Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 158: Ranma 1/2

Episode Date: July 2, 2018

Travel back in time to Midwest Gaming Classic, when Jeremy, Bob, and guest Caitlin Oliver (@sacaitlin) traveled even further back in time to the ’90s and the wild world of gender-bending anime Ranma 1/2... and all the games based on the series.

Everyone is Jeremy. Before we jump into the episode proper, I wanted to indulge in a tiny bit of self-promotion. Retronauts has teamed up with fan gamer and engineer Mike Choi to create something for fans of classic gaming and Nintendo's Switch. Flip grip. Flip grip is the missing piece to Nintendo Switch. It's a simple plastic controller grip that allows you to play the system sideways in handheld mode. A lot of old arcade games ran in what is known as Tate mode, where their screens and their cabinets were rotated sideways to be taller than wide. Lots of games on Switch offer vertical display options, which the same. system can take unique advantage up thanks to the way the entire console consists of a portable screen with detachable controllers, but until now you've needed to set the screen on a desk stand in order to play Tate mode games.

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Unlike other Kickstarter projects, this one's risk-free. We've prototyped the FlipGrip extensively, and it's ready for manufacture. We just need the cash to pay for it and have it produced and distributed. In fact, since the Kickstarter has already blown past its goal, we've already set the production wheels in motion, so the FlipGrip will be in your hands this fall. FlipGrip is just $12 plus shipping. So if you love Classic Gaming on Nintendo Switch, head over to Kickstarter before July 9th and check out FlipGrip. This week in Retronauts, podcast Nobaka.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to an explosive. No, actually, it's not explosive. What would be a good descriptive term for this episode of Retronauts? Not gender-changing. I guess that's, okay. Transformative? Yes, a transformative episode of Retronauts. Well done. I am Jeremy Parrish, and it just wouldn't be Midwest Gaming Classic without our regular Retronauts Midwest Gaming, classic panelist contributor, et cetera, et cetera. Introduce yourself. My name's Caitlin Oliver. One time I set a record in Splatterhouse and it was really good.

And I collect video games and I'm just generally a giant nerd. And of course, also here is... It's Bob Mackie. We're making it safe to talk about anime in 2018. That's right. Yes. And what better anime to talk about in the year 2018 than, of course, the hottest, newest, freshest anime,

Rodma one half. Okay, so it's not exactly new and fresh. But then again, this is retronauts, so it's old and stale, just like everything we talk about. I don't know if it's stale. Okay, okay. Actually, no. Aranma is really interesting to revisit in this day and age as I think, you know, gender identity and things like that have become more, more familiar to audiences.

Yeah. Well, yeah, fluid for one thing. And this is truly a ginger fluid anime and manga. Well, we did a Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon episode. I don't know if it'll come out before this or after it, but one of our guests, Sam Lighthammer, had a very good point about the whole gender change. thing how it's a theme in a lot of Japanese stuff. And speaking as an ignorant American, I feel like their gender roles are even more strict. So there's like a fantasy of like what would it be like if I could do the things a woman could do or a man could do. Right. And you definitely

see that in Ronma one half. So this is another one of those episodes where we're talking about a media property and the games related to it. But we're not just talking about the games related to the media property. We are talking about the media property itself. And I have a lot of fondness for Ronma one half and I assume you guys are here because you also have a lot of fondness fondness. A lot of people our age who are at least relatively or vaguely into the subject matter or at least familiar with it and have some nostalgia for it by default. Just because it was one of the largest series in that time that at least America could get. Yeah, it was one of the big breakouts of anime in the early to mid-90s. And unlike Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball, it never

aired on television for some reason. I couldn't imagine why. But it was never the less really popular, both online and just in terms of home video sales. And that was really where it thrived was Viz Media would publish their two episode VHS tapes. And it was $30 for two episodes dubbed and $40 for two episodes subtitled. Because subtitles cost you extra. No, I was introduced to the series by renting it from a local comic book store because they would have maybe 15 or 20 tapes that they would rent out of random anime. And they're the only one place I could ever find Rahnma, at least in Northwest Indiana.

Yeah, this was the first series I ever really collected in the sense of, you know, having a collection of tapes. And that's because I picked up a few on rental. and thought they were really interesting, but it was like, I think the first episode I ever saw was the one where Ukio is introduced. So that's like third or fourth season.

And I was like, okay, so one thing, I got a really, the really wrong idea of what the character dynamics were because I was like, man, why is Romo stuck with this chick Akane? She's the worst. Oh, no.

But I hadn't seen, you know, the foundation for their relationship. But it was really hard to find, you know, any, like a consistent run of tapes. And then Viz started releasing their videos as box sets, the digital dojo box sets. And they were like an entire season for,

it was probably like $150 or $200. It was a lot of money. But it was a good deal for the time. And I was like, okay, I'll do this. I think it was $150 for the dub and $200 for the subtitle. It took up way less space too. No. Oh, I'm thinking of the DVDs.

Oh, yeah, yeah, the DVDs. I have the whole series on DVD now. It was called Digital Jo, Digital Dojo on DVD as well. Okay. Well, that was what they called it on VHS, even though it was analog. Okay. Figure that out. It's weird.

But, yeah, I have a very strong memory of ordering by mail order, the digital dojo. And then I went to do, I studied overseas in Prague for a month. And I came back and the box set had arrived while I was traveling. So, like, as soon as I get back into America, I start walking. watching anime and I remember I like went out and got some Chinese takeout and a friend of mine came over and was like, so you get back to America and the first thing you do is watch Japanese cartoons and eat Chinese food. I was like, yeah, well, what can I say? You're no patriot

your name. But yeah, like anyway, the point is I just, you know, I read and watched a lot of Romo back in the day and have a fond, definite fondness for it. Weyaboo before the term weaboo was absolutely. I was so we. Sobu. I discovered it kind of late because of I didn't have the income to buy these expensive tapes. And no one was renting them. I mean, I rented all of the, the anime VHS as my video store had, but it was limited to like all the shitty movies like the Fatal Fury movie and the Samurai showdown movie and the fire emblem OVA. And I guess, Dad, you're saying, you're saying, you're saying, the motion picture was directed by Masama Obari. I'm sure the animation is good, but it's nothing. I mean, the story is just like, actually, I didn't even really really know about fatal fury characters. but um it was only until my anime club days of college yes i'm that cool that i saw oh my god my school didn't have an anime club i hung out with i hung out with the international students and that was as close as i got well it was only then that i discovered the anime itself but i had exposure to it because like you said it was one of the first uh bigger series released in america

that didn't air on tv so um it might even be the first like how are the like 200 episodes or around that much? No, I don't think there's that much. It's seven seasons, 26 episodes. So, yeah, I guess it's like 160, 170. Plus there's movies and OABs. I mean, I really enjoyed it. And I think it's all on Funimation now or Crunchyroll.

One of those services is just streaming. So it's easy to get. Yeah. And again, there is an entire, like, the entire series is out on Blu-ray and DVD, I think. And they didn't really promote it that heavily. but I did eventually find that they released the movies and OAVs on Blu-ray a few months ago, so I picked that up in my collections complete, although those are actually kind of the worst of the RANMA stuff.

They take some liberties. But anyway, so let's talk about Rana one-half. It is actually, we keep saying anime, but it's manga. That's how it got to start. True. Created by Rumiko Takahashi, the artist, the mangaka who created Uruzea Yatsura and Maisanikoku, and more recently, following Ranma, Inouyasha and Reney.

She's wealthier than Oprah, I think. Yeah, she's super, super rich. I think he could classify her work as seminal. Absolutely. And she also did a lot of other stuff in the 80s. She doesn't do the one-off so much anymore, but she did stuff like Mermaid Forest, which was weird sexual horror, fire tripper,

Maris the Chojo, the one of the boxer, one-pound gospel. Yes. I was going to say that that's her as well. I mentioned Mezzanikoku. That's actually my favorite series by Takahashi, but it's not as video game heavy. It's all like visual novels, so kind of hard to talk about.

But Ranma is, it's kind of, you know, Shonen Boys anime or manga, but actually started out being written for girls. Like she specifically set out to create something that would appeal to women. So the result is I feel like a kind of crossover, a show with cross. or a book with crossover appeal. Like, I feel like it appeals to a lot of different people. I feel like that's really appropriate for the subject in question. Absolutely.

So we should talk about... Well, the premise, we keep talking about gender fluidity and that sort of thing. But that is the point of Ranma One Half. And the title, Ronma One Half in Japanese is Ranma Nibu Noichi, which means Ranma two parts of one. So instead of saying this is half a person, it's saying there's two, two, facets of a single person. Like the term New Half, which is... Is that from the same term? New Half is

the new generally accepted term for transgender bolts of all stripes. So I feel like it was kind of a proto term for that. Hmm. Okay. I could be totally wrong and somebody could tell me that in the comments and that's cool.

