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Post by Sarge on Sept 25, 2018 22:11:03 GMT -5
Yeah, I played it. Unfortunately, I never saw a copy in the wild. Given the prices, it's no wonder I didn't.
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Post by anayo on Oct 1, 2018 5:28:09 GMT -5
ExYoukai Watch looks pretty charming. I’ve been meaning to watch the show for Japanese practice. While Youkai Watch is definitely the most modern “children who tame magical animals” multimedia franchise, I never felt it was as much of an international sensation as peak Pokemon, though. What I do remember stealing Pokemon’s thunder was Yu-Gi-Oh. There was this period around 2001-2002 where Yu Gi Oh just eclipsed Pokemon in popularity. Tweenage me kind of resented it for that reason. I’ve noticed that guys about 5 years younger than me have a lot of nostalgia for Yu-Gi-Oh, though. The Pokemon Movie - my Mom took me to the theater to see this. She slept through it. 10 year old me was aghast (“Moooommmm, how could you sleep through the Pokemon movie?!?”). The movie creeped me the hell out. The storyline was NOT a sunshine and rainbows kids’ flick. It’s about some scientists clone an ultra-rare Pokemon (Mew) from a DNA sample. But the clone (Mewtwo) turns out to be this roided-out, malevolent version who kills his creators in a scene taking cues from Akira (1989). Shortly afterward he decides he’s going to kill all of humanity. He can control peoples’ minds (and has a human character in his lair who does his bidding with glassy-eyed obedience.) He telekinetically stop attacks before they reach him (Ash loses his temper and hurls a punch at Mewtwo, but Mewtwo just lifts Ash in the air while he harmlessly struggles as though in zero-gravity.) The movie has an “anime weird” ending involving Ash getting killed by Mewtwo, getting brought back to life by Pokemon tears (I said it was anime weird), causing Mewtwo to have a change of heart. Me and all the other ten year olds hated this ending because we wanted Mew and Mewtwo to fight to the death. We would have intense debates about who would win. I’ll never forget this one kid named Alan chanting, “Mew’s gonna win! Mew’s gonna win!” I also remember it was very important to us who would win in a showdown between Mewtwo and Goku from Dragonball Z (not sure who would win now, but I will say DBZ is far more watchable for someone in their 20’s.) My parents took me to Bob Jones University summer camp in the year 2000. While I was there I wouldn’t shut up about Pokemon. One kid confronted me and said something like, “You shouldn’t play that.” I asked him why. He said, “Because it’s satanic!” I asked him why on earth he’d say that. He said something like, “Because Pokemon have psychic powers, which is satanic.” I asked my parents about it later and my Mom got a concerned look on her face and said, “Well, I’m not sure. I know Dungeons and Dragons definitely was satanic. Pokemon might be. I’ll have to look into it.” Pokemon never got the ban hammer though. Although one Saturday morning I started watching Yu-Gi-Oh and as soon as the narrator started talking about, “Powerful, ancient magic.” My mom said, “Alright, turn it off. None of that in my house.” I find it a little ironic now that I know my Mom read Stephen King’s “Pet Cemetery” and “It” in her teens and twenties, but I guess having kids has a way of changing one’s priorities and bringing out those protective urges. Anyway, today I don’t think any of these games really pose any spiritual concerns. I’d be more concerned about the weaponized commercialization of them. They really are designed to get kids to spend lots of money and time on them. Although I did find my Dad’s dismissive attitude of Pokemon a little disappointing. He still has this attitude like anime isn’t a “real” genre. I was over at his house last year watching Tenchi Muyou on my laptop when he strolled by, got a weird look on his face, and said, “Have you ever watched Tom and Jerry before?” I hesitated, then answered, “… Yes?” That's brilliant. XD Oh the cringe stories. I have a lot of those, but the funniest is at someone else’s expense. In fourth grade we’d love to invent our own Pokemon. Alan (same kid from earlier) would just take Pokemon from canon and change one letter to an “F”. So his version of Staryu would be “Faryu”. I approached him one day and said, “Alan what would you call your version of Psyduck?” Without hesitating he said very loudly, “Psy-%$#!.” A split second later his eyes got big and looked around with a self conscious expression on his face. I didn’t look like anyone had noticed so he leaned my way and said, “… Don’t go spreading that around, OK?”
