Previously I brought you my Top-10 video-game cartoons. Now it’s time for the opposite, the ten cartoons based on video-games that I personally disliked and hated for their awfulness. I found compiling this list sort of difficult given that I personally have a high tolerance for cheese and corniness, but these are the ten cartoons based on video-games that just didn’t need to be made…
10. Final Fantasy: Advent Children
Lets start with the obvious. Final Fantasy 7 is the best-selling title of the FF franchise and Square has been milking it ever since it came out. Sure, they’re not the only or even the first Japanese game company ever to do this (compared to Capcom who are fucking masters at this) but you rarely see a company base so much shit on only one game.
What even needs to be said about this one? It’s a sequel to the game the sole purpose of which was to give the series creators another excuse to get Cloud and Sephiroth to fight again. It’s as inane and pointless as it gets.
In favourable comparison to the rest of the entries, this one can actually be watched without having played the game (though you wont recognise the character cameos at the end) and at least the animation quality is pretty high. It’s garbage, but at least it’s easy on the eyes.
9. Pac-Man
Before DIC, Hanna-Barbera were the go-to company for video-game to cartoon adaptions. Though they started fairly successfully with a cartoon series based on Pac-Man (and went on to create Saturday Supercade and Dragon’s Lair), in hindsight, I’m left with the question as to why was this cartoon even necessary.
Now, lest you think I have something against Pac-Man – forget about it. He’s one of the first and most enduring mascots of the game industry. His game was in my Top-10 favourite classic arcade games and I think Pac-Man is a visually appealing character due to his simplicity. My question is, why was it necessary to make a cartoon out of him? It’s as clichéd and redundant as you could imagine from Hanna-Barbera, who were fresh creating a gazillion Scooby-Doo knock-offs during the 70s.
I guess it was a show that strengthened moral values by showing Pac-Man as a family man and taught children that all of life’s problems could be solved by eating pills. Pac-Man is interesting enough as a curiosity, the first video-game based cartoon show, but not worth coming back to after all these years.
8. Street Fighter the Animated Series
Before we start, let me just admit my undying and unconditional love for the cheesy 1994 Street Fighter live action movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme as Guile and my disdain for the 60 minute fan-service clusterfuck that is Street Fighter: The Animated Movie. Coming off of that, I have to say that Street Fighter the Animated Series fell incredibly short considering its rather noble intentions of accommodating elements of the live action movie with the actual canon of the games.
Yes, this wasn’t your dime-a-dozen action cartoon directed at teenaged boys (though it may have come off that way), this one had story. Sadly, it’s hard to take a cartoon seriously when Derpy McDerpenstein happened to be your animation director. Street Fighter was a bit of a mess animation wise: occasionally competent shots intercut with messy and choppy animation. Character motives getting badly re-construed and the whole thing just coming off as a weird compromise rather than a good, solid show.
For its good intentions and at least somewhat competent production, I don’t think the show deserves to be any higher on the list – but no-one was really that happy about this one.
7. Super Mario Bros.: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach!
Ah! The infamous forgotten Mario anime film from 1986. JC Staff are to thank for this mess which actually had a theatrical release in Japan, but was then forgotten by nearly everyone for the next decade and a half. Slowly through the internet, people started to become more aware of this lost film and some were even excited about the prospect of there being an alternative to the nearly universally derided 1993 live action film with Bob Hoskins. Many were also confused why the film was never released outside Japan.
The reason, despite rumours of its purported content that American censors deemed inappropriate for small children, was something rather mundane. In the very beginning of the film, Mario is seen playing a Japanese FamiCom when Peach jumps out of the TV to escape Bowser’s minions (a bit not too dissimilar from the Mega Man: Wish Upon a Star educational anime). Obviously, Nintendo wanted to avoid confusion and the scene couldn’t have been removed since it would have disrupted the whole narrative flow of the film. Also, a few years down the line we had the release Super Mario Bros. 2 (Doki Doki Panic) which also caused problems for the film since it depicted Luigi with a colour scheme more akin to Wario than what we normally associate with the character.
