"There are now Shōnen action series being written about everything. Somewhere in the depths of a Tokyo manga café there even exists one such series about... baking bread. [...] On the surface, nothing could be more stupid. And yet, it is charming. All because of the unmistakably Japanese thought process that might lead a character to shout, in amazement, 'I HAVE NEVER SEEN A YEAST SUCH AS THIS!'."
— Justin Freeman, reviewing
Hikaru no Go
Hikaru no Go"As with all Japanese popular culture, it appears to delve deeply into and grapple profoundly with the eternal existential-philosophical question, What the Fucking Fuck Was That?"
— Bill Walsh on The Tragedy of Belladonna
"It's kind of like watching the history channel narrated by your ten-year-old nephew after a blow to the head."
— [adult swim].com on Code Geass
Daniel Remar: Don't ask why. Ask why not.
Ludosity: It's pretty much impossible to describe this game. Here's a quote from one player:
M3nTo5: At first I was wtf. But then I was wtf.
— On Garden Gnome Carnage
"Karin suffers from an issue I like to call JYAW syndrome. It stands for 'Japan, You Are WEIRD,' which is something I have to say every time I utter a plot summary like Karin's, and it means the principal reason shows like Karin ever get watched or obtain a following is simply based on their alien premise. Japan just has a knack for coming up with new types of just plain weird."
"Japanese cartoons are weird, man. Though I may be on to something with that blue hair."
— Strong Bad, Homestar Runner, "Japanese Cartoon"
"Think you've got what it takes to tap-dance with the monkeys? (Has anyone ever written that sentence before?)"
— Tap Trial's description in Rhythm Heaven Fevernote
"Japan is capable of a special kind of weird that no one else can really get just right. It's that sort of weird that often involves ludicrous concepts mixed with bright colors, notable characters, and an unbridled sense of creativity that dazzles as much as it baffles."
— Sotenga, Hardcore Gaming 101 article on Calorie-kun vs. Moguranian
on Calorie-kun vs. MoguranianDanny: Dude, what fucking acid trip fever dream did this game come from?
Arin: Um, it's called Japan.
Arin: Um, it's called Japan.
— Game Grumps, on Parodius
"I have a theory about this one: Someone wrote a home-made computer algorithm for generating an anime script on random snippets from other anime shows, and he animated whatever came out of the printer. Japanese shows are notorious for being confusing and nonsensical, but this one takes the cake. "
"That should be the description of this game on the box — 'Weird Things Happen.'"
— Vinny describing Tomodachi Life
"Yeah. Monster suits, toy planes, anime people. You have to wonder if even Japan looked at this and said, 'Uh, you think this might be a little too... us'?"
"If you find the Japanese offensive, then you'll find this game offensively Japanese."
— Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, Zero Punctuation, on Zack and Wiki
A blue-haired girl with bat wings - who I presume is the titular Remilia - produces the Gungnir and throws it in the air. It falls on a sleepy red-haired girl wearing stereotypical Chinese clothing. She almost manages to block it, but the sheer force of it still pushes her to the sky and she falls on what looks like a one-horned oni. The oni stabs the Chinese girl in the forehead with her horn, and they then fall into some underground facility, where they are greeted by a black-haired girl with corvid wings. She suddenly produces an epic-ass gun and shoots them with it.
We cut to a girl with long blue hair sitting on a huge rock with a short blue-haired girl with icy wings stuck under said rock. Suddenly there's an explosion, the rock flies high into the sky, and the icy-winged girl crashes into the camera. the rock falls onto a Shinto shrine, pissing off the local priestess, who suddenly turns manly and proceeds to assault the girl with the long blue hair with cards and Tao orbs. The blue-haired girl crashes through a doctor's office and ends up on some green-haired girl's flower garden, which gets ruined in the process. The green-haired girl gets pissed and punches the blue-haired girl into the sky, chases her down, and punches her again, destroying a mountain in the process. She then throws her into the sky and attempts to annihilate her with a rainbow beam from her mouth.
We cut to a girl with long blue hair sitting on a huge rock with a short blue-haired girl with icy wings stuck under said rock. Suddenly there's an explosion, the rock flies high into the sky, and the icy-winged girl crashes into the camera. the rock falls onto a Shinto shrine, pissing off the local priestess, who suddenly turns manly and proceeds to assault the girl with the long blue hair with cards and Tao orbs. The blue-haired girl crashes through a doctor's office and ends up on some green-haired girl's flower garden, which gets ruined in the process. The green-haired girl gets pissed and punches the blue-haired girl into the sky, chases her down, and punches her again, destroying a mountain in the process. She then throws her into the sky and attempts to annihilate her with a rainbow beam from her mouth.
We then cut to a different green-haired girl who is piloting a GIANT ROBOT, HELL YEAH, and showing off its moves. Suddenly the blue-haired girl hits the robot's head and it crashes into the ground. In panic, the robot's pilot accidentally presses a button that launches its rocket fists. One of them flies to the town and wrecks shit up, until it falls on top of another shrine. That shrine's priestess immediately throws the fist away from the shrine, and it then flies to Remilia's house. Remilia's maid immediately casts some sort of a spell that allows her to escape the scene, leaving her mistress alone to face the wrath of the giant metal fist.
Did I miss anything?"
Did I miss anything?"
"The Japanese make some crazy shit, and what can you expect? They've lived isolated on an island for, like what, thousands of years? Your brain's bound to make up some weird stuff. This one time I saw Tom Hanks was living on an island, and he became best friends with a ball. A ball! And he was only there for like a couple of years! Can you imagine how many tentacles it would've had coming out if you give him a couple more decades on that island?"