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Post by Ex on Oct 1, 2018 9:31:18 GMT -5
While Youkai Watch is definitely the most modern “children who tame magical animals” multimedia franchise, I never felt it was as much of an international sensation as peak Pokemon, though. You might be surprised at how well Yo-kai Watch sells in the USA. The first game, all iterations of the second game, and the spin-off action series have been released in the USA. The various iterations of the third game have been announced for USA localization as well (releases February 8, 2019 here... super late 3DS release). And the fourth game, on Switch, has been announced for USA release too. Now I wouldn't say that Yo-Kai Watch has reached the same level of Pokemon awareness in the USA, only that for what these games are, monster capture-training JRPGs, Yo-Kai Watch is the closest to reaching that potential yet of any Pokemon competitors I've seen. I agree that Yu-Gi-Oh! eclipsed Pokemon in popularity as a card game series in the USA during that time period. (It never touched Pokemon as a video game series competitor.) Case in point was personal experience in early 2003. I was working as an assistant manager at a Fred's retail store, and we happened to sell Yu-Gi-Oh! cards there. We ended up moving the rack to within eyesight of the manager's office, the cashiers, and multiple cameras, because shits kept stealing packs off of it. Those cards still sold like wildfire despite the theft issue. My manager decided every Wednesday afternoon we'd let kids use our breakroom for weekly Yu-Gi-Oh! tournaments, to encourage even more sales of the cards. It worked, lots of kids came for the weekly tournaments. And these kids would beg their parents to buy them a few card packs before walking into the breakroom. Over time however, the kids started getting displaced by older, creepy dudes (mid-twenties to early-thirties) who wanted to play Yu-Gi-Oh!. I'm not saying those basement dwellers were pedophiles with an ulterior motive either, no, these guys were hardcore Yu-Gi-Oh! fanatics. Problem was, they didn't buy cards from our store, and they (perhaps intentionally) made the kids feel uncomfortable, so the kids (and their parents' money) stopped coming on Wednesdays. My manager shut down the weekly Yu-Gi-Oh! tournaments shortly after.
Edit:
Man most of you guys had REALLY strict parents about content restriction. Compared to you dudes, my parents were ultra liberal (or ultra lazy) about what I could watch or play as a kid. The only thing they wouldn't let me watch would have been straight up porn (my mom probably wouldn't have cared about that, my dad would have). But magic? Evolution? Demons? Violence and gore? Nudity? I was watching stuff like that at five years old with my parents. For better or worse.
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Post by Xeogred on Oct 1, 2018 10:03:43 GMT -5
Man most of you guys had REALLY strict parents about content restriction. Compared to you dudes, my parents were ultra liberal (or ultra lazy) about what I could watch or play as a kid. The only thing they wouldn't let me watch would have been straight up porn (my mom probably wouldn't have cared about that, my dad would have). But magic? Evolution? Demons? Violence and gore? Nudity? I was watching stuff like that at five years old with my parents. For better or worse.
Yeah, now they're the total opposite and hippies, even way more out there than I like to go on like supernatural things and whatnot. There's a 5 year gap between my sister and I, it's safe to say she had a very different upbringing and less rules, though they were way harder on her about curfews.
Naturally found my way around everything with friends though. Watched X-Men at my neighbors, played Doom when I was 5 years old at a friends, played all the M rated PSX classics in grade school, snuck into movies, etc. I think I turned out okay...
Kind of like anayo mentioned, my parents were also really into KISS or what THEY were told was Satanic themselves growing up, all the hair metal and stuff. My parents are on the younger end and it's definitely weird to consider the phases they went through at certain ages I've hit or passed myself in comparison. Weird and different times...
