You know, I’ve always hated the box art for The Last Ninja, videogame classic or not. The idea is sound — a very angry ninja glaring at you, nearly-life-sized, with presumed intent to kill — but the actual execution is horrible. It’s hyper-detailed, yes, but all that detail embellishes an anatomically inaccurate face. Grotesquely inaccurate. It’s like the publishers said, “Hey, our character is Japanese, and the Japanese like to draw them big-eyed anime people, so we should make Armakuni’s eyes the same size as Astro Boy’s!” And so the artist did. And then he applied realistic skin texturing and hairs and big ol’ pores and even beads of sweat to his misshapen homunculus. And thus did a million young C64 gamers experience untold years of nightmares.
Anyway, today’s posts are about Armakuni and some other less hideously rendered dude. Which is saying a lot, because said dude made his debut on NES and was illustrated by Konami’s airbrush wizards, who (for example) decided it would be pretty cool to give delicate mage lady Sypha Belnades revolting man-hands.
Alucard is the man. I wonder how much it unsettled him to be around Soma, knowing he was the reincarnation of Drac.
Though I think Alucard would more fittingly be the Brainiac 5 to Drac’s Brainiac, degrees of ancestry aside.
I thought for a minute you opened up a can of worms because I had believed that Sypha Belnades (like Noah of Phantasy Star I fame) was one of those video game characters of debatable gender. However, according to wikipedia, she’s a woman all right but, “hid her gender to become a vampire hunter.” I guess if you’re magical hiding your gender can involve transforming your hands.