Teenagers From Outer Space: TFOS Does Winterfest!

First off, no relation to the Mystery Science Theater 3000 subject of the same name. Although that was certainly goofy enough to be right at home in this game.

Without going into too much detail, as I’m pondering a rundown of the game itself sometime, once upon a time a designer at R. Talsorian Games found out about a really funny sci-fi/school comedy anime called Urusei Yatsura and evidently thought it would be a great basis for a role-playing game. And thus was born Teenagers From Outer Space, where creatures from across the cosmos have decided to enroll their kids in human schools and expose them to such radical ideas as individuality and capitalism. The players control these star spawn, or the lucky kids who’ve been put in charge of helping them get acclimated to life as an Earthling teenager. And hijinks, as they say, ensue.

Sadly while the game’s fondly remembered by the people who did get to experience it, it evidently didn’t find a lot of support from the game-buying public. I own six products with this game’s name on them and as far as I know that’s it. Three are versions of the core rules, two are premade adventures and one’s a mall for the players to hang out at. Heh, malls. Remember those?

One of those premade adventures is the subject of this particular review, but pays homage to its animated roots by eschewing the long and intricate plot of the only other premade adventure, “The Field Trip,” and instead being a loose outline of short, humorous episodes to keep things fast and fun. They also packed in a list of new powers characters can have, like being stretchy or literally being so cool your character can deflect an attack by making a (hard) saving throw.

As the name indicates the meat of the series of little episodes laid out in the book revolve around the winter festivities of the characters’ school (Or perhaps the very, very basic premade school that comes with the booklet. I’m not sure if it’s embarrassing or not that the school outline that came with “Bad Medicine for Dr. Drugs” was more detailed. And that was a serious anti-drug tale that still thought a good name for a street gang was "The Monkey Thugs"). These include the big dance, electing the WinterFest king and queen, an extremely cheap and dangerous carnival, a planetary invasion by three races of evil, uncool aliens at the exact same time, and of course saving Santa Claus from corporate mercenaries.

Yes, really.

Of course the GM’s expected to fill in an awful lot of blanks to keep things as crazy as possible, so the scenarios in this module require a certain kind of person to run them. But then, TFOS requires a certain kind of player to begin with. The main focus of the scenarios is on winning a popularity contest against a pair of jerky but good-looking cool kids (aren't they all?), something the players can’t do with brute force even if the game makes it easy for players to equip themselves with silly futuristic weapons. Hell, it’s easy for the unwashed masses to resort to violence; if they were smart and sophisticated enough to try something else they wouldn’t be the unwashed masses.

On that note, though, I’d say that while the final scenario where the players help save Santa is practically required, it’s also a disappointment. While in the hands of a good GM it’ll still end up being plenty silly, it’s also just your typical “blow up the bad guys” thing from any old RPG. Besides the holiday theme it’s not connected to the previous plot ideas and just kind of pops in like a poorly-integrated boss fight. There aren’t even circumstances that have them meeting up with Santa who’s already in trouble: the kids just hear about commandos attacking the workshop on the news and, presumably, pile into their flying saucers to go to Saint Nick’s rescue. Suppose those zappy guns it’s so easy for the players to get had to figure in somewhere.

I guess I'm just down on heavy combat in a game that tries to be as cartoony as possible, and the penalty for losing all your hit points is missing your next turn, and then getting them all back after that. Sounds to me like the combat monsters can stay home.

It’s a little interesting to note the game getting a little more blatant about its anime roots, even if some of it’s stuff the players aren’t really meant to see. One of the aliens the players have to save Christmas from during the three-way invasion are the Robotoids from planet Voltron, and considering whose work inspired this game in the first place, I highly doubt it’s a coincidence that one of the stimuli the new power list uses as an example of what can set off an “out of control power” is being hit with cold water. Not when switching genders is already a power in the game.

And look at those cute Totoros you can win for your lady! Or whatever’s appropriate on the planet you’re from.

All in all, aside from the combat-centric scenarios, this is a pretty good module.The winter festivities are a great setup for plenty of teen-related chaos, the new powers and devices described in the book are cool and a lot more original than the ones in the book as they weren't filling most of it out by copying and pasting from UY's major alien characters.

