I shrieked when I learned the ZeroRanger team had a new game, and it's been out for three days, and I managed to learn nothing about it. It's so rare to be surprised like that, to just hear "hey the people behind that shit you loved did it again." Hey! They did it again!

The appeal of ZeroRanger wasn't rawly as a shootemup, though it was a good one of those. Rather, the appeal was in the edges of it, in how it expressed ideas and concepts, how it subverted those concepts, and what it expected of you in return. They have done it again, and in a completely different way than last time. Must play.

So, friends of mine have pointed out that my taste in games leans a lot towards Japanese pixel art games. That's largely because it's what I grew up with, where I was looking at what, like, EA was putting out versus what Treasure was doing and just being like "yeah uh there's no contest here." It didn't occur to me until much later that that art style was attempting to invoke anime art, and I've never been able to reconcile how much I can't stand anime with how much I love old Japanese action games. Except you look at this fucking thing, and play this fucking thing, and it's like a perfect little test case of how tipping too far into deliberate anime invocation can make a promising idea ("oh shit they're making a sequel to Contra Hard Corps!") into just the most mid horsehit imaginable. Look at those people in the box art! In Contra Hard Corps you could play as like a werewolf with a chaingun arm and sunglasses! How did you fuck that up?! Being too anime is how you fucked that up.