Marvel...BAKUGAN?! + Damn You, Nintendo.

Just wanted to update with something. Here's something.

Marvel VS Bakugan.Yes, that is a real thing. Discuss below. :)

Also, someone please get me this and/or the new Serperior Tin for Christmas. The cute little sculpted figures in both packages are SUPER-detailed. I particularly like how he box set shows Reshiram's wings working; they're segmented at the digits (no, Reshi is likely not feathered), sort of like Avatar's Banshees. I've really been digging that segmented wing style as of late, so sorry if I come off as begging, but...please?

I Surrender.

No, I'm not quitting this blog in favor of my creature one. I still have plenty of card game love left in me, as my eBay watch list will attest. Speaking of, I need to ask WTF happened with my Digimon card game decks...

But I digress. I have bitched long enough about how Pokemon has been mooching Digimon's designs since Gen III (as well as, perhaps, YGO's since Gen II), about how Bakugan mooches from everybody, and so on. Corporations mooch off of each other all the time, no matter how shamelessly.

I surrender. I'm going to stop complaining about that. Digimon, though cool, is all but dead. What made it better than Pokemon originally has been all but lost; the new Digimon seem almost like Transformers or Megazords. Pokemon has won by appealing to the lowest common denominator. Deal with it. (Plus, Bandai fails hard at marketing.)

Similarly, I actually like how Bakugan mooches, sometimes. For example, Skyress looks an awful lot like Magic Knight Rayearth's Windam. The two are similar down to the color. No other monster series had ever tried to base something off of a monster from a shoujo manga (and a rather famous one at that!) that had been made YEARS before. This could grant CLAMP some extra revenue should people dig deep enough. That's not a bad thing.

There will, however, still be times when I bitch at copying...especially when it's done poorly. YGO, although based off of Magic:the Gathering itself, is EXTREMELY prone to being copied. Duel Masters is the most notorious copy of BOTH games, no matter how unique people claim that it is. That I will pick up on like no tomorrow.

No more bitching about the designs. Franchises evolve. They are just using what works.

New NCS + Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's: More than meets the eye?

NIKE! I hate to sound like a TOTAL girl, but pretty horsie is pretty! Pegasi (including winged alicorns) have always been my favorite members of the fantastic horse family, and Nike up there is no exception. Nike's foil is also AWESOME!

On another note, posts on dA and shared links have told me that YGO 5D's is actually a decent series. The first episode and the monster designs did not impress me, but the characters and monsters seem to receive substantial development.

Yes, characters and monsters. Apparently Stardust and BRD have a love/hate rivalry going, and AFD has a backstory. It seems solidly written, but I will try my best to avoid it until it is complete. There is no telling when the writing will suddenly turn sour.

Also, no matter HOW well-written the series is, Konami is handling it the wrong way. You have marketable monsters, good characters with decent, themed decks, and a new game mechanic to pimp, but what do they do with all that? Churn out Yusei product after Yusei product after Yusei product, make cards unrelated to the series crappy, and do not seem to realize how badly their Synchro mechanic has affected the game. They are doing a lot of things right- if only they would go back to slimming the gap between collectors and players.

TROOOGDOOOR!

Is it just me, or is "dragon" some sort of golden word when it comes to marketing? I'm not just talking about card games; there's a movie coming out called How to Train Your Dragon. You know, as if dragons now have some sort of all-encompassing care guide. There are a few other franchises I could poke at, but that movie in particular made me wonder if dragons (as a whole) are nearing the end of their rope.

Does anyone else think that dragons have reached a low point? Sure, they were mostly created to begin with, being largely exaggerated snakes and fish at their cores, but...gah. I cannot even finish that sentence. Dragons have degenerated from something potent yet imaginary to creatures designed to sell stuff. This is especially true for Western dragons; oriental dragons, though pimped, are still held in such high esteem in China that disfiguring the image of a dragon is just plain wrong.

