That hum is the thing I miss.

A big branch of modern portal fantasy has mostly let it go. The formula often runs like this. Some guy dies, usually from a truck or overwork, wakes up in a fantasy realm with a cheat skill, and inside three episodes he’s running a tavern, collecting admirers, treating the entire mess like a soft landing. Nobody’s crying over a mother they’ll never see. No one’s staring at a strange sky wondering if anyone on the other side even noticed they vanished. The move now is often to settle in and thrive.

I get why it sells. Who wouldn’t want a do over with god mode flipped on? Still, the older stuff hit harder because leaving wasn’t the fantasy. Getting back was.

Think about Hitomi in Escaflowne. She runs track, reads tarot, nurses a crush, lives an ordinary teenage life. Then the impossible crashes straight into that ordinary world, a young swordsman battles a dragon practically in front of her, and before she can process any of it she’s standing on Gaea. The series never lets that sense of displacement fade. Every quiet scene carries the ache of a girl separated from her own bed, old friends, and the small familiar problems she used to shrug off. Gaea is gorgeous and doomed and soaked in war, and she’s stuck inside it holding visions nobody asked for. The spectacle lands because plenty of the time she’d gladly trade all that grandeur for something as ordinary as standing at a starting line again.

Or take Now and Then, Here and There, the title I pull out when somebody swears cartoons can’t wreck you. Shu is a cheerful kid who jumps into danger trying to protect a stranger, then gets dragged somewhere scorched and merciless. No power boost arrives. Zero fan club waiting. Just child soldiers, drought, and a warlord running on cruelty alone. Our hero spends the full run gripping plain decency like the last familiar thing left, and the drive to escape is less about comfort than about staying himself. That whole tension only works because the place that swallowed him is actively trying to break him.

See the pattern? Over there had teeth.

That’s the piece a lot of today’s wave trades away. When the strange realm is a theme park built around one guy, nothing really presses on him. Danger gets defanged. Isolation evaporates. The stakes shrink down to whether he can out level the next opponent. Set that beside Chihiro in Spirited Away, who spends the first night trembling and half invisible, watching both parents turn into pigs, learning that forgetting her own name could leave her trapped forever. Miyazaki understood the assignment. That bathhouse glitters, but it’s a snare too, and the only fuel keeping Chihiro upright is the memory of a life worth getting out for.

Even the goofier entries from that stretch kept a pinch of this. Fushigi Yuugi drops Miaka inside an ancient book, and yeah, it swerves into full romance soap, yet she stays scared half the time, still hungry, still aware that her ordinary life and looming entrance exams sit on the far side of the page. El Hazard sends a whole cast into a stunning elsewhere and lets them enjoy the ride, though the possibility of getting home never disappears completely. The ordinary keeps tugging.

Then you’ve got The Twelve Kingdoms, maybe the cleanest version of the idea. Youko gets pulled across with pretty promises and a blade, and almost at once everything curdles. People lie to her. Monsters stalk the roads. Starving, broke, and betrayed early in the journey, Youko may have a special destiny waiting for her, but surviving long enough to understand and claim it is anything but free. Earning a foothold means grieving the dull safe routine she used to resent. By the time she quits begging to leave, it’s because she grew into that place the hard way, not because anybody handed over a mansion.

That growth is the whole point. Longing for familiar ground wasn’t decoration. It was the engine. A character who wants out has to change enough to either find a door or decide, through blood and loss, that remaining means something now. The reluctance made the eventual choice to stay actually cost something.

Flip to plenty of modern isekai. The protagonist shows up ready to embrace the new world almost immediately. Where’s the friction in that? If paradise lands in your lap on day one, there’s no arc, just a slow drip of fresh perks. I won’t pretend each current title is hollow. Re:Zero drags Subaru through real hell, and part of why it cuts so deep is that he’s stripped of any clean exit and forced to relive brutal stretches of time through Return by Death, dying again and again while trying to change the outcome. Mushoku Tensei at least sits with the weight of a squandered first go round. So the old instinct isn’t buried. It simply turned rare.

A chunk of this comes down to the wish each era sells. Those classic stories often spoke to kids who felt small and overlooked, and the promise was that your dull everyday mattered, that people would miss you, that clawing your way back was worth the fight. A lot of the modern crop sells the reverse. Your real existence was the cage, and the trapdoor out is the prize. One version says you belong somewhere. The other says you should vanish and restart. I know which message I’d rather hand a twelve year old.

There’s also richer drama in craving something you can’t easily grab. Tension needs a gap. Drop a teen into a brutal elsewhere and make them desperate to cross back over, and every episode carries a pulse. Give that same teen a palace and groupies, and you’re mostly watching a dude have a nice time.

I’m not here to gatekeep anybody’s cozy watch. Sometimes a low stakes story about running a potion shop is exactly the mood. But when people ask why the classics lodge in your memory, this sits near the center of it. Those kids were lost. Genuinely lost. And watching them scratch toward something familiar, or make peace with losing it for good, meant the trip carried real weight.

Give me a lead who stares at that beautiful ruined sky and still whispers that they want to go home. That’s where the good stuff lives.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

Let me rewind for anybody who tapped out after Gears 5.

The last mainline entry dropped in 2019 and left Kait Diaz holding a decision that split the fanbase and, honestly, kind of split the mood of the whole thing. Two roads, one dead squadmate either way, big questions dangling about her bloodline and the Swarm. Then quiet. Years of it. So when The Coalition finally spoke up, the safe assumption was obvious: pick up the thread, settle the drama, keep pushing the timeline ahead.

They did the opposite. They marched us home.

E-Day arrives October 6, 2026, with Premium Edition early access beginning October 1. Rather than continue the tale, it winds the clock back to the beginning of the Locust War. Emergence Day itself. The moment the ground split open and the Horde came screaming out of the dirt, turning a working civilization into a slaughterhouse. The campaign follows those first three devastating days through the city of Kalona. You play a young Marcus Fenix, fresh off the Pendulum Wars, running with his brother in all but blood, Dom Santiago. Both men already carrying the scars of an earlier war, but neither one fully aware of the nightmare about to claw up from beneath their boots.

That last piece is the whole reason this gamble pays off.

