Sonic Says "Wait Until Marriage": A Very Silly Weird History

[Small Nerd]

Things begin in the early 1990s when, due to an unfortunate miscommunication, the staff at Sega of America believe that the company's new mascot character, Sonic the Hedgehog, must be vocally in favor of chastity. The Japanese branch had only intended to say that the character should be uninterested in romance, but something got garbled in translation. The Americans believe that this focus on chastity is something their Japanese counterparts thought of to try and make Sonic more palatable to the more conservative parts of America, and this "considerateness" makes them decide to give "Sonic the chastity lover" a serious attempt. This eventually leads to Sega of America helping to make a nationally-broadcast PSA that airs around the mid-90s that goes down in history as the "Sonic says wait until marriage" PSA. The actual message was closer to "you should make sure it's the right person before doing anything," but the collective memory didn't see things that way. This PSA has a number of repercussions, not all of which have to do with Sonic or Sega.

Most immediately for the blue fellow and his corporate masters, the embarrassment of "Sonic says wait until marriage" pushes Bernie Stolar away from ever working at Sega of America, and Ken Penders avoids ever working on the Archie Comics Sonic comic book. After Tom Kalinske leaves Sega of America due to the headache of transitioning from the Genesis to the Saturn, his replacement as head of the branch decides to go all-in on selling the Saturn. The console still doesn't do well in America, but it does well enough the fifth generation of consoles is a slump for Sega and not the utter disaster it was IRL. After Final Fantasy VII releases in America and sells tremendously, this same branch head starts pushing for Sega to do more with RPGs, which eventually leads to Square making a Dreamcast version of Final Fantasy X, which goes more smoothly than it otherwise might have thanks to Sega deciding to give the Dreamcast a DVD drive rather than using the proprietary (and much smaller) GD-ROM format. No one ever confirms that the Dreamcast was designed to use DVDs in order to make Final Fantasy X easier to port, but many people believe it. More on the Dreamcast and beyond in future posts.

Around the year 2000, as the anime that we know as Sonic X is first being conceptualized, someone at Sega of Japan hears about "Sonic says wait until marriage" and decides that it would be funny to mess with "those prudes in America" by making this new Sonic media, which everyone knows will get exported across the Pacific eventually, one where the main character is as lecherous as a kids' show can get away with. Since the series is being worked on by Sega's pet anime studio TMS, that idea ultimately morphs into making Sonic X a sort of "Lupin the Third for kids," where Sonic and friends spend each episode stealing from Eggman or other villains so they can't do their evil schemes, while Sonic flirts with Rouge the Bat (designated as the Fujiko to Sonic's Lupin once the show's staff heard about what was happening with Sonic Adventure 2) and any other female character who's the right age. 4Kids Entertainment, both for the obvious reasons and because they're busy trying to appeal to the newly created female anime fan market (more on what happens with anime in this timeline in future posts), doesn't pick up Sonic X for American distribution. The company that does bring Sonic X over decides to find voice actors who have dubbed Lupin the Third before, and their pick to play Sonic himself is an actor who just recently dubbed Lupin in yet another dub of Castle of Cagliostro, one Sean Barker, better known by his actual name, David Hayter. Hayter as Sonic proves popular, and he ends up voicing the character for quite a long time. The world sees no small amount of fanart with a concept based on Sonic and Solid Snake sharing a voice. This casting has some effects on broader popular culture as well, but more on that in future posts.

Also around the year 2000, Sega management decides to reorganize its development staff into several teams, each headed by an experienced developer and given free reign to work on whatever ideas the team leader is interested in. The head of one of these teams, Toshihiro Nagoshi, spends some time thinking over what sort of game he wants to work on before hearing about Napple Tale, a game designed largely by women and intended to appeal to girls. Nagoshi decides that he wants to make games that will draw new demographics into arcades, starting with one for girls and young women. Shortly after, he bursts into Rieko Kodama's office and shouts at her "WHAT DO GIRLS LIKE?!?" The following conversation leads to the development of Monkey Ball, a game which is not very different from the real-life Super Monkey Ball, aside from more female characters and possibly a jump button. Monkey Ball does fairly well, and this has some consequences later down the line.

Some things to look forward to in future posts: the creation of the Nintendo Cinematic Universe, the election of socialist president Kanye West, and LeBron James's legacy in esports. Don't miss it!

A/N: Welcome to my alternate history timeline! My goals with this are to make things happen that amuse me and aren't completely implausible. I've already got a sizable backlog of things to post about, and I'll be uploading posts about a given topic every day or two until I run out of backlog. At that point, who knows what my posting schedule will become. To maintain momentum, I'm writing this timeline is mainly as a summary of what happens and why, so if you'd like to flesh out any of the events I describe with your own writing, feel free. If you have any suggestions for things that could happen in this timeline, feel free to offer those as well. This isn't a serious timeline by any means, so let's have fun!

 

[Small Nerd]

For reasons that I'll admit I haven't worked out and probably won't work out for a long time if ever, the anime Slayers gets broadcast on American television in the mid-late 1990s, as opposed to what happened in real life, where the series was only released in America on home video (from what I've heard, there seem to have been plans for TV broadcast, but they fell through). The series is aired on the Fox Kids block with significant edits made to tone things down (less blood, less innuendo, etc), and it does quite well, especially with girls and young women who are happy to have a show with a few female main characters who are considered cool. This combines with the other anime airing on American television in the period to help start a boom in the American anime and manga importing business (though it also helps that 4Kids Entertainment doesn't produce its infamous dub of One Piece since they're busy trying to find something that appeals to girls and fits well with their style of localization).

One side effect of the American anime boom being helped along by a series with a strong appeal to a female demographic is that anime and manga become perceived as somewhat feminine interests in America. It's not to the same degree as something like horses, but to the average American, the first thing they think of when they hear the phrase "anime fan" is a young woman, and there's certainly a large and vocal segment of the American anime/manga fandom that's female. This has some ramifications.

An early ramification of American weeaboos tending to be female is that a long-running flame war gets going between American and Korean internet dwellers after some Korean nerds learn about how Americans think of anime as "kind of for girls, isn't it?" and start talking smack about how Americans "let women steal anime." The Great Feminism Flame War, as some dramatic people call it in hindsight, ends up pushing a number of American nerds towards becoming feminists due to their desire to troll their misogynist opponents as much as possible. There is also a degree of racism involved with the whole affair, and the reckoning with that fact in later years shakes the English-speaking parts of the internet as people remember why the phrase "warts and all" exists.

One person who is caught up in the Great Feminism Flame War is Mark Zuckerberg, who did not hack into his college's database to get pictures for a "hot or not" website but rather made a site to rank the attractiveness of anime waifus. Zuckerberg does eventually become a big name in Silicon Valley (though he doesn't make a social media site), thanks in part to Zuckerberg's experiences in the flame war encouraging him to set up a company that gives women a fair deal. Other Silicon Valley companies eventually try to imitate Zuckerberg's success in attracting female employees and mostly end up creating weird ads where tech companies try to present themselves as "woman-friendly" and say things like "work here, and let the earth mother help you birth great apps." With such competitors, Mark Zuckerberg becomes an icon of male feminists.

Around the same time, one Christopher Poole decides to leave the Something Awful forums for another forum website where the anime discussion isn't being moderated by people who hate the whole concept of anime. 4Chan is never created, and without its example the idea of totally unmoderated social websites never quite becomes mainstream. The internet is still something of a cesspit, but it's slightly less of one.

Eventually, the American animation industry comes to feel the effects of the local animation nerds being largely female and/or the sort of weird dude that's willing to be a hardcore fan of animation in a culture that thinks it's kind of girly. Over time, American animation becomes increasingly dominated by the sort of people who would be likely targets of harassment to the point that it becomes more feasible to crack down on harassment than sweep it under the rug. No one really misses John Kricfalusi.

A side effect of American animation becoming more and more dominated by art kids and fujoshis is that American animation develops a tendency towards being progressive in messaging and experimental in form. This proves to be a bit more than most American kids can really wrap their heads around, and since there's hardly anyone available to explain to kids what they're seeing on TV (their parents often don't get it either, and hardly anyone on the internet is willing or able to explain it properly), along with upheavals like the late 2000s financial crisis, the American youth of the 2000s and 2010s become very used to living in a world that feels like it doesn't make any sense. This has some consequences down the line.

Some things to look forward to in future posts: Grand Theft Auto meets Mickey Mouse, the Playstation 3 becomes the Xbox 360, and LeBron James forgets the Magnet Beam in Mega Man 1 on live television. Don't miss it!

 

[Small Nerd]

As a quick recap, for the most part the video game industry in the 1990s looks like it did in our reality, aside from the Sega Saturn being less of a disaster outside of Japan. However, since the Dreamcast doesn't enter the market dead on arrival, Microsoft doesn't get involved in video games. So now let's get to the effects that has on things.

Firstly, Bungie doesn't go to Microsoft to get the funding to finish the original Halo game. They get bailed out by Sony instead. This means that Halo is a series for the Playstation 2 and its successors. While this isn't great news for Sega, the Dreamcast does have Grand Theft Auto III and other games in that series, so things stay competitive. Both series are probably about the same as they are in real life, though maybe Halo has less crunch in its development since Sony isn't expecting Bungie to deliver a launch title meant to move consoles all by itself.

Nintendo's Gamecube does not do very well. It actually sells more units in this world than in ours, but it's still a distant third. The Dreamcast is itself a pretty distant second to the Playstation 2 (which actually doesn't sell as many units as the real Playstation 2's 150 million, thanks to the Dreamcast competing with it as a cheap DVD player, but even so it does incredibly well), but it still beats the Gamecube like a red-headed stepchild. A few years into the Gamecube's lifespan, Nintendo management sees the writing on the wall and decides to go for their real-life "blue water" strategy (i.e., appealing to people who don't have much interest in video games) even harder than they did in our world. This starts by getting some strong advertising with children and their parents/grandparents through the most reliable medium they have access to: TV shows.

