Raise your hand if you remember Kimi ga Nozomu Eien (KimiNozo), otherwise known as Rumbling Hearts. You know, the heartwarming story of a boy, his girlfriend who gets hit by a car, her best friend he’s in love with, and their years of mental breakdowns. When it came out in game and anime form, it became famous for its overwhelmingly depressing mood, which led to the creation of the term 鬱ゲー (utsu gee, or Angst Game) for it and its legion of imitators.

Now raise your hand if you managed to watch Akane Maniax (AkaMani), the pseudo-sequel to Rumbling Hearts – which is the heartwarming story of a brilliantly stupid anachronism and the romance/giant robot action series he keeps living out in his head. For the short version of how diametrically different this is from its predecessory, you just have to watch the openings of each: here’s KimiNozo, which starts out with a report on the victim of a hit and run, and here’s AkaMani, in all of its burning/sprouting wonder. It’s hard to believe that both games/anime came from the same studio, and that studio’s transformation from Angst Peddler to Creator of Glorious Stupidity is a funny story to follow.

The game company age (warning: not all links safe for work) released its first game, Kimi ga Ita Kisetsu, in 1998, but the game that really put it on the map was KimiNozo in 2001. The story and characters really connected with fans, in spite of (or because of) the story’s constant abuse of emotion – nothing good ever really happened to the characters, and many of the stories were spirals into depression, PTSD, and depression. It was so massively popular, it spawned a TV series, a couple of re-releases, and a bunch of fan discs that are worth a mint today if you can find them.

However, as a response to the overwhelmingly dark atmosphere of the original work, the age staff packed as much humor and stupidity into the KimiNozo omake discs. First, they made all of the theme songs parodies or outright ripoffs of old burning anime. Here’s the opening for one of the omake discs, Daikuuji Kiki Ippatsu! Please note the similarity to the classic Saint Seiya opening, Pegasus Fantasy. To add even more Fake Burning to their games, they contracted out a few JAM project singers to belt out their parody hits, striking up a strong relationship that continues to this day – a topic I’ll get to when I get to Muv-Luv in a few weeks.

Akane Maniax represents the peak of age’s period of pure silliness. It is filled with parodies of Tekkaman Blade and Gundam: Char’s Counterattack, most of which occur in the imagination of ’70s throwback Gouda Jouji. In the anime (I’ve never had the pleasure of playing the game), all things close to angst are resolved by mental battles with the evil robot King Irresoluter, piloted by a masked villain eerily similar to the main character of KimiNozo. It is, in short, the best thing ever.

After Akane Maniax, age has worked pretty much exclusively on its Muv-luv series, which straddles both burning and sprouting equally – which means you’ll see me talking about it a lot more in upcoming weeks.

Final tangent: age is part of the “Chiyoda Federation” (千代田連合, or ちよれん for short) along with two other companies with neighboring offices: 0verflow of School Days fame/infamy, and Nitroplus, who gave the world a similar dose of angst in Saya no Uta and also made up for it with giant robot cheese in Demonbane. This tells you all you need to know about the influence these companies have on each other.

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Burning, Sprouting, Win-Myun Kim, anime, games, moe. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.