Game OVA Season 4: Episode 1 — Zillion

I've been looking for something to help me through the hot 'n' humid summer months and what better way to beat the heat than to stay indoors watching questionable anime and playing questionable games based on said anime? For a rundown of this little project, check out the first episode.

The Property

Zillion, known as Akai Koudan Zillion (Red Photon Zillion) in Japan, is a sci-fi property set in 2387 that sees the planet of Maris, previously colonized by humans, become a battlefield after the alien Nohzas (or Norzas, or Nozas) empire decides to clear it out so they can terraform it into their new royal crèche. The titular Zillion refers to the guns carried by the heroic White Nuts* mercenary crew—each handed down to humanity through forces unknown, made of lost technology, and impossible to reproduce. Its similarity to the Sega Master System's Light Phaser gun peripheral is purely coincidental (it's not, I'm being facetious for comic effe- oh, you already figured that out). The show follows the White Nuts—particularly the reckless protagonist J.J., the highly competent ship navigator Apple, and their sarcastic leader Champ—as they thwart the Nohzas at every turn.

Zillion began as an original anime TV show that ran for most of 1987 in a thirty-one episode season. After it concluded it was followed up by a sequel OVA in 1988, in which the White Nuts form a rock band for some reason. However, it was never meant to sit alone as an anime series: the studio, a not-yet-christened I.G. Tatsunoko, had worked closely with Sega as the latter simultaneously produced the same-titled Zillion for their Sega Mark III system, which was released a few weeks into the show's run and localized for the American and European Master System later that same year. Towards the end of the show's run Sega had already produced a sequel, Zillion II: The Tri-Formation, which also saw international releases.

Suffice it to say, since I'm playing a lot of Master System games this year for my "Mastering the Master System" feature and Zillion would naturally pop up on there sooner rather than later as one of the console's best-loved exclusives, it seemed prudent enough to fold its coverage into Game OVA this year. That's me, always looking to give myself less work to do. The Master System did see a few other anime licensed games though not as many as you'd hope/dread: it was pretty quickly abandoned by Sega of Japan as they got to work on the Mega Drive (that I guess was also the Sega Mark IV? I don't think I've ever heard it called that though) which meant it saw very few games that would've been specifically targeted at a Japanese audience, i.e. the only ones to care about anime back in 1987.

Cast

• J.J.: Though the lowest ranked of the main White Nuts offense team he is our perspective character, a reckless youth with plenty of country wisdom and a yearning to prove himself in battle. He's notable for his mushroom bob of black hair and trademark red shirt. Kind of an idiot?
• Apple: The White Nuts' navigator. The very competent and badass space heroine type. Kind of a scold?
• Champ: The White Nuts' leader. Calm and somewhat arrogant but with the skills to back that attitude up. Kind of a jerk?
• Dave: The White Nuts' stocky engineer and technician. Usually stays in the ship. Kind of a... nah, Dave's cool.
• Opa-Opa: The White Nuts' assistant robot and, effectively, mascot. Identical in name and likeness to the Fantasy Zone character. If you have a deal with Sega you might as well take advantage of it to put Opa-Opa in your show.
• Mr. Gord: The commissioner for the White Nuts and their main contact point for missions. His glasses do that shiny Gendo Ikari thing a lot.
• Amy Harrison: Mr. Gord's pink-haired secretary. Has a thing for J.J.. Probably that bowlcut, it's a real ladykiller.
• Admis: The Empress of the Nohzas empire. Mostly an unseen character.
• Baron Ricks: A general of the Nohzas empire, leader of the invasion force, and the one giving the White Nuts the most trouble. His face is the same plain mask as any other Nohzas but his clothing is a little more ostentatious.

The Anime

The Zillion anime was created by Tatsunoko Production studios, directed by Mizuho Nishikubo, and written by Tsunehisa Ito. Tatsunoko Production is a super long-running studio (since the '60s) that's still active today, with a few shows in the works for upcoming anime seasons. However, it'd be more accurate to say that Zillion is the work of the fledgling I.G. Tatsunoko, an internal division divised by planner Mitsuhisa Ishikawa as a means of keeping the talented crew behind Zillion as a cohesive unit going forward rather than spreading them around to other productions. I.G. Tatsunoko later went independent and became Production I.G., a studio every bit as prolific as their former owners.

