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.

A shooter this loud should feel finished. It does not.

Valve’s baby broke its own ceiling in April of last year, touching an all-time high of 1,862,531 people online at once. Millions continue to play it, and one widely circulated independent estimate placed its 2025 transaction revenue around $1.16 billion, with a large share tied to case keys, marketplace fees and other in-game spending. By every metric a suit would slap on a slide, the thing is winning.

So why do I boot it up some nights and feel like I walked into a gorgeous house with no furniture?

Real talk, the gunplay is where the ache lives first. You line up a shot, the crosshair is dead on the dome, you click, and the body just keeps walking. The community has been shouting about inconsistent hit registration, animation timing and shots that look right on the screen but produce the wrong result since launch. Much of that frustration circles back to subtick, the timing system Valve sold as the future. Counter-Strike has always demanded that you stop, counter-strafe and control your weapon before firing accurately, but plenty of regulars still believe CS2 does a poor job of showing exactly when those actions register. FACEIT cannot restore the old 128 tick setup because CS2 is locked into Valve’s subtick architecture. Serious players still run there for separate matchmaking, its own anti-cheat and a competitive environment they trust more than Premier. When your most committed crowd keeps rebuilding the experience somewhere else, that tells you plenty.

Then there is the ghost that never leaves. Cheaters.

Look, every online shooter has them. Counter-Strike has fought aimbots since the LAN cafe days. But this feels different, and the base knows it. Valve’s defense now includes traditional VAC detection, the machine-learning-powered VACnet system and VAC Live, which can cancel a match when cheating is detected. Ambitious. On paper it sounded like the answer to a decade of prayers. In practice? Folks still report walking into suspicious lobbies depending on region, rating and account trust, with some players convinced that a clean Premier session comes down to luck. Valve’s enforcement has misfired at times as well. After the launch of Premier Season Four in January 2026, legitimate users reported receiving false VAC bans before the affected penalties were reversed. Public trackers later recorded a sharp February wave involving thousands of Game Bans, many believed to involve boosting or farming accounts, though Valve never released an official total or explained exactly what every account had done.

And just this summer, Valve finally closed a nasty hole that allowed malicious players to avoid being processed by VACnet. The official update confirmed the fix but never explained how long the weakness had existed or how many matches it may have affected. Good news, sure. But sit with what had to be written in those patch notes. Players had found a way around the system responsible for examining suspicious behavior during the most profitable era the series has ever seen.

That is the part that gets me. The money is astronomical and the trust is running on empty. Plenty of committed grinders are drifting back to FACEIT or quitting Premier altogether, not because of one bad match but because they no longer believe every game is legit. Once you stop trusting the outcome, the whole climb stops meaning anything. Ask anybody who ever poured a year into a rank only to wonder if the person across the map bought or cheated their way there.

Matchmaking wears its own bruises. Premier Season Four reset player ratings in January and threw much of the population back into placement matches at once, which meant uneven queues while the system tried to sort everybody again. Season Five arrived in July with another reset and another round of calibration. Rating inactivity piles on too, with players regularly reporting that their visible number disappears after a relatively short break, although Valve has never publicly explained one exact universal threshold. Casual dudes with jobs and kids feel punished for having a life. The competitive heads I respect keep saying the same thing, that Premier introduced features they begged for, transparent ratings, map bans and real stakes, yet somehow became one of the most divided ranked environments the series has known.

Now here is where my Blerd heart really breaks, because I remember what we lost. Community servers still exist in CS2, and Workshop support has improved, but the old Counter-Strike wasn’t just the sweaty 5v5. It was surf maps at 2am, bhop lobbies, jailbreak, zombie escape and the goofy stuff that made the whole thing a hangout instead of a job. Much of that culture returned slowly, unevenly or without the visibility it once enjoyed. Years later, the ecosystem still feels thinner. Modes, maps and small community tools vanished during the move from Global Offensive, while every update seems to restore one piece without rebuilding the whole universe around it. And the Operations, those seasonal content drops with missions and rewards that gave you a reason to log in beyond climbing, remain absent. The last traditional one ended back in 2022, and the base is still out here in 2026 wishing out loud for another.

Valve never explained the reasoning, but it quietly gave the old Global Offensive its own standalone Steam entry again in March. Read that again. The ancestor returned from the grave while its replacement continues dominating the platform. The catch is brutal though. There is no official matchmaking on that build, your current inventory does not carry over, and most online play runs through community servers. It feels closer to a preserved playground than a fully restored home. Still, the fact that tens of thousands of people have shown up to play it says plenty about what the upgrade never completely replaced.

So what do we do with all this?

