It is, it says here on the blurb that comes with a very attractive press-kit promo box, "the latest title in the acclaimed STORM series based on the beloved Naruto anime and manga"-this being the same beloved franchise that I, until this game's arrival, had genuinely never heard of. Going to bars might have had something to do with it.Īnd now there's a new game in front of me: CyberConnect2's Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 4. The fascinating near-future worlds of Appleseed and Akira were committed to memory, but I suddenly wasn't interested in investigating others like them. (It's still magnificent, mind.) But then, without any real reason, I went cold on anime. For, like, a week, until I remembered Alien, and Blade Runner, and Total Recall, and Star Wars, and so forth. The first time I saw 1995's Ghost in the Shell, I was sure it was the greatest sci-fi film of all time. Manga picked up countless series from the 1980s and later, and put out new-at-the-time movies that blew our still-developing minds. The titles available seemed to stretch on forever, like there was no end to the amazing shows and full-lengths films we could watch. In other words, it shipped anime, the cartoons, not manga, the comics, which was very confusing for the 14-year-old me who just wanted to watch Cyber City Oedo 808 on a Sunday morning, or sit down with a friend to plough through half a dozen episodes of Fist of the North Star when we should have been seeing to our homework.
Founded in 1991 and headquartered in Los Angeles, the company, not the medium, was the market leader in supplying Japanese animation to Western audiences. When I was a younger man, a teenager you might say, I had a taste for Manga. All screens courtesy of the game's publishers, BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment