senpai
was really the point at which SNK
Japan had decided that the consumer product would not be as successful as it hoped. They shifted the business model at that point, and the new strategy was to market the arcade versions primarily. The
home version was really more as extra income and less as SNK's featured product. Sony's PlayStation was clearly a mood changer for the release of the NeoGeo CD. Although SNK later spent money to market the NeoGeo CD, there was definitely a different mood around the office with this new product and lowered expectation due to Sony's machine. GS: You experienced your share of ups and downs during your time at SNK. Among them, the censored release of the home AES version of Samurai Shodown and the poorly managed US release of the NeoGeo CD unit. Can you provide some background as to why Samurai Shodown was censored in the US and what reactions were inside the company toward selling the edited game? SNK of America didn't realize the US version of Samurai Shodown was censored until it was too late to do anything about it. CO:To be honest, we didn't know that Samurai Shodown was edited until it was too late to do anything about it. SNK Japan had
started to release home versions of English games to Europe before sending them to the US and didn't give us any input into how a particular game would be localized for the North American market. By the time that Samurai Shodown had reached our warehouse, gray-market versions from Europe had already penetrated the US region, so the company was already in a hurry to just release the game already.
Matches are shown in these constant close ups of the characters slowly gliding across your screen as you hear the play happening in their head. But the play itself is never actually explicitly shown. It's reminiscent of those imovie projects you had to do for middle school where you couldn’t quite figure out how to get the images to stop moving with the ken burns effect as you try your best to match your squeaky dialogue with the 4 second image overlay. It’s an embarrassing production. Football is dynamic and exciting at heart, especially in attacking play. But this static imagery completely ruins the momentum of each play and makes it really hard to sit
through some of these moments that I would like to imagine were exciting on paper. If you don’t get the animation right for a sports anime, it’s really hard to build from there.
The ranking system is atrocious and representative of everything wrong with shonen anime. Why would the ranked 299 person realistically even have a shot at becoming one of the best players. It’s this unnecessary from the bottom to the top type writing that tries to maintain hype through introducing opponents of increasingly high rank. This might work for some, but to me, it’s tedious to sit through knowing that someone with more power but with even less personality will
appear and none of this matters.
Retrieved July 21, 2008. ^ Sharp, Jasper (2003). "Beyond Anime: A
Brief Guide to
Experimental Japanese Animation". Midnight Eye. Archived from the original on July 25, 2008. Retrieved July 21, 2008.