Japan’s famous all-female theatre troupe, the Takarazuka Revue, put up a recording of one of their performances for international streaming. The theme: Castlevania, the classic Konami video game series about fighting vampires, and half the namesake of the “Metroidvania” genre.
In fact, Castlevania: Awakening in the Moonlight is actually a loose adaptation of the franchise’s first Metroidvania, Symphony of the Night. It even starts with Richter Belmont’s refrain (in)famously translated as “Die, monster! You don’t belong in this world!” And after Dracula’s defeat at the hands of Richter, time jumps forward to focus on the main protagonist of this story: Dracula’s half-human son, Alucard.
Despite having traveled to Japan before, this was my first time watching Takarazuka. I had some idea of what to expect based on numerous cultural references in Japanese media, but all my assumptions were waiting to be defied or affirmed.
I believed Takarazuka to be non-stop singing, but that wasn’t the case. While it’s certainly a musical, the numbers are interspersed between spoken scenes. I also wasn’t sure how they would incorporate the action element of Castlevania, which turned out to be more of an interpretive dance-fighting that fits the medium, and largely takes a secondary role to drama, angst, and romance. That said, they do include some elements from the Symphony of the Night I had not expected.
And sometimes, something happened that would reinforce my preconceived image of a Takarazuka Castlevania while also throwing me for a loop. Namely, they somehow manage to incorporate the French Revolution into this thing, and Robespierre is even a prominent character! The Rose of Versailles is one of the Takarazuka Revue’s most iconic adaptations, so it’s not wholly unusual that they would use France as a partial backdrop to Awakening in the Moonlight. Nevertheless, making Castlevania more familiar and accessible to the typical Takarazuka fan in this manner is pretty amazing.
I believe all the music is taken from the games and adapted for the stage with lyrics and all. Given that Castlevania as a whole has a fantastic soundtrack, it’s not a surprise that they would take this approach. That said, it’s certainly different from other times they’ve added words.
I could tell that I was limited in some ways by the home viewing experience. While I definitely appreciate the opportunity to watch it from the comfort of my couch, I’m 100% sure that it pales in comparison to being there in person. There are parts that feel a bit long, but I wonder if the live spectacle would change the experience—I’ve seen enough musicals at this point to know this can happen. Maybe I should make the trip out to Takarazuka next time I have the opportunity.
I continue to vacillate between feelings of hope and despair for humanity, and I really hope the former wins out. I’ve come to realize that many human beings have to touch the stove to learn their lesson, and I get the sense that a lot of people have put their hands on the flames at this point. I just wish it didn’t cost so many lives in the process. Innocent people are caught in the imperialist games of the world, and they should not be the ones to bear the cost.
Shout-out to my Patreon members, and a big, big thanks to the following:
Lots of tweets leading up to the live drawing event that took place on February 21.
Closing
I actually happened to be in Japan for part of February! I plan on having lots of blog posts based on my experiences and (delightfully tariff-free) purchases.
While I don’t have a set schedule for what I will post and when, I hope you’ll enjoy the fruits of my travels.
Kio will be going analog (physical media + projector!) for his live drawing session this month with Minoda Kaidou. He plans to draw a Spotted Flower character.
Because Kio has felt his concentration decline recently, he decided to draw outside. He’s not sure how well it worked, despite being more productive overall.
Having decided to write out the plot in the morning for something in Spotted Flower, Kio went and finished the written storyboard. He had thought about how it should go for a while, so the drawing went pretty smoothly.
Additional advertisement for the live drawing event. Kio mentions you can get a photo copy of the drawings! He also reconfirms that it’ll be streamed using a projector.
When asked about what they’re hoping for at the live drawing event, Minoda said her answer was a difficult one—she wants to see people to react to their drawings by going, “What the heck is this?!” This makes Kio look forward to being there.
Kio thanks Minoda for her congratulatory message on 50 chapters of Spotted Flower. Minoda also drew characters from Kio’s previous manga Jigopuri. Minoda also mentions the live drawings will be bunny girls.
In Japan, a double cheeseburger (especially from McDonald’s) is sometimes referred to as a dabuchi—short for daburu chiizubaagaa.
Recently, I had a thought: Doesn’t dabuchi sound a lot like duì bùqĭ—Mandarin Chinese for “sorry”?