I’m not here to tell you the game is dead, because that would be a lie and the numbers would laugh at me. It is thriving. It is gorgeous. The core gunfight, when the timing behaves and the lobby is honest, remains the best in the business, and nothing else scratches that exact itch. That is precisely why the gaps sting. You don’t get this mad at something you don’t love.

Popularity is a magician. A million people online is a spotlight so bright you stop noticing the cracks in the stage. The suits can look at that concurrent count, look at the money pouring through cases and digital items, and reasonably conclude that whatever’s broken isn’t broken enough to touch the bottom line. The crowd keeps showing up. The cases keep opening. Why rush?

Because we deserve better than a slot machine wearing an esport’s jersey. Because the people who kept this world alive through every rough patch earned a title that respects their clicks, their hours, their rank and their intelligence. A game can be the biggest one on the platform and still owe its audience a more complete product. Both truths live under the same roof.

I’ll keep queueing. Of course I will. But every time I dodge a suspicious player, eat a bullet that should’ve dropped somebody, or scroll past a server browser that used to feel like a whole universe, I feel the same quiet thought settle in. This giant is still under construction. And the strangest part is that being enormous is exactly what lets it stay that way.

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.

You remember how it went down. Twitter, or whatever we call it now, lit up overnight. Screenshots of cuddly critters holding assault rifles. Somebody captioned it “Pokémon with guns” and that was that. The phrase spread faster than the actual gameplay ever could. In less than six days, the Steam version had sold more than eight million copies. Palworld’s online infrastructure struggled beneath the traffic. Everybody and their cousin had an opinion, and most of those opinions came from folks who never once touched the launcher.

I get why the label stuck. It’s catchy. Does the marketing job in three words, no trailer required. Nintendo built a multibillion dollar empire on pocket monsters, and here comes this scrappy studio out of Japan flipping the formula on its head, tossing your fluffy little buddies into a factory line or handing them a shotgun. The joke writes itself. Shock value sells, and Pocketpair rode that wave straight to the bank.

But here’s my issue, and I’ve been sitting with this since I put a couple hundred hours into it. That nickname stopped being a doorway a long time ago. Now it’s a wall.

See, the folks who dismissed this title as a cheap knockoff never stuck around long enough to figure out what they were playing. Underneath the memes and the viral chaos sits a design that has almost nothing to do with catching creatures in tall grass. What you’ve got is a survival sim with real teeth. You spawn on an island with nothing. No inventory, no shelter, no plan. Cold nights that’ll drain your health bar. Hunger meters. Resources you have to swing a pickaxe at. The early hours feel closer to Valheim or Rust than anything Game Freak ever shipped.

And that’s before you even get to the base building.

This is where it all clicked for me. Your Pals, those creatures everybody keeps reducing to a punchline, they aren’t just fighters or trophies. They work. Assign one to a mining node and it chips away at ore while you sleep. Put another on a ranch and it produces eggs. One’s watering crops. Another’s smelting ingots at the furnace. You’re basically running a little sweatshop of adorable monsters, and I mean that with love, and the automation hooks into your brain the same way Factorio does. Suddenly you’re up at 2 a.m. optimizing a conveyor of labor, muttering about efficiency, wondering why your electric type keeps slacking off near the generator.

Nobody warned me about that part. The label sure didn’t.

Let me talk about the crafting for a second, since it runs deeper than most give it credit for. Tech trees stretch out in every direction. You unlock stations, weapons, saddles, gear, structures. Everything feeds back into the grind loop. Want a better weapon? You need refined metal, and refined metal means a furnace, fuel, and a Pal with a fire skill standing there doing the labor. It’s interconnected in a way that respects your time and your intelligence, and that philosophy has zero to do with a franchise about gym badges.

Once your base hums along on its own, the itch to leave it kicks in, and the map gives that itch somewhere to go. It earns the wandering, too. Towering bosses guard the corners of it, hulking Alphas that hit like trucks and force you to actually build a loadout instead of button mashing. You glide off cliffs on a flying mount. Caves hide the rare materials worth the climb down. And the breeding pen quietly turns into an obsession, letting you pair partners to pass traits down the line until you’ve engineered a worker who mines twice as quick or a bruiser tuned for one nasty raid. That’s genetics, basically. In a game people wrote off as a shallow gag.

Then multiplayer enters the chat.

Roll with friends and this whole thing transforms. Dedicated servers let you and your crew build a shared settlement, split up the responsibilities, and raid tough enemies together. One homie handles combat, another manages the supply chain, somebody’s off exploring dungeons for loot. It becomes a cooperative sandbox where your collective base grows into a stronghold none of you could pull off solo. Some servers run dozens of players at once. That’s not a creature collector. It’s an ecosystem.