Anyway, interesting trivia aside, the bottom line here is that the Mario Anime film sucks massive balls. It does have some funny moments, actual characters from the games, but it’s also one of those movies that decides to take a left turn to do something that’s completely at odds with the Mario series (granted, a series still only one game in at this time, but still). Spoiler alert!: Throughout the film Mario and Luigi are followed by a dog, who at the end turns into a Prince that Peach is going to marry. This all happens after all the peril the Mario Bros. face and after a rather tender day-dream sequence where we see Mario and Peach dancing. It’s probably one of the most disappointing downers for a movie ending and just left me pissed.
On top of this, the movie just has a lot of off-the-wall crap and is still somehow kinda slow-paced. Again, it’s probably worth seeing as a curiosity and a lot of the elements that are at odds with the established canon can be excused with the fact that this film came out only a year after the first Super Mario Bros. game, but it’s still a shitty movie in spite of that.
6. The Duel (Halo Legends short)
I have to profess to actually not giving a flying fuck about the Halo franchise as a whole although I’m aware of the mythos and the series’ importance to the Xbox. A few years back Halo Legends was released. It was a collection of short animated films based around different elements of the Halo universe. Some were traditionally and some computer animated and the quality was quite miss-mashed. A few of the shorts were actually pretty cool and entertaining while most were only okay or really nothing special at all.
The Duel which is the first stand-alone after the two-part Origins clips however is an absolutely embarrassing way to kick off the Halo Legends collections. In short, it’s about an alien’s inner struggle with the morals of his society where he ends up slaughtering a bunch of other aliens and then his wife gets assassinated. Also, it looks like a 3D test animation. Literally, The Duel doesn’t look like it’s even finished. Characters move jaggedly and awkwardly, there’s a lame sepia-tone chop-filter thrown in over many scenes to mask the horrible non-fluency of the animation and to give it a faux-samurai film feel.
The Duel is just a mess. The only reason I didn’t put it in the Bottom-5 is that at least it’s short and you can skip it without feeling too bad about it. Secondly, the part after the main guy slaughters all the aliens we see a little minion dude running in panic and yelling the line “He’s a demon!” before getting sliced up. It’s the only time I laughed during this horrible short film.
5. Final Fantasy Unlimited
Oh Final Fantasy… why must you suck so bad at anime adaptions? To its credit, Final Fantasy Unlimited tried to stay faithful to the traditions of the game series by being a stand-alone story with original characters, coloured by the necessary essentials of the Final Fantasy mythos. What’s the problem then? It’s the most clichéd action anime you can find.
I wished I was exaggerating, but everything from the characters, to the plot scenarios, to the repeated running gags to the almost embarrassingly high amount of animation reusage (and this is coming from a He-Man fan) just makes this a show that’s more fun to make fun of than actually watch. The characters are so clichéd and tripe, you will be hard-pressed to identify with any of them. And the villains are a bunch of weirdos sitting around in a dark room doing pretty much nothing. What is this show even about? I watched the whole thing and I still don’t give enough of fuck to find out.
Adding the final nail to the coffin, the series actually ends before reaching any kind of climax or conclusion. It’s clear they were aiming for a second season to finish off the storyline, but quite frankly, I didn’t care enough to even understand it, so why would I voluntarily subject myself to another helping of this crap. Unlimited deserved its spot in the Bottom-5 for being a long, uninteresting and inconclusive cartoon. Its saving grace is its undoubtedly high animation quality – but that’s about it.
4. Pokémon 4ever
I haven’t considered myself a Pokémon fan for ages. I recognise the relative greatness of Pokémon 2 and 3 in comparison to the rest of the Pokémon film franchise (which is part of the Pokémon anime continuity), but beyond that I haven’t had a very large interest in the rest of the films – catching glimpses of them here and there, but lacking the energy to actually sit through most of them. Never the less, I decided to give Pokémon 4ever a shot since I found out that A.) the story included time travel which is always cool and B.) it was supposed to feature an appearance by a young Professor Oak.
Sadly, Pokémon 4ever is a “sequel trap” to which I fell in like chump. Yes, there is time travel and, yes, a kid-Oak does appear – but neither of these elements are ever put to good use story-wise. It’s an innane piece of crap that pretty much repeats the story-elements of the prior films (bad guys want legendary pokemon, the world is threatened etc.) but does so in an incredibly boring and uninteresting way. The funny part here is that I chose to take a chance with the movie because it was pretty short (81 minutes), but the film felt like it dragged on and on.
