All right, let's move on from the RPGs. The only thing I had left was Order of the Griffon, and it's about as impenetrable as any of the Gold Box D&D games. Well, maybe it isn't that obtuse, but it's another first-person dungeon crawler and I've seen quite enough of those for the time being.
Instead, we're moving onto a new theme. As someone who is frequently associated with hyper-masculinity (this is emphatically untrue, but stick with me here, I'm doing a bit), it's hard to find games that are able to reflect my lumberjackian levels of testosterone. The games I'll be covering all this week all have "man" in the title, is basically what this is, because I noticed there was a lot of them and I'm running out of rational ways to thematically link these games together.
The first is Namco's Bravoman. A bizarre but inconsequential curio back in the day, the telescopic superhero has gained something of a minor resurgence of late due to his prominence in Namco Bandai's ShiftyLook campaign to resurrect various old licenses of theirs via webcomics and cartoons. Why they couldn't just release another dozen Namco Museum games or give them all cameos in the next Tales as per usual I'm not sure. Bravoman's a "parodic" superhero game, ridiculing the po-faced tokusatsu superhero shows that were a thing in Japan and decidedly less of a thing in the US. For all this pre-amble leading up to the part where I post a lot of pictures, I don't really have a lot to say about it.
This Week on "Bravoman": The Real Housewives of VILLAINY
Bravoman's fun enough on a rudimentary level, but there's nothing particularly remarkable about it. The TurboGrafx-16 kind of hovered between the 8-bit and 16-bit era, so you'll see plenty of its games hearken back to a more innocent time where all you needed to do was to walk right and hit dudes occasionally. The stretchy powers both enhance the player's arsenal of moves while also allowing them to stand safely far away from any danger, so it kind of feels like a double-edged sword. Or a double-length arm. I don't know. I feel like a lot of the humor and references might have got lost in the translation too.
But hey, it looks like Namco's doing some weird and interesting stuff with the character now. On top of the ShiftyLook media, there's also a new tablet game called Bravoman: Binja Bash. On the one hand, I have to imagine Bravoman is a hopelessly obscure game even in regions that actually got to play it and so all the attention and funding being put towards its resurrection is kind of baffling; but on the other hand - that is, the one that I've been using to flip off Capcom for mishandling all of its legacy properties besides Street Fighter - I can totally get behind any weird attempts to tap into nostalgic appeal like this. Namco's never one to toss an idea or an old character to the wayside, even if it's just some blue guy with extendo-limbs that everyone's forgotten about.
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