Ego-Man25

...So, uh, hey everyone, what a year, huh? Pretty certain the popular consensus I've gotten is that this year is a mixed bag across the board... which, you know, fair. 2023, what a year of changes... crazy changes. I started it with a job, then was unemployed for a few years, which I thought I was going to like more than I ultimately did, but thankfully, I was soon able to get back into a job... if through admittedly the weirdest way possible... which is to say via moving into my older brother's place, a move that... worked, mercifully enough! Got my own room again, got around to making my own money again on top of that, many changes were made, I was able to fucking commission people again, on a consistent basis on another note, and shoot, creative energy-wise, I am on FIRE right now!

But, of course, there must be a bittersweet twinge to things... and without saying names... let me just say that I had to cut some people out, further work on myself, let myself live, let myself breathe, and free myself from just... hidden resentment. There's nothing good that can come from it, or for that matter absolutely rejecting any and all changes that come our way. Yet, despite this, I wish the person I'm cutting off... nothing but the best.

I don't want to live in resentment, and, maybe this year was rougher for them, as I'm certain it's been for a lot of you, so... with the new year that's coming, I hope the best for even them, I really do. I hope they find happiness in their creative endeavors, or indeed just in their life in general... but, I need to focus on me as well. I need to know that when I'm talking with someone, that the other person is, well... down for whatever crazy changes I might bring on board. I wanna... free myself, get some crazy shit going down in MY vision... and now that Pirate Time's done, I feel I finally can. To discuss that elephant in the room, Pirate Time finally completed! Several months back, the story I was starting to think wasn't ever going to end, ended. Maybe there'll be some crazy shit I do at the Sweet Saga side of things, with my incredible friend CyberKirby19, though even if it's not that, dear God, do we have so many other things we're doing, like a Harem Quest here, One Piece romps there... or as you guys are noticing on over on my profile, some Wario insanity on over at moi. Hell, maybe I'll do something solo and do, freaking, I don't know, The Elevator Woman! A story thing or two, completely... me, in all of it's glory... that is a beautiful feeling to have.

But yeah, since I'm writing this journal, I definitely intend to shift gears back into less predictable fare... which isn't to say I'm switching to one-shots full-time, oh no, continuity is one of my fucking calling cards, my friends... but you are going to be seeing far odder things, going forward into this next year, that you already started seeing in this... surprisingly transformative month of December, holy shit, this is... yeah...! But, getting back to the point, from a gigantic story about Pirates, to a story about an adventuring capitalist who hates one Pirate in particular... oh, how fascinating my creative whims are.

Speaking of pirate things... I'd be remiss if I didn't discuss... the elephant in the room: One Piece. So, okay, One Piece fans everywhere... in what... fucking timeline are we in, where God decided "And let every single live action adaptation of an anime suck ass... except for the One Piece one", resulting in that masterpiece? My God, we have bragging rights at long last!! We got the first good live action anime thing! AND OH MY GOD, THAT FEELING IS SO FUCKING GOOD!!!!

...And when we experienced that euphoria, wouldn't you fucking know it, it was two weeks later that we would be hit with... Chapter 1098. A chapter that, when I experienced it... I was petrified, disgusted down to my core, rendered... catatonic. Such was the incredibly sick feeling in the pits of my stomach, it was a living hell. Oda seemed damn certain to hammer in that regarding Celestial Fucking Dragons... ABSOLUTELY NO ONE WAS WORSE. We've crossed into the Berserk Threshold with this one, a sentence I never thought I'd ever utter as a One Piece fan, let alone with complete sincerity, and yet... that is where we are. And with the deceased legend Kentaro Miura in mind (may that beautiful legend rest in peace), I'm seeing now that One Piece Fans are on the precipice of seeing a fellow legendary writer, Eiichiro Oda, on the quest of delivering the kind of ending that will blow away... everyone. And I only wish him the absolute best of luck, going forward.

If you're wondering what the point of that digression was, dear friends... the point is this: I am going to continue waiting until the Egghead Island Arc concludes, before I do any stories and planning on the One Piece side of things. I've started discussing something more concretely with Cyber to collaborate over, finally gathered the courage to bring up that story's antagonist to start REALLY turning things around... and such is my good feeling about that tale, that following the rest of Downpour Masquerade being uploaded, we're gonna start refreshed and renewed, diving into our next project... and as for solo-works? Remains to be seen.

