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Reviews (3)
21 September 2009
Far more than anyone but fanatical completists need
2 of 2 found this helpful All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku is a comic book series by Yuzo Takada which has had no less than three animated series based on it. All three are collected in this set.
The 1992 OVA series is directly based on the comic series and is highly critically acclaimed. It is basically the story of a young boy, Ryunosuke, whose parents Kyusaku and Akiko are separated and in the midst of a fierce custody battle. The title character is a cat whose brain was implanted in a super-powerful android body by Kyusaku(quite the eccentric scientist) and who acts as a sort of big sister for Ryunosuke. Naturally, her struggle is to protect Ryu from the vicious battles between his parents.
One would expect a series of this subject matter to be incongruous: how can something as wacky as a cat's brain in a android body work with something as depressingly real as a parental custody battle? Yet APCCG pulled it off, turning the focus away from the familial strife that modern culture seems so fascinated with, spotlighting instead the love that always remains between family, even in their most vicious feuds.
But that's not all. Everything about the custody battle is translated into exaggerated metaphor: angry fights turn into a war of the giant mechs and super-androids that Kyusaku and Akiko unleash at each other, parental manipulation turns into Akiko brainwashing Ryunosuke's best friend, and so on. It acts as a clever satire of custody battles.
Suffice to say, the first 3 episodes work at multiple levels. You can enjoy the laughter, the zaniness, yet be moved by the both tearfully angsty and genuinely heartwarming moments... And afterward, you can mull over the subtly voiced insights on broken families. The last 3 episodes, sadly, miss all of that, turning the focus onto Nuku Nuku herself. They're entertaining episodes, but neither as deep nor as enjoyable as the first ones.
Next came the 1998 TV series, which re-imagines the milieu and characters. Kyusaku and Akiko are now a happy couple, Ryunosuke is a cold cynic, etc. The series is in fact a parody of animated adventure shows for kids, and while it has none of the depth of the original OVA, it does have plenty of hilarious wit.
But then there's the last series, "Dash". This re-imagination doesn't just alter the characters; it desecrates them. Nuku Nuku's apparent age is now 18, but Ryunosuke has been aged to 14, and the main subplot is Ryu's sexual infatuation with Nuku Nuku. To make things worse, despite his being 4 years younger than her and a total loser, Nuku Nuku apparently returns his feelings. Now, I know this is an AU re-imagining, but a Nuku Nuku/Ryunosuke romance is a hideous distortion of the characters' relationship. What's next, a remake of Finding Nemo with a Nemo/Dory romance?
But even on its own merits, Dash is excruciatingly bad. Dash's Ryunosuke is one of the most unlikeable heroes I've seen; why we're supposed to root for an infantile middle school kid lusting after a college-bound woman is beyond me. The plot in the final episodes becomes laughably convoluted, abruptly throwing clones and bug-eyed monsters into the mix with no explanation.
Here's the clincher: 3 of the 7 discs in The Whole Kitten-Kaboodle are devoted to Dash. That's a lot of garbage that even Nuku Nuku fans don't need in their collection.
Rather than spend the extra money on this, I'd seek out the DVD that just collects the original 1992 OVA series.
13 May 2020
Imperfect, but compact and functional
If you want an inexpensive device that makes switching between AV inputs quick and easy, this does the job. It's not perfect by any means; the build feels a little cheap and the nodes for the switch are awfully close, making it difficult to tell which input you have selected. However, the compact design is pleasing (no matter what your situation and setup, you'll have room for this baby), everything is clearly labeled, and most importantly, it works. I've been using the device for a couple weeks now and have yet to encounter any issues.
29 September 2009
If you enjoy repetition, you'll LOVE this game.
0 of 1 found this helpful ...that is, if you can stand a total lack of intelligent gameplay design.
Corpse Killer for the Saturn is an upgraded version of an interactive movie with light gun-style gameplay that previously appeared on the Mega CD, 32X, and 3DO. But while the FMV does look better than any earlier version, the game still amounts to playing the same cruddy levels over and over and watching the same videos OVER AND OVER.
Here's the basic flow of the game: Play through the insanely easy opening levels, enter the village, and run the "village" and "swamp" levels over and over until full on health and datura bullets. Then tackle the fortress and its four levels, the last of which is absolutely ridiculous and guaranteed to drain at least 50% of your health. You've now rescued one of your army buddies - but you still have two levels to go to make it back to camp and save your game. Did I mention that there's no way to skip the FMVs in this game? Seriously, it's cool that you can actually pause FMVs, but isn't it traditional to not force the gamer to watch the same long videos every single time he dies?
So what that all adds up to is: If you die on the 2nd of those two levels, you have to go through the intro levels, the village levels, the four fortress levels, the two return to the graveyard levels, and all the FMVs joining them all over again. I am not joking. And brace yourself, because it gets worse.
Even if you somehow make it through all those levels without dying, you STILL have to go through the intro levels, the village levels, the four fortress levels, the two graveyard levels, and _most of_ the FMVs linking them all over again! That's right. You have four army buddies to rescue, and while the videos in which the current captive appears obviously differ slightly from rescue to rescue, everything else is exactly the same.
...except that the developers had the clever idea of using randomly generated levels. Unfortunately, they didn't set reasonable parameters, so sometimes you'll be positively showered with health recovery items, other times you'll face a screen littered with too many zombies to shoot and too many health-draining items to avoid. What's worse, you frequently face situations where you cannot avoid taking damage because you have zombies coming at you simultaneously from opposite sides of the screen, and even a gaming wizard can only move the cursor as fast as the game allows. As a result, Corpse Killer is a matter of 20% skill and 80% sheer luck.
For variety, there are a couple "side quest" levels and a final, 3-level dungeon. But the last level requires nearly all of that 80% luck to beat, so you're again left repeating levels and FMVs OVER AND OVER.
The funny thing is, despite being two discs, Corpse Killer not only has very little gameplay, but very little FMV to boot! A good chunk of the discs' space is wasted on pointless segue FMVs and alternate videos of the same event(e.g. three different videos of your friends pulling the jeep up to the graveyard). More importantly, roughly 2/3 of the videos of disc 1 also appear on disc 2. All in all, if Corpse Killer were presented as a movie, it would be about 20 minutes long.
The one thing earning this thing a rating of "2" is the video footage. Corpse Killer is a truly hysterical b-movie with great tongue-in-cheek puns and laughable innuendo, all delivered with great zest by the actors. If you find it for $5 or less, _consider_ buying it.