just punch people freely. Most of the cast of the original cartoon returns to voice their characters, and I think this game has a lot of fans and a lot of well memories.

You can certainly watch people on YouTube play through the entire game and just have the time of their lives because they get to fight all their favorites and kill them. This is a great-looking game, too, because this is a late PlayStation game, so it tries to model what the anime look like with, you know, PS1 models. But, like, there's a Doctor Slump game that came around at the same time, and it just looks really, really good, especially the deformations of the bad guys when they explode. They also put a lot of love into those. Right, because everyone's all polygons. So you can just stretch and twist the polygons

until they, you know, explode into red polygons. Yes. But yeah, tons of voice acting, tons of music, very well received. On the flip side, there is, in Japan called Punch Media, in other territories, it was called Fighting Media. And it was released overseas as Fist the North Star, a very interesting fighting game where it's an arcade cabinet. And you can You sort of feel like the server Mario Maker feel to that, oh, you like punching enemies? Why don't you do it? Because the whole idea is that the cabinet has six pads that move forward and backwards and light up.

And the idea is the player has to punch them at the right time to punch the character on the screen. So if you like Ken Chiro punching guys really fast, well, you better learn to do it yourself because that's how the game works. It's not quite a rhythm game because there's no music. But the pads move in and out, and they have a rhythm to them. So you have to work with what the game wants you to do until the rush at the end, where it's basically, oh, just punch as fast as you can. And the more punches you land, the better your score. But for the actual fights, it is very much about, oh, punch this, not this.

And if you punch it too soon, it counts as a miss. And I remember actually playing this one in arcades. I remember reading about it in a magazine and then playing it. And I remember having a great time with this one. I've never seen this. No, you've never seen this. Yeah, I played it once. Out here in Suburban, New Jersey, they actually got one of these once.

And I have, like, a picture I took with my, like, brick cell phone of it. So it's not a great quality. But I remember just like, wow, it's a North Star here. It's cool. I desperately would like to find one at some point if somewhere has one. Shockingly, I live here in the Chicago area. Shockingly, the Galloping Ghost does not have one. It absolutely seems like something that they should have.

But Doc Mac, if you ever listen to this, please, Fist of the North Star Punching game. We want it. I mean, you have to assume that it's up there with, like, Pac-Man Jr. As far as, like, a pain in the ass to, like, maintain. I'm almost certain that that's the reason why he doesn't have it. You know, much like the Google 13 sniping game around the same era, like, you still see that one in arcades in Japan sometimes. But, like, if that gun doesn't work, then the game is useless, you know, the custom sniper. rifle. So, I can't remember the last time I saw this game in a Japanese arcade. It's been a while. So

maybe someone still has it. I think I saw one maybe in, um, hiricata park, which is like a suburban amusement park here in Osaka, but that was, that was probably like 10 years ago. So this is a good chance that's gone by now. But it was around. I definitely saw it. I saw it in English. I saw it in Japanese. So it got a release overseas. But if you could find this one, please tell us where it is so we can come to your house and play it. But moving on to what I would say is probably the biggest and most remembered game of its era was the 2005 arcade game. Again, in Japan, just called Hulk Dono Ken.

In overseas, it was just called Fist the North Star. This was a joint production by Sega and Arc System Works. Yes, the Guilty Gear people. And it is a 2D versus fighting game. And wow, what all those forgettable, you know, 90s games had, this one's like, no, no, no, we got you. We're doing this right. It is big characters, big sprites, all 2D, everything's voiced. It's got the theme song.

It is, I think it's awesome. I mean, does anyone else think this game is not awesome? Please, sound off. I love it. Oh, it's a ton of fun. I think it's one of the best, how do you want to put it, like poverty fighting games you can learn. There's always side tournaments for these at big events and things like that, and we'll get into why they're so fun. but, like, it's a super cool game.

Yeah, it's very much, you know, it's very much, I would say, kind of a, like a Capcom versus style game in that your characters can jump very, very high, and you can do combos that are extremely long, and you can bounce people, and you can sort of like the super jumping and the super moves, and what I think makes the game very distinct is what I'm going to call the big different mechanic. I don't know what the game calls it, but basically when the match starts, every character has seven stars that are, like, in a big different shape. under your life bar.

And if you get hit by a big combo or you get hit by a super move, you lose a star. And when you're out of stars, that's when you're vulnerable to what's called a fatal KO. And if your opponent does a fatal KO move, they win the round instantly,

no matter how much life you have left. Now, I would say, you win the round, not the match. So if you do it during round one, you still have to play round two. So it's kind of like, say, time killers. If you chop your opponent's head off in time killers, you still have to play the next round,

better, but you do lose. They lose all their life. And all the fatal KO games, all the fatal chaos moves in this game are based on something from the anime. They're usually pretty epic. Some are more lacklister than others, but I think all of them certainly look and sound like a big deal, and the music kicks in, and it's pretty much like an instant endorphin rush. Yeah. And like, Arc System Works, I think, would do other things with like this sort of fatal chaos thing, but I don't know if this was the first time they've done it, but certainly it's earlier than any other of their games I can think of that have sort of a similar mechanic, like the Persona Arena games sort of do kind of have something similar.

The original Guilty Gear had instant kill moves, but they were just the worst because you just did a move and then the other pose and just completely died and you lost everything and it was super annoying. So the way that they did it here is definitely less frustrating. And I think because of the fatal chaos presence, because it can sort of win around instantly, but it takes a long time to set up. We should also mention the seven stars, when a round ends, you do not reset them. I think you might regain some of them, but not all of them.

So in most tournaments that I've seen, they actually go, they do a three out of five. And the idea being that if you've won two matches, if you win two rounds, you've probably worn your opponent down, so your third win can be very quick. But the roster is basically sort of a who's who of the early parts. Like, you get Kencho, you get Shin, you get Jaggy, you get Toki, you get Rao, you get Ray, you get Mr. Hart, you get Sousa, you get, basically every character we mentioned at least once, you get all those characters.

So it's about, uh, one, two, three, four, five, ten, ten characters picked from. Only one woman, unfortunately, it's Mamia. And it's weird. She fights with, like, a bow gun, so she has, like, a limited number of ammo, but it's kind of like a, like, and Yuda has, like, strikers who can summon. It's, it's

interesting. Each character has, has very distinct moves and play style, like, Jaggie can shoot a gun. Jaggy can like, his, his fiddle kill move is basically a bomb. There's lots of specific character finishes. If you fight certain characters with certain

characters and kill them, it prompts like anime scenes. Like Ray and Yuda have a scene right out of the manga. Ray and Mamia have a scene right out of the manga where he tears Mommy his clothes off in a PG-13 kind of way. But the reason this game is probably still memorable

today is the fact that, besides it's fun. I mean, obviously it's a fun game. It works. But it's actually broken in the sense that every single character can do an infinite relatively easily if you know what you're doing. So a tournament of this game is basically, comes down to who gets the infinite first and whether they drop it or not, because once you start it,

it can take, like, minutes to complete. Because the damage, I guess, scales down. So, like, you need to do a lot of hits to actually finish your opponent. It's watching tournaments for this is absolutely hilarious because you will have the person who has caught in the infant will stop and, like, take a selfie with the person who is doing the infinite because they literally can do nothing and there's no point in, you know, unless the person attacking them happens to drop the infinite, which let's be real. Most people who play in this game in these tournaments are probably not going to drop the infinite. But what I love is the fact that the infinites are just so, are so ridiculous because what ends up happening is you're basically bouncing your opponent off the ground.