Yeah, I wonder what the etymology of that is. This is just what I suspect and how it would be related to it. All right. So Ron Moe One Half is about a martial artist, a young high school student named Ranma Sautomi, whose father was like the head of a dojo. Genma. And so they spent a lot of time training.

And on one of their training trips, they went to all kinds of places. But one of them was the cursed pools of Jusinkyo in China. And even though the guide was very adamant that they'd be very careful around the cursed pools, they weren't very careful. And they both fell into the cursed pools. pools and became cursed.

And their curse is that they transform when they are splashed with cold water and refer to their normal bodies when they're splashed with hot water. This is a common theme in the series as there were 1,000 pools in Xenkyo. Yeah. It really wrote a lot of potential for other characters to be cursed in that series. Absolutely. There's a lot of people who end up with a lot of different curses that transform and do a lot of different things.

Animals too, not just gender swaps. Many animals. Apparently, if something does, died in one of those pools. It was a very dangerous place. Pigs and cats are drowning left and right. The pool became cursed and whoever fell into the pool would become cursed to take on that form. So Ron was curse is that when he splashed with cold water, he becomes a girl like a red-haired, I guess in the manga she's not red-haired, but a red-haired version of himself but smaller and bustier.

And voiced by Megumi Hiashibara. I believe so, yes. Lena inverse. Yeah, hot-headed, on-a-maid ladies. And then she played against type when she was Ray. I know, right? Which is awesome. It's tricky. I got that wrong in an episode, and Kyle McLean sent me some angry messages.

I left an angry comment on my own podcast. All right. So his father, Genma, is cursed to become a giant panda, which is a source of comedy, because his father's actually pretty lazy and shiftless. So when he becomes a panda, he's actually. like the one character who's more comfortable in his cursed form, he just lounges around as a panda, not doing anything.

He talks via signs. Yeah, that's right. Yep. So other characters, you show up throughout the series, but sort of the core relationship in the Sadori is between Ranma and a girl named Akane, who is the daughter of his father's

best friend, Son Tindo. She's Akane Tendo. And basically, they're going to, they were promised to be married to one another by their parents at a young age. Well, okay. Okay. Get particular.

Son has three daughters, and he promised that one of his daughters would marry Genma's son in order to carry on their dojoes. It's like King Lear. Yeah. And he was, or rather, they were kind of given the choice to select whom. And Kasumi and Nabiki, who are Akane's sisters, both bowed out and immediately pointed at Akane and said, then she doesn't even like boys. they'll be perfect together.

She hates men, and he's not even always a man. So it's great. But, of course, through the anime comedy of errors, they both kind of get to know each other by walking in on one another in the bathhouse. So she thinks he's a pervert, and that's kind of the basis of their relationship. But over time, they grow close together,

but because he's very stubborn and prideful, and she's very sort of hot-headed. In different ways. They're both very proud and frustrating in different ways. their relationship is always kind of at odds and they just can't bring themselves to truly admit how they feel for each other although you do get a lot of like

single panels where it's a close-up of one character kind of looking off into the distance and like the background kind of fades away and they just say like Ranma or Akane So Akane is Sundari then? Yes, very much. Okay. Very much the proto-sendary.

Should we explain what that means to people? Go for it. It's sort of the person who pretends they hate you even though they love you, but they're just too prideful to admit it. And, yeah, her catchphrase is Ronma Nobaka, you idiot Ronma. So that's pretty much,

and there's a lot of him being hit by tables and mallets pulled out of, I think this is where the term hammer space came from, isn't it? Exactly what it came from. Okay, so that's... Hammer space is Akane. Yeah, so, like, you know, the popularity of the series meant that

there was quite a fandom that emerged for it online. this was kind of, I would say it was the first sort of cult anime series to happen once the internet became popular. Like Dirty Pear sort of predates that, but Ronmo one half was, you know, right around the time that people were really getting online in the mid-90s.

So there was quite a fandom built up around it. And so, yeah, lots of interesting terms emerged from Ronma fandom. Did you know there's a whole song Ronma Nobaka that's just recorded with Akane's screaming, Ronma Nobaka or Baca, Baca, Baca, Baca, Baca. Yeah, isn't it?

That's on one of the albums. It is one of the image albums where it's just characters singing songs about how they feel about things. They had a Christmas song on it too, I think. I think that was the same album. They kind of blur together right now. We're talking about the manga or the anime or both. I mean, they're both very similar. Like the first, I would say, two seasons of the anime are really, really directly adapted from the manga.

Yeah, I was reading about the production history, which I was unfamiliar with because it was just presented to us in America as like, here's season one and here's season two. But upon doing research, it was like season one did poorly and was canceled. And a month later, it came back under a different name. So there's technically two shows. And I say that if you just want, like, to not watch all the episodes, season one is a great place to just dip in and dip out because it has some fantastic animation, which is probably why when they rebooted it, the animation was much worse, but still pretty good. Yeah. But, yeah, like, there's a Twitter account called on. The first season has all the really fundamental character arcs, too.

But there's a Twitter account called Random Sakuga, and it is about, like, showcasing via video the very brief flourishes of animation you'll see in anime, like 20 seconds or 30 seconds. And one day they showed the scene where the Akane arriving at school and all the boys trying to, like, confess their love or whatever. And it is so, it looks so great. I forgot how good the show looked. Extremely well choreographed. Yeah, and there's some really great scenes, even like the slow motion when Rama deflects Ryoga's. bandana and it cuts off Akane's hair that she's so proud of. Yeah. Like that

slow motion scene with her hair like being, oh, it's fine. It's been 20, 30 years. Her hair like, you know, coming out of its the binding as it's cut and just like flying open in slow motion and the world reacting around her.

I'm picturing it all as you're described. Yeah. It's very iconic. Yeah. It's very very clearly see it in my eye. Yeah, it's a really thoughtfully, like the first season is very thoughtfully directed. It's pretty interesting though that the the same, so season one it was canceled, the same people just made it cheaper, and it went on for like

six or seven more years, and then there were like 15 OVAs, several movies. There was a recent short movie in like 2008 even. Was there? Yeah, I think that was the last Rahnma contents. Unless you're counting the live action series of years ago, but don't. I don't count any live action

adaptations of anime. I haven't seen it, but everything I've heard about it says, please avoid this. I really need to dip my toes in it, though. I have a thing for live action adaptations. and I know it's going to be terrible. Well, Caitlin, you would know this in the Sailor Moon live action series. The Luna is just a stuffed animal, right? That's correct.

They use 3D animation for like transitional parts, but in a lot of scenes, it's straight up the manufactured plushy that you could buy. They couldn't even get like a Sabrina Teenage Witch style animatronic in there. I think it's the same thing with Genma in the Ronma TV series. It's just like a stuffed doll or something. I figured they just cut away to stock footage of a panda. No, they definitely do that. They do that a lot of live-action dramas because those don't usually get produced on large budgets.

And they're kind of one-shots usually. Yeah. Like, a lot of Japanese TV series do not have sequels. They do not do seasons like we do in America. They get 12 episodes or maybe, you know, between 10 and 13 episodes, and that's it. So gender fluidity is again, again, one of the themes of this series. So gender fluidity is, again, one of the themes of this series. I think one of the interesting things about the way it's written is that Ronma is not like, yeah, I turn into a girl. That's cool. He hates it. He's super macho. And to him, you know, this very prideful martial artist, like being turned into a girl is just like a tremendous humiliation for him.

Did we say how the transformation works? Yeah, he splashed with cold water. Is that the same for every transformation? Yes. Okay, yeah. I thought that to be like hot or cold. Hot turns them back into their normal form. Cold turns them into whatever their curse to be. Okay. Yeah, so a lot of the humor of the series emerges from just different pratfalls and misconceptions that happen because of the curse. For instance, Rana's rival, this kid who completely hates him named Riyoga, it's a very one-sided rivalry. Ramma's not even aware of it initially, but tracked him to the ends of the earth and eventually found him at Jusinkio.

It took him a while to track him, though, because Riyoga didn't. notably has no sense of direction whatsoever. Which is why he hates Ronma because he challenged Ronma to a fight and Ronma waited for three days and Riyoga showed up on the fourth. It was like the vacant lot behind their school. Yep. Anyway, so yeah, he is cursed to turn into a piglet and... Pichon.

And Akane thinks that Pichon is the cutest thing in the world. It's true. And snuggles up to Pichan and just like he falls in love with Akane and it's very one-sided. but Rahnma feels like his honor forbids him from telling Akane that Pichan is Riyoga because it's Rana's fault in a way that Riyoga is Pichon. So, yeah, so like that becomes a point of trinchin. Yeah. And there's people who fall in love with Rana, men who fall in love with Rana when he's in girl form and don't realize that he's not actually a girl. Mostly Tatewaki Kuno, who is also in love with Akane.