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Post by toei on Oct 1, 2018 12:40:12 GMT -5
Ex Magic: The Gathering was a huge fad in my last year or two of elementary school, and there was a store dedicated to them less than ten minutes away, so we went there all the time. There were often adults playing at the few tables, but there was never any issue. We'd go there to browse and buy stuff (literally any pocket money, birthday / christmas gifts and any money I earned went to that during that period), but we'd play at each other's houses. The adult players clearly understood the game at a whole different level than we did, anyway, and we'd have all lost badly to them (and probably disagreed on the rules). The solution at the store you worked at might have been to explicitly make it a tournament for kids, or have two tournaments?
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Post by Ex on Oct 1, 2018 12:47:19 GMT -5
The solution at the store you worked at might have been to explicitly make it a tournament for kids, or have two tournaments? Being a store the decisions were always financially based. The kids would encourage their parents to buy packs of cards when they came to the store (along with candy and drinks). The adults didn't buy cards (or anything else) from the store, and just wanted to use our breakroom as a free hangout for tournaments. The store gained nothing in that regard, but rather lost money, due to the kids feeling unwelcome via the adult players. The decision to shut down the entire thing was my manager's, I had nothing to do with the outcome.
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Post by Sarge on Oct 1, 2018 13:40:10 GMT -5
My parents were pretty restrictive early, but much less so as I got older. I think they realized that, once I knew fact from fiction, I could handle the stuff that wasn't Biblical in nature. I remember going for Lord of the Rings at a book fair, thinking it might have been an iffy choice (wizards and magic and all that jazz). Nope, in fact, my Dad said that he read them when he was in college, and highly recommended them. Same deal with Harry Potter, although I was college-aged by then.
Most of the iffy stuff I was exposed to ended up being at various friends' houses. I remembering seeing the start of The Exorcist, with the girl in the classroom exposing herself. Another time, I watched one of the Jason movies, and honestly, it didn't scare me at all. Which, of course, is rather strange, given that the scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark gave me nightmares, but whatever. I saw the uncut version of Terminator 2 many, many times before I was technically old enough to watch them.
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Post by toei on Oct 1, 2018 13:44:26 GMT -5
The solution at the store you worked at might have been to explicitly make it a tournament for kids, or have two tournaments? Being a store the decisions were always financially based. The kids would encourage their parents to buy packs of cards when they came to the store (along with candy and drinks). The adults didn't buy cards (or anything else) from the store, and just wanted to use our breakroom as a free hangout for tournaments. The store gained nothing in that regard, but rather lost money, due to the kids feeling unwelcome via the adult players. The decision to shut down the entire thing was my manager's, I had nothing to do with the outcome.Oh, I know, I was just suggesting that maybe he could have just restricted participation in the tournament to kids aged 14 & under or whatever to avoid this.
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Post by chibby on Oct 3, 2018 16:35:46 GMT -5
I even asked for Pokemon Snap and Pokemon Stadium, two N64 games I can see now are pretty brazen cash-ins. Shit all over the card game and the T.V. Show if you want to, but don't you DARE insult Pokemon Snap. Take that back right now! I've regaled this thread on numerous occasions of the things my parents thought were tools of spiritual warfare. @tsumuri, not to one up, but my own cringe inducing memory from this time period was trying, very much in earnest, to warn my friend that her listening to rock music could very much lead to demon possession. She... She was gracious enough not to laugh in my face, which is frankly more than I deserved. My old man's levels of religious intensity ebbed and flowed over the years, but he maintained a hard-line stance against Pokemon to his grave.
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Post by Ex on Oct 3, 2018 17:50:00 GMT -5
My old man's levels of religious intensity ebbed and flowed over the years, but he maintained a hard-line stance against Pokemon to his grave. I can't even imagine what people like your father would have thought about Megami Tensei. I mean in Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne for example, if you wanted to, you could literally recruit demons, work for Lucifer, and kill Yahweh.
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