So why does the “Pokémon with guns” thing still dominate every conversation?

First impressions calcify. We do this as a culture. Slap a shorthand on something so we can file it away and keep scrolling, and once that label goes viral it becomes the truth whether it’s accurate or not. Half the discourse around this title never moved past the launch week jokes. People argued about whether some designs borrowed too heavily from Pokémon, whether Nintendo would sue, and whether any of it was even ethical, and they kept arguing about the wrapper while ignoring the gift inside.

And look, the Nintendo lawsuit is real. Nintendo and The Pokémon Company accused Pocketpair of infringing gameplay patents, and Pocketpair has acknowledged that the case led it to alter certain summoning and gliding mechanics. I am not here to pretend the visual similarities are imaginary, either. Some of those Pals do look suspiciously familiar. Fair criticism. But the patent case and the arguments about creature designs are separate conversations from what the finished product actually is when you sit down and play it for a week straight.

Here’s the frustrating part for me as a person who loves this hobby. When you reduce a piece of work to its most viral comparison, you rob it of the chance to be judged on its own terms. Imagine if we only ever talked about Hades as “that roguelike.” Or called Elden Ring “Dark Souls but bigger” and left it at that. We’d be flattening years of intentional craft into a bumper sticker. The nickname did its job, got butts in seats, moved units, and now it lingers like a smell that won’t leave the room.

I think there’s a bigger current running under all this, a truth about how we let virality define worth. A title blows up for one reason, and that reason becomes the ceiling instead of the floor. The creators built a full survival, crafting, automation, and multiplayer beast, poured real systems into it, and the internet handed them a meme in exchange. Moved a ton of copies off it, sure. Can’t knock the bag. But the identity got hijacked by the gag.

What would it take to see it clearly? Time has already started doing the work. Palworld officially reached Version 1.0 in July 2026, expanding its world with new regions, additional Pals, a fresh threat, and the long-awaited World Tree. Pocketpair announced that the game had surpassed 40 million players before the full launch. Every major addition pushes it further from the original joke and deeper into its own lane. Eventually the gap between reputation and reality becomes too wide to ignore.

Maybe this one’s already earned it and we’re just slow to catch up.

Because when I fire it up now, the gun angle isn’t even in my head. My focus lands on the base layout. Which Pal to breed next for better stats. Whether my defenses can hold against the next raid. How to squeeze more output from my production chain before the sun comes up. That’s the real game. It was always there under the noise.

The comparison opened the door. I won’t deny it. Millions of us walked through the moment somebody made a clever joke about beloved monsters carrying firearms, and curiosity did the rest. Respect where it’s due. But a door isn’t a house. You can’t keep standing in the entryway describing the knob while a whole mansion waits behind it.

Palworld deserves better than the sentence that made it famous. It grew up. Maybe it’s time the conversation did too.

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.

So somebody explain this to me. The whole world is eating this stuff up. Then why do fresh stories keep catching the axe before anybody even learns their names? Been chewing on that one a while. Feels like nobody in a suit wants to touch it.

Peep the money first. Japan’s domestic manga market reached a record 704.3 billion yen in 2024 after seven straight years of growth. Sales cooled a little in 2025, falling 1.7 percent to 692.5 billion yen, but digital manga still brought in 527.3 billion yen and accounted for more than three quarters of the entire market. Manga Plus drops translated chapters around the world alongside their Japanese releases, so somebody in Nairobi can open a story the same day it reaches a reader in Osaka. One hit anime adaptation can turn an unknown title into a franchise. Books are moving. No cap on that.

Then you turn around and stare into the graveyard.

Shueisha runs Shonen Jump+, the digital home that gave us Dandadan, Kaiju No. 8, and Spy x Family. Those became major franchises, spun off into anime, merchandise, games, and the rest. Nobody is out here crying for them. But scroll under that glossy top tier and you hit a rotating cast of debuts that show up, grab a first chapter, then vanish so fast you would swear they never ran at all.

This year the pattern turned loud across both Weekly Shonen Jump and Shonen Jump+. Gonron Egg, gone after twenty one chapters. The Mage Next Door wrapped after twenty one. Hero Girl and Demon Lord Call It Quits got shut down around the five month mark with barely twenty one chapters to its name, and the rough part is fans mostly saw it coming. Otr of the Flame closed out in January after thirty four chapters. Blood Wing Hunter, a series from Ryuji Kunimoto, ended at number thirty six on Shonen Jump+. The God Before Me finished in July after fifty three chapters, with Money Forest following at twenty eight. Not every one of those endings happened under the exact same circumstances, but some of these titles barely had time to establish themselves. You may never have heard them whispered about, which is sort of the entire point.