Yeah. And it's almost like you're dribbling that. it's really funny. Or you're doing one move over and over again that sort of like stuns them or like juggles them but then you're juggling them

like then you're leaping up and juggling them and bouncing up the ground and then you're hitting them in the air like it's, you know I would say a good infinite will actually include a variety of moves that isn't just one move over and over again

but essentially you could do it by just doing one move one move repeatedly but they try to mix it up like they try to make it fun to watch basically because otherwise what's the point? I want to see whatever the new show

is acknowledge this and just have a scene for like two minutes like Kencho is infiniting someone. So it was a 2005 release, and this release was international. There is an English text option, and probably other language, which is two. But then it was poured to PS, this is wild. It was ported to the PS2 in 2007. So the PS3 is already out. But no, they made a PS2 port only in Japan.

And the PS2 got a lot of Japanese-only arcade ports, but it's kind of a shame because you'd think. this one, you know, would have some appeal overseas, but no, the PS2 version was only released in Japan in 2007. You know, years later, you can find hackers out there. They've hacked this game to run the Dreamcast because it was a Naomi board. So today, if you're willing to, you know, partake at the Piracy, you can play this game on a Dreamcast, but for many, many years, it was basically like if you were looking to get an arcade, you could. Otherwise, you had to sort of, you know, get lucky. But now you can, it's a little more available now. And,

I think, as you said, people are still probably playing this at Evo, you know, on the side. Oh, yeah. I certainly see, on Twitch, I've seen streaming tournaments on this pretty regularly, so people still love it. Yeah. And, of course, whenever I go out to local retro arcades, this one's usually still, usually a cabin of this is still around. Yeah. Even though it's, you know, coming up on almost 20 years old, it's still fairly popular because the property is so popular. And the game is just fun to play.

I mean, I'm not good at it, and I can still usually get through like two fights. with it. You know, it's just fun to select people around. Yeah, and it's, I mean, it's beautiful to look at regardless, like, especially if you know the characters that you're looking at, like even if you come in and you don't really know how to play the game, you're, you're going to have some amount of a good time with it just because they're also faithfully represented there. Yeah, and of course, if you, if you play this whole game, you have to fight, you know, I think it's a special version of Rao to be the last boss, like he's a Ken-O, but if you beat him, he absolutely does the pose and the voice line, and it's just, yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

very much, it's like, it's the good kind of fan service. The game, like the game lovingly recreates so much, you know, so many elements of the original work because people know it and love it so much. I like those sort of licensed games, because licensed games that came out at the time, they tend to be very, very rushed and just like, ah, we got to get this out to make

some money, but, you know, so many years separated from it, you have people that grew up with it, and they love it, they aren't quite under the same pressure so they can really take their time to make something that shows a lot of love. Absolutely. Very, very worth your time if you can find it now. I just want to highlight one game that absolutely was only in Japan and probably didn't sell

that well, but it was funny to me, and I saw it, took a game show, so I'm going to mention it. It was a 2008 DS release, only in Japan, and the gimmick was, you're using the stylus, and the comic panels will just kind of move across the screen, and you have to tap pressure points to hit the enemies, and you have to do it very quickly, and if you do it right, they literally, like the manga panels literally explode into polygons. so it's kind of a cheap release which is probably why it wasn't localized but for a you know

for a one-off demo and took a game show I thought it was hilarious so I wanted to mention it here I can't imagine it has any fans but I had to highlight it as a weird curiosity that made the most of DS you know made the most of the DS control panel because you know

for all your good rhythm games out there there is this sort of you know low quality Hoked and Okin tapping game yeah that is that is the most DS type of game that there ever was. I mean, there were also like, you know, Pachinko versions, but, you know, this is actually, you know, relatively, at least fun to play for like five minutes. As opposed to spinning, you know, spinning cylinders.

But we should mention the next game, which was actually, again, fairly popular in Japan, and it got US release too, so it must have hit with somebody. It's Hokuto Muso. That's right. It's a Muso game. Released abroad as Fist the North Star, Ken's Rade. 2010, PS3 and 360. And, I mean, at the one point, it is a Muso game, so you know what you're getting? Like, you're Kentro and you're fighting 100 guys at once, which is like, I guess that's what you do in the anime. It seems like thematically appropriate. But I don't know. I remember playing this one at TGS and not being impressed, but someone must have bought it.