...But there is one more thing I wish to mention for you all, something I've been stewing over lately, and I have to mention Cyber again, because this originated as some simple, stupid prompt thing... of a guy really bad at cooking... but something that I managed to mutate into him only pretending to be bad at cooking, to get people off of his trail... which in turn mutated into something crazier, of a man beginning a Culinary Journey in freaking Osaka, finding out secrets of his craft, further improving, with loads of HOT BLOOD thrown around, maybe some unwanted harem chicks chase him, which would strike one as weird, until I tell you I've recently got into the Yakuza series, beginning with Yakuza 0, where you will realize I am going ALL IN on the hotblooded insanity of honor and pushing one's self higher and higher, with shirts being ripped off, and people thwacking each other with fucking benches, to where you know that such a project I have in mind, I am happy to announce the title of... is none other... than Chefstalkers. This is a project that might not even remain in fucking Japan, not if Hawaii becomes a factor! Prepare, my friends... for though I am not doing a release date for Chefstalkers (not even a tentative one)... I do have a new vision for the future... so sit tight.

Let's jump into 2024 together, you crazy sons of bitches. We're ready.

It is an easy mistake to make, allowing people's words on the Internet to dig under your skin, and taking said words at face value, but do not ever forget that at the end of the day, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING SHOULD BE COMPLETELY TAKEN AT FACE VALUE. Unless you do your damndest with research, and make sure information is verified or falsified either way (which you should always strive to do, that is good to make sure your facts are straight), it is very easy to fall into the illusion that you actually know the people on the other side of the screen, be they prolific YouTubers with massive channels to their name, far smaller artists and writers on deviantART, or some oddball folks on Discord and Reddit in-between. It is incredibly easy to fall into the trap of thinking that everything there IS to know about someone, is already out there, that they tell you everything, hell, they'll even openly insist that they're open books, what you see is what you get, and that they have no rhyme or reason for why they do what they do... but that's just it: this is The Internet, and if they can lie about stuff like that, then buddy, lemme tell ya, a lot of times... they probably are lying about stuff like that. There was a multitude of obnoxious people online (won't specify which site), and in just the way they talk, the way they speak, the way they doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on their worst tendencies, being so far up their asses that they genuinely grated on my nerves... and I was about to loose my goddamned patience and blow up on me... but then I caught myself, bearing in mind that, again, this Internet experience is probably all they have. We don't know that their lives offline aren't absolutely miserable, and that they feel the need to prove themselves better than others, or to parade about how much they love certain things, ad nauseum, the echo chambers hopefully giving them some sort of cathartic release to hear others wholeheartedly agree with them, and that maybe, just maybe, they just want to feel better about themselves. That they want to feel that they're better than certain others, at every opportunity they can take, because once they log off... that's it: back to their miserable lives trying to struggle for a living. Or maybe they are every bit the obnoxious pricks they display themselves as on the screen. The truth likely lies somewhere in the middle... but for the life of me, we can't know for sure.

Remember this, when dealing with everyone online, that you don't really know who they are, not even the big communities of like-minded people. You can strike the mutual acknowledgement between someone, all of the above... and that's usually a positive sign in the right direction... and actual important relationships can GENUINELY START with the Internet, I'm not about to discredit that! The Internet has brought some amazing things that we take for granted every day!... but it's a double-edged sword. There is no healthy parasocial behavior, there just isn't. Remember that as you conduct internet discourse. Never forget: people could be lying to you even as they speak.

...Words... cannot begin to describe... exactly how unprecedented this show is. This, this show right here, it being a live-action adaptation of an anime and manga, produced by a Western nation (i.e. America for bonus points), that was inevitable. That went without saying. That was just going to be part of the territory... and produced by Netflix, oh my God, daring are we, with the "Predictable Adaptation Bingo" card? Them pushing it really hard, prior to release, as THE next big thing, as a third pillar, that TOO was completely predictable (because, again, Netflix), we have been through this song and dance so many different times by now, and we all knew how this was going to end.

