(AfroGamers.com) Fantasy romance manhwas, as popular as they are, aren’t always safe from criticism – especially from their own fanbases. The biggest one that goes around in the Rofan (standing for romance fantasy) fandoms is how the genre a lot of times overuses tropes, plot lines, and magic systems. As this post discusses, another thing that the genre overuses are character archetypes – like the infamous ‘Duke of the North’ archetype. These archetypes come in different shapes and forms but there are specific characteristics that they always share. And sometimes those characteristics reveal to the readers in the fandom that they are the ‘Duke of the North’ before the manhwa’s story itself explicitly says so.

Who is the ‘Duke of the North’?

In the words of Rinha Seol from the rofan manhwa, Charming the Duke of the North, the ‘Duke of the North’ or the ‘Northern Duke’, is “A cold-hearted man with looks that kill! Powerful enough to kill any monsters! Cynical to everyone regardless of their age, gender and race!”

Inwardly, this man can be described in many different ways, and its honestly up to the reader to decide what they think of him. But most would argue that he is aloof, emotionless, and quiet. Outwardly, he is a man (or, rarely, a boy) who occupies the position of a duke in some kingdom or country. His dukedom is more often than not situated in a cold wasteland that only thrives due to its military prowess and mineral-rich lands. What defines the ‘Duke of the North’ from other nobles and royalty is how he does his best to keep away from them. He steers clear of interacting with others of high status and only does if he is ordered by the King and/or Crown Prince themselves to do so.

What likens all these manhwas’ versions of the duke is their outward appearance. In a lot of cases, the ‘Duke of the North’ has dark, black hair, red eyes and a figure worthy of being called an undefeated warlord. Speaking of “undefeated warlord”, the duke a lot of times has a nickname that vilifies him as some monstrous person meant to be feared by all – just because he is always the first at the frontlines during wartime. Nicknames like, ‘monster Duke’, ‘northern beast’, and ‘bloodthirsty beast’ are commonly used across these rofan manhwas.

The Ones Who are the Same

The ones who are the same are those duke characters who maintain the stereotype in fantasy romance stories. They are the ones who either started the craze or became known for it due to their respective manhwas’ popularity. It is honestly because of them that the ‘Duke of the North’ has elevated from being an actual noble title a character has, to one of many manhwa tropes contributing to reader’s disdain of overused tropes and character archetypes. The biggest thing, as already mentioned, is the appearance. Most of these dukes share the same face, same body, same colour palate. They are always dukes (obviously), always have black hair and red eyes, are always warlords and always reside in the north. The one question that has plagued the fantasy romance fandom in the manhwa reader community is how there is no ‘Duke of the South’, or maybe, a ‘Duke of the East’ – and what about the ‘Duke of West’? These manhwa authors keep repeating the same pattern over and over whether or not considering how much they are exhausting the readership and it is honestly concerning, because… Where is the creativity?!

This is not to say that there are no readers who do not love this archetype, because to be honest, there are a good number of readers who eat these characters up and never stop loving it. And that’s okay. But it wouldn’t hurt if the readers who aren’t as into this type of duke character are accommodated a little by manhwa authors. Looking at some good examples of ‘Dukes of the North’ (exclusively from fantasy romance manhwas), there are Pellus Termaine from Another Typical Romance Story, Baras Valias from The Grand of the North, Hades Louvremont from I Became the Hero’s Mom and Hugo Taran from Lucia.

The One Unlike Others

The good part about this stereotypical character is that there are manhwa authors and mangakas (manga artists) who end up inspired to do something different with their characters. These differences can be something big or something relatively small. At times that difference would be so small that it is practically non-existent. Some big changes when it comes to appearance with the dukes of the north is changing the hair and eye colours to white hair and blue eyes instead of the typical black and red. Unfortunately, in typical manhwa fashion, these ‘new’ colours quickly became another recurring descriptor for the ‘Duke of the North’ character image. Although seeing a duke with white hair and blue eyes still feels like a refreshing sight for most readers, the colour palate is already making a name for itself as an ‘alternative version’ of the same thing.

Even so, there are still dukes who have been able to successfully earn the title of ‘creatively different’ without the risk of being likened to any other variety of their archetype. The most notable mention which some fantasy romance readers can agree with is, Grand Duke Raegrane Vlenn from The Villainess Captured the Grand Duke and Duke Hades Louvremont from I Became the Hero’s Mom.

What makes Raegrane such a unique (grand) duke is the fact that the cold-hearted characteristic given to every duke character across manhwa is actually a trait necessary to his character’s personhood and the plot of the story. It is not merely there because every other manhwa author is adding it for their own character but because it plays an important role in character motivations as well as a plot device to assist in advancing the relationship between him and his love interest. He isn’t the way he is, cold and emotionless, because he chose to be but because the story’s plot involves him being forced to be (like a curse).

And then we have Hades who is portrayed as a cold duke only due to his traumatic past and unorthodox religious beliefs. Other than that, Hades is more times than not made to be a comedic character who isn’t as strict and bound by the laws and rules his country desperately tries to impose on him. He strives to live a happy and fulfilling life with his wife and son whilst devilish antagonists force their way into making sure that doesn’t happen. I Became the Hero’s Mom is also one of those manhwas that put their faith in the plot and writing to attract the readers’ attention and so, the whole ‘Duke of the North’ archetype that has been added through Hades, doesn’t seem forced or overused and instead buried under how important he is as a character to the story.

To sum it all up, the ‘Duke of the North’ is a character archetype in fantasy romance manhwa that really needs to be put to rest. If not, manhwa authors need to make an effort to create a version of the archetype that does not make the reader feel like they are immediately drowning in cliches and stereotypes the second the duke character is introduced to them.

Staff Writer; Fadzai Nyamande

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

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

(AfroGamers.com) Kimetsu no Yaiba is one of the best looking pieces of animated work ever put in front of an audience, which is not a controversial position to hold. Ufotable animated this thing like the studio had declared war on visual restraint. The trouble surfaces once you look past that polish, because the writing underneath plays about as safe as a Sunday sermon, and the gap between those two things has bothered me for a while now.

Let me say the obvious part first so nobody accuses me of hating. Ufotable makes gorgeous television. When Tanjiro pulls that blade and the water effects bloom across the frame like ink dropped in a clear glass, my whole living room goes quiet. My cousin who does not watch anime sat through the Mugen Train movie with me and asked, out loud, how they made fire look wet. That is the power we are dealing with. The studio treats every clash like a music video shot by somebody with a grudge against flat lighting.