I know, Brian, you enjoyed this one, Brian? I'm that someone, yes. So not only, and I, look, looking back at this in retrospect, I realized it was. probably nothing special, right? But at the time, it had been so long since I played a good Fist of the North Star game, I actually bought a PlayStation

3 partially for this game. Okay. Which probably not many people can say. And like, for, I, I can have fun with a Muso game. I don't think they're the, you know, best things that ever were, but I can have fun with them. But I think the appeal here was like

the what if kind of side story things that you can do in just about any Muso game, but there was sort of a special appeal to it for Fist of the North Star, because, like, you could play, for example, scenes with Ray, which he was not alive for in the original story, which was kind of neat. And interestingly, I remember hearing at the time that a criticism of the original version of this game is that Kenshido was too weak. Like, he was, you know, too weak to line up, you know, with how Kenshito was in the source.

And so they actually, in Japan, re-released an international version that sort of corrected the balance a little bit. This was not the sequel. There was a sequel. And this was not that. This was actually Hoktonomuso International. And the last thing I'll say about it is the treasure box. So like the big, you know, special edition of that most Muso games have came with a lot of goodies. It has a Hokton Muso business card.

holder, which I still use today. Ah, nice. But it also came with an alarm clock. And I, I, you, you could definitely find this on YouTube of someone demoing it for anyone who wants to see it. But it's basically, it's one of the, uh, sound samples on there is Kenchio doing is, and at the end, he says, oh my one more octaedu. Like, you're already awake.

And everything, Rao has a sound sample on there about like waking up and someone else does. It's amazing. Oh, I love it. That's, I'm more interested in that than the game. Right. That probably is the best reason to buy that crazy set. I don't know how much that is these days. I bought it new. So I bought it new in an era where the dollar was not favorable against the yen. So I probably paid way too much money for it, but whatever. Yeah, that was the era. There was certainly, there was an economic reversal at that point. Yes. After the tsunami. So, but yeah, As you mentioned, there was a straight-up sequel, and the sequel was also localized, so both games were released internationally, and I don't know, I don't think their reputation was as well overseas, but I'm pretty sure they were received pretty well domestically. Like, I don't think 40 out of 40, but I think they had their fans.

Yeah, they were considered to be solid, I think. Yeah, the Muso games, they don't seem to review very well over here, but they're like, if you're a fan of the property, then, yeah, but there's not a tremendous amount of it's the North Star fans here, so. Right. I think, like, some Muso games that cross over, like, I think Hyrule Warriors got a lot of, got a lot of good attention, you know, but this is, I think this is one of the lower ones in the totem pole. But if you, if you want to be Kentro and you want to, you know, KO 100 dudes, like, this is the game to get because it's going to give you a hundred dudes to Kio. And any game that I can play as Ray is all right by me. But if we're going to kill a bunch of dudes, we should probably talk the next one, which is probably one of the more faithful, why not faithful, let's say loving, loving recreations, because it's Sega again. Sega, Sega tries. Sega tries. They put their whole ass into these games. It is Hoktukaggotu. That's right. It's a Yakuza style spinoff. It was released overseas as

Fistinor Star Lost Paradise. Only for PS4. There is no Xbox version. There's no PC version as of this recording. But it came out in 2018. And the whole gimmick was, we're going to make a Yakuza game, but it's Fisth the North Star, and all your favorite Yakuza voice actors are going to voice the Fist of North Star characters. So Kiriu is not Kiyu. Keriu is Kenchiro. Uh, Majima is now Jaggy. I love that, I love that casting. That's perfect. There's a DLC where you can buy to actually have Kyrieu fight in the game if you want to be Kiryu, so it's Kiru now.