We already know how these two wind up. Anybody who lived through the original trilogy carries that weight into every quiet moment before a single trigger gets squeezed. We watched Dom sacrifice himself in the third outing so his squad could live. We watched Marcus travel from a prison cell to reluctant legend across three punishing campaigns. These two are the emotional spine of the entire saga, the friendship every later heartbreak leaned on. Now we meet them before the Locust War has carved its deepest wounds, and the sorrow sits right there in the room the whole while. You are basically playing a prologue whose ending already gutted you once. Wild trick to attempt, and it only sticks because the writers trust you to remember on your own.

Winding the clock also gives the studio a chance to repair something the newer material struggled with.

The fourth and fifth chapters looked gorgeous, prettier than anything the old 360 ever pushed. Cleaner faces, wider zones, a floating bot named Jack who could suddenly do just about everything. Somewhere under all that shine, though, the property lost a bit of its grime. The 2006 original felt like a slasher flick with a shotgun. Black corridors, wet growling off in the dark, a creeping sense that you and your squad were on the ropes and might stay there. By the Swarm era that dread had melted into something closer to a popcorn blockbuster. Loud, fun, not scary.

October’s release is charging straight at scary again. The developers have emphasized the horror and desperation of a civilization facing an enemy it has never encountered. During those opening hours, the COG has no established playbook for fighting the Locust, no understanding of how far the invasion reaches, and precious little time to figure either one out. Picture your people holding rifles and prayers while something enormous barrels through the smoke toward them. That flips the entire power balance. In the trilogy you were the counterpunch. Here you’re the poor soul catching the hit before he ever spots the fist. Sign me up.

There’s a business brain behind the rewind too, and it’s sneaky sharp.

Newcomers can stroll in cold. No Swarm homework, no Kait family tree to memorize, no decade of backlog to binge on YouTube before the plot makes sense. You show up, the sky looks normal, life is fine, then the floor betrays everybody at once. Cleanest entry point this property has offered since 2006, which matters a ton when a whole generation of players has never touched a single title in this universe. Xbox needs fresh blood for the brand, and beginnings are the front door. That’s a generous gift to hand a crowd that felt locked out.

The timing borders on too perfect. This lands two decades after the franchise debuted on the Xbox 360 and right beside Xbox’s own 25th anniversary. Wrapping a beginning with a certain reboot flavor in that much nostalgia is slick marketing, no doubt, yet it reads as earned instead of cheap. Last year the studio shipped a remaster called Reloaded that finally carried the classic onto PlayStation, letting a fresh crowd taste the roots. Now the prequel shows up to plant new ones. Old and new breathing at the same time.

I do have one nagging worry, and skipping it would be dishonest.

Prequels get lazy fast. When your audience already knows the finish line, the craft has to earn the ride through character and tension rather than shock, because the shocks are mostly spent. Humanity survives long enough for the classic saga to exist. The pair make it through Emergence Day. So everything rides on how it feels, not simply what unfolds. If The Coalition plays this as a lore checklist, ticking off famous faces and winking at the lens, it flops hard. If they play it as an intimate study of two men watching their world die, it might be the strongest thing the brand has produced in over a decade.

What the studio has shown so far leans toward that second version. People Can Fly, a studio with real history in this universe, including work on the original trilogy and Gears of War: Judgment, hopped aboard to co-develop. Kalona is a brand-new city, so the map isn’t just a nostalgia diorama. There’s a jump button now, smoother cover transitions, sliding, extra movement, and Unreal Engine 5 flexing hard on the visuals. Horde returns as Horde Siege, a larger 12-player experience built around multiple squads fighting through a city under attack. Versus comes back with refined 4v4 combat, and the campaign even protects two-player split-screen on consoles when local cooperative gaming has become increasingly easy to overlook. Small choices, sure, but they stack into a team that appears determined to respect both the history and the folks who lived it.

So here’s where I plant my flag.

Continuing immediately past the fifth chapter would have been the comfortable pick, and comfortable is the last thing this saga needed after seven years without a new mainline entry. A straight sequel closes a plot. A journey home to Emergence Day rebuilds a feeling. It reminds everybody why they fell for these characters to begin with, hands the keys to the newer crowd, and gives the studio room to revisit the future without forgetting the past. Kait’s unfinished story hasn’t been officially abandoned, either. The Coalition has simply chosen to visit the beginning before returning to whatever comes next. You can’t really tell where a story is heading until you remember where the whole thing kicked off.

Whether you’re jumping in October 1 through early access or waiting for the October 6 general release, bring a friend, kill the lights, and get ready to lose.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

Truth is, the idea was already breathing years before he ever crashed onto Earth talking reckless. It just wore different clothes, because opposition back then wasn’t a checklist you ran down. It was a worldview.

Start with the Red Comet.

Char Aznable rolled through Mobile Suit Gundam in 1979, gliding behind a mask, moving three times faster than any pilot had a right to. People hold onto the crimson machine and the flash. What slips their memory is the why. Aznable wasn’t chasing Amuro to prove who logged more hours in the gym. Instead he was hunting the family he blamed for his father’s death, burying his real name, working both ends of a war so a revenge plot could wear a revolution’s face. His beef ran on grief and politics. Class, bloodline, betrayal, all of it braided into one aristocratic figure who’d smile warm while sketching your funeral.

That’s the texture the modern mold sanded away. His quarrel with the hero meant something off the battlefield. Pull the man out of the cockpit and he stays dangerous, still scheming, still carrying a plan bigger than any single duel. Later shows chased that ghost so hard that fans coined a name for the copycats, the Char clone, which tells you plenty. You don’t spawn a whole archetype by beeping a scouter. You do it by mattering.

Go back further still. 1974. Space Battleship Yamato flings a patched together crew across the galaxy, and parked out there waiting is Dessler, lord of Gamilas, blue as the cold vacuum around him. Opens as the enemy, no asterisk. No secret soft heart, no misunderstood childhood montage. Dude tries to wipe humanity off the map.

Then something strange creeps in. As the campaign drags on, he starts seeing that ragged crew as worthy. Not as future allies. As people who earned his regard by how they stood when everything burned. When the story finally lets him shift, it isn’t because he dropped a tournament bracket and had to choke down the loss. A warrior simply recognized another one across enemy lines. Down the line, that saga even brought him back on the side of the ship he once hunted, and it never felt cheap, because the honor was baked in from the jump. That ancient code, where you can want a man gone on Monday and salute him come Friday. Try folding that into a training montage. It splits at the seams.

Now flip to the one who needed no superpowers to make a rivalry burn. Kaede Rukawa, Slam Dunk, drifting onto the hardwood in the early 90s with his eyes low like the entire world bored him stiff. Basketball was his only religion. Sakuragi couldn’t stand the sight of him, partly over a girl, mostly over ego, and that friction set the whole squad ablaze.

