#god im so sad that this is such obscure lore at this point

[aphantimes]

hey did you know that the sonic adventure perfect guide has a part written from the perspective of researchers who speculate that the surviving members of the knuckles clan after chaos' rampage split into two groups

did you know that one group of these survivors made the decision to create angel island using the master emerald. they willingly isolated themselves from the world to ensure this never happened again. they had the power to control the master emerald and chose a sacrifice to benefit the rest of the world instead of being conquerors like they were under pachacamac.

did you know that the in-universe researchers speculate that the second group stayed on the surface to pass down the knowledge of the disaster to future generations.

meaning it may very well be possible that there are some echidnas still alive out there. and if not then there's definitely room to explore what the heck happened to make both groups eventually disappear. were their numbers just too low to be sustainable? did some other disaster befall them? ghhh how often i think about this.....

[tumblunni]

Okay I know that kingdom hearts has a bad reputation for sticking crucial plot information on obscure spinoff games but HOLY SHIT I just finally watched a lets play of the fuckin digimon tcg game and found out it ACTUALLY HAS A GODDAMN CONCLUSION TO ANALOGMAN FROM DIGIMON WORLD 1

like 90% of the damn game has no plot whatsoever let alone indicating its a digimon world sequel! and then suddenly in the last battle without being foreshadowed whatsoever analogman returns and gets possibly the best boss battle ever IN A GODDAMN TCG GAME

holy shit his whole fight is framed as ‘this is literally the same guy from digimon world 1, hacking another game’, the interface wigs out and a bunch of fake command windows pop up with rapidly scrolling code of the game supposedly falling apart. And then his boss battle flips the entire gameplay system on its head by giving him fourth wall breaking special moves that pull overpowered effects by “hacking the engine”, with cool animations to fit. Fuckin badasssss!!

and it also fuckin FINALLY EXPLAINS THE DAMN PLOT LIKE GEEZ

digimon world’s conclusion was so rushed, you never even meet the villain until the final battle and it ends all weird with just “something” going wrong that causes him to get sucked into a portal or something while screaming dramatically in weirdly high resolution terror faces??? the tcg game confirms that this was him attempting to flee back to the human world after you defeated him, but one of the stray attacks from the battle damaged his machine and it caused him to essentially commit accidental suicide when he turned it on.

and HOLY SHIT MY FUCKIN OBSCURE HEADCANON IS TRUE????

the game had some sequel bait hints that maybe analogman is somehow still around and that the portal explosion just turned him into “corrupted data” so he can never return to the human world. and i always thought it would be super ironic if he actually got turned into a digimon aka the thing he hates more than anything

WELL OKAY I GUESS CRITICAL LORE IN A TCG GAME IS OKAY WHEN ITS A BIG YES BUNNI U THEORY BE CORRECT

he appears in this game as a malomyotismon who does a damn good vexen face during the fight, lol. And he’s all “gahh that stupid kid ruined my plans but this accursed body at least improved my hacking abilities!” Tho its implied that his corrupted state is more like a bodyless cloud of data that can possess/copy different digimon, which would be REALLY FUCKIN CRITICAL to explaining the goddamn plot of Digimon World Next Order!

Seriously wtf is up with this series? Digimon World 2 is not the sequel to Digimon World 1, all the numbered games are entirely separate individual stories with wildly different genres from pet sim to roguelike strategy. The real sequel is fucking DIGIMON THE CARD GAME THE GAME and then Digimon World Next Order a bazillion years later for the ps4. In which i am STILL REALLY SALTY that they have a FUCKIN RAD remix of analogman’s boss theme yet he doesn’t appear in the game. The added context of this damn tcg game confirms once and for all that the Ambiguous As Fuck Ending actually WAS him appearing in the game, this unexplained “oh wait the villain was good all along and he was just possessed by an evil virus” was supposed to be corrupted-digi-analogman and seriously WHY DONT THEY JUST FUCKIN EXPLAIN IT!!! this tcg game wasnt even released in europe!! and even american fans probably had no clue it was linked to this entirely separate subseries! You have to friggin piece it together with context clues like the battle music and the fact analogman’s signature mon was machinedramon. I mean vjesus christ Next Order is a litera; sequel with the grown up version of Digimon World’s protagonist as a badass home ec teacher who still defends the digital world in his free time yet you couldnt spare ONE LINE OF DIALOGUE mentioning the name of the villain?? and summarizing the fuckin tcg game everyone missed??? AND CONFIRMING THAT THE VILLAIN IS INDEED MAKING A REAPPEARANCE POSSESSING THIS GUY??? oh god everything makes SENSE, thank you terrible card game adaptation. ehh but i do still love Next Order for making Hiro/Mameo’s canon partner Mamemon, he’s even more badass as this big tough bishie version of himself with a tiny adorable pal that can shoot rocket fists through space and time. (its funny tho cos the DW1 intro movie showed metalmamemon and metalgreymon and the american boxart flipped a coin and decided metalgreymon must have been the one the protagonist was using in that scene. Whoops!)

