Hello, folks. I know it's been a long time since my last entry, but I got a little burned-out on the particular brand of insanity that rockets across the Pacific in surprisingly cute, hyper-efficient missiles. Now that I've concluded the Anime Friday column at our partner website Foreign Entertainment, I have more time and a stronger overall desire to devote myself to Japanese... culture. But it wasn't just my new-found freedom that brought me back to Kabuki Shojo. No, it was something more specific. Specific and utterly confounding.

I'm no stranger to video games. I may not sink time and money into high-end consoles, but I keep up to date on the industry. At least, I thought I did. In my ignorance, I believed the Nintendo Wii was a harmless toy that focused on marketing broad-appeal games to the folks who don't have the stomach for another bloody war with evil aliens. I've generally been a supporter of that console, what with its silly name and neutral color scheme. After all, how bad could something that tricks lazy people into exercising be? Well, the Japanese have answered that question with yet another reliably bizarre perversion of the gentle pixel.

What The Hell Is Going On?

The most elaborate joke in Japanese history, that's what. It starts off like this: "An American football quarterback, a bipedal polar bear in a hot pink thong and a translucent alien accidentally get involved in an unintentionally offensive Japanese interpretation of a Western gay pride parade..." And it somehow evolves into the most embarrassing application of a WiiMote outside of a tasteless sexual fetish. My best guess is that the point of this video game is to strike the appropriate body-building pose to keep your ridiculous muscle men and their animal friends from colliding with walls. This somehow helps you catch up to the quarterback and tackle him, though what that has to do with anything, I have no freaking clue.

What's Actually Happening

I wasn't actually that far-off this time. Apparently the quarterback has stolen your body-builder character's protein supplements, so you have to chase him down to get back what is rightfully yours. This somehow justifies tens of millions of yen in property damage.

How Accurate I Was

9/10- I didn't get the protein supplement part, but everything else seems spot-on to me.

The thing that I find most confounding about the Japanese and their relationship with video games is that they seem to lack the filter for horrible stuff other cultures possess in quantities too large to be useful. Sure, a lot of video games that are popular in the West don't make any sense, either, but at least they don't embrace a sense of wanton insanity. It's like North Americans and Europeans get the games that just aren't weird enough for the Japanese. A plumber who eats magical mushrooms and flowers that grow out of floating bricks so he can save a princess from a real-estate obsessed turtle-dragon? Too tame for Nippon. Send it to those beef-eating savages in the States. What's that you say? You've developed a game that requires me to humiliate myself in every conceivable fashion? And it involves anthropomorphic animals... in revealing underwear? Sign. Me. Up.