(AfroGamers.com) Somewhere around midnight, back when the television still had a knob and a prayer, I used to catch these shows after the rest of the house finally gave up and went to sleep. Cowboy Bebop ran low so the volume wouldn’t travel down the hall. That saxophone came creeping out the speakers, and Spike Spiegel moved through it like a man who already knew the last page of his own story. No charging up for ten minutes. Nobody screaming at the clouds just to swing once. The thing breathed. And sitting there in the dark, half the time I’d notice I was breathing right along with it.

The feeling has been poking at me again lately. A lot of what comes out of Japan now shows up louder, shinier, and kinda empty in the spots the old stuff used to wreck me.

Let me be straight before anybody gets their feelings bruised. The new wave looks incredible, no argument. Studios are putting sequences on screen that would have cooked a TV set back in 1998. You watch Demon Slayer and some sequences are so pretty you stop and stare. Then Jujutsu Kaisen comes through with choreography that honestly unhooks your jaw. Craft did not fall off. Matter of fact the ceiling shot straight up.

Here’s where my worry lives, though. Somewhere along the way a chunk of the industry started confusing bigger with better, and the two were never the same cousin. Watch enough current hits and you notice the pattern. A hero gets strong. Then a villain shows up stronger. Hero digs deep, finds a gear nobody knew he had, pulls it out. And here comes somebody nastier with a bigger number stapled to his forehead, and round and round it goes till winning barely registers anymore. Dragon Ball ran that treadmill for years. Goku reaches another impossible level of power, so the writers gotta cook up somebody even stronger, then somebody stronger than that, and every fresh victory kinda erases the one before it like it never happened.

Compare that to how the old shows made you actually love somebody first. Take Yu Yu Hakusho. First episode, Yusuke Urameshi dies. A teenage knucklehead who picks fights and skips school steps into traffic to save a kid, and he gets flattened for it. What follows is not a training montage. We watch his mother fall apart. Then we feel him hovering there, realizing nobody expected much from his life anyway. By the time he earns his way back among the living, you are locked in, and not one ki blast has gone off yet. The muscle came later, sure, but it rode on top of a kid you already understood.

Trigun worked a different angle and hit just as deep. Vash the Stampede walks around like the biggest fool in the desert, gorging on donuts, dodging bar tabs, flinching from spiders. Underneath all that clowning sits a gunman good enough to settle any argument in a blink, who decided he would rather suffer than take a life. That contradiction is the entire engine. His restraint costs him. Every town he saves still looks at him sideways. Here’s a man who could end any fight before it starts, and he keeps choosing not to, and you can see what it does to him. That taught me more about guts than any screaming power up ever has.

Then there’s Inuyasha, which figured out that wanting somebody can carry a whole show on its own. Sure, there was a jewel to chase, shards scattered everywhere, the usual. Come on now. Wasn’t nobody sitting through week after week for a scavenger hunt. We stuck around for a half demon caught between two worlds that neither one wanted him in, fumbling his way toward letting a person actually get close. Kagome and Inuyasha spent ages just orbiting each other, and the orbiting was the whole thing. That ache built something no scoreboard ever could.

Cowboy Bebop, my old reliable, might be the purest proof. Think on who is even aboard that ship. A bounty hunter running from a love he cannot undo. Beside him, a woman buried in debt and ghosts. Then a kid hacker, a sharp dog, and a whole lot of silence between the jazz. A good number of episodes barely bother with a fight at all. What they chase instead is mood, and regret, and that nagging fact that your past knows your address no matter how far out you run. So when Spike finally walks toward his ending, it drops on you like gravity, ’cause the show put in every hour before it to earn that moment rather than puff him up into some demigod.

So notice what those four have in common. Their original television stories actually reached an ending. Yu Yu Hakusho wrapped up its main run, even if the franchise eventually returned with specials and adaptations. Bebop said its piece in twenty six tight episodes, though a movie and a live action version followed. The original Trigun finished its journey back in 1998 before Vash eventually rode into town again in newer productions. And Inuyasha finally brought its central story home with The Final Act, even if another generation later picked things up in Yashahime. The point was never that these worlds could not be revisited. It was that their stories had somewhere to land. An ending used to be the whole point, the thing the entire ride was aiming at. Now too many properties seem built to run till the sun burns out, every new arc straining to outshout the last, because a finished show quits printing money and a forever one keeps the merch flying off the shelf.

I get why it shook out this way. Streaming numbers, manga sales, and merchandise can all give publishers and studios reasons to keep a successful franchise alive. A fresh and scarier opponent is often the simplest lever to yank when somebody needs another big arc. The machine is doing exactly what the machine was built to do. None of that is a conspiracy. It is just incentive, grinding away.

Here’s the part that keeps my head up, though, ’cause I’m not trying to be the old man on the porch hollering that it’s all over. Thing is, some newer shows are already proving there is another way. Frieren strolled in soft spoken and pulled a massive crowd, and beneath its flashes of action gave us quiet, and grief, and a story you measure in what somebody remembers instead of how hard they punch. Vinland Saga swapped out revenge for something that cuts deeper and knows more. People are plain hungry for weight, not just sparks going off, and the money men have reason to pay attention when the slower, more soulful stuff finds an audience too.

So this was never a sermon about the past being holy and the present being junk. The craft today is astonishing, and I would not hand it back. All I’m really asking, hat in my hands, is that these shows remember what the old ones already had figured out. Make me care about the person before you turn them into a wrecking ball. Give a fight some stakes because somebody’s heart is in it, not ’cause a fatter number popped up on screen. And when a story’s run its course, let the thing end.

Flip to a station at midnight sometime and sit with one of those old joints. Keep the volume low. You will feel the difference in your chest before your head ever finds the words for it.

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.

(AfroGamers.com) Back in 2014 a goofy cosmic romp ended its very first episode by blowing up its heroes, their ship, and the planet beneath them. The credits ran over the rubble. A week later the same crew sauntered back in, hair intact and swagger somehow louder, out chasing rare aliens for pocket change like nothing had happened. That was the pitch. It was also, weirdly, the whole genius of the thing.

Shinichiro Watanabe, the mind behind Cowboy Bebop, served as chief director while Studio Bones turned the project into a playground for an unusually large collection of writers, directors, designers, and animators. The show lived on that freedom. One week you got a zombie outbreak played strictly for laughs. A few episodes later Dandy entered an intergalactic grand prix that eventually hurled him billions of years into the future. Over 26 episodes across two seasons, very little felt obligated to what came before because continuity was never allowed to put a leash on the imagination.

You barely need the premise, which is sort of the joke. Our guy drifts around the galaxy registering new species for cash, hauling along a cranky robot called QT and a Betelgeusian who looks a lot like a house cat and answers to Meow. The three of them inhale wings at a knockoff joint with a name that would get sued. The Gogol Empire keeps trying to capture Dandy, and the show cannot be bothered to tell you the full reason until much later. Small stakes, loud shirts, a pompadour you could see from orbit.

Variety was the flex. Inside a single stretch the show might hand you body horror, then drop Dandy onto a strange planet populated by highly evolved plants, then swing into a ridiculous high school musical parody that had no right to work as well as it did. Other episodes played with radically different visual styles, alternate dimensions, and worlds where the characters themselves could be bent into shapes that barely resembled ordinary existence. None of it needed to connect neatly. That was the point nobody argued with.

The payoff landed late, when the series finally dove headfirst into the whole alternate selves idea and nailed it precisely because it had already earned the chaos. Dandy encountered other versions of himself, QT, and Meow scattered across alternate universes, each one a shade off from the crew we knew. By the finale, the reason the Gogol Empire had been chasing him came into sharper focus. The idiot everybody had underestimated possessed extraordinary Pyonium energy, the very thing capable of bending the boundaries between dimensions. That smug narrator floating over every adventure turned out to sit a lot closer to the center of everything than you would ever guess.

So there it is. Dandy could die, planets could explode, timelines could swap, dimensions could fold in on themselves, and the next episode would just keep walking, hair unbothered. No grief counseling. No three film arc about processing the pain. Keep it moving.