Here’s the sneaky brilliant part. Both of them pulled on the same jersey. One team. Their competition wasn’t champion against threat, it was two starving teenagers clawing for the same oxygen, shoving each other toward heights neither could touch solo. No strength readings. No planet on the chopping block. Just sweat, wounded pride, and a jump shot dropping clean. Tension bubbled up from inside the huddle, which somehow ran hotter than any galaxy ending showdown ever managed. A sports story pulled that off with nothing but a scoreboard and two hard heads, which is arguably braver than anything with a spaceship.

So what actually shifted?

Shonen’s boom took a rich, tangled notion and ironed it flat into a pattern you could set a watch by. Enemy becomes friend. Friend becomes measuring stick. Everybody levels up on schedule, the arrogant one stews, then bends his knee just enough to link arms for the final boss. Satisfying stuff, I won’t front. That Saiyan pulled it off better than nearly anybody, and his peak moments still land like a freight train, the sacrifice against Majin Buu, a heel who took a hundred episodes to soften. Day ones remember exactly where they sat.

Doing a thing beautifully and inventing it are two separate acts. He polished a narrow cut of the concept and never fathered it.

What quietly died when the pattern hardened was range. Aznable’s version was political. Dessler’s was moral. Rukawa’s was raw competitive fire between two boys who couldn’t share a room yet needed each other badly. Not one of them leaned on a power ranking to carry weight. Their arrogance sprang from somewhere real, meant something, cost something back.

This whole medium had already wrestled the heavy questions to the ground. Why do prideful men throw down? What price does respect carry? Can you salute somebody while trying to erase them? Those stories trusted the audience to sit in the discomfort without a number crawling across the screen to translate it.

The prince stays a classic, no argument. Love him loud, no shame in it. Just quit slipping him the deed to a house other builders raised brick by patient brick, decades before his hair ever flashed gold. Proud challengers were walking around fully alive and gloriously complicated long before that smirk calcified into a genre rule. We simply quit looking back far enough to catch it.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

A marine biologist named Stephen Hillenburg cooked up SpongeBob, and it hit screens in 1999. Bikini Bottom just flat out refuses to follow normal rules, and nobody living there seems the least bit bothered. Fire burns fine underwater. Sandy the squirrel walks around in a diving suit and everybody treats it like ordinary Tuesday business. None of it makes a lick of sense, which was the whole idea. Hillenburg spent real years studying the ocean before he ever picked up a pencil, and you can tell. His made up sea somehow feels lived in.

What sneaks up on you is how much of the comedy grows out of work. Half the show plays out at a fast food counter. You’ve got a boss so cheap he’d charge you rent on the air near his register. His star employee, though, treats flipping burgers like a calling, which drives their coworker Squidward slowly out of his mind. Meanwhile the competition is a guy the size of a thumbtack, dead certain that one stolen recipe stands between him and the life he deserves. Take away the water and it’s just people worn down by work, chasing things, putting up with folks they never chose. Adults heard those jokes one way. The young ones heard them another. That second layer is a big chunk of why the thing lasted.

Now flip the channel in your memory to Dimmsdale.

The Fairly OddParents came from Butch Hartman, and there’s a wrinkle worth noting. The kid actually reached the screen before SpongeBob did. His scrappy shorts turned up on Oh Yeah! Cartoons back in 1998, a full year ahead of Bikini Bottom opening its doors, though he wouldn’t claim his own half hour slot until 2001. Timmy Turner is ten, ignored by parents who love him in a distracted sort of way, and terrorized by a red haired babysitter named Vicky who rules his house like a warden. Into that gap float Cosmo and Wanda, magical guardians who grant almost any desire the boy can dream up.

Where the sponge’s saga mines the grind of adulthood, Turner’s tale lives entirely inside the fantasy of being small and powerless. Every episode is a pressure valve for childhood frustration. Bad grade? Wish it away. Bully getting loud? Poof, problem solved. The genius sits in the catch. There’s a rulebook, Da Rules, and it exists purely to make sure each wish curdles into a mess. You cannot manufacture true love. Fairies cannot directly maim or kill people. And whatever the kid conjures always spirals into a lesson he’d rather skip.

That structure tells you everything about the split. One cartoon asks you to laugh at the absurd machinery of the working world. The other hands you the keys to omnipotence, then quietly teaches you why unchecked wanting rarely ends clean. Both are moral in their bones. They just preach from opposite pulpits.

Look at the texture, too. Hillenburg’s ocean is soft and painterly, a little grimy, alive with strange organic shapes and a jazz and sea shanty soundtrack that feels older than the audience. Hartman’s Dimmsdale is sharp, flat, loud, built from bold outlines and primary colors, humming with the frantic buzz of a grade schooler bouncing off the walls after too much cereal. You could mute either and still know which universe you’d wandered into inside three seconds.

Even the pacing splits them. Bikini Bottom often slows down and marinates in a single stupid moment until it becomes hypnotic. That famous shot of the sponge scrubbing while the narrator drones about time passing? Pure patience as a punchline. Dimmsdale, by contrast, sprints. Setup, wish, catastrophe, reset, all before you can catch your breath. Hartman built a machine for velocity. The marine biologist built a mood.

This is where I tip my hat to what the network was pulling off back then. Early 2000s Nick wasn’t chasing a single flavor of funny. It was betting on range. You could roll out of bed and watch a fry cook find spiritual meaning in a spatula, then turn around an hour later and see a lonely ten year old accidentally destroy his town with a careless thought. Neither approach apologized for itself or tried to mimic its rival.

That confidence mattered. A lot of channels pick a lane and flog it into the ground. Nick, in its prime, understood that being young contains multitudes. Little ones are surreal philosophers, then turn into raw balls of want a breath later. The biologist spoke to the first mode. The animator spoke to the second. Put them side by side and you’ve pretty much got the whole feeling of being a kid, back when the adults ran everything and mostly missed whatever was rattling around in your head.

Both franchises got milked long past the point they should have quit, and the reason is plain enough. When something taps a real vein, executives keep drilling long after the well goes dry. Purists argue the fry cook lost his soul after his creator first stepped back, and plenty of folks felt Turner’s adventures overstayed their welcome too. Fair criticism, all of it. Still, go back to those first few seasons of either one and they hold up. Two cartoons chasing totally opposite notions of what counts as funny, parked under the same roof, both landing. That is not nothing.