anyway even with the added context that IT WAS INDEED GODDAMN ANALOGMAN, the final boss fight in Next Order was as terrible as the rest of the plot. So I’m glad trash gramps got a suitably badass boss fight after all, even if it was a CARD GAME VERSION! lets all celebrate the awesomeness of this obscure fuckin spinoff game’s obscure fuckin intercontinuity cameo with the boss fight music that other game wasted

seriously fuckin hell the biggest challenge in that final boss was that i was so distracted by SHEER OFFENDEDNESS at the cool music not matching it that it was hard to keep focused

its not just a great boss theme for a terrible boss, its a really fuckin EMOTIONAL song for anyone whose childhood was fuckin defined by the first game!!!

and look you had a PERFECT FUCKIN EXCUSE for a REALLY GOOD boss battle against MY MAN GRUMPY GRANDPA OF THE COOL DAMN NAME. Seriously guys analogman was THE FIRST digimon villain! digimon world came out before the anime, digimon world was the BETA FOR THE ANIME! this was the first place they had the ideas for file island, so much of the areas in the game are awkwardly mistranslated versions of stuff that would later appear in the anime in a different form. before this digimon had never been anything more than a fuckin 2-bit graphics tamagotchi and this was (after the manga) only the second goddamn time these monsters had an actual full colour character design! all of those charmingly janky 90s gross out show styled tcg illustrations? that was concept art that this game was working from! fuckin hell this game thought up the idea for metalgreymon’s changed design that ended up becoming the iconic partner of tai in the anime. (you can also see beta tai in the manga with a beta veemon as a partner instead! o_O)

SO LIKE...

JUST....

I HAVE FEELINGS ABOUT ANALOGMAN OKAY!!! he’s a badly written guy with only like five sentences across all the videogames but fuckin hell he was such an Iconique part of the development of this series that they named him fucking ANALOGMAN

like dude you could have SO EASILY made me scream at my tv in a more positive way by bringing him out as the surprise villain and showing us wtf his deisgn is even supposed to look like cos god all we have is a blurry faceless early ps1 model buried under the glow filters of Mt Infinity’s funky background effects.

AND FUCKING

IF IT IS CANON

THAT MY FUCKIN

STUPID THEORY

IS CANON

slap a fuckin O on this man and LITERALLY LET ME BEAT HIM UP

like dont even give him a team or anything, just let me fight THE MAN HIMSELF

you canonically fuckin said he’s a digital ghost now and basically the same as a digimon

let me beat the shit out of a regular businessman in a suit and tie while he pulls his badass ‘i’m hacking the game i’m in’ bullshit from the GODDAMN TCG GAME THAT WAS MORE CLIMACTIC THAN YOUR SHITTY CASH GRAB FAKE SEQUEL

man god i didnt expect a fuckin TCG GAME to revive my righteous fury from back when i first played that piece of shit. i hate it cos Next order is so pretty and its gameplay is so good and i really loved my twin digis but there were SO MANY bugs and cut corners and missing content and really bad writing and GOD it made me so sad that the dub team really really tried, they tried so hard that they got fuckin renamon’s original voice actress back even though the renamon in this game has nothing to do with the anime one. THE DUB WAS REALLY GOOD BUT IT COULDNT SALVAGE THAT SCRIPT!! THE MUSIC WAS REALLY GOOD AND THE ART WAS REALLY GOOD AND THE DIGIMON THEMSELVES WERE MY BEST DAMN FRIENDS FOR THAT MONTH OF MY LIFE BUT THE GODDAMN FUCKIN SCRIPT!!! the postgame was MORE FUN because FINALLY everything opened up like the sandbox of the first game and you could just fuckin hug u digis without being distracted by constant cutscenes butchering your childhood nostalgia