Yeah, so there's a lot of, I can't really call it love triangles. I think I could say gay panic jokes. I don't really remember gay panic jokes in the series. Well, it's not like, I mean, it's like if you're in the body of a woman and a man is coming after you, and that's the joke, it sort of is a gay panic joke. But it's also the 80s in Japan. So, yeah, I mean, that that is the thing is like you have to kind of keep in mind that this does come from a different time, a different place. And like, I don't even know that much about Rumico, Takahashi's personal life.

Like, I've read speculation that she might be gay. She's never been married. Is she? I heard she was not married. Wait, no. She's not. I'm sorry. She's not married.

But she only employs women to do her as assistance. So I guess you should point out that manga authors usually have a lot of assistance or maybe just one to do backgrounds and incidental characters and they will do the main amount of work. But she notably just hires women to do her work with her. Right. So my feeling on Rahnma is that I just. take what's presented in the series

at face value. This is one of those where you could read a lot of things into it, but I don't know that you really should, just because the context of everything of its creation is so different. If a straight white American dude wrote this series in

2018, I would be like, you should maybe rethink some of this, but coming from the time, place, and person that it does, I'm like, you know, okay sure like the the the intention is different and again it was it was it was written to appeal to women to uh you know most manga appeals to like teenage boys uh whereas this was meant to appeal more to younger girls i think it's also worth noting that rahnma even if he may have had reservations was also pretty free about using his female sexuality to further his oh yeah whatever it is yeah yeah like he knows that um like really Yoga gets very uncomfortable around women. So he's more than happy to basically torment Riyoga by, like, getting all cozy with him.

And, you know, early in the show, he realized, or the series, he realizes, like, wow, if I go, you know, cruising for snacks and stuff as a girl, just a cute girl and act, you know, winsome and adorable, then people will just get me stuff for free. It's great. So, yeah, so you can, you can, you can, you can, you can, you can write all kinds of essays about gender politics in this series. but I don't know that you're going to accomplish that much. It's just, it's interesting. I just feel like it's, even if he didn't want to be a woman and he wanted to get rid of the curse, and I can understand that, especially if you're somebody who is comfortable with your body, then having it changed against your will would certainly be uncomfortable.

But he didn't hate it as much as he may be let on, because he certainly learned how to use it. And another way that the focus on a female audience really shows in this series is that it's a, like, it has a lot of tournament type, you know, combat sequences, but they're all built around things that are kind of traditionally feminine pastimes, like rhythmic gymnastics or cooking or ice skating. Like, it's, it kind of puts a twist. on things like Dragon Ball, where it's not just like martial arts for the sake of martial

arts or Prince of Tennis, where it's not just like, you know, playing sports. It's this kind of ridiculous, like everything in Ronma's universe somehow has a martial arts component. So of course he's like, oh, I can win this contest. And then there ends up being some sort of big to do about it. And he gets entangled with his rivals or Akane's rivals or there's something on the line. Rhythmic gymnastics is my favorite arc, actually. the one with Kodachi Kono

Kodachi Kuno Kudachi Kuno I almost swapped their first and last names, how bad of me but she was just such a good character she was always the Ojo Sama

kind of haughty laugh Oh yeah putting her hand like this Yeah to the side of her face and I don't want to blow out a microphone so I'm not going to do that But yeah She's also like a psychopath, like a pure murderous, unrestrained high school psychopath, who goes to an all-girls school, all-girls school.

They call her the black rose. There's a bit of, I think, repression going on there. Do we know of the popularity of Rama in Japan? I know it lasted for a while and it had a lot of content, but I'm wondering if it's perhaps more popular here because of how it was released here. I think it is, yeah. I know people like my friend Henry, he looks for Rama stuff whenever he goes to Japan. and it's just not there. And I mean, there's lots of things that just aren't there.

But if this series was so, I don't know, impactful as I think it is, I figure there'd still be some lingering things or like a Pachinko, a new Pachinko machine or something like that. No, Ronmo was, I wouldn't say niche over there, but it definitely was not as popular as Orsa Yatsura or Maisanikoku. It was kind of like a trail off a bit for Takahashi's work, I think, compared to like even Ino Yasha. I think Inu Yasha was huge, like super huge. Yeah. That's one I've actually never watched. I haven't seen it. I read the first few volumes and it didn't really connect with me.

But I guess I was kind of wanting more Ronma. But really, like, Ronma undergoes some transitions over the course of its running. Like, it starts out. Yeah, like, it's very much a sort of slice of life, romantic comedy with this kind of weird, goofy, supernatural element. I feel that's when it's at its best. Yeah, I mean, I feel like the plotting in the first, you know, a couple of years is really strong. the characterization is strong. And then after that, it gets a little more like screwball comedy

and stops being so much about like individual stories and, you know, like the kind of continuing narrative and character development and more just like, here's all these ridiculous characters. Let's put them together in ridiculous ways. You know, somehow always revolving around martial arts or Ron Miscarse or whatever or some romantic entanglement. And then toward the end, it's more,

it becomes more like a traditional shonen. There's a lot of fighting and rivalries with, like, serious martial arts opponents. Technique mastery to level up, to fight the guy. Yeah, I don't know if there's ever any leveling up so much. Well, it's not direct leveling up, but there's certainly points where technique mastery becomes a focus, and that's the key to defeating opponent X. Right. Well, that's one thing that I think really kind of stands out about Ronma one-half is that

Rana's family school is the Musabetsu Kakot. Sautomi School of, what is it, the indiscriminate grappling, or I think it was, is, is the direct translation. They used indiscriminate grappling for sure. But anything goes martial arts is how Viz went with it. Yes. But basically it means, like, there are nothing's off limits. Like anything's fine.

Yeah. So, so Rama tends, he's not like a dirty fighter. He has some integrity. But basically the, the prime technique of the anything goes school of martial arts. is to run away. So when he's losing, he takes off and regroups and tries to think back, like, how can I, you know, outdo my opponent? So, so, yeah, basically, like, running away to fight another day is the central tenet

of the anything goes martial arts school. So there's a lot of stories that, you know, he's just completely overmatched, even against Ryoga at the beginning. And then he comes back. Oh, gosh, I can't remember the name, the chestnut one. Amagachi, Amaguriken or something like that? Amagrikan. Yeah. Amagiriken that he learns from shampoo's grandmother Cologne.

And it's the chestnut punch because she like, it's, he's just like grabbing hot chestnuts. Yeah, she throws them into a bonfire and makes them pick them out with his bare hands. So he becomes extremely fast because he's grabbing these burning chestnuts from a fire and not wanting to, you know, destroy his hands. So, yeah, there's always kind of like a goofy. karate kid kind of element like you know that's the leveling up yeah i mean and you know it's the same kind of thing you see in like dragon ball leveling up no but but it's more like it's more like early dragon ball where you know uh the uh mutin rochi or roshi or is uh like making krillin and and uh goku do ridiculous menial tasks and it turns out oh by the way you're mastering amazing martial

arts in the process so it's kind of like that but much much stupider and goofier one thing we didn't point out about the anime is if you watch the dub everyone is distractingly canadian it's like they wandered off the set of a strange brew um i did not care for that much we i think we watched the sub but we watched some of the dub and like everyone is so canadian i can't take it i didn't i didn't really recognize canadian accents or dialects back then so i'd have to rewatch but you're probably right a lot of a lot of voice talent was Canadian they did a good job but i mean to my American ears, it's just like, it's already weird that they're speaking English, but now that they're all Canadian, it's extra weird. I'm sure if you're Canadian, it's like, oh, it's a boot.

Yeah. Yeah, well, we may do with, with dubs because they were a lot less expensive than subtitles back in the day. That was the, that was the American way. It's 10 bucks a tape extra for subs every time. Yep. No matter what the price point was. Like, even if you were lucky and you got the 1999 tape, still 2999 for subs. Yeah, hearing the two episodes per tape kind of surprised me. By the time I started buying VHS tapes, it was like three. If it was just a TV series, occasionally get one with four on it. It would be like, your lucky day. Yeah, like every, I feel like they came out every other month.

So, like, every other month, I would put down my 30 bucks and watch 45 minutes of on a day. My dad would take me to Suncoast video at the mall and let me pick out a tape. And I would be super excited to go home and watch my two episode tapes that he paid so much money for. Thank you, Dad. This episode, we're talking about a lot of bad games, and there's nothing worse than paying your hard-earned cash for one of those stinkers. That's why we recommend Gamefly, the best way to buy and rent all your favorite games. With a monthly subscription to Gamefly.com, you can pick your favorite games from more than 9,000 titles and have them mailed directly to your door to try before you buy. You don't have to waste your money buying the latest new games until you know

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This premium trial allows you to check out two games and or movies at a time, a special Retronauts offer. The usual first free month offer is only one game at a time. You can only get this offer by visiting Gamefly.com slash Retronauts. Sign up today and start playing all your favorite games absolutely free for 30 days. So before we finish So before we finish talking about the manga and the anime, Are there any personal favorite storylines that you have?

I think, Caitlin, you said the rhythmic gymnastics storyline. I love anything with rhythmic gymnastics, Ukio and Shampoo. Okay. So what is it about that particular storyline that you feels really is like the pinnacle of Rana? Why is that? I feel like he and Akane get to play really well together in that, and they learn to actually work together and fight together during it, and that they start to rely on each other a little more and stand up to Kodachi.

and various other people in rhythmic gymnastics. And he also learns to harness his femininity a little more because he's doing this all in a leotard, one piece with ribbons. It also really plays up the rivalry with Ryoga, I think. He kind of comes in and he's like, okay, Rahma, you suck at gymnastics. So I'm going to train you now, which is basically just his excuse to beat the crap out of Ranma.

Like he's not really interested in making Ranma a better fighter. He just wants the excuse to beat the crap out of Ronma. If he gets better, it's lucky break for him. Right. Yeah, that's a really good one. I'm trying to think about on my favorite. Bob, what about you? I wanted to revisit some of the manga before this trip, but I didn't have time.

But I always say, from my memories, anything with shampoo is great because it's sort of a like a Pepe-Lapu kind of story. But with the rolls reverse. Accurate. Yeah. Yeah, and I kind of like, I mean, it's not that original, but back when I watched, I was like, this is pretty funny. So, and it's a funny, her episodes are always very interesting and entertaining to, wacky. They have cute interactions with one another. And she turns to a cat, which is also very cute.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, a cat with like little, uh, bells. Yeah, bells. Yeah. Uh, yeah, so Shampu is a Chinese martial artist who, uh, Rahnma defeats and, uh, because he defeats her in girl form, Shampu wants to kill him. because it's like the tradition of her Amazon tribe that

Yeah, when you... She's a Chinese Amazon. Yes, of course, because that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, so it's a tradition of her tribe that when a woman is defeated in combat by another woman, the loser must have vint herself. But if a woman is defeated by a man in combat, then they must get married.

So when she finds out the truth about Ronma, it goes from being like, you know, the indestructible terminator stalking him to kill him to basically a different kind of stalker coming after him. I don't learn what Nihau meant as well from shampoo. Yeah, and then, of course, shampoo has her own suitor who hates Rahnma named Moose. Right. Who turns into a goose.

Yes. I forgot about that. Wow. He's near-sighted and can't see for crap. He's got those crazy, like, swirling on. Yeah, with like it indicates you're insane if you have, like, those concentric circles in your glasses. Or you're a huge nerd. It's the umino glasses from Sailor Moon.

Yeah, you're right. Or like a creep, I guess, too. Yeah. I think my favorite story is the full-body cat-tonged saga. I normally hate anything involving Hoposai, the perverted old man who is basically Ronma's parents' master. Yeah, he's like this horrible little pervert and he's not funny. But in this particular case, he gets mad at Ranma for some minor infraction and curses

Rahnma so that his body is as sensitive as a cat's tongue. So he can't turn back into his male form because even lukewarm water is like burning hot to him. So he's, you know, like, anytime he touches hot water and changes back, he's like, I'm scalding and he has to splash himself with cold water to cool down. So he has to like overcome his own weaknesses. They look for a crazy mystical medicine to try to cure it. Right. And also there's the whole fact that he's terrified of cats. which plays into this. His father's idea of a training exercise when Ranma was a child

was to get a pitful of like hungry cats and cover Ranma's body with fish sausages like Naruto or whatever and toss him in and like learn to survive. But all it did was traumatized this poor child into being terrified of cats. So of course, like the fact that shampoo turns into a cat also freaks him out. Yeah, that's right. You're talking about, sorry, haplasai, the little old man.

I noticed in the series, and I wonder how the author feels about it now, but all of the elderly people are just, like, tiny bug creatures. And now that she is becoming an older lady, I'm wondering if she's like, hmm, I should have been more sensitive to the elderly. Probably not. But Colon was awesome, is the difference. Colon was super strong. She was a powerful figure, and she wasn't a creepy panty snatcher.

Right. But, I mean, that is kind of... I mean, even my wife, she's not just a lot better. I mean, even my wife, she's not Japanese, but Vietnamese, has said that's kind of how Asian people age. They're like, they look young, young, young, and then all of a sudden, like, one day, they're just like, they shrink and become tiny and wizened and bald. I should say we're all white in this room and we all age horribly, so it's fine. Yeah, I mean, I'm 21 and look at me. Now, it's just an Asian thing that I'm jealous of.

Your genes are wonderful, is what it is. On the other hand, I can drink milk, so... I'm wearing Asian jeans right now. They're from Uniclo. That's true. Okay. So I feel This love

So I feel like, oh, yeah, we've all talked about the storylines, everything. So with our discussion of the anime and manga out of the way, let's talk about the video games. Naturally, Ronma One Half, being a fairly successful anime and manga in the late 80s and early 90s, spawned mini video games. And because it involves martial arts, a lot of those have to do with fighting. But it's not just fighting games. Because it's an anime, there's also a lot of visual novels. And a couple of puzzle games.

Yep. And I believe only one of these ever came to America. Technically, two of them. But only one of them came to America. Licensed as... Yes. Yeah. As a Rhonda One Half game.

So the two that did make it over to the U.S. came on Super NES, and so that's where we're going to start. It was the Super NES fighting games. Are we starting with hard combat? Street combat, yes. Oh, street combat. Okay. Street combat first. Got it.

So a lot of these games were made by Messiah and published by, I can't even remember. Or they were, some of them were published by Messiah, but actually developed by a Talia double, who is a company that I have written about. out on Game Boy Works a lot. They did like Sokoban and stuff like that. I think Micro Cabin did a few too. Yeah, probably. Especially on PC. Yeah, yeah. So just a lot of like companies that don't really get a lot of traction in the U.S. Messiah is better known for its shoot-em-ups. And having played Ronma's fighting games, I would have to say that Messiah is always best when they are working with shooters. All right. But, but yeah, the Super Animus, Super Famicom was the dominant

platform in Japan at the time of Ronmo's peak popularity. So it makes a lot of sense that most of the games would come out for Super Famicom, Super Nias. But the first one was just called, I think, Ronmo I half. It probably had some sort of subtitle in

Japan. But, oh, yeah, Chonai Gakito-Hen. Whatever that means. Anyway, I should have looked that up. Yeah, so it was, you know, Someone in the comments, I'll tell you. Of course.

It should have, you know, it should surprise no one that as a fighting game, this basically just brings in the Ronma cast, like the main cast. But it's when it comes to America, that it becomes very interesting. Have you guys played Street Combat? I rented it a long time ago without knowing what Ronma was. And in retrospect, I'm guessing it was a more expensive to use the characters because they put a lot of work into re-skinned this game. a lot of, in terms of all the new art they had to create and things like that, they did a lot of work for a not great game. A lot of really ugly work.

Yeah, that too. Well, I wonder if it was a matter of it being expensive or if it was a matter of it being tied to a media property that hadn't really appeared in the U.S. yet. True. Because at the time Street Combat first showed up on Super Eniast, I don't think Ranma had really launched here. Maybe the manga had, but not the anime. Well, I mean, my argument ultimately is, would it have mattered?

In either case, if you don't know what Ronma is, these are all going to be new characters for you. So my question is, like, why did it even matter? Like, you know. Because I think at that point, a lot of game companies felt like anime and manga properties were too cartoony. And America needed, they were still in that mindset where it was starting to become less prevalent, but they still wanted to westernize a lot of stuff and make it more palatable to. I agree with that in general, but maybe not with street combat, because, Because what they ended up going with for the character designs, they are not more realistic or less cartoonish than Rahnma. They're weird.