That lightness was the actual power. A solid decade before alternate worlds became the industry’s comfort food, this funky little oddball treated infinity like a shrug and a punchline. Big stakes were never the aim. Dumping them was, which let the imagination run anywhere it wanted without pausing to ask permission.

Put it on now and it feels less like an old relic and more like a memo nobody answered. The culture caught up to the idea, then lost the lesson sitting under it. Endless possibility only stays fun while it stays loose. Grade every alternate universe on a rubric and you choke the very thing that made it worth watching. Our boy figured all that out while hunting a paycheck across a galaxy that could fall apart at any moment, laughing the entire way down. It’s a mystery, like he always said. Maybe just let it stay one.

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.

(AfroGamers.com) Some shows hand you a glossary. This one handed you a fist and dared you to keep up. Twenty six episodes, zero homework, all attitude.

Let me put it plain. Back in 2001 a scrappy series named s-CRY-ed came out swinging, and it had zero interest in handing you a textbook first. It wanted you hyped, a little fired up, and ready to pick a side before episode 1 even wrapped.

Studio Sunrise built the thing with Goro Taniguchi calling shots, years ahead of him dressing Lelouch up in all that chessboard scheming over on Code Geass. The plan ran leaner this go, meaner too. Two young dudes who can’t stand the sight of each other, stuck on the isolated Lost Ground, a ruined region cut off from mainland Japan after a massive upheaval. Give them a reason to collide, then another, then another, pretty much weekly. That’s the format and it never pretended otherwise.

Kazuma is the kind of lead you barely see written now. Nobody handed him a prophecy. He wanted cash, some elbow room, and the simple pleasure of shutting down a mouthy somebody who got to looking down on him. That right arm of his? It could twist into a screaming chrome weapon, Shell Bullet they call it, and he swung the thing the way a stray dog barks, nonstop and kind of proud about it. Destiny never once came recruiting. Our boy scrapped for his next meal and grinned wide through it all.

Opposite all that heat stood Ryuho, cold straight to the marrow. Zetsuei, his phantom familiar, moved like a blade nursing a grudge. Where the loudmouth hollered, this guy calculated every angle. That lone contrast is the whole engine of the show, and real talk, it is every bit of fuel a great grudge match actually requires.

Now, the gifts themselves. The world dubs them Alters, powers that let certain people break down matter and reconstruct it into something else, and you can tell the staff let imagination run feral. One fighter commanded eight floating spheres that could become weapons. Another ran on nothing but velocity and would not quit yapping about going fast, faster, fastest, a motormouth menace named Straight Cougar who swiped every scene he skidded through. None of it arrived packaged as tidy, balanced game mechanics. Each power read like it got ripped out of whatever made its owner tick, so clashes hinged on personality far more than stat sheets.

Part of the joy lived in how theatrical the whole production got. Guys would scream their move names mid swing, straight up shonen theater, zero embarrassment in the building. That English dub cranked the cheese dial even further, handing our brawler a gravel throated swagger that just worked. And Reckless Fire, Yasuaki Ide’s opener, revs like somebody redlining a bike in a parking lot at 2 a.m. You knew the exact flavor of ride from those first few bars. Nobody came here for subtle.

So the broken coast. Reality warped out there, which is why the powers showed up, and the writers were smart enough to not sit you down for a physics lecture about it. Ground split, strange abilities appeared, action. Skimping on the why bought them extra minutes for what folks actually clicked play to see, which was two knuckleheads going at it over whose worldview hit harder.

Lesser shows would’ve stopped at loud, but these scrappy human bits kept crawling up through the wreckage. Take Mimori Kiryu, a researcher working inside HOLY while carrying feelings for Ryuho she could never quite shake. She’s the reminder that real stakes sat under all that noise. Underneath the endless back and forth, our hero and his frosty counterpart gradually built something resembling respect, the type only earned from a soul who can meet you at your level. They would never hug it out. Those two did not have to.