Specifically, Nintendo of America starts working with Nickelodeon to make a suite of cartoons based on the various series of video games owned by Nintendo, with the first of these coming to television around 2004 or 5. These cartoons do very well, and over the years, people start noticing that these cartoons make small references to each other, leading to speculation that they all take place in the same world, which is eventually confirmed around 2009 or 2010, when the Super Smash Brothers movie (probably not the actual name, but people definitely call it that) hits theaters. The Nintendo Cinematic Universe is born, and without a Marvel Cinematic Universe to compete (it didn't quite get off the ground for reasons that will be elaborated on in future posts), this is the big thing that dominates popular culture for a large portion of the 2010s. After the Smash Bros movie, there are more cartoons and movies, since Nintendo isn't going to shut off the money printer, but as opposed to the real-world MCU, there's a slight focus on quality over quantity, because this whole project is intended as advertising for Nintendo's games, and they don't want to hurt their brand by associating their characters with low-effort slop churned out by the ton. That doesn't stop these characters from becoming omnipresent, though.

The success of Nintendo's first cartoon prompts other video game companies to take notice and get their own cartoons in the works. Nickelodeon, whether due to an exclusivity agreement or due to lacking the spare manpower to take on more video game projects, largely isn't an option, so other networks get these other video game cartoons. Among others, Insomniac works with Fox Kids (buoyed by Slayers and Sonic X, and already seeing some initial success with their adaptation of another Sega series called Sakura Wars [more on Sakura Wars in future posts]) on creating a Ratchet and Clank cartoon, while Sucker Punch partners with Disney (angry that Nintendo, the "Disney of video games," didn't reach out to them and wanting in on the action) on a Sly Cooper cartoon in exchange for making a Mickey Mouse game for Disney.

Sucker Punch's Mickey Mouse game becomes an attempt at "taking Mickey back to his roots in the 1920s" by being a Grand Theft Auto clone set in the Prohibition era. It's noticeably more violent than most Disney media, and Mickey even says "damn" a couple times. "Grand Theft Mickey," as the general public nicknames the game, becomes a bit of a laughing stock, but the game is surprisingly solid, and it releases in late 2005 or early 2006, so it ultimately becomes an early hit for Sega's next console after the Dreamcast, the Sega Concord.

The Sega Concord is the result of Sega looking at the Dreamcast and trying to figure out what made it succeed. Sega management concludes that the Dreamcast succeeded because it had solid support from third-party developers (the examples of Grand Theft Auto and Halo, among others, do a lot to give them this impression), so their next console needs to be as friendly to third parties if not more so. This results in Sega consulting with a number of third-party developers to find out what they want in a next-generation console, and somehow this avoids becoming a "design by committee" disaster. Instead, the Concord (named after this spirit of cooperation between Sega and other companies) is a console that's relatively easy to develop for, with cooperative hardware and robust documentation in English and Japanese (one of the results of Sega's consulting process). Advertising for the Concord uses the idea of Sega working together with customers rather than other companies, with one early ad using the line "Become part of something greater, become part of the Sega System."

The Concord spooks Sony into rushing the Playstation 3, since the Dreamcast had beaten the Playstation 2 to market by several months, and Sony doesn't want that to happen again. Because of this need to beat out Sega, Sony decides to ditch the Cell processor in favor of a simpler main processor built off that technology for the sake of having games ready earlier, and this new CPU design just so happens to be quite similar to the CPU used in our world's Xbox 360. Also, since the Concord uses a GPU designed by Nvidia (Sega wanted to revive an old relationship), Sony goes to Nvidia's main rival at the time, ATI, for the Playstation 3's GPU. They get a chip that's very similar to the GPU used in the real-world Xbox 360. The Playstation 3 releases pretty close in time to the Concord, and Sony breathes a sigh of relief.

One of the bigger attempts at copying Nintendo's cinematic universe comes from Capcom, which has its own fairly large stable of characters to use for such a project. Capcom opts to partner with Warner Brothers, so Cartoon Network comes to host adaptations of a number of series, including Street Fighter. The Street Fighter cartoon is one of the more successful video game cartoons, thanks to some lucky timing that has the last season of the cartoon (the show had done well enough to justify extending it for a bit) release around the same time as Street Fighter 4 (around 2007 or 8 in this world), and a whole generation of people remembers that they do, in fact, like Street Fighter. That second season happens to be an adaptation of Street Fighter III that uses the original game's "new generation" theme to tell a story about legacy and passing on the torch to the next generation, and this resonates strongly with a lot of adults who want to share something they loved as kids with the kids of today. The character arc for one of the Street Fighter III characters, Sean, is praised as a sincere and thoughtful examination of hero worship. I have a whole write-up on this cartoon ready, and I'll give it its own post if that's something people would like to hear more about.

Eventually, the Capcom Cinematic Universe gets its own movie, a sort of sequel to Space Jam where the current greatest player in the NBA, LeBron James, has to team up with Capcom characters to fight a villain. This movie isn't especially good, but the premise is weird enough that it gets a decent number of people to watch it. To tie in with this movie, Capcom's American branch makes NBA VS Capcom: The Jam Session, a hybrid of Marvel VS Capcom and NBA Jam where you select of team of 3 out of a large roster of Capcom characters and professional basketball players, both male and female, to fight and also play basketball. You win either by eliminating all the members of the opponent's team or having more points when time runs out. As part of the promotional efforts for the movie, LeBron James has to pretend he actually likes any of Capcom's games, which leads to him embarrassing himself multiple times on national television. He plays Mega Man 1 and forgets to get the Magnet Beam item required to beat the game, he plays Street Fighter II Super Turbo and loses despite picking Old Sagat (a very strong character that's easy to win with as long as your execution's decently consistent), and he plays NBA VS Capcom against famous fighting game player Justin Wong and loses badly. LeBron's poor sportsmanship after losing in NBS VS Capcom eventually leads to him making a public apology to Justin, which includes the line "I wasn't really familiar with your game." This does not stop anyone from making art of Justin dunking on LeBron.

Somehow, being made to play fighting games in exhibition matches to promote a movie doesn't completely turn LeBron off of the genre, and he comes to enjoy them. Of course, being a professional athlete means he doesn't really have the free time to practice and get really good at any fighting games, but LeBron still has a lot of money, and he uses that money to support some small tournaments in the area around his hometown of Cleveland. Though with the publicity of a famous athlete funding them, these tournaments don't necessarily stay small. This inspires Nike to look into the fighting game scene and esports in general as a new source of people to sponsor, which eventually leads to Nike creating its own invitational tournament, similar to the real-life Red Bull Kumite.

Overall, in this world, LeBron James's legacy isn't too different from the one he has in our world, but his public embarrassments while promoting the not-quite Space Jam 2 help humanize him. In this world, debates on whether the greatest basketball player is Michael Jordan or LeBron James have an extra dimension of "do you prefer your heroes to be superhuman idols or relatable, flawed human beings?" I suppose that only makes the debates even more heated, huh?

Things to look forward to: Sonic the Hedgehog becomes Jewish, Marvel VS Capcom 2 for furries, and Japanese game developers invest into good netcode. Don't miss it!

 

[Small Nerd]

I've teased socialist president Kanye West for long enough, let's get into American politics in this timeline.

During the 1990s, US politics is mostly the same as in real life. The first big difference is that this is a world where Al Gore wins the 2000 presidential election. The election is still close, but this time it goes in Gore's favor. Gore continues Clinton's policy towards Iraq and opts to fund Iraqi opposition groups without escalating to an invasion. Also, 9/11 doesn't happen because the people who would have perpetrated the hijackings found sources of community that weren't radical Islam and so were never in an environment that made them willing to conduct terror attacks. The War on Terror doesn't happen, and neither does the US invasion of Afghanistan.

There's a lot of details I haven't figured out yet, but by the time 2016 approaches, there's a generation of American youth voters who see the whole American political system as a joke that keeps the same small group of old elites in power while letting the common people feel like they have any say in what happens, and they also feel like they live in a world where very little makes sense. Into this environment steps Kanye West.

In this world, Kanye West is an indie game developer who got his start making Sonic the Hedgehog fangames before transitioning into professional game development. Due to the dynamics of the Sonic fan community in this world (more on this in future posts), Kanye's experiences there mean that in this world his pride isn't pathological and he doesn't have the real Kanye's virulent antisemitism. This world's Kanye also makes music, but his main priority is making games, so his music never quite made it to mainstream success.

In 2016, Kanye West announces that he's running for president as a third-party candidate for a joke party he made up called the Surprise Party. The Kanye campaign would be a footnote to the election, but enough people are willing to give an outsider a chance that they end up getting him on the ballot properly. Then Kanye shows up to the first presidential debate while incredibly high and proceeds to spend the entire debate mocking the other candidates and the electoral process as a whole. Every American dissatisfied with the status quo takes notice of the man who, to their minds, is willing to publicly say what they're thinking. Add to this that Kanye West is 39 in 2016, making him one of the youngest people to run for president, and he also has a strong appeal to the youth vote.

Once November 2016 rolls around, Election Day does not see Kanye West win... but no one else wins either. Kanye has gotten a plurality of the popular vote and split the electoral college so that no one has a majority. For the first time in almost 200 years, Congress has to elect a president. The House of Representatives, which is tasked with electing a president, finds itself unable to pick either of the two mainstream candidates due to the rules concerning this kind of election (the House votes by state, and if a state's representatives can't agree on a candidate, that state's vote isn't counted). Eventually, the House gets tired of the whole process and settles on Kanye as a compromise candidate that they assume will be controllable. No one controls Kanye West, of course, but they don't know that.

Meanwhile, the Senate has to elect a vice president, and the Senate doesn't vote by state in this kind of election. This means that the Democrats, who happen to have a majority, are able to quickly elect their party's candidate, one Bernie Sanders. Bernie was offered the vice president spot on the Democratic ticket as an attempt to win over the youth vote after Kanye started making waves, and he accepted since it was still an influential position he could use to push for the changes he wanted.

As the election proceeds, there are a lot of political cartoons making the same bad jokes about how Kanye was the candidate for the "Surprise" Party and the results are surprising.

Once the new president and vice president are inaugurated, they quickly get to work on a legislative program and getting it through Congress. It turns out that this world's Kanye and Bernie are able to agree on a lot of things, even if both of them do sometimes need a while to understand what the other means. Indeed, Bernie does a lot of work to keep the Kanye presidency running smoothly, from helping to "translate" Kanye's frequent odd phrasing of his ideas into something that the general public can understand to leaning on Congress to get legislation passed.