It's really weird. When I see the character designs, it reminds me of when Japanese artist parody American comic books. It's hard to explain in words. But if you look at the designs, I mean, they're not doing a good job at it. If you look at the manga and anime series My Hero Academia, one of the main characters, All Might is like a Japanese parody of an American superhero right down. know how he's drawn and animated. So I feel like they were trying to go for that, but they were very amateurish in how they were doing it. They did a terrible job of it. There's a lot of clowns in this game for some reason. It's true. They did not have like an accomplished artist

making designs for them to copy. They were left to their own devices and those devices were bad. Yeah, there's only one character that even vaguely resembles the original Japanese character. And that's a girl named Lita, who was originally shampoo. And she's just, you know, like a young girl, or young woman, uh, wearing a mini dress. And I guess they figured, uh, sex appeal is good in either territory. So they kept her the same. But like, uh, Tadawaki Kuno, who is this ridiculous character in the, the comics who, you know, styles himself as like a modern day samurai. So he goes to school, instead of wearing a school uniform, he wears like, you know, a kendogee and he carries a wooden boken, like a training sword around with him all the time. He calls himself

the blue thunder. Yes. Aoi kuzuchi Yes Well right now I'm watching some street combat now on my laptop And it's Ronma named Stephen Fighting Haposai as a small dwarf named Happy Actually Haposai came across fairly close But yeah

It becomes weird because when it's divorced From the backstories for these characters You're like, why is this giant Burley martial artist guy Beating up on a tiny dwarf It's terrible. He's like a small, defenseless old man. Why would you do that?

You know, when you understand in Ronma that Hoposai is extremely talented as a martial artist and also a horrible human being, like, it totally makes sense that Ronma would beat the stuffing out of him. Happensai special attack is throwing bombs at people. Yeah. Very large bombs. Like, that's what he does. Yeah. So anyway, Kuno, the modern day samurai, uh, becomes GI Jim.

who is basically guile but carrying like a stick and hitting people with a stick Kodachi Kuno who is his sister who loves to be a gymnast uses unfair dirty weapons when she's a gymnast becomes a clown

Genma the guy who becomes a panda also becomes a clown here I feel like at least for Kodachi in particular they chose a clown because of her weapons specifically because she has like the juggling type I don't know what they call them

in rhythm and domestics but the weighted pins that they can throw and juggle so they kind of ran with that and went what juggles a clown sure but what about Genma that I don't know that's weird right yeah that one's weird and then

Ronma's female form like in all of these games you can play as Ronma as a male or a female and in some games they actually have different abilities or you know stats depending on their the character's gender. But here, Ronma, the girl, becomes Stephen wearing armor.

Like, well, the idea, the idea behind Ronma, you know, becoming a girl in a fight, is that he becomes faster, but he has less reach. So it puts him at a disadvantage while giving him some other advantages

that people might not expect. But here it's just like, now you're in power armor. Okay. I think everybody expects the female character to be faster. Let's be real. Well,

that's canon. and Ron no one half. I'm watching the ending. It says, congratulations, Stephen. You are a very worthy champion and a fine young man.

Wow, he looks like a TV host of some variety show or another in Japan. It doesn't matter which one. It just looks like a variety show host. Yeah, that's interesting. But one thing I really appreciate

is that in this game, they changed. Sorry, we're distracted over here. It's very, look up a long play. It's a very funny game. but not deliberately funny.

No, but it's like, I love the fact that, you know, they, they redrew all the characters and changed them to be more friendly to Americans, but they didn't change the backgrounds or the music. So you're still fighting in, like, Narima tojo, in Narima, Tokyo, boy, that was tough to say. So there's like, you know, you're in backyards, Japanese backyards, or in, like, you know,

a koi pond or in a Japanese school gymnasium. I mean, at that point, if you're going to actually redo all the backgrounds, why not make a new game? Because you're essentially doing most of that work at a day time. Yeah, like, if they had completely redone the backgrounds, then no one would ever have known. They were just like, oh, they just used the Ronma one-half engine to create a brand-new game. But no, it's just, it's really strange. It's one of the weirdest localizations I've ever seen. And it's a really ugly re-skin.

It is. It's so bad. It's just like, who would buy this? Not me. I did not buy this I like to collect things like Ronma games are horrible spinoff games from my favorite properties

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So I did not buy that one, but I did buy Ronma One Half Hard Battle after I started watching Ronma. And that was nice. That was the one game that came to America as Ronma One Half. And I said, I don't really care that much about fighting games, but I will buy this. And it's actually an okay fighter. I like that game and I think it gets a way worse rap than it deserves. Not that it's reviled or anything, but I think it's really not as bad as people make it out to be. I didn't know people made it out to be bad.

They do. It's not a good system. The AI is really hard. I did notice that, but I thought that's because I suck at fighting games. No, the AI in that game is just really hard. It's not considered to be a great game, but I think it's pretty decent. Especially for the time it came out, it was more than serviceable. and honestly I think it looks better

than what's considered to be the better fighter I think it's a better visual game Really? So you like it better than Shogi Ranbu Hen? I do, artistically at least. Oh, interesting. I do appreciate the fact that female Ranma is dressed more like her usual or his usual self in this game whereas in the Japan-only sequel

Ronmo's wearing like a girl's swimsuit or something for no particular reason. It's kind of weird. It seems like a really strange cheesecake trace. A really lazy, a champ of fan service. Yeah. I think this was actually the first time I really engaged with Romana stuff after reading mentions of it in like Wizard Magazine and things like that.

I think renting this game was like, oh, I guess this is the thing they're talking about, but I have no way to watch it or anything. So looking at the gameplay, I'm like, oh, yeah, this is how you learn about all these characters through playing the game and watching all the endings and stuff like that. Because don't they get like a wish if they win the tournament or something like that? the principal gives them something. Yes, that's right. Yeah. They're supposed to, and it, of course, usually ends up not working out so well.

The Monkey's Paw kind of wish. Yeah, so this is a comedy series. Right, of course. So, yeah, this is, again, like we said, it was brought to the U.S. And it was promoted heavily, cross-promoted heavily, and the Rahnma anime and manga. Like, it was in the Viz Floppies. There would be ads for it. So they pushed it pretty hard.

It's kind of weird because of that that they'd, didn't use like Viz Dubbs voices for the character for the character battle cries and they also didn't use like the original Japanese voices. It's just like these weird voices that you're like Ronda's like super deep voiced. He's like, Rur. I feel like even, I mean, this was like 1992 or 1994. Do we have a year on this? I want to say it was 95 actually that it came to the US. I don't think they would go to the lengths to track down the dub cast and have them record new audio, like even in the mid-90s. Right, but they did

re-record the voices, and they didn't use the Japanese voice. So it's... 92. Well, that's when the game came out of Japan. It showed up here later than that. 93. Oh, was it that early? Mm-hmm. Okay. Wow. So it was

right at the beginning of the localization of Rahnma. So that makes some of the choices in this game a little strange. It has a lot of characters who wouldn't show up in the U.S. run of Ranma for several years. So, like, when I first played this, I was like, who the hell is gambling king? And why am I fighting a Minotaur at the end? So, yeah, there's like these two

major characters in here that, like, gambling king is a minor character from like a single one-off story. And it's so weird that they put him in this, because he's like, if you read a story, like, it doesn't really have any impact. It's very kind of trivial. He's a fun-looking character. He's the king from the one of the suits. Yeah, yeah. But it's like, no human should look like that so it's fun to see him move around true okay fair enough it's like a short fat version of the king of suit yeah right uh and then pantyos taro is the the guy who turns into a minotar and he's like one of the super yeah he's like a super serious fighter um from one of the later story arcs when it becomes more like a you know a shonenonymy um so he wouldn't appear in the u.s until like i want to say like

96 or 97 so many years after the this game out. So, so there was this kind of disconnect between the, the localization of the manga and the game. But, oh, well, anyway, it's, it was easy to buy because it was a versus fighter. That's what, yeah, especially in the U.S. when we were just getting stuff like street combat shoved at us. It was pretty reasonable. I agree. And I think it does a good job of interpreting the characters. Like, if you go back and watch or play it, um, the characters move and act in ways that are very distinct to that character. Like, Riyoga, you know, in the comics, Rana is much faster than Riyoga, but Riyoga is much

stronger. And here he has this, even though they're the same size, like Riyoga just has this way of moving that seems sort of hulking and the Zangif kind of slow and plotting, but clearly threatening movie. Yeah, but, you know, in a, in like a normal size teenager as opposed to a gigantic wrestler. But the same movement stuff. But yeah, like it translates that really well to the character. So I think, yeah, it does a good job of interpreting the characters.

It is kind of limited as a fighter because, you know, the characters only have a couple of special moves. Because I think they tried really hard to stick to like what's canon in the comics. So Ranma has, you know, his speed punch attack and he has his Hiru Shotenha, which is like a dragon punch basically. Amagrii Khan. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, then Riyoga has the Shishi Okudin, which is the, it's basically a chiata. but it's based on his depression. No, it's his depression, isn't it?

Oh, oh. I was thinking of his umbrella attack. Oh, yeah, he has umbrella attacks, but then his special chi attack instead of, like, drawing on his combat strength that draws on the fact that he's always depressed. So the sadder he is, the more powerful it is. I also think Rahma is one of the last series to predate fighting games and the fighting game genre.