man i wanted to write a fic/draw a comic about my headcanons on how to fix it but i never managed to do it cos holy shit it was basically “throw everything out and make a different game geez” I COULD RAMBLE FOR HOURS ABOUT THE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SEQUEL THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN!! and a fuckin!! tcg game!! was closer to that sequel!!!

and fuckin MY THEORY WAS RIGHT AND MY BETTER GAME IDEA ACTUALLY WOULD WORK IN CANON

fuck it im gonna do draw myself decking business gramps in the face

oh! and the female protagonist design! thats another rare good part of that thing! i loved the pixellization effect on her ponytal, way better than the male equivelant having a very ordinary costume design just with a pixel corner taken out of his jacket. also why did the plot never actually make a thing out of that? like you’d think that ‘unlike every other digimon tamer i’ve got this scar of my digitization’ would be a plot point. like they didnt give everyone else a cool pixel squares mark! they could have at least used it as an excuse why the protagonist is the Only Chosen One who can do all this plot shit. or if it was me i would have made it early foreshadowing for the Return Of Business Gramps, like you were partially infected by the Oooo Mysterious Unexplained Digi Virus (seriously why did they not just have ONE SENTENCE explaining its the fuckin original villain returning????) during the prologue and i dunno somehow that gives you powers to break analogman’s control on the digimon he possesses. or maybe the pixel thing is like a tracking device he put on you? or just give that cool design trait to the protagonist of digimon cyber sleuth instead, whose entire plot is that theyre a digimon human hybrid with literaly the power to pixellize themself into computers.

ALSO!!! actually do something!!! with mameo!!!

they really fuckin hyped up in all the prelease materials that the digimon world 1 protagonist was gonna be in this game and he’s all grown up now. and then he does NOTHING in the plot except babble exposition and stand around your home base. and has one line about how he’s a badass teacher now and his partner is mamemon but hey we made a bullshit excuse for why his digimon is sealed away and he never gets to fight :<

give me an actual cool teamup of new protag girl and her cool teacher dude beating the shit out of business trash with their bare fists and also their digimon’s bare fists while THE BEST DAMN MUSIC GOES UNWASTED

...fuck i sure do Feel Intensely about nostalgic games lol. i wonder if i’ll be so rambley when i play kh3? maybe itd be a really shitty lp, aaagh...

[meiizumi]

Castle of Shikigami: An informal rant nobody asked for about my most obscure obsession to date

STOP i spent like 2 days writing this post and im only posting it on tumblr because it’s the one website i’m a member of that can hold the most text. i wanted to infodump somewhere...... read this to learn something i guess (´･ω･`)

Bad voice acting is the Peak of comedy to me, and while I was looking for something to laugh at one day, I found this game called Castle Shikigami 2 for the PS2. The US version of the game's dialogue is rife with machine translated text that makes no sense, and awkward voice acting to boot. They even have voice actors saying the wrong lines, voice actors speaking implied commands, and a few voice lines are left in Japanese. Apparently, Roger Craig Smith (Sonic the Hedgehog's current voice actor) was in this game but I don't think he's even credited?! I think I know which character he voiced but I’m not exactly sure.

The history behind this game’s localization is REALLY weird. Castle of Shikigami/Shikigami no Shiro was originally an arcade bullet hell shoot em up game. The series was created by Alfa System and it was one of Alfa System’s main IPs. There are three main shmup installments and a text adventure game for the PS2, Nanayozuki Gensoukyoku. Nanayozuki was practically fanservice for whatever number of CoS fans there were back then. Each main game in the series was originally an arcade cabinet, but they were all ported to PC and home consoles. In CoS 2′s case, it came out on the PS2, Gamecube, and Dreamcast, but only the PS2 version got localized. The western publisher, XS Games specializes in publishing quality budget titles such as “Bass Pro Shops: The Strike” for the Wii. I theorize they didn’t care too much about the actual content of CoS 2 and were more focused on selling a game quickly for a low price, so they just machine translated it and adjusted a few things. If you’re wondering if Castle of Shikigami 1 was also translated this badly, the answer is No. XS Games instead removed all the dialogue from the western release of CoS 1, and released it with the title “Mobile Light Force 2″.