I didn’t like the first Pokémon movie myself, but in combination with the feature-length TV special, MewTwo actually got some character development. This was just a painfully boring and uninteresting film.
3. The 3rd Season of Captain N
Captain N the Game Master topped my Top-10 Video Game Cartoons list, but in all fairness, that entry is only justified in the context of the first two seasons. The 3rd Season of Captain N: The Game Master was so bad that it wasn’t even included with the series official DVD release. That alone should give you an inkling of how bad it was, but if you’re still unconvinced, you can go ahead and read up my reviews of the episodes from that season.
The suckiness of Captain N’s 3rd Season was due to lowered production costs. During its second season, the show was combined with the prior Super Mario Bros. Super Show to create the Captain N/Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 programming block. It’s clear that Mario got the shitty end of the stick with lowered production quality while Captain N continued with relatively high quality animation. However, by the third season and Super Mario World, DIC decided that Captain N was wasting too much money. The show length was shorted from 20 to roughly 15 minutes, the animation quality lowered with more simplified character designs and the general level of effort in the series writing took a nose dive.
In fact, some episodes weren’t even video-game related and instead featured pointless celebrity cameos by Larry Bird and Bo Jackson. It really defies all logic why DIC thought it was a good idea to so blatantly butcher their own show. The only reason it’s not higher is that Season 3 was so short and that one episode (A Tale of Two Dogs) was actually worth seeing.
2. The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog
After finishing off their last Captain N and Mario cartoons, DIC turned to Nintendo’s biggest competitor and decided to produce two shows off of Sega’s blue mascot, Sonic the Hedgehog. The eponymous Saturday morning cartoon variety went on to enjoy two seasons and enduring love and adoration from the Sonic fan community. The weekday variety would go on to be the popular source of Penis-related video and audio clips for numerous YouTube Poop videos.
The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog was an absolutely shitty cartoon adaption. Even though I think it’s healthy to laugh at something you’re a fan of, I couldn’t really enjoy the cheese-factor of this show all that much (and I’m sure Sonic fans are more likely to get their yucks from either the horrible English dub for the Sonic Movie or Sonic X). Generally, the problem I had with this show was that it embodied everything I hated about 90s cartoons: Ren & Stimpy style gross-out humour and animators unable to draw anything aesthetically appealing.
As a kid I could value the show a bit since it was the first Sonic cartoon I saw, but I immediately resigned any affection towards it when I saw the better Saturday Morning show. So why isn’t this one number-1? Three reasons:
- Jaleel “Urkel” White was also Sonic’s voice-actor on this show and his iconic delivery of Sonic catch-phrase (“I’m waaaaaaitiiiiiing…”) was something I’ve grown quite attached to.
- Long John Baldry’s delivery of “I hate that Hedgehog!” is unequalled in the realm of Robotnik/Eggman voice-actors.
- Scratch and Grounder were somehow a very likeable henchman duo. It’s just too bad they had to appear on this crummy show.
1. Darkstalkers
Have you played Darkstalkers? Yeah, me neither. It seems everyone knows Darkstalkers for exactly two reasons: Succubus lady with Big Tits and a Cat Lady with Big Tits. Seems like a legit way to start a cartoon show for the kids, right? Why is this show here then? Imagine everything that was wrong about Street Fighter the Animated Series and multiply by ten-fold. Yes, it’s really that bad…
Darkstalkers is the perfect example of a show that didn’t need to be made. There was also a TV anime of it but I never saw it and I doubt it’s much better except for the animation. Speaking of which, it was awful. For a show based on a fighting game, the fighting was about the worst thing in the show. Then you have the usual horrible voice-acting and a cheese-factor that blows the socks off even The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog.
On the off-chance that you are a Darkstalkers fan reading this, I’m sure you’ll agree that nobody was happy with the way this show came out. It displays a complete lack of effort to make animation look solid, the characters to appear as anything more than caricatures of themselves and to be anything other than hacky, quickly made and bad effort to squeeze money out of the licence. Darkstalker the Animated Series just didn’t need to be made.
Agreed. Depsite I never watched it, sonic underground stunk as well.