But it's Yakuza style, so you've got sort of an open world style, but you have certain, you know, story beats, you've got side quests, you've got areas to explore. You can explore the wasteland and a dune buggy. But when you brawl, you brawl sort of Yakuza style, but of course it's Fist the North Star. So you're doing combos and you're landing, you're landing, you're landing. landing pressure point hits, and if you time them right, your opponents explode. And this is one of those games where, because it's very manga style, they will, you know, they'll shout something, and that shout will turn into words that you can pick up and wield as weapons and hit other opponents with.

It is, it is manic to watch this game in action. It's pretty wild. And in keeping with the, you know, Yakuza style, there's lots of mini games, which are based on old video games, which are particularly fun. in this case because it's just Kentro like walking through the desert and finding an old Mark 3 and then turning it on and works.

I like the setup of this game because it takes place right after he kills Shin. So like basically right at the beginning, but it's a completely original story that it kind of wedges in there in a way that makes sense. Yeah, it gives you a lot of freedom, but it also gives you a lot of

familiar faces. But they let you, you know, they let you hit all the things you want to do in a yakuza game, but they had to get very creative with it because, you know, again, it's the end of the world. So, like, there's no batting centers, so they make a mini game where Kenchro has a telephone pole and bikers are rushing at him, and he's just swing the telephone pole to knock the bikers into the air and hit a home run, or, you know, quote-unquote home run. But I love some of the details because when, you know, there's a lot of press about this

game, of course, some of the mini-games had to be very specific because the license holders didn't want Kenchro to do certain things. Like, obviously, if you play Yakuzaa game. You want to go out and sing karaoke, of course. But the jump people, whoever the editors were, they said, Kenchro does not sing. This is not a man who sings. So they replaced that mini game with a pressure point, like, healing game. Like Kenchro opens a clinic, and people sort of storm his office, and you have to very quickly, you know, poke everybody in the right place to make them feel better.

And it looks pretty silly, but it is essentially the same as the Karoluke game, except it's, you know, it's a clinic opening game. And they had to remove, they couldn't do any kind of hostess clubs or dating because Ken Chiro cannot romance anyone besides Yudio. That tracks. And yes, she's in the game because she's kidnapped. So, yeah, yeah. I think you spend the bulk of the game looking for Yudio again. I'm shocked. This is one that I know I bought and I haven't installed in PS5 and I want to play it, but I'm also like five games behind on my PS5, so I haven't really played it yet.

But its reputation is great, and it's really high on my list of games I really want to dig into, because I do like the Yakuza games, and I do like punching guys. So, do you get any far in this game, or how did you, how did you receive this game? I'm kind of in the same boat where I did, I did play it for a good stretch around when it came out, and then life things happened, and I just sort of put it down and didn't end up picking it back up for whatever reason. also really, really want to get back to it. But I feel like it probably could be the perfect Hokotono Ken game. Yeah, it's the same for me. I got it when it came out and I played it for a couple hours. I'm like, yeah, this is really cool.

And I just never got back to it. It bugs me how the, the, uh, the yakuza game sent it, like, put the, the classic Sega stuff. They really, like, buried in there. Like, I want to just play the Mark 3 game again. But, I mean, that's not, there's no insult to this game. It is really good. No. And I feel like, I certainly wouldn't want to see them do this to the same extent that the Muso franchise does.

But I feel like there's something here for selectively taking licenses for putting them into the Yakuza template. Like, this one worked so well. And I don't know, maybe it's just because of the particular license it was. But, like, I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to seeing, like, extremely careful selection of licenses kind of having this sort of treatment. in the future. It's a good framework to work in. Yeah. It's kind of wild as concepts go.

It's like we're making it. We're making a spinoff to a game. Everyone knows and loves that's very character-based, but we're going to pick it. We're going to pick characters from a complete different property and tell an original story with those characters you already know and love. It's hard to think of another example like that. Like, yeah. I don't know.