“Wait, what do you mean ‘Mobile Light Force TWO’ if Castle of Shikigami 1 is the first game in the series?” If you want to know what Mobile Light Force 1 was, it’s GUNBIRD; another shmup game, but by a completely different developer than Castle of Shikigami. I don’t know why they did that. What really kills me though is that both MLF 1 and 2 use the same boxart, which is COMPLETELY unrelated to the actual contents of either game. AFJQHJFOKLJFDS look at this

There’s more hilarity behind Mobile Light Force that isn’t hard to find so you can search that up if you’re interested. But thankfully, Castle of Shikigami 3's Wii edition got more of a proper localization by Aksys Games.

Now I would bluntly say something like “stan castle of shikigami” but:

1. This series’ lore is insanely convoluted. It’s an essential part of this expansive fictional universe referred to as “Mumei Sekaikan” (I don’t know what this translates to in English) where there’s like, 7 different parallel worlds. There’s more obscure ass games and manga that are tied to this universe, and I think there’s even a tabletop RPG made based off it. Have you heard of “Gunparade March”? Most likely you haven’t; it’s an obscure video game made by Alfa System that also got adapted into an anime, and I feel it can be described as Mechas x Persona. One of the characters in CoS 2 is just one of the GPM characters going undercover to find her senpai who traveled to the CoS world. Or something like that. The 7-world universe isn’t explicitly talked about in the game but they make so many references to it without defining anything that it’s like you Must know about it. There is NO documentation in English about the Mumei Sekaikan I could find on the internet, although there is a wiki in Japanese where I got a ton of knowledge from (GOOGLE TRANSLATE IS MY TRUSTED FRIEND) I feel like I might be THE person in the United States who has the most knowledge on the Mumei Sekaikan, and I could go on another tangent talking about what I know so far (and who this one specific dude Shibamura Yuuri is) but I won’t.

2. The writing isn’t excellent and can be pretty Unwoke ™; the first game came out in 2001 and the third game came out in 2005 if that gives you a sense on what era these writers were in. As far as the games dialogue goes, the characters appear kind of flat. CoS 1 and 2 Kotaro (i refuse to use the official “Kohtaro”) is stupid and driven by JUSTICE to a point where it’s annoying. I can’t tell if Hyuga is trying to be a Ladies Man in CoS 2 and 3. Kim, a religious tae kwon do instructor, spends CoS 2 thinking about how he should atone for his sins, then he turns himself into jail at the end. Sayo’s backstory is that she was a shrine maiden raised as a “human weapon” to have no emotions and her only goal in life was to kill god and then die, something like that. However, after CoS 1, she gets a crush on Kotaro because he actually treats her like a human and Of course that’s what you’d expect from the main teen girl and boy in the series. In CoS 3, Sayo's character is mostly played out to be a major tsundere for Kotaro even though surprisingly HIS character in this game changed a ton compared to 1 and 2 (he had to kill an illusion of his older brother, who he learned actually died earlier, and now he has to kill an illusion of his childhood sweetheart... damb that shit sucks :/). He’s still stupid though

There’s a gag in CoS 2 that I can’t clearly remember where it’s like, Niigi makes Sayo and Fumiko, who are both romantically interested in Kotaro, think that he’s only into little girls? Meanwhile, Fumiko’s magic goes wrong and her appearance turns to that of a child though in response she’s like “hee hee maybe Kotaro will like this”. basically more On-Brand early 2000′s anime unwokeness than average. Speaking of Fumiko, she’s a 400+ year old militaristic witch who constantly teases Kotaro (who’s like 16 or 17) and she wants to marry him for his magical potential since he’s like one of the candidates for becoming God??? From the official CoS 3 character descriptions, “Her hobby is to steal the men from other women. Her second hobby is trampling upon people.” She canonically stole her stepmother’s husband from her stepmother (the 3rd boss of CoS 3). I don’t get how that shit would have worked

