I am abjectly terrible at fighting games. This didn't stop me from seeking out arcades in Japan to hamfistedly fondle the seductive BlazBlue machines, or importing the US version when it was released, or venturing online to be emasculated in short order. I may appreciate their focus and purity but a lack of innate talent and free time means I'll never be as good as I desire. Talent is not in question, but is my ineptitude really an issue of time?
waiting for a time when I've run out of series to review and ideas to explore
Certainly a nine to five job blocks out close to ten hours of the day, but leaving a modest six hours for sleep that still leaves eight hours for hobbies and the minutiae of life. Pondering the issue more, I could only conclude it is still fundamentally a time issue, but it would be more apt to brand it as a lack of dedication. When that invisible plateau is reached where the time to become better encroaches on the ability to enjoy other games and anime, that dastardly analytical part of my brain takes over.
Even when I'm waist deep in Noel's story and practically giddy from her soundset when facing Litchi, a mental flag pops up. There's new anime to be watched! New games to be played! Things to do. Sometimes very good games can override this, dragging me under for weeks at a time, however all it takes one slow section to send me gasping back to the shoreline. This sounded like a good enough reason: essentially a free time defence mechanism; and it certainly fit with my habits, but it doesn't explain why the balance between video games and anime I used to maintain had been broken, marginalising former in favour of the latter.
The opening says all it needs to about the first three episodes of Needless: loud, brash, and utter nonsense. The plot, flimsy as it is, concerns a nefarious corporation called "Simeon" who are brazenly chopping up the "Needless": a group of super powered twits cluttering up the Japanese post World War 3 landscape. One of these happens to be the sister of a small, annoying child who is saved by an outlandishly dressed, wood carving of a man known as "Blade". From there all semblance of continuity is lost and the episodes devolve into poorly animated fights with contenders announcing their attacks after which the names are emblazoned on screen, usually with flames coming off them.
While ludicrously oddball, the characters are stripped of any kind of detail or nuance
To call Needless silly would be doing it an injustice: it is so outwardly ridiculous that at times it feels like it's trying to be po-faced serious but failing miserably. The cast balloons outward to incorporate a number of noisy and paper-thin characters including: a scantily dressed brawler with a penchant for changing people's names and whose breasts are unsure of what shape or consistency to take; and a short-on words antagonist that has a collar so freakishly huge that one could hang glide with it. The character designs are fresh up to a point - obviously there are mixes of other similar characters, Blade for instance has a healthy dose of Vash the Stampede mixed in with some generic masculinity from the likes of Heat Guy J or Fist of the North Star. Unfortunately they are entirely wasted when given such protracted and atrocious dialogue that it becomes painful to listen, exacerbated by the typical shounen budget-saver of extending every scrap of action with an ongoing diatribe by each character on the vagaries of their fighting style.