But if there’s one thing that’s a shame about this book, I’d actually say it’s the humorous insert art, since nobody’s meant to read the booklet except the GM. As bare-bones as it is to leave most of the content up to the person running the game who actually knows his players and their quirks. So, here’s a few more examples of the goofy pictures in this booklet, along with a little sample of the mayhem waiting to be unleashed.

Happy holidays!

The Adventures of the Little Prince - The Greatest Gift

Penned by Antoine de Saint-Expurey, “Le Petit Prince” was about a nameless boy living on a small asteroid called B-612 (According to this show that's pronounced "Bee-Six-Twelve"). He travels to Earth and makes all kinds of profound observations about the status of life there, and I’d like to tell you about it in more detail but while I owned the book as a child I never read it.

However it was adapted into an anime that aired on Nickelodeon from the mid-to-late 80’s, which I did see occasionally on trips to Grandma’s house. By catching passing shooting stars with a butterfly net the prince could travel to other planets and make profound observations on the state of being of the people he found there. And maybe, just maybe, we learned a little something about ourselves in the process. And in this particular one, the true meaning of Christmas or something like that.

The opening sequence informs us the show’s “Based on the character THE LITTLE PRINCE……conceived by ANTOINE de SAINT-EXPUREY and not directly on the book itself.” Since the end of the book would seem to preclude any further stories about him, yeah you’d think so. Although for the curious, there was a live-action movie based on the book.

Then a guy with a terrible French accent presumably meant to be the author basically explains the premise I just did, and how the prince heard from his buddy Swifty the space bird about Christmas and all its material manifestations like presents and snow and tree decorations and blah de blah, and wanted to check it out. Let’s see how the episode tackles this, shall we?

We see Swifty and the prince after they land on a tropical island (which doesn’t look very tropical and which seems merely a handy insert to explain why there’s no snow), and Swifty tries to wake up his companion. Not that he matters, since he immediately flies off to check in on some people on Jupiter.

That looks like a landing a small boy would survive, yeah.

The prince makes his way into town, marvels at the decorations, and is just in time to nearly be run down by a horse and buggy (incidentally, all the episodes I can remember appear to be set in the 1800’s or something, but I distinctly remember the prince talking about going to Disneyland. Not actually going there, of course, but talking about it). The passenger, an old man called the major, has his huge manservant bodily drag a young boy out of his house in order to adopt him. The prince protests that the major shouldn’t separate people from their families, even if it is to save the boy from a life of miserable poverty. Why’s the major so interested in adopting a young boy, you ask? Well, because he takes one look at the prince and recognizes the kid as the spitting image of his dear departed son. Really? We’re doing one of those?

The nostalgic among us might be interested to know both Swifty and the major are voiced by Hal Smith, who people my age probably know best as Gyro and Flintheart Glomgold from DuckTales (or if you're really nerdy the evil wizard from Dragon's Lair II). He does well as an eccentric inventor, but not so much as a stern old man. At least one without a Scottish accent and any apparent underworld ties.

The very accommodating prince is brought back to the major’s mansion, where more marveling over how he’s the very model of a modern major general…I mean, the major’s son, is done. The servants, by the way, appear to be indigenous, and talk in this frankly rather patronizing pidgin English that would probably get this show sent back these days. (crap like “Don’t make filler, plenty roast goose in tomorrow dinner”)

Shown his new room, the prince is amazed that it’s painted to look like the night sky and spots where B-612 is. This gets him thinking of home and a rose girl he takes care of, and that gets him thinking of sneaking out and seeing what Christmas is like for non-rich people. Conveniently there’s a ladder outside his window and a hole in the mansion wall, which seem like something a guy who’d previously been about to basically kidnap a boy to have someone to fill the void his son left would’ve taken care of beforehand.

Once back in town he catches the kid the major was trying to carry off before (Robby, since this cartoon apparently has a problem with naming people) running from a policeman with a stolen cake. The prince promises the major will take care of everything, but it’s not just the baker who’d like recompense since apparently the kid has a history of this kind of thing. The major refuses to pay back Robby’s victims, which makes the prince sad.

He plays to the major’s sympathies since the old man has everything and wants a son, while lots of boys have nothing and want a father. I suppose I’d be a little more sympathetic if this show didn’t seem to be saying the boy should be forgiven for stealing a luxurious cake (and released from police custody, yet) because it’s Christmas. My personal favorite Christmas stories are the ones that showed the people are capable of celebrating the holiday and their loved ones without needing tons of gifts and fancy food (even if they end up getting those things as a reward anyway). The prince even explains how the major’s maid is making up gift baskets full of nice things to give out to the less fortunate. Sure generosity’s something we ought to promote, but what about humility and the deeper meaning of the holiday?