I catch myself missing that whenever I sit through a lot of what’s out now. Too much of it feels ground down into mush, scared to pick a lane or say anything with a pulse behind it. Back then two very different minds were handed room to be strange in their own directions, and Nick had the nerve to platform both without forcing them to rhyme. The undersea tale dug into adult drudgery through the eyes of a creature too pure to notice how bleak his gig really is. Timmy’s world, meanwhile, mapped the fantasy of childhood escape and gently reminded us that getting everything you want is its own kind of trap.

Neither is better. That was never the question worth asking. They’re two answers to the same riddle of how you make a kid laugh while slipping something real under the door. Put a fry cook at one end and a starry eyed boy at the far side, and you’ve drawn the full width of what that beloved network could be when it trusted its own imagination.

And honestly? Both of them still hit. Throw on an old episode of either and watch how fast the years fall off your shoulders. That’s the mark of the good stuff. It waits for you, patient as the tide, ready to pull you right back under.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

Then I loaded up Reissad Studio’s little photorealism experiment and my whole body changed posture.

Something about that first person lens does not sit right, and I mean that as the highest compliment I can offer. The screen breathes. When you jog down a hallway, the picture bobs and stutters like real footage jerks when a person is actually sprinting with a rig strapped to their chest. Your eyes keep hunting for the crisp, floaty steadiness that triple A shooters trained us to expect, and it simply is not there. Instead you get grain, lens flare bleeding across a doorway, that sick greenish tint living in every leaked clip you ever watched on the news and immediately wished you had not.

Here is what nobody warned me about. There is no comforting little dashboard. No minimap glowing in the corner, no ammo counter, no red arrow announcing where death is about to arrive from. All those numbers and icons we lean on, that heads up display we treat like a security blanket, gone. The absence rattled me harder than any jump scare. Without a readout babysitting my attention, I actually had to listen. Had to peek. Had to move like somebody who could genuinely lose something.

And the lighting. Lord, the lighting.

Most military shooters illuminate a room so you can win. Everything readable, every corner legible, the whole space arranged for your success. This build does the opposite. Shadows pool in ways that feel uncooperative, almost hostile toward you. A single bulb swinging over a stairwell throws enough glare to swallow a full squad. Fog eats the far end of a warehouse. You round into pure white overexposure and for half a second you are blind, truly blind, thumb hovering because you cannot tell friend from threat. That hesitation is the entire point. That hesitation is precisely the thing Activision’s machine simply refused to ask of me.

I kept noticing myself doing something I had not done in a shooter. Holding my breath.

Think about why the footage look works on us at all. These clips are things we associate with consequence. Real consequence. When one autoplays in your feed, the brain flinches before your eyes even parse it, because history says whatever follows is probably nobody’s finest hour. Reissad took that specific dread, bottled it, and handed it back as a multiplayer round. So even though I logically understood the spraying red was just shaders, some older animal part of me refused to power down. My palms did their little routine. You know the routine.

Contrast that against the polished franchise and it becomes almost comedic. The big series knows exactly how to make dying weightless. The frame flushes crimson, a slick “you were eliminated” card slides up, maybe a killcam replays the guy who got you pulling off something flashy. Everything is engineered to keep you cozy enough to click again instantly. The whole loop exists so the panic never sticks.

This other creature lets the panic stick.

I want to be fair to the veteran, because it does what it does beautifully. Cinematic momentum, buttery gunplay, that pop rush of a hot streak. Nothing wrong with popcorn. I still throw on a match when I want to feel like the star of an action reel that asks nothing from me beyond reflexes. Comfort food earns its spot on the shelf.

But there is a gulf between watching an explosion and feeling like you accidentally opened a file somebody meant to keep buried. That is the nearest I can get to naming it. Booting a round of the newer thing feels less like entering a level and more like inheriting evidence. The frame is too honest. The motion is too human. You are not the protagonist of a story in here. You are a set of eyes attached to a torso, drifting through a space that does not care whether you walk out.

Which drags me toward the messy question. Is this fear the healthy kind or the too much kind? Some nights I honestly cannot tell. A few sessions ended with me logging off after twenty minutes, not bored, just wrung out, nerves fried in a manner no killstreak ever managed. Other nights that exact tension had me locked in tighter than any objective marker could dream of.

So let me toss it over to you, since we are all sorting this out together. Are you actually firing up the experiment right now, here in September, or did you bounce off once the novelty thinned? Because the population has gone bananas lately. That Locked & Loaded update dropped and the count blew straight through its old record, eventually peaking above 38,000 concurrent players on Steam, more than double anything from the launch window two years back. Reissad stuffed in drones, RC cars, actual melee, a rebuilt audio pass, and a fresh map named Trenches that leans all the way into grimy, claustrophobic warfare. Third-party estimates now put the game somewhere around the two million owner mark. The appetite is clearly out there, at least this week.

Hype is a slippery companion, though. Plenty of tactical shooters have spiked on a giant patch and then quietly bled their crowd back into the void by the next season. Realism is a punishing standard to keep fresh. The very discomfort that makes this grim ride unforgettable is also the exact quality liable to exhaust a person across the long haul. Coziness scales forever. Dread might not.

My honest guess? It survives, but as a particular mood rather than a daily ritual. Somewhere you crawl back to when you want your pulse to mean anything real, not a thing you grind before dinner. A haunting instead of a habit.

Either way, one truth holds firm for me. The safe, shiny veteran handed me a thousand power fantasies and never once left my hands sweating. This grainy upstart pulled it off in roughly ninety seconds. And I still cannot decide whether to thank the developers or uninstall on the spot.

So which camp are you in tonight? Locked in, or letting it quietly fade?

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

Finding a good one took actual legwork. You dug through the back shelf at the video store, you set the VCR to grab something strange off late night cable, you begged a homie to record you his copy. That scavenger hunt was the whole thing. So keep Akira and the usual names off the table for a minute. These six survived on raggedy cassettes and word of mouth, and the veterans never did let them go.

Start with Megazone 23 from 1985, because a big chunk of what came after owes it a debt. This became one of the early landmarks of the home video anime boom, reshaped into an OVA after plans for a television series fell apart, and it wrapped its cyberpunk mystery around the pop idol culture of the day. Shogo is your standard hothead, works a burger gig, lives for his motorcycle. A friend slips him a prototype bike called the Garland and his life goes sideways in a hurry. Come to find out the thing is secretly a war machine, men in dark suits want it back by any means necessary, and the deeper he digs the nastier the truth gets. His city, his entire reality, none of it is what he was raised to believe. If that setup rings familiar, well, The Matrix would play with a remarkably similar idea more than a decade later: reality is not what you think it is. Megazone 23 was already swimming in those waters back in 1985.