The suits called HOLD lorded over that strange region folks labeled the Lost Ground, and they supplied most of the friction. They craved order above all. Our brawler craved the precise opposite. Ryuho rode with their special enforcement wing, HOLY, which planted the pair on opposing benches from minute one. Intrigue stayed thin on purpose, backdrop rather than labyrinth. We got barely enough scaffolding to justify the next showdown, nothing weightier.

That restraint was a quiet gift. Nobody needed a wiki open in a second tab to track who despised whom and the reasons why. A slimeball like Kyoji Mujo oozed in as exactly the villain you boo without any footnote required. Motivation played out clean across everybody’s face. Simple, as this cast kept proving round after round, is a universe away from shallow.

The finale said the loud quiet part even louder. After every escalation you could dream up, the final exchange between these two was not some cosmic revelation or buried bloodline reveal. Knuckles. Just two rivals settling the whole affair the one way their entire arc had been promising all along. Not a single last gasp mythology avalanche. No hidden deity yanking strings from behind a cloud. Pride against pride until one of them finally couldn’t stand back up.

Right here sits the reason all 26 episodes still land decades on. The show bet everything on swagger over blueprint. It gambled that a clenched hand plus a big mouth could haul a full saga across the line, then cashed the ticket. Loads of modern favorites adore their interlocking calendars and nineteen feuding factions, and plenty pull the juggling act off beautifully. Taniguchi’s rowdy throwback just reminded the room you can chuck the syllabus and still leave a dent in the wall.

Fandom these days gets a touch buried in its own homework. Spreadsheets breaking down exact mana costs. Timelines stacked three layers deep. That labor has its place, truly it does, yet somewhere along the road a slice of viewers began treating a clean, furious story as if it came out undercooked. s-CRY-ed stands as a blunt rebuttal. Clarity drove it. Heart pushed it along. A lone blistering feud dragged the thing further than a hundred appendices ever managed.

Hand me stubborn over complicated any day of the week. A hero who scraps first, learns slow, and never apologizes for the racket. #ShellBullet, loud forever.

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.

(AfroGamers.com) Somewhere in the middle of Magic Knight Rayearth, it clicks that those three girls are not on vacation. Hikaru, Umi, and Fuu get yanked away while visiting Tokyo Tower on school field trips and dropped into Cephiro with a job nobody asked them to sign up for. Under all the sword fights and giant mecha, one wish keeps humming. They just want their regular lives.

That hum is the thing I miss.

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

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

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

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

See the pattern? Over there had teeth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

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

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

(AfroGamers.com) Nobody saw this one coming. Well, a few sharp folks did, but most of us who ride for this franchise walked into that 2024 Xbox showcase expecting a big number 6 on the box and the next chapter of Kait’s tangled mess. What we got instead was a trip 14 years before the original game, straight to the worst day in the history of Sera. Bold call. Took me a minute to sit with it, but yeah, I’m all the way on board now.

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

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

They did the opposite. They marched us home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So here’s where I plant my flag.

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

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

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

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

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

(AfroGamers.com) Back in 1993, a whole slew of American children started absorbing Japanese storytelling logic every weekday afternoon, and not one of us had a clue. We figured we were just watching five teenagers with attitude stomp a rubber monster into the dirt. What we were actually getting was an early education in an aesthetic, one that would grab us by the collar years later when Toonami lit up the after-school block.

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.

(AfroGamers.com) Boot up a Game Boy in 1996, when Pokémon Red and Green first arrived in Japan, and you got a screen the color of pond scum. Four murky shades of green doing their best impression of color. It should have looked cheap. Instead, it felt like you were holding an entire world in your hands. No backlight either. You tilted the thing toward a lamp or leaned near a window just to watch Professor Oak explain his world. By the time Red and Blue reached American kids in 1998, those little monsters were ready to take over the schoolyard. Thirty years after Pokémon’s original Japanese debut, that memory carries real weight, and Red and Blue remain the reason a whole generation fell hard for a batch of pocket monsters Game Freak brought to life on Nintendo’s handheld.