So, like, Takashi was developing all of this without thinking back to, like, what do streetfighter people do? And what do, like, Tekken people do? So I feel like with a lot of anime, currently, you can see, like, influences from games, but this is, like, the last time where they would be free of that. For sure. So, yeah, I don't know. Like, as the one representative game for the Ronma franchise to make it to the U.S.,

I think it's okay. We could have done a lot worse. We certainly could. Yep. There are some real stinkers on this list that we won't talk about in too much depth, but I do want to talk about the one last, of the third. Super Famicom, Super EniS fighting game, and that's Chogi Ranbu Hen from 1994. Supposedly the best of the fighting games, although Caitlin disagrees.

I do. It's not that I think Chogi Ranbu Hen is bad, but I think at least visually it doesn't stack up to Hard Battle. I think hard battle looks a lot better. I think the characters are a little bigger. They have more color variation to them. The backgrounds are a little more They have a little more depth to them They have some like

They'll have fog effects in front of them To give depth to a stage I do think I like the design of the characters In this version better aside from female Rahnma Yeah what's up with her? Him? Okay She's jiggly and wearing like the gym shorts

That look like underwear and like a tube top Yeah, it's kind of weird It's the right colors as her normal uniform with the yellow top and the blue pants that Ranma wears a lot. But it's a glorified bra and underwear. Yeah. Right. But, okay, so aside from that, like, I like the look at the characters in this.

They have a very sort of cute style that's reminiscent of Takehashi's artwork, especially, like, the splash page panels and that sort of thing. So I like it on that front. But, yeah, like, it doesn't have as many interesting effects, and the animation's not as good as in Hard Battle. I think the characters in Hard Battle look better. Okay. That's fair.

But personal preference, I think they both look pretty good. It's not like I think Chogi Ranbohan looks bad. Yeah. I supposedly this was going to be released in the U.S. as anything goes martial arts, but there was a problem with the licensor. They went out of business, so that all fell through. I don't know how true that is, but I did find some claims of that online. It's a little hard to find clear information on that era, too.

Nobody documented it really. Not well, anyway. Yeah, it's interesting that it doesn't just use. the previous game's engine, which I guess is good because it makes it a distinct fighter, but it does lose a lot of the little touches that I liked, like, you know, like Riyoga's animation, that sort of thing. So

it's okay, I guess. And it has, again, once again, it has a weird collection of characters. Like, you always have Rana, Akane, Kuno, Ryoga. I usually have, you know, always shampoo, Ukio. Sometimes you get

Kodachi. But this one has Mariko. who is a cheerleader who again like gambling king is just like this minor character from a single storyline you're like why and then it has um the final two characters you fight are uh miss hinako who is a character introduced later in the series who is a um she's not she's not cursed in the way that the other characters are but she's like very sickly and haposai taught her this technique to steal other people's chi by focusing it through uh circular coins you know japanese coins the five denominations have a circle a hole in the middle so she uses like anything basically that that serves as a

like a focus like that but she usually uses coins and she siphons people's chi away and then she turns into a very voluptuous woman um so she's like a a very sort of mean-spirited person who uh takes advantage not not in a bad like a sexual way but just um doesn't treat her students very well so she's kind of a villain in the stories. It makes sense for her to be here. And then Herb, who is in the manga only, there was never an anime based on that. But he's like kind of the culmination of the late era of the series really going in for the like the serious martial arts drama. He's like an extremely powerful fighter who's also cursed to turn into a woman. But in it like, he's just on a whole different level as a fighter than Ranma. But so not memorable that I can barely picture him without looking him up as a

reference. Well, you know, he is from late in the manga and he was never turned into anonomy character. So I mean, I've read the whole thing, but not in a while. Right. So he just does not stand out. So anyway, I guess some good choices here and also some not so good choices. I do, oh, I like, I like a Connie in this one. She's not wearing the martial arts ski. She's wearing her student uniform. And she has the ability to like bring, summon her school bag into existence to wall up people and stuff like that. So a dimensional school bag. Yeah, of course. So there's some fun details in this one.

There were fighting games on other platforms, of course, such as the PC engine CD-ROM. The first of them is really interesting. It's called Dato-Ganso-Musabetsu Kakoto-Riu. And instead of being like a traditional fighting game, it's more like a narrative fighting game in that each match is kind of predetermined. You only play as Ranma.

And like the form you fight in, whether it's male or female, is determined per match and your opponent is determined each match and it basically, because it's PC engine CD-ROM, it has a lot of interstitial cutscenes. So it's basically playing out the first few chapters

of the manga. It's a story mode in a fighting game except that's the only part of it. Right. Well, there is a versus mode, but this treats the versus mode as secondary. Right. And you really don't have any special moves in this one. So it's just a melee fighter, which

really limits it. It's a really like, it's contemporary as a release with Street Fighter 2. So it doesn't benefit from ideas like special techniques and combos and things like that. So it's sort of doubling down on the whole multimedia aspect because of the format? Something like that. I don't know. The most remarkable thing about this is that it's the sauciest ROM because it's PC engine CD-ROM. It didn't have Nintendo and Sega censorship on it. So like the very first battle takes place in the bathhouse. and Habosai turns Ronma into a girl, so there's some cartoon nudity. And the first match you fight as Ronma, as a girl, wearing nothing but like a towel around her waist, his waist.

It was kind of interesting that in, I want to say, a good 80% of the sprites drawn for that, they actually obscure the boobs. Yeah. When the boobs are shown, they have no nipples. Right. Cancel your orders, so online people. It's very much like ride in an arsenal gear. Yeah. Like, the fact is, you know, the idea is that your character is naked and therefore kind of at a disadvantage and sort of like, you know, it's supposed to be sort of, I guess somewhere between fan service and like, oh, this is a bad situation to be in.

But it's not really meant to be super titillating, I don't think. Well, there's not a nipple. Yeah. It's their weird Barbie boobs. The series was much more free with nipples, but they went for it. I think she actually, she kind of front-loaded the nudity in Ranma, didn't she, for the most part? The very first thing I ever saw of Ranma One-Hoff was when I was in college, and I think the anime had just begun to be localized. And some friends of mine, I guess, were secretly anime fans.

They never really talked about it before. We used to have to hide. Yeah, I happened to be in their room, and they had the video cassette showing in the, you know, like on the TV, someone was watching it. And I looked over and this girl pops out of a pool of water, pulls open her karate ghee, looks at her boobs and screams. I was like, what the hell is this? Episode one. Yeah.

It was the very first episode. It was super crazy. But yeah, I don't know. They put a lot of care into the cutscenes in this one. I love that it has lots of eye catches and stuff. So it really does feel like you're playing through the anime. PC Engine in general was really good about that. Yeah, I mean, that was very much the plot.

platforms thing. But I like that. It's nice. It feel like it's very much a time and place kind of thing. And that's great. So the way it's not great is Rodman one-half Battle Renaissance for PlayStation. Let me tell you, that game is a fudgy turd. It's more like the Battle Dark Ages. It's not a Battle Renaissance. Exactly.

There's like a plague happening here. I mean, I never played this. It kind of reminds me of Dragon Ball GT Final bow. with how the characters look and how slow and floaty and swimming everything is. It's just like it's everything that you hate about bad PlayStation 1 fighting games. It's like, you know,

very, like you said, slow and floaty. The action doesn't feel convincing the characters, you know, it's licensed, so you've got that familiar touch, but the characters all look bad. And there's a lot of, I don't know, just crappiness to it. It's the second game I ever imported

after Castlevania Symphony the Night. and I spent $80 on this game, and I was so sad because I was in college and didn't have a lot of money to waste. And that was like the video game that I bought for that month. It was terrible. So I don't have any fond feelings about this. One thing that is interesting is that it doesn't separate Rana's cursed and male form. So instead of treating those as two separate characters to fight as, instead all characters who have curses, can be transformed in the middle of the stage by like random water events like a geyser or

you know like a rainstorm or something which i think is interesting and adds some unpredictability to it but also kind of sucks because it's extremely poorly balanced like you know it's it's okay for rondo to be turned into a girl because he can still fight he's faster that's great but shampoo rioga like they turn into these tiny little harmless animals. Like, that's, it's not fun. It's really just like an interesting idea that they didn't think through. That seems to be the theme here. They didn't think it through. You're also forgetting what I'm watching now are glorious CGI cutscenes that make the characters look worse than they do in 2D and like cruder. But yeah, it's very of the era. Yeah, it looks a lot worse

than even the worst of the Super Famicom games just by merit of it being poorly modeled early 3D. Anyway, we're through the fighting games. Thank God. There are quite a few other RANMA games, but most of these are adventures, so we won't go into too much detail about them. But some of them are pretty fun. I've played some of them.