One year on, everything flipped silly with Project A-ko. This joint began life as an adult project before the crew wised up and shaped it into a real theatrical release in 1986. The premise is dumb in the best possible way. A-ko is a normal schoolgirl who just happens to be strong enough to chuck a tank, B-ko is a spoiled rich kid who builds robots to fight her, and the pair feud without end over a girl named C-ko while an alien fleet hovers over town like it is nobody’s business. Here is the trick though. Underneath, the film reads as one long valentine to other cartoons. Its title jacks a Jackie Chan movie. B-ko’s classmate Mari looks like she wandered in from Fist of the North Star. Superman and Macross bits go flying past in the background. Spotting them all was half the joy back then.

Then 1987 rolled up with Bubblegum Crisis, and a certain type of fan flat out lost it. Eight installments, straight to video, cool dripping off every frame. Mega-Tokyo got rebuilt after a bad quake, and now a company called Genom runs near about everything while pumping out android workers named Boomers. Trouble is the Boomers keep turning dangerous, getting weaponized, or ending up at the center of crimes the ordinary cops cannot keep up with. Enter the Knight Sabers, four women in sleek powered suits who take the gigs no other crew will touch. Sylia runs the operation while maintaining a lingerie boutique as her civilian business, Priss sings lead in a band when she is not armored up, and the score still slaps generations later. Blade Runner was clearly in the water, sure, but that big hair and those hardsuits and that music turned it into its own beast.

Come 1988 we landed Dominion Tank Police, the pick you reach for when you want your dystopia with a laugh attached. Masamune Shirow drew the comic, same man responsible for Ghost in the Shell, but leave the deep philosophy at the door for this go. Newport City is so choked with pollution that people strap on gas masks to step outside, crime jumps off constantly, and the law responds with literal tanks that flatten more of the block than the criminals ever do. Leona is the rookie, green and reckless, who wrecks her boss ride and cobbles a scrappy little tank named Bonaparte out of the leftovers. She loves that hunk of metal more than any human. What stuck with everybody were the Puma Sisters, the cyborg cat girls rolling with the villain, who spawned a devoted following all their own. It later turned up on the Sci-Fi Channel’s Saturday Anime block, where plenty of American fans stumbled across it during the 1990s.

Early 1989 brought Riding Bean, a jolt of pure American action from a Japanese team that clearly loved our high speed chase flicks a little too much. Kenichi Sonoda planted the story in Chicago. Bean Bandit is a mountain of a dude who drives a monster machine called the Roadbuster and hauls anybody or anything for the right stack of cash. His partner Rally handles the shooting. A gig goes bad, the pair get pinned for a kidnapping, and the back half is basically one long screaming pursuit that refuses to quit. The producers even hired top Los Angeles studio players, with keyboardist David Garfield handling the music, so the thing came loaded with slick American style jazz, fusion and road movie swagger. The plan was a whole run of these, but the money folks and the creator fell out cold, so we ended up with a grand total of one. That leftover fire later became Gunsmith Cats. Anybody who rides for Rally owes this little relic a real debt.

The Guyver closes us out, arriving later that same year and running clear into 1992. If you were young when it hit, odds are it left a mark. Sho is a plain high schooler right up until he stumbles onto a slab of alien armor that fuses to him whether he wants it or not, and from that point the show curdles into straight body horror wearing a superhero mask. A shady outfit named Chronos keeps cooking up monster men, the Zoanoids, and every time Sho suits up the change looks like it hurts something fierce. Blood all over the place. Your mama getting up to leave the room. Twelve episodes got sliced across a pile of cassettes when it crossed over here, and scoring a copy felt like holding contraband. They cranked out live action films afterward and a tidier remake in 2005, yet none of it landed like that filthy original, the armor creeping over the kid like it planned to swallow him whole.

That is the lineup. Six joints that lived on video before the web made every title a quick search away. The magic was in the hunt, the plain fact that landing one meant something because you sweated for it. No algorithm was handing you the good stuff. You had a tip from a friend, a beat up rental card, and a whole lot of faith that the blurry cover art was not lying. Chase one of these down this weekend if the names lit something up. And if you never heard of a single title before now, lucky you, because you get to trace a big piece of what you love back to where it started.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

Rap does the exact same trick. You can ride for Kendrick all day long and never once press play on a Rakim tape, and your whole life is fine. Dig into the roots, though, and suddenly every clever bar in the present starts landing with a different kind of weight. Old ink operates on the same principle. Five books in particular carry the DNA of so much filling your queue right now, and once you meet them properly, you simply cannot unsee their fingerprints smeared across the new stuff.

Start with Akira. Katsuhiro Otomo handed over years of his life to these panels, and you can feel it in each square inch. His Neo Tokyo doesn’t sit still behind the characters. It hums, it rots, busted concrete and tangled cable and neon leaking into the gutters. The man drew each rivet like it personally owed him rent. And under all the biker gangs and psychic meltdowns, the book is really two friends falling apart. Kaneda and Tetsuo came up together, then one of them tastes real power and the whole thing sours from the inside. Anybody who watched a tight bond rot over jealousy already knows how this hurts. The scope here is enormous, yet Otomo never loses the small human beats underneath the wreckage. Its fingerprints can still be spotted across cyberpunk cities in manga, anime, film, and games decades later. The movie gets most of the glory, sure, but the printed version goes much deeper and considerably farther, and it earns its brutal ending panel by panel.

Next, slow all the way down for Lone Wolf and Cub. Two names run this one, Kazuo Koike on the writing and Goseki Kojima on the art. What they made hardly acts like a comic at all. The premise is dead simple. A ruined executioner drags a wooden cart across feudal Japan, and his baby son rides along inside it. Wherever the pair stops, blood tends to follow. So does grief. Whole chapters roll by without a single word spoken. Just wind. Boots grinding dirt. A sword doing what a sword does. Kojima’s brushwork moves the way a scroll unrolls in real time, unhurried and sure. You feel the weight of each step in your chest. Modern creators who understand that silence can hit harder than shouting have been walking ground this series helped clear for decades. Frank Miller openly championed the series and acknowledged its influence on his own comics. The lineage runs bone deep.

