Vice City is back. The palm trees, the neon, the swampy Florida heat rendered so clean you can almost feel the humidity through your screen. Rockstar built a machine that prints money, and much of the fuel that machine runs on has always come from us. Our sound, our slang, that swagger nobody else can bottle. The way we move, talk, dress, and joke gets scanned, copied, and sold to the world at $79.99 a copy, plus whatever monetization follows down the line.

I have been gaming since the Genesis days, and I say all this as somebody who will absolutely be in line for GTA VI. That is the trap, honestly. I love these worlds. I poured hundreds of hours into San Andreas riding around Grove Street, feeling seen in ways few titles bothered to attempt back then. So this is not a boycott sermon. This is a grown conversation about depth, and whether the studio treats our people as human beings instead of cultural scenery.

Think about what fuels one of these maps. The radio stations are the soul of many entries, and those dials lean hard on hip hop, funk, and R&B that we created. Someday a writer will do the math on how much franchise appeal rides on the shoulders of Black artists who look like me. Fashion follows the same road. The durags, the chains, the fits pulled straight off the block get modeled onto characters who too often exist just to shoot at or run from. Neighborhoods sculpted after where we actually live become playgrounds for chaos, then the credits roll and nobody seems curious enough about the folks who breathe there daily.

Humor is where it gets slippery. Rockstar writing has always leaned on satire, and satire cuts both ways. When the joke punches up at power, at cops and billionaires, at the rot festering under the American dream, it sings. Aim that same jab at a caricature of somebody from the hood talking loud and acting a fool, though, and the whole thing curdles. That line between commentary and minstrelsy runs thinner than people want to admit, and past titles have stumbled over it more than once.

Here is my worry laid bare. A culture can be everywhere in a product without receiving equal care in the writing. Rockstar has given us important leads before. Carl Johnson carried San Andreas, and Franklin Clinton stood alongside Michael and Trevor as one of the three protagonists in GTA V. Franklin later became a family man and the owner of a legitimate business in GTA Online. Those characters mattered, and pretending otherwise would weaken the argument. They also proved the studio knows how to place a Black man at the center when it chooses to.

Lucia gives me another sliver of hope, I will admit that much. She and Jason Duval are now confirmed as the two central characters, a criminal couple forced to depend on each other after a score goes wrong. That relationship changes the formula and gives Rockstar room to tell a more intimate story than another tale about one man climbing through the criminal world. Representation on the marquee matters. Still, a face on the box art does not guarantee a soul in the script. I have been burned before by companies waving a diverse cast like a flag while the writing underneath stayed shallow as a puddle.

What would real depth even look like? Rockstar has already introduced several promising Black characters. Boobie Ike turned his years in the streets into an empire spanning real estate, a strip club, and a recording studio. Dre’Quan Priest wants to become a music mogul, while Bae-Luxe and Roxy of Real Dimez are chasing another hit record. Those ambitions are a start. Now let their bonds with the neighborhood feel lived in, not looted. Let the dialogue sound like folks I grew up among, penned by writers who know those communities instead of people approximating them from a distance. Show us ambition beyond the next crime, family obligations that matter, private fears, old wounds, and dreams that survive past a mission. This company renders skin pores and rain puddles with obsessive care. Applying that same obsession to inner lives would change everything.

The money angle deserves a hard stare too. GTA VI could generate billions over its lifetime, and Take-Two expects the launch to help produce record company performance during its fiscal year. Much of the title’s appeal rides on music, language, fashion, and aesthetics shaped inside Black communities. Nobody outside the individual contracts can honestly say what every musician, actor, or performer receives, so reducing those arrangements to a check and a handshake would be unfair. The larger question concerns where the greatest rewards eventually settle. Corporate owners and shareholders stand to collect enormous wealth, while the neighborhoods supplying so much of the cultural texture rarely receive anything comparable. That is an old American story that predates any console.

I keep circling back to a comparison from my Blerd bookshelf. The best anime, the kind that stays with you for years, rarely treats every side character as furniture. A seemingly minor villager in a strong series may have a name, a desire, or some wound carried beneath the surface. That craft is available to anyone willing to invest in it, and Rockstar can absolutely afford the writing hours. The real question is whether the studio considers all these characters worth that care, or whether some of them remain flavor used to season a world built for somebody else to dominate.

Do not misread me as some grump who hates fun. I will cop the Ultimate Edition. I plan to get lost in that reborn Vice City for a month straight, arguing with my boys online about the best station and the fastest ride. My critique lives right alongside my love, because that is what caring about a medium demands. You hold the thing you enjoy to a standard precisely because you know it can reach higher.

Which puts that standard squarely on you, since you are the one holding the controller. Do you believe Rockstar gives Black characters the same range and interior depth it gives the worlds built around them? Will Boobie, Dre’Quan, and Real Dimez develop into people we remember, or will their style and music carry more weight than their stories? Is that too much to ask of a crime sandbox built for mayhem? Sit with that honestly, because your answer decides how much you shrug off once the reviews start rolling in.

So consider this an open letter to a developer I respect and side eye in equal measure. You gave us CJ and Franklin, which means you already know Black characters can carry the drama instead of decorating its edges. You have also borrowed our shine for decades and gotten rich from grooves we helped invent. The least you owe in return is a cast of people who breathe, ache, and want something, who get to be more than target practice with a nice playlist behind them. Give us humanity instead of props. Manage that and every dollar is earned honestly. Keep phoning it in, though, and all the technical polish money can buy will not cover the hollow spot underneath the surface.

We have been watching the whole time. What feels different now is that plenty of us stopped whispering the critique and started saying it at full volume.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Which magazine escapes me and I don’t think it’s particularly important but I will say my main gaming mag in middle school was GameFan. However, I’m leaning towards it being the guide from Electronic Gaming Monthly. Everyone read different gaming mags at the time.

Stories in Fighting Games at the Time

Prior to discovering Tekken, I was mostly a Street Fighter Alpha-Night Warriors guy. Capcom’s artwork by the time these two games came out intrigued me. It was the same style from X-Men: Children of the Atom. One thing that didn’t wow me at the time was the story and background stories for the characters.