Hiding out in a playground the prince finds a foster kitten abandoned under a bench and takes it to find someplace with a ceiling as it starts to know. “I guess they found homes for all your brothers and sisters and nobody wanted you. It happens with people sometimes too.” Oh I’m sorry, this does have a completely valid moral after all. It has a poor homeless kitten, it must.

The major’s maid tells him she’s wrapping Christmas presents but he’s not in a festive spirit; with the prince gone the gift that mattered most is gone too. The major even goes on about how the prince brought snow, it hasn’t done that in any time in the major’s memory. Okay, maybe we shouldn’t be asking the major to help people out. Seriously? The prince made it snow? I don’t think I conveyed this but as far as I can tell he doesn’t have any magic powers or anything other than an uncomplicated view of the world.

The major realizes he was just looking out for what he wanted when he abducted children back to his mansion, and sets out into the snowy night to find the prince. He finds the boy under a bridge talking to the kitten about how it’s not right to lock up a living creature. “If you love something you can try to help it but you don’t have to own it.”  Amazing how childhood innocence cuts right through all those issues like "real world logistics," huh?

Mr. Major admits he was wrong in only thinking about his own wants in seeking a new son and ignoring all the good he could do for the local downtrodden. He agrees to take in the little sneak thief and try to make a respectable lad out of him, even though the episode barely shows the kid at all and doesn’t really get into why he had to steal such a fancy cake for Christmas. I’m sorry, when I was five I probably would’ve bought this without thinking about the root causes. Of course when I was five I would’ve forgotten all about this when the next show started and I got to see Autobots wail on Decepticon tucus.

And the major throws a big Christmas party for the whole town and hands out gifts to all the kids. And the prince catches a comet back to his own little asteroid. No idea what happened to the cat. All in all a quick and inoffensive little Christmas episode. Although I don’t mind saying the Darkwing Duck one was deeper and more memorable.

Joyeux noel, everyone.

Engine Sentai Go-onger - Protect the Holy Night

Note: This episode jumps around a lot and I haven’t written everything that happens in the order it’s actually shown in an attempt to make things a little more streamlined.

Last time on Engine Sentai Go-onger, the evil Cleaning Minister Kireizki appeared and gave the Go-ongers a hard time right before Christmas. They thought they defeated him with an ingenious scheme, until it turned out he had a magic garbage can he could hide inside. I’m only bringing this up because the actual recap was narrated by one of the Engines, Birca, who peppers his sentences with words from various European languages for some reason, and was my favorite secondary character.

Having survived their best efforts, Kireizki sucks Santa and the Go-ongers into the garbage can, flinging them to the four winds.

Sousuke, Ren and Gunpei (the black guy) land in a kindergarten where a couple armed bank robbers have gone to ground. Hiroto and Saki (the gold and yellow guys) find themselves in a swamp surrounded by ghosts, and Marty Stu Hiroto takes one look at them and runs out of there like a dog with its tail on fire.

Hanto, Miu (green and silver) and Santa land on a pier, but one that’s not being attacked by anything. Doesn’t mean they don’t have problems of their own; Santa dropped the present bag somewhere, and right as they spot it some garbagemen toss it in their truck and drive away.

Gaiark is of course taking advantage of not having superheroes around to thwart their plans by coming up with a big one. In the spirit of the new years cleaning ritual (which is a major tradition in Japan I hear, but I’m really not the one to ask about day-to-day life there), Kireizki’s having them lay out strings of what appear to be innocuous giant Christmas ornaments, but are really bombs. Hurry on back, Go-ongers.

Saki finally finds Hiroto, who tells her to stop yelling or the ghosts will find them. Despite being an invincible add-on Ranger with literally every skill in the book, he’s afraid of ghosts because his grandpa was a little too good at telling scary stories when he was a kid. Saki convinces Hiroto to man up. He doesn’t want to go down in history as the guy who mastered every martial art but pussied out when he had to deal with a couple ghosts, does he? Watching Saki insult his manhood for being afraid of something stupid like ghosts comes really close to making up for episode upon boring episode of him and Miu being pretty much invincible.