Red and Blue gave you a fixed roster. One hundred and fifty-one creatures, and every single one earned a slot in your head. Kids could rattle off Bulbasaur to Mew without blinking. That number mattered because it was finite. You could work toward completing the original Pokédex, even if the elusive Mew remained a mystery to most players. “Gotta catch ’em all” wasn’t marketing fluff back then. It was a real goal you could see and chase down.

Here’s the clever part. Buy one copy and you literally could not fill your Pokédex alone. Red locked away Ekans and Arbok. Blue hid Sandshrew and Vulpix. Game Freak built the need for cooperation right into the design, then handed you the solution: a friend with the other box. Suddenly, the schoolyard turned into a marketplace. You needed people. That was the whole idea.

Which brings us to that gray cord. The link cable was a small miracle of plastic and copper. You plugged two handhelds together, sat shoulder to shoulder, and watched pixels stroll from one system to the next. No WiFi, no cloud, no account login. Trading meant showing up in person, sitting close, and trusting the other person not to yank the connection in the middle of an exchange. Anybody who lived through it remembers the panic of a bad link.

And oh, the stories. Every lunch table had a kid swearing up and down that he knew the truth. Move the truck near the S.S. Anne and Mew appears. Fill all 150 slots and something secret unlocks. Follow some mysterious sequence of button presses and the game rewards you big. Most of it was pure fiction, passed mouth to mouth like folklore. But that was the beauty of the era. Before you could Google an answer in two seconds flat, mystery had room to breathe. A single rumor could live for months.

Now here’s the twist that kept the whole myth machine running. A few of those tales weren’t tales at all. MissingNo., that garbled blob lurking off the Cinnabar coast, was the real deal. Follow the right steps, surf along the eastern shoreline, and collide with a corrupted mess of a sprite. Suddenly, the item sitting in your sixth Bag slot multiplied out of nowhere. Half the room swore it was a hoax right up until they watched it unfold on their own screen. That smear of broken code earned its legend status for one reason. People could actually prove it.

Strip away the nostalgia and the bones still hold. Combat ran on a rock paper scissors logic anybody could grasp in a minute yet spend years mastering. Fire beats grass, water douses fire, grass drinks up water, and the loop kept unfolding into deeper territory. The difficulty respected you. No coddling, no glowing arrows pointing the way. You got a town, a rival, a starter, and the freedom to explore Kanto, one new route at a time.

Speaking of that rival. Gary. Blue. Whatever you named him. He showed up right when you were low on potions and high on confidence, always with that grin, always with a team a notch above yours. Beating him settled something. And before any of that, you had to make a call nobody prepared you for. Bulbasaur, Charmander, or Squirtle. Folks still defend their pick like it says something about who they are. Charmander loyalists took the rough road early. Squirtle folks played it smart. Bulbasaur heads breezed through the opening two gyms and never once apologized for it.

What these carts kicked off is almost tough to measure now. A trading card empire. An anime that ran what felt like forever. A phone app in 2016 that had grown folks bumping into light poles chasing digital critters through the park. None of it happens without those original Game Boy adventures. Some guy named Satoshi Tajiri liked catching insects as a kid, and that hobby of his eventually helped inspire a franchise recognized around the world.

You’d think all that would bury the debut. Hundreds of new critters since, full color, 3D towns you can spin the camera around in. And yet the old one refuses to sit down. Some of that is just how firsts work. They dig in and stay. But it runs deeper than sentiment. Those early adventures asked you to imagine, to fill the gaps the hardware left wide open. Grainy sprites forced your brain to supply the coloring. Silence between chiptune bleeps left space for wonder. Tight limits sparked creativity in a way that polish sometimes smothers.

Three decades later, the pull hasn’t faded one bit. Somewhere right now a parent is handing a wide eyed kid a worn cartridge, watching them meet Oak and pick their first Pokémon, and the cycle keeps spinning. Those first 151 aren’t a pile of dead code rotting on old silicon. They’re the thing you and some kid you haven’t seen in twenty years can still bond over in a single sentence. A tiny gray box held a whole world once. Wild part is, boot it up today and the world’s still in there.

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.

(AfroGamers.com) I’ve been revisiting the Infamous games lately. I finished the first two games some years ago and we’re going to get into the three main games but let’s talk about the game world itself and the OG conduit.