Kanye has something of a habit of going on TV to address the nation, and his addresses often turn into him freestyle rapping about whatever issue the address is supposed to be about. Since Kanye is pretty good at coming up with good lyrics and he doesn't start rapping at a consistent point in his speeches, many people develop a habit of watching all of his addresses all the way through so they don't miss anything. The people at Rap Genius also start putting up transcriptions of Kanye's presidential addresses with annotations explaining what he's talking about, which provides a decent number of people with their initial political education. It also turns out that Kanye is happy to use these addresses to insult members of Congress who are blocking the legislation he and Bernie are trying to pass, and "vote how we want or the president will make a diss track about you that half the nation will watch" is a pretty effective tactic. And that's how this world's United States gets universal healthcare.

Things to look forward to in future posts: I'm actually getting close to the end of my backlog, so there's going to be a lot of stuff that I doubt many people here will be interested in, but it's my timeline and I get to choose the Japan-only games that come to America. Don't miss it!

what am i reading

Click to shrink...

The results of me and a couple friends doing improv comedy with each other, mostly.

 

[Small Nerd]

For a timeline with "Sonic" in the name, I haven't talked very much about the blue guy. Let's change that.

Sonic the Hedgehog spends most of the 1990s fairly similar to how things went in our world, aside from the infamous PSA. However, this changes with Sonic the Fighters, the Sonic fighting game that is an actual game in real life with a competitive scene and everything. Sega management decides that Sonic the Fighters could be a game that acts as a gateway to Virtua Fighter for America, where Virtua Fighter never quite caught on. Sonic the Fighters is a somewhat simplified version of Virtua Fighter, both in real life and in this world, and Sonic the character does quite well in America, so it's not a completely ridiculous idea. I'm pretty sure the real life Sega never tried it, and even in this world it doesn't quite work. Sega management tries their experiment and concludes that Americans still won't go for Virtua Fighter, but they might like another Sonic fighting game that takes a different approach.

The developers of Sonic the Fighters are the same team that created Virtua Fighter, so when they get the order to make another Sonic fighting game that isn't like VF, they're at a bit of a loss at first. Eventually, the team comes to the conclusion that they're going to need to make another 3-D fighting game, since that's what they have experience with, but they'll have to find a new way to do it. One of the team members happens upon Rival Schools, a 3-D fighting game made by Capcom, the king of fighting games, and that becomes the main source of inspiration for the new Sonic fighting game. 1999 sees the release of Sonic the Fighters Duo, a very different game from its predecessor.

Sonic the Fighters Duo is a tag-team fighting game where each player controls a team of 2 characters that can be swapped out at any time. Most of the gameplay takes place in a 2-D plane, but characters are able to sidestep attacks from the opponent and use sidestepping to attack from angles that are difficult or impossible to block. Additionally, the game features a significant aerial component, since many characters have special ways to move in the air after jumping and all characters are able to launch the opponent into the air to perform aerial combos. The game overall plays much more closer to 2-D fighting games than the 3-D games that had come out at that point (mostly Virtua Fighter and Tekken), and it has a strong resemblance to Marvel VS Capcom 2 in particular, leading to a longstanding joke among the fighting game scene that Fighters Duo is "Marvel for furries."

Sonic the Fighters Duo also follows the grand tradition of Sonic games and introduces a new character, Honey the Cat. In real life, Honey was a character that had been considered for Sonic the Fighters but was never finished until the game was rereleased on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2012. In this world, Honey is added to the sequel, and since this game is very specifically meant for the American market, the developers decide to retool the character somewhat. The original concept for Honey was a fashionista, but the developers conclude that Americans like female characters who are "cool" rather than "cute," so Honey is reworked into a punk rocker whose look and personality are inspired by the riot grrrl movement, with a fighting style based off using her guitar as a weapon. She is, naturally, quite popular with a certain crowd.

This second Sonic fighting game does fairly well, and its success helps the sequel to Rival Schools, Project Justice, do well in turn, since Fighters Duo has helped prepare audiences for a fighting game in that style. Both games sell fairly well on the Dreamcast, joining that console's canon of classic fighting games. This also has an impact on how 3-D fighting games are designed going forward, with Virtua Fighter and Tekken both eventually adjusting their systems to follow those two games' example. Fighting game players rejoice when they no longer have to remember two different ways an attack can be "mid."

The Dreamcast in general serves as a good home for fighting games as a genre, since, much like in real life, it has almost exactly the same hardware as Sega's main arcade machine in that period, the Naomi, making it easy to bring fighting games from the arcades into homes with little or no loss of quality. This combines with the Dreamcast's internet connection, which makes it possible to play with a large number of other people easily, to make the Dreamcast the fighting game player's console of choice throughout the Dreamcast's lifespan.

The Dreamcast's internet connection also prompts an important development for fighting games, the development of proper netcode. The Dreamcast port of Street Fighter II Super Turbo, which has online play, gets released in America in this world (in real life, it was Japan-only) as a test run to see how well online play can work in one of the major fighting game markets, since any version of Street Fighter II, but especially Super Turbo, is something of a guaranteed money printer. However, the netcode for this port is bad enough that it utterly bombs in America, and the entire fighting game ecosystem, from players to developers, takes notice of just how much netcode can make or break a fighting game. This results in the early development and adoption of rollback netcode, which makes a lot of people much happier.

With the Dreamcast providing both a platform for fighting games and a way to easily play them with many people, the genre doesn't die quite as hard during the 2000s as it did in our world. There is a notable slump, though. Street Fighter III's lack of commercial success is unchanged from real life, which encourages Capcom to get out of the genre for a time, and Capcom's involvement in fighting games is often what determines the genre's health, both in this world and in ours. The release of Street Fighter IV at the end of the 2000s, as in our world, does a lot to reinvigorate the fighting game scene. And, thanks to Sega's approach to console design at this point in time, the Concord follows in the Dreamcast's footsteps as the console for fighting games. But more on the Concord another time.

Some things to look forward to: Sega goes after the pick-me girl demographic, no timeline can escape Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, and I decide if I have Zack Snyder make a Sonic movie. Don't miss it!

 

[Small Nerd]

One thing about Sonic I've kept teasing is that something interesting happens with the American Sonic fanbase, so let's get into that.

While Sega of America making Sonic chaste in this timeline was because they thought it was an idea from the Japanese branch to try and make it easier for the character to do well with conservative segments of the population, they largely had in mind conservative Christians. As it turned out, the "Sonic says wait until marriage" PSA, along with the rest of Sega's attempts to push Sonic as chaste, to say nothing of the fact that Sonic's main color is a deep blue, helped him do quite well with families of conservative Jews. Note that I mean "conservative" in the social/political sense, not as in the branch of Judaism called "Conservative." Most of the Jews we're talking about here would probably be termed (Modern) Orthodox.

While no one is under any illusion that Sonic was created to be "for Jews" in any way, a significant part of the American Sonic fandom is Jewish kids (or adults, later on) who grew up in households where Sonic was the coolest thing their parents let them have access to, and that does have an effect on Judaism's image in the English-speaking parts of the internet. Since even Jewish kids from less-than-strict households are just as likely to get into Sonic as anyone else, along with the significant amount of Jewish kids from strict households who love the series, a new stereotype of Jews begins to develop: Jews are furries. It's mainly internet dwellers who perpetuate this stereotype, but over time it does filter into the general public's consciousness to a degree.

For the most part, Sonic media doesn't really respond to the existence of this trend, since it's mostly being made by Japanese people who don't have much contact with Jews or Judaism in their everyday lives, but there is one exception. Much like in our world, there's an American comic book about Sonic and friends produced by Archie Comics. Unlike our world, this world's Sonic comic book doesn't get killed by lawsuits from Ken Penders, since he never worked on the comic in this world and thus has no reason to sue Archie over anything to do with it. The Sonic comic becomes the main Sonic media that responds to Sonic having a prominent Jewish fanbase due to the comic's staff getting a large amount of letters from Jewish readers talking about how much Sonic means to them. Over time, the Sonic comic includes more nods to the Jewish fans, such as scenes where Sonic is shown wearing clothes that look like traditional Jewish dress or using words and phrases from Yiddish. One of the most significant acknowledgements of Sonic's Jewish fanbase, though, is a whole comic storyline.

During the second half of the 2010s, readers of the Archie Sonic comic are treated to a long storyline (I haven't figured out the precise number of issues, but it's somewhere between 30 and 50) where Sonic is confronted with the fact that the kingdom he lives in (as in our world, the comic book was originally an adaptation of a Sonic cartoon where he was fighting to restore a monarchy deposed by the show's villain) has a significant underclass that's oppressed for no apparent reason. Many of Sonic's friends don't see what's wrong with the situation since they've grown up thinking it's perfectly normal and good, but Sonic, being the story's hero, can't accept it and starts working with this oppressed group. And he is working with them, the story makes a point of having Sonic say that he wouldn't even think of trying to be these people's leader since he's a stranger to them (and he's not the type to lead anyway). Since this is a comic for kids, things do eventually get better, though the story doesn't completely end after the oppression officially ends, with some issues at the end of the story going into how not everyone who had been on top is willing to just accept that this group isn't being oppressed anymore and how the people in this (formerly) oppressed group can't simply let go of everything they suffered through. Still, the story ultimately ends on the hope that maybe everyone in this kingdom will eventually be able to live with each other as equals and without hatred between them. The whole story is a metaphor for Israel-Palestine, albeit with enough details fudged so that it's not immediately obvious (for example, the oppressed group in the story isn't all one kind of animal so that they aren't obviously an ethnic group).

This Sonic comic story, often called something along the lines of "Sonic goes to Palestine," ends up coming to the attention of the broader Jewish community on the internet, where it quickly becomes viral. Some people love it, some people hate it, and some people think it's not worth getting worked up over. As it turns out, a lot of the younger generation of American Jews in this world have misgivings about Israel, and having a story that speaks to these feelings means a lot to them. The Archie Sonic comic sees a surge in sales numbers, though a lot of these new readers leave once "Sonic goes to Palestine" wraps up and the comic goes back to the sort of story it usually does.

As you might have guessed, the American Sonic fandom being full of Jews is one of the main reasons why this world's Kanye West isn't virulently antisemitic. His experiences in the Sonic fangame community led to him unlearning that prejudice. There might be more consequences to this American Jewish Sonic fandom, but I haven't worked them out yet.

Some things to look forward to: I'm not sure, honestly. I really am starting to run out of backlog now. There's probably just one or two more posts before I have to go silent for a while and work on some more ideas for this timeline. Don't miss it!

This is beautifully batshit insane.

Click to shrink...

Thank you, that is exactly the vibe I'm going for.