I feel like someone could make a good pun out of this, but having to cross two languages so that it makes sense feels like a tall order. If anyone wants to take a swing, be my guest!
Earlier this month, the Soul of Chogokin King Exkizer (from the anime Brave Fighter Exkizer, aka Brave Exkaiser) went up for pre-order, over a decade after the line’s release of King of Braves Gaogaigar. Given the clever engineering that always goes into these figures, I assumed there would be some fun discussion about where it falls on the “toy fidelity” vs. “anime faithfulness” spectrum. But what I’ve since learned is that trying to achieve that balance is remarkably difficult, and the question of what to prioritize in an Exkizer figure is actually a point of contention among fans.
As someone who’s never watched Brave Fighter Exkizer outside of a handful of episodes, I don’t have any real personal skin in the game. My interest in this, aside from a general love of mecha, is mostly because the struggles of translating imagination into physical reality is something I can explore forever. With that in mind, I decided to write about this for a couple reasons. First, I want to prevent these conversations from simply being lost to fleeting social media. Second, I want to convey all this to an audience who might not be familiar with Exkizer, and thus wouldn’t easily understand why there’s a bit of a controversy in the first place.
So let’s begin!
The Myriad Inconsistencies of King Exkizer
Generally speaking, shows about giant robots take creative freedoms when adapting designs. Limbs bend in angles impossible for toys, parts pop out of nowhere or disappear, proportions are made to look less silly, and there’s just a bit of “cartoon magic” applied overall. Combattler V the toy has tank treads on its back that are always visible, but Combattler V the anime robot sees its treads pop in and out of view depending on what the show needs. Devastator from Transformers will have a different head design depending on the episode. Deluxe versions that try to thread the needle of toy vs. show will do things like “make the tank treads removable” or “provide both heads and allow the owner to choose.”
However, King Exkizer presents a number of major challenges.
In the anime, Exkizer is a large robot who can turn into a car. To fight greater threats, he summons King Roder, a bigger vehicle that transforms into a humanoid frame which Exkizer can enter to become King Exkizer. It’s essentially a matryoshka-esque combination reminiscent of Gordian and Baikanfu.
Not surprisingly, there are differences between the original toy and the animated representation of the robot. But within the show Brave Fighter Exkizer itself, the size relationship between Exkizer and King Roder is also wildly inconsistent.
When Exkizer executes his “Form Up” to become King Exkizer, King Roder is portrayed as a kind of power armor relative to Exkizer’s size. If the shots in this combination sequence are to be trusted, the vehicle form of King Roder should be a little less than 1.5 times as long as Exkizer’s car form, which is the case with the original toy. But the official data says King Roder is over four times longer than Exkizer (22.4 meters vs. 5.5 meters), and no amount of reconfiguration or bending of parts can reconcile this incongruity. To add to the headache, the official lineart shows King Roder to be about 2.5 times the length of Exkizer as automobile, and the anime can’t keep this consistent, even within a single shot in the opening!
Exkizer in car mode attached to King Roder: Original toy vs. Anime production lineartvs. Anime opening
Now, it’s incredibly common for giant robots to not match their official sizes in all shots. That’s just part of anime. Are they taller than the buildings or are they shorter? Depends on the shot! And there are plenty of instances of robots magically changing size as part of the lore, like when Megatron in Transformers turns into a gun, or how the car in Braiger grows bigger for no reason when becoming the robot. The tricky thing in King Exkizer’s case is the fact that the relative sizes of the two robots affect how they’re supposed to join up. As a result, the conflicting info about size ratio between the component pieces can’t be squared away or easily ignored; it’s basically impossible to make all of them work in one toy. And even if you hand-wave away every one of those problems, even the appearance of King Exkizer changes from one shot to the next during his combination, and then those don’t necessarily match up with how he looks when posing for his special attacks.
These issues are so significant that Bandai Spirits released a 12-minute video recounting some of the struggles the designers went through in creating it. That is unprecedented!