If you follow anime much at all you've probably seen something Production I.G. have worked on: maybe the parody of tough '70s bancho dramas Cromartie High School (and, honestly, if you haven't you probably should), the dystopic sci-fi thriller Psycho-Pass, the volleyball sports anime Haikyu!!, or the more recent tokusatsu-inspired show Kaiju No. 8 (soon to begin its second season). I'll always remember them fondly for the two hilarious Dragon Half OVAs (more on what that's all about over here (though the YT link is dead, so try this one)). I.G.'s subsidiary Wit Studio is no slouch either, having produced the global hit Attack on Titan along with Spy x Family, Ranking of Kings, and (currently airing) Yaiba: Samurai Legend. That Zillion walked so all of the above could run really gives it a legacy I wasn't anticipating from an obscure '80s show about light guns that spawned a couple of Master System games.

As to some of the humans behind Zillion, Mizuho Nishikubo had been working for Tatsunoko as a dependable pair of hands since the 1970s, where he directed (among others) episodes of the superhero show Gatchaman and the boxing drama Ashita no Joe before becoming the showrunner for the entire run of Zillion. Soon after that he went freelance, directing Patlabor 2: The Movie, being a sequence director for Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, and winning awards for the original movie Giovanni's Island. For most westerners, he's perhaps best known for his work on the animated sequence from Kill Bill Vol. 1, which conveyed the backstory of Deadly Viper member O-Ren Ishii. Tsunehisa Ito, likewise, had been with Tatsunoko for a very long time prior to writing most of Zillion's episodes, afterwards moving onto the 1988 anime adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers (had no idea that was a thing; I might have to check out some trailers), the screenplay of Gundam movie Mobile Suit Gundam F91, and a few episodes of sci-fi racing show and possible Game OVA candidate Future GPX Cyber Formula. Looks like he may have retired after working on the Incan-inspired fantasy adventure Nazca, a show that perhaps only persists in cultural memory due to a couple of its clips appearing in the chaotic opening of Malcolm in the Middle (man, the tangents I find).

As we often do with TV shows, I'm just going to cover the first three episodes here to get a taste of what this Zillion business is all about. Hopefully that will be enough of a basis to figure out what's going on with the game; something tells me it's probably not going to be all that complicated though. (Titles are the original Japanese, translated, followed by the localized versions.)

Episode 1: "Codename: J.J." / "They Call Me, J.J."

In this first episode, after the amazing City Pop OP "Pure Stone", we fade in on the newly formed White Nuts training in a simulator at their headquarters. Well, Apple is: Champ is relaxing on the sofa with Opa-Opa and Dave and their last member, J.J., is absent after sleeping in and is presently cycling like crazy across a desert to get to the HQ. All right, so I guess I have a few questions right off the bat: if this kid is part of some elite force, couldn't they give him a better vehicle? Like, even a flying bike would be better. Second, why (or really how) is he cycling across a desert? And which direction did he come from? The answers to all of these are probably not important because we jump right into the action as J.J. gets distracted watching a shuttle launch only for it to get nixed by a sudden missile barrage from Nohzan forces, who then march on the nearby Lanier Base and the civilian homes around it. The shuttle pilot crash lands in a hydroponics area and hands a secret computer chip—which we were just told was very important in the previous briefing scene—to a five-year-old girl (Addy) and her dog. You know, the safest place for it. An admittedly cool-looking Nohzan stormtrooper shows up to mercifully shoot the dude and is about to also murder the defenseless child when J.J. pops the alien with a sick bicycle wheelie. An exchange of gunfire later—his gun seems surprisingly ineffective, so I'm guessing it's not the Zillion—and the alien is down, the five-year-old girl having saved the day by whacking the alien over the head with a metal rebar as J.J. was prone and getting his ass whupped. Our hero, everyone.

Meanwhile, Apple and Champ are officially assigned their Zillions by Mr. Gord and his assistant Amy and given instructions to find the fallen pilot and recover the chip, taking off in the White Nuts jet tank—or specifically, a jet that has a tank attached to it that it can deploy independently. Gotta have rad vehicles in a show like this. J.J., still armed with his crappy pistol (which he refers to as "his honey") and an increasingly busted bike rides directly towards the Nohzan invasion force without much of a plan at all. Also, can I just say here that this show is already getting pretty dark with the war violence: the Nohzans nuked at least two families trying to evacuate Lanier with fully packed cars like they were the Griswolds heading to Walley World. In one case, all that remained after the explosion was a baby in its carriage; sucks for that kid. J.J. and Addy are quickly outgunned and try to elude the alien forces and their various mech scouts to little avail after J.J.'s "ride a bike at the big robot" plan spectacularly failed (who is he, Mumen Rider?). After hiding on top of a solar panel for a while (good way to stay out of the open) he devises a new, even more foolproof plan: spin a few brodies in a vehicle carrying several tons of explosive fuel while getting shot at, then drive it directly at the invading army and jump out of the truck at the very last second, ideally surviving the approach, the landing, and the resulting explosion.

