Director: Yūji Mutō
Screenplay: Ryota Yamaguchi
Based on the manga by Mine
Yoshizaki
Voice Cast: Sakura Nogawa as
Fubuki Sakuragasaki; Hiroshi Fujioka as Leader; Kaori Shimizu as Hanako
Kokubunji; Masaki Yamamoto as Sanpeita; Megumi Toyoguchi as Honey; Satsuki
Yukino as Alka; Shinnosuke Furumoto as Arashi; Toru Furuya as Mr. Mystery; Yuu
Asakawa as Chizuru Jyumonji
Veronica Taylor as Fubuki
Sakuragasaki; Bob Orlikoff as Masao; Brad Bradford as Arashi/Mr. Mystery; Dan
Green as Leader/Narrator; Jamie McGonnigal as Sanpeita; John Paul George Jones
as Groepie; Lisa Ortiz as Chizuru Jyumonji; Rebecca Honig as Ruriko
Sakuragasaki; Sharon Becker as Alka
Viewed in English Dub
This, viewed by itself without
context, would be an embarrassment for someone to see as his or her first
anime. It's a title to point to so anyone could dismiss anime as a bad thing.
There's no way around this sense of shame with Arcade Gamer Fubuki, and yet it's entirely blameable (no matter how
wrong it sounds to write this) because the production was more fixated on
teenage panties than a potentially fun fever dream, envisioning an evil cabal
wanting to take over the world who can only be defeated by playing video games.
Technically, I viewed Fubuki as a notoriously bad anime,
though it's never brought up with the infamy of a Garzy's Wing (1996) and that ilk. It only got to my attention
because of Justin Sevakis. Among his
many hats over his career, he was the in-house video and subtitle editor for
the DVDs of Central Park Media, writer and co-podcaster in the Anime News Network, alongside Blu-Ray/DVD
Authoring and Restoration of titles currently for Discotek Media. Authoring is an unsung position, as restoration in
cinema let alone anime has always been a task with arduous struggles before the
successes, testament to the poor guy with the restoration of Discotek's release of Cyborg 009 The Cyborg Soldier, the
2001-2 TV anime of Shotaro Ishinomori's
manga which never got a full run or DVD release in the United States, and was a
horror story in when Sevakis got the
master materials to restore. Suffice to say, it took a year to complete, just
for the uncut dub alone, because the master tapes were in a frightful state,
aspects of restoration we don't consider even in terms of non-anime cinema let
alone for one man who worked on the project with these issues in front of him.
Sevakis wrote of the subject of this review as part of his Buried Treasures articles on Anime News Network, which I openly admit
to still tracing through the archives of to locate titles to see and review,
many thankfully getting re-releases but also quite a lot talked of from a man
who authored titles like them or from different eras of anime over the decades
as obscurities. Fubuki comes from
the occasional "Buried Garbage" sections which talk about the worst
of anime, the idea like a carnival freak show but with the knowledge of his
career so you learn something from them. Arcade
Gamer Fubuki is for him the worst anime he ever saw, which wasn't helped
when he had to work on the title in his time in Central Park Media; bear in mind, for all the good titles that
company released, like part of Revolutionary
Girl Utena (1997), but also had the schlock fest MD Geist (1986) as one of its successful titles to sell as well as
a lot of hentai (porn) anime that would horrify some, a lot Sevakis has talked about working on in
his time there too.
Whether Arcade Gamer Fubuki is the worst is a debate, without wanting him
to hear of this review and come punch me in the face. There has been worse made
anime, as this is a nicely animated OVA with a handful of redeemable aspects, but
good grief besides the toe curling plot point of the "Passion
Panties", which I will be forced to get to, this is a premise of some fun
squandered in the end. Probably the worst thing that can happen to an anime is
when it deflates good will from the first episode onwards. The calibre surprises
as it's based on a manga by Mine
Yoshizaki, whose Sgt. Frog manga
is one of his most popular work, the TV series infamously a property ADV Films got the license to but sat on
for a few years in the 2000s despite the company being known for being prolific
in their releases and the amount of time they worked on releasing it.
The title as mentioned also has
an amusing premise in imagining a standard anime tale, a plucky young heroine
versus a world dominated evil group, by way of arcade cabinet tournaments. It's
ludicrous, but if anime should teach outsiders anything, along the cerebral and
intelligent work it creates, it can have a multi-series work like Yakitate!! Japan (2004-6) which is
about competitive bread making, so we can have a plucky young heroine named
Fubuki fight a group wanting to take over the world with videogames. We can
have a groupthat includes an evil villainess who manages a bunch of despondent
masked goons, acting more like the disgruntled staff of an ICT company, and
even a velociraptor that is brought back by gene manipulation and can somehow
operate an arcade cabinet, let alone perceive with intelligence what to do with
it.
It is also bright and slickly
made, a handsome four episode production that went as far as even getting
license to use Sega videogames of
old, such as Fighting Vipers 2 (1998)
to Fantasy Zone (1986). The irony is
not lost, whilst never a video gamer but just a curious outsider who knows a
bit, that this was the time of the Dreamcast,
their last games console before giving up on them as, like an ominous sick joke
at how Arcade Gamer Fubuki tanks the
good will in the license, that console didn't do well in the damndest. The show itself with all its good ideas - as
the heroine wishes to win the world arcade game tournament, fight the villains
and find out what happened to her absentee father from her childhood - doesn't
even try as that company did with the console.