Didn't you pick up anything from hanging around Kabuto?

They attack the ghosts only for it to turn out they were in an amusement park the whole time. D’oh!

At the kindergarten the robbers aren’t content with holding a bunch of kids hostage and decide to get mean, trampling the class’s Christmas tree. Sousuke’s seen enough and basically gives the robbers a “if you’re so tough, let’s see you actually use that gun” line. The robber bites, only to find out bullets don’t work on Sentai members and Sentai members don’t like cowardly punks who terrorize little kids. After dropping off the robbers, it’s back to dealing with Gaiark.

The three of them find the lesser ministers and demand to know what’s going on, and Kitaneidas defiantly refuses to tell the Go-ongers they’re planting bombs.

Because the other Gaiark are pretty much useless Kireizki rolls out his garbage can again, only for the Go-ongers to knock it out of his hands. Since his special weapons aren’t getting him anywhere he uses that time-honored fallback plan of Sentai bad guys: he grows into a giant. The three Go-ongers call the couple talking cars they have handy to hold him off.

Santa and his hangers-on make it to where all the garbage get dumped, but despair of finding the right one in the huge pile of garbage. They’re about to give up and admit Christmas is ruined when Hanto persuades Miu to use her sooper speshual poorly-defined Mary Sue psychic powers to find the present bag. Which works after Santa and Hanto pitch in by touching her hands. Gee, maybe they can still save this.

One by one the other groups show up to help the ones fighting Kireizki, bringing out more and more of their giant robot brigade. They blow up the detonator for his bombs, so it’s just him against them. They even do an over-the-top introduction for every single one of their five robots before not even using them, really. After a little bit of fighting the Go-ongers combine all their Engines into G-12, the ugliest mecha I’ve ever seen in all my days of seeing mecha. And I have a lot of days of that.

They set G-12 on fire and crash into Kireizki, which is finally more than he can stand and he blows up after a short but silly death speech. Like most of the villains in this show, actually.

Santa leaves to make his rounds without a bunch of surly Georgians this time, and right on cue it starts to snow, capping off a perfect Christmas Eve. And all those people waiting for Santa to come will never know the Go-ongers decided to leave all the bombs up because they make perfect decorations.

From Spectrum of Madness to you, Merry Christmas to all, and to all a gnarly chalkboard.

Screencaps taken from the fansubs released by TV-Nihon.

Engine Sentai Go-onger - Year End Cleaning

If you need any background on what Super Sentai is, feel free to swing over to the Jetman review.

Every Sentai show was a little different, but the one unleashed in 1996 was really different. While there had been spoofs of the posturing superheroes with their phony-looking giant robots before, Gekisou Sentai Carranger was the first actual Sentai to be a parody of itself. And it was glorious. My favorite example’s probably when Green Racer kills a monster then, while trying to come up with an appropriately cool victory pose, accidentally has his henshin bracelet fly off his wrist and fails to notice.

In 2008 the series seemed to be trying to cover that territory again in Engine Sentai Go-onger, the story of goofy robotic villains trying to pollute Earth to make it more suitable for inhabitation by their kind, and giant sentient cars (Engines) from another dimension who partnered with a team of equally silly humans to stop them.

This is a monster from this show. It's made of bendy straws.

Did it succeed? Well, opinion’s divided. Some fans were charmed by the quirky show, while others were turned off as it didn’t stick to the drama-heavy stories they were used to. I originally fell into the second camp, but after I gave Go-onger a chance, it grew on me. It still has some glaring flaws, but it’s by no means the stinker some make it out to be.

Open on the island headquarters of the Gaiark, the aforementioned robotic bad guys. A mysterious pair of boots enters, scaring Kitaneidas and Kegaresia, the villain leaders. A few episodes earlier they’d lost their third member when a big scheme went south and they’d fallen into a rut, so if somebody new’s showing up it’s probably for the best. Both for them and the audience.

The owner of the boots shoots at them with a shotgun and introduces himself as the Cleaning Minister (the leaders of Gaiark all having the title “minister”), Kireizki. He’s “cleaned up” three parallel worlds already and is here to make it four. And he has nothing against pulling weapons on his own teammates. Gee, the Go-ongers could actually be in trouble here. Believe it or not, most Sentai aren’t afraid of having villains that are actually kind of scary for guys in rubber suits. By and large Gaiark was more like the bad guys in Pokemon than Jetman.