Hell, I'm just gonna re-open some wounds here on just some examples we can think of, right off the bat: Dragon Ball Evolution. Death Note. Cowboy Bebop. Adaptations that fucking hurt our soul... and pay special attention to that last one, because the fucking kicker to all of this was that the people who produced Live Action Cowboy Bebop (Tomorrow Studios), was producing this one, as if we needed enough salt to be rubbed in the wound of this upcoming live action adaptation of One Piece. You knew how this was going to go, I knew how this was going to go, hell, everyone in the fucking fanbase knew how this was going to go: at best, quietly ignored, at worst, further damage to our fanbase than 4Kids had already done, over twenty years ago. We were waiting for the other shoe to drop, let's be real here. This was going to be one of THOSE grand, gigantic fuck-ups, everyone was going to either hate it, or not give two shits, whatever, and I publicly made my vow on several of my good buddies' status posts that I was going to acknowledge that this existed, and then ignore it. That was the common logic... and even when they said that Eiichiro Oda himself, in fact, was "heavily involved", I thought that was like when other mangakas said THEY'D be "heavily involved" as well, "give their blessing" as it were, where truthfully it didn't mean jack shit, and when you saw the product in the end, well... that was all she wrote.

So... I waited. I waited for the shitstorm to inevitably wash over, and just get the horrible miasma out of the way, let myself get kicked down.

...One problem with that, however: people... weren't HATING this, nonononono, in fact, they were... not even apathetic or neutral, they were... speaking... positive things...? They... were... god forbid... liking this...?! NO, scratch that, they were loving what they were seeing?! We were gaining fans with this?! They had their SHIT together?! Oda and Iñaki Godoy were actually BFFs?! History was happening with this fucking thing?! This thing was actually... GOOD...?!?

As you can imagine, dear fellow One Piece deviants of mine, this... this... was fucking unusual. This... wasn't supposed to happen. The best case scenario, of course, was that this was just meh, inoffensive, and then we just, you know... shoved it into a bin and moved on with our lives, so... what, what, what was this fucking positivity all of a sudden? Why were we getting fans? Why was TvTropes actually giving the live action show love, of all things?! Why was normies getting into this, when they literally never before in their lives expressed interest in anything even TANGENTIALLY related to anime? What... the fuck... was going the fuck ON?!?! Something had to have happened, to have apparently not only not damaged the growth of the fanbase we've enjoyed in the past few years... but do the opposite and actually have it finally break the 4Kids Dub Curse. This shit was driving me so insane, in fact... that I did the one thing I never thought I'd manage in my life: I broke my vow to ignore this thing.

Few days ago, I finally bit the bullet, went on someone's Netflix account, and just said to myself "If I don't like this, I'm dipping immediately", and hit play on Episode 1. If I didn't gel with this, my ass was OUT... so I watched this thing, as an Insane Mega Hyper One Piece Fanboy. You know: THE absolute hardest kind of fan to win over. I, reasonably so, figured that if anyone would find nitpicks, it was GOING to be me... so, I watched the first episode. Then I watched the second episode. Then I watched the third, then the fourth, then the fifth and sixth, then WAITED a few days, and then today, watched the seventh and eighth episodes.

...Words cannot begin to describe... exactly the complete and utter mastery that is this completely unprecedented success story.

Okay, okay, okay, so, first thing, right off the bat, the important question: is this thing GOOD? My answer: YES, FINALLY FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, YES~!!!!! ONE OF THESE THINGS IS FINALLY UNIRONICALLY GOOD AT LONG LAST!!!! This has anime waifu moments that happen, that get played completely straight. No lampshading, no snark to undercut it, no toning down, nononononono, they got that mastered. In fact, there's no shame to be found anywhere here: this thing knows it is the One Piece live action show, and it decides at Episode One that it's going to commit to this wacky, insane madness, that is the World Of One Piece. There is no shame here, no snark, no meanspirited BS, you have a rubber jackass, meeting with Koby, punching Alvida the fat bitch in the face so hard that she's sent flying off of her own Pirate Ship, and it never fucking looks back since. And yes, for those normie peeps watching this asking if this is comic accurate to the source material, it is very much comically faithful to its source material, and it rides with it.

