Go Play a Toriyama Game Today

 

In some absolutely soul crushing news today, it turns out that Akiratoriyama, an absolute legend in video games and anime, has died at the age of 68.  I remember when I first came across his work around the time I was in middle school when Dragon Ball Z started being aired on TV and his work has been hovering around my life in various capacities ever since.  Hell, even right now there's a Dragon Quest Monsters towel with a bunch of monster and character designs of his adorning it pinned to the wall behind me as I write this post.  This guy was such a massive force in the field that even people like my wife, who are WAY outside of any of those interests knew who he was an the impact he had.

During his life he was quite the busy guy in the field of video games.  The most well known of it by a wide margin is Dragon Quest with Chrono Trigger following close behind but he worked on some other games that you may not have heard of or played.  The one that sticks right the fuck out in my mind is Blue Dragon, an RPG that sadly remains locked to the 360 and didn't review particularly review very well at the time but back then next gen JRPGs were a bit hard to come by so this scratched a particular itch and the effort was very much welcomed.  While the OG Blue Dragon is locked to the 360 there were a 2 sequels made for it on the DS so maybe those are easier to obtain and certainly easier to emulate if you chose to go that route.

If RPGs aren't your speed though he also worked on some fighting games.  You may think I'm about to list off all the Budokai and Tenkaichi Dragonball games but I'm not and of course I'm talking about the legendary Tobal No1.  It might not look much nowadays and it plays stiff as dick but it hails from a time when fighting games actually had content to experience so comes with a full on adventure mode that involves running around mazes and fighting dudes for experience alongside the regular 1v1 fighting.

The one thing I discovered while taking a quick glance at his wiki page for this short appriciation post is that he worked on a game called Fantasian.  Fantasian looks like a pretty standard JRPG but it's got a fairly unique visual style as all the environments are made out of hand-crafted dioramas instead of 3D graphics and that alone is enough to get me interested enough to give it a go.  Unfortunately it's been locked to the apple arcade for YEARS but maybe, in light of the news, I'll bite the bullet and give it a spin because I'm not sure when or even if a PC port is happening.  I'm not going to look it up in advance, I'm going to see if I can guess which diorama is his as I play then look it up at the end.

Japan and the world lost a legend today, 68 is far too young for anyone to be pushing up daisies.  Fire up some of his games, read some of his manga, watch some of his anime, put some respect on the mans name

Hokkaido Snow Festival

So I've not posted anything for a while due to being stupid busy (and a little bit lazy) but now that my holiday in Hokkaido is over I have a bit more time.  Even though it's not video games I thought I'd make one post about my experience there since the snow festival was quite the spectacle.

Hokkaido is located in the north of Japan and going there in the winter is like taking a plane right to the fucking Ice Cap Zone.  Hokkaido is so cold and there is so much snow everywhere that they don't really bother trying to remove it properly, they just have big ass trucks come in the night and shift it to the side of the pavement in huge piles so that cars don't spin out and kill people.  There is also some mild gritting of roads but aside from that they just let it all happen.

So I went up there for the Snow Festival, a famous festival in Japan where people come on down and build huge sculptures out of all that aforementioned snow and ice.

This Dragonball sculpture for example was probably the biggest and most popular thing in the festival.  People would come out on the stage in front of it to do little shows or give speeches or something but I never stuck around long enough to find out what they were talking about.  The snow festival is cold and crowded as shit so I didn't feel like standing around and listening to people talk for too long.

Aside from the big sculptures there is also an international competition where teams of 3 from all over the world come to Hokkaido to build snow sculptures.  These smaller ones are judged and then a winner is picked but I have no idea what the reward for having the best sculpture is.  I heard that each team is given about 4 days to create their stuff and it was cool to walk around the festival seeing the teams at work on their creations

Dudes from Poland working on their snow sculpture

Down the road from the snow festival there was an ice festival which was equally, if maybe not a little more impressive at times.

These were just sat in the main road in a place called Susukino and there were also a number of small, makeshift rooms crafted from ice that housed small bars and other places to buy glasses of shit booze like Jim Beam and Bacardi.  Despite the crappy drinks the ice festival was really impressive just because of the amount of detail that went into the sculptures.  Also the sun was shining on the day that I went so some of the snow ones melted a bit and looked a bit weird while the ice ones managed to stay impressive the entire time I was there.

There was another snow/ice festival in a place called Otaru too which was on a much smaller scale but kind of spread a bit wider and was certainly less busy.  All around the town shops had built little snow sculptures and then left a candle either on or by the side of it somewhere.  It was cool to walk down Otaru's streets and see all the sculptures dotted around town.

So that's essentially what I went to Hokkaido to do, look at snow.  It sure as fuck didn't disappoint and despite harsh conditions it's something that I would recommend doing if you're looking for a holiday idea.  Hokkaido has plenty of other shit to do, some of which I took part in but this is a gaming blog not my fucking travel journal so this is enough for now.

Usual gaming stuff will resume shortly!