Mind you, it’s the 90s and these games were ported to console where you had time to enjoy it without much interference. Playing the arcade version where you’re sinking coins in and trying to conserve continues, story was barely secondary. Also, the story after beating a final boss wouldn’t even be that rewarding.

Also, you often picked up these games without much context as to why all these fighters were gathered for a tournament. The little context you got was guaranteed to be lost after time dedicated to beating Shadaloo. Hell, even in arcade best ‘em ups, you pretty much just advanced through levels slamming the Mad Gear Gang who didn’t get much fleshing out story-wise until later Street Fighter games.

So, again, not very important. Then Tekken game along.

Tekken: Bringing Long-Running Storytelling to Fighting Games

While Street Fighter, Fatal Fury, King of Fighters, and Mortal Kombat released before Tekken and had somewhat defined stories, Tekken was closer to Mortal Kombat in that they were actively building something to told over the years. You could say that SNK was doing this as well but their stories were simply told in the 90s, I feel. Actually, Mortal Kombat was like that to a degree but there was a reason for new characters to be added and they were given a sliver of story to get you adequately invested.

Tekken came at a time when arcade cabinets and home consoles allowed developers to do more as far as mechanics, animations, graphics and yes, story. What I liked about this period is that characters who didn’t seem the most appealing initially were more fleshed out to the point that they got some play.

I mean, my favorite fighter in Tekken is Paul Phoenix. The PlayStation period Tekken games gave just enough to pique your interest in different fights with cutscenes at the end fighters’ journeys and some good write-ups in the manual and guide but with Tekken 4 in 2001, we got a lot more. Not only that, Namco only added more and more lore with each main entry.

You see, I’ve never been a fan of sliding timelines where retcons play a heavy role or slow-moving timelines where characters age but we have little to no idea where we are in the series’ timeline. I can tolerate a reboot but what I love is a story told in chronological order through the years.

The Mishima and Friends

While Tekken has a variety of characters and a large cast over 30 years, it has a timeline of events, characters age, kids are had, and they have lives outside of fighting in this tournament or dealing with the Mishima family. Of course, it’s the Mishima family drama that anchors the series’ story and it works!

The fighters either have some relation to another character but they’re all binded by involved in the different Iron Fist Tournaments. It’s the epic of fighting games told through multiple generations of Mishima in a “sins of the father” sense. By today’s writing standards, it might be simple on paper but how Namco Bandai executed it over the decades keeps me picking up a new Tekken title and enjoying the story from different character perspectives.

That’s always a strong series writer skill: having characters with their own noticed and enjoyable stories who happen to be involved in the major ongoings either directly or because of some related event. It’s what makes these characters worth keeping around and not a throwaway character.

Mind you, I’m familiar with the old takes that it’s a messy storyline. A few friends of mine even asked when does it end since the game came out when we were all finishing elementary school. Personally, I like this degree of messiness in action or fighting games because there is usually lore and development to accompany it.

Let us know your favorite fighting game storylines and if you’re a fan of Tekken’s story in the comments!

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.

Even so, there are those romance anime, regardless of how well or badly they were made, that simply remain memorable to us as their viewers. That means, these anime end up worthwhile in our personal lists of rewatch-ability. The relaxing, heartstring-pulling moments and how relatable some characters of the shows can be, do incredibly well in drawing us back in to experience it all again. That being said, in no particular order, this post picks out five of some of the best romance anime out there with animation, writing and character developments that make it worth watching over and over again.

1.  Ouran High School Host Club

Ouran High School Host Club is one of those romance anime treated as a classic by perpetual watchers of the romance genre. That classic tone truly reveals itself in its animation style and exaggerated expressions as commonly seen in anime from the 1990s and early 2000s. This style specially makes the romantic comedy a comical watch .

There are a lot of comedic moments that can leave you wheezing in laughter but it is the show’s use of satire which makes it a beloved watch for romance and comedy anime watchers. Ouran High School is self-aware, inclusive and although it includes a reverse harem (where the female lead has multiple male love interests), it does not bombard its viewers with fan service and jokes that fall under the perverted/controversial umbrella. Instead, it successfully critiques its own tropes through humour and heart-warming moments.

2.  Classmates

This is a BL (Boy’s Love) anime film. Released in 2008, the film follows two high school boys, Hikaru and Rihito, in a sort of coming-of-age journey. It dips slightly in the enemies-to-lovers trope but not so much so that there is open hostility between the two characters. One could even say the dislike happens because of typical high school boys’ pubescent attitudes towards one another.

The film also does well as an introduction for anyone looking to try out watching queer anime. The slow build-up in their relationship and the inevitable time when they end up together is emotional and touching that you might end up surprised as to why the two high schoolers disliked each other in the beginning. The art style may seem rough and ragged around the edges but it remains smooth and natural in its movements. The watercolours used in the animation also give it a unique feel which can easily have you mesmerised.

3.  After the Rain

If you are looking for a complex story with intricate and meaningful episodes, then After the Rain definitely succeeds in that department. The soft teenage love Akira experiences towards her much older boss Masami, is done so well that the viewer can deduce that love as being more about her admiration towards him – with Masami trying his best to help her realise that.

The anime is well-written and includes a diversity of characters who encounter varying kinds of internal struggles which test the fragility of a teenager’s heart. After the Rain is one rare anime which quote-unquote “has present adults”. There are several role models and older figures who serve to advice and protect the younger characters and it is there where the anime shines in its realism.

4.  Kamisama Kiss

Yet another classic, Kamisama Kiss is a supernatural, drama and romance anime. Our main character Nanami gets caught up in the world of yokai, gods and other divine creatures. The eccentric and kind-hearted nature of Nanami has the series taking on a more of a slice of life vibe but with a good amount of drama and, even, adventure that leaves you wanting more.

The thing about Kamisama Kiss is that, although its main premise follows the dynamics of a romance story, it includes interesting elements involving the supernatural to propel the story forward without it simply being about a human girl falling in love with a fox spirit. Yes, there are other love interests who act as rivals for Nanami’s affection, but the importance of her unexpected role as the god of a shrine, places a significant and comedic duty which works hand-in-hand with the romance portion of the series. Altogether, this romance anime journals the growing bond between Nanami and Tomoe (the fox spirit) with incredibly well-written plot twists.

