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| Aw yeah reviewing the Hay the Hedgehog video game!!