The Go-ongers are setting up their Christmas decorations outside the camper van they live in when Bomper, the little robot who tells them when monsters show up, well, tells them a monster’s shown up. They run off to take care of this malcontent fast so they can enjoy the holiday, but are more than a little surprised to learn it’s actually a new Minister looking for a fight.

Kireizki has some terrifyingly powerful weapons he rolls out when the Go-ongers attack him, like the rag grenade that sucks up the energy from their own shots and blows them up with it. Not only that, it paralyzes the chips holding their Engines, cutting the Go-ongers off from their strongest attacks. The blast also happens to shoot down a sleigh flying overhead…

Kireizki’s weapons are so powerful Sousuke, who wears the red suit, is sent flying out of sight from a barrage of sword-strokes. The sixth and seventh Rangers appear and tell the others to run for it while they hold him off.

You know how a lot of Sentai start with five members and add a sixth one later on, when the villains start getting tougher? Who are then gradually surpassed and exist to let the villains have someone whose butt they can kick before the main group saves the day? This show had two, the Go-on Wings. So named because instead of cars their partners are talking aircraft.

When they were introduced they were one of the biggest black marks against show. They were basically Mary Sues, being psychic brother and sister prodigies who were so much more formidable than anyone else in the show, even the new Gaiark member they debuted to counter, it literally wasn’t even funny. They would swoop down and either annihilate the monster giving the other guys trouble, or be forced to let it get away to save those useless Go-ongers.

Thankfully the writers stopped worshipping them after a while, but there was a period where I honestly wondered if the feud between the Wings and Hiramechimedes would ever end.

The Wings get Worfed, and are sent flying over the hills by Kireizki’s attacks too.

Sousuke, who’s kind of a dope, tries to run back to the fight even though the explosion shorted out his Engine buddy’s powers, but gets tripped by Santa. He thinks it’s just some guy who works at the mall until Santa reaches into his empty bag and pulls out a present for Sousuke. It’s a toy racecar. The exact same one he asked for as a kid. The one that convinced him to hold onto his dream of being a racer even though everyone said he could never make it.

Not only is this Santa the actual Santa, he’s from a parallel dimension devoted entirely to Christmas. Which we actually got to see when they teamed up with Shinkenger. And boy, do they not screw around when it comes to transit security.

Kireizki shows up at the camper van and attacks the remaining Go-ongers, who fight back but are overwhelmed without being able to add the Engines’ powers to their attacks.

In the woods Sousuke’s trying to get Santa to take it easy (he hurt his leg falling out of the sleigh), but he can’t because it’s almost Christmas. Saint Nick’s determination convinces Sousuke to do his part to make Christmas go well no matter what, and he swears to beat Kireizki before the bad guy can ruin the holiday.

Sousuke, Santa and the Wings make it back to the camper van to find their Christmas decorations in ruins (yeah, he left without doing anything besides wrecking their decorations). The others are depressed because Kireizki seems invincible, but Santa gives them the favorite toys he gave them as kids. The toys they got for believing they could make a positive difference. They have to stop Kireizki from taking Christmas away, Sousuke says. Ren, the blue guy and the brainiac, thinks they might just be able to do it with help from Santa’s bag.

Is that why the Wings stopped being so effective?

Over cocktails at the evil island, Kireizki tells the other ministers beating up the Go-ongers was just for starters. He has a plan in mind that’ll devastate the entire world…

...but before he gets a chance to put it in motion Sousuke shows up behind him on a rooftop and tells him no way, no how. Kireizki gets ready to use his rag bomb again, but right then everyone else jumps out of Santa’s TARDIS bag and grabs him so he can’t use it before Sousuke destroys it with his sword.

Able to use their full power at last, the Go-ongers indulge in their over-the-top introduction sequence before getting to work on Kireizki. I especially like the Wings’ entrance with the sparkly confetti in the background and weird dive moves. It’s ridiculous, yes, but if you can’t get into that you shouldn’t watch Sentai.

They destroy his other weapons by using all their heavy-duty attacks, and, it seems, Kireizki himself. That is, until he shows them how he hid inside another of his secret weapons, an interdimensional garbage can…

Be back on Christmas Eve Morning for the exciting conclusion!

Screencaps taken from the fansubs released by TV-Nihon.