5.  Horimiya

Horimiya is a modern-day romance anime with a very perceptive vision of teenage love lives. It includes various couples and love interests but at the core of the series is Hori and Miyamura. The anime’s title emphasises this by combining their names to form a ‘ship name’. The romance between them is arguably comforting and relaxed. It does not shy away from displaying their good communication and profound respect for one another as romantic partners. Another takeaway is how Hori and Miyamura are the technical definition of opposites attract. While she, Hori, is fiery and adores horror movies, Miyamura is timid and enjoys baking and making sweet pastries.

The overall mood of the romance anime is calm. It is easily a comfort anime as there is rarely any conflict and whatever is there relates to the complicated feelings, anxiety and depression which teenagers in high school tend to face in an otherwise fast-paced school environment.

There is so much more that can be said about which romance anime are nostalgic and/or are worth rewatching – which also means a list much larger than this one can be made to prove that point. Nevertheless, whether or not we rewatch an anime, most of us romance watchers can agree to some degree that there are romance anime that have something to them with the power to enchant and captivate human nature.

Staff Writer; Fadzai Nyamande

A South African who brings her love for fiction, manga, and storytelling into every piece she creates. Her writing is shaped by imagination, curiosity, and a true appreciation for the worlds stories can build.

Feel free to drop a note at; FadzaiN@AfroGamers.com.

His name was John Stewart. For my generation, he wasn’t a substitute or a watered-down copy of anybody. He was the whole thing.

Let me rewind for the newer heads in the room. On the printed page, test pilot Hal Jordan became the Green Lantern of the Silver Age back in 1959. Fine. Solid enough. Stewart showed up in 1971, dreamed up by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams, standing as one of the earliest Black heroes DC ever printed. An architect with an attitude and zero interest in bootlicking. When he first slipped into that uniform, he tossed the mask aside and basically told the world he had nothing to hide. That energy stuck to the character for good.

Comic readers knew the man for decades. Television? A different story entirely, and that’s exactly where things shifted for kids like me.

November 2001. Justice League premieres. Check the founding roster: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash streaking past, Martian Manhunter, Hawkgirl, plus the ring-bearer we showed up here to talk about. Phil LaMarr handled the voice. Deep, a little smoke curling through it, and it landed low in your chest a beat before any of the words even registered. Controlled. Military. A brother who never had to raise his tone because the weight was already there.

That cartoon refused to treat him like a benchwarmer. He pulled real arcs. Got handed a spine, flaws, opinions that clashed with the folks around him. Take “In Blackest Night,” where the Manhunters haul him across the galaxy accused of blowing up an entire planet. Instead of running, he surrenders to face trial. Willingly. Because being held accountable actually meant something to the man, even when it could cost him everything. Try finding that kind of moral weight in most weekend animation from that era.

Then there’s “The Savage Time.” Our guy gets stranded in a busted World War II timeline, loses access to the ring, and refuses to fold. He grabs a rifle, links up with Easy Company, and scraps as a plain foot soldier. That stretch told you everything you needed. The jewelry made him a hero on paper. It was not the thing that made him brave. LaMarr caught all of it, the hardness, the restraint, the quiet of somebody already sitting on too much and living to carry it.

By the time Justice League Unlimited rolled around, he’d gone bald, gotten sharper, and locked himself into the culture. For a stretch of us growing up in the 2000s, you said those two magic words and this was the face that appeared behind your eyes. Not the pilot. Him.

Here’s what folks who never needed it might breeze right past. Watching a Black man lead a squad standing shoulder to shoulder with Superman, calling the plays, thinking three moves ahead of everybody, being the disciplined presence that kept its cool when the room caught fire? That did something to a young mind. We didn’t have a buffet of options back then. This brother was it. And nobody wrote him as a mascot or a sidekick with a catchphrase. He argued. Butted heads with teammates if the moment called for it. Carried himself as a grown adult with grown responsibilities, and he looked like our uncles and our cousins while doing it. Blerds of a certain vintage still light up at the sight of that steady presence and that unmistakable baritone.

I’ve sat through the debates plenty of times. Hal loyalists will swear up and down that Jordan is THE definitive pick, the space cop’s space cop, the original pick of the litter. Cool. No disrespect to the OG whatsoever. Definitions get built in living rooms, though, and mine got built watching LaMarr command a room stuffed with legends. You don’t talk somebody out of a first love. It doesn’t work that way.

Chew on the bigger picture for a second. In 2001, a Black lead anchoring a marquee superhero team wasn’t exactly a common sight on Saturday programming. Static Shock was doing its thing around that same period, sure, and that mattered too. Beyond a small handful of examples, though, the pickings stayed slim. So when this particular hero showed up steady, competent, and unbothered, a lot of us latched on and never let go. Representation talk gets tossed around loosely these days, but the real version feels like recognition. Feels closer to somebody finally leaving the door cracked.

Which carries us, at long last, straight to right now. HBO dropped Lanterns on August 16th, and for a bunch of us that premiere landed heavier than the average superhero rollout. You catch it over on HBO Max, with fresh episodes hitting the platform every Sunday night rather than all at once, eight of them across the season. Aaron Pierre steps into the role, sharing the frame with Kyle Chandler as a grizzled, road-worn Hal Jordan. Best part? The whole creative approach tosses the usual cape-and-cosmic-battle formula straight in the trash.

Chris Mundy ran point here. Same dude who ran Ozark and executive produced that icy True Detective: Night Country stretch. He set it up as a grounded murder mystery, dropped way out in the American heartland. Dusty backroads. A body left where nobody happens to be looking. Two space cops grinding through a case, and the vibe leans grim. Slow-burn noir. Popcorn spectacle this ain’t. Damon Lindelof and Tom King had their hands in it too, and Lindelof’s already copped to that old cartoon rattling around his head while he shaped his piece. Of course he did. That version is the water plenty of us learned to swim in.