Here is how one part of the machine runs, and I want you locked in so you understand it. Weekly Shonen Jump keeps a tight number of print slots. Fans treat where a story appears in the table of contents as a rough sign of its standing, even though color pages, new launches, promotions, and editorial scheduling can move a title around. Reader surveys, collected volume sales, and audience response still carry serious weight. Stay popular and you buy yourself more time. Struggle for a long enough stretch and start writing your goodbyes. Ten series were reportedly cut in 2025 while three more reached something closer to natural endings. This calendar year has strolled down the same road without blinking. Jump+ has more digital room than the print magazine, but it is not some safe shelter where every story gets unlimited time either.

The cold logic checks out, I will grant them that much. A publisher spends staff time, promotion, editing, and money keeping a low performer alive while a hungry rookie waits for a shot. Slots open, fresh blood rushes in, and whoever could not grab enough eyeballs in a handful of months quietly disappears. On a spreadsheet, real neat. From where I sit, it feels a lot closer to a talent grinder than a house for storytellers.

Think about what that pace actually asks of a person. You spent years drawing in the dark, praying for one break. Eventually you land a spot in the most famous publication your art form has produced. And you may get only four or five months to convince a distracted global audience to fall in love before the numbers hand down your sentence. No slow burn. Zero cushion for a rocky start that develops into a classic. Some of the greatest runs in history stumbled out the gate. A newcomer today rarely gets that grace, and everybody in the building knows it.

That is the piece that eats at me most, honestly. We keep hearing how healthy the whole scene is, how the culture won, how the nerds finally got their flowers. Plenty of that is true too. I came up getting clowned for this stuff in the lunchroom. Now it is on billboards. Part of me feels a little vindicated, real talk, along with everybody who rode with it back when nobody else would. But a booming market and a generous one are not the same animal. You can be thriving and still treat the folks making the art like disposable napkins.

There is a real toll buried in all these quick endings, and it reaches way past bruised feelings. When publishers only bet on concepts that spark instant heat, everybody starts chasing familiar formulas. Battle fantasy. Supernatural action. Exorcist stories. Whatever blew up last quarter. The weird little swing that needed room to breathe hardly gets a shot, because weird takes patience, and patience is the one currency nobody is handing out. With Jujutsu Kaisen Modulo and Chainsaw Man both taking their bows in 2026, the lineup has lost two powerful names. You have to wonder who exactly is being groomed to fill those shoes when the pipeline chews through rookies this fast.

Now I am not up here claiming every axed book was some hidden masterpiece. A bunch of them earned their ending fair and square. Certain concepts just do not land, and a reader’s attention is a real resource nobody is obligated to hand over. All fair. But there is daylight between a book failing on its own steam and a book never being allowed to grow into whatever it might have become. When the window shrinks to a few months, you are not really testing craft anymore. You are testing whether lightning struck on day one.

And here is the trap in how we measure all this. We look up, see Dandadan and Spy x Family sitting fat and happy, and figure the machine must be healthy from top to bottom. Survivorship bias, plain and simple. We notice the ones who climbed out. The ones who got buried? They do not trend. No think piece. Not even a proper send off. You just stop seeing a name one week, and nobody clocks why it went dark. That silence is the design doing its job, and it is what leaves the whole party feeling hollow once you actually sit with it.

We hold a little power in this too, and we barely flex it. Platform front pages, recommendation systems, and social feeds keep pushing the giants because the giants already won. Comfortable. Familiar. But those obscure debuts nobody is tweeting about? Somebody poured years of work into those pages, survived brutal deadlines, and bet a piece of their future on the result. Poking around past the front page, giving a strange new title an honest look, tossing a few dollars its way ahead of any trend, that is how ordinary folks push back against a system built to reward whatever is already famous.

So yeah, the medium is winning. The billions are legit. The sales records were real too, even if Japan’s domestic market cooled slightly in 2025. Just do not let the glow up top hide what is rotting at the bottom. New talent gets a runway that feels shorter by the season while everybody toasts how high the industry flies. Bigger than ever, sure. Kinder to the folks actually making it? Different question entirely, and the answer right about now is not looking too generous.

Staff Writer; Carl Davis

This bro has always been into gaming, anime, manga, old-school sitcoms, and just about anything connected to nerd culture. A proud Black blerd for life, CD enjoys writing about the shows, games, and characters that have stayed with him over the years.

Feel free to drop him a message at CarlD@AfroGamers.com.

