.hack

In the last few weeks I have paid tribute to Mary McGlynn and Steve Blum, and now I will cover one of my favorite projects that they both worked on, .hack. In this series, Mary McGlynn plays hacker/goddess Helba and Steve got the role of Sanjuro, a character who was only optional during the games but was clearly a fan favorite and got promoted to regular in the anime .hack//Legend of Twilight. The .hack project was very ambitious and I appreciate their effort in managing to cross several media formats to tell a continuing story that actually required all parts to get the whole story. Sadly it's one weak point was the kingpin of the project; the game itself. The .hack series went through a series of four games released over the course of a few months that allowed you to actually play the game "The World" that the story is based around. It is a fun game, but there has been criticism, mainly that it was a four part game that should have been released as one game instead of making people actually pay for four games. Personally, I found a way around that and my real complaint is that the game within the game is incomplete. I will have to break down my review into two parts, one regarding the story of .hack, the other regarding the game within the game, "The World" and unlike the series, I will post both parts in separate paragraphs instead of making you wait for part two.

I will start with the game within the game, "The World" since you need to understand it to understand .hack as almost everything happens within the game. "The World" is an online game, much like World of Warcraft, EverQuest, FFXI & FFXIV and when playing it it feels like a solid foundation was set up. There are six character classes, Wavemaster, Twin Blade, Long Arm, Heavy Blade, Heavy Axeman, and Blademaster. Like many RPGs, the classes have different equipment and skills, what makes this system different is that you get your skills from your equipment, meaning that every time you upgrade equipment you change skills, and if you want to keep certain skills you may have to keep equipment with inferior stats. It doesn't make that much difference actually, I beat .hack//Quarantine with Goblin A Gear from.hack//Mutation. Wavemasters are the magic users who ca use staves that have powerful magic but no attack skills and can only use light armor. Twin Blades and Long Arms can use medium armor and light armor, but no staves, so very limited magic. Long Arms use spears, halberds and the occasional lance and rely on long range physical attacks while Twin Blades use knives, daggers and claws, always paired, and tend to rely more on rapidfire speed attacks. Heavy Blades and Blademasters both use swords, but Heavy Blades use bigger swords that they wield with two hands and drag around behind them whereas Blademasters use one handed swords. Heavy Axemen obviously use axes. All three of these last classes can use all types of armor, though the fighting style their weapons allow tend to make them best suited for wearing heavy armor and tanking. The game is played on five servers each represented by a town with the standard NPC shops, magic, items, weapons & armor. There's also a Grunty farm where you can raise up to three grunties per server that you can ride in battlefields to avoid combat and skip to the dungeon or race in town for HP and MP boosts and they'll even set up shop and sell you other cool stuff when you'r enot riding them. There is also a chaos gate which allows you to access other town/servers when your character reaches the right level, and most importantly allows you to access battlefields and dungeons. This is sort of where the game breaks down, the chaos gates allow access to battlefields based on three word key phrases that usually lead to randomly generated areas that all follow the pattern of having a dungeon and sometimes a well. The dungeons are also built from a pattern, though the interesting thing is that given the number of words that can be used to unlock an area you can in fact reach virtually infinite areas which each rearrange the pattern in an unpredictable way. There is one notable exception, one area is a church where many events occur, but you only fight there once or twice and otherwise it's just for meetings. There are also other hidden areas that you find after navigating a dungeon. The problem is that while this works within the larger framework of .hack by inserting extra areas due to a malfunction of "The World" if you remove all of the malfunction storyline, the properly functioning game doesn't seem to provide a lot to do. The grunty farm provides the most obvious sidequest, and there ae about two other sidequests that may exist in a normally functioning version of "The World" Goblin Tag and arguably Mia's Aromatic Grass sidequest. Aside from these, the sidequests are all provided by other players with no sign of how one would actually initiate any specific sidequest without the other players, and in fact, many of their sidequests are simply doing favors that have nothing to do with an actual game provided quest. As for the main story, there are two quests that are alluded to, "The One Sin" and "The Key of Twilight" however the former was apparently a one-time thing and was already cleared and the latter is so vague nobody seems to even have a clue what it actually is. When I get to the bigger story in the next paragrapjh I'll explain how this is compensated for, but I am disappointed to say that when they attempted to make an actual online game .hack//Fragment, it simply allowed you to play the offline game with a custom character and join with friends, which only reinforces that "The World" doesn't stand on it's own.

Now for the story of .hack. A computer virus wipes out the internet except for parts operating on the Altimit system run by Cyber Connect and the virus is tracked back to an online game so all online games are outlawed and shut down until Cyber Connect creates a new game called "The World" which becomes wildy popular, obviously because it is literally the only game in town. In .hack//SIGN we follow a Wavemaster namd Tsukasa who is stuck in the game with no way to log out. The series takes place almost entirely within the game with only a few short moments revealing the real world outside the game where we see how different the characters are from what they present themseves to be online. Tsukasa makes a few friends who help him find a way to fix his situation and eventually do succeed by finding Aura a girl who only exists in "The World" and may in fact be the Key of Twilight. Shortly after awakening Aura, things start to get really wierd and everyone is saved by Sora, a Twin Blade who enjoys killing other player characters and has acted as an antagonist for most of the series, and then gets turned into Skeith the first wave. This dovetails into .hack//Infection, the first game where we switch to Kite, a new player who is being shown the ropes by his best friend and legendary champion, Orca of the Azure Sea. They encounter Aura who is being chased by Skeith, an undefeatable monster. Orca is killed, the player goes into a coma and Kite is given a gift by Aura which turns out to be the Twilight Bracelet, a unique item which allows him to hack the game. This mechanic makes the game interesting as long as you take it at face value and don't see through it asthe plot device it really is. Kite, the player character, is the chosen one who can hack the game by Data Draining monsters which can yield rare items while turning big baddies into little joke monsters and is also the only way to make the waves fightable. The eight waves and Cubia are the bosses, though as I said before, they only exist as part of the malfunction storyline and leave "The World" without any proper bosses. Because the waves are sympotms of a system malfunction, they can not be fought as normal enemies because they are not in fact normal enemies and they aren't even really part of the game within the game, they are part of a hidden program and since they were not created as part of the game, they are not subject to it's rules just because they are invading it to get to Aura. The true story, we find out, is that the game's creator, Harald Hoerwick, created Aura as his artificial daughter when he lost the true love of his life, and the game is really just supposed to be a way of helping to format her by gathering data from players. However, the proram that is responsible for Aura, Moraganna, doesn't like the idea that she exists only to make Aura happen so to suppress her existence has created the eight waves to stop her. In response, Aura created the Twilight Bracelet to reformat such beings to exist within the games parameters so that they can be fought. Morganna's malfunction leads to a viral infection of the system which first afffects monsters by turning them into invincible forms that must be Data Drained in order to be fought. Data Draining can also yield virus cores which are necessary for Gate Hacking. Some of the areas that can be accessed from the Chaos Gate are locked because they contain hidden areas created by Harald Hoerwick to contain Aura, Morganna, the eight waves, and ultimately himself when he transcended into a purely digital form. It seems really cool to be able to hack into these areas using virus cores, but the reality is that they are intentional roadblocks. As you play through the games, key phrases to unlock areas relevant to the story are provided through e-mails and message boards as the story requires them, and these areas are always the same despite the random mapping that occurs for other areas, but you can actually enter the key phrases manually, meaning that if you know the areas before you start you can unlock them well before the story tells you to go there, but they will be blocked by gates that you have to hack and to get the virus cores you will have to collect virus cores, and invariably at least one core is always unique to a monster that only appeared in the dungeon before, meaning that you can never actually enter any really important areas until you get through the one before and play through the story properly. Data Draining also has a downside, infecting your character with a virus that can cause random status ailments and end the game if it gets too high. This is serious, when your infection level gets high, your next Data Drain can lead to a Game Over screen, though you do have fair waring and you can lower infection by fighting enemes without hacking them. The problem is that some dungeons are so filled with infected monsters that you have to make sure your infection level is at it's absolute lowest before going in or you'll game over just from hacking. The other characters are interesting enough, particularly Mia and Elk, though most of the others are pretty extraneous. Mia is actually the most outstanding and relevant because she is the only character that isn't human, either in appearance or true nature. While most characters seem to be restricted to the default race of human, Mia is the only character that is a Mock Cat, which aparently is a race only available through a hack that only Mia seems to know how to do. She appears to be an anthropomorphic cat wth purple fur and long rabbit-like ears. She is a Blademaster, and despite her apparent prowess, seems to be content to forming a party with a Wavemaster named Elk and searching for Aromatic Grass, an item that seems to have no purpose except for making Mia happy like virtual catnip. In .hack//Outbreak, the third installment, we finally find out that Mia is in fact not a hacker or a player at all, she is actually an NPC that functions like a player and is secretly the fifth wave Macha the Temptress. Macha is unique because it seems that as Mia it possesses a will of it's own independent of Morganna and Aura. Mia is benign, but as you hack the game and take out the other waves, she becomes less stable util she is broken, which is probably the most interesting thing that happens in the whole game series. In a bizzare twist, the final game, .hack//Quarantine has a bonus dundeon that allows you to recover Mia and play with her again, unfortunately, it is the last dungeon, when you complete it, "THE END" appears on the screen, so you can only use her in random dungeons whch you can create ad infinitum until you are bored with Mia, but you can't use her in the story after you defeat Macha. Another annoying thing about Mia is that she and Elk seem to only be available when they want to be, mainly during their aromatic grass quests, or after you complete an installment and continue to play the aftergame. One interesting aspect of the format of each quarter of the game being treated as a separate game is that when you finish a game, you can continue playing a flagged game which means that since you finished the story, the data can be transferred to the next installment, but in the meantime, until you do grab the next installment, you can keep playing with the story's timeframe paused indefintely. You can use any character(except Mia and Elk in Outbreak, Mia is out of commission and Elk is mad at you for your part in it) and you can complete unique sidequests such as Goblin Tag with Martina who is not available until after you finish the game and a special dungeon which requires a Gate Hack involving a virus core that you can only get from the final boss, so forget about getting to the dungeon beforehand, and of course finishing Grunty raising and racing and unlocking all of the extras, which you may not have done during the game, because they get a lot of crap in there.

Ultimately the .hack//project was ambitious and enjoyable, it's only bad if you overthink it, but if you just sit back and relax and enjoy it, it was the most amazing multimedia blitz I've ever seen and I hope to replicate it with 7th Moon.

Steve Blum: the Man, the Myth, the Legend

This is TOM. He is the host of Toonami, the greatest programming block in the history of television. He has been voiced by two people, Sonny Strait(Krillin in Dragon Ball Z, Usopp in One Piece) and Steven Jay Blum. Steve retweeted my post regarding last week's piece on Mary McGlynn and I promised it would be his turn next, so here it is. Mr. Blum not only voices TOM as he introduces anime every week on Toonami, he also was instrumental in bringing it back two years ago. First he joined forces with the Toonami team to bring TOM back for the greatest April Fool's prank ever, then when the Toonami Faithful demanded a comeback for real, he tweeted every week for #BringBackToonami, and then when it was announced the campaign succeeded, Blum was among the first to tweet #ToonamisBackBitches. But all of this is just the tip of the iceberg, Blum isn't just the guy who brings us the anime, he IS the anime. Steve has a ridiculously long list of roles in anime voice overs, he even set a record for most roles ever in anime dubbing. Arguably the number one role is Spike Spiegel of Cowboy Bebop which actually earned him the rol of TOM because the guys behind Toonami were fans of his work on that show. But he hasn't just sat around in the Absolution(Tom's spaceship) he has a lot other roles that make him popular at the conventions. As a Final Fantasy fan, I'm partial to Vincent Valentine from the FF7 sequels/spin-offs, say what you will about them, Steve makes Vincent even more badass than he already was, which is sayng something. Blum also had a role in IGPX the gorundbreaking first ever anime made for Toonami as Alex Cunningham, the defending champion for the first season and rival of the protagonist Takeshi. He has also been Wolverine numerous times including the Marvel Anime X-Men, sadly he did not reprise the role in Wolverine and instead played Kikyo, a badass swordsman who has the same regeneration power as Wolverine and can retract his sword into his arm the same way Wolverine can retract his claws. Unfortunately, the one downside to Kikyo is that Blum does him with about the same voice as Orochimaru from Naruto which is also very similar to Leeron fro Gurren Lagann. Did I mention Leeron is openly gay? I don't hate gay people, and I don't hate any performance by the great Steve Blum, but in an attempt to make them sound more sinister, Blum ends up making Kikyo and Orochimaru sound gay, which actually makes them sound less menacing to me. I once shared this opinion with a girl at a convention and she said it made sense because Orochimaru is clearly gay for Sasuke, pointing out how the first time they met he gave him a hickey and is always going on about how he wants Sasuke's body. Come to think of it, it puts a whole different light on Kikyo's obsession with Logan. Okay, enough of that, Steve is a badass and he brings it with pretty much every role he has, from video games(Sanjuro in .hack) to anime(Kazuma in S-CRY-ed) to Transformers and X-Men, even, I believe, an Arby's commercial. Without him there is no Toonami, not just because there would be no TOM but there would be no anime without the voice acting god that is Steven Jay Blum. I bow down to you oh mighty one, I am not worthy, please forgive me for my criticism, do not send the wrath of the snake upon me!

It should go without saying that as big a fan I am of Steven Jay Blum, he did indeed influence 7th Moon. Since it was inspired by Toonami I have always imagined the voice of the main character Hidariude, his doppelganger antagonist Seichei, and his mentor he was cloned from, Ryu as being that of Steve Blum. Lately I've been thinking about taking over these roles myself, but seriously, if Blum is willing to be a part of this project, he can have any part he wants, hell I'll let him do all of the voices if he wants, even the female voices! Steve is god he can do whatever he wants! Until then, may his voice be in your mind when you read the book, still available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and my private e-store that you can reach from the llinks on this page.

Mary McGlynn, Anime Goddess

Voice actors are very important to the anime industry, without them, we'd have to read subtitles. To this end they have become rock stars of the American anime world. They may not always realize it in their cramped little booths where they record their dialogue, but when they get to the conventions and see hundreds of people in costume screaming their character's name and demanding they say that line...well, I only know from the fan side but it's got to be satisfying. One of these greats is Mary McGlynn, a very distinctinve female voice I can recognize without having to check the credits and I am always happy to hear. I am picking her as my first voice actor profile for this blog because the Silent Hill Band that she is a part of recently followed me on Twitter. Honestly, I'm not entirely sure why, but I am very happy about it. She is absolutely an influence on 7th Moon as I wrote a character with her in mind, Zokushou, leader of the rebels. I actually thought of anime voice actors for everybody in the story, but this is Ms McGlynn's turn to shine, so let's focus on her. Zokushou is the daughter of the main villain, Han Toromi, but doesn't agree with what he's doing so she's trying to lead a rebellion against him. She can be a bit of a hard ass, just like many of Mary McGlynn's other roles, but like the others, Zokushou has her heart in the right place, it's just that she isn't above kicking someone's ass to get what she needs. Unlike the main characters, she does not have any super powers, but she does have a bit of inheritance from the richest man in the world and the respect of her troops. McGlynn came to mind primarily after hearing her as Princess Cornelia Li Britannia in Code Geass where she played pretty much the same part, at least being a military leader. Previously I had actually imagined Zokushou as a male and then listening to Mary McGlynn I thought, I want her to play this character, I'm gonna make her a kick ass woman!

Mary McGlynn has a number of impressive roles, Jagura in Wolf's Rain, Helba in .hack, Kurenai Yuhi in Naruto, just to name a few of my favorites. But I believe her definitive role was Major Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell:Stand Alone Complex. For those not familiar with GitS as we call it, it's basically about the singularity, when the line between man and machine gets blurred out of existence. Kusanagi stands at the precipice of this being the first cyborg with a full prosthetic body for most of her life. In the second season we learn that Kusangi barely survived a plane crash when she was a child and what remained of her functioning brain was put in a prosthetic body that she eventually learned to control. For most of her life she has experienced everything in this artificial body(which happens to be quite possibly the most attractive prosthetic body ever made), and to pay for it she gave her life in service to the Japanese government, first serving in the military earning her rank as Major, and then transferring to Public Security Section 9, a police department dedicated to cyber crime. The series tackles several crimes that are possible in the future when people start using cyber brains. Yes, cyber brains, forget your smartphone and your bluetooth, in the future all of that is wired directly into your brain and now phone calls are like telepathy and net surfing is done at the speed of thought. Cases vary from a conspiracy to cover up the prevalance of cyber sclerosis to organ donation taken to an extreme when the leader of an organization donates his entire body and now lives in a cheap prosthetic body that looks like a child's toy. I have to say my favorite episode is a flashback revealing the how Kusanagi met her sniper Saito. Saito used to be a rebel fighter in South America when Major Kusanagi was in the military and fought for the government. She cornered him and it was down to the two of them in a shoot-out, the most tense scene in whch nothing was really happening, Saito contemplated his next move, realizing that if he came out and made the first shot he'd leave himself open to her shooting him. But then he realizes the factthat she isn't making the first shot is probably because she needs to download information to make the shot. He reaches the conclusion that his natural skill is superior and his only chance is to take her out first. He goes for the shot and she fires back. His shot misses but her shot hits him perfectly centered on his sniping eye, and then she jump him, cutting his gun arm and says "You're mine now!" The episode then comes back to the present where he has prosthetic replacements for the parts he lost in that confronation, and as she said, he still works for her, his life changed forever in an instant. Still that line is the most badass line I ever heard from the most badass woman in voice-acting, here's to you Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, long may you reign as the queen of anime!

FLCL, Paranoia Agent and Deadman Wonderland, the most screwed up anime

I have reviewed the good and the bad, this week, I will cover the wierd in between that I can't even comprehend let alone decide whether it is good or bad. Since these are such short series I will combine them into one review.

First up is FLCL(pronounced "Fooly Cooly") which was recommended to me by a friend who swore it was the best anime he ever saw. He also admitted to me on another occasion that he baked a batch of magic brownies so strong he spent the weekend on his back staring at the molecules of air in front of his face. After watching FLCL I feel I missed something by being stone cold sober. It's the story of a boy named Naota who gets run over by a girl on a vespa. That girl, Haruko, moves in with his family under the auspices of being a housekeeper so she can keep an eye on Naota because things start coming out of his head, starting with a robot named Kanti that also lives with them. All of this happens within the first episode, the subsequent five episodes each featuring something else coming out of Naota's head and none of it makes any sense. After much research and consulting with my friend the scholar of FLCL, I have determined that what happens is that Haruko is interested in a space pirate named Atomsk and figured out a way to trasport him to her by opening a portal between the left and right hemispheres of Naota's brain. Kanti is actually part of Atomsk, but the rest of him is stuck in Naota and Haruko can't close the portal until she can get the rest of Atomsk out. The result is that the two have to sort of fuse into one so that they can fight the other robots that come out of Naota's head which are apparently pursuing Atomsk. This dynamic isn't even explained until the final episode, the rest of the time FLCL just seems to be a story about how puberty can be worse than just a pimple on your forehead, you could have an entire war coming out of there.

Next up is Paranoia Agent, a show which I actually enjoyed, and it scares me to think what that says about me. There is simply no way to understand this except to go through the plot, and it is one seriously screwed up story. BTW, make sure you watch the opening right above this paragraph, it doesn't make any sense, and yet gives the perfect WTF setup for this series. The first six episodes tell a linear story before going off the rails completely, but you're already roped in by then so enjoy the crazy denouement. The story begins with Tsukiko Sagi, an animator who made it big by creating a puppy character named Maromi who is basically Hello Kitty. Her company wants her to make another character but she's a one-hit wonder and with her deadline tommorrow she is overcome with the pressure of trying to invent a new character when she gets assaulted by a boy on rollerblades who hits her with a baseball bat in the parking lot outside her office. The story turns to the investigation of the mystery assailant known only as "Lil' Slugger". The second episode focuses on the first suspect,  Ichi, a young boy who fits the profile physically, he's a young boy who enjoys rollerblading and baseball and owns the signature equipment of Lil' Slugger. However he is a model youth whose life was absolutely perfect until he's accused of assault. The one person who comes to his defense is Shogo, the new kid who embodies everything Ichi hates including being blissfully unaware of how much Ichi hates him. Of course, Lil' Slugger attacks Shogo while he is walking home from school with Ichi and there are no witnesses to prove it wasn't Ichi. Ichi begins to buckle under the pressure, giving up his rollerblades and bat and baseball itself to try to escape suspicion, and then he gets attacked by Lil' Slugger himself. The third episode shifts to Ichi's tutor, Harumi, who has a split personality, the other being a prostitute who thoroughly enjoys having sex with strangers and revels in how it could destroy her alternate personality's life if she ever gets caught. Through the episode the two personalities struggle for dominance until one night when Harumi's face is half-covered in her alter ego's make-up reaches her breaking point, stumbling through the street unsure who she is and she gets hit by Lil' Slugger. The fourth episode focuses on a police officer named Masami Hirukawa who is a regular customer of Maria, the prostitute alter ego of Harumi from the previous episode. It should be noted that he insists his prostitutes always call him "daddy".Masami has been stealing money and services from a prostitution ring in exchange for not reporting them as he should. But then a higher up in the crime organization tells him he needs to pay back the money with interest and forces him to become a burglar to steal the money from other people to get the money to pay back the yakuza. Of course, this pressure leads to his mental breakdown and Lil' Slugger comes for him too. The difference is, this time the police officer gets up and goes after Lil' Slugger and arrests him and is celebrated as a hero for finally bringing Lil' Slugger to justice. The fifth episode is the interrogation of Lil' Slugger who has a bizarre confession regarding a video game he was playing and describing the attacks in terms of events in the video game, claiming he was a holy hero defeating monsters. After a thorough investigation, they realize this kid is actually only responsible for Shogo and the police officer, the other attacks have nothing to do with him. The sixth episode tells us about Masami Hirukawa's daughter Taeko who loved her father until she found that his computer had a secret file of pictures of her undressing. Now we know why he keeps asking the prostitutes to call him daddy. She runs away and their house is destroyed by a storm, a metaphor for how their home was destroyed by her father's betrayal. Of course, this pressure leads to yet another Lil' Slugger attack. In the seventh episode things go crazy when Lil' Slugger is killed by Lil' Slugger-yes you read that right, no he did not kill himself, another Lil' Slugger appears and kills the suspect in custody. The remaining episodes veer off from the main original story, but still, every episode features the theme of growing pressure until Lil Slugger shows up. Finally the last two episodes bring it home by finally revealing the truth, Tsukiko actually had a pet dog named Maromi when she was a kid and based her cartoon character on him as a tribute. The real Maromi was killed when young Tsukiko absent mindedly let him wander into traffic. She was so ashamed she shifted blame onto a fictional assailant, Lil' Slugger. As it turns out, the true Lil' Slugger is actually a product of her imagination that took on a life of his own, feeding on people's stress. Ultimately Lil' Slugger is defeated when she accepts responsibility and apologizes to Maromi. Maromi the cartoon character is also interesting because it turns out Maromi is the opposite of Lil' Slugger, while people try to escape responsibility and stress by giving their worst to Lil'Slugger, Maromi represents the paragon of innocence to which they cling and aspire to, ultimately their souls torn between the two.