To you hardcore fans like myself, actually? While, obviously, there's no doubt that changes are made, fret not, my friends, for you can tell Oda is here, heavily here, part of the writer's room FOR those changes, with him being like, "Okay, so, I'll admit, I was on the rustier side with East Blue when I started, so let's, you know, streamline the rough stuff, but like in a way that makes it kick ass more than usual". And for all of those changes that it makes... the live action show actually reinstated a thing, that the Toei Animation anime didn't have the balls to show: confirmation that Zeff actually ate his fucking LEG in Sanji's flashback. So, you know... they know what they're fucking doing.

But yeah, let's, you know, set aside the fact that we're breaking American-produced anime live action adaptation history, breaking One Piece history by breaking the 4Kids curse, and just in general kicking regular-ass TV shows' ASSES right now!!!... because this thing did something... so deeply out-of-left-field, catching me COMPLETELY the fuck off guard... that I was certain that this feat would never be replicated... and yet it did so with EASE...! The thing, that if you saw these three films as they were happening in the mid-2000's, and later with the MCU, you were convinced that Bob Chipman was right, and that this feat would NEVER be achieved again: breaking comicbook adaptational history, PERIOD. Specifically, matching the casting of a character so... 100% perfectly, zero flaws to see, that was the fucking acting legend JK Simmons as J Jonah Jameson. This... this, my friends... was supposed to be physically impossible to ever replicate again, even beyond the heat death of the universe.

...The One Piece Live Action Show did this fucking TWICE.

No, no, NO, I am not making this up, this fucking show, on just Season ONE, accomplished what by all accounts should have an impossible task, twice... and they did so with Kuro... and motherfucking Dracule Mihawk. And, to be clear, I am not dissing Iñaki Godoy, Mackenyu, Emily Rudd, Jacob Romero Gibson or Taz Skyler, nor anyone who was casted, because at the absolute worst (except maybe for Beckman's actor, but I'm not gonna be that dick), it was 95% accuracy across the board, which still would have been impressive enough to begin with... but Kuro was literally ripped clean out of the manga and anime, at 100% accuracy, he looks fucking uncanny, there was no alteration between the manga pages and the live action, they got him perfect in his every waking fiber... but they then did it the fuck again with Mihawk... who somehow managed to go even BEYOND PERFECTION!!!!

Mihawk, Mihawk, motherfucking Mihawk, oh god, okay, yeah, this man, this legend, this... insanity at how this happened? I am 100% convinced that God literally created his actor, Steven John Ward, precisely for the purposes of this man to portray this godlike Warlord of the Seas... and went even further in uncanny 100% accuracy than Kuro, because not only does he look exactly the same, act exactly the same, and even managed to twist his arrival towards Luffy the exact same, even WITH the Garp elements of Garp giving him the lead (because on paper he's there on Garp's orders, but in practice you can tell full fucking well that this man is really just taking the Marine Vice Admiral's words out of sheer "fuck it" mode boredom due to not having much better to do)... but he even fucking SOUNDS the same!! (By which I mean you are honestly astonished that he's not, in fact, voiced by John Gremillion, HE SOUNDS SO UNCANNILY THE EXACT FUCKING SAME!!!)

The Sam Raimi Spider-Man Trilogy... is no longer unique in breaking comicbook adaptation history like that. That is the power we're talking with the One Piece Live Action show... which made me realize that when they said Eiichiro Oda was heavily involved, for the very first time EVER, they were telling the truth. Motherfucker was not only in the writer's room, not only actively spitballing ideas back and forth with the fantastic showrunners, writers and actors... he was doing all of that, absolutely ALL of that... while vice gripping Netflix's fucking balls. He was staring them in the eyes, going, "...You are not going to give this The Witcher treatment, not going to give this the live action Cowboy Bebop treatment, you aren't going to screw this show over like you did with Inside Job, there will be NO such bullshit like we saw with your attempt at adapting Death Note, you are going to make this show fucking work, or so help me GOD, I WILL DRAG YOU ALL TO THE BOTTOM PITS OF HELL UNTIL YOU DO THIS THING FUCKING RIGHT!!!!"

And. It. WORKED!!!!

Actually, I wanna give a special shout-out to the Kuro Arc, because here? Oh my god, this arc is so much better in this adaptation. They head straight for the shipyard, Usopp works at the shipyard, they go to Kaya's manor, the arc happens at Kaya's manor, they do the gag for the very first time of Zoro being the kind of guy to get lost in a fucking hallway, and, okay, get this: Sham and Buchi got their screentime buffed. Buchi's a hilarious big beefy chef guy with the kind of stupidity to taste test his own cooking, even if that cooking is literal poison, and as for Sham? Sham is a girl now, a very PRETTY girl, a sassy maid on the shorter side, they just run with the fact that a live action adaptation of an anime is finally doing a random waifu out of the blue, don't even draw ATTENTION to it, just running with it, and they make Luffy and Kuro's fight better by Kuro giving Luffy his ominous warnings about the risks that come with the territory of continuing his piracy ways, hypocrite though he is... and yes, Kaya is absolutely adorable, and you WILL want to hug her. In conclusion, my friends, I leave you all with this closing paragraph: For all of these years that we have been One Piece fans in the US, wanting the fanbase to explode here as well, get EVERYONE on board, we deluded ourselves for so long by thinking that the next video game, over, over, and over again, would somehow suddenly fix the lingering damage that 4Kids did, and we've been in denial over how we all knew the video games weren't going to do jack shit worth a damn for fanbase growth... because what it was going to take, was a live action show, to reach out to an entirely new fanbase, building on TOP of the pre-existing fanbase that's already there. Conventional wisdom would have told us that this was a hazy, drug-fueled pipe dream that was NEVER going to happen... and yet it fucking did, at long fucking LAST...!!! Manga's fucking perfect, anime's wildly popular, and now the live action SHOW is wildly popular too!! This fanbase is growing, and growing rapidly. Not only is 4Kid's curse being lifted, it's being crushed with a fucking vengeance. One Piece is a three-pronged juggernaut now, and this time, even the United States of America is going all in for this one.

We don't have to dream this day anymore, we don't have to yearn for it anymore, wish for it... because the day is finally fucking here. The Golden One Piece Age has kicked the fuck off. We're here now. Our fanbase is exploding in its GROWTH now. And we owe all of that to a show that, while not perfect, kicks ass regardless.

Watch this fucking show now, you will NOT regret it.

I just saw the Mario movie at last, breaking my vow to skip out on this one, because once you start hearing that they actually TRIED with a movie… you GOTTA start giving it that watch, you gotta contribute to it actually making the success it probably actually really deserves, and see if it’s a waste of time or not.

…Son of a bitch, why are video game adaptations suddenly being really fucking GOOD? (9.34/10, just saying upfront, which I’ll delve into more momentarily.) This was an ILLUMINATION film, for fuck’s sake. If they were ever going to drop the ball at any moment, this would have been the moment… but it DIDN’T HAPPEN.

Chris Pratt, my dude, YOU ACTUALLY VOICE ACTED, and were perfect. Those trailers made me SO worried, oh dear God, I was just expecting him to bog the movie… but that didn’t happen, dear god, it did not. I see he had pressure on him, and he responded by going above and beyond. He killed it, Charlie Day killed it, Jack Black fucking SLAYED as Bowser, I was expecting Peach to be WAY worse, but ultimately she worked. And Toad was awesome.

Donkey Kong was surprisingly good, and Cranky… okay admittedly Cranky needs more work, but given this movie made $1 billion already, I think they’ll have that opportunity. And that’s an opportunity I hope they sieze properly.

9.34/10 for me. Note to everyone making these animated films at DISNEY: we WANT villains again, really GOOD

villains at that, who drive the plot forward. Illumination, I can’t believe I’m saying this… but keep up the pace. Disney? Do better.

...And I really have been thinking deeply about this too, that I have... and... for the longest time... FOMO has been a curse (FOMO of course being an acronym for Fear Of Missing Out), which, more often than not... includes Nintendo games... I've been playing Nintendo games for since I was literally just four, Super Mario 64 was THE first ever video game I played, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is outright my favorite game ever, and more such games like it came with the territory... and that had for the longest time trapped me in a dilemma, really it had. The corporate side of the company can kiss my ass, but the game devs are nothing short of some of the most fantastic innovators around, helping redefine the gaming landscape as we know it, with some consequently absolutely iconic games to result. How could anything that wasn't a Nintendo game, ever achieve such prestige that I live and die for? Pizza Tower is the video game that slapped me over my head, and said "Hey, dumbass, perfectly flamboyantly Italian-as-fuck protagonist of a video game, literally right over here, you literally couldn't mistake this guy for anything BUT Italian, go to town." And... it is, it is beautiful, it is cartoony, the level design is immaculate, it somehow manages to be both Wario Landish and Super Mario Worldish in design philosophy, and unlike Wario Land 4, this game's factory level not only HAS a memorable and fucking awesome factory level theme, but actually two of them, and get this: this god-tier platformer game... is $20. Nintendo, and so many of the Triple A studios would have their games at $60, or hell even $70 at launch, and for what? FOR WHAT?!? Just so they can gouge our wallets every single time, drive us to live in Fear Of Missing Out, get us hardwired to support them on name-brand recognition alone, and to look at these things, as brands, and not as the objective games they need to be?

I've officially decided... that I'm not doing that bullshit anymore, I'm not. Fear Of Missing Out is how they get you, and what had, and you know what? Fuck FOMO. If my ass is missing out, will it really, when like 80% of the time, it's just going to be some slop that Triple A throws at us, that is ultimately not worth our time in the slightest? And that fucking goes for Nintendo as well, I am NOT going to be grabbed at the balls by them anymore, their copyright strikes towards video creator fans of their games has gone on for too long, and... yeah, you know what? Sega has been better about that shit than Nintendo was, Sega can't afford not to be. They finally swallowed their pride and allowed fans to contribute to their flagship franchise... and waddayaknow? Sonic Mania is easily one of the single greatest 2D platformers ever to grace the face of the earth. Tee Lopes, my dude, you are literally a god amongst men for continuing the one legendary trend of Sonic games, the god-tier music, keep it up.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, will be purchased by me, when I fucking feel like it, perhaps not at fucking launch, or maybe I wind up actually having spare change for that, whatever. I have zero doubt that this will be nothing short of a fantastic game across the board, that will hopefully be one of those good direct sequels to a Zelda game, in the vein of Majora's Mask, and what has remained my favorite entry in the series, Twilight Princess, that actually does something with the setting, the gameplay, that innovates in many creative ways that keeps you guessing, and while Breath of the Wild is no doubt one of the biggest bangers in the Zelda series I've played in some time... I'm gonna call bull on everyone's claims that it is the only game in the series to get it to evolve in the direction again that it had, it shares that distinction with A Link Between Worlds, which is probably, just saying now, a contender for the greatest Nintendo 3DS game there is. But I don't want to fall into the mindset of thinking I have to get the game, nor for that matter any Pokémon game, just because those games continue existing, just for the sake of the games continuing to be these consistent things, when maybe I want to approach these games more from my perspective.

What I'm saying is that I'm done with blind loyalty to a company that clearly doesn't deserve it. I'm done being part of the blind Nintendo fan problem, I'm done being part of thinking I have to be that fan who contributes to buying copies, just because that's what I'm expected to do. The video game company has to meet me halfway, giving me more of the exact kind of game I'm LOOKING for... which, chances are, more likely than not, is an actually good game... and obviously, Nintendo devs have a consistent-enough track record to where that isn't going to stop me from picking up more of their games in the future. The devs who actually work their asses off, give them the love and kindness that they deserve, seriously, but for the ones just barely coasting by, just expecting name brand recognition alone to drive them forward, wake the hell up, and actually try for once, god only knows your games could actually use it. And for the copyright strikers behind videos being taken down? Fuck all of you, and I hope all of you burn in Hell. Your fans are literally trying everything they can to support your brands, and you punish them for that? No. No, I'm not playing that fucking game anymore, I'm... done being THAT fucking fan. Steam Supremacy here with Ego-Man25. Just wait for me to get an X-Box controller to play the games I'm actually passionate for, you'll see. Because now that I know that games like Pizza Tower are not only going to exist, but be obscenely popular... I don't need you anymore, Nintendo. I'll buy whatever games suit my fancy, and maybe it'll overlap with the ultra-popular ones that your diehard fans will instantly get in a heartbeat... but I'm not one of them anymore. And The Pokémon Company can kiss my ass.

Ego-Man25 OUT.