So who makes up a valuable part of the audience in 2026? Grown folks. The ones who caught Toonami after school. You would haul home from the bus so you did not miss Tom setting up the next block, since a live broadcast did not rewind for anybody. We were teenagers then, sneaking episodes of Gundam Wing while the homework sat there ignored. Some of us traded fifth generation VHS dubs at lunch, tapes so worn the colors bled together. Now that same crowd pays a mortgage. Got real jobs, got kids, got cards that actually clear at the register. And the people making these shows noticed all of it.

Here is the part nobody wants to say out loud. A brand new title is a gamble. You drop the entire budget on a cast nobody has met yet and hope the story lands before the season runs out. Some do. Frieren broke through, swallowed the timeline whole for a stretch of months, and reminded everybody that an original television arrival can still become a sensation. Behind each success, though, sits a pile of titles that disappeared around episode three with barely anybody around to clock it. You know what arrives with a head start? Bringing back something a million adults have tattooed on their childhood.

Look at what has landed lately. Rurouni Kenshin received a completely renewed television adaptation in 2023, with a new staff and cast. Ranma got dragged into the present looking sharper than it ever did on a fuzzy afternoon dub. Urusei Yatsura, a property older than much of the audience streaming it, came back looking like it had not aged a day. That is no accident. Call it a spreadsheet talking, dressed up as a love letter.

The reason it works is math wearing an art costume. My cohort, the one raised on grainy VHS and Blockbuster runs, has more spending power than it did when those shows first arrived. We are the ones dropping two hundred on a resin figure of a character we first met half asleep on a Saturday. We buy the fancy Blu ray box, the one with the art book stuffed inside, even though the thing streams three clicks away. Sentiment can loosen a wallet in a way that ordinary seasonal hype rarely does.

Bleach proved it loud. The original television run ended in 2012, leaving the manga’s final conflict unanimated for a decade. Then Thousand Year Blood War arrived in 2022 with cinematic direction and the kind of presentation longtime fans had spent years imagining. Its fourth and final cour began airing in Japan on July 25, 2026. Why return after such a long silence? Because the crowd was still there. Waiting. Ready to see the conclusion that the original series never reached.

Streaming platforms caught the scent too. The One Piece live action series looked like a dangerous bet. Manga and anime adaptations had disappointed viewers often enough that skepticism came naturally. Instead, the first season connected, the second arrived on March 10, 2026, and Netflix had already renewed the show for a third. Familiarity helped bring people through the door, but the production still had to earn their loyalty once they arrived. Then Yu Yu Hakusho followed the same road onto the same platform, using an established name to draw worldwide attention.

Trigun returned as Stampede, rebuilt from the studs up in a style Vash had never worn before. Some heads grumbled about the fresh coat of paint. The name still pulled eyeballs, but recognition alone could not settle every argument over what the new version changed. Sailor Moon received a fresh adaptation through Crystal, followed by the Eternal and Cosmos films. Fullmetal Alchemist keeps getting repackaged and resold whenever another anniversary provides an excuse. Dragon Ball basically never stopped, cycling through Kai, Super, and Daima while feeding multiple generations from a single well. The catalog stretching from the late eighties through the DVD boom has become a vault companies keep unlocking.

Let me put it plain for anybody who thinks this is only fan service. This is also a financial play, and a shrewd one. A company choosing between a wild original concept and a beloved revival may view the familiar property as the lower risk option. Recognition gives the project a running start. An existing audience already understands the characters, remembers the music, and knows why the announcement matters. That does not guarantee a profit, but it gives the marketing department something an unknown title has to build from the ground up. Especially in a market where production costs have climbed and streaming companies have become more selective about what they finance.

There is a quieter engine under all of it too. A lot of us are parents now, and we sit our own kids down in front of the stories that shaped us, half hoping they catch the same bug. That gives companies a second audience inside the same household. My cash for the memory, my child’s attention for the future. Two birds, one dusty box set.

I will not front though. Some of this sits wrong with me. We are digging up the past so hard that I wonder what is left to build from scratch. Pack a whole release slate with sequels, reboots, and thirtieth anniversary tins and something quietly goes missing. Cowboy Bebop did not crawl out of a boardroom scared of its own shadow. That kind of nerve, the thing that hooked us on the medium way back, needs air. And you cannot bring back a show that nobody bothered to make in the first place.

Still, I understand the logic completely. From where a producer sits, my emotional attachment is a renewable resource. They tap it, I pay, and the ledger starts looking friendly. Merchandise tied to an established title can reach a customer base that an untested property must earn one person at a time. Some collectors in their late thirties and forties treat limited pressings like investments, snatching them the morning they drop, then placing the extras on resale sites for twice the original price. Toonami itself returned to Adult Swim in 2012 after a surprise April Fools broadcast stirred up a loud fan campaign. Enough of us showed up to prove that the attachment had survived. The revival wave does not look finished. Every successful return gives somebody else a reason to search the catalog.