It's pretty unique. Like, and it's not that far removed from, I actually guess that was 2011, wasn't it? I'm thinking of the, the Akusa spinoff that was basically a zombie shooter. But that one was, like, that one was relatively unpopular and didn't really play well, whereas this one, like, everyone loved this one. But still, I guess Yakuza is done so well. They sort of take chances like that, and some of them work and some of them don't. Yeah. And who knows if they're going to do that again? Because they seem, at this point, they seem to be very comfortable with making Yakuza games that are more like turn-based RPGs. That's true. But I don't know. They have come. They know how to do good brawling. So in theory, they could always, you know, regress. Who knows? Maybe we could see, uh, Kimunotakuya voicing. Ken Chudo, who knows. I don't know, not with a new Johnny scandal, but who knows? That's true. Don't look that up, fellows.

You will only be, you will regret that if you look that up. Yep. One less one I want to mention here, just because it is so recent and it is so silly, it is part of the fit boxing lineup here in Japan for the Switch. You know, there's a lot of games out there that make you, you know, work out at home on your Nintendo Switch. So, and it's released in Japan, but also released a, broad as Fist and R Star, and it's a boxing game where you've got your, you know, you've got

your joycons and you're punching and you're kicking and you're, you know, you're working out. And the tagline here in Japan is, oh, my, amo, yesatero. Like, you are already slim. You're already losing weight. I want to play this so bad. Yeah, me too. That sounds great. I think that just announced there's also going to be a Hatseneimuku version.

So, of course, people are drawing fan art of Hataeniku and Kedgero together, which is fun. But that's where we're at. Like, you know, 40 years later, this property is still going strong because there is, you know, like I said, they've announced a new animation, but there is no animation right now. There's no current manga spinoff that I'm aware of. Like, these characters just exist and people love them, and they just go on and on and on, even though story-wise, like, this merchandise, it's always merchandise, but, like, the characters just endure, people just know these characters and love these characters. I was like, last time I was in Nakano Broadway, which is sort of like the nerd mall in Tokyo, like, there was an entire Hokton Okan just store. Like, just all Hokkaan merchandise. Like, they had Hokkaan liquor.

They had Hoktonokin'okin'Kin'Kin. Like, just tons of stuff because everyone loves these characters. And like, I get it. I almost bought something. It was Hokhtonokin Honey. Oh, my gosh. Which character would consume honey? I guess, I don't know, Hart.

I, God, I mean, if I wasn't charged for my phone, I could look up my pictures. still have them. But yeah, it just, just all this lineup of, like, there was, I know there was like a jaggy jacket that was like, I'm a genius, like, I love it. It was just, you know, just fantastic stuff that, you know, if it wasn't, if it was priced a little bit cheaper, I would have just Impulse bought it all. But it didn't

stop me from taking selfies in front of the giant row poster, you know? But yeah, that's where we're at. Like, are there more, is there more hoped to know him coming? Yes, absolutely. When will it arrive, we don't know. But it's going to be popular. And I know the new series that was announced,

It's produced by Warner Bros. Japan, which means it's a really good chance it will launch worldwide with translations. So it's probably coming soonish, if they're announcing it. And, yeah, I mean, the story must go on. The world ends, but these characters keep going. I hope it picks up more internationally, because it always felt like over here. Like, yeah, people knew about it from being back in the 90s. But after like the several failed mega attempts, like it's finally getting there. but it's never going to have the same amount of relevancy here just because we didn't get it back in the day.

But I hope people to discover it because it is so foundational, especially to the stuff that is popular now. Because it took a long time for Jojo to really pick up steam over here. And now it's, you know, hugely popular. So maybe Fiss and North Star will have its day finally. If you convince the kids to watch it, I don't know. It's maybe a little too manly. when you look at something like Demon Slayer, like there are, you know,

like a diverse roster of men and women. I'm always shocked how popular Demon Slayers with kids. Oh, yeah. My daughter loves it. She's 10. Yeah, we were at a garage sale. There was some seven-year-old girl that was selling some Demon Slayer stuff to go to Legoland.