 

[Small Nerd]

This post is mostly going to be a grab-bag of some things that happen in this timeline that I want to share but haven't figured out how to assemble into a coherent post.

American comic books see some changes in this timeline. Thanks to the "Sonic says wait until marriage" PSA, the two main American comic publishers have their complex about needing to be seen as "for adults" kick in and they spend an extended period making sure people know their characters are sexually active, but in ways that aren't too controversial, like as part of a heterosexual marriage. This does mean that the infamous Spider-Man storyline "One More Day" never happens since Spider-Man is one of Marvel's flagship characters, so he especially has to be seen as a sexual being. Joe Quesada quietly fumes about this for ages.

Over with DC, no doubt many things are happening as well, but I've never been very interested in their comics, so I can't say much about what's going on with them, aside from one thing. Both IRL and in this timeline, there's a strange continuity mishap in the Batman comics where the second Robin, Jason Todd, had two different backstories (and different personalities to go with) at the same time for a while due to one comic book's staff not keeping up with changes that had been made as a result of the "Crisis on Infinite Earths" event that retconned a lot of things to try and make the DC Comics Universe simpler. In our world, as far as I know, this has never been addressed. In this world, though, eventually a continuity lover in DC's editorial staff notices the discrepancy and decides to make it official that there's two of Jason Todd running around. There are definitely stories that have some fun with this fact, but I'm not sure what they'd be.

American comic books in general have serious difficulties in this timeline thanks to the late 90s/early 2000s boom in anime and manga starting to draw American readers to manga over comics earlier than in reality. In this world, the Marvel Comics "Ultimate Marvel" line isn't just an attempt to win over new readers by giving them an easier starting point for getting into comics, it's also an experiment with giving comic books some of the same appeal for readers that manga has. This world's Ultimate Marvel comic books are a line of books that take place in a new universe where a number of popular and/or iconic Marvel characters go through a number of story arcs until they all meet for one massive crossover event called "Ultimatum" that brings the story of the Ultimate Marvel Universe to a definitive end. The overall storyline for each book, along with Ultimatum, is roughly plotted out ahead of time, and each book is collected into a set of trade paperback volumes (sold in mainstream bookstores in addition to specialty comic books stores), with each volume containing one story arc of one book. Marvel also makes sure to keep track of trade paperback sales (in real life, the two major comic book publishers have only recently started to do this; in this world, Marvel's starting to do it about 20 years earlier), and editorial keeps a close eye on the Ultimate Marvel books to make sure nobody does anything that might seriously hurt the line's mainstream appeal. There's a number of things in our world's Ultimate Marvel comics that are true "what were they thinking?" moments, but they don't happen in this world.

The Ultimate Marvel line does fairly well, and both Marvel and DC are forced to reconsider their approach, since they now have good evidence that there are viable alternatives to the traditional way of doing American comics. This takes both companies a long time to work through, but eventually they work out a system where each company's "main" comic book universe becomes a testing ground for new plotlines, characters, and ideas in general, with the successful ones getting used in "standalone" comics that are plotted out ahead of time, have a definitive ending, and are sold as trade paperbacks in bookstores. The "standalone" comics aren't necessarily all part of one universe, and none of them are necessarily part of the "main" universe either. Over time, superheroes become thought of as something like folktale characters, where there isn't an expectation that there's some "real" version that every story has to draw on, just that the overall spirit of the character and their stories is preserved.

Another big thing for the comic book industry is that the X-Men movies of the early 2000s don't do very well. One of the people who would have written them, David Hayter, is too busy with his acting career to work on them, and the scriptwriter who takes his place isn't quite up to the task. The movies do poorly enough that Marvel is able to buy back the X-Men film rights from Fox for an amount that isn't an arm and a leg, and an Iron Man movie that comes out around 2006 or 7 also does poorly (another casualty of Hayter focusing on acting over screenwriting; the real-life man is prolific in superhero movie writing), though this Iron Man movie wasn't made by Marvel, so it doesn't hurt them too badly. Still, the only successful superhero movies of the 2000s are the Spider-Man movies directed by Sam Raimi and the Batman movies directed by Christopher Nolan, while there are some high-profile failures, including movies with well-known and popular characters, so both Marvel and DC decide that movies aren't something they can rely on. The Marvel Cinematic Universe never comes to be, and Disney never decides to buy out Marvel. This world's pop culture is, perhaps, just a bit more varied than in our world.

Things to look forward to: Now I've really got just one or two more posts before my backlog's completely drained. After that, the big "getting ideas" break begins. Don't miss it!

 

[Small Nerd]

Here's some more things about what's going on with Sega in this timeline. After this, all I've got left in the backlog is a bunch of details about certain media in this timeline I found interesting to work out the stories of. If people are interested in those, I can give them their own posts. Now let's get to it!

Around the turn of the millennium, Sega management decides that Yuji Naka is becoming more trouble than he's worth and start treating him accordingly. Shortly after Sonic Adventure 2 finishes development, Naka decides to leave Sega and start his own company. The new head of Sonic Team is Takashi Iizuka, who is the current head of Sonic Team in real life and has been since around the time Naka left Sega after Sonic 06, if I recall correctly.

Yuji Naka goes on to create this world's equivalent of Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, which is a Dreamcast game because Naka doesn't want to waste his experience working with that console, and it doesn't do very well because of course it doesn't. After that failure, Naka bounces between a number of game companies, including both startup companies and well-established ones, and he doesn't make many friends. His career continues on somehow, but it's never quite stable.

After the release of Halo, Sega puts out a Dreamcast controller with two analog sticks, since that game has made it clear that two analog sticks is the future of controllers. Starting with the Concord, a dual-analog controller is standard for Sega consoles. Many Dreamcast games later on in its lifespan have dual-analog support, but they still have to be designed on the assumption that the player only has a single-analog controller, so Dreamcast game developers have to put a lot of work into figuring out camera systems. The Dreamcast never quite loses its reputation for games with bad cameras, but once people start playing Dreamcast games with dual-analog support via emulation, those games get a bit of a boost in reputation.

Over the course of the 2000s, Sonic Team faces more and more pressure to put out new games frequently (gotta keep the company mascot in the public eye, after all), and the increasing complexity of console hardware means that it takes them longer to make games. To solve this, Sonic Team becomes two teams under the same management. One team works on mainline games that have bigger budgets and longer development times so that these games can maintain the series's reputation, and the other team works on spin-off games that have smaller budgets and shorter development times so that there can be some kind of new Sonic game released regularly and any failure won't stick in the public's mind for too long. The spin-off team also uses the games they make as places to experiment with new characters and styles of gameplay. This world's analogue of the Sonic Rush games, for instance, are made by the spin-off team. The first one introduces Blaze the Cat (or at least this world's analogue to the character) and the boost mechanic, and the second is a solo game for Blaze that's used to judge fan opinion of her and refine the boost mechanic before any mainline game uses it.

Sony creates the PSP because they believe that Sega has their own handheld in the works. Sega actually does not have one in the works, since the failures of the Game Gear and Nomad scared management off the idea, but once Sony announces the PSP in an event that includes some unsubtle jabs at Sega's past handhelds, such as showing off the PSP's rechargeable battery so you don't have to buy new batteries all the time, that changes. After that event, Sega does start work on their own new handheld (I haven't figured out a name for it yet; I welcome suggestions), and since they started on it a bit later than Sony, they can take advantage of even slight improvements in technology to give their handheld specs as good as the PSP's or better while maintaining a similar or even lower price. Sega's announcement of their new handheld has them making a mockery of the PSP, in a reversal of Sony humiliating Sega at E3 1995. Also, this handheld is the main home for Sonic spin-off games during its lifespan, but that probably goes without saying.

Starting in the late 2000s, Idea Factory begins work on a role-playing game that eventually becomes this world's equivalent of Hyperdimension Neptunia, but since there aren't any high-profile console manufacturers that dropped out of that market, the plot is quite different. It's still a metaphor for the state of the video game industry where the characters are personifications of different video game companies, and the main character is still a personification of Sega, but the plot has a significant focus on the power of friendship (as a metaphor for Sega courting third parties with the Concord), and the villain who represents flashcart piracy is named after a flashcart for Sega's handheld and is outright sucking the life out of Neptune's younger sister (who isn't named Nepgear, but since I haven't named the new Sega handheld, I don't know what this character's name is). There are also mechanics based around fostering synergy between party members, including bonuses for taking suggestions from them, to go with the story themes.

As you might imagine, Idea Factory does eventually start officially collaborating with Sega on this game, and that collaboration is why the game is so biased in favor of Sega. Additionally, the idea of a character who is a literal personification of Sega gives Sega management the idea to make Neptune a new mascot to supplement Sonic, one who can appeal to girls and young women. Idea Factory is fine with the idea, and so work begins on making Neptune a character who can appeal to the right demographic both inside Japan and outside of it. Part of this includes consulting with female staff of Sega's non-Japan branches for what girls and young women in those parts of the world like. It's American staff who come up with the idea of making Neptune a character who appeals to girls that don't want to be "like the other girls" (even in this timeline, Americans of the 2000s don't consider video games to be exactly a feminine interest), as well as suggesting that Neptune's design is changed to lean into the look of the scene girl, since her original design (essentially the one she has in real life) was already similar to that. In the American version of Neptunia, at least, Neptune is a bit of a pick-me girl whose character arc is learning not to look down on other girls who have more feminine interests than hers, even if she still isn't interested in them herself.

Somehow, this scheme actually works, and Neptune becomes the "Sonic for girls" that Sega management was hoping for. It probably helps that Sega was involved with the actual development of the game, so it has less of the griminess common to Idea Factory games. Of course, once the scene look stops being popular, Neptune has to get redesigned a bit, at least for America, but it isn't very drastic since scene fashion is pretty androgynous to begin with and this world's Neptune isn't meant to be very feminine. There are crossovers between Sonic and Neptunia eventually, of course, but I haven't thought much yet about what they'd be like.

Things to look forward to: As I mentioned at the start of this post, I really don't have anything in the backlog left aside from story details of media that either don't exist in real life or didn't make it outside of Japan. If people are interested in that, I'm happy to make a couple posts about those things, but if not then I'll be taking a bit of a break to let my brain generate new ideas. Don't hesitate to make your voice heard!

Question: In this time line, does Shaq get a decent fighting game?

Edit: I now have this strange image of Shaq retiring from basketball, and then finding his way to fighting game tournaments. Like, not regularly, but at any given tournament, you could likely be challenged by Shaq.

Click to shrink...

Unfortunately, Shaq-Fu still isn't very good. The licensed game curse is too strong for me to defeat. I do find the idea of Shaq just randomly showing up at fighting game tournaments funny, so if I can think of a way to set it up properly, I'd love to add it to this timeline. If you're okay with that, of course.

 

[Small Nerd]

Nobody has objected to me going into specifics about the stories of specific media in this timeline, so I'm gonna talk about them. Let's start with the 2000s Street Fighter cartoon, since I've got more details in my head for that than a lot of other things.

There are three seasons of the show, one for each Street Fighter game that exists by the time of the cartoon (what's a Street Fighter 1?). I'm not sure if the seasons would be thirteen episodes or twenty-six episodes long. I'm leaning towards twenty-six, but maybe that's not realistic.

The first season is, as you might expect, primarily an adaptation of Street Fighter II. Each of the major characters would get an episode for their backstories and the specific incidents that get them involved with the main plot. These would be characters like Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Cammy, generally characters the general public might recognize. The main plot, of course, is that the extremely bad dude M Bison is up to no good trying to take over the world and needs to be stopped. Bison's various schemes mess with the heroes in various ways, and that's why they come after him.

Most of the cast of Street Fighter II do have pretty strong reasons to go after Bison, leaving aside the man's henchmen, but there are a couple of characters I want to single out for how the adaptation changes their backstories or reasons for getting involved. The main one is Cammy, whose backstory in the games is being a (modified?) clone of Bison that got out from under his thumb. In this adaptation, Cammy is one of the many people that Bison has abducted and brainwashed into being his pet super-soldiers, and she had her brainwashing undone in a chance encounter with Rose, the embodiment of Bison's conscience that he split off from himself (also a character in the Street Fighter Alpha games). Rose was keeping an eye on Bison's activities because of course she would, and Cammy happened to be one of his brainwashed super-soldiers that she was able to get to and help. The cartoon also shows Rose helping a few other playable Street Fighter characters who have this sort of backstory, such as Juni and Juli or, in this adaptation, Blanka.

Aside from Cammy, the characters getting the most backstory/motivation changes are Ryu and Ken. In the games, Ryu's motivation for doing, well, most of what he does is a combination of constantly seeking to improve himself as a martial artist (and thus stumbling into all the tournaments run by would-be world conquerors) and a dislike for staying in any one place for long (so that he keeps running into different characters). Ryu's not exactly amoral or immoral, but he's also not really the sort of hero that works well outside the context of a fighting game, so the cartoon does change him up a little. Similarly, Ken in the games is often motivated by looking out for his family and/or best friend, Ryu (leaving the, ah, unusual plot of Street Fighter 6 aside). In this cartoon, both Ryu and Ken have been given a final task by their martial arts teacher to wander the world helping those in need so that they can learn to use their skills in service of the common good. For Ryu, this is to keep him from becoming so single-minded in his pursuit of greater skill that he turns into a new Akuma. For Ken, this is to give him perspective his wealthy background can't provide and curb his worst traits, a certain arrogance and a lack of care for others. Also, this is a task the two receive while their teacher's on his deathbed, so they both feel obligated to do it even though neither of them likes the idea. Eventually, the two run into Rose, who asks this pair of strong martial artists for help fighting Bison, and keeping a megalomaniac from conquering the world is helping others, so they agree.

A lot of characters are reduced to cameos or cut out entirely, so as to keep the narrative from getting too bloated. In particular, Honda and Zangief are cut out entirely aside from occasional background jokes (such as an ad for one of Zangief's matches or a sign reading "Honda Bathhouse"), and Blanka only gets a scene or two that show him as one of Bison's brainwashed minions that Rose helps get out of there. There's too many other characters to list that only appear as cameos or references if at all, since Street Fighter II and Street Fighter Alpha have a lot of characters and I'm not going to detail what this cartoon does with each of them. In general, if I don't mention a character, it's safe to assume the cartoon isn't doing much with them.

The main subplots of the first season of the cartoon are Ryu and Ken's shared character arc of learning to think beyond themselves and care about other people (while also becoming better friends with each other), Cammy trying to find a place in the world now that she's a free woman (and ultimately ending up more or less where she does in the games, as part of a team of people dedicated to fighting the good fight), and Guile and Chun-Li having a shared character arc that's a classic "justice versus revenge" story (and they both choose justice in the end, of course). A significant part of Ryu and Ken's arc is the two meeting Sakura, who just had to transfer schools after things got too rough at her old one (as a nod to her appearance in Rival Schools) and has discovered that she likes fighting and wants to get better at it. Ryu sees something of himself in Sakura and agrees to help her out a bit, only to find that, like him, her desire to get better can get dangerously single-minded. More specifically, she says something after losing a fight that uses phrasing Ryu finds concerning and familiar. In the process of encouraging Sakura to take a healthier approach to her passion, Ryu ends up convincing himself to do the same thing. The last we see of Sakura is her going to an arcade to play video games, which symbolizes her finding things to do with her life that aren't "get stronger no matter what," but they are fighting games, so she's not getting away from martial arts and combat entirely. And her opponent is an opportunity for another character to cameo (probably Karin, but I like the idea that it's Morrigan from Darkstalkers, who in our world has been shown to like fighting games in some games that have her). It's worth noting that all these subplots would be spread out over several epsiodes, with any one episode probably only including one or two beats at most for any given subplot.

As far as the main plot of the cartoon's first season goes, it's pretty much what you'd expect. The various heroes come together (with Rose encouraging this process) and beat the bad guys. Cool fights happen, there's some scenes with great animation, sometimes there are funny bits, and so on. Much like a fighting game, the main plot isn't what makes the story appealing, the characters do that.

The second season of the cartoon is an adaptation of this world's Street Fighter IV. Much like in our world, Street FIghter IV is meant to be a revival of the series, so, much like in our world, the plot is mostly just an excuse to have all the iconic and/or popular characters make an appearance. Bison's back, some of his mad science experiments got loose and are causing trouble, that sort of thing. So the cartoon would take that idea and turn it into a season that's half monster of the week and half serialized story. For the second season, the heroes run into and deal with Bison's various creatures (both literal and metaphorical; the cartoon frames Bison's subordinates as the products of his madness just like the monsters he had engineered), gradually coming together to track Bison down for a final confrontation, which happens at the end of the season.

The main theme for the second season's story is treating people as tools versus treating them as people. Bison treats everyone as tools, which leads to his downfall because it leads to him encouraging his subordinates to turn on him. The heroes treat people as people, which lets them come together in order to defeat Bison. Alone, none of them could manage that, but together, they can do it. This also ties in to how they find Bison in the first place. Juri shows up in the cartoon (I don't know exactly how the developers of the real-life SFIV came up with her, but taekwondo is a famous martial art and Japanese culture has some pretty negative stereotypes about Koreans, so a villainous Korean who fights with taekwondo wouldn't be hard for this world's SFIV devs to come up with) as a recurring antagonist, and it's the heroes' willingness to treat her as a person that gradually convinces her to turn on Bison. More specifically, Chun-Li decides to research who Juri is and finds evidence that Bison arranged for Juri's life to be ruined so she'd be willing to work for him, and then she shares that evidence with Juri because they might be enemies but Juri still deserves to know what Bison did. Once Juri has the chance to prove to herself that Chun-Li isn't playing some kind of trick, she decides that she won't work for him any more and gives Chun-Li the first clue that the heroes need to start figuring out where Bison's base is before leaving Bison's employ violently by helping the heroes assault his base. Once the dust has settled, Juri has to go to prison for a long time because she did commit a lot of crimes, but Chun-Li puts in a good word for her, so it's not as long of a sentence as it could have been. The last we see of Juri is her leaving prison at the end of her sentence and smiling at the sight of Chun-Li being there to welcome her back into society.

Other than that, the second season of the Street Fighter cartoon has one main subplot, which is to foreshadow the events of Street FIghter III. This includes Ken getting a hanger-on named Sean (who gets more and more fit as the second season goes on) as well as raising a son, Seth mysteriously disappearing after being beaten (like with Juri, the basic concept for Seth is one I don't think is very hard for this world's SFIV devs to come up with), the fact that no one can figure out how Bison was able to strike back so quickly after being beaten at the end of the first season, and how some of the monsters of the week get beaten with the help of some interesting-looking characters. There are also a few blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearances of a figure in strange clothing observing the heroes from a distance, and some of the more major characters who don't show up in SF3 get explanations for why they're not involved with those events. In particular, Sakura shows up in the second season and helps out with some of the monsters of the week and the final fight, only to find that while she likes fighting, she doesn't like it when the stakes are life and death, while Rose doesn't have much motivation to fight once Bison is gone since she only ever started getting her hands dirty to take him down. And in the last episode of the second season, after all the nice shots of the heroes going back to ordinary life and enjoying themselves, there's one final scene. Two figures cloaked in shadows discuss the fall of Bison, the "thorn in our side," and the heroes who defeated him. With him gone and those heroes lulled into a false sense of security, well, I'll put it in their own words, the words that close out the season.

Female Figure: Is it time? Time for the curtain to raise on the third act of our plans?
Male Figure: Indeed. After all these centuries, we will finally strike, and remake the world.

I'm sorry, I had to sneak in a reference to the phrase "Third Strike" somehow. That was the least awkward way to do it I could think of.

The third season of the Street Fighter cartoon is an adaptation of Street Fighter III. In this season, an ancient secret society has set in motion its plans to destory the world and remake it as a utopia. To do this, they first need to make their leader, Gill, perfect in all ways so that when he remakes the world in his image it will truly be a utopia. Gill has already achieved perfection in many areas, but he is not yet physically perfect. His plan to acheive physical perfection is to find strong martial artists and lure them into being captured by his subordinates so they can be studied and have their strengths copied into Gill. Once that's been accomplished, the society will deliberately trigger several catastrophes at the same time to break society and weed out the weak. If this plan sounds crazy, that's because it is. Gill and the secret society are high off a combination of religious fervor and the sunk cost fallacy. Bison used to be part of the society, but he struck out on his own and stole a lot of their people and resources. With him out of the picture, they can take back what he stole and finally get their plans underway.

The season starts with various characters being attacked by strange, silent beings. This starts with Ryu and Ken, naturally, but then some of the newcomers for SF3 are shown as victims of this too (specifically Alex, Makoto, Dudley, and Elena). Ryu and Ken (with Sean tagging along because he's started doing that now) run into Chun-Li, who explains to them that this has been happening to martial artists all over the world and she's been assigned to investigate it. This cuts to a scene of the newcomers being gathered together by Ibuki, a ninja from an old ninja village that has been fighting the secret society for generations. Ibuki explains that there is a secret society and what they're doing this for before asking for help. The ninja village has been worn down over time, and now that society is getting ready to kick off the apocalypse, they need strong fighters ready to fight off the society's forces right now. All of Ibuki's audience agrees to help out, for various reasons. Conveniently, both Chun-Li and Ibuki have reason to believe that the society plans to target someone they can still get to before it's too late: an ancient martial arts master living in Brazil named Oro (both characters would say this name at the same time in a shot that's split down the middle and shows each of them in one of the halves).

In Brazil, the two groups meet (with the exception of Ken, who's temporarily elsewhere for Reasons) and initially fight each other because each group thinks the other is the bad guys (this fight happens at the docks, in reference to a stage in Third Strike). Once that's cleared up, they agree to join forces and head into the Amazon to find Oro. Naturally, our heroes stumble on Oro just as he finishes beating up the guy the secret society sent after him. Oro has mystical abilities that mean he's aware that something very bad is about to happen if nothing is done, so he decides to stick with the heroes and help out how he can, especially since something about Alex feels odd to Oro.

From there, there's a number of episodes where the heroes go around the world helping different fighters stay out of the secret society's clutches, and the henchmen sent after targets gradually become stronger. This is how some of the characters from Street Fighter III show up in the cartoon, as one-and-done appearances. Some characters from previous seasons of the cartoon also show up this way, either as targets of the society (the good guy characters) or as willing henchmen (the bad guy characters). Eventually, the heroes come across Necro, once an ordinary man but now merely another of the secret society's tools, if a strong one. And yet, whatever the society did to bring him under control couldn't erase his love of music. After one fight with Necro (he fights the heroes a couple times), Elena notices that Necro sings before he starts fighting and thinks that maybe he's not just a mindless tool like Ibuki believes. As it turns out, Elena is right, and by showing Necro that she also loves music (though Elena's a dancer rather than a singer), she gets him to hesitate long enough that Makoto can knock him out, letting Oro undo the brainwashing the society performed on him. As thanks, Necro leads the heroes to the lab where the secret society made him into an electrified stretchy man so they can look for more clues about where the society is actually based, and then Ryu suggests to Necro that he go meet someone who knows about how it is to recover from being brainwashed, Cammy, and it's off to Britain Necro goes. At the secret society lab, it's Chun-Li's investigative skills that find the clue they need, though it's Dudley who knows enough about geography (due to his gentlemanly education) to determine where the secret society's main base is: a small island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.

Throughout the season, the heroes have run into a woman who's also keeping an eye on this rash of attacks and abductions and sometimes points them towards other people who need help. Once they get to the secret society's base, it's revealed that this woman is Gill's right hand, Kolin. Gill wanted to make the heroes as strong as possible by giving them stronger and stronger opponents, since he judged them to have the most potential of any martial artist he could find (except for Sean, which gets an indignant "Hey!" from him). Once the heroes reach their peak, he'll personally copy their strengths into himself using a technique that the secret society developed as part of a ritual that will cap off Gill's quest for perfection and give him unfathomable power. But first, they need one last little push. Cue a fight with Urien, Gill's brother. Previous episodes had occasionally shown some of the secret society's machinations, including Urien plotting against Gill, but now Urien is fighting the heroes at Gill's command. What happened? A flashback shows Gill confronting Urien. Not with violence, but with words. As powerful as Gill may be, his true weapon is charisma, and he puts it to good use convincing Urien to be loyal to him. This charisma is also why when Remy appears in the cartoon, it's as a one-off antagonist. Gill met Remy and convinced him to fight the heroes. And once Urien's beaten, Gill intends to use his charisma again.

After Urien's beaten (with cool moments for everyone, including Urien doing an Aegis Reflector ping-pong on someone), Gill applauds the heroes and tries to convince them to let him use their power to become perfect. Ryu wants to help others, so does Gill. Chun-Li wants to protect the defenseless, so does Gill. Ken wants his family to be safe, Gill wants everyone to be safe. Elena wants to be friends with everyone, Gill wants everyone to be friends with each other. Makoto and Sean want to be respected, Gill wants everyone to be respected. Dudley wants to be safe from being attacked again, Gill wants an end to conflict. Alex wants... well, what does he want? It comes up occasionally throughout the season that Alex isn't quite sure what he wants. He's the last to agree to helping Ibuki, none of the society's targets are people he cares about (because he doesn't have any close friends or loved ones), and while the other heroes have reasons for learning martial arts (be that a passion for the craft or to help them accomplish a goal or something else), Alex only learned how to fight because a friend's dad offered to teach him and he had nothing else he felt like doing. Alex... wants a purpose. And Gill can offer him that.

Alex is the last of the heroes that Gill tries to steal the strengths of, and as Gill says the final words of the ritual that will give him new power, Alex listens to those words. What he hears is a promise to destroy the weak and make a paradise for the worthy. Alex may not have a purpose, but he does have a sense of fairness (which he mentions when he first agrees to help Ibuki, along with some other sporadic occasions). As he puts it, "I don't like bullies." And what is destroying the weak but bullying on the largest scale? In that moment, Alex finds his purpose. He's going to save the weak from every bully he can. Gill finishes the ritual, gaining power over fire and ice, his skin changing color to glow red and blue, split down the middle. And then, the camera cuts to Alex, who's also gotten red-and-blue skin. The strange feeling Oro had about Alex and Gill deciding the group with Alex in it had the most potential have the same cause: Alex, in some strange cosmic coincidence, has the same ability as Gill to be empowered by the secret society's perfection ritual. Maybe his ancestors were subjected to the secret society's early experiments, maybe fate picked him to stop Gill, maybe he's just built different. Whatever the reason, Alex now has the power of anime on his side, and he's going to use it to kick Gill's teeth in.

After some cool fight sequences, Gill's beaten, he and Alex both lose the ritual's power, and that loss renders Gill permanently catatonic, so the heroes decide what they'll be doing in the aftermath. Ryu takes Makoto as a student, and Ken takes Sean as his. Chun-Li gets to work dismantling what's left of the secret society. Ibuki decides to see if her village can integrate with the outside world (and look for a nice boyfriend). Elena decides to keep exploring the world to meet new friends. Dudley decides to teach people boxing for self-defense. Oro decides to look for someone to pass his teachings on to. And Alex decides to do like Ryu once did and wander the earth helping those who need it. All of them, in their own ways, will continue to fight for the future.

As you might expect, a major theme for the third and final season is legacy and passing on the torch to the next generation. Aside from Ryu and Ken taking on students, Chun-Li mentions that she hopes for Yun and Yang to keep their hometown safe while she's out in the world doing what she needs to do (this is during the episode when they appear), Ibuki is the heir to her village's legacy and struggles with the question of which parts of it she wants to keep (she's one of the most promising ninjas in the village and it's assumed she'll lead it one day, but she doesn't know much about the outside world, so traveling around to beat Gill has given her a lot of questions), Oro is a relic of the past who needs to find out what he can pass on to the future, Elena has a legacy she wants to move on from (she's a member of what was a royal family and is in favor of her country becoming a democracy), and Alex choosing to wander the earth at the end is partly inspired by Ryu deciding to take on a student, since Ryu will be too busy training Makoto to go around helping people himself, and Alex thinks there should be someone doing it. So in a way, Alex is taking on Ryu's legacy.

A major subplot of the third season is Sean's relationship with Ken. At the start of the season, Sean treats Ken with some serious hero worship, which Ken isn't comfortable with, but Ken also can't figure out how to get Sean to stop without being cruel. Once Chun-Li shows up and asks for help, Ken's not really willing to go along with the others because he wants to be there for his son, who's still pretty young. This damages Sean's image of Ken, since Sean is happy to get out there and fight for justice. Ken does agree to help pay for everyone's expenses while traveling, but Sean still has to confront the fact that his hero isn't perfect but just a man, warts and all. Once all the heroes know what Gill plans to do, Ken does agree to help more since that's the kind of thing you need all hands on deck for, but he still hangs back as much as he can. But during the Urien fight, Ken rushes in to keep Urien from targeting Ryu, showing Sean that Ken isn't an untouchable hero or a despicable coward, he's a man with good points and bad points. Once the big final fight's done, Sean tells Ken that he understands his hero worship was too much and he won't get on Ken's case for being a coward anymore because now he really understands that everyone's got their limits. Ken responds by telling Sean that he's glad Sean could learn from something from him and asks if Sean would like to learn some more from him. The two aren't idol and tagalong anymore, they can relate to each other as people now.

As for Ryu's new student, Makoto has been changed significantly for the cartoon. Aspects of her cartoon version are inspired by what Sakura's like in the games. The cartoon's Makoto is a martial arts practitioner who wasn't very interested in them until seeing Ryu in action inspired her. She's introduced wearing a school uniform that looks like Sakura's, only putting on her usual outfit once she's survived the initial attack on her by the secret society and agreed to help Ibuki fight them. Throughout the season, Makoto is shown trying to perform a hadouken without much success. Makoto can gather the necessary ki energy to do a hadouken, but she can't shoot it out as a projectile. During the big finale, Makoto merges her tries at a hadouken with a different technique she can perform much better to create a new, cartoon-original attack where she rushes into the opponent with a punch that explodes with a ball of ki when it connects. Ryu notices that, and her lateral thinking and persistence inspire him to take her on as a student. This comes after the two of them spending time fighting together throughout the season, as well as having conversations that establish that Ryu's been thinking about taking on a student for some time and that he gets on well with Makoto. Sakura, it turns out, has been working with someone else ("Dan something," Ryu says) to start up her own martial arts school, and Ryu wouldn't dream of insulting her by offering to train her. So if he's going to take on a student, Makoto isn't a bad fit.

Now, there's one Street Fighter character I haven't talked about very much that I expect people want to hear about: Akuma. In the cartoon, Akuma appears throughout the first season, trying to tempt Ryu to become like him so that Akuma can have an opponent on his level. Ryu, of course, rejects that idea and has a fight with Akuma while everyone else is fighting M Bison. Akuma decides that Ryu isn't close enough to his level to be worth fighting as long as he's determined to not see things Akuma's way, so Ryu survives because Akuma just leaves once he's gotten bored. Akuma is also why Ryu recognizes that Sakura's in danger of becoming too single-minded about getting stronger. The line Sakura has that tips Ryu off sounds like something Akuma's already said to him. In the second season, Akuma appears trying to find someone else who can be his new rival, only to come up empty-handed (everyone he approaches either fights him off or turns out to have weaknesses Auma can't stand). The last time Akuma shows up in the second season, it's to watch the heroes beat Bison once and for all and wander off back to his private island (he actually has this in the games that exist IRL) to think over what's happened during the season, coughing ominously. The third season of the cartoon sees Akuma, now visibly older to match his appearance in SF3, seeking out Ryu for one last fight. Akuma's body is failing because of his constant use of the Satsui no Hado, and if he doesn't get one more fight in soon, he'll be too weak to fight anyone ever again. He shows up once or twice before the big finale, which prompts Ryu to ask Oro for help facing him. Akuma's on a level Ryu's never gotten to, so he needs training if he wants to even survive an Akuma who's got nothing left to lose, never mind win. Oro teaches Ryu how to tap into the Power of Nothingness (explained in the cartoon as a kind of supercharged mental clarity that allows the user to use their body, ki, and training to their fullest potential without needing to think about it), as well as training Ryu in more conventional things. Finally, while Gill's fighting Alex (and the other heroes), Akuma confronts Ryu for their final fight. It's a very cool fight where both combatants hold nothing back. The earth shakes, the sea rages, the sky roars. But in the end, Ryu is able to win, landing a Shin Shoryuken as the final blow. Akuma lays on the ground, body finally unable to even keep him standing. He calls Ryu by name for the first and last time, congratulating him on his victory, and uses the last of his strength to make a giant fireball. When the fireball disappears, Akuma isn't there anymore. Did he die or teleport himself away? No one knows, and the show's staff get just enough wiggle room to actually have Akuma die to Ryu in some way, even if it's a bit unclear. Thus passes Akuma, and his legacy is getting Ryu to leave a positive legacy of his own.

As part of the adaptation process, a lot of characters have their designs modified to be easier to animate or to match standards of what's appropriate for a kid's show. In particular, Cammy has an outfit that's similar to her outfit in Street Fighter 6, though with a full-length tank top and jacket, Ibuki's ninja outfit covers her hips completely, and Elena is given an entirely new outfit to wear that consists of a big baggy T-shirt and cargo pants with hiking boots, to fit with her original conception as somewhat tomboyish and avoid the whole "this character is only wearing a bikini" thing. Similarly, Urien is only ever seen wearing his suit, and Gill always has his robe on. Other than those characters, changes to character design are mainly just simplifications like changing fingerless gloves to regular gloves.

Who's voicing all these characters? There are so many characters that I'm not too interested in coming up with an entire English cast. Since the second season of the cartoon is adapting SFIV, which is coming out around the same time, I'm going to say that the real-life Street Fighter IV's English cast is more or less the same as this world's Street Fighter IV and this world's Street Fighter cartoon. Any characters who weren't in SFIV will have voice actors that may or may not be the ones they've had in any real-life Street Fighter games that included those characters and had English voice acting. If anyone would like me to do some casting, feel free to ask me about the English VAs for specific characters, just not the entire cast. I am not figuring out a Japanese cast for Street Fighter.

So there's the Street Fighter cartoon. I had a lot more to say about it than I expected, but I'm pretty happy with this. Maybe I'll take the time to figure out more details of all these video game cinematic universes now that I know how much I like doing it. Would you all like to see that kind of detail? Make your voice heard!

 

[Small Nerd]

I feel like expanding on this world's version of the Neptunia series, so let's get into it.

The first Neptunia game gets the English name Neptunia: The Console Warriors. It's released on the Sega Concord around 2010 or 2011, and was a joint effort between Idea Factory and Sega. Much of the technical work was done by Sega, much of the game's design was from Idea Factory, and people from both companies contributed about equally to the game's aesthetics and story.

Console Warriors is an action-ized RPG, since a more traditional RPG wouldn't fit well with Sega's brand as a company that makes exciting games that do new things. Specifically, combat takes place in real time, with the player directly controlling one character while the other party members act automatically, and the player can switch which character they control at any time. During battles, AI-controlled party members will occasionally shout out actions they want the player-controlled character to take, and the player's response to those requests will affect the relationship between the characters involved. This means that the player can manipulate how any two party members feel about each other, similar to the real-world Star Ocean 2. Doing what an AI character asks you to do also means that the synergy between those two characters will be increased for the duration of the battle, and high synergy lets you use team attacks you otherwise can't access. Additionally, at the start of each dungeon, the party has a strategy session where the player decides not only who will be in the active party but also what the other characters will do while the party fights through the dungeon. Depending on the dungeon, this can include things like searching for additional treasure (along with opening the treasure chests you could've gotten but missed), weakening the boss at the end of the dungeon, and even taking care of certain sidequests for the player (mainly of the "collect so many monster parts" variety). Which characters the player assigns to the different tasks is important, both for manipulating relationship values (characters don't like being put on tasks they hate) and because the outcome of the task depends on which character is assigned. For any given dungeon task, different characters will be good or bad at it, and picking the wrong character to do a task can lead to failure or even making the situation worse (for example, failing to weaken a boss can make it stronger than normal). That said, giving characters the right equipment can mean they'll succeed at dungeon tasks they'd otherwise fail at, and doing this success-by-equipment has a special effect on relationship values. Console Warriors is a game meant for replayability so that players have more of a chance to get attached to the characters. Neptune is the new Sega mascot, after all.

Aside from the above, Console Warriors has fairly normal RPG gameplay. The player explores dungeons and towns, completes sidequests and main quests, buys and sells gear, and so on. Most of the distinctive things are its approach to combat and relationships, which are meant to tie into the story's themes about the power of friendship, as a reflection of how Sega at this point in the timeline has been working hard to have good relationships with third-party developers.

As for the story of Console Warriors, it's both similar and different to what you'd expect of a real-life Neptunia game. In the world of Gamindustri, three countries (Microsoft never entered the video game industry, so it's just Nintendo, Sega, and Sony) fight an eternal struggle, the forces of each country led by their own heroines: the Console Panoply Users (yeah, it's silly, the translators were doing their best), who fate has chosen to wield the power of their country's faith to do feats no one else could. Each country has a pair of sister CPUs, the Greater and the Lesser (a metaphor for each console maker's home console and handheld machines), and each country's CPUs have fought the other countries' countless times. By the time our story begins, the CPUs have all grown tired of the endless war, but no country is willing to back down, for fear that the other two will pounce on the first country to back out. It is a bitter struggle, with no end in sight. Because the war is lead by the CPUs, this eternal conflict has come to be called... the Console Wars.

As our story begins, we see the Greater CPUs fighting each other yet again while the Lesser CPUs keep each other from interfering (by having their own fight, naturally). The first CPU we see clearly is the one for Lowee (I couldn't think of a better name for the console-countries than what actual Neptunia came up with), Delphina of the White Heart (Nintendo). The oldest of the CPUs, Delphina fights with a patience no one can match. Next we see the CPU of Lastation, Diva of the Black Heart (Sony). The youngest of the three, Diva has many skills that she has had an eternity to cultivate to heights impossible for anyone else to reach. And lastly, we see the CPU of Planeptune, our main character, Neptune of the Orange Heart (Sega; she's orange rather than purple as a nod to the Dreamcast). The most creative of the three, Neptune has an endless well of tricks she can pull out to surprise her foes and get victories no one else could dream of winning. I should note, the player doesn't actually get all of this information right away, just the names and faces of the CPUs, along with some cool fight moments.

Unlike the many battles that have come before, this clash of CPUs is interrupted by mysterious figures that immediately incapacitate the Lesser CPUs, forcing the Greater CPUs to temporarily team up in a battle that introduces the player to the game's combat. However, it is not enough, and these mystery figures steal power from the Greater CPUs as they fight, eventually reducing them to little more than ordinary humans. Then, these mystery attackers scatter the Greater CPUs to the four winds, disappearing with the Lesser CPUs.

Cut to Neptune waking up from all that, her injuries tended to by IF (Idea Factory) and Duma (DMA, the developers of Grand Theft Auto). Duma found Neptune unconscious and brought her to IF's clinic. While IF was able to treat Neptune's injuries, she can't do anything about how weak Neptune is after having her power drained. In fact, IF and Duma don't recognize Neptune as their country's CPU at all (each of the Greater CPUs was launched into random spots in their respective home countries). Luckily for them, Neptune isn't the sort of person to get angry about that kind of thing Neptune decides to spend a while living as a normal person, since she figures that whoever attacked the CPUs is bound to show themselves eventually ("That was a villain, there's no way we don't meet again!"), and she needed a break from her job anyway.

IF and Duma decide to help Nep (as they end up calling her) with getting back on her feet, and that means an introduction to sidequests. Over the course of doing those sidequests, the player is introduced to the game's relationship mechanics (including a mandatory loss of points between Nep and IF when Nep learns that IF likes to sew and mocks her for it; Nep later apologizes and you get the points back). Soon enough, the main plot kicks in once again, and the party runs into an outpost of of the Collective, an organization that's been terrorizing all parts of Gamindustri recently. This is the player's introduction to dungeons and strategy sessions. After defeating the outpost's leader, Neptune finds some of her CPU power returned to her and decides that this is the kick in the pants she needs ("But you don't wear pants, Nep." "Come on, Duma, you know what I mean!") to actually do something more than odd jobs around town. It's time for Neptune (and her new friends she's dragging along persuaded to join her) to set out into the world, get her power back, and save her sister!

Of course, it's hard for Nep to get her power back when no one knows where any of the Collective's bases are. To find that information, Nep and company make their way to Planeptune's capital, since the government's got to be keeping an eye on that kind of thing. Naturally, it takes them a while to get there, including some sidequests and new party members Atlanta (Atlus; in this timeline, they stayed an independent company) and Sophie (Sucker Punch). Once they actually meet with an official, the party learns that Neptune really is the CPU of Planeptune... at the same time they learn she has no idea how the country's government works ("I'm busy fighting all the time, why am I gonna remember that boring stuff?"). Still, this means that the party has a list of places to investigate, and they get to it, exploring a couple more towns and dungeons. By the end of it, the Collective isn't a threat to Planeptune anymore, and Neptune has... some of her power back, but it's nowhere near what she used to be. Something more is going on, and to figure out what that is, she's going to need to go to the other countries... peacefully (Gasp!).

