Sunday, February 14, 2010

Japan Ruins Everything: Mutant Ninja Turtles Gaiden

Like most other males in my cohort, I grew up watching the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and by that I mean the late-80s, early-90s version that realized that there was a pretty severe limit to how much emotional torque you were going to be able to get out of a show where the main characters were...well....teenage mutant ninja turtles. But I suppose you could make an emotionally charged version of the show, if that's what you really wanted to...

You know what, fuck it, anyone who tries to turn the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles into some sort of weird emo fanfic is the enemy of all right-thinking men, and that's simply all there is to it. Mutant Ninja Turtles Gaiden is shit. Period.

Okay, I suppose I should show a little evidence to buttress my claim. Let's start with the plot. You see, the story here is that one day as the TMNT were chilling out in the sewer, an evil sword came in the mail and the only way to get rid of it was the stab Splinter through the heart, this causes the team to break up and that's where the main story begins some years later when the Turtles find some kid who got turned in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, and oh God, why does this exist?

Sorry, I can't do this review normally, because I just don't want to. Suffice to say, if you've ever wondered: Man, what if they took the Ninja Turtles, dumped in as many anime cliches as they could (schoolgirls in uniforms, speed lines, and evil samurai curses) and then add in some good old-fashioned teenage angst (a girl named 'shadow', and the ninja turtles all becoming brooding people making 'deep' comments about life) then you should be on some heavy-duty medication to prevent yourself from thinking such awful, awful thoughts. Oh, also this comic can show you exactly what that's like.

Listen, at least 90% of fan fiction is terrible, and at least 90% of webcomics are terrible, so, at best, there's a 1% chance that a fan fiction webcomic isn't going to totally suck, which aren't exactly terrific odds. And, in a sense, can I really blame Mutant Ninja Turtles Gaiden for failing to achieve the near-impossible?

Yes, yes I can, and if I had a time machine, I would go back in time and prevent it from being created by any means necessary, even though that would inevitably lead to me having to escape from a dystopic timeline where the Nazis won World War II with the aid of a ragtag bunch of rebels, who I assume would be lead by an alternate version of Barack Obama with an eyepatch. Eventually I'd make it back to our timeline and be forced to destroy my time machine, only belatedly learning the folly of trying to rewrite history.

Uh....which is to say I don't care much for this particular comic.