Thanks to Siliconera we get a prismatic view of Japan’s confusing, wacky, and often surrealist culture that seems to be a broken mirror reflection of our own. I’m sure there’s an analogue to be found here within an anime about a psuedo-goth fourteen year old girl who meets her sunny counterpart on the other side of a broken mirror (possibly in an attic), but my familiarity with anime extends only a noodle’s width beyond Galaxy Express 999.
Anyway, the video you see above is from Neon Genesis Evangelion: Battle Orchestra, a title that seems to ape the multi-player, multi-planar fighting style of the Super Smash Bros. series, only all the cuddly Nintendo mascots have been replaced by robots that would be more at home in a Tim Burton movie being fawned over by adolescent girls (and adolescent boys with nary a hint of masculinity).
While this sort of thing would just confuse the standard American gamer, the Japanese are as rabid for this sort of cross-branded gaming mayhem as they are for bleached-blonde pop starlets and over-the-hill baseball players. It’s long been my wish that the American gaming industry would become profitable enough that we could see all those titles the Nipponese are privy to on our shores, if only to witness the stampede of lawmakers in Congress trampling one another in order to be the first to decry the societal effects of interactive incestual tentacle sodomy simulations.