The sound design carries just as much weight. Yuki Kajiura and Go Shiina built a score that swells at exactly the right half second, and LiSA singing over the opening set a bar that half the industry is still trying to reach. You hear those first strings and your posture changes. Even people who dropped the show after the first cour will admit the audio hits like a live band at a homecoming tailgate.

So the presentation is elite. Nobody with functioning eyes is arguing that.

My problem sits somewhere else entirely. Underneath all that gloss lives a plot so tidy you could predict its beats from a bus stop three towns over. Boy’s family gets slaughtered. Sister survives as a monster. Boy joins an organization, climbs a ranked ladder, fights progressively stronger opponents, and finally battles the big bad in the final act. That is the shonen skeleton, unmodified, unbothered, untouched by any real experimentation. Gotouge drew it clean and drew it well, but clean is not the same as bold.

Consider how the villains get handled. Most significant demons receive a tearful flashback as defeat closes in. First time, I felt something real. Rui and that fake family, the desperation of a lonely child stitching together relatives out of corpses, genuinely moved me. Second time, I nodded. By the fifth or sixth sad memory montage, I started checking my phone. Sympathy became a scheduling item rather than a surprise. When you can time the tragedy reveal down to the second, the emotional machinery stops working and you can hear it grinding.

Compare that to what other franchises risked around the same years. Hunter x Hunter took its most beloved character and put him through a mutilation arc that permanently reshaped that world. Attack on Titan? Isayama convinced us of one moral arrangement for seasons, then flipped the whole map and dared everybody watching to keep cheering. Vinland Saga went further. Thorfinn spends years chasing revenge, gets it taken from him, and has to sit in the wreckage figuring out who a man is once you pry the sword out of his hand. Every one of those swings could have missed badly. Swinging anyway is the point.

Now think about Tanjiro. Where does he actually change? Kind, stubborn, allergic to giving up on his sister, that is the boy we meet in episode one. The same description fits him at the finish line, only older, stronger and permanently scarred. There is one late transformation after Muzan forces his blood and will into Tanjiro, but the story reverses it so quickly that the darkness never has time to reshape him. Progress for this character means new techniques and stronger arms. Nothing rearranges inside.

Nezuko frustrates me even more. Here is a character with enormous conceptual potential, a demon who protects humans, a walking contradiction of everything the corps believes. What does the writing do with her? Bamboo in the mouth for most of the runtime. A backpack. Occasional bursts of pyrotechnics when the plot requires a save. She barely speaks for entire seasons. Her interiority stays locked in a box because giving her a voice would complicate the moral clarity the whole thing depends on. That is a risk left on the table.

The battles themselves reveal the same conservatism. Breathing styles are presented as a system, complete with forms and lineages and elemental branches, yet almost nobody solves problems through clever application of that system. Fights resolve through determination. Somebody remembers a dead relative, screams, swings harder than physics should allow, and wins. Contrast that with something like Hunter x Hunter’s nen rules, where victory usually belongs to whoever thought three steps ahead. Here, thinking rarely beats feeling. Willpower functions as a cheat code the writing reaches for whenever a corner gets tight.

Death gets the same soft treatment. Characters do die, and some of those losses hurt. Rengoku’s finale still gets brought up in every barbershop anime debate I have witnessed. But watch what happens immediately afterward. Warm light. Deceased loved ones appear in a golden field. Approval, hugs, closure delivered in a bow. Grief usually becomes a gentle handoff rather than an open wound. The survivors carry loss, but the story rarely allows bitterness, uncertainty or emotional damage to remain untreated for long.

Let me argue against myself for a minute, because waving off sincerity has become its own lazy move. A whole lot of folks showed up here worn out by irony, sick of shows where being decent gets treated like being stupid. Watching a boy’s kindness function as actual strength carries real value, and I say that as somebody who grew up when cynicism was mistaken for intelligence. Gotouge wrote a fable. Fables run on repetition and clear moral lines, that is the machinery, that is how they teach. Even the sad demon flashback pattern I complained about earlier says something honest about cycles of harm, about monsters getting manufactured by circumstance rather than born. You could look me dead in my face and say the predictability was intentional, that comfort counts as an artistic goal, that the numbers settle the argument. Fair enough. Mugen Train becoming Japan’s highest grossing film, followed by another historic run for Infinity Castle, is not nothing.

Here is where I hold my ground, though. Ambition and accessibility have never been enemies. Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood handled genocide, theology, and a government built on human sacrifice while staying perfectly readable to a fourteen year old. Oda buries genuine political commentary inside a pirate cartoon and nobody complains. Easy to follow is not the same as unwilling to gamble.

What frustrates me most is the suspicion that the spectacle covers for the script. Strip away the particle effects and the orchestral swells, put those same plot beats in a mid-budget production with stiff key frames, and I do not believe this thing becomes a phenomenon. The technical achievement is doing heavy lifting that the writing has not earned. Watching the Infinity Castle material, I felt genuine awe at the craftsmanship and mild boredom at the developments happening inside it. Both feelings, at once, in the same scene.

That does not make it bad. Read none of this as a takedown. I will keep watching, I will keep buying tickets, and my arms will keep getting chills the second that music kicks in. My wish is smaller and far more specific. Give a beloved character a choice that cannot be forgiven. Hand Nezuko an actual voice. Allow somebody to stay dead without the golden reunion afterward. Trust that an audience which showed up for beauty can sit with discomfort too.

Right now, the sword swings look incredible. What they cut through rarely bleeds.

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) A death in anime increasingly works less as an ending than as a scheduling decision. The scene still gets the score, the slow pan, the full farewell treatment, while the machinery underneath has already penciled in a return date.

Let me talk to my folks for a minute. If you came up the way I did, sitting on the carpet with a bowl of cereal while that Toonami countdown ran, you know exactly what it feels like when a scene hits you sideways. Goku on Namek. Wolfwood slumped against that church wall. Whatever your first real gut punch was, it landed on the belief it was permanent. Fast forward to today and I catch myself watching a funeral sequence with my arms folded, already doing the math on how they plan to walk it back.

That reflex is the tell. When a viewer stops grieving and starts calculating, the writing has already lost.

Dragon Ball planted this seed early, and I say that with love, because Akira Toriyama gave us the blueprint for basically everything. Seven Dragon Balls capable of granting wishes, though, mean nearly every major loss carries an asterisk. Krillin has been through more resurrections than most of us have been through phone upgrades. Fans joke about it now, which is fine, except jokes are what happen when tension evaporates. Even the Nina Tucker memes depend on the fact that her fate still horrifies people.