Case in point: Yu-Gi-Oh!. I cannot count the amount of times that dragons have been advertised as the monsters on that show. Two of the God Cards are dragons, the three Legendary Dragons were Western-style dragons, and 5D's effing revolves around 5 dragons (albeit with some creative tweaks). It's a shame that, in a game with SO much potential for awesome creatures, Konami resorts to market whores. They're almost at the point of running out of words to attach 'dragon' to. Better break out a thesaurus!

Bakugan has a similar, albeit better-maintained, problem. It suffers from what I like to call "Tai syndrome": Not only does the main character have a dragon, said dragon is obligated to all the merch and forms the creators can muster. In Bakugan's case, there's the normal Dragonoid, the evolved Dragonoid, something called Maxus Dragonoid...I've lost track. I should feel lucky that Skyress gets some merchandise as opposed to none. Now that they've killed her off, I'm not sure how long this balanced character marketing will last.

Pokémon used to be good at keeping dragons scarce, but I can see the insanity starting. Gen III had, along with the usual "psuedo-legendary" that just so happened to be a dragon, two seemingly random Dragons that evolved from Pokémon with other types and three Dragon-type Legendaries that...didn't look too hot. I personally cannot tell WTF Lati@s are based off of, and Rayquaza would look OK if they had done just a little bit more work on its tail fin (or omitted it entirely). The three D/P/Pt cover monsters do not even look finished, but it doesn't matter. They're dragons. People will snap them up because of THAT alone!

Digimon, Battle Spirits, and M:tG are fine in this regard. Although, yes, I did make mention of "Tai Syndrome," that was more of a writing flaw in Digimon Adventure (please tell me I wasn't the only one who wanted to see the Mega forms of Tentomon, Biyomon, Gomamon, and Palmon get some screentime) than a gimmick, and Matt got most of the same stuff. Battle Spirits...OK, it has dragons, but it also has a bunch of other stuff that makes it worth looking into. The same goes for M:tG.

So, for those wondering, it's not that I hate dragons. I just hate the marketing porn that they have become. Stick a dragon in ANYTHING and it will sell. Forget substance, story, or integrity. Instant money: Just add dragons.

Fakugan.

Have you ever received a Bakugan (or other merchandise) from eBay that just...didn't seem right? Now I know what it feels like.Hong Kong is churning out fake Bakugan.

Check out the pic below:



OK, first off, I had ordered a Subterra Storm Skyress, not a Ventus. That made me WTF, but something was still off when I tried to open the Skyress I did receive.

The first thing that tipped me off to this one's authenticity or lack thereof was the fact that her crest did not come out. Period. Also, the paint job is SHODDY and she does not open well. She does not bear the markings of other fake Bakugan, but she came from Hong Kong, so there is the possibility that she is either a fake or a factory reject.

Now, I've seen another auction or two NOT from Hong Kong with the jungle green Skyress in question, but the paint job, texture, and fact that the crest does NOT come out still say that this is a fake.

I also recently got some fake Digimon cards. It was IMPOSSIBLE to tell in the auction. It was, however, obvious when I got the cards - the backs of every type of card were different, the set numbers DID NOT EXIST, and the numbers were way too big.

"Caveat emptor": A rule of the internet.

*Sigh.* It wouldn't let me post.

Yeah, apparently the cookies for this blog are malfunctioning on my Mac. Hopefully, this will be fixed by the time I re-find my Doctor Who card pack (come back, you...), and perhaps I will also have a few more obscure packs to open. ;)

New Bakugan Video Game Revealed.

The trailer for the next Bakugan game. This is probably old news to some of you, but nobody ever reads this, and I need to rant somewhere.

Thoughts:

- UNCANNY VALLEY'd! The humans look TERRIBLE. I have to give them credit for trying, but the Uncanny Valley is KILLING Dan in the trailer. For those unaware of WTF I am talking about, the Uncanny Valley is a point where realistic rendering almost becomes too realistic, and all the differences start to stick out like sore thumbs.