Watching Pierre gear up carries more freight than a casual viewer might clock. This marks the first time our guy gets handed a major live-action leading role. Not a cameo. Forget a blink-and-miss background nod for the diehards to screenshot. A genuine lead. His mother Bernadette turns up through Nicole Ari Parker. Sinestro lurks somewhere in the shadows. Guy Gardner pops in courtesy of Nathan Fillion. A real cosmos is getting stacked brick by brick, and this hero sits close to the middle of the whole build.

Will Lanterns actually stick the landing? Way too early to crown anybody. Comic adaptations fumble the bag constantly, and a moody detective spin on space cops carries its own stack of risks. Still, the plain fact that a kid who grew up jabbing a finger at the television can now watch that same hero anchor a prestige drama on a Sunday night? Not small at all. That’s decades of a once semi-obscure figure finally collecting his flowers on the biggest stage the medium offers.

For me, and for a whole generation that met him before any other version, the animated one already settled this argument ages ago. Live-action is just the wider world catching up to what we understood as children. He was never the backup plan or the asterisk. Lanterns is simply the newest chapter proving what we called years back. He was the one all along.

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.

It’s now quite common for new games, especially in the indie sphere, to arrive on the market long before they’ve actually had the final touches put on them, or even been built out to include all of the levels and features that are eventually planned. What’s more, early access games still come at a cost to the player, and so developers are even incentivized to take this route and get an often much-needed early injection of capital.

Further fuelling this trend is the fact that some early-access games become hits, racking up tens of thousands of concurrent players and building marketing buzz, along with the revenue that comes with it. But just because a huge audience is already enjoying a game, that shouldn’t also cause the developer to take their foot off the gas and leave it unfinished.

Open-ended isn’t Satisfying

A good game has a good gameplay loop, and sometimes it’s possible to achieve this even if the experience doesn’t have a firm conclusion in place when it’s launched, whether as an early access release or something that is claimed, on paper, to be complete. More often than not, games with open-ended design that effectively rely on the same gameplay loop being repeated endlessly with no end will become a grind, and while player counts might climb sky-high initially, if there’s not some satisfying outcome for those that commit for the long term, people will drop off in droves.

Open-ended design is fine if players get rewarded, of course. Level progression and upgrades that change the experience meaningfully, beyond the basic aesthetic unlockables that are still widespread, do make a positive difference. It’s the kind of thing that works for Tikal Casino, for example, where the simple gameplay loop and the consistent rewards are central to the experience.

Scope Does Not Equal Depth

Another issue with games that are fundamentally unfinished is that even if they are vast in their scale, with huge maps and equally huge player counts, that doesn’t matter if the underlying experience is missing a few key pieces. So whether that depth is achieved through meaningful progression systems, as mentioned, or the introduction of a narrative to provide context and structure for the action, it must be present.

Social Interaction Can’t Be the Only Selling Point

One of the biggest catalysts of any game’s rise in popularity today is the ability to play with friends and strangers, and we’ve seen titles take off in short timeframes because they enable and encourage social interaction. This, in turn, often leads to fun and inventiveness that stems from player involvement, creating a sense of enjoyment in the short term.

The drawback is that if competitive or cooperative multiplayer forms the basis of the game but there’s not much more to it than that, you’ll also see player counts tumble once people have their fun and then burn out.

So, unfinished games cannot hope to be hot properties indefinitely if they don’t become more polished and feature-rich over time. We’ve seen the likes of No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 go from being criticized on release to eventually being considered masterpieces, but it’s only through regular updates and iterative improvements that this transition was possible.

Staff Writer; Carl Carter

Funny thing is, that first outing was small in a way none of us clocked back then. A handful of soldiers. One busted planet. A long dark stretch spent buying Sera a sliver of breathing room. Nobody was rescuing reality itself. They were trying not to bleed out before sunrise.

Then the series grew. Man, did it grow.

By the sequel, whole neighborhoods were sinking into the dirt and Fenix rode a colossal worm through its guts. Part three pushed harder, dropping in the Lambent and their glowing abominations, landing on a note that read like a planet’s obituary out loud. After Judgment, Microsoft bought the franchise from Epic and handed it to a new studio, Black Tusk, soon renamed The Coalition. The next two mainline games stretched the canvas wider than ever. New enemies they named the Swarm. Machines. A young woman knotted into the bloodline of the horde’s queen. The fifth mainline entry even dropped an open map in your lap, side quests, choices that shuffled who walked away breathing. Loud stuff. Ambitious in ways I respected even when the wandering lost me.

Somewhere inside all that swelling, a thread came loose.

Here’s the wild part, and it’s happening as I type this. Early access to the multiplayer beta that went live August 6 leans all the way into bigness. Horde Siege now packs twelve players across three fireteams onto one sprawling map, world bosses soaking up ridiculous amounts of fire, Brumaks that force everybody to stop what they’re doing and gang up or die. Early hands-on impressions have leaned hard into the scale and chaos, which tells you the appetite for spectacle is alive and eating well.

So why am I still leaning forward on this one? Because none of that is the actual heart of E-Day. That part nobody has played yet.

The single-player side rewinds the clock all the way to Emergence Day, the day the whole nightmare kicked off. Fourteen years before the original. Right after the Pendulum Wars wrapped, back when Marcus and Dom were younger, greener, still raw over the recent death of Dom’s older brother Carlos. No Swarm. Zero robot battalions. Just that instant when the ground cracked and the horror hauled itself up into daylight for the first time.

And here’s the detail that grabbed me by the collar. The story never leaves Bravo, one four-person unit, threading through a single coastal metropolis called Kalona while everything ends around their boots. Three days. That’s the whole timeline. The developers said it flat out, they never cut away from these four for the entire game. No globe-hopping tour swapping continents every third mission. One place. Marcus, Dom, and two fresh faces, a hardened ex-Gear named Mags Carter and a green comms cadet named Lucas Reyes who never once saw the front before the sky fell in on him.

That’s a decision. A pointed one.

Sit with what that does to the pressure. When your whole tale unfolds inside a handful of square miles, every crumbling block carries weight. Each civilian you fail to reach in time lingers with you after. You learn the alleys by heart. The walls start creeping inward. There’s a claustrophobia stitched into that framework a planet-spanning plot can never reach, since sheer scale has a way of ironing dread flat into fireworks. Distance is the enemy of fear. Give a threat the whole world to roam and it turns into weather.