There is a catch nobody hawking this stuff mentions. Not every redo honors what it borrows from. Some are lazy, phoned in, obvious cash grabs that scrape the paint off a good memory. When a reboot fumbles the tone that made the source sing, longtime heads feel it instantly and the backlash gets ugly online. Even a misfire may pull an opening wave of curiosity, but attention does not guarantee lasting success or a profit. We will sometimes tune in just to complain, and the meter keeps spinning for at least as long as we remain interested enough to argue.

So expect more. Expect that dusty favorite you assumed everyone forgot to resurface with a slick trailer and a bright fresh logo. The tape you wore thin in 1999 may return in crisp 4K, priced like it just rolled off the line. Run the figures and you will see the pull plain as day, since those numbers adore our memories. Whatever raised you on a CRT with the volume dialed low so your folks would not hear, somebody in Tokyo may have circled it on a whiteboard with a fat dollar sign beside it.

Our youth is not just precious to us anymore. It graduated into an asset class. And business, from where they are standing, is very good.

Staff Writer; Carl Davis

This bro has always been into gaming, anime, manga, old-school sitcoms, and just about anything connected to nerd culture. A proud Black blerd for life, CD enjoys writing about the shows, games, and characters that have stayed with him over the years.

Feel free to drop him a message at CarlD@AfroGamers.com.

Real talk for a minute. I’m a cookout-and-manga kid, plate of ribs in one hand and a beat-up volume of Bleach in the other, so praise out of me is not a freebie. You gotta earn it. Sparks of Tomorrow hit Netflix on July 5th, and I pressed play expecting soft, pretty, forgettable. Nice background noise for folding laundry. What met me instead was a chest full of feeling I had no plan for.

Here is the shape of it. Somebody dreamed up an early 1900s Japan where electricity never won the race, so coal and steam swallowed everything whole. The result is an alternate Kyoto drowning in haze, gorgeous and grimy at once, painted like an Impressionist canvas that got smudged with soot. A prickly young tinkerer named Kihachi filled a strange catalog as a boy, cramming it with visions of a wired world that never arrived. His adored older brother later marched to war carrying that book and did not return. Years on, Inako stumbles into his orbit. She is fleeing an arranged marriage, so soft in the heart that she mistakes ordinary folks for gods, and her family turns out to be tangled up with the very pages Kihachi believed were gone for good.

That is the entire engine. Nobody here is a chosen one. You will not find stat screens tracking who hits hardest, and no creature comes clawing out of the dirt every third week to justify a budget. Somehow the thing still cuts deeper than half the shonen blowouts I sat through this year.

I need my fellow Blerds to sit with that, because we get trained wrong. Anime taught a lot of us that stakes mean somebody has to scream a technique name while the sky splits open. We measure ambition in explosions. This studio walked in and quietly called that bluff.

Take the sorrow running underneath all of it. Kihachi is not brooding for aesthetic points. He carries the specific hollow ache of a person who lost somebody and never got to bury the question of why. Anybody who has watched an empty chair at Thanksgiving knows that particular weight. The show refuses to rush him past it. So he gets to be a jerk. Bitter, shut down, mean to people who did not earn it. And the writing just lets that sit. No swelling strings, no training montage papering over the hurt. Just a kid stewing in it. Watching him inch back toward wanting a tomorrow, one grudging degree at a time, grabbed me harder than any sword clash I could name.

Now layer belief on top. Inako walks through this soot-choked place convinced the sacred is hiding in plain sight, tossing prayers at strangers she figures might be divine. On paper that reads goofy, and early on it plays for a laugh. But her faith is not just a running joke. There is a stubborn realness in the way she keeps believing while the era around her turns smug and sour. She trusts what she cannot see. Our tinkerer only trusts what his hands can bolt together. That is not a fight scene. It is the argument people have been chewing on since forever, faith against proof, and the writing refuses to crown an easy winner. I grew up in a church pew, watching grown folks pray through evictions and funerals and cancer scares, then walk out still humming a hymn. That memory sat right in my chest the entire way through.

And the tech side carries just as much heft, not merely for flash. That lost catalog is basically a promise of a different future, a wired dawn that could pull this whole city out from under its coal-smeared sky. Kihachi’s tinkering is grief and hope wearing the same coat. He is trying to finish the dream his brother did not live to see. Progress here is not some cold march of gears. It is personal, aching, tangled up with everything he refuses to say out loud. The steam-soaked setting becomes a mirror for a young man stuck in the past, wanting badly to move.