The show was so violent, I can't even watch. It isn't Fist of the North Star violent, but it is like relatively violent. And yeah, with so many young kids watching it. It's very interesting. Yeah. And I mean, they're also, like, there's not a lot of old people in the show, but it seems like they're older than the regular teenagers, which I don't know how well it'll

resonate. But, you know, again, fingers crossed so that maybe someday we can have her own fifth and North Star store here in New Jersey. I mean, you mentioned Jojo. There's no doubt that this predates Jojo by several years. And there's no question that Araki read this and took some inspiration from it. Certainly if you look at that first cover of the very first issue of Jojo in 1987, like the picture where it's Jonathan and Dio on the cover, like those look like a couple of guys who could be in different clothes in the fifth and Nostar universe. Like they're both massively muscular. And the outfit that Jonathan ends up wearing in part one is very Ken Chiro. He's got the shoulder pads.

He's got the jacket. I mean, let's face it, almost every Jojo hero has a rushing punch attack. And it's very, you know, it's very, you know, 100, 100 fists, you know. Yeah. Instead of, you know, it's, you know, Aurora, you know, it's, it's right there. And, I mean, you look at the late 80s, like double dragon, double dragon is absolutely, like, at least 30% fist than our star. Like, oh, it's, it's story, even though the story doesn't quite make, it's supposed to take place in a post-a-pacupic world, like in the backstory, but it doesn't ever actually seem that way in the game. Yeah, you could never tell.

But the art is, I don't think it's Tetsu-a-Hara. but it's somebody doing, like, on the Famicom, like, their best impression. Right. And we should mention, actually, Brian, you put some notes, like, Tetsuohara did work for Capcom, right? For some of their, what, the muscle bomber games? Yeah, he did the, I think they were called Saturday Night Slam Masters in America. But, yeah, it's extremely recognizable as him. Like, at least to me, like, any time you see Tetsuohara, it's drawing something, like, you immediately recognize it as his work.

Yeah, I'll have to look up with the Famicom double-dram. dragon cover, because I guess I always just assume that was him, because it looks, it's absolutely his style. So if that's somebody aping him, like, they did a darn good job of it. One thing I do really enjoy is that because, like, all these manga guys are basically friends now at this point in their old age, you see someone's artists will draw characters of other, by other artists. Yeah. And there's a doodle out there of, well, it's not a doodle. It's a full color illustration. There's a drawing out there of a Rocky's interpretation of Kenchero, and it is so it's so wild because it is

it's visibly, you know, it's visibly Kentro, and it's a, it's a ripped guy in a jacket, but it also has like very Jojo energy and he's sort of posing, and there's a softness to his, like, his eyes, but it's still like Kenchero, and he's got, like, he's got product in his hair, basically.

I do kind of love it. But I think for the 40th anniversary, they just relaunched, like, they launched a new edition of the manga, like the old, like the original story manga, but like a new edition. And they've got blurbs on there with a rocky on the cover, like saying, you know, this is, this is such a great world to occupy. And, yeah, I guess it doesn't have the, the Jojo sort of weirdness to it because it is kind of like, like, the battles in Fist and Rostar are very much about, like, punching guys and making them explode.

Like, you're not going to get the story of like, oh, I've, you know, oh, I wanted you to punch me and knock me into this rock so I could use my power to turn it into a slug or something. Like, you don't, you don't get, you don't get those sort of, you know, brain warping. fights, but you do get a lot of massive masculine men, and it's sort of, it's almost with self-parody at this point, but it is what it is. Like, it wears its, it, it wears it sort of, you know, it's, it's motto on, you know, on its sleeveless vest. It takes itself very seriously in spite of being completely ridiculous, and that's why I love it. That's a good way of summarizing it. Yeah, I don't know what to say about that, but just, you know, my last to his fight, and I swear to you, I tried to name my son Kenchero, and my wife would not have it.

