this might not be news to DQ fans but it's new to me—apparently Akira Toriyama's overbearing former editor Kazuhiko Torishima told some completely untrue story to Yuji Horii about how Toriyama was hooked on Portopia in order to initiate their collaboration dot.asahi.com/dot/2021010600…
it's not from this interview, but here's another Torishima/Toriyama tidbit for Dragon Ball fans: the android/Cell saga's constant changing protags were due to Torishima (who wasn't even editor by then!) being like "really, that's what you're going with?" after every new reveal
...so if it weren't for Torishima's brow-beating, that whole saga may have begun and ended, somehow, with Gero and that weird clown robot
back to the Horii interview, he ends it by talking about wanting to create a real-life Hero's Grave—this is not the first time he's brought this up, and it always comes up in a sorta-joking-but-not-really way, so I wonder if he might actually try to make it happen
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I deleted my earlier warning about the Business Journal Sakura Revolution article bc I figured nobody outside of my feed was going to see anyway, but I see people talking about it, so PSA: that site's renowned for posting misleading tabloid garbage, don't take it as gospel
they've already had to edit their article a few times, and the site they've been citing for sales figures has come out and said their numbers are extrapolated from app store rankings, are not necessarily accurate & shouldn't be passed around as hard data
what's more, it seems their article is primarily based around a video essay by some JP youtube dude, and he's been taking heat for all the slop they packed in around his words as if it had anything to do with him
like, think about just how many different rules Puyo has messed with, let alone all the clones and ripoffs and fan games and whatever else, and the only alternatives that ppl have ever seriously entertained are Fever (which took a minute to catch on) & PPT Swap (if that counts)
coming up with new stuff is hard & it can be hard to gauge just how much demand there is for something original to begin with
the other more pragmatic issue is that, aside from Tetris, Puyo's the only game in this genre that can still maintain traditional full-price games, but…
Nintendo's in the works to buy Next Level Games, the Canadian studio behind Luigi's Mansion 2 & 3, Mario Strikers, Punch-Out!! Wii, etc—if all goes well, Nintendo will attain complete ownership by March 2021 post.tokyoipo.com/tdnet/20210105…🇯🇵
basically, it seems like one of the owners wanted to sell his stake in the company and so Nintendo decided to buy the company outright so as to secure their working relationship, facilitate more direct personnel/resource exchange, etc
Next Level Games has gone on record about how they tried being a multi-line studio that simultaneously handled Nintendo & non-Nintendo games and how they ultimately didn't enjoy it, but I hope they can try that approach again because I want more games from the both of them
come to think of it, someone recently asked about this and I forgot to answer, and bc I'm in a reflective mood I figure I'll answer here: I ended up not going ahead with the idea of a formalised STG news resource, for three reasons (>)
one, doing it the way I think it ought to be done would mean covering euroshmups (which, like them or not, do occasionally and quietly find success, aspects of which are worth analysing) and so many other games/events that I just don't have the necessary time to keep up on
two, it's thankless work, and seeing the tiresome horseshit that gets thrown at shmups twitter dude, various youtubers, etc by jaded old dudes for having the temerity to ask for attribution or share their content with ppl with their intended audience makes me not want to bother
Hiroshi Iuchi's end-of-year Ubusana update is pretty much what it has been for the last few years (& as expressed in the recent stream) but he does go into general detail about the parts he's able to plug away at on his own: music, plot, etc vgmaterials.com🇯🇵
icymi, here's the statement he gave on M2's stream a few months ago
more context for those who haven't been following at all: Ubusana's been content/design-complete for a while but still hasn't entered full production due to budget, lack of personnel, indecision about how much to outsource vs. attempt to do him/themselves, etc and so...
forgive my indulgence but 2020's been a big year for @shmuplations, so here's a look back at everything that went up over the last twelve months—there's a lot of stuff I'm sure you all read & other things you'd be forgiven for missing, so let's recap (thread)
the year kicked off with shmuplations' first big video project: a subtitled translation of a 2016 NHK documentary on the 30th anniversary of Dragon Quest which features interviews with Yuji Horii, Koichi Nakamura, Akira Toriyama, and Koichi Sugiyama
following DQ30 was one of the most popular articles of the year: an assortment of interviews with composers Yuzo Koshiro and Motohiro Kawashima concerning the music of Streets of Rage 1, 2 & 3 shmuplations.com/sormusic/ their comments on SoR3 in particular were full of gems