Naruto took that idea and cranked it further. Pain’s assault on the Leaf Village was arguably the finest sequence in that entire run. Bodies everywhere. Kakashi gone. A community leveled while our boy was off training. Then a redemption arc arrives, one technique gets used, and many of the people killed during the assault stand back up like somebody hit the reset switch on a fighting game. I understand the thematic point about breaking the cycle of hatred. I still felt robbed, and I know I was not alone in that theater of the mind.

Healing erodes things in a comparable fashion. Somewhere along the line, the medium decided that any injury short of decapitation could be undone by a support type with soft hair and a kind expression. Recovery Girl accelerates the body’s natural healing, and class soon resumes, although even she warns Midoriya that his self-destructive fighting carries consequences. A random elixir shows up at the exact hour it becomes necessary. Whole limbs regenerate off screen between chapters. Physical cost is supposed to mean something, which is why Edward Elric’s automail hits so hard. Metal replaced flesh and the trade never got refunded.

Memory erasure might be the sneakiest offender in the catalog. A character finally admits how they feel, finally says the thing that took forty episodes to reach, and then a convenient spell wipes the slate so the status quo survives another season. Romantic tension gets preserved at the expense of everybody’s growth. Watching that pattern repeat feels like listening to a producer loop the same eight bars since the hook tests well with focus groups.

Timeline manipulation deserves its own conversation, mostly given that a couple of titles prove it can be handled beautifully. Steins;Gate turned repetition into agony. Okabe kept trying, kept failing, and the accumulated weight of every attempt sat on his shoulders because he alone remembered them. Re:Zero runs a similar engine and grinds Subaru into powder with it. Both understand something crucial: a rewind only carries weight when somebody has to hold the memory of what got erased. Take away that scar tissue and you have got a video game save file, not a narrative.

Now here is where I have to give proper respect, since plenty of creators absolutely refuse to blink.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood built its entire spine around permanence. The Elric brothers broke the rules once, paid immediately, and spent the rest of the series living inside that receipt. Maes Hughes stays gone. Nina stays gone. That is why the ending satisfies instead of soothes.

Hajime Isayama never flinched either. Attack on Titan killed people I liked, then killed people I loved, then made me question whether I had been rooting for the right side the whole time. Not one wish orb in sight. The Scout Regiment’s body count is the reason those charge scenes made my chest tight.

Yoshihiro Togashi went even harder during the Chimera Ant arc. Kite technically returns, reincarnated as a small girl who remembers everything, and that is precisely the move most writers would use as a get out of jail card. Togashi refuses to let it function that way. Gon does not get the mentor he lost, only a stranger wearing those memories, and the boy burns his own future to ash chasing vengeance before he ever learns that Kite has been reincarnated. He comes out the other side hollow, and Togashi lets him sit in that emptiness. Cowboy Bebop closed with Spike collapsing after “Bang.” Roll credits. No promised rescue and no clean answer.

So why does the industry keep reaching for the undo button?

Money answers most of it, honestly. Popularity surveys and commercial performance can influence editorial decisions when a manga runs weekly for a decade. A fan favorite moves figures, keychains, acrylic stands, and collaboration cafe menus. Editors watch those numbers. Killing a merchandise engine takes a courage that quarterly earnings rarely reward, so the safer play becomes a dramatic exit followed by a quiet return once the outrage cools.

Length compounds the problem too. A property running six hundred episodes cannot afford to keep amputating its cast, or eventually nobody familiar remains. Serialization rewards elasticity. Rebound, reset, repeat.

I will steelman the other position for a second, since I do believe there is one. Mythology has always allowed for returns. Orpheus went down to get Eurydice. Osiris was restored after death and became ruler of the underworld. Christian scripture is built on resurrection, and I say that as a man who sits in a pew on Sunday. Hope has real value, and a medium aimed partly at young audiences carries some duty to suggest that devastation is survivable. Kids processing loss for the first time might need a story that says the sun rises again. A relentlessly bleak catalog would be its own kind of failure, and shows like Frieren prove you can handle mortality gently without cheapening it.

My issue was never with hope. My issue is with cost.

Bring somebody back if the story demands it, but charge somebody for the privilege. Orpheus lost her twice because he looked over his shoulder. That single condition is what makes the myth endure across thousands of years. Modern series too often skip the condition and keep the miracle, which turns transcendence into a vending machine transaction.

Audiences adapt to whatever they are taught, and right now the medium has trained a generation to withhold investment. Scroll any comment section during a big episode and you will find viewers immediately theorizing about the loophole rather than sitting with the feeling. That is a learned defense. We flinch less because flinching stopped being useful.

Consider what that costs a creator. Every emotional deposit gets valued against a currency that keeps inflating. Ten years ago a genuine sacrifice could carry a finale. Today the same scene needs three additional twists just to convince us it is real, which pushes writers toward escalation instead of depth. Louder does not mean heavier.

Where do we go from here?

Viewers hold more leverage than we admit. Reward the work that commits. Talk about the shows that let wounds scar over instead of vanish. Buy the volumes, stream them legally, tell your group chat. Studios track what we amplify with alarming precision.

Creators could also try trusting us. My generation grew up on Bebop, on Lain, on Evangelion’s psychological freefall, on Rurouni Kenshin carrying the weight of a reverse blade so he would never add another name to his ledger. We handled it. Our kids can handle it too. Protecting an audience from grief is not the same thing as caring for that audience.

Permanence is not cruelty. Permanence is the thing that makes a story matter after the credits roll, the reason certain scenes stay lodged in your ribs twenty years later while entire seasons of resurrections blur into nothing.

Let it hurt. That is the whole point.

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) Let’s get into a few classic video game series that I was never fully onboard with over the decades. This could be down to me not finishing the entire series or most of the games while others are just games I never rocked with but they have long-lived fanbases and still see recent games being made.

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.

(AfroGamers.com) Some video game genres exist within a specific period of time. When an indie studio comes along and announces they’re making a game inspired on a somewhat dated genre or they picked up the license, that game tends geared at players from that generation of gaming.

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.

(AfroGamers.com) Few franchise reinventions in modern gaming have been praised as thoroughly as Santa Monica Studio’s Norse era God of War, and few have quietly surrendered as much of their original identity in the process. Emotional maturity arrived. Volatility departed. Whether that exchange strengthened the series or simply made it easier to admire remains a conversation the fanbase has largely avoided having.

Look, I’m not about to sit here and pretend Santa Monica Studio didn’t cook. That Norse run is gorgeous, well acted, thoughtfully written, and it moved a whole lot of grown men to tears in their living rooms. My problem isn’t quality. Whole issue here is what got traded away while everybody was busy applauding.