The term “conduit” is used for any being that can use super powers. Initially, you had Cole and a few others in Empire City who utilized these powers but with the Department of Unified Protection (think S.H.I.E.L.D in Marvel Comics) being formed and getting their hands on important information, their high-powered death squad and director can wield powers as well.

A Lost PlayStation Hero: Cole MacGrath

Listen, I enjoyed electricity conduit Cole’s adventures in Empire City (NYC) and New Marais (NOLA). Being able to determine if he would be a hero, villain or anti-hero of sorts was a fun mechanic that directed impacted your gameplay.

I’d say it influenced the gameplay more than the story itself. Depending on your actions, the story would head in whichever direction but the combat options and benefits open to you by either saving hurt pedestrians and risking your own well-being or snuffing out ops and leaving civilians to their fate was very interesting.

It also helped that the people of these open-world titles varied between support for Cole MacGrath or fear and resentment of this perceived menace. Mind you, this was despite what heroic or nefarious actions you took. Because Cole was such a stock late 2000s-early 2010s action game (gruff, tough, athletic, possibly got parkour skills), the world itself and the people could have the player’s opinions towards these grateful or ungrateful citizens and act out of them.

The World of Infamous

Honestly, it was like playing through a living world versions of the Spider-Man games post-PlayStation. In these Spidey games, the city is rocking with the Web-Slingers and it’s mostly their ops and J.Jonah Jameson who have some animosity towards them.

In Infamous, it was more like you had this new super-powered person doing stuff around your city during a crisis and the news is telling everyone they’re a menace. The city forms individual takes on this new force and it’s routed in respect and hope or fear and desperation.

All of this is on top of gangs taking advantage of the crisis and the military’s super special task force shutting down the city and shutting it off from the rest of the world. For the PlayStation 3 era, this was some primo world-building! Sucker Punch Productions borrowed the morality system from games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Fallout 3, mixed it in with the world around the protagonist as well as the powers system and it worked.

When the Cole’s adventures ended and the PS4 dropped, the story followed Delsin Rowe (who can absorb the powers of conduits) and later Abigail Walker (who utilizes neon). Their story takes place in Seattle. I always found it odd that Seattle was good as a setting but New York and New Orleans in name? Better avoid that piece of business. The aforementioned D.U.P organization makes it’s appearance as the primary antagonist for most of the Infamous: Second Son game on PlayStation 4.

The Best Part of Infamous’ Gameplay

Infamous was very much like other open-world action games from the PS3 era. You got a big city to run around in, plenty of powers (or weapons if you’re playing a Grand Theft Auto or Just Cause), and plenty of enemies to fight. Just go nuts and have a blast, the story isn’t timed or relies on an in-game clock and schedule. It’s not going anywhere.

Because of the decent amount of side quests, you always had something to do if you didn’t want to invest time in the main story’s nonsense. What really helps in getting players to indulge in the side missions is turf.

I love a game with territory conflict. Always have since GTA San Andreas and GTA Vice City Stories introduced and built on that mechanic. The Infamous games have maps featuring a few major parts of a city under control of the ops. They’re enemies flood the areas of these territories and to gain control, you have to do side missions or take out checkpoints and holding centers.

Once the territory objective is completed, you’ll notice the enemy presence in that area goes away and it’s safe to navigate. Very simple in execution and I spent most of my time in the Infamous games clearing out territory. Of course, I wish more came from doing so but there’s no currency or equipment to get in the games and no one tries to reclaim turf.

Maybe that will be explored more if Sucker Punch ever returns to the world of Infamous. However, with their Ghosts games being so successful that might be unlikely.

Were you a fan of the Infamous games? If so, share your memories of playing the game or if you think we’ll see another title in the series. Where will it be based?

Let us know 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.

(AfroGamers.com) So, you got your mobile phone and you’ve got your usual games that require some skill and investment. You know: Call of Duty: Mobile, The Division. If you’re like me, you’ve got Pokemon TCG or Might and Magic. Sometimes, you got to have something that eats up less time. Something that can be played while watching a show. A low-effort or no-effort game that you will return to.