Alas, the last part of the plan required shooting the barrels and J.J. discovers he's out of ammo. No immediate clues what happened to the truck after that but J.J. and Addy are surrounded by Nohzans. Just as it's looking bleak, Apple and Champ finally show up on their sidecar motorbikes and create enough of a distraction to rescue the pair. We then get to see the awesome power of the Light Phaser Zillion at work as J.J., having stolen Champ's piece when he wasn't looking, vaporizes a mech in a single shot and the rest of the team sweep up the various footsoldiers milling around in a montage set to a power ballad (also the ED) with the amazing name of "Push!! I Don't Stop On My Way". Well, it was the '80s. This montage ends with J.J. getting back into the energy tank pick-up truck and driving it into the Nohzan's enormous tank, I guess because he really had his heart set on blowing all that shit up and just shooting the tank with the instant-kill laser gun handed down by a cosmic god (canonical) wouldn't have been flashy enough. Somehow surviving all of that, just, J.J. smoothly hands over the mostly intact chip everyone's looking for and the day is saved. Sorta. A lot of people died still and it's not clear if Addy's dog (or her family for that matter) made it but let's chalk this up as a win for humanity. Go us!

Episode 2: "Attack the Enemy of the High Skies" / "Hang Fire"

The Nohzas have discovered that a power control center in Gloria City provides electricity to every single urban center on the planet and decide to blow it up. Sensible. The attack strategy and the city planning choices that led to putting everyone's energy needs into one basket alike. Meanwhile, it's J.J.'s turn in the simulator and despite a promising early showing he struggles when the targets start darting around a hundred miles an hour. The camera pans to a completely over it J.J. as Champ trash-talks his light gun chops with all his wasteful shots, only for J.J. to ask why they don't replicate the Zillion so all this ammo preservation business is unnecessary. Identifying a handy opportunity for some exposition that won't cost much to animate, Apple has Amy explain to him why they can't reproduce these things because they're mysterious technology that literally came from space. Duh.

A pair of goobers are keeping an eye on the wastelands surrounding Gloria City but one of them has become so bored of looking at dirt all day that he's busted out the guitar for some impromptu jams. When his companion smacks him over the head with a wrench to force him to pay more attention it's a mercy to us all. Alas, it turns out today is the day the Nohzas roll in with a giant army of tanks (I guess they don't have any orbital lasers, because that would've made things easier). The Maris Forces quickly get to work mobilizing tanks and choppers while the energy silo is housed underground—this process takes about half an hour though, giving the Nohzas plenty of time to drop down from their aircraft above and interrupt it while the rest of the Maris Forces are out getting fooled by the tanks' diversion. Typical Maris; always a no-show. That means it's time to deploy the White Nuts and for me to write out and then decorously delete about six or seven very gross jokes about their name again. Also, turns out that jet of theirs is modular: they attach a blue plane to it this time rather than the red tank from Episode 1. It's sort of like Thunderbird 2, if that's a reference that still plays at all. Apple and Champ strategize around a console to devise a plan to reach the silo by taking an underground route via a nearby basement elevator, while J.J. sits up top in the cockpit telling Dave how he's not suited for "strategies" or "plans" or "thinking" and instead is mostly just here to shoot things. Don't be so quick to put yourself down, man, I'm sure you can find a bike somewhere to throw at an army of armored paratroopers.