I've looked at videos of all of them and read up on all of them. Did a lot of research trying to get details. I think the very first Rana game was just called RONMA one-half. It was a PC-engine CD-ROM game, and it's a belt-scrolling brawler like bad dudes or or Kinsaden or something. And like that one fighting game on PC Engine, it attempts to basically tell the Ronma one-half

story, beginning at Jusenko. So it begins before the manga. The manga, like, Jusinkio, you find out about the curse in a flashback. But here, you actually fight through Jusinkio, and you have to fight against Genma on those bamboo poles, while the

guard and the Maoist hat is like, oh, sirs, please do not. the big appeal here is the extensive cutscenes which are you know very much in the the PC engine CD-ROM mold they look really nice they're nice I mean they're poorly animated but

you know they're not full motion video they're sprite art that's been slightly animated and it's nice it's very much of a time and place again for the time period it looks pretty nice yeah this is I guess I guess a better comparison for this game might be like China Warrior or something. It's like a year after China Warrior. And I mean, obviously it doesn't have the big gimmicky sprites, but it has that same general kind of feel. And that also that sort of stiffness. Like it's not that fun to play. It feels very kind of clunky. But it tries to be, I don't know, tries to be creative with the source material. Like you have matches that are sort of like boss fights. I guess.

other characters. And there are some special events like the first time Ranma and Akane go to school together. It's almost like a runner level. And Ranma is running and Akane is running alongside him and you're both beating up

all the school students who are coming to proclaim their love to Akane. It's really funny cute. It's a good video game interpretation of that scene. They were trying to be creative. Then there is

Kakugeki Mondo on Game Boy, a Ronma trivia adventure. This was the first Ronma game I ever played on an emulator. and you walk around and other Ranma one-half characters challenge you to questions about the anime

and not having any real Japanese literacy at the time. This was 20-odd years ago. Or even the benefit of Google Transline. Right, I was like, what the hell am I doing in this game? So having looked at the Game Boy Advance Library, like you have, Jeremy, would you say it has an unusual amount of trivia games? That's something I've noticed when just playing random wrongs. There are quite a few trivia games.

On Game Boy, yes. I don't know. I have a few of those coming up in, like, next year or so. I think it's a good, it's a good format for that sort of thing, but we just never got any of them. I mean, I believe that Shinji Makami, Reson Evil Creator, his first Capcom job was a trivia game, a Game Boy trivia game. That's where he started. Yeah, there are several by Capcom. Yeah.

I genuinely wish we got more of them because I actually love trivia games, but they just never get translated. Well, a lot of them are about, you know, Japanese anime. or about a given company's game output. Like the Capcom one, I have that game. That was on Game Center CX. Oh, was it? It seems to be all about...

Capcom episodes of quiz, I think. Okay. They did at least... Quiz no hot enough? Yeah. Yeah. So, like, the cover has... Let's see, Dr. Wiley and the Red Armor

and damned from Final Fight on it. Okay, yeah. But they're all in, like, super cute K. K.G. Inafune cartoon style. It does seem to be like a more popular Japanese thing because I remember one of the later Shenmoo games like, I'm sorry not Shenmoo Yakuza games, three

or four, they didn't localize one of the major trivia mini games because they said if we localize this you wouldn't get any of them right. And I think in Mega Man Legends 2 there's a trivia mini game but they actually rewrote all the questions to be about American pop culture which takes a lot of work.

Yeah, they totally relocalized that one which was nice and it was that scary little girl who got the questions. But in Yakuza, we still got the Manzai game in Yakuza 5. That was amazing. And everybody hates it. I kind of enjoyed it. I don't know how to play most of the gambling-based mini-games in Yakuza

because they're all very Japanese gambling games. The only ones I can't play are show. I don't do well at Shogi. Yeah, Shogi. In Mahjong, I have never sat down and learned the rules for Mahjong because it's so intense. It's so many. But I can play Silo.

I can play Hanafuda. I love Hanafuda. Quoi is where it's at. On mega CD, the one mega CD, Sega CD, Ronma game, Biacoran Aika, which is a visual novel featuring a villain who never appeared in the manga, who kidnaps everyone, and that's about it. It's basically like the plot to Nihau My Concubine, but without the cool animation, the movie great animation, and it's extremely dialogue and menu-heavy. It does have lots of voices. acting by the actual voice actors

from the anime, which is nice. Benefit of the PC engine and Sega Mega CD. Yep. But unfortunately, it also includes a lot of simplistic turn-based battles, which don't look fun at all. And reading reviews of this, like visual

novel fans do not like it. Ronma one-half fans do not like it. Yeah, the battles, they just seem luck-based. Yep. Entirely. But I think a better interpretation of Ronma as like a based battle system came on Super Famicom with Akane Kodan Tekihio, which is, even though it says Akane in the title, it's not about Akane, it's about like the red ghost pirate cat or something.

So basically there's like some sort of ghost cat, like a demon or something or a yokai who is basically trying to increase his power in the world. And Ranma being mortally afraid of cats is adamantly opposed to this because he does not want cats to rule the world. So this is a super NES RPG and it's actually been fan translated so if you want to play it, I think

it's at romhacking.net, the localization and it's a pretty solid looking, you know, bog standard, but charming and pleasant in its way super NES RPG. Like I've certainly seen worse super NES RPGs than Ronma one half. Have you guys played this

at all? I might have. I was going to ask Caitlin, how does this compare to the Sailor Moon RPG on Super Nintendo? I would say they're different for their respective properties, but they're pretty comparable. You could do a lot worse in playing either one of those games. And they're all pretty breezy. I'm pretty sure I did play this. I'm looking it up right now. The translation came out in the year 2000, so 18 years ago.

So I'm positive. I play through this one summer weekend or whatever. So, yeah, if you like Romano characters, it's just a breezy RPG. You could do a lot worse. it's an enjoyable way to kill a weekend if you're into the property anyway. If you're not, maybe not so much.

Yeah, I feel like you need to have a vested interest in this, but an existing interest. But that's true of most licensed RPGs. Yeah, true that. So also the final Super Famicom game is one called Ogi Junkin, which is a Puyo Puyo Clown,

but it has a rock paper scissors, Junkin theme. And it's a really, like I have trouble wrapping my head around this game, basically instead of trying to just match colors, each of the colors is assigned to rock paper or scissors. You have to, like, somehow beat, beat a symbol. Yoshi's egg or Yoshi.

Yeah, kind of like that. So it's, yeah, it's sort of abstract and, you know, it's competitive fighter so you can send garbage over to the other person's side. But I don't know. I feel like when you, there's only so many puzzle games of this type that are good. and when you try to get fancier and, you know, come up with something more complex than the big hits, it doesn't work. The solution is to find a new idea instead of making someone's idea less fun. And they only went with rock paper, scissors, because it can have a vague connection to gambling,

and they wanted to use gambling king again, I guess. Sure. I guess so. Yeah. That's the only connection I can think of. But that's about all I got, because it's really the only connection. to the series, but you could, the heck, I've had money matches

and rock paper, scissors, so why not? Another, I think the last of the PC engine CD-ROM games is a visual novel called Toroware No Hana Yome, which is interesting, mainly for the fact that it's the only non-fighter RONMA game that lets you play as characters other than RANMA.

Like, RONMA games are always, you control RONMA. But this one, Ronma is actually the blushing bride who gets kidnapped to be forced to marry someone as opposed to a kane or shampoo or whoever. So his friends have to go and save him so that he does not become someone's wife, which, you know, I can understand the problems there. Speaking of Nehaw, my concubine. Right, exactly. So, like, this is a very weirdly common theme in Ronma stuff. Like, lots of women get kidnapped to be turned into wives.

Nobody has ever actually made a wife. But everybody's kidnapped to be a wife. But this is the one time that Ronva gets kidnapped to be a wife, I think. So the famously unmarried, Ramiuku Takahashi, that's her social commentary. Women are kidnapped into marriage. Exactly. Read into it. It's a fate worse than death.

Uh, let's see, then there's, um, Netsu-Retsu Kaku-Tohen on Game Boy, which is a side-scrolling adventure. Um, actually, this was the first one that I ever played on an emulator. The other one is the second one I played, but this is one where it seems like it's going to be an action game. It's like a side scrolling game 2D, like you play as Ronma, you walk around. The graphics are kind of cute. They're fine. And there's no action.