Back in 2005, when that Greek nightmare first dropped on PlayStation 2, we weren’t playing as a hero. We were playing as a problem. A walking catastrophe with the ashes of his murdered family cursed onto his skin and zero interest in your feelings about it. Ares tricked him into slaughtering his own family, and instead of processing that trauma in healthy increments, dude went to war with heaven itself. No therapy arc. Zero slow burn toward wisdom. Just a man who decided the entire pantheon would answer for what happened to him, and then made good on it.

That version scared people. Genuinely scared them. You’d watch him rip a soldier’s head off and feel something uncomfortable crawl up your spine, because the game never once asked you to admire him for it. Athena would show up talking about balance and destiny, and our boy would basically tell her to save the speech. Every conversation felt like negotiating with a live grenade. Nobody in Olympus knew what he’d do next, and honestly? Neither did we.

Then came Norse mythology, and suddenly the Ghost of Sparta became a dad with communication issues.

Here’s where my Blerd brothers and sisters start typing angrily, so let me be clear about the argument. Character growth in gaming is good. Absolutely necessary, even. We’ve spent decades watching muscle bound protagonists grunt through campaigns with nothing resembling an inner life, so seeing a franchise mature its lead into something complicated deserves credit. What bothers me is the specific direction that maturity took, and what the studio decided maturity had to look like.

Restraint became the entire personality.

Think about how often that Norse duology asks the old man to hold back. He teaches Atreus to control his temper. Apologies get handed out for his methods. Shame about his history sits visible on him across two full games while he tries to outrun the reputation he earned honestly. Modern God of War treats his former self like an addiction he’s managing, one careful breath at a time, and structurally the games reward him for keeping that beast in a cage.

Cool message. Terrible loss for a series built entirely on unleashing that beast.

Compare the pacing sometime. Greek era combat threw you into arenas stacked with enemies and let the chains fly in wide, reckless arcs. Chaos everywhere. You’d juggle three minotaurs while a hydra head swung overhead, and the whole thing felt barely survivable, like the fiction itself was fraying at the seams. Norse combat, for all its weight and craft, is deliberate. Measured. You’re managing stagger meters and cooldowns, checking your gear score, thinking about builds. Excellent design work, no argument from me. Different sensation entirely.

One system simulated a rampage. Another simulates a professional at work.

The bosses tell that same story. Remember the colossal set pieces from the trilogy? Cronos crawling across the desert with a temple strapped to his back. The Colossus of Rhodes towering over an entire city while you scrambled across its arm. Scale that made you feel like a bug that learned to bite back. Many of the Norse era’s most important encounters lean toward intimate duels against humanoid opponents of roughly comparable size, and while the Valkyrie fights are genuinely superb tests of skill, they don’t produce that specific vertigo the older games manufactured almost casually.

Something else disappeared too, and this part nobody wants to discuss at the cookout: the ugliness.

Original God of War let its protagonist be genuinely, unforgivably rotten. He’d shove innocent people into traps to solve puzzles. Allies got abandoned mid sentence. That infamous cage sequence where a man begs for his life and you use him anyway? Santa Monica put that in on purpose, because nobody was supposed to root for this guy. Watching a person hollowed out by grief become something monstrous, then sitting with how that felt in your hands, was the whole exercise.

Modern entries sand every rough edge into something palatable. Our guy still kills, obviously, but the fiction constantly reassures us he’s got reasons. Enemies attack first. Threats are established. Moral positioning gets handled before blood spills, so nobody watching a stream has to feel weird about enjoying it. Safe. Marketable. A protagonist you can put on a Father’s Day post without irony.

Unpredictability was the franchise’s actual signature, and it went out the door with the Blades of Chaos aesthetic.

Let me push this further, since I’m already in trouble. Ragnarök spends a shocking amount of its runtime having characters talk him out of things. Freya wants revenge, he counsels patience. Charging ahead is what Atreus keeps pushing for, and caution is the answer he gets. Mimir cracks jokes about how much the old man has changed. The narrative architecture of that game positions our Spartan as the voice of reason inside a cast of hotheads, which is genuinely funny when you consider he once murdered his way through Greece after years of divine manipulation, betrayal, and revenge.

Wisdom looks good on him. Danger looked better.

There’s a version of this story where growth and menace coexist, and occasionally the Norse games flirt with it. That moment in 2018 when he unleashes his rage after Atreus collapses during the confrontation with Modi, or the raw brutality of the Baldur fight, or those brief flashes where his temper slips loose and everyone nearby remembers who they’re standing next to. Those beats are electric precisely because they violate the game’s own rules about him. Santa Monica clearly knows what they’re sitting on. They just ration it like it’s rare.

Rationing was the wrong call.

My honest read? The industry shifted, and the franchise shifted to survive. Prestige narrative became the currency around 2013, and studios chasing critical respect learned quickly that emotional interiority scores better than spectacle. Every major series started giving us complicated fathers, quiet campfire conversations, and protagonists working through something. God of War played that game brilliantly and won. Awards, hearts, an entire new audience who never touched the PS2 originals.

Winning cost the series its weirdness though, and weirdness is worth something.

Nothing on the market right now feels like Greek era God of War felt. Doom gets close on pure aggression, but Doom Slayer is a power fantasy without the psychological rot underneath. Devil May Cry has style and flash minus the genuine cruelty. That specific cocktail of mythological grandeur, personal damage, and complete moral bankruptcy hasn’t been replicated, mostly because the studio that perfected it walked away from the recipe.

We got a better character and a smaller experience.

Ask yourself honestly what stays with you longest. Some of y’all will say the boat conversations, the way Mimir’s stories filled the silences, the ending of Ragnarök and everything it implied about legacy. Beautiful answers, all valid. Others will admit that what lodged permanently in their memory was Zeus getting beaten so thoroughly the screen went red, or the sheer audacity of a mortal dismantling an entire religion out of spite.

Both versions matter. Only one of them was singular.

So as Santa Monica Studio prepares God of War Laufey and continues working on a remake of the original Greek trilogy, I’m hoping somebody remembers that his rage was never merely a character flaw to be corrected. Rage was the thesis. Everything interesting about him grew out of that soil, including the fatherhood arc everybody loves. Strip it entirely and you’ve got a well written dad simulator wearing a legendary name.

Give me the old man who learned something. Keep the part that made gods nervous.

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) The strongest asset in Square Enix’s flagship role playing series has never been its airships, its summon animations, or its willingness to end the world halfway through a campaign. It has always been the ensemble. For much of its nearly four decade history, the series earned its reputation by assembling a roster where every member carried mechanical purpose alongside narrative weight, and where losing any of them changed how a fight actually played out. Recent installments have quietly walked away from that principle, narrowing the experience around a solitary protagonist while everyone standing beside him gets reduced to scenery, and the cost of that decision becomes obvious the second a battle begins.

Now let me talk to y’all like folks instead of like a press release.

I came up on a beat up SNES that lived under a milk crate in my grandmother’s den. Blanket over the window, sun beating outside, controller cord stretched across the carpet like a tripwire. What kept me in that room for months at a stretch was not the graphics. It was the crew. Fourteen playable folks in FF6, and every last one of them had a reason to exist. Sabin threw suplexes at a locomotive. Cyan swung a sword with a menu that made you hold your breath through four levels of stance. Edgar carried a toolbox like a mechanic who moonlighted as royalty. Gau ran wild on the Veldt learning moves off monsters nobody else could touch. Setzer gambled with slot reels that could either erase a boss or blow up your whole squad.

That roster was a posse cut. Everybody got a verse, everybody had a flow you could pick out blindfolded, and nobody was riding on somebody else’s beat.

Compare that to what the publisher has been handing us lately and something feels hollowed out.

Older entries built their emotional weight on the idea that a group of broken people had to lean on each other. FF4 practically ran on that engine. Allies joined, allies betrayed you, some got yanked off the board at the worst possible moment. Palom and Porom turning to stone still stings decades later because those twins were mechanically useful and annoying and lovable all at once. Losing them cost you real damage output. Grief and strategy hit at the same time, which is a trick very few games pull off.

FF9 did it differently but just as well. Vivi was a walking existential crisis wrapped in a hat too big for his head, and he also happened to be the reason you survived certain fights. Steiner started as a joke, a stubborn tin can yelling about protocol, then evolved into a wall you actually needed. Freya carried a whole tragedy on her back while jumping halfway off the screen. Quina ate enemies. Amarant sulked in the corner and threw things. Eight permanent party members, eight distinct rhythms, one story that felt like a found family instead of a solo tour with backup dancers.

Ten had my favorite version of this. That swap system where anyone on the bench could tag into an active turn meant benching somebody was never permanent. Lulu, Wakka, Kimahri, all of them stayed relevant to the final hour because the system refused to allow you to forget they existed. Blitzball nonsense aside, Wakka’s accuracy made him the reliable answer to flying enemies my sword users kept missing. Auron broke armor. Rikku stole and mixed. You learned every kid on that pilgrimage because the combat forced an introduction.

Somewhere along the way that philosophy got traded for something sleeker and lonelier.

Fifteen gave us four boys in a car and a soundtrack that made you cry in a gas station parking lot. Genuine love for Prompto, Gladio, and Ignis over here. Problem is, at launch, you directly controlled only Noctis. The homies fought under AI control, while most of your direct input came through their Techniques and cutscene warmth. Square eventually added full character switching in December 2017, a little over a year after launch, which tells you exactly where that feature sat on the original priority list. A brotherhood tale where you can only ever be one brother is a strange contradiction to build a sixty hour campaign around.

Sixteen went further and made Clive Rosfield the only human character under direct player control. Jill shows up in your camp with a whole tragic history and fights beside him, but never once takes a turn under your command. Torgal the dog gets more direct input from the player than most of the humans. Yes, the wolf is a good boy. Yes, I petted him every chance the prompt appeared. That does not replace a lineup.

Here is where I have to be fair, because I do not do the thing where fans pretend a good game is a bad one just to win an argument.

Sixteen’s combat is excellent. Combat director Ryota Suzuki brought experience from Capcom titles including Devil May Cry 5 and Dragon’s Dogma, helping shape something with genuine weight and precise timing, and those Eikon fights are the most spectacular set pieces the series has ever produced. Titan alone justifies the purchase. Clive’s arc about branded slaves and stolen agency is the sharpest political writing Square has attempted in years, and centering him serves that theme deliberately. A story about one man refusing to be a tool for other people’s power arguably needs a narrow lens.

Real time brawling also carries technical constraints. Steering four bodies at once creates chaos that turn based systems handled gracefully and twitch systems generally do not. Design teams face actual tradeoffs, not laziness.

But the excuse only stretches so far, because the counterargument came from inside the same company.

Remake and Rebirth run on real time action and hand you three characters to flip between mid swing. Barret tanks. Tifa builds pressure with speed. Aerith zones the field with wards. Yuffie throws that star and changes her ninjutsu element to exploit weaknesses. Red XIII builds vengeance gauge off blocking. Switching feels like changing instruments in the middle of a song, and the fights ask you to do it constantly. Rebirth even added synergy abilities that only trigger when two teammates coordinate. Somebody in that studio clearly believes an ensemble can survive a modern battle system.

Meanwhile the rest of the genre kept the faith without breaking a sweat. Metaphor ReFantazio gave us archetypes and a crew you build relationships with. Persona 5 built an entire second layer out of confidants. Baldur’s Gate 3 sold millions on companions so specific that people argue about them like family members at a cookout. Octopath split its narrative eight ways on purpose. Nobody told those developers that audiences only want one guy.

Why does this matter beyond mechanics? Because ensemble storytelling reflects something true.

Nobody I grew up around got by without help. Church mothers, uncles who fixed cars in the driveway, cousins who fed everybody, the neighbor who kept an eye on your door. Survival was rarely a solo act, and stories that pretend otherwise ring false to anybody raised inside a real community. The old rosters modeled interdependence. Your mage covered what your fighter could not. Your healer kept the whole operation breathing. Somebody had to draw aggro so somebody else could set up the kill. That is not just game design, that is Sunday dinner logic applied to dragons.

A single chosen one carving through everything by himself is a different premise with different values baked in. Sometimes that story is worth telling. Told exclusively, it starts feeling like the franchise forgot what made people fall in love with it.

So what do I want from the next numbered Final Fantasy?

Give me four bodies I control. Give me a healer whose absence I feel immediately. Let somebody leave the roster halfway through the run and let it hurt because I built around them. Bring back mechanical identity so distinct that I can name a character by their menu alone. Keep the flashy action, keep the production values, keep the orchestral swell when a summon lands. Just remember that the reason people still hum Terra’s theme thirty years later is that she was surrounded by folks who mattered.

Square knows how to do this. They wrote the manual. The Final Fantasy VII remake project and Square Enix’s Octopath games have already proved that ensemble driven RPG design still works on modern hardware.

Put the band back together. I am tired of listening to a solo.