Now bring the noise for Fist of the North Star. Buronson and Tetsuo Hara cooked up a fried, lawless future where every dude is packed with impossible muscle and the bad guys have a nasty tendency to pop from the inside. Kenshiro treks a scorched earth, jabbing secret pressure points, murmuring his famous line right before his foes burst apart. First glance, it’s nothing but spectacle, cartoonish and ridiculous in the finest possible way. Sit with it a spell, and you catch on that the book actually cares. Ken keeps throwing hands for folks who cannot throw them back, in a place that quit protecting its own ages ago. That template helped shape the language of battle manga that followed, the stoic hero, outrageous rivals, escalating threats, and bodies pushed beyond anything remotely human. Plenty of fighters who came later walked at least part of a road Ken helped pave with his knuckles.

Then comes Devilman, and honestly, buckle your seatbelt. Go Nagai wrote the thing back in the early seventies, and it remains among the most unhinged, tragic, gut punching stories the form has ever produced. Akira Fudo bonds with a demon to fight demons, believing he can rescue humanity, only to watch humanity reveal itself as the true monster in the room. What begins as a creature brawl curdles into an apocalyptic gut check about mob violence and fear. Nagai had zero interest in comfort. He wanted to grab you by the collar and ask what people become when panic grips the wheel. Evangelion openly carries his fingerprints in its DNA, while later demon soaked works such as Chainsaw Man echo some of the same mixture of grotesque violence, humanity, and apocalypse. His willingness to burn the entire world down for a single point helped make that kind of scorched earth storytelling part of manga’s vocabulary.

Finally, meet Battle Angel Alita. Yukito Kishiro started rolling this cyberpunk run out in the early nineties, and somehow it reads fresher than half the stuff hitting shelves today. A doctor digs Alita out of a scrap heap, a cyborg with no memory of her past, and rebuilds her piece by piece. She spends the rest of the saga swinging her fists toward some idea of who she used to be. The fights go hard in ways only drawn panels can manage, limbs smearing, bodies moving how no flesh ever could. But the brawling was never really the point. Alita is scrambling to work out who she even is while wearing hardware some stranger bolted onto her, and chasing that answer is what keeps you flipping ahead. Kishiro took those classic cyberpunk questions about identity, memory, flesh, machinery, and the soul and made them painfully personal. Alita became one of manga’s most memorable vehicles for asking what remains of a person when memory, flesh, and even the body itself can be replaced. James Cameron spent roughly two decades developing an adaptation before Alita finally reached theaters in 2019. The source material clearly gave him plenty to chase.

So what stitches these five together across such wildly different moods? Ambition, mostly. Not a single title on this list ever once played it safe. Each reached for a payoff bigger than a quick thrill, and the reaching is exactly why they endured while flashier peers faded. Together they showed just how far manga could stretch, carrying horror, philosophy, tenderness, and absolute chaos at once, occasionally within the same breathless page.

Here’s the notion I want you to sit with a minute. Loving the new wave requires no homework at all. You never have to eat your vegetables before dessert, and anyone telling you otherwise is a gatekeeping bore. But when you finally trace a favorite trope back to where it was born, the whole hobby cracks wide open. You begin noticing echoes everywhere you look. A silent standoff, a warrior pushing past total collapse, a metropolis eating itself alive, a machine quietly asking what it means to feel anything. All of it got planted decades ago by artists working with brushes, endless patience, and a flat refusal to think small.

Pick any of these and gift it a weekend. Let it be strange. Let it drag when it drags. Let it get ugly when it gets ugly. Chances are the thing you figured was some brand new invention has been parked on a shelf for forty years, just waiting on you to catch up. And here comes the real payoff. After the classics sink in, everything you already love hits deeper, because you finally clock the artists tipping their caps to the ones who taught them the moves.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

First up, The Vision of Escaflowne. Try describing the plot out loud and you’ll sound unwell. A high school girl lands in another realm, giant armored war machines clank across battlefields, tarot cards decide fate, and a love triangle simmers under the whole thing. Somehow it all fuses into something graceful. Yoko Kanno and Hajime Mizoguchi scored it, so the music alone will rearrange your chest. Van and Hitomi’s relationship actually works because the writers give it room to grow instead of forcing the issue. Those mecha though. Big ornate slabs of armor with blades tucked in weird places, and I could stare at them all day. What grabs me is the mood swings. One episode a schoolgirl is sweating over some boy. The next, a whole kingdom turns to ash. Both land. Half the new shows chasing that kind of range just faceplant. If you came up on isekai, do yourself a solid and see where a lot of your favorite tropes first found their spine.

Record of Lodoss War is old-fashioned high fantasy, no apologies offered. It moves like a tabletop session somebody finally bothered to animate, every quest beat and party squabble left in. Parn the earnest young swordsman, Deedlit the elf who launched a thousand crushes, dwarves and dark sorcery and a continent soaked in old grudges. This 1990 saga laid tracks that every fantasy quest you love still rides. Every pointy-eared archer and stoic knight who came after owes a nod to this cast. Slow burn, sure, but the payoff lands with real weight. If your idea of the genre stops at flashy tournament arcs, sit with this one and feel the roots.

Gunsmith Cats drops you straight onto the cold streets of Chicago. Rally Vincent runs a gun shop by day and chases bounties for extra cash, her tiny partner Minnie May lobbing grenades like she’s handing out candy. Kenichi Sonoda knew his weapons cold, and the firearms are handled with a level of mechanical detail most anime never bothered with. Setting the entire thing on American soil handed it a flavor most of its peers never touched. Car chases tear through the Loop with a crunch modern action wishes it had. It stays lean and mean, proof that a tight thriller needs no glowing sword and no chosen savior, only raw skill and steady nerve behind the wheel. Three episodes, no filler, all momentum.

Cyberpunk heads keep sleeping on Bubblegum Crisis, and that’s a crime. Mega Tokyo after the quake, rogue androids, a shady corporation, and four women in powered hardsuits handling business the cops cannot touch. The Knight Sabers carry the swagger of a rock band, and Priss is literally the frontwoman of one. Rain-slicked neon, chrome, and a score drenched in that fat ’80s synth, all of it clearly staring straight at Blade Runner while carving its own lane. Each entry runs as its own tense little mission, easy to sample before you sink in deep. Half of today’s sleek sci-fi is still cribbing this rain and chrome, whether the artists cop to it or not.