The immediate issue, and where
you roll your eyes in embarrassment, is that to power up, as to be the best
arcade player you have to jump high into the air and play the arcade cabinets
upside down in gravity defying gymnastics, is that she has the "Passion
Panties", which means having her female friend expose them with a fan and means
exposed panty shots. It's bad enough to have the leering nature of anime,
especially as the medium has all the potential to deal with sex with better fun
and grace than this, but you then have to realise female characters within them
are meant to be underage teenagers a lot of the time, regardless if their
character designs and proportions suggest otherwise. Fubuki is, what, meant to
be only between ten to twelve, which makes this worse, also with mind her nemesis
is another girl, who travels on rollerblades and is an expert on shooter games,
is reduced to this as well. It's really low, creepy, idiotic hanging fruit particularly
when you know this OVA title is targeted to grown men.
The other issue though is my
biggest takeaway, that Arcade Gamer
Fubuki is lazy. Its fan service is as much part of the problem, alongside
how it squanders its premise. I can thankfully say that its director Yūji Mutō went to better work, as he
made Tonari no Seki-kun: The Master of
Killing Time (2014), a hilarious micro-series about a guy in a class
mucking about with bizarre activities with none of the issues here and perfect
comic timing, which makes Fubuki's
existence in his early career a shame*. Its say a lot to a four episode OVA that
it fails so blandly in spite of having all the weird and potentially fun details
you could want, from the velociraptor playing videogames to that the minions,
led by a stereotypical female villain who uses the famous noblewoman's "ho
ho ho" laugh used in a lot of anime, being a bunch of regular employees
who get drunk with her in a bar and put up with their lot clearly just to get
paid.
A lot of the premise never is
dealt with as a result, like the tournament where a cavalcade stereotypes appear
to duel, and most of the cast is underutilised. One character that could've
been done without, or shot into space by the cast when he appeared, is a young
boy whose obsession with just taking exposed panty shot photos of Fubuki is
stalking in all but name. Many however are underutilised, even the
stereotypical busty American cowgirl who is the best at dancing games as, in a
better work, that she's actually on the villains' payroll but a) is lovely and
b) immediately adores Fubuki as a friendly older sister figure is at least fun
in premise. Probably the only character who gets fully fleshed out, even though
he sadly still has to go on about those damned Passion Panties and a creepiness
to his shadow over Fubuki in characterisation, is Mr Mystery. Mr Mystery is the
noble masked guide to help Fubuki, a buff guy in just a wrestler's pair of
pants and mask whose virtues and strength don't negate that, when he jumps
through a plate glass window for example, it still hurts and black humour comes
from him being liable to injury even if he does good in the end. As much as
this is due to his voice actor Brad
Bradford, watching the OVA in English, being the only stand out as he
clearly go the memo to boom his lines to the back row of the theatre and in
gravitas. The sense that he's of interest is found as much in when he's finally
revealed beneath the mask - he looks identical to the protagonist of a
1978-1984 manga called Game Center
Arashi about a videogame player, which clearly is meant as a nod and had its
own anime in the early eighties.
Beyond this, well, it would still
be possible to make four twenty plus minute episodes succeed, just accepting
the gross fanservice as the sad aspect most productions are stuck with to sell,
but the time is wasted on a lot of dumb jokes like the female rival wearing a
dog costume or content which is ignorant of its creepiness, like the villains
in Episode 2 stealing Fubuki's Passion Panties. In a perfect world, this
would've been a tournament fighting story with tokusatsu villains, absurdity
embraced like contests taking on top of a skyscraper or the promise suggested
in one of the best and earliest moments, in which the villains try to rid of
Fubuki by setting a literal trap on her walk to school, an invisible barrier
which forces her and her friend to dodge giant barrels trying to crush them like an actual videogame of yore. The lack
of actual videogame logic barring occasionally just adds to the grievances. As much
as it pays lip service to the passion of the gamer, with all that lucrative Sega merchandise on display, it barely
plays on the aesthetic or style. In a better world, for an example, we could've
have Fubuki trying to avoid being crushed by Tetris blocks or a parody of Street
Fighter with a world arcade gamer tournament. Maybe it could have even
flipped the bird at Nintendo, say by
having an evil Italian plumber as a villain. I wonder how much of the many
problems are due to sticking to the source manga, but I know animated
adaptations can take liberties with only occasionally some fan complaints.
The OVA also suddenly tried to
become serious in the fourth and final episode, introducing a main villain who
is a cross between Akuma from the Street
Fighter series and Go Nagai's Violence Jack. Connected to Fubuki, the
villain drags this silly farce into the most abrupt tonal change possible as
he's a videogame developer who was horrified when his technology was used for
ballistic missiles in warzones. Even if there's an absurd moment where, super
strong and buff with his shirt off, he stops a missile with his strength just
as it is about to hit him, only for it to explode, this is suddenly Arcade Gamer Fubuki getting into territory that looks
ludicrous and misguided to fall into. It's interesting, don't get me wrong, but
utterly ill advised in a production that hasn't succeeded at all.
The result was forgotten. I only
know of Arcade Gamer Fubuki through
someone else's vitriol. Whilst I can find some joys here, I feel exasperation at
so much squandered potential that is on display. "Bad" is subjective
in use, but "bad" in failing is really the crime here and stinks
miserably to witness.
*Studio Shaft, who created the OVA, also thankfully went onto better things. Mainly collecting all that Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Monogatari money.
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