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) Let me start with a confession. I have lost entire Saturdays to two dudes screaming at each other in a rock quarry while the sky turns purple and somebody’s hair changes color for the fourth time. I loved it. I still love it. But somewhere between the Cell Games and whatever tournament arc is airing right now, I started noticing something that bugs me every single season, and I think a lot of us feel it even when we can’t name it.

Somewhere along the way we stopped writing bad guys and started writing stat sheets.

Think about how conversations go now. Somebody drops a new antagonist and within six hours the internet isn’t asking what he believes, what broke him, or what he wants the world to look like when he’s done. The timeline wants to know if he beats Goku. Whole channels exist for nothing but that math. There are men with families and 401ks arguing in comment sections about whether a fictional man’s punch could destroy a fictional galaxy, and I say that with love, because I’ve been that man. But when the loudest question about a character is always “how strong,” you eventually get writers who answer that question and skip the rest.

Here’s the thing though. The heavies we actually remember, the ones that lodge in your chest and stay there for a decade, almost never won us over with numbers.

Griffith didn’t scare anybody with his output. Griffith scared us because we watched him be charming, be brilliant, be a genuine friend, and then make a choice so cold that nearly thirty years later grown folks still can’t say his name without their jaw tightening. The terror of him is that he was reachable. There was a hand out, and then it wasn’t. No transformation sequence in the world hits like that.

Johan Liebert has no supernatural abilities. He’s a regular sized man in a sweater. Half the cast of Fire Force could take him, and honestly so could a determined middle schooler. Still one of the most frightening people ever animated, though, because his weapon is a conversation. Soft voice, patient eyes, and then he finds the one loose thread in your life, tugs it, and walks off while you unravel on your own. Naoki Urasawa understood something a lot of modern writers forgot. Dread is a writing problem, not a wattage problem.

Makishima in Psycho Pass sits in that same seat. Dude reads books, quotes philosophy, and calmly argues that a society running on predictive scores has already surrendered its soul. And the uncomfortable part, the part that keeps that show in rotation for me, is that he’s not entirely wrong. A monster with a point is still a monster, but the point doesn’t go away. Watching a Black audience process a story about a system that judges your potential for crime before you’ve committed one, that scans you and sorts you and decides what you are, well. Let’s just say Makishima’s argument lands different depending on who’s watching. A real adversary does exactly that, makes you check your own position before you check his.

Now compare that to the parade we’ve gotten used to. New arc, new guy, he’s got a tragic flashback that lasts ninety seconds, he says something about how the world was cruel to him, and then he grows six arms. He gets a form. Then another form. By the time he explodes into light, I couldn’t tell you a single thing he wanted besides winning. The flashback isn’t ideology. It’s paperwork. It’s the show filing a form so we know it’s allowed to feel sad for a second before the next beam struggle.

And I want to be fair here, because Dragon Ball catches strays for this and it isn’t entirely deserved. Frieza works. Frieza works because he’s not just strong, he’s an imperialist. Dude runs an operation. Planets get bought and sold under his name, entire peoples get logged as inventory, and the whole time his voice stays bored and pleasant, the tone of somebody who has never once been told no. That is a personality. More than that, it’s a political posture wrapped in a purple lizard. The problem isn’t Frieza. The problem is that a thousand shows copied his ceiling and none of them copied his attitude.

Toriyama understood that raw strength worked better when it came wrapped in an unusual personality. Buu behaves like a child, while Beerus is a catlike god who naps and cares about pudding. Those choices are weird on purpose. They’re personality first.

Look at what actually stuck from the big three. Everybody remembers Pain, not because of the Almighty Push, but because he stands in front of Naruto and lays out a cycle of retaliation that the show cannot easily refute. Pain says pain teaches, that hurt people hurt people, and that peace built on somebody else’s suffering is just a scheduled war. Kid me heard that in a dorm room and got real quiet. Aizen sticks because of the sheer audacity of the man, that reveal, that walk, that voice. The numbers had nothing to do with it. Man was already iconic back when he was playing a mild mannered captain in glasses.

Meruem is maybe the best argument I’ve got. Yes, he’s the strongest thing in Hunter x Hunter for a stretch. But nobody talks about Meruem because of that. We talk about him because a creature engineered as a weapon learns to play a board game with a blind girl and slowly, painfully, becomes a person. His arc is not escalation. It’s tenderness sneaking up on something that was built to have none. The ending of that arc is quiet. Two people sitting in a room. No screaming, no craters. It wrecked me more than any final battle I’ve ever seen.

So what happened? Part of it is the market. Publications such as Weekly Shonen Jump pay close attention to reader surveys, while the larger anime business depends heavily on licensing and merchandise. A scary silhouette with a cool new form sells figures. Ideology doesn’t fit on a keychain. Part of it is us, honestly. We rewarded the escalation, clicked the tier lists, argued the matchups, made all that versus content profitable, and studios noticed. And part of it is that writing a real adversary is just hard. Anybody can write a guy who hits harder. Writing a guy whose worldview survives contact with the hero’s worldview takes actual thought about what you believe.

Because that’s the secret. Your antagonist is a mirror. Whatever your protagonist claims to stand for, the opposition is the pressure test. If your hero says people can change and your big bad’s only argument is “no they can’t, watch me hit you,” you didn’t test anything. You just scheduled a fight. But if your hero preaches forgiveness and the man across from him is somebody the world genuinely never forgave, now you’ve got a story. Now the punches mean something, because they’re carrying an argument.

I think about Stain a lot for this reason. He is far from the strongest villain in his world, basically a knife guy surrounded by walking artillery. Yet an entire society cracks around him, because the question he asks lands, who’s actually a hero and who’s just employed, who’s saving people and who’s building a brand. Ideas travel when they’re true enough to travel. Long after his body count stops mattering, the question keeps moving.

There’s your standard. Not can he destroy a planet. Does his idea survive him.

So my ask for the medium is simple. Give me the guy I argue with in my head at two in the morning. Give me somebody whose logic I have to work to dismantle. Let him be physically unremarkable if that’s what the story needs. Let him lose the fight and win the point. I’ll take one Johan over a hundred final forms, and I suspect most of us would, once the spectacle wears off and we’re left holding whatever the show actually said.

Strength is the easiest thing to write and the fastest thing to forget. Conviction is what we’re still talking about twenty years later.

Give us somebody worth being afraid of for the right reasons.

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)  Treyarch put this out in 2010, and I still don’t think people give it enough credit for how strange it was willing to get. Most Call of Duty campaigns run the same play. Big guns, bigger explosions, a helicopter or two eating the dirt before the credits. This one had all that, sure. But it wanted something else from you. It wanted you a little lost. You sit down expecting Cold War soldiers and grenades, and the first thing the game shows you is a man tied to a chair. Lights stuttering. A voice somewhere in the dark asking him about codes he can’t remember. Numbers scrolling past like roaches you can’t stomp fast enough. That’s the hello. That’s how it greets you.

That opening still lives rent free in my skull. Alex Mason, tied down, sweating, disoriented. Somebody keeps asking him about broadcast codes. He doesn’t know. He genuinely doesn’t know, and neither do you, and that not knowing is the whole point. Most shooters hand you a rifle and a reason. This one handed you a headache and dared you to trust anything you saw.

Here’s the thing folks slept on. Most of the story is being reconstructed through an interrogation. You aren’t playing missions so much as digging through a man’s cracked recollection while somebody with a rougher voice than yours pushes him to remember faster. Nearly every level is a memory, and memories, as anybody who has argued with a family member about who said what at Thanksgiving knows, are slippery little liars. Treyarch understood that. They built the whole experience on the idea that the narrator’s head was not a reliable place to stand.

Then came Viktor Reznov. My guy. Gravel voice, scarred up, dropping wisdom like a Soviet uncle who has seen too much snow and too much blood. He rides shotgun through Mason’s flashbacks, guiding him, naming enemies, telling him who has to die. Dragovich. Kravchenko. Steiner. The list becomes a prayer Mason repeats until it’s tattooed on his soul. You believe Reznov. Why wouldn’t you? He saved this man. He fought beside him. He feels realer than half the actual living characters.

And that’s the knife.

Because Reznov was dead. Had been for a long stretch of the timeline you were living through. The man riding along in Mason’s head giving orders was a ghost, a piece of psychological wiring somebody planted and somebody else never fully removed. The Soviets ran a conditioning program on Mason, tried to turn him into a sleeper, a weapon that walks around looking normal until the right sequence gets whispered and the trigger finger does what it was told. Reznov, the real one, got hold of that same programming and hijacked it. He couldn’t kill his enemies himself, so he rewired a captured American to do it for him, hiding his own vendetta inside the conditioning like a message tucked in a bottle.

Sit with how wild that is for a mainstream military franchise. The protagonist you steered through most of the campaign was a puppet, and the hand up his back belonged to a hallucination that was itself a smuggled revenge plot. You weren’t the hero saving the day. You were a loaded gun somebody else was aiming, and you spent hours thanking the phantom holding you.

Now let’s talk about the broadcast, the transmission, the endless recitation of figures that haunted the loading screens and the wall of a certain hidden room. Those weren’t set dressing. The broadcasts carried coded instructions meant to activate sleeper agents and order them to release Nova 6 across the country. Hudson and Weaver already had recordings of those transmissions. What they needed was Mason, because the Soviets had planted the ability to translate the sequences inside his conditioned mind. The whole tense back and forth, the flashing red room, the way that recitation gnawed at you, all of it was a man’s brain being pried open like a stubborn oyster while he fought to remember what the codes meant and where the numbers station was located.

I remember finishing it the first time and just sitting there. Controller down. Screen dim. Feeling like I’d been running through somebody else’s nightmare and only realized at the exit that the dreamer was me the whole time. Games rarely earn that. Movies barely earn that. The Manchurian Candidate did it. Memento did it. Get Out did it in its own way with the sunken place, that horror of your body still moving while your will gets shoved into a basement you can’t climb out of. Treyarch snuck that same dread into a product mostly known for teabagging and killstreaks, and somehow it worked.

What made it stick was the craft underneath the twist. The hallucinations weren’t a cheap rug pull tacked on at the finale. The clues were breathing in the margins the entire time if you were paying attention. Reznov appears where he shouldn’t. Timelines don’t quite line up. Characters react to Mason like he’s carrying something they can see and he can’t. On a second run the whole thing reorganizes itself in front of you, which is the mark of a story built with actual intention rather than shock for its own sake. Not every player caught it live. Plenty of us needed a forum thread and a homie explaining it before the pieces snapped together. That’s fine. Good mysteries reward the rewatch.

Here’s my honest gripe, and it’s less a gripe about that entry than a lament for everything after. Call of Duty returned to this well, especially with Black Ops Cold War, but it never recreated this exact feeling. The sequels chased spectacle. Bigger set pieces, more helicopters spinning out of the sky, more slow motion breaching. Fun, loud, absolutely. But loud isn’t the same as haunting. Later stories tried the “gotcha” structure, tried unreliable narration, tried to twist your understanding of who you were controlling, and a couple got close. None of them left me questioning my own perception the way that 2010 release did. None of them made the act of remembering itself feel dangerous.

Part of that is the franchise growing into a machine expected to satisfy an enormous global audience every year. You can’t build a slow, paranoid character study when the quarterly report demands a rollercoaster. I understand the business of it. Doesn’t stop me from missing the version of this series that trusted players to feel confused, to feel manipulated, to sit in discomfort instead of getting spoon fed a clean victory. That entry treated the audience like grown folks who could handle their own footing being pulled out.

There’s also something quietly heavy about who Mason turned out to be. A regular soldier turned into a vessel, his identity carved up and rewritten by governments on both sides treating him like equipment. As a Black man who grew up on stories about how power loves to reach inside people and turn them into tools they never agreed to become, that theme landed with extra weight for me. The horror wasn’t the gunfire. The horror was the erasure. Somebody reaching into your mind and deciding what you’d believe, who you’d hate, what you’d do with your own hands while telling yourself the choice was yours.

That’s the buried genius of it. Underneath the Cold War coat of paint, the real war was for a single man’s grip on reality. Every shootout was really a question. Is this true? Did this happen? Is the voice guiding me a friend or a splinter left behind by people who wanted me broken and useful? A shooter asking those questions in the middle of its own gunplay was rare then and feels damn near extinct now.

So yeah, I’ll say it plain. Later entries gave us prettier explosions and slicker menus and a multiplayer suite that ate years of our lives. What they never gave us again was that specific vertigo, that feeling of the floor of your own mind giving way beneath you. For all its rough edges, that 2010 title reached into the player’s head and left fingerprints. Everything since has been content to just entertain the hands. Give me the one that came for my perception. Give me the ghost, the chair, the recited code, the terrifying possibility that the hero was the crime scene the whole time.

That’s the one that stuck. That’s the one I still think about at two in the morning. And that’s the one nobody has managed to top.

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) For a series this beloved, One Piece is remarkably easy to underestimate, and most people do. A cheerful boy made of rubber sails off after a legendary fortune. Not wrong, just shallow. Spend enough hours inside what Oda built and a heavier idea surfaces. This is a story about liberty, and about the price tag hanging off it. Not the poster image where a hero throws a fist at the sky. The actual invoice, the one that always comes due.