Finally, I bring you the most screwed up piece of animation ever, Deadman Wonderland. Seriously, if there is something worse than this, I don't want to know about it. And when I say worse, I don't mean it's a bad show, I mean it makes you wonder what the hell is wrong with people who can even imagine stuff like this. I watched it because it was part of Toonami's reboot a couple years ago, and while they have been pretty solid since this one got replaced, I so wished they had come out of the gate with something better than this. The opening you see above is hands down the best part of the show, it goes downhill very fast. Deadman Wonderland refers to a prison that is also an amusement park. Right there, any sane person is saying WTF and walking away, but somebody ran with this to come up with a story that destroys your faith in humanity. The first episode opens with a class of elementary school students discussing their field trip to Deadman Wonderland, when suddenly a stranger appears and brutally murders all of them except a boy named Ganta who is then accused of the crime and railroaded at trial and sentenced to Deadman Wonderland as a deathrow inmate. I can not understate the horror of this opening, Ganta awakens to a scene of black and red and his classmates dismembered bodies scattered across the room, and then his trauma is raised by being sent to a prison with actual criminals, some of whom actually killed people and have no problem Killing Ganta. He soon befriends Shiro, an albino girl of the same age who stands out by being the only inmate who doesn't wear the prison uniform, and also nobody is quite sure what she's in for in the first place. The second episode takes it to a new level by showing what life as a Deadman Wonderland inmate is like, you can buy anything, including, hypothetically, your freedom, provided you can earn the money, but the catch is that you earn the money by entertaining the guests in the most horrible ways. As an example, Shiro drags Ganta into a race through an obstacle course with deadly obstacles such as razor sharp axes, arrows, electric fences and toxic gas and when the last three surviving participants make it to the end, they are forced to fight to the last in a game of catch over a pit of spikes, all for a bean curd bun. On top of this, Ganta is also subject to the death sentence, his tracking collar streams poison into his body which will kill him abruptly unless he takes an antidote once every 72 hours, and he has to purchase that antidote with his earnings as well. The series is only 12 episodes and the remaining ten focus on the Deadmen, the true reason behind Deadman Wonderland, individuals who have developed special blood powers and the prison is meant to contain and research them, as well as have them fight for the entertainment of investors who gamble on the duels. Ganta turns out to be one of them as a result of the attack on his class and many other Deadmen were similarly framed and railroaded just to be put into the prison.

Well, those are the wierdest I have come across, I challenge you to watch any of them and hold on to your sanity.