And underneath the belief and the invention sits pure longing, which might be the truest fuel in the story so far. Everybody in this place is reaching for something they cannot hold yet. Kihachi reaches for a brother and a dawn that keeps slipping. Inako reaches for a life her family already sold off to a marriage she never chose. The city itself seems to reach for cleaner air. All that yearning, a whole town of folks grabbing at a tomorrow they cannot quite reach, is what gives this story its heartbeat. Forget the war drums.

Which drags me to the part I cannot skip. The grief sitting behind the camera itself. This studio lost thirty-six employees and colleagues in a horrific arson attack back in 2019. Thirty-six people, gone after a single terrible morning, along with much of the paper-based production material and equipment housed inside Studio 1. This particular title had been announced nearly a year before that nightmare, then remained dormant for years afterward. So when I watch a story about mourning something precious and clawing toward hope anyway, I am also watching a house full of survivors pour their own recovery straight into the frame. The metatext is almost too heavy to hold. A wounded studio made a beautiful thing about wounded people learning to keep going. If that does not move you, check your pulse.

Now I will not pretend the balance is flawless. The loudest knock here is not really pacing, it is tone. Yosuke, the rich rival chasing that catalog, gets played so broad and cartoonish that his scenes can yank you clean out of the sorrow the rest of the episode worked to build. I feel that gripe. A buffoon mugging for laughs does sit oddly beside a boy still mourning. But here is my honest take. The tender center holds anyway. Even when the comedy misfires, the hurt underneath keeps its grip, and that tells you where the real weight lives. Viewers who dismiss it as too slow may be answering the wrong question. The show is not asking you to wait for a fight. It is asking whether you still have the attention span to feel something small and let it grow. I hope enough of us take that bet.

The craft backs the ambition, by the way. Those hazy, hand-touched backgrounds do heavy lifting, wrapping every scene in a melancholy fog that makes the rare bright moment glow like a struck match. The character acting, all those tiny shifts in a face when a person is holding back what they mean, is the sort of detail this house has always done better than almost anybody. Beauty is not decoration here. It is argument. The show insists that ordinary human ache deserves the same lavish treatment we usually reserve for a final boss.

So no, this is not the loudest thing you will watch this season. It will not trend from a hype clip of somebody powering up. But bold? No question. It stays small on purpose and bets everything on the quiet stuff, mourning and prayer and one kid’s wild blueprints, trusting all of that to hold up an entire series. Pulling that off is way tougher than staging a duel. This house managed it anyway, steady and sure, moving like survivors who walked straight out of a fire, then figured out precisely what they needed to say.

Give it your patience. Let it be quiet. Then feel how loud quiet gets.

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.

Pac-Man

Now, the 3D Pac-Man games added some story here and there later on but I was never a big Pac-Man fan. Even when I played my first game in 1989, Pac-Man never got play and my cousins had the console version. I would play it years later when I had my own console and my dad picked it up from the video store.

It was a fun play through but it seemed endless and these stages were all same-y. This was the early 1990s and it was one of those ports from arcade to console with nothing extra added, so it wasn’t the most exciting experience but I had become invested.

I find that now, the game is more enjoyable if you can find a cabinet or an arcade. It was just one of those arcade games that didn’t equal the same fun at home.

Bomber Man

This is similar to Pac-Man in that there was no story here and the game seemed endless as a kid. The main difference is that I had a blast with Bomber Man and still enjoy a game of Bomber Man now. It eventually got a storyline via the Nintendo 64 games but I’ve forgotten it and it wasn’t expanded upon much.

What keeps Bomber Man from being one of my favorites and merely a game I can enjoy is that after a short period I’m good on the game for a long time. I mainly play solo and Bomber Man is donezo after two hours and back then, didn’t know too many people who wanted to slam in Bomber Man.

It’s a game that really benefits from online multiplayer because there is a fun factor and replay value to be had but on console that fun factor was fleeting in the 1990s.

F-Zero

I admit my indifference towards F-Zero comes from two places: I don’t care for racing games and there were racing games I found more fun and interesting. For those who don’t know, F-Zero is a sci-fi racing series that made its debut in 1990 on the Super Nintendo. There was a brief stretch where it was Ninty’s only racing offering among multiplatform racing titles.

Then Mario Kart came along. The two co-existed well for roughly a decade but during the Super Nintendo final years and the early years of the Nintendo 64, there was less F-Zero until there was sparse FZ. A major factor in this is the increased popularity of Mario Kart and addition of Diddy Kong Racing and something like Wave Race.

It might seem like 3D racing killed enthusiasm in F-Zero but FZ could’ve easily taken the 3D jump. Also, Nintendo’s turnaround on releases tends to be a little slower than other companies. They rarely have logjams where too many titles are in the works and nothing comes through but also some series just end up on ice for a long time.