— JonTron tries to explain this trope, "Japanese Shoot 'Em Ups"
"From what I understand, there's a bunch of penguins walking around. They buy tickets and then go into a transformation booth where they become evil mutant penguins. And from there, they go to the Doom Scale, yeah - the Doom Scale. They jump in the mouth and then appear on the scale. So you gotta stop the penguins by using a weapon; for example, a baseball bat. How do you get the bat? You gotta collect letters that spell the word "Bat". Where do ya find the letters? Inside treasure chests. But how do ya open the treasure chests? A key, right? No, gremlins. Yeah, you collect what they call gremlins and supposedly you drop the gremlins inside the treasure chest and then it opens. But no, it doesn't open right away, it takes like ten seconds. The more gremlins you use, the faster it opens. But it doesn't open, it like explodes. When ya get the bat, you gotta kill all the penguins, but they don't die if ya hit 'em. Instead, there's a bunch of power orbs that scatter all over. You gotta get all the power orbs to power up your bat so you can kill the penguins. But ya only kill the penguins wearing hats because the ones that don't wear hats fight the ones that do wear hats. If the mutant penguins on the Doom Scale outweigh the regular penguins, the Doom Scale starts screaming and going apeshit! [...] I got it, I could come up with a game like this. How 'bout: You're a shark, and you gotta shake palm trees 'til trains fall down, and ya put the trains in an apple, and then, turkeys come and eat the apples, and then, the turkeys go up waterfalls, and to get them down, ya have to collect monkey butts. So you drop the monkey butts on power lines, and then... (mimics explosion)"
— The Angry Video Game Nerd, referring to Attack of the Mutant Penguins, "Atari Jaguar (Part 2)"
"For those unaware Hitler was actually in Persona 2: Innocent Sin, wielded the Lance of Longinus and was actually Nyarlathotep in disguise. I did not make any of that up."
— A post on Know Your Meme
on Know Your Meme"Anime sure is weird."
"Combine equal parts Super Mario 64, Japanese soap opera, Teletubbies, and LSD freakout. Shake (don’t stir). And pour into your Nintendo. This will approximate the effect of Mystical Ninja, the most incomprehensible of incomprehensible anime games I have ever seen."
—Game Revolution's review of ''Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon'' for the N 64
of ''Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon'' for the N 64"What I like about Japan is that they're not afraid of ridiculous batshit insane premises and still draw interesting narratives from them sometimes."
"It's just absolute craziness, like here I am just walking through some tunnels, and now I'm using my purse to hit an evil tractor?"
—Dreamcast Guy review of Yakuza: Like a Dragon
of Yakuza: Like a Dragon"...I love anything that feels like it questions the accepted orthodoxy, in either story, visuals or gameplay design. Whether it be Edmund McMillen coming out of the lawless Newgrounds era of online content asking why a platform hero couldn't be a sentient cube of wet meat, or Persona 5 asking why an in-battle interface couldn't be an explosion of radiating smears rather than a neat list of options, or Undertale deconstructing the entire concept of an RPG, or of course Cruelty Squad defying every imaginable rule of aesthetics and game design to create something weirdly captivating in the middle.
I wonder if my liking this kind of thing is something to do with being British. The British have a much deserved reputation for being stuffy, emotionally repressed authoritarians, but with culture must come counter-culture, and so there's always been a matching undercurrent of anti-authoritarian resentment there that loves to see those of high status brought down a peg or two. Thus the strong presence of Punk in the 70's British music scene, the alternative comedy movement in the 80s, and in the gaming sphere, the British bedroom programmers on their Commodore 64's and ZX Spectrum's in the dawn of home computing eschewed the traditional mazes and alien shooters of early video games to realise weird, anarchic, satirical concepts like Hover Bovver, Bozo's Night Out, and Attack of the Mutant Camels, games respectively about mowing a lawn, stumbling home drunk from the pub, and an attack by some mutant camels.
Oh and hey, you know what's another first-world island nation whose people have a reputation for being uptight? Japan! And I also love Japanese subversive comedy like Excel♡Saga and Cromartie High School [...] and one of my favourite Japanese game developers is of course Goichi Suda, or Suda51, creator of No More Heroes and whose work more or less embodies what I think of as post-punk."
I wonder if my liking this kind of thing is something to do with being British. The British have a much deserved reputation for being stuffy, emotionally repressed authoritarians, but with culture must come counter-culture, and so there's always been a matching undercurrent of anti-authoritarian resentment there that loves to see those of high status brought down a peg or two. Thus the strong presence of Punk in the 70's British music scene, the alternative comedy movement in the 80s, and in the gaming sphere, the British bedroom programmers on their Commodore 64's and ZX Spectrum's in the dawn of home computing eschewed the traditional mazes and alien shooters of early video games to realise weird, anarchic, satirical concepts like Hover Bovver, Bozo's Night Out, and Attack of the Mutant Camels, games respectively about mowing a lawn, stumbling home drunk from the pub, and an attack by some mutant camels.
Oh and hey, you know what's another first-world island nation whose people have a reputation for being uptight? Japan! And I also love Japanese subversive comedy like Excel♡Saga and Cromartie High School [...] and one of my favourite Japanese game developers is of course Goichi Suda, or Suda51, creator of No More Heroes and whose work more or less embodies what I think of as post-punk."
—Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw discussing the cultural context of quirky works in "An Explanation of 'Post-Punk' Games", Semi-Ramblomatic