Peep the roots, too. That first chapter in 2006 flirted with survival horror before it fully committed to the action-blockbuster lane. Cramped corridors. Ammo you genuinely counted. A Berserker you sprinted from before you could finally bring the Hammer of Dawn down on it. The team even confirmed the chainsaw Lancer gets born here, kit-bashed together from a prototype right on the battlefield, which means the exact thing that rattled me twenty years back has its origin folded into this. Circling home to a besieged neighborhood, monsters brand new and unknowable, reads like a return to that early DNA more than a break from it.

I keep drifting to horror flicks, real talk. The ones that actually rattle you aren’t the alien invasions where the globe torches on the evening broadcast. Nah. They’re the stories trapped inside a house, a boat, a cabin miles from any road out. And the setup here is built for exactly that kind of dread. The people of Kalona are marking the end of nearly eighty years of war, Marcus and Dom attending an armistice memorial, when the crust opens under their feet. That whiplash, hope to terror in one breath, is exactly the shock the original traded in before the sequels chased bigger and bigger fireballs.

Am I carrying worries? Obviously. This kind of throwback drags a built-in curse behind it. We already know both leads walk away breathing, which siphons a specific flavor of suspense off the top before you even boot it up. The real test is making the road matter when the ending sits spoiled from jump. And you can already feel the pull of shiny modern hardware in that beefy multiplayer showing. It would be easy to smuggle the scope creep right back through a side door, sell you a documentary-style survival story and then bury you under a set piece parade by the sixth hour.

Still, the pitch itself is the boldest gamble this brand has taken in ages.

Because size was never actually the magic ingredient. I know that cuts against everything a marketing slideshow wants to shove down your throat. We didn’t fall for these dudes over the raw scope of the threat. It was Dom hunting for his wife across a shattered landscape. That crushing loss draped over his partner like soaked concrete. Brotherhood under live fire, men who would eat a round for whoever was ducking beside them. That connective tissue thinned out as the budgets fattened up.

A grounded origin story is a wager that people still recall why they gave a damn back when. It was never the biggest boss on the roster doing the heavy lifting. What stuck was the folks in the trenches next to you.

I’ve watched a whole graveyard of franchises try to cure creative exhaustion by simply piling on. Extra foes. More zeroes on the body count. Bloated maps that eat more minutes to cross than they ever repay in fun. That approach almost never patches the true leak, which is usually that we quietly stopped feeling much of anything. The single-player is walking the harder road instead. Strip away rather than heap on. Bet the house that four soldiers and one endless brutal stretch on the same streets can haul more emotional cargo than another continent going up in flames.

The multiplayer already proved they can still do enormous. Whether they can do small, cornered, and heartbroken is the question October answers.

If they keep their nerve, this could turn into the chapter that reminds a generation what yanked them in during that first ugly, gorgeous shootout. Way back when it wasn’t about the survival of everything under the sun. It came down to the person gasping for air right there beside you, and whether you had it in you to keep them upright till light broke.

I’ll be posted up launch day. Lancer warmed up. Praying they kept it tight enough to actually break my heart.

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.

Somewhere down the road that hunger went missing.

Ask anybody who came up on the original Kanto run and the answer lands the same. Those first seasons had bite. A haunted tower where Gastly, Haunter, and Gengar treated the spirit world like their personal playground. A dude named Bill who somehow got himself stuck inside a Kabuto costume and needed Ash to help get him out. Towns run by gamblers, clowns, and hustlers who seemed to drift in from some stranger pocket of the animation world.

None of it played like a thirty minute ad for the next handheld cartridge. It just breathed.

Take the Maiden’s Peak stretch. Ash and the crew roll into a seaside festival and Brock falls hard for the image of a woman who supposedly waited two thousand years for her lover to return from war. Gastly spends much of the episode feeding the illusion, playing tricks, bending the town into a haunted stage for its own amusement. The thing quotes riddles. It warps what is real and what is not. For a program supposedly built for grade schoolers, that half hour carried a genuine chill down the spine.

Or the Tower of Terror. Ash climbing through Lavender’s haunted tower, and the story comes awfully close to making our boy look dead for a spell. His spirit floats out of his own body, hangs with the ghosts on their side of the veil, laughs and plays with them like old friends. My young self had no language for how heavy that landed. I just knew it stuck to my ribs.

That is the piece I keep circling back to. The old writing trusted you to sit with something odd and did not rush to explain it into dust.

Now compare that to the current era. I catch bits of the newer seasons and everything looks incredible. Clean lines, gorgeous color, motion smooth as glass. Battles pop with a snap the old cels could never touch. And yet most of it slides right off me. Pretty, sure. Memorable? Almost never.

Feels like the machine got too careful with itself.

Think about what early Team Rocket used to pull. Jessie, James, and Meowth were losers, and I mean that with all the love in my chest. Their plans made zero sense. Dress up as chefs, dig a pit, build a robot Snorlax, con a whole village while wearing outfits nobody asked for. They flopped every single time and it never got stale, because the flopping came with real personality baked in. Those three read like people you would catch scheming behind a gas station at midnight.

By the later Ash-era seasons, though, some of those edges had already been sanded down. Less desperation in the eyes. Gone was some of that grimy, broke charm. They shifted from wildcards into something closer to a checkbox.

And here sits the thing my Blerd heart cannot let go of. The strangeness was never a bug. It was the whole appeal. Fandom lives and dies on the parts that break the mold. We quote the cursed episodes, the banned ones, the fever dream detours. Put a room full of grown fans together and ask for a favorite moment. Nobody reaches for a spotless gym match from last season. They go straight to Porygon and those infamous flashing lights that sent hundreds of Japanese kids to the hospital. Somebody mentions the Safari Zone warden pointing a revolver at Ash in an episode American kids never even got to see. And then the James wardrobe situation comes up, the certain choices that had a whole generation of kids quietly asking questions.

You cannot cook that up on a spreadsheet.

