The Fighting Game Character Shonen Otaku Awards

Characters are the lifeblood of a fighting game.  They are the means by which the players engross themselves in the game through their varying fighting styles and personalities as they clash in combat. From Mexican wrestlers to masked karatekas to flawed super soldiers, the guys you see in fighting games get wild.

Fighting game characters often shine in their own particular way.  Some are made to look cool first and foremost, some are meant to be the most fun to play with and others are made to be extremely difficult to use, but incredible in the right hands.  Over the years in the many many different fighting games I’ve played, I’ve identified some fighters that excel in certain ways that no other has ever matched.  To recognize those standouts, I’ve made this list of awards to celebrate the best of the best in fighting game history, the Shonen Otaku Awards!

The only criteria I have for these awards is that they cannot be from fighting games based on a license.

Shonen Otaku Plays Dead by Daylight

Neogeo Arcade Stick Pro Review

Plug-and-play consoles are a great idea on paper: a quick, portable means of playing games right out of the box with almost no other accessories or game cartridges required.  Unfortunately, be it due to the limited technology of their time or just plain laziness, a lot of plug and play consoles aren’t that great.  Over the years the most common ones I’ve seen are the basic Atari and retro arcade games like Pac Man with the occasional Double Dragon or original Mortal Kombat.

The NES and SNES Classic systems caused a bit of a resurgence in retro plug-and-play consoles. After how much demand they got, I started seeing more of the retro Sega Genesis and Atari plug-and-play consoles as well as the PS1 Classic on store shelves.

The Super Nintendo Classic was the only one to catch my interest, but it wasn’t enticing enough to join the rabid fans in hunting one of them down, especially when I already had, or could easily get, the games on it off the WiiU eShop or other ports.  You’d have to put KOF on your retro game system to get me to want it.

Wuzzat.

Samurai Shodown Neogeo Collection Review

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I love game compilations. They’re a bargain, convenient and sometimes have extras for added value.  There are a lot of great game compilations I can recommend starting around the time of the Gamecube, but in recent years game developer Digital Eclipse has been rising to prominence in this particular subgenre.

A not-inaccurate way to describe Digital Eclipse compilations is that they are the Criterion Collection’s game counterparts. Using their Eclipse game engine, they’re able to take the ROMs of older games and decompile them for modern systems at maximum efficiency, and using painstaking effort and resources from whoever hires them, they get every detail they can about the games included. That includes development history, interviews, high quality scans of whatever production and promotional artwork they can get their hands on, music galleries and explanations of each game’s central idea and what unique parts they play in the history of its franchise and gaming. It can almost make the games more of a side attraction there to let you experience the history the rest of the package lays out.

I recommend their Street Fighter 30^th Anniversary Collection, even if Street Fighter is obviously for peasants who can’t play KOF.  It not only has all the mainline games made before Street Fighter 4 (as well as the original Street Fighter nobody cares about), but it also has online play for the four most important games included and the aforementioned museum.

That's a lot of games.

After how well they pulled that off, I got excited for their new fighting game anniversary collection on the PC: the Samurai Shodown Neogeo Collection. It may not be as awesome as the fast-paced action of KOF, but Samurai Shodown has its own legacy as a series less focused on high speed combos and more focused on slower-paced fencing, where one strike from a weapon can do tons of damage and draws lots of blood to really make you feel the weight of the blades. With a beautiful aesthetic of the Edo period of Japan, it’s host to all kinds of warriors of old from around the world, from Prussia to France to Texas. It’s a great series well-deserving of such a compilation.  There was already a Samurai Shodown compilation, the Samurai Shodown Anthology for the Wii, PS2 and PSP, but more game compilations available on more systems is good to have and both the Anthology collection and Neogeo collection have their own quirks and upsides, regardless of what might be considered the better one.

This is one of the best pieces of cover art ever.  Gold star.

Shonen Otaku's Top 5 Voice Actors

Voice actors are a critical part of any animated medium.  Just like any live-action movie or TV show, no game or animated series would have anything close to the kind of emotional impact it has without the performance to back it up and voice actors have just as much training and background as the Hollywood stars.  Among the many actors in games and anime, there are a select few who stand out as my favorites.  Based on my previous writing one may expect such favorites to be the likes of Keith Silverstein, Kevin Michael Richardson, David Brimmer, Maddie Blaustein or Christopher Corey Smith, but that is a misconception.  To set the record straight, I present my top 5 favorite voice actors ever.