Almost to the point that they become dated while similar series advance with new titles. In F-Zero’s case it sucks because the series actually had a story that could’ve only been expanded on in modern gaming. I will say that F-Zero 99 is a fun play but it wasn’t something that kept my attention or something I revisit.

Samurai Shodown

An odd entry because I dig SNK fighters over Capcom and I love Fatal Fury. King of Fighters is better as a series but I will jump in on a few rounds of Fatal Fury and bring some Terry Bogard action. Samurai Shodown is similar to the LG Soul series starting with Soul Edge when compared to Tekken in that it’s Fatal Fatal with swords.

Diehard fans will say it’s more than that but it’s pretty much FF in feudal Japan. That’s not why I’m indifference towards the game, it was actually my first arcade fighter (along with X-Men: Children of the Atom). Similar to F-Zero, there just got to a point where the games stopped coming out, other more exciting fighting games dropped and Samurai Shodown was a memory for years.

And that sucks because I find the character design and animation to be awesome. Then again, I always preferred SNK’s character art to Capcom’s until the Street Fighter Alpha-Night Warriors period. The backstory for the fighters were also done in a way that I would’ve played the game to see how some stories advanced but some titles weren’t released stateside until years after their release.

I’m working my way around to the 2019 reboot but there’s a lot of back catalog stuff to chop through. Who knows, it might pique my interest in returning to the older, later-released titles.

Let us know what gaming franchises that get love that you find meh for whatever reason.

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.

I’m talking about the tried and true beat ‘em up. They were big in the 1980s, we saw some fun ones in the early 1990s and by the end of the decade, things were leaning towards slash ‘em ups and shoot ‘em ups. I always enjoyed beat ‘em ups not because the gameplay was straightforward to the point of not requiring a tutorial, but they were a reflection of action films from that period.

Beat ‘Em Up Games Were Like Playing Through an Action Film

That should’ve been the main marketing point at the time, but you have to consider that not everyone was taking kids to go see Kickboxer or Under Siege. However, they would go to see Double Dragon, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and even Surf Ninjas. You know, the fun, colorful action films. Those beat ‘em up games ran the gamut of being reflective of both kinds of action movies but the ones that were closer to those gritty one-against-many were the ones that rocked.

What was cool was having those games that were a mix of both. The LJN Spider-Man and the Sunsoft Batman games catered to a mainstream audience based off the FOX Kids Spidey and Batman cartoons from the same period while also being similar to beat ‘em ups like Rushing Beat, Final Fight, and Streets of Rage. Well, less so the Batman game. It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t play like the others, but it wasn’t a colorful beat ‘em up like the TNMT titles.

Even the reasons why you and your buddy had to take to the streets were stock action movie reasons. Maybe someone’s girlfriend was kidnapped or a new gang is causing trouble and your crew are the only ones trusted to stop them. You honestly didn’t need much to throw fists with knife-wielding punks and chain-swinging thugs.

Thinking back, some action films also featured an ineffective police force that results in the player taking it to the streets. It’s like Death Wish with fists, you’re going full Sonny Chiba in The Street Fighter. One storyline I haven’t seen explored much in beat ‘em ups is the martial arts tournament.

That’s more of the realm of fighting games even though when the tournament falls apart and is shown to be a criminal or corporate front, things tend to escalate into a compound-wide brawl or shootout.

Beat ‘Em Ups Today Still Have That Spirit

Now beat ‘em ups still get made and many have that nostalgic vibe graphically. Some open-world games also allow you to navigate the world like its a beat ‘em up with story. I mean, I treat every Fallout game like it’s Fist of the North Star and raise unarmed: Power Fist or nothing, folks. However, the games that are made with being a beat ‘em up in mind take me back.

I’m big on games and television having better story than decades earlier. Stories are paced so that we get actual lore as opposed to the events of the game being the lore going forward. Or episodes having no effect on the rest of the season. You find out about all characters’ motivations and some of their background across multiple games in a series and even the villains have deeper motivations than being  just evil or greedy.

I appreciate that in some beat ‘em ups if they are reboots in nature. A sequel, remake, or revival? Eh, I could do without the whole story. For instance, 2022’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge doesn’t need too much story. It’s a game made for fans of beat ‘em ups but more so for fans of the Ninja Turtles games that made it to the Sega and Nintendo consoles while also holding down Showbiz Pizza and Chuck E. Cheese.

That said, I do appreciate the modern day features such as a skill tree and levels. It’s a good mix now. What were some of your favorite beat ‘em up games and which ones are you fan of that no one seems to remember?

Share with us 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.