Here are three such games that won’t even eat up much storage.

Papa’s Burgeria (Flipline Studios)

The Papa’s games are mobile OGs. Flipline Studios figured out the formula for fun, repetitive lite-simulations games much like our second entry. The studio makes the kind of game that you will keep coming back to manage your shop and might even have you sinking time than necessary into it.

Papa’s Burgeria is the first of the Papa’s games I picked up and is a great introduction to the gameplay you can expect in other titles such as Papa’s Pizzeria and Papa’s Wingeria. While there is some business management in here as far as buying equipment and decorations for your shop to improve productivity, the game is a time management sim first.

In the Burgeria, you will serve up burgers to customers who give you their orders. You’re expected to cook the burgers as requested, put the orders together, and get it out to them in a timely matter. Faster speed equals a good performance and means both return business and more profit for you.

I recommend this one for time management veterans who want a fun challenge you can knock out during commercial breaks or a dragging show or game. Also, the Papa’s games tend to run on the inexpensive side being $1.99 for all games except for Papa’s Freezeria which is $0.99.

Game Dev Story (Kairosoft)

Kairosoft is a studio that also figured out the formula for mobile simulation games and actually influenced a lot of game studio simulators, the best known one being Game Dev Tycoon from Greenheart Games (also on mobile and Steam).

The studio is essentially “The House That Game Dev Story built” with most titles being some variation of GDS. If it’s a business game, it takes after Game Dev Story but it’s a village sim it’s more like Dungeon Village. For the studio’s sports sims, most are in a vein similar to Pocket League Story. But most games can be traced back to Game Dev Story, especially with featured characters/employees in each game.

In a nutshell, GDS has the player running a small gaming studio and building it up over a 20-year period. In that time, players will see new consoles, conventions, and award shows. If they’re sturdy with developing games and hiring the right talent, they could move millions of copies, get games in the Hall of Fame (making them sequel-worthy), or win one of the four Year End Awards.

I’d say Game Dev Story hovers between low effort and no effort as you do have to manage your employees via hiring, firing, training, and promoting but once they’re in place, you’re really just assigning devs to one of three stages of the development process and maybe naming the game if you think it’s worth it.

Of the games on this list, the Kairosoft games are the more pricier ones and that wasn’t always the case! They run anywhere between $4.99 for the older ones and $7.99 for the more recent titles with a Doraemon branded title running for $14.99. Let’s not even get into the prices of the game on PSN.

Regardless, the games have the same effect as Papa’s where you’ll return to manage your studio and try to develop better games each time. If you like this one, I recommend the Manga Works which is a little different in it being a manga artist career sim.

Zen Basketball GM (ZenGM)

If you dig basketball but don’t want something that will dine on your battery and storage or hit you with a promotion deal upon opening, Zen Basketball Manager is what you’ll want to get.

It’s a text-based basketball management simulation but it strips down the deeper management aspects such as lengthy contract negotiations and managing the stadium and coaching staff. Instead, you mainly handle the players you put on the team.

By “handle”, I mean you sign your rookies, you renew or cut players, and just allocate how much money goes into the facilities. At any point, you can move to another team and manage it. If you want absolute control over the league (or an easier playing experience) smash GOD MODE.

With that you can edit players, contracts, league rules, tournament and season length and contract caps. It’s with GOD MODE that the game’s involvement ramps up a bit but you’re not having to play the game or watch ads.

Zen Basketball Manager is free-to-play and has no ads. ZenGM has baseball, football, and hockey management games that feature a banner ad. I highly recommend their games for the sports fan who multitasks or who just loves sports.

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.

(AfroGamers.com) Somewhere along the way folks started talking like Vegeta drew up the whole blueprint himself. Arms crossed, that smirk, the grudging little nod when the hero finally pulls ahead. Ask around who built the proud opponent and the Saiyan prince gets the credit like he filed the paperwork. Respectfully, nah.

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

Start with the Red Comet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what actually shifted?

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

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

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

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

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

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

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

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.