I get why things tightened. The money got serious. When a property mints billions across cartridges, cards, films, and lunchboxes, the suits start guarding the brand like it owes them back rent. Oddness becomes a liability. Liability becomes a memo from legal. Bit by bit the rough magic gets polished out until what remains is competent and instantly forgettable.

But smoothness was never the hook. Nobody on this earth fell for this world because it was tidy. We fell because it felt like anything at all could crawl out of the tall grass. A talking cat with a Brooklyn attitude. A gym leader losing his mind over beauty pageants. An old man who wanted you to describe the difference in a Rattata’s tail on two separate visits and treated the whole thing like scripture.

That looseness gave the writers room to breathe fire.

There is a Black cultural thread running under this too, real talk. Coming up, the cartoons that dug into us were the ones willing to swing. Static Shock. That early Boondocks nerve. The Saturday blocks that felt handmade instead of assembled by committee. We can smell corporate gloss from a block away, and we tend to keep our distance from anything scrubbed that clean. Give us something a touch off, a touch dangerous in tone, and now you are talking. Original Kanto had that in spades. Grit tucked right under the fun.

I am not out here saying torch the whole modern operation. The kids today deserve their own front door into all this, and plenty of them adore what they got. That matters. My beef was never with the young ones finding their joy. It sits with a formula that decided surprise had gotten too pricey to keep on payroll.

Bring back the haunted places. Let a monster read as genuinely unsettling again. Allow a story to close on a question mark instead of a tidy lesson stapled to the end. Give the villains space to be pathetic and human and broke. Trust the audience, even the small fry, to handle a tale that refuses to tuck itself in neat.

Because I remember being a youngster, glued to a screen, stomach twisted over whether Ash was walking back from the spirit realm or not. That feeling is exactly why I still carry this franchise around in my chest all these years later. Not the graphics. Never once a tournament bracket. The chills did that.

What airs now knows how to look good. It plain forgot how to make you feel like you got away with watching something you maybe were not supposed to.

Give me a little danger back. I want the phantom in the tower again. And I will be right here, cereal going soft, ready to get spooked all over.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Let me take you back.

Start with the machines, because that is where a lot of us got hooked. In 1972, Go Nagai gave us Mazinger Z, and the man changed everything by doing one simple thing. He put a person inside the cockpit. Before then, giant mecha were generally controlled from a distance, like fancy toys operated by remote control. Nagai said nah, let a kid named Koji Kabuto climb in and drive this thing like a car. Suddenly the pilot and the metal beast breathed as one being. Toei animated it, that Super Alloy Z was forged from the fictional element Japanium mined near Mount Fuji, and Dr. Hell threw his mechanical monsters at the boy week after week. Two years later, Nagai and Ken Ishikawa dropped Getter Robo and pushed the concept even further, three pilots combining their vehicles in different formations to create three distinct robot forms. Every combining Voltron, every Megazord you screamed about growing up, that whole lineage runs right back through these builders and the wild imagination they poured into every frame.

Then Yoshiyuki Tomino showed up in 1979 and broke the formula on purpose. He looked at the giant machine and refused to let it play savior. In his hands it was just a weapon, cold hardware some poor kid got stuck driving, and Mobile Suit Gundam built its bones on that ugly little truth. His mobile suits carried no magic. They were treated as military hardware, with prototypes, mass produced models, mechanical limitations, repairs, and constant maintenance, and the fifteen year old civilian named Amuro Ray who climbed into the Gundam never asked for any of it. Conflict simply landed on his doorstep.

The Earth Federation clashed with the Principality of Zeon, and Tomino, a creator whose childhood unfolded during the destruction of wartime Japan, flat out refused to pretend combat was glorious. He soaked the whole production in real politics. Zeon carried unmistakable fascist and militarist imagery, and the story asked you to sit with the ugly cost of every death. Executives wanted a toy commercial. Tomino handed them a meditation on grief. Wild part is, the planned run was cut short, but reruns, Bandai model kits, and a successful theatrical trilogy transformed it into a phenomenon. That real machine philosophy, hardware instead of heroes, left a mark on everything from Evangelion to generations of animated and live action mecha stories that followed.

Now let us talk about the stars, because iron giants were not the only frontier being opened.

Space Battleship Yamato launched in 1974 and pushed serialized television anime toward a scale and seriousness few earlier productions had attempted. It told one long, unbroken story. The run went twenty six episodes, and each one genuinely carried over into the one that followed. No tidy reset button waited at the end of the week, the crutch so many other children’s programs leaned on back then. Yoshinobu Nishizaki and Leiji Matsumoto had themselves an old battleship that sank generations ago and sat abandoned after Earth’s oceans dried away. They used that wreck as the foundation for a starship. Wild premise, right? Its crew rockets clear across the galaxy to save an Earth already poisoned by the alien Gamilas. That clock was running the whole time. Extinction was not a maybe for humanity. It sat on the calendar with a date attached. That weight, that feeling that everything mattered, snagged older viewers who had written the art form off as kid stuff.

The original broadcast struggled in the ratings and had its planned run shortened. Then reruns gradually found an older and more dedicated audience, and the successful 1977 compilation film turned that growing loyalty into a national phenomenon. A science fiction fever spread across Japan for real. That obsessive breed of superfan we call otaku? Yamato helped create one of Japan’s first major generations of organized, deeply committed anime fans. Over in the States we eventually got the thing repackaged as Star Blazers. It even walked off with the Seiun Award, one of Japan’s leading science fiction honors. Serialized craft, the exact quality that makes One Piece and Attack on Titan the cultural monsters they are, earned one of its strongest early proofs of concept right here.

Leiji Matsumoto was not finished either. He handed us Captain Harlock, and if you ever wondered how anime perfected the brooding outlaw archetype, look no further. Harlock sailed the sea of stars aboard the Arcadia, a man of honor spat out by a corrupt, lazy government that feared him even while he defended humanity. He did not wave a flag for anybody. Loyalty went strictly to what he believed in, full stop. Melancholy hung over every single frame. Every wounded loner who came after owes that captain a little something. Spike Spiegel carries echoes of him. So does Vash, plus about a hundred other beautiful, rebellious souls the medium keeps handing us. That same year gave us Galaxy Express 999. Young Tetsuro climbs aboard a train that rides clear through the cosmos, and the mysterious Maetel settles in beside him. He is chasing a body death cannot touch. The trip teaches him precisely what a wish like that will cost a person.