Now for something that pokes fun at the whole space opera racket, meet Irresponsible Captain Tylor. Justy Ueki Tylor somehow ends up commanding a warship, and the running gag is that you never quite know if the man is a genius or the luckiest idiot alive. The humor plays it dead straight. It keeps jabbing at all that chest-thumping space-navy melodrama, and half the fun is arguing with yourself over whether Tylor planned his latest miracle or tripped face-first into it. His crew earns their keep too, a bunch of burnt-out officers and two troublemaking twins who milk every scene. Underneath the jokes sits a surprisingly warm meditation on leadership. Folks tired of grimdark posturing will find this goofy commander weirdly refreshing.

Blue Seed pulls from Japanese myth in a way few others bothered to try. Momiji, a regular teen, learns she belongs to the ancient Kushinada bloodline and becomes central to the fight against the Aragami, supernatural creatures rooted in Japanese mythology. Susano-o, mitama, the entire Shinto mythos gets pulled into a monster of the week groove that never loses its emotional core. Its ’90s production means the color palette pops with a hand-painted cel warmth phones cannot fake. It mashes horror and romance into old folklore without losing the thread, and the finish more than earns its payoff.

Golden Boy is the oddest pick on here, and I’m not backing down from it. Kintaro Oe travels town to town on a rickety bicycle, taking odd jobs and soaking up a new skill at each one. Fair warning, it gets crude. And I mean crude. But sit with it and you find a guy chasing knowledge like his life depends on it, tripping over his own feet, dusting off, going again. The art earns its own paragraph. When Kintaro flips out, his face contorts into these deranged, hyper-detailed expressions that still hold up as some of the best hand-drawn comedy around. Dude studies. Dude fails. Dude climbs back on the bike. There is a strange nobility to a knucklehead who keeps chasing knowledge for its own sake.

A lot of older anime got unlucky with the business side over the years. Licensing deals expired, smaller distributors disappeared, and plenty of titles became difficult to find during the long shift from physical media to streaming. Kids coming up in that gap sometimes had almost no honest way to watch certain shows, short of hunting down aging discs or hoping another distributor eventually rescued the rights. Some of these titles have since resurfaced through Blu-ray reissues and official streaming services, while others remain harder to track down. That silence was never a verdict on quality. The market simply lost the thread for a while, and a whole shelf of treasure went quiet with it.

So why does any of this matter for a crowd raised on simulcast and endless recommendation queues? Because taste gets shallow when the pool only goes back three years. These older anime were built by hand in an era with tighter budgets and zero safety nets, which forced true invention. Limits breed creativity, and those teams had them stacked to the ceiling, which is exactly why the swings read so bold. You can spot the seams, sure, but you can also spot the ambition. Nobody was optimizing for a thumbnail. They were trying to move you, and that effort still radiates off the screen decades later.

Passing this down feels less like homework and more like handing a cousin the good headphones. You want them to hear what you heard. Half the joy of loving a thing is watching fresh eyes light up over it years later. The catalog is out there on Blu-ray reissues, in a few streaming corners, and yeah, in the dustier reaches of the internet if you know where to dig.

Do the youngbloods a favor. Slide one of these into rotation next movie night. Kill the algorithm for one night. Put on something with a little age on it and let it catch you off guard. The classics did not fade because the calendar rolled over. The world just looked away for a minute. They went quiet, waiting on somebody to press play. You will not regret the detour. Trust me.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

Look, I’ve been rocking with anime since the days of blurry fansubs and questionable download speeds, so trust me when I say I have sat through more chosen ones than I care to count. You know the type. Kid catches a bite from a creature, inherits a bloodline, absorbs a demon, or just wakes up one Tuesday able to level a city block. By episode 3 he’s already stronger than his teacher. Come the halfway mark, the writers are inventing new galaxies for him to punch. It’s fun for a minute. Then it gets old real quick, because nothing is ever hard for that dude again.

So when I sat down with Coco, I braced myself for the usual. Small town girl, big destiny, cue the explosion. That is not what I got.

Here’s the thing about her world. Sorcery isn’t a gift you’re born clutching. It’s a skill, and you access it by drawing. Actual line work. Sigils inked onto a page with a special pen, careful shapes that have to be precise or the whole spell flops. Coco is a dressmaker’s daughter with steady hands and zero pedigree, and for the bulk of her life she believed the enchanting arts belonged only to some blessed few. Then a traveling witch named Qifrey rolls through her village and she catches him sketching, and the truth cracks open. What she thought was a bloodline lottery turns out to be a discipline. Something you can study.

That reframe hit me harder than I expected.

Because think about how rare that is right now. Half the fantasy shelf hands the protagonist a cheat code in the first ten minutes and spends the rest of the runtime figuring out who’s dumb enough to fight him. We call it a power fantasy, but really it’s a shortcut. The audience gets to skip the boring part, the part where somebody actually has to get good at anything. And I get the appeal. After a long shift, watching a guy vaporize his enemies with a flick of the wrist scratches an itch. I’m not judging anybody’s comfort watch.

But Coco offers a different flavor entirely, and my grown self appreciates it.

She messes up. Early on she casts a spell she doesn’t understand and accidentally petrifies her own mother. That’s not a flex. It’s a catastrophe she caused herself, and the story makes her sit in it. There’s no reset button, no convenient mentor to wave it away. The stakes are personal and they shadow her every move. Everything she does afterward carries that weight.

And the mentorship, man. That is where the show quietly earned my respect. Qifrey doesn’t just point at Coco and unlock her potential like some anime Yoda. He teaches. Corrects her posture, watches her hands, breaks down why a shape didn’t hold. She trains alongside other apprentices who are also grinding away and failing right there next to her. Agott is prickly and gifted and clearly resents the new girl. Tetia is bright and energetic. Richeh does her own thing. These young witches feel like classmates in a demanding trade school, not a squad of prodigies waiting to unlock their true forms.

The animation from BUG FILMS deserves a shout too. Kamome Shirahama’s original manga is stacked with some of the most gorgeous art in the medium, all that ornate detail and crosshatching delicate as lace, and the studio had a mountain to climb bringing it to motion. They pull it off. When a spell forms on screen, you watch the pen move, you see the geometry take shape, and the payoff feels earned because you witnessed the effort behind it. That connection between labor and result sits at the heart of everything the story is trying to say, and the visuals honor it.

What gets me most, though, is the philosophy tucked underneath all that pretty artwork. Coco discovering that the craft can be studied means it also carries responsibility. Every drawn glyph is a choice. Draw the wrong shape and somebody gets hurt. Get careless and you don’t get to blame fate. There’s a moral spine here that the shows built on nonstop brawling tend to skip, and it makes her wins mean more. When she finally lands something, I’m actually rooting, because I saw her earn each step.