Did you know the project actually started eight years ago, and that multiple people in charge of it tried to figure out a solution but failed? A young designer named Fujiki Yuuya (who was a fan of the Brave series born in 1999, after the franchise had essentially been over) was eventually assigned to make a version of King Exkizer for the Metal Build line, only for him to hit a dead end as well because the toy’s mechanisms became increasingly complex. It took advice from the SoC Gaogaigar lead Terano Akira to keep playability in mind and look at the SoC Tryon 3 for inspiration, as well as suggestions from the Tryon 3 project’s Mizuno Masahiro, to help bring it to the finish line.
So, presented with these design roadblocks, how does the Soul of Chogokin King Exkizer strive to overcome them and reach a solid compromise?
The Answer, According to Bandai Spirits
First, rather than try to match the animation depicting the Form Up sequence, they decided to make the scale and proportions relatively accurate to official stats for both the vehicle forms and the combined King Exkizer (Exkizer in car mode might even be a bit too small). However, rather than abandoning the combination concept entirely, Exkizer is still made to nestle into King Roder, albeit in a way that looks different from the anime. The result is something reminiscent of Arc Guren-Lagann inside Super Galaxy Guren-Lagann.
Exkizer Combining with King Roder (Soul of Chogokin)
In contrast, a previous King Exkizer figure from the company Toyrise did not even attempt to make this work, instead opting for Exkizer to enter King Roder from the back as a solid block. An even earlier toy, the Masterpiece King Exkizer, somewhat more faithfully captures the combination sequence proportions at the expense of the vehicle size ratios and overall body proportions of King Exkizer, and the Exkizer inside is still noticeably smaller than the anime’s. The same can be said of another upcoming version of King Exkizer, from Shokugan Modeling Project.
Second, King Exkizer actually has a couple of swappable inner parts: a “form-up” frame that more faithfully lets Exkizer enter King Roder fully intact, and an “action” frame that allows for greater poseability. A lot of previous entries in the SoC line were made to go in one direction or the other, but in the case of Brave Fighter Exkizer, the combination sequence and the Obari Masami–esque poses are such iconic parts of the anime that they both appear to have been deemed necessary. This is accomplished by having the limbs of Exkizer split up and stored in different parts of King Exkizer’s body when using the action frame.
Form Up Frame vs. Action Frame
Fan Reaction
The actual final form of the figure looks good and seems to generally have the polish and articulation one expects out of the SoC line. Social media shows plenty of positive feedback too. The reason this figure is the subject of debate comes down to the fact that fans disagree about the most important aspects of King Exkizer to preserve.
They might consider the “power armor” aesthetic (and the proportions needed for it) more important than keeping the official sizes of Exkizer and King Roder. Or they might find that the use of different frames to prioritize different types of play over-complicates things. Or they might even deem the Obari-faithful poseability and limbs to not be worth the other sacrifices. Ultimately, it seems impossible to please everyone, and the fact that it feels like a damned if you, damned if you don’t scenario makes me wonder if that was a factor in delaying the project.
It’s tempting to point to fellow Brave Robot Gaogaigar and ask why they couldn’t do something similar to its SoC. Yet one has to remember that not only is the King of Braves just a bulkier design in general with fewer displays of extreme poseability, but the extremely intricate Final Fusion combination is such a defining part of Gaogaigar that it has to be the #1 priority. King Exkizer’s Form Up doesn’t compare.
The Devil in the Details
In thinking about all the hurdles Soul of Chogokin King Exkizer encountered, one thing that comes to mind is that most classic of combiners: the original Getter Robo. In its anime, the vehicles form the main robot in a manner that is literally impossible to replicate with physical materials. Body parts just magically appear out of nowhere, and the overall shape shifts like a blob to accommodate things. The Soul of Chogokin line never even bothered with making combining toys of Getter Robo, and attempts to create one have been awkward at best.
While King Exkizer seemingly shows none of those Play-Doh qualities, it’s not that far off. In isolation, each depiction of an exciting mechanical detail trick viewers into thinking that it all makes sense, but when you take the whole of it in, you realize it’s basically tossing aside overall consistency in favor of Rule of Cool. That works just fine in animation, but it’s clearly a conundrum for toy makers.
In essence, King Exkizer in animation is like having incomplete versions of 10 jigsaw puzzles, all of which are depicting the same general image while also having subtle differences in size, number of pieces, and other finer details. The premium toys and figures are, in turn, attempts to combine them into one cohesive image that can satisfy everyone. It’s an impossible task, and yet the fans and designers alike keep hoping that a real solution is out there. Whether the Soul of Chogokin rendition is the right move really is in the eye of the beholder.
