Extra History: The Sengoku Basara Way: Part 3

With Nobunaga dead, the last 2 parts of the Extra History videos cover Hideyoshi, his death and the battle of Sekigahara.  This post is going to be shorter than the other ones because, well, the videos go into a lot of backgrounds that Sengoku Basara chooses to push to the wayside for the sake of an exciting action story, but there is still a fair bit to note.

 

Extra History: The Sengoku Basara Way: Part 2

I've held off on discussing Nobunaga's Sengoku Basara design.  Everyone knows it.  He's portrayed as an evil overlord with a spiky and intimidating outfit with a blood red cape and he laughs at the carnage and atrocities he commits.  Up to this point in the Extra History videos though, Nobunaga has just been a very tactical and pragmatic warlord, not a lot worse than the others.  It's starting around here where we start to see where his reputation comes from.

Extra History: The Sengoku Basara Way: Part 1

We aren't done with Sengoku Basara yet.  In the first part of my Sengoku Basara retrospective I directed people to a series of videos from Extra Creditz, specifically their Extra History sub-series.  This 6-part series of short videos does a good job of detailing all the most important moments of the Sengoku period while making them fun and expressive through the use of artwork.  Even more fun an expressive is one of my favorite franchises, Sengoku Basara.

 

It's always funny to me when I learn something about history and think back to how the madcap action of Sengoku Basara interpreted that, especially with Sanada Yukimura Den steering closer to real history.  As such I thought it would be fun to go over some real history and how that was interpreted into what we see in the games.  The Sengoku era of Japan is already pretty crazy, as the videos show, so watching it become more crazy is pretty entertaining.

Sengoku Basara Retrospective: Sengoku Basara: Sanada Yukimura Den

I originally ended my Sengoku Basara retrospective at Sengoku Basara 4 because the main series and all the English media was already covered and the last game, Sanada Yukimura Den, is story-focused when fan translations are already incomplete and sparse for Sengoku Basara 4, which is still more than Sanada Yukimura Den got.  Since then I discovered a miracle.  An app for the iphone that, in a way, breaks through Capcom’s attempt to stop American players from enjoying Sengoku Basara 4: the translate app.

With the translate app, players can take pictures of the screen as the dialogue appears and form halfway comprehensible translation of all the text.  It doesn’t make the Japanese voice acting any better, but with the help of the translation app I can finally understand and somewhat enjoy the stories of Sengoku Basara 4, which, it turns out, are wonderful.  Sengoku Basara 4’s stories have something for everyone.  It has stories that are funny, sad, cute, awesome and everything in between.  It’s a pain to have to take constant pictures of the screen as the dialogue goes along and it doesn’t alleviate the depression of Capcom’s vicious betrayal, but it does make it partiallypossible to play the game to the potential it was made to be played.

It also means that Sengoku Basara: Sanada Yukimura Den is on the table.  Now that I can understand this more story-centric game, I can give my thoughts on it proper.

TV Edits of the Viewtiful Joe Anime: Episode 19

In this episode, Joe helps a young girl reunite with her mother while inspiring a team of little league baseball players led by Mona Marshall to not give up, all the while Gran Bruce concocts a plan to defeat Joe by cutting him off from cheeseburgers.

 

This episode is probably taking beats from a sports movie (pick one), but the movie it seems to take place in is Friday the 13th.  Yes, really.  I'll get to that.