We get a cool sequence of the trio dropping from the plane in their sidecar motorcycles and driving through the city. After dispatching with some Nohzan goons taking the same elevator they need, they all pile in with one of the bikes (I hope there's no weight limit on that thing) and follow the underground tunnel to the silo. Champ, not quite calculating the right distance, ends up driving through the guard rail and falling to the silo's bottom floor, while J.J. is stranded on a hanging rope further up. This also puts him in ideal distance of three Nohzan combat engineers doing... something to the underside of the silo. J.J.'s quick to start indiscriminately shooting at the enormous power plant generating enough energy for an entire world but his Zillion stops working: turns out you need to regularly replace the battery after so many shots then wait thirty seconds for it to charge back up again. Isn't the future great? Just before J.J.'s Zillion is fully charged and he's about to get blasted by the Nohzan soldiers, who have presumably figured out where all the extra weight on their rope was coming from, Champ has already taken them all out. Our hero, everyone. Killing those three guys was apparently all that was needed of them (I told you three was plenty), so the White Nuts take it easy on a nearby hillside somewhere and watch as the Maris Forces parachute some soldiers in to take care of the rest of the invasion force. Some missions are easier than others, I suppose.

Episode 3: "0.1 Second Chance!" / "Split-Second Chance"

This time, the Nohzans have built a giant laser death ray and are planning on pointing it at Hope City, situated a few hundred miles away. They first test it out on a fleet of supply planes coming in to rescue a group of soldiers stranded in one of the planet's jungles. Kind of a dick move, honestly. The cannon's test fire is a success so the Nohzas plan to up the power output several magnitudes and aim for the more tantalizing target of a major civilian area. Starting to think these Nohzas might be the bad guys? The situation is very tense right now, but it's nothing a powerful White Nut can't alleviate (sorry, phrasing). The team is deployed to the jungle close to where the cannon sits in another new modular vehicle: a yellow submersible this time. Wow, it really is Thunderbirds.

One issue to J.J.'s "let's just run in" is that there's several legions of soldiers between them and their target, which sits inside a fake rock on the top of a waterfall (pretty crafty). While Champ and Apple hash out a better plan than that of anime Frank "So Then I Started Blasting" Reynolds over there the cannon fires again, obliterating the military forward operating base on the outskirts of Hope City. According to the flashing terminal Amy's looking at, Mr. Gord and his contact in the Science Academy have determined that each shot takes two hours to charge up and each has managed to extend its range even further out, suggesting Hope City will be doomed when 5pm rolls around (bummer, right before dinner). Sensing the urgency at stake, Champ observes that they need some decisive action (J.J. is totally for it) but still can't settle on a plan that'll get them past the forces on the side of the lake they're hiding under, up a mountain, and past the solid rock fortifications. J.J., being the poster child for ADHD that he is, decides he's going to take off on one of those motorcycle things whether he has back-up or not, and Champ can only admire his courage (in an "insulting his stupidity" indirect sort of way).

J.J. naturally runs into trouble quickly, getting ambushed by a field of mines at first and then some flying mecha. Overwhelmed, he's forced back to where Apple and Champ are watching him get his ass lightly toasted by alien lasers (hey, you take your entertainment where you can on this dustball of a planet) and the trio beat a retreat after a convenient total solar eclipse provides some cover of darkness. I want to say one of these happened in the first episode as well, which seems extraordinarily unlikely astronomically speaking, but then this is an exoplanet rather than Earth. It could just so happen to have some really big moons that float past its star a lot. If I planned to watch any more of this show maybe I'd be inspired to keep a total solar eclipse tally going. Anyway, Champ got injured while saving J.J. so now he's even less patient with his recklessness, but J.J. insists that their tight time limit leaves no room for caution. Instead, Champ comes up with a plan to snipe the cannon's center with his Zillion and its attached scope, popping out of the water in the submersible just as the cannon is about to fire. It's the team's best shot, as it were, and so they wait for the last possible moment to have the submersible leap out of the water like a White Nut sperm whale (sorry x2) while J.J. drives out on a motorcyle with Champ in the sidecar aiming his Zillion in sniper rifle mode. Usually you'd want a little more stability than all of that for sniping but Champ's just that good, man. Don't just earn a nickname like that for nothing. The bullet hits the cannon's energy ball just as it's moving out the barrel and causes the entire structure to vaporize in the episode's third massive explosion. Oh, also J.J. and Champ survive getting caught in the blast and falling several hundred meters onto the hull of the submersible. Why wouldn't they.

On the next episode preview: Ninjas! Too bad we're all done here.