Here is the part people sleep on hardest, though. This art form was already grown when the world showed up.

The Rose of Versailles belongs in this same conversation, and it arrived in 1979. Riyoko Ikeda never once watched the French Revolution from a safe balcony. She wrote her people straight into the fire of it. Her lead is Oscar, and here is the twist: this is a woman her father raised as a man so she could serve as a military officer and stand guard over the crown. Now she is cornered. Her oath tugs one direction while the country falls to pieces around her, and Ikeda refuses to let that knot loosen for a second. Class, gender, rebellion, the guillotine’s shadow, every bit of it got handled with a maturity rarely attempted in contemporary television cartoons. Tadao Nagahama directed the early episodes before Osamu Dezaki took control and placed his unmistakable cinematic stamp on the later chapters. Nobody talked down to the audience. They trusted grown viewers to feel grown things, sit with heartbreak, and wrestle with a nation’s guilt, and that trust made all the difference in the world.

So when your cousin acts like the whole medium sprang up out of thin air, you can set the record straight with love. The piloted mech, the sprawling galactic epic, the tragic loner, the political weight, the long unfolding arc that keeps you up until three in the morning, none of it counts as new. Craftspeople built every last pillar during one remarkable stretch, working on children’s television budgets while smuggling in ideas about mortality, memory, freedom, and revolt.

We simply arrived fashionably late. The house was already jumping, and it had been for a good while. Real respect belongs to the ones who flipped the lights on. Next time Frieren makes you cry or a thruster fires up on your screen, tip your cap toward the seventies, because that stretch handed us much of the blueprint and asked for almost nothing in return.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Picture a metropolis stuck somewhere between an old black and white crime flick and a chrome future that never fully arrived. That’s Paradigm, a place built on Manhattan’s bones where nobody can recall anything from before forty years ago. Something severed the entire population from the lives they had known before that catastrophe. Old careers, childhoods, faces of loved ones, all disappeared with the past. Life kept moving anyway, which is the eerie part. People just adjusted to living without a yesterday.

Into that fog walks Roger Smith, the smoothest professional in town. He calls himself a Negotiator, and the gig is exactly what it sounds like, part private eye and part hired diplomat for whoever can afford his rates. Man rolls around in a sleek dark ride, keeps a butler named Norman, and answers to nobody. When the talking breaks down and something enormous starts flattening city blocks, he calls down a hulking machine known as a megadeus. Problem gets solved, loud and ugly.

If that setup rings a bell, good. Your ears work fine. This series was Bruce Wayne fan fiction from the ground up, and it never once pretended otherwise.

And most folks never clock the receipt behind it. Sunrise, the studio that animated the show, had already contributed animation work to Warner Bros. on Batman: The Animated Series, that nineties superhero cartoon everybody still praises. The connection ran deeper than a few artists admiring the mood from a distance. Keiichi Sato and Kazuyoshi Katayama were working within a studio that already understood those shadows, sharp angles, imposing skylines, and wealthy heroes carrying private burdens. Sato wanted a giant robot tale that could grab American eyes, and the shortcut was obvious: make it resemble the superhero cartoon every kid on this side of the ocean already worshipped.

You feel it in every frame. The art deco skyline, the shadows pooling in alleys, the aristocrat lead haunted by things he can’t name. Roger even keeps a young woman around who happens to be an android, R. Dorothy Wayneright, whose deadpan sass could hold its own against any sidekick. Toss in a femme fatale named Angel, a weary lawman named Dan Dastun, and a clownish crook cribbed straight from Lupin lore, and you’ve got a rogues gallery worthy of any comic panel.

Calling it a knockoff would be lazy and flat wrong, though. That’s where the noir soaks in and shifts its flavor.

This wasn’t capes with a machine bolted on. Katayama and head writer Chiaki J. Konaka were chasing something moodier, closer to those hardboiled detective pictures from the forties where every answer opens three darker questions. Paradigm itself becomes the real puzzle. Why did everyone forget? What lives beyond the wasteland at the edge of the domes, where the wealthy hide under glass while the poor scrape by in the dust? Who keeps these buried war machines running, and why do they obey a chosen few?

The mecha genre rarely worked this way. Neon Genesis Evangelion had already dragged the entire category into existential dread, but this took a separate route toward a similar abyss. The titans here aren’t sleek. They’re rusted, monolithic, nearer in spirit to old Gigantor than anything Gundam ever rolled out. Watching one lumber downtown felt less like a toy commercial and more like a Godzilla nightmare with better tailoring. That collision of pulpy fun and creeping unease is the exact sauce.

Can we talk about the sound for a second? The original opening blast sounds like an unapologetic salute to Queen’s “Flash,” all pomp and thunder, the kind of thing that makes a grown man throw up devil horns before the plot even starts. Composer Toshihiko Sahashi laced the broader score with smoky jazz fit for a dim lounge. For a young brother who grew up loving both heavy riffs and cool horns, that music struck a specific nerve nothing else on the programming block came close to touching.

Now here comes the turn that should make its obscurity a straight crime. The story had originally been mapped across twenty-six chapters, but during the writing process the production order was abruptly reduced to thirteen. Rather than crush the entire planned story into that smaller space, the creative team allowed the first run to end with a cliffhanger dangling. What rescued the whole thing? Partly us. American viewers embraced the series, sent requests for more, and helped prove there was still an audience waiting. That enthusiasm, combined with Cartoon Network executives who genuinely loved the show, led the network and Sunrise to co-produce a second batch and complete the twenty-six-episode run. That kind of rescue almost never occurred back then. Our support helped revive a property that otherwise might have remained unfinished, which tells you the audience sensed it had caught lightning even when the ratings were never enormous.

The back half grew weirder, richer, and far more willing to break your brain. Roger starts questioning why he alone can pilot such giants. The border between what’s real and what’s staged blurs until the ending drops you into a wild rabbit hole about performance, creation, memory, and whether any of these lives were authentic to begin with. Some viewers hated that ambiguity. I get the frustration. The conclusion leaves enough room for another story, but it can also be read as Paradigm completing one more turn in a cycle that may have happened before. Ratings and home-video sales never grew strong enough to justify opening that door again.

