Reflections on Detective Conan, 2023

As a forward to this, I started watching Detective Conan with some friends midway through this year, and we are now nearly 100 episodes and 1 movie deep. Its been a long journey, and I see it continuing for a while, so I figured I may as well write up some thoughts on it.

Detective Conan itself is a mystery.

On the face of it, it shouldn't be too great. It's one of those standard Sunday morning kids TV anime, something that you'd probably imagine sitting alongside Anpanman, and its tight cultural grip on Japan would lead one to think that it might have some impenetrable barrier for western audiences. Mix in that Gosho Aoyama's prior works, at least in my experience, aren't that popular divorced from Detective Conan's explosive success (that last part was specifically to single out Kaito Kid), and generally aren't regarded as too great, and yet, Conan persists.

Too smug

Honestly, as someone who had already been a Detective Conan fan, reading all the way to the end of the Vermouth arc nearly a decade ago now, I really didn't expect to fall in love with the anime, especially considering how reliant it would be on anime original content as it went on. Yet, something about it manages to shine even when a mystery story isn't that great or is even outright bad.

There's something in these characters that makes it easy to latch on even when nothing is happening, even when the Black Organization has vanished from the narrative for too many episodes to even count after a point. The soft jazz and rocking climactic tracks keep everything feeling ethereal, like you've been dropped into another plane of existence solely to watch this show.

The childish antics of the Detective Boys, Kogoro's Mr. Satan like appeal with moments of genuine charisma and skill, Ran's often overprotective and harsh love, it's all fun. It's like this gooey inside you're rewarded with for overcoming the various barriers to this, whether it be the already mentioned aspects regarding Aoyama's prior works or the cultural barriers, or even just the sheer length or the odd concept.

But, what really makes this series is the titular character, Conan Edogawa, or rather, Kudo Shinichi.

After every session where we watch the anime, I tend to look through Conan related media. Whether it be old boorus to search for obscure fanart, the recent uploads for the tag here, or, my personal favourite, old independent blogs that happened to talk about it. In one of these ventures, I found someone describing their own experience with the anime, watching them fall in love with it almost in real time, and they offered this interesting insight, one that particularly resonated with me during Episode 78 of the TV anime.

The blogger had said something along the lines of "Kudo Shinichi isn't cool because he's an adult. He is cool because he is Kudo Shinichi." Even as Conan, even through all these childish antics, Conan still puts on a serious face and challenges every criminal with his idea of justice- and no matter the crimes committed he wants to ensure that nobody else will die or be harmed. The one time he was forced to watch someone die resonated with him, and seeing a follow up to that 67 episodes later, and seeing Conan make declarations about what it means to be a detective, that is cool. That is the heart of the show for me, and it just never gets old. Kogoro could get knocked out in every episode from where I am, Conan and the crew could be walking right into piles of suspicious dead bodies every session, and I would still love every single moment where Conan drops the act and becomes Kudo Shinichi.

I guess I really do love anime.

Ramblings On Batman: Arkham Asylum

I think perhaps the most generic Batman story one could write has gone from "Batman punches a deranged mad man" to "Maybe Batman is just like these mad men". He's constantly contrasted with his antagonists, characters like the Riddler or the Joker will go "He's the real crazy one", as if it's a get out of jail free card to adding depth, that this one idea itself is enough to really drive home some point.

The Arkham series as a whole is ostensibly about this, it being named for the in universe asylum that Batman's villains typically end up in. People who were wronged by society at large or simply had that 'one bad day' so to speak, and found their new home among the criminally insane, and Arkham Asylum adds the additional detail that yes, they are *all* mad in here (looking at you, Warden Sharp).