Capcom held a contest for their upcoming game Mega Man: Dual Override, and for the first time in years, they held a Robot Master Design Contest.
As someone who grew up reading Nintendo Power and loving Mega Man, I dreamed of getting my own boss designs into a game someday. Despite barely drawing at all in recent years, I knew I had to at least try.
Unfortunately, I didn’t make it into the Top 20. Fortunately, however, that means I can share my design here: Lamprey Man!
All entries had to follow the basic template of a boss with a hose-like suction arm, and I wanted to stretch the idea to keep it from just being a vacuum robot.
Mabataki Yori Hayaku, the sport karate manga by Funatsu Kazuki, finished in 2025 after 12 volumes. It’s a series that I had been enjoying a great deal thanks to its ensemble of characters at varying skill levels and each with a unique relationship to karate, as well as the solid artwork that communicates the action and intensity of a match on both a physical and a psychological level. While MYH was clearly forced to end a little abruptly, I still think it’s a fun read overall and concludes in a satisfying way.
Kohanai Himari, a clumsy girl who gets inspired to learn karate after being saved by an upperclassman, is the main character of the story. Despite a case of mistaken identity where she confuses two twin sisters raised on karate (one enthusiastic about it and the other cold), Himari joins the school club, which is small and lacking in members. And while she seems ill-suited for any sort of athletics, the more practiced hands realize that she has unusually sharp and perceptive eyes. Soon, she’s practicing daily, growing alongside her teammates, and even gaining a few rivals, all while she and the other characters navigate the various forms of karate-centered drama.
Up until the end, the MYH is very consistent in terms of its sports manga appeal, and everything I wrote about it before still holds true. Seeing Himari come into her own as a competitor is wonderful, and learning the truth about the rift between the twins is satisfying. In the final volume, however, the story suddenly moves at a breakneck pace in order to wrap up everything and move all the characters into their intended positions. The climax of the series happens at a big karate tournament (naturally), and the results are satisfying in terms of the girls’ character arcs. The epilogue then puts them many years into the future to answer the question of “Where are they now?” I really do wish I could have seen the series get there at its normal pace.
Kio Shimoku, author of Genshiken and Spotted Flower, is having a live drawing session in Tokyo! The event will also include another manga artist, Minoda Kaidou; both have had series in Rakuen: Le Paradis.
I linked to this previously in my January Twitter roundup, but thought it was important enough to dedicate a separate post.
The live drawing will take place at Tonarimachi Cafe in Shinagawa, Tokyo on Saturday February 21 from 6pm to 8pm JST. Both in-person tickets and streaming tickets are available (either one is 3,000 yen), and can be found after the “get tickets” button on the website.
There’s something I find really funny about the current state of shounen anime and manga fandom.
On the one hand, you have an online fandom that loves battles and action scenes. “Who comes out on top in a 1v1?” is a perennially popular question, and I understand the appeal. You have all these powerful warriors around, be they awe-inspiring heroes or dreadful villains or something in between, and you want to either support your favorites or genuinely think through the question of who’s superior. Beyond the immediate domain of Shounen battle manga, there’s an entire cottage nerd industry built around exploring this idea: Who would win a Death Battle?
On the one hand, a lot of the big series in recent years, particularly the ones that have been finishing up, have emphasized themes surrounding group effort. While “the power of friendship and teamwork” is a longstanding staple of shounen anime and manga, titles like Demon Slayerand My Hero Academiafeel more about collective action and understanding that even if you’re not the strongest, your contributions matter. What makes someone the greatest isn’t how hard they hit or how many foes they can take down single-handedly, but conviction and a desire to help.
You end up having this combination of fans who care a lot about who’s the biggest badass around trying to mine stories where that’s of diminished importance. It would sometimes make more sense to ask who wins in a 1v1 between romance manga heroines. Certainly not all shounen fans think this way, and even those who love the big fights aren’t necessarily obsessed with ranking characters in a tier list. But just the fact that these two aspects exist, and they are almost in direct conflict with each other, both amuses and frustrates me.
PS: Who wins in a fight between Sawako from Kimi ni Todoke and Hachi from Nana?
OGIUE MANIAX 