3. The game itself is HARD af but to be fair I’m a scrub gamer. I can’t get past stage 3 on easy difficulty without continuing. Yes i bought CoS 1 on Steam, Yes it has a port on steam i feel like i should have mentioned this earlier

4. Besides CoS 1 having a port on Steam, CoS 2 and 3 might be hard to obtain legally. The poorly translated CoS 2 was apparently super cheap back then, but since it’s an old game, its value might’ve increased. When I tried looking up prices for English CoS 3, all the listings were like at least $40 and being broke I wouldn’t want to spend more than $29 for a Wii game in 2019... honestly I just emulated CoS 2. shout out to PCSX2

Last month I was desperate, bored enough, and deep enough in the Shikigami rabbit hole that I tried to find the manga based off of it online. The CoS manga only tells the events of the first two games so I still don’t really get anything about CoS 3, like who Mihee, Batu, and Emilio are supposed to be. However, the plot events also differ. For example, Roger Sasuke exists as a character in CoS 3 but in the manga he literally Dies. There’s 11 total volumes of this; 3 volumes dedicated to CoS 1 and the latter 8 (the “Twisted Castle arc”) dedicated to CoS 2. Only the very first 3 chapters were scanlated to English all the way in 2011. Fortunately, I did find the entire manga uploaded though............... in CHINESE. So you know what I did? I “read” the entire thing using my phone’s Google Translate OCR app to take pictures of each page and comprehend the translations. Of course I still don’t understand CRAP because of the Mumei Sekaikan jargon + machine translation but I understood enough to get emotionally attached to some of the characters. I wish I hadn’t. At least through the manga I learned that the characters DO have some depth and pre-established relationships. For instance, the reason why Roger Sasuke became a ninja is because when he first landed in Japan as a kid, he was getting bullied or something and he didn’t know Japanese then Kotaro saw this and told the bullies to stop. Then after Roy /sorry i mean Roger learned that he was set to home-stay with the Kugas in the first place, he decided to dedicate his life to Japan in order to protect Kotaro back. I think. DO U SEE HOW ABSURD THIS SHIT IS Anyway Nanayozuki takes place between the second and third games and sets things up for CoS 3. There’s a full playthrough of it uploaded to YouTube and I think it contains a lot of juicy lore, but it’s just too much to go over with Shitty Google Translate OCR. There’s also Shikigami no Shiro novels which apparently contain the most backstory, but I have a 0% chance of finding these online for free. Not to mention that these would ALSO be too much effort to Google Translate.

in conclusion: You don’t HAVE to play Castle of Shikigami. Like, I’m not gonna recommend it for the content, but if you love shmups and are looking for a shmup game you haven’t heard of then I will recommend it for the gameplay (old touhou mutuals assemble theres a POWER-UP-BY-GRAZE MECHANIC). I’ve counted like 4 total fans outside of Japan that like this series for the story, and I don’t think that number is going to increase because I doubt CoS 2 will ever get retranslated and ported. I just want you to know that this series exists and that there’s a ton of wacky shit behind it besides the bad Castle Shikigami 2 dub. also if someone knows enough japanese or chinese and has an INKLING of interest in this series umm talk to me and help me decipher stuff

I‘m kinda sad that the series is pretty much Dead though. This is the most recent piece of official Castle of Shikigami art I could find, and this was for the 2018 New Year. The next most recent piece of official CoS art I found was also drawn by the character designer Sonoda Miku all the way in January 2008, commemorating the end of the CoS manga serialization. Alfa System released a spiritual sequel to Castle of Shikigami on the Japanese Switch eShop called Sisters Royale, with character designs I think are still by Sonoda. By “spiritual sequel” I mean that it has some of the EXACT same shot types as CoS and the same mechanic where grazing bullets increases your power and score. This is the closest we’ll get to a Shikigami no Shiro 4. I wonder what the business decision behind that game was but it actually looks like fun and I want to play it so OK Go off i guess