It's an interesting enough albeit somewhat generic concept for the character, though I am viewing this title roughly fifteen years removed from its initial release. But, even before the release of this title we had obvious inspirations for a lot of its narrative conceit, namely the ever popular comic, "The Dark Knight Returns", which also highlights the mental wellbeing of the antagonists as well as Batman himself, culminating in a rather infamous moment where we have to dissect his personal delusions from the facts of what has happened. Also before this game was the Animated Series and its follow-up, Batman Beyond, the former featuring an episode offering a similar idea to TDKR in that Batman did not create his enemies, rather they created him. The latter offers a more direct idea that we would later see paralleled in the Arkham Trilogy's concluding title- that being in the Return of the Joker, which is primarily about a mentally disturbed Tim Drake.

This is all beside the point that lies at the heart of this, which is 'Was Arkham Asylum worth it, did it serve as an interesting Batman narrative', and begrudgingly I have to say yes. The overall mystery isn't that deep or hard to follow, the machinations of the Joker and incredibly silly despite how well thought out his plan is, the various antagonists do have to phone it in a bit because you can't just have Scarecrow steal the entire show (I do appreciate Ivy taking complete control in the final sections at least), but at the heart of all of it this game is more a celebratory title. It's like a Super Sentai anniversary special but for Batman. You get a ton of cute references, new renditions of classic characters, at least five of the big name antagonists here get to really shine, and it tries its best to make you feel like Batman.

In the spirit of an utterly generic review of the time, I will complement the freeflow combat system's ability to give the player a very brutal yet also very comic book and silly fighting style, one that echoes a lot of what Mortal Kombat 9 would do with its brutality in combat. When playing through the game's challenge scenarios, I really dug into the moveset given, finding a level of depth with a game that ostensibly has a fairly low skill floor (this is where I should mention that means it has a high skill ceiling).

That's it for gameplay though. Gameplay is fine, it's *fun*, but there's more important things to talk about here. What is the game trying to say beyond all the flair, the flashy combat, the massive cast, the good music and even better vocal performances, the really awkward cutscene direction, what is it trying to say?

I honestly couldn't really tell you, and that's my biggest issue with the Arkham series as a whole. It often feels like it's holding back, much like how the combat system only has depth if you seek it out due to that low skill floor, the narrative feels very shallow unless you dig into a lot of it on your own. While comics can be known for being very wordy (almost overly wordy), the Arkham games have a brevity that feels wrong in a way, and this peaks in the game I am not talking about here, Arkham City. In Asylum, this is far less of an issue due to how pedestrian the whole affair is, how simplistic Joker's end goal is and how single minded every character happens to be, it's like the whole world is revolving around Batman and Joker with little bits of depth regarding the depraved treatment of the mentally unwell hidden in optional audio logs (and those same audio logs show how scary the mentally unwell are, and then you go to fight a ton of crazy guys who only scream and lunge at you).

I put that last part in brackets, but it's very significant here. This game wants to show off how Amadeus Arkham and Quincy Sharp are just as unwell as those they look down on, but then you have an entire enemy class that's just "Those crazies huh". It feels tone deaf, and I understand this is part of the game design, you need a new common enemy in the overworld so the player isn't getting bored running around the island, but they also had to write that. They had to direct the big cutscene where Batman enters intensive care and gets a bunch of guys screaming at him and they all look like insensitive caricatures of what an insane person would be. But, this is gothic, this is comic book, which is sad that I'm making that concession but I guess it has to be said.

This all isn't really important though. I know I just spent most of my time talking about the game's treatment of those with mental illness, but most of this doesn't matter. The game isn't really about this, and while there are bite sized pieces of interest sprinkled in, it's more about having fun in the Batman universe, and I can be forgiving. It achieves that goal despite some narrative incongruities in the subtext.

I suppose the bottom line is that this isn't a game concerned with what it is or isn't saying, as what it's trying to be is far louder than anything I just spoke about. It is a game about being Batman, and I hate people that say that about any video game based on an established IP, "This is a game about being X", but it's true. This is all about being Batman- you investigate crime scenes, you take down the notable cast members of his rogue's gallery, you pull off insane combat feats, and at the end you stop Joker's evil plan to destroy Gotham. I suppose that's fine.