You just like walk around talking to people. It's like a day in the life. I was looking at that long play and it is intensely boring. Nothing happens in it. Yeah. Like you literally just walk around and talk to people. Walk around a couple times. Leave the room. Go to another one. Walk around back and forth. Nobody would be there. This is a very bad reference, but it reminds me of Alex

kid in high tech world. Yeah. It just looks like a platform, you're just going to random rooms and talking to people and being bored. I was going to say, uh, Alf, Alth, master system or, or Alfa is just a lesser Alex kid in high tech world. So yeah, yeah, fair enough. There, there are definitely, another one might be, um, uh, Takeshi's no Chosenjo, where you're just like walking around doing stuff. But that's amazing in its own special.

Yeah, like that would at least had its own personality, whereas this is just like, a heck of one. Here's some kind of cute black and white Rhonda character. doing stuff. I love hearing what people would say about myths on how to beat Takeshi No Choshenjo. The craziest stuff

come out of people. Then, winding down, there's another Game Boy game, one that I've actually covered on Game Boy Works called Kakorinbo Death Match. It was given to me.

Yeah, and it's actually pretty good. I think of all the non-fighting games here, it might, and maybe besides the RPG, it might be the best one. It's like a kind of, hard to hate. Yeah, it's very inoffensive. There are a lot of puzzle

type games, puzzle action games on Game Boy, and this is another one, but it's pretty well done, and it does come up with an interesting application of Ranma's gender switch, which is that basically it's a box-pushing puzzle game, kind of like Pingo or something,

but depending on which form you're in, you have a different level of strength. So you have to change genders for Ronma in order to solve puzzles like if you want to push something really far then you turn into a male and if you want to use finer movements then you turn into a female so that's kind of cool it's not great but it does the trick I've played much worse on game I believe me it's not amazing but it's perfectly serviceable inoffensive if you want to play Romma and you

feel like playing a puzzle game go nuts and really what more could we want in a video game than to be kind of inoffensive. When you've played so many awful games, I'll take an offensive. Yep. And finally, the last of the Rahnma games is an MSX game, a point-and-click adventure called Hear You Dinsets. And it is very much in the style of, you know, like the classic graphical adventure game, like, you know, Shadowgate or before that.

The ICOM games. Yeah, the ICOM games, but also on the Japanese side, stuff like Portopia. Yeah, I was going to say that, Portopia, for sure. Yeah, like this was a big, you know, the detective games, Jake Hunter. Jake Hunter is great. Yeah, they've all totally blanked out of my mind. But it's exactly like that. You just like walk around to different scenes and you'll talk to characters and basically

you run through all your dialogue options and all your item options and eventually you'll do whatever you have to do in that particular scene and then you'll move on. to the next one. It's not that great. It's very much, you know, kind of standard fare. It's interesting because it was developed by both tech, a company that would eventually become Quest, and Quest would be known for developing games like

Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics. This is a far cry from that. We're missing one final game. I just found it. It's a Pachinko machine from 2011. There's the Pichinko machine you were asking about. It's based on the 2000. 9 or whatever OVA or movie, whatever, came out then.

But I was just curious, like, everything from the 90s eventually comes back. And I guess that was Aranma's one brief resurgence. I think that tied in with the live-action TV series. Oh, yeah, probably. It said it's feature high-quality animation based on the newer anime look from the film or OVA nightmare incense of spring sleep. Oh, okay. I haven't seen that one yet. I mean, again, Dragon Ball came back and Sailor Moon came back.

I feel like there's got to be room for more 90s anime to come back in some way in Japan. I hope they keep picking the good ones. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of crappy ones. Yeah. Yeah.

So, yeah, that final game here, you didn't set to, I don't necessarily recommend anyone playing it. But there is a live, a long play online that I will link to in the comments for this episode, which is pretty amazing because it has an auto-translate on it. And the auto-translate on it, keep. reading the kanji that form Ranma's name. His name basically means crazy horse. Like, that's what the kanji mean. And so they keep translating his name just as horse. So it was like, horse keeps saying stuff.

And also the cutting room floor, I was doing research on this and found a little bit at the cutting room floor. And apparently there is a nude pinup of Ranma hidden inside the code. So that's the classiest Ronbo game. Maybe she has nipples this time. She absolutely does. I thought that was part of the curse. It's like you would become a nippleless woman if splash with water.

Ah, yes. Very specific. All right. So that's it for Ron 1.5, I guess. Is there any, do we have any final thoughts? Any final opinions we need to weigh in with on these games, on the series, et cetera? I just think it's worth examining if you haven't. Maybe you'll like it.

Maybe you won't. But it's so important. to what everything that has come after it in anime manga you at least have to take a look at it and make the call for yourself whether or not you're interested

but you can't ignore it I was going to say again my recommendation there's a lot of it and whenever there's a lot of an anime or a manga you might be intimidated but it's on I believe Hulu and probably Funimation and if you just want to check in for that first season

it's a good taste of probably in terms of animation quality, the best the series ever looked, and if you want to pursue it more, it's available everywhere for money, you know, the manga you can buy, and I assume the OVAs and movies are around. Jeremy, you said you've been buying them on Blu-ray?

Okay, yeah, so there's no shortage of Rama. It's not like Evangelion where you can't find it anywhere, so. Yeah, this did a pretty good job of bringing it back into circulation a couple of years ago, so good on them. Yeah, I'm, you know, I have a lot of fondness, like I said, for this series, just because it was kind of an introduction for me to the concept of manga.

So I don't know necessarily how a newcomer would feel to it. But like I said, I do feel it has a pretty wide crossover appeal to people of many different persuasions, genders, nationalities, interests, et cetera. Like there's a little bit of something, a lot of different things in here. There's comedy, romance, there's a little bit of dirty humor. it's sometimes extremely screwball slapstick sometimes extremely clever

there's some fighting some martial arts so yeah like it's a very broad sort of of work but I feel like that works for it's

to put something in there for everyone yeah so yeah I'm a big fan of Rumiko Takahashi like I said Maisanikoku is my favorite thing by her

but Ranma is a close second although I do hope that someday someone localizes the rest of Ursa Yatara The manga. I'm the one who loves her seyatra. I believe, well, so did all the anime come out or no? The anime has come out, yes.

That's right. On VHS. That's a little closer to 200 episodes, I think. Yeah, that's a whole lot. It's much longer. But the manga never did. I don't think Takahashi has made anything as huge since Inuyasha ended, but she still does produce work.

But I feel like she is probably approaching 60 or inner 60s. I don't see her creating another 40-volume manga series. anytime soon. Yeah, apparently her current series, Renee, is actually supposedly really good from people have told me. So that might be worth checking out. It's gone on for about as long as Ronma at this point. Really?

Okay. But that was off my radar. I read the first volume of it. It was like, I think I've outgrown this. But, you know, for those who haven't, then I hear it's good. So give it a shot. Anyway, this has been another wee-aboo episode of Rotter-Nats deal with it. I am, of course, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the,

Prince of Weibu. I'm Jeremy Parish. And thanks very much, Caitlin, for coming to our... I am Maho-shojo, Caitlin. Thank you. Okay. Maho or Mao? I'm hot-blooded Bob. And, yeah, so, Caitlin, why don't you tell people where they can find you on the internet if they want to follow you and not stalk you, but just like, follow the cool stuff you do? The best place to find me is Twitter. I tweet all the time because I have no life. It's S.A. Caitlin. as in Sierra Alpha C-A-I-T-L-I-N. I'm totally cool,

and post pictures of cats and video games all the time. Hit me up. Bob? Hey, I have no life, too. And I've never logged off of Twitter. I'm still on it to this day. So you can find me on there as Bob Servo. He's tweeting right now.

I'm actually looking at Twitter right now. I missed a whole lot of tweets. But I will say that I do other stuff outside of Retronauts. I do Talking Simpsons, which is a chronological exploration of the Simpsons. We have a Patreon there. that's patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons.

If you go there, I don't want to give you the whole spiel on this, but there's a ton of podcasts, dozens upon dozens of exclusive podcasts. We also have What a Cartoon, our weekly series. It looks at a different cartoon

from a different series every week. And we also have Talking Futurama, which Jeremy will be on towards the end of our first season run. So there's a lot going on on our Patreon. But both Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon are free and all the bonus stuff in advance episodes are on our Patreon at

Patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. Thank you very much. And, of course, I'm Jeremy Parrish. You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite and around the internet at places like Retronauts.com, which is also where you can find the Retronauts podcast, as well as, you know, things like Apple Podcasts and the Podcasts One Network who hosts this. So there's all of that. And of course, Retronauts is supported through Patreon. Patreon.com slash Retronauts gets you early access with better quality, audio quality. The quality of content is always the same, whether you're listening for free or not.

it's a great podcast by God but you're El Pacino by God that's right so don't make us break your legs support us on Patreon

or not it's cool we just like for people to enjoy our show it's awesome so that is it Rhonda one half

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