So we got two seasons and a question mark, and honestly? That messiness is part of why it lingers. Tidy conclusions fade. The stories that itch at you for years stick around.

Look at what surrounds us now. Studios can’t stop mining superhero material, and half the internet argues about grimdark reboots versus brighter takes. Anime bleeds into western pop culture harder than ever before. A property that fused a beloved American icon with meticulous craft and film noir bones should have become a cornerstone people cite constantly. Instead it drifted into cult standing, a name traded among heads who know while the mainstream shrugged.

That’s the loss I keep circling back toward. We had a real original hiding in plain sight, bold enough to remix Wayne’s shadow through jazz, colossal fists, and philosophical dread, and we let it slide toward footnote territory. It earned shelves of merch, essays, a fandom as loud as the ones chasing far weaker fare.

Do yourself a solid. Hunt it down. Let Paradigm pull you under its glass domes and unanswered riddles. Cast in the name of God, ye not guilty, as our hero liked to intone before the fists started flying. Then wonder how something this strange and this brilliant stayed buried so long. I’ve been asking that same question for years, and the silence still bugs 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.

Took me a long time to peep the con for what it was.

Anime loves this figure. The gifted outcast who rolls solo, needs help from no one, and somehow winds up treated as the top dog in the building for that exact reason. We call it independence and we clap for it. But peep game. A lot of the time the cat on screen is just scared to reach for another human, and the writers drape something cool over that fear and pass it off as depth.

Sasuke is the poster child for this whole thing, especially for the generation that grew up watching Toonami. Dude lost everything young, so I get the origin. But watch how the franchise treats his retreat inward. Every time he shoves Naruto off and picks the colder road, the animation swells up and the soundtrack swears we are watching willpower. His refusal to be held becomes his brand. Fans clipped those moments and posted them like scripture. Meanwhile the real read is simpler and a lot sadder. He lost everybody young and figured he would rather freeze the whole world out than risk that gut punch a second time, so he slammed the door before a single soul could walk through it. That is not toughness. It is a hurt little boy who found some armor and forgot how to take it off.

Levi hits a little differently but lands in a similar spot. The man is clean and efficient and lethal, all of it bolted down behind those flat eyes. Attack on Titan frames his silence as battle scars, like he has witnessed too much death to waste breath on feelings. Fair enough, the brother carries real grief. Still, notice how rarely the show asks whether his walls protect him or just imprison him. He buries teammate after teammate while barely letting anything move across his face, and folks online treat that frozen grill like the gold standard of manhood. Sit with it a second, though. All that stuff he keeps stuffing down might be the exact reason he stays torn up where nobody can see.

Then you got Vegeta, my personal favorite for this conversation. Prince of a nearly wiped out race, spending much of Dragon Ball Z keeping his own family at arm’s length while he chases a rival he could just, you know, be cool with. Dragon Ball plays a bunch of it as pride, and pride sounds better than the thing sitting under it. Underneath all that noise is somebody who cannot get close to another person without it feeling like he just lost a fight. His arc eventually softens, thank God, and that softening is the most truthful thing the series ever did with him. Yet for years the culture only quoted the scowl.

Here is what gnaws at me. Those portraits do not stay trapped on the screen. They soak into the boys watching, and plenty of those boys were me. Spend your whole childhood hearing that the hardest dude in the room is the one who needs zero people and tells not a soul anything, and you run that same play at home without even thinking. You start believing the fact that you cannot crack yourself open is a gift instead of a wound. Being tough to reach gets tangled up in your head with being impossible to break. And ain’t nobody clapping for the kid brave enough to admit he is scared, so you lock that up quick and leave it that way.

For a whole lot of us, the ones brought up to keep our guard up and carry every burden alone, that message dropped onto ground already tilled and waiting. Be hard. Keep your mouth shut about whatever hurts. Deal with your business solo. Anime did not write that script, but it animated the thing so well and handed it right back to us glowing. The lone wolf looked like a mirror when he was really a snare.

People get this part twisted constantly. Somebody who is truly self sufficient can still open up and let folks walk in. He likes his own space, sure, but that is a choice and not a hiding spot, and he can drop into a room full of company and have a ball. Now hold that up against the anime version we keep hyping. That cat could not connect if you paid him cash money. His walls went up because something cracked in him a long way back, and it stayed cracked. One version is freedom. The other is a jail cell the inmate painted so pretty he quit staring at the bars.

Wild part is, these shows already know better the minute they stop posing. Naruto straight up refused to let Sasuke waste away in that hole, and we are supposed to love him for it. Guts over in Berserk fronts like he cannot stand his crew, then comes undone the moment they are gone. Even the iciest of these figures usually gets that one flashback, the scene where the mask slips and the story quietly cops to what is real. The lonely posturing was not about being strong at all. It was hurt with nowhere to land, plain as that. Writers see it too. The suits and the stans just like the frozen version better, since a scowling loner moves more posters than a guy who did the work.

I am not asking anybody to stop loving these figures. Love them to death, matter of fact. Sasuke reformed is still my guy. Vegeta finally hugging his son wrecked me in the best possible way. What I am asking is that we quit reading the frostbite as the flex. When a story hands you somebody who has walled off every exit and calls him the baddest dude alive, sit with the question the show is too shy to ask out loud. Is he actually free, or is he just too frightened of being turned away to even knock on a door?

Because I know grown men, good ones, who took that lesson to heart at eight years old and are still paying it off at forty. Cats who bought the myth that requiring nobody equals winning. They are not liberated. What they are is lonely, and somewhere down the line they learned to call it discipline. The cartoons gave them a gorgeous excuse to stay that way.

Toughest people I have ever met were not the ones standing apart from the room. They were the ones brave enough to walk into it, hand extended, knowing full well they might get left hanging, and reaching anyway. That takes more nerve than any brooding silhouette ever showed. And it is the arc I wish more of these stories had the courage to animate from the jump, instead of saving it for the finale after they already sold us the lie.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.