I think about the young folks coming up watching this stuff. What does it tell a kid to see hero after hero handed limitless might with no effort behind it? Feels like a lie, honestly. Real life doesn’t run on bloodlines and lucky bites. It runs on reps. You want to write? You’ll produce trash for years first. Cooking means burning a few dinners before anything comes out right. Building something worth having takes ugly, unglamorous nights where nobody is clapping. Coco embodies that truth, and she does it while wearing a cute pointed hat, which somehow makes the lesson land softer.

There’s a Blerd tradition of loving the underdog who grinds, and Coco slots right into it. She reminds me a little of the best sports arcs, the ones where the scrappy kid outlasts the naturals. I also see every artist I know who wasn’t the most talented in the room but simply refused to quit. That’s a hero I can recommend to my nephew without a second thought.

You can now catch all 13 episodes of the first season on Crunchyroll across much of the world outside Asia, while Netflix carries the series in selected Asian markets. Crunchyroll launched the subtitled and English dubbed versions together, and a second season is officially on the way, although no premiere date has been announced. So if you’re burnt out on invincible boys yawning their way through the apocalypse, give this one a real look. Witch Hat Atelier respects the grind. What it really tells you is that getting born gifted just puts you at the front door. You still have to open it and put the hours in, which is what Coco keeps doing, clumsy at first and a little sharper with every lesson. That slow climb is the part I keep coming back for. Give me a kid fumbling toward good over one who showed up already maxed out before the story even started.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

2026 has been generous on that front. Three titles in particular got me feeling some type of way, and not one of them leans on a screaming protagonist punching a mountain into gravel.

Start with Frieren. The second season premiered in January and ran through March, and it kept doing the thing that made the first run so quietly devastating. Here’s an elf mage who will outlive almost everybody around her. Her old party saved the world together, but her human companions grow old and die while she barely changes. That’s the whole engine of it. Our girl spends her long life realizing, too late, that she never really knew the humans she traveled with. Himmel the hero is gone before she thinks to ask him a single real question. And the grief in it never announces itself with big orchestral swells. It creeps in. A small memory, a flower she recognizes, some habit she picked up from a dead friend without ever noticing she picked it up.

I lost my grandfather a while back, and this series understands something about that kind of loss most media fumbles. You don’t grieve all at once. It comes in ambushes. Somebody laughs a certain way in a grocery store aisle and suddenly you’re gone for a minute, standing there holding a can of beans. Frieren gets that. For a fantasy cartoon about wizards, it has more honest things to say about mortality than most dramas built by adults for adults. Mallorie Rodak and the dub crew earned their flowers too, because none of it works without that restraint in the delivery. Say it too loud and the whole thing collapses.

Then there’s Akane-banashi, which snuck up on the whole culture this spring. It’s a Shonen Jump title, but the subject is rakugo. You know, that traditional Japanese art where somebody sits on a cushion and acts out a full story using only their voice, a folding fan and a small hand towel. Doesn’t sound like something that would survive the jump to animation, right? But the way ZEXCS staged it, the audience literally starts seeing the world the performer is describing, and the screen bends around the storyteller once the performance gets cooking.

The heart of it is Akane, a high schooler whose father was expelled from the Arakawa school during a promotion test for shin’uchi, rakugo’s highest rank. As a little girl she watched the whole thing come apart. Over the next six years, she quietly trained under his former master. By high school, she is ready to chase that rank herself, partly out of love and partly out of a slow-burning need to set it right. That’s where the personal responsibility runs deep. Power isn’t the prize here. What she wants is command of something ancient and unforgiving, and she has to figure out whether she’s doing it for her pops or for herself. Any Blerd who ever fell for a discipline nobody around them respected knows that feeling in his chest. Everybody who picked up an instrument, a pen, a controller, a mic, and got told it was a waste of time.

The artistry is what stuck with me longest. This is a show about how hard it is to be good at a thing. Not gifted. Good. It respects the grind, the failure, the nights you bomb in front of a half-empty room and drive home replaying every flat line in the dark. And it never pretends talent settles the matter. Akane may have inherited some of her father’s ability, but she still has to eat dirt to earn a spot at the table.

Now if you want something that scratches the political itch, Nippon Sangoku is the one nobody saw coming. It landed worldwide on Prime Video in April and turned a lot of heads, Hideo Kojima’s included, which tells you something about the quality. The premise is bleak. Near-future Japan buckles under the effects of nuclear war, a deadly virus, a devastating earthquake and a government too crooked and greedy to protect its people. Heavy taxes and famine squeeze the population until the people finally rise up. A hundred years later, the country is split into three warring states, and a young man named Aoteru Misumi is trying to stitch it back together using his mind and his command of language instead of brute force.

Watch that setup and tell me it doesn’t rhyme with the news. Leadership acting on its worst impulses because nobody can check it. Regular folks treated as disposable over who they are and where they come from. What the series does with the setting is wild. It takes the skeleton of the Chinese Three Kingdoms saga and drops it into a Japan where technology and society have fallen back to something resembling the Meiji era. Sepia washes over everything, with dust in the corners of every frame like an old period drama. Beautiful to look at. Also cruel, and in no hurry to let you off the hook. Aoteru climbs on knowledge and persuasion, which is its own argument about where real strength actually lives. Not always in the blade.

What ties these three together is that they trust you to be an adult in the room. Frieren asks you to sit in loss without a tidy bow slapped on top. With Akane-banashi the question becomes whether inheritance is a gift or a debt you signed for without reading. And Nippon Sangoku wants to know what you owe a broken society, whether one clear-eyed person can shift it at all.

That’s the stuff I need at this age. I came up on Toonami like a lot of us, mainlining action after school, and I’ll never quit that part of me. There’s still a place for a good scrap. But the older I get, the more I want a story that respects my hours and my losses. One that knows I’ve buried people. One that knows I’ve got responsibilities I never asked for and had to grow into anyway, ready or not.

Death, crooked politics, the loneliness of chasing something beautiful, the weight of family sitting on your shoulders. Turns out the form had room for all of it the whole time. We just had to age up enough to notice it was there.

So if you’re a grown Blerd staring at a bloated watchlist wondering why nothing’s landing, skip the flavor of the month. Sit with one of these instead. Give it space to get quiet on you. That’s exactly where all three do their real work.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

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