That does make more sense. I mean, there’s still Goku and Gohan’s outfits early on, Kami and the Kais... but yeah, if you start with Raditz you don’t get to a full-on Tenkaichi Budokai until the start of the Boo saga, and I guess I can see how all the jokes at the US’s expense during the Cell arc can just read like…

I... don’t know what to do with that statement. Don’t know how to validate it, don’t know how to evaluate it. So I’m gonna choose to ignore it for now.

I really shouldn’t be shocked by examples of US insularity, but boy, it’s really hard to avoid.

I mean... depending on when you’re watching the “main cast” includes an anthropomorphic shapeshifting pig, an anthropomorphic hairless cat in ancient egyptian gear, a bald guy with three eyes, a pink bubble gum man, a buddhist monk, a Frankenstein’s monster person, two lesbians sharing the same body, a supreme deity…

Best guess on that from me? US films pivoted from selling on star power to selling on IP. You don’t go see the next Chris Evans movie, you wonder who they’ll cast as Captain America.

Oh, hey, don’t get me started on how anything set pre-Industrial Revolution is mandated to have a British accent. I heard an actual, professional director say recently that you couldn’t have the characters in their Rome-set movie have American accents because it just didn’t work and I was also baffled by that. It’s so…

There’s no way to know, but it’d be so interesting to find out. I suspect there is a small but significant group of people that played God of War or Horizon on a console, but also felt that if they splurged for a four digit GPU they may as well drop a few extra bucks to get proper 4K Kratos beard.

Hah. I’d have to ask a Brit, but my take on that has always been that the reason UK actors can do US accents but not the other way around is that they are blasted with US media from a young age while Americans only get bits and pieces of UK accents and very little cultural context to locate them or tell them apart.

I genuinely don’t get it. What about this reads white to anybody?

Wait, is the DBZ cast “white-presenting”? Like, Son Goku, the specifically Journey to the West-inspired kid that has a grandpa dressed in Chinese clothes and runs around in a gi with a big fat kanji on it everywhere? Tien Shinhan? Krillin being explicitly introduced as a monk from a full-on monastery?

Well, you do bring up the point that the only way to get this game in their own console is as part of a bundle (what gets bundled with what is kind of irrelevant). I think that’s a pretty big precedent. I bought these games as a bundle which was the only way to get them, so I’d expect to do that again. I do agree with…

You don’t actually roll the Rs in either of those words, but yeah, basically that’s the thing I’m saying. Americans do put the stress entirely in the wrong sylable when they say “Florida”, though.

I guess. It still set the expectation for the two to be bundled together, or at least to be released together even if they required separate purchases. It’s weird to go back to the remaster of the first game if you consider the second to be a sequel and weird to see them released separately if you consider it a…

Gotcha. Guess Sony needs to get something back from expanding to an all new platform, but as a previous owner that’s probably the bar for me. Maybe when it’s on sale as a bundle or whatever.

So I’ve been a bit confused about this thing. Is Miles Morales packed-in here as it is on PS5? I probably should skip this, already owning the console version, but I could be persuaded if the second game was in the mix. Definitely would rather replay the short and sweet side thing that plays better. 

Yeah, I’m less shocked at English’s pronuntiation weirdness (although, man, who let it get to that state?), as much as how English speakers can’t leave the loose, fuzzy internal logic of it when they try to say something from a different source.

Again, as a fluent but non-native English speaker, I can barely tell and it didn’t sounda ny weirder than the rest of the fake old timey newsreel stuff they’re pulling. Languages are weird.

I am always a bit weirded out by how much native English speakers focus on tiny differences on pronouncing vowel sounds (that to me are either indistinguishable or almost entirely down to accent) but then very consistently just take a wild guess at any foreign-looking word even if the language in question is strictly…

I mean that a lot of gender norms and tropes, including for the space outside of heteronormativity, are culturally specific (because gender is a cultural construct, despite what bigots will tell you). You see a lot of those in a lot of very Japanese stuff that doesn’t really conform to western ideas of gender or…

I mean, I’m not gonna tell you how to feel, that’s a valid read, but they do take their time going through some of that in the story and setting up how she feels and why (I mean, in the time they have on a handful of pre-fight cutscenes, this is still a fighting game). Still, it doesn’t come out of nowhere.