Say it plain, the way the show rarely does. Being your own person, loose and answering to no crown, is not handed down. It gets purchased. And the coin tends to be the softest, warmest thing a person owns.

Look at Luffy first, since he’s the flag we all follow. Man wants to be the freest soul on the sea. That’s the dream. Not the richest, not the strongest for its own sake, the loosest. And look what he keeps laying on the table to chase it. He left the only home he knew as a boy. Then his brother died protecting him after finally being freed at Marineford. Arc after arc he throws his body into a meat grinder, breaks bones, burns years off his own life toward a horizon most folks swore was a fairytale. Don’t let the smile fool you. That grin is covering a tab.

Roger. King of the Pirates himself. The man had the whole world in his hand and still couldn’t buy his way out of the one thing coming for all of us. So what did he do? Walked to the gallows on purpose, turned himself in, laughed in the face of the crowd, and lit the fire for a whole era with his last breath. A man who decided even his death would be on his own terms, nobody else’s. Ungovernable, right down to the final second. His.

Nico Robin. Whole island gone. Ohara. Scholars who did nothing but study old rocks, wiped off the map because knowledge was the crime. Eight years old when the smoke cleared. Somehow she lived, carrying every drowned voice from that library on her back, running twenty years with a bounty on a child, never trusting a soul because trusting got people killed. When the moment finally came at Enies Lobby to holler that she wanted to live, that wasn’t a small line. That was a woman quitting the toll of hiding to pick up the harder tab of belonging. Both had a price. The one she claimed was worth the ache.

Franky nearly lost his life trying to stop the Sea Train that carried Tom away. With his body torn apart, he rebuilt himself out of scrap because dying wasn’t gonna bring Tom back or finish the dream they started. Man built a body that could take the hits his heart never learned to dodge.

Sanji, now. Born a prince, this one. Actual royalty, actual power, a bloodline whose name made whole armies flinch. And he walked away from every bit of it, eventually finding more family inside a floating restaurant than he ever knew inside a royal palace. Cooking for a stranger sat better with him than ruling next to people who never loved him. The sea won out over the throne. He’d be nobody’s weapon.

Nami sold off her own freedom to save her village, drew maps for a monster year after year, kept a smile stitched on so her people could keep breathing.

Zoro at Thriller Bark. Nothing happened. That was all he said. He swallowed a whole grown man’s worth of agony in silence and told nobody, because his captain’s goal weighed more than his own spine. Weakness dressed up as strength? Not even close. A receipt he settled in blood and never once asked to be paid back for.

Vivi belongs in this too, even though she never sailed off with the crew. A whole ship of family sat waiting, and yet she stayed behind for a country that needed her more than any adventure ever could. She put her people over her own wide open want. Sometimes the harder liberty is the one that keeps you rooted.

Now for the part that made me put the remote down.

Being free in One Piece is not some fuzzy vibe. Oda built the spine of this whole saga out of slavery. Real chattel bondage. Branding irons. Human beings owned as property by the Celestial Dragons, who sit in their marble city treating folks like furniture. If you a Black nerd watching this, your chest recognizes it before your brain does, because we know that story. We carry it in the bone.

Fisher Tiger climbed that mountain, broke into their holy city, and unlocked every cage he could reach, not just his own kind. He covered the mark of ownership with the blazing symbol of the Sun Pirates so the young ones wouldn’t wear that shame on their skin. And when the bullets caught him and human blood could have saved him, the hatred carved into him during slavery proved too deep to overcome. Yet with his last strength, he begged his crew not to hand that hatred to the next generation. He knew the poison inside him could not become their inheritance. Sit with the size of that. A man picking death while still trying to spare his children from the hatred that consumed him. The most costly kind of liberty there is, the sort you pay so somebody else never has to.

Koala is the proof it landed. A little girl he pulled out of those cages, who could have kept her head down the rest of her days, grateful just to breathe easy. Instead she grew up and threw herself into the fight against the same system that branded her, shoulder to shoulder with the Revolutionary Army. The gift she was handed got spent right back on the next person still locked up. That’s the chain snapping forward instead of dragging back.

And then there’s Kuma. Lord. I can barely talk about him without getting quiet. Descended from a hunted people, treated like a beast his whole life, and he still spent every last coin of himself. Gave up his memories, gave up his mind, let them scoop out who he was piece by piece until a machine stood where a father used to be, all so his daughter might get one shot at living. Two full years he held the line for the crew as a hollowed out shell, because he made a promise, and a promise was the one thing they couldn’t take. When the story of what he traded finally landed, grown folks were on the floor. That’s the truth Oda keeps whispering. The freest people here are almost always the ones who gave the most to hand that same gift to somebody who couldn’t reach it alone.

Bon Clay stayed behind in that prison so Luffy could run. Ace laid his life down in a war reaching for his baby brother. Jinbe walked out of the only home the ocean ever gave him to ride with a crew that might get him killed, because loyalty beat comfort. Even Shanks handed over an arm without blinking. Whitebeard could have seized the throne of the whole world and traded every ounce of that ambition for a crew of misfits he called his sons, then died so they could scatter and live. Brook drifted alone as a rack of bones for fifty years, mind nearly cracked, all to keep his word to one friend. Rayleigh could have lived like a king off the old era and stepped into the shadows instead, letting a new generation earn the horizon themselves. Over and over, same arithmetic.

So what’s Oda really saying under all the stretchy powers and goofy faces?

Liberty is not the absence of chains. It’s what you’re willing to hand over to snap them. Comfort. Safety. Your name. Your body. Sometimes the people you love hardest, or the version of yourself you assumed you’d get to keep. The World Government sells you a life with no risk and no wings, a tidy little cage with three meals a day, and calls it peace. And every soul on that ship looked at the offer and said keep it.

That’s why this show hits different for folks like us. We come from people who understood in the marrow that being loose was never the cheap option. It got paid for in bodies, in stolen years, in names lost and families split, by folks who chose to leave the next generation some open water even knowing they’d never taste it. One Piece just draws it big and loud and slaps a straw hat on top.

So next time somebody calls it a kids’ cartoon about buried gold, let them keep believing that. You and me already know what’s really waiting past the last island. It was never only about treasure. Whatever waits there, the deeper prize has always been the right to belong to your own self. And Oda’s stayed honest the whole run about the tab that rides shotgun with it.

Pay it or don’t. But don’t let a single soul tell you it ever came free.

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.