- In contrast, the monsters look beyond awesome. I could reach out and touch that Hydranoid if I wanted to. Do I? I'm not sure, but I'm looking forward to seeing Skyress rendered that beautifully.

- Less mini-games, please. I'm glad I didn't get the first game; after watching my brother play the Wii version, I realized that the mini-games were just as annoying as I had been told. Simplicity can be bliss. K.I.S.S.

Looking forward to this! ^_^

Magical Beasts and How to Sex Them.

A while back, Janime (a famous YGO site) posted something wrong that I wasn't pushy enough to correct, but was detectable immediately. I was only in my early teens when I got into YGO, so if my BS radar was going off then, it was flaring like CRAZY when I posted the correct stuff on my own site.

The issue was this: There are two anime-only cards in YGO called "Phoenix (Houou) Formation" and "Suzaku (Sparrow) Formation." The site was telling us that Houou and Suzaku were opposite sex members of the same species.

I must have LOL'd so hard that I didn't even bother correcting them. There are SO many things wrong with that. I see where they were coming from - the Houou card is aggressive while Suzaku is defensive - but the two are different species. Houou is the mythical bird representing feminine power and marital harmony; Suzaku is the crimson bird that rules the southern quadrant of the sky and the element of fire.

To demonstrate how silly it is to mix them up: Imagine if every white tiger got confused with Byakko, another mythical guardian beast. I would need to see evidence telling me otherwise about Suzaku; Digimon and Matsuri Akino (Pet Shop of Horrors) both mark it as a distinctly different creature from the houou.

I like 4Kids's way of dealing with the problem. Despite looking just as peacock-like as the houou, the two are considered different creatures (like the pixiu and qilin are), and Suzaku's original kanji do indeed translate to "Vermilion Sparrow."

So, why am I bringing this up now?

Chinese creatures often have a way of telling the females from the males. In the case of houou/fenghuang, although both sexes are assimilated into the name, it is possible to tell whether one is looking at a male or female bird by counting their tailfeathers; males have an odd number, while females have even. That means that, yes, Skyress from Bakugan is indeed female. ^_^

Another easily-sexable animal is the Chinese lion/shishi/shisa. The surefire sign is that the female has a cub under her paw while the male has a sphere. People are impressed when I can ID which lion's which. Now you can, too!

You wanted to see me?

OK, then. Have a link to a video of me opening card packs!

Yesterday was a good pull day. ^_^

Collectible Dog Tags?

So, besides the mind-scarring bath products, I found something else interesting and Bakugan-related: Collectible dog tags.

I love dog tags. I love the chains that come with them. The clasps aren't super-fragile (like some jewelery latches are), and you can put all sorts of cool things on the tags. They also don't look particularly girly, despite the fact that they are indeed necklaces.

This is certainly not the first time I have invested in such dog tags. Somewhere, floating around in the mire of chaos called my bedroom, there is a Megatron tag and trading card. There is also a Birdramon tag that I need to re-find. Point is, they're cool, so I was excited to see trading packs with Bakugan characters. ^_^

I got a pack...and pulled a "Luminous" (i.e. glitter finish) Preyas tag + a bunch of Dragonoid stickers. Not bad, but I dunno...it feels like they could have done something besides glitter. Glow-in-the-dark tags would have been AWESOME. It's also kinda weird that the trading card didn't match the tag, but I suppose that was done for variety's sake. More randomness = more cash.

Also, for some reason, they left out Runo and Julie's monsters entirely. Is something NOT cool about tigers and golems, or do I detect a hint of sexism? Hrrrrmmm...

On a side note, someone needs to use this tag + trading card strategy to promote Claymore...C'mon, SJ. You know you want in on this. These things are made extra cheaply in China. XP

Bakugan....body wash?!

No, I did not mistype anything: Bakugan now has bath sponges, body wash, bath bombs (at least, I think that's what they were), shampoo, toothbrush holders, sponges...etc. No, I was not on drugs. I was at Wal-Mart.

I wish I was kidding about this.

At least it did not break my brain as much as Digimon eau de toilette.