Conclusion

Zillion's fun but it's clearly meant for kids. I could certainly see myself coming home from grade school and catching episodes of this between other imported anime like Transformers and, I dunno, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors (it's Franco-Japanese, it counts). The sort of enterprise that felt designed primarily to sell toys and doesn't really do much in the way of sequential storytelling but was entertaining enough for casual fans of futuristic vehicles, explosions, and cool teens posing with plastic guns that shoot infrared lasers and are attached to hip battery units with a long cord (now I'm wondering if this was less a Light Phaser peripheral thing and more a Laser Tag thing?).

Either way, 31 episodes of this is probably around the right amount for its target audience: I was always the sort of undiscerning child who would never notice when a syndicated cartoon had started over its run, and I imagine I'm not alone. Hell, I watched Galaxy High School for years and never noticed that they only produced 13 episodes. The question is: How much of what we saw here is going to make it into these Master System games? They were developed concurrently while the show was in production so I suspect we'll have some general "show bible" stuff like matching character and vehicle designs and less resemblance to any actual storylines (sort of like the Konami Simpsons arcade brawler; they pretty much winged it with a handful of faxed over concept art) but I suppose we're about to find out.

The Game(s)

We'll start here with Zillion, a side-scrolling action game developed and published by Sega themselves around mid-1987. However, it has a slightly unusual structure for the era in which you're meant to traverse a base full of single-room obstacle courses, most of which have at least four pods that can be broken into for a piece of the room's passcode. This passcode is necessary to open the door to the next part of the world and, while enemies and hazard might respawn, that room stays "complete" for the rest of the playthrough. You'll also find permanent upgrades, additional characters with their own advantages, and a set of necessary collectibles to complete your mission of setting the base's self-destruct and getting the heck out of there. That also means some back-tracking, as some of the power-up providing pods are shielded and require an upgraded Zillion to break open. As such, it would be fair to designate this game an explormer: rare for the 8-bit era, following what is popularly considered the first (but not quite the first) in the genre, Metroid, by a mere handful of months.

Now, this game definitely has its limitations. There's no saving, and you're only given three "lives" to complete the game or else be forced to start over. However, this is mitigated by a generous health bar, a level-up system (which fully restores health), food items that restore an admittedly tiny chunk, and a system where you can switch from protagonist J.J. to either Apple or Champ once you've rescued them. Each character has a separate health bar, though sadly doesn't also carry over any upgrades J.J. has found like the super useful Zillion upgrades (destroy higher-level pods) or the Scope (shows the normally invisible infra-red alarm sensor beams), but this does mean that you can switch to someone else temporarily if J.J.'s getting dangerously low on health.

Other neat ideas are extra codes you can input in any room's computer: typing the same number four times will cause something to happen, though at the cost of one of your keycards (they're easy enough to replace at least, but finite in total). These events might include checking the map, turning off the laser beams (necessary since they hurt a lot), turning off the sensor beams (might save you some grief), turning off the conveyor belts (mostly a minor annoyance), or turning off the auto-turrets (usually not a problem since they shoot indiscriminately but some rooms can have too many to deal with). All these effects are temporary and the cost might not be worth it, especially as you need to hang onto a stock of keycards for any otherwise unavoidable laser beams as well as at least one to use the computers in the first place.

The game is surprisingly solid, giving you goals and challenges to overcome in every room where you can plan a route to avoid trouble or else sacrifice a few keycards to get what you need. Finding the codes usually means going out of your way to find all four parts (though you could probably wing it with just three: it's always four different numbers and the game doesn't care about the order you input them) which might require some careful jumping or judicious hacking. Levelling up doesn't just replenish your health but increase its max, as well as occasionally boosting your jump height (Apple starts with the highest jump stat, making her useful to reach some areas early on), so it's important to figure out where all those level-ups are. One irritant is that when a character is dead, they're gone for good until you use up one of your restarts: I let J.J. die early on and since he was the only one with an upgraded Zillion, it meant several progress-critical rooms couldn't be completed because the pods were too high level, forcing me to suicide poor Apple who'd only just been woken up. Three lives is probably generous enough but the game's about three or four hours long (maybe way less if you know the route) which is a lot to have to redo. Even so, it's quickly become one of my favorite Master System games: I think Jeff Gerstmann might've been right about this one.