She just, she said no. What a pity. Yeah, I just, I can't beat that, you know? Like, GoFite is pretty good, but Kenchro fight is better. Go fight makes it sound like you were, you were a big Kinikuman fan and you were angling for that way. That's a comedy character, too. That's true. Um, so final thoughts.

I just say Ken Shor well live us all. Anyone else want to wrap this up? I think it's the, for my money, it's the best representation of, I guess, post-apocalyptic media. There's a lot of fun to be had there. The characters are insane. And, like, I, I've just never seen another post-apocalyptic thing that I enjoy as much as this. And I hope they keep it going in some decent form for the 40th anniversary. Yeah, I do hope that they, again,

revive it because it is, I mean, manga's manga, but it's hard to go people to go back and watch something from the 80s. So modernizing it, I think, will greatly looking forward to it. Yeah, I hope so. And I hope we get some more news beyond just the teaser

because, you know, at this point, there's a lot of anime being pumped out these days. So who's making it and what their timeline is is a huge factor? I think the whole reason that Jojo became suddenly popular after decades of obscurity is, you know, it was animated by a team that loved it in a way that few people lovingly love anything.

At least for now, the early signs are good and that the creators are on board. They seem very excited about it, but we'll see what happens. I don't think we're going to get more news before this episode goes up because it's going up pretty soon, but we'll see. So that's the end of the time we've had for today. This was a lot, but I think it was worthy. I'd like to think this is worthy of the fifth of the north star property. Before we wrap things up, I'd like our guest to sort of tell the internet where they can find them.

Brian, would you go first? Tell the internet about yourself. Sure. So I write slash translate for my site, which is one million power.com, as I mentioned at the beginning. It's kind of a mixed bag of stuff. It's sort of schmupulations, but weird, is how I like to describe it. It is a lot of developer interviews and, like, game industry, related stuff, but I don't tend to translate the obvious things. Like, you won't see too many

interviews with Shigeru Miyamoto translated there. I also do Japanese rock music stuff there, which is another big hobby of mine. And later this year, I'm going to start doing some YouTube stuff as well. So, yeah. Excellent. So is there a user link or a word that should search for? So if you go to one million power.com, you'll find links to everything. That's where all my articles are, I centralize them there. And if we're talking Twitter or X or whatever it's called these days, I'm usually on everything as B. Clark OMP. Okay, gotcha. So 1 million power or B. Clark OMP. Yes. And Kurt, I think we will know because you told them already, but why you tell them one more time. Yes, I run Hardcore Gaming 101.1. That's hardcoregaming

101.net, all one word. We put out books also, mostly retro game themed. We actually had a plan to do a Mark 3 Master System book at some point. We probably still will. But with those, I commissioned some of our regular cover artists to do like little fan artwork.

And to go along with the Master System 1, I had one of our regular cover artist Rusty Shackles do Black Belt. But he did it in the style of Fits of the North Star. So you get to see Ricky and those other boss characters that are in the game in the Tetsurahara sort of style.

I'm on Twitter as HG underscore 101. Blue Sky, I think is just HG 101 also. Excellent. So, and this has been Retronauts. Thank you very much for listening. We really appreciate your attention span. But if we might, if you might go to patreon.com slash retronauts, we are primarily fan funded.

So if you consider giving us, say, $3 a month, you get all our episodes one week early in a higher audio quality. But if you do $5. a month, just $2 more, you get exclusive episodes, two exclusive episodes every month. You get columns from me every week. I also read the columns to you, so it's like a little podcast. We have a Discord. That's also for $5. And we have even higher tiers, but I think $3, $5, pretty good deal all around. If you're looking for me on the internet, you can find me. You can find me pretty much anywhere by looking at my handle Fight Club, F-E-I-T, that's my last name, C-L-U-B,

That is a blunt instrument that is useless against Ken Chiro because he'll punch it. And if that's all, I'm going to say good night, everybody. So good night, everybody. Oh! Ha! Ha! Hey!