Neptune's not on good terms with either Delphina or Diva, but she has less history with Diva, so she goes to Lastation first. Once there, the party tries to get help from the government again (and Neptune still doesn't know how the government works), but the Greater CPU of Planeptune isn't going to get help from Lastation, even if she's weak and asking politely. If the party want to hunt down the Collective, they're gonna have to find their quarry the old-fashioned way. Naturally, there are more sidequests, more dungeons, and a couple new party members. These new party members are Banshee (Bungie) and Cece (CyberConnect2). While leaving the last Collective base, the party runs into Diva, who's very unhappy to see Neptune, but since she's getting her CPU power back no matter who beats up the Collective members in Lastation, she's willing to leave the party be... until she notices Banshee in the group and assumes Neptune kidnapped her. Cue a boss fight, then the misunderstanding gets cleared up and Diva joins the party "to make sure you don't try anything with my friend, Nep-Nep." With the Collective in Lastation taken care of, it's time to go to Lowee.

We all know how things start off in Lowee, to the point that the party doesn't even bother to ask the government for help finding the Collective's bases and just starts wandering around the country immediately. You know the drill, sidequests, dungeons, party members. The new party members for this country are Kona (Konami) and Rachel (Retro Studios). Similar to what happens with Diva, the party run into Delphina after clearing the last dungeon (with one of the party wondering out loud if it'll happen again) and she gets mad at Neptune over Rachel specifically. Delphina doesn't care much about Kona, but Rachel is someone she's taken as a protege. There's a boss fight, things get cleared up, and Delphina joins the party. Now that the Collective's gone, what's next?

It turns out the Collective is not gone, the party just got rid of the organization's rank and file. The true leaders of the Collective make their appearance. Arfore, who feeds on the power of Dua, the Lesser CPU of Lowee (the R4 flashcart for the Nintendo DS; I'm just having Nintendo make the DS, I don't see why they wouldn't). Dax, who feeds on the power of Waki, Lesser CPU of Lastation (Dark AleX, the creator of early PSP custom firmware; not exactly piracy, but the PSP didn't really have anything like a flashcart, so I got as close as I could). And the one who feeds on the power of Planeptune's Lesser CPU (still named Nepgear, though she represents the Sega handheld that would be current in this timeline's late 2000s, and I still haven't figured out a name for that thing): Chelac (a reference to the hackers who broke open the security on Sega's handheld at this time, a group called Shellac). These villains abducted the Lesser CPUs at the start of the game and have been feeding off their CPU power the whole time. With that power and the power they kept from the Greater CPUs, they've been getting ready to summon into existence their own imitation CPU who will defeat the true CPUs and conquer all of Gamindustri. Being villains, they naturally waited for the most dramatic moment to reveal their existence and plans, and now they raise up an island in the middle of seas that separate the countries from each other, where they will enact their ritual and bring their scheme to its apocalyptic conclusion.

At this point, there's the last few sidequests, including ones to get the super good gear that requires tons of extra work to find and ones that unlock when you meet various secret conditions which practically require using a strategy guide to figure out, in the great tradition of RPGs. There aren't any new party members at this point, but there are some new optional dungeons that let you fight the optional extremely hard bosses every RPG needs. But eventually, you go to the villains' island for the final dungeon.

For the final dungeon, things are different from usual. Each CPU leads their own party through their own part of the dungeon, ending with a boss fight against the villain that's got their sister. As a result, the strategy session is mostly about which characters go into each party, with the leftover characters (there's a total of eleven party members and each party has three characters, so there's always two left over) being assigned to try and sabotage the villains' summoning ritual. If they succeed, the final boss is easier. If they fail, the final boss is "normal." If they fail badly, which requires picking specific characters for the job, the final boss is the toughest enemy in the game. Once that's done, Delphina fights Arfore, Diva fights Dax, and Neptune fights Chelac. But it turns out that beating each of the Collective's leaders was the final part of the summoning ritual, and the party has to ready themselves for one last fight, the monster emulating a CPU: the Steel Heart. All three of the Greater CPUs team up to fight the Steel Heart, and in this final battle, their synergy is always at maximum. The Steel Heart goes down, the day is saved, and the CPUs all realize that they really don't want to fight each other anymore. They agree that from now on, they'll make sure their countries stick to non-violent competition and keep a real war from starting again. The Console Wars aren't exactly over, but there is peace.

That's the main story, but there multiple endings the player can unlock that play after the main ending. The unlockable endings, similar to Star Ocean 2, depict each of the party members in pairs in their lives after the events of the game, with characters paired up according to who has the highest relationship values with who. But there's one last secret ending that unlocks if you get Neptune's relationship with all of the party members to max value in one playthrough, which shows the non-CPU party members cheering on all the CPUs, Greater and Lesser, as they compete with each other in a racing game.

In addition to the main plot, there's the major subplot that is Neptune's character arc. She starts off the game as a bit of a pick-me girl who's proud of having non-traditional hobbies and looks down on feminine interests, which leads to some friction with IF early on, since IF likes sewing. Throughout the game, Neptune keeps meeting characters who have hobbies that are feminine and ones that aren't, particularly in sidequests and the bits of main story that focus on getting access to the next dungeon, and she gradually becomes less of a jerk about the matter. This culminates in her obligatory main character speech before the final boss, which is a mix of silly and serious where Neptune talks about how the party will win because they trust each other and can work together, "it doesn't matter if some of us spend all their free time doing lame stuff, that doesn't make us not friends." There's some eye-rolling, but the party takes the speech in the way Nep intended.

As you've probably gathered from all the parentheticals, most of the party member characters are personifications of one third-party game developer or another. You've probably also noticed that there's an equal amount of characters who reference a Japanese company and ones who represent a Western company. This is a decision that was made once Sega began officially working on the game and make Neptune a new mascot character. As part of their efforts to make Neptune work outside of Japan, they made sure that were jokes Western audiences could pick up on easily.

Another part of Sega trying to make Neptune work in the West is some significant localization changes. All the names I've mentioned above are the ones used in the English localization of Console Warriors, the Japanese script uses names closer to what you see in the real-life Neptunia games. That localization is also why a number of the character names aren't references as obvious in real-life Neptunia, where characters often have the exact same name as the company they're a personification of. The idea was to try and avoid legal issues. I don't know enough about Japanese law to guess what names these characters would have in the original script, but I assume the references are generally more obvious.

In addition to character names and general terminology (as in the real-life Neptunia, the Japanese version has Goddesses and Goddess Candidates, not Greater and Lesser CPUs, for instance), the localization rewrites some character personalities and interactions. One example of this is Sophie, who, in reference to Sucker Punch's Sly Cooper series, is a raccoon woman. The Japanese script has a few jokes about characters mistaking Sophie for a tanuki, which the English script had to replace since the average English-speaker doesn't know what that is. But the more major aspect of Sophie that had to be rewritten is the way characters in the Japanese script find Sophie a bit off-putting because anthropomorphic animal characters like you see in the Sly Cooper series aren't very popular in Japan, and this has to get rewritten for the English version because of the missing cultural context. The translators make it so that she's a kleptomaniac and people avoid her for the obvious reason. Neptune's pick-me girl personality isn't entirely a product of localization, but the English version emphasizes it more than the Japanese version, where her opinions on other characters' interests don't come up as often as in the English script. There's also a bunch of jokes that need to be rewritten just because of differences in what different cultures find funny and replacing Japan-exclusive memes with Western ones, and so on.

As for the different characters in the game, their personalities and so on are as follows. IF is a doctor who enjoys sewing and finding ways to make her treatments as painful as possible. She's your standard-issue squishy healer with a few offensive abilities if you put in enough effort to get them. Duma is somewhat air-headed and is always ready to commit a crime. She focuses on physical attacks and toughness. Sophie, as mentioned before, is a kleptomaniac and that's mostly it because in the original script she was pretty one-note too. Naturally, in gameplay she works like your usual RPG thief, dodging attacks and stealing items from enemies. Atlanta studies the cultures of Lowee and Lastation and is excited to travel the world, only to keep accidentally insulting people. She's mainly used to debuff enemies, with a few abilities that let her buff the party. Banshee is a gun nut who's a conspiracy theorist obssessed with aliens and evil computers controlling the world. She shoots enemies from a distance, and she gets bigger and better guns as she levels up. Cece is a shut-in who always has her laptop with her so she's never completely cut off from the internet. Her gameplay is focused around inflicting status ailments on enemies and removing them from the party. Kona has a serious gambling problem and keeps insisting that anything mysterious the party runs into is some kind of monster or horror movie creature. In combat she has a bunch of luck-based mechanics that determine how hard she hits and occasionally give her attacks extra effects. Rachel has trouble deciding what to do when Delphina isn't there to tell her what to do and wears a helmet she never takes off. She works as a tank in combat, drawing enemy attacks away from less durable characters. The Lesser CPUs aren't really involved in the plot, so they don't really have defined personalitties in this game. Delphina is a control freak who wants to make everything safe for children (in English "think of the children" is her catchphrase). Diva is paranoid about anything and everything Neptune does and is very smug about all the skills she has (in her own words, "I only do everything"). And Neptune is a big fan of video games who thinks a lot of other hobbies are lame and is mostly showing up to do and/or say whatever amuses her, but she'll act heroic when the situation calls for it. All of the CPUs function as jack-of-all-trades characters in combat, with slight differences in what exactly each one is best at.

I'll admit, the characters' personalities aren't especially fleshed out, but that's not very far off from what the writing for the real-world Neptunia is like, in my experience. You're mostly showing up for the jokes about the video game industry and to watch the characters bounce off each other in fun ways. And that's how this timeline's Neptunia is too.

Neptunia: The Console Warriors is only the first game in a series that does fairly well for itself, thanks in large part to some serious marketing and a skilled localization team that's given a lot of leeway in how to adapt the series for the Western market. As a result, Neptune becomes one of Sega's mascot characters, and a generation of American youths comes to recognize Neptunia merchandise as the sign of a Gamer Girl™. There are, no doubt, a bunch of Neptunia games, mainline and spin-off, and if I ever get ideas for what those games are like, I might write about them too. But for now, that's all I have to say about Neptunia in this timeline. I put way too much thought into all the little details that reference something in this. If you can find them all, you're as much of a nerd as I am.

Next time: I finally start talking about Sakura Wars. Don't miss it!