Does it do right by the anime? The thing is, while leaving J.J. on his own to cleverly adopt subterfuge, computer hacking, and stealth to get through a heavily monitored base is... not exactly in line with what I understand about his character, the fact remains that they really couldn't have treated Zillion better than allowing it to be the basis of one of the Master System's strongest games. A tough, uncompromising, early explormer that relies on player judgment as frequently as it does their reaction speed (and their sense of direction too, given that pulling up an in-game map is kinda wasteful). And you still get all the White Nuts pulling out Zillions and blasting away, and Opa-Opa cameoing as the game's cursor, so really what more could you want? Any of those cool vehicles? You sorta see one at the start of the game, so there you go.

Before moving onto the sequel here I should probably address the elephant in the room that despite having guns that greatly resemble the Master System Light Phaser the peripheral in question doesn't factor in this game at all. Neither Zillion nor Zillion 2 contain any light gun sections where you're meant to take up your own "Zillion" and start blasting away at the screen, which seems absurd given the animators bothered to put it front and center in their TV show. In fact, the Light Phaser was never released in Japan and so there weren't any compatible games released for it over there. There IS a Fantasy Zone game for the Master System at least (and it just so happens to have been the one randomly drawn for Mastering the Master System this month; pure coincidence).

Zillion II: Tri-Formation, or just Tri-Formation if you go by its title screen alone, is a bit more straightforward than the first Zillion. As in, you literally just go straight forward until you either beat all eight levels or the overwhelming enemy numbers cause a game over. This is what an anime licensed tie-in 8-bit game is meant to feel like: cheap looking, overly difficult, and not a whole lot of fun for more than fifteen minutes. The story is pretty similar to the first: the White Nuts are tasked with investigating some new Nohzas base and end up getting captured, except for J.J. who I guess they left behind because... well... I mean, you've met J.J., right? The gameplay format's changed a little too, in addition to dropping all the passwords and non-linear exploration that made the original interesting. The game now alternates between vehicle sections—onboard those sidecar bikes I mentioned in the anime review, which I guess were called Tri-Formations this whole time—followed by on-foot sections that require a little more platforming and caution. The vehicle sections are auto-scrollers whereas the on-foot sections are more like Contra, in that you can't really sit still because enemies are spawning from every direction. Most are disposable Nohza troopers but you'll also get these irritating probes that float around and are hard to pin down as well as what look like evil Nohzan Opa-Opas that fly right at you at high speed.

Graphically it's... well, it looks like a game that was made in six months, I suppose, though you can tell they more or less cleaned up and reused several sprites from the first game. Bit garbled with the backgrounds but those character sprites are still as decent as before. Real basic looking title screen though, as you can see above. It only has the two musical tracks from what I can tell: another rendition of Pure Stone that plays throughout and a slightly more frantic boss theme. The one boss I took on (I'd guess they're at the end of every on-foot section, so there's four overall) was just me versus a bunch of slightly bluer versions of the regular goons beaming in from both directions, which was moderately tough due to how hard it was to avoid crossfire. The game also doesn't have RetroAchievements—given the overall quality I can understand why—so I'm not really incentivized to keep beating my head against this thing to improve enough to see the ending. Seems like I got a pretty good cross-section of it at least, after surviving two vehicle levels and an on-foot one. If anything, it reminded me a lot of that Dirty Pair FDS game I played a few years back for this feature: the fast vehicle sections are similarly way too sudden and arbitrary with their enemy placement which makes it hard to avoid dying.

Does it do right by the anime? Well... I guess? I rescued Apple but couldn't switch over to her (not without a second pad at least), so it loses points there compared to how first Zillion which let you vicariously live out your fantasy of either being Not-Samus or Champ, the navigator and super cool leader of the White Nuts respectively, rather than just the bowlcutted dork of the group everyone constantly shits on. Conversely, the show had a lot of vehicle stuff in it so having levels where you're riding around those bikes does feel closer to the spirit of embodying a White Nut, which I'm sure every kid wanted to be in 1987. (Technically they were one before they were even born.) At any rate, I know which Zillion game I prefer and it's not this one.

At any rate, I'm not aware of any other Zillion games and I don't think Sega ever thought to do anything with the license again. Nor did Production I.G., despite it being the reason they exist. Definitely an "of its time" sort of situation. If the Master System ever rises again, though, you can be sure that J.J. and pals won't be far behind as the revived system's new mascots. Just have to kick Alex Kidd's ass in the process, probably. Someone needs to. See you again real soon with some more anime tie-in goodness, and remember to keep those Zillions charged.

*Some localizations change this to the White Knights, which makes some degree of thematic sense given their job is to protect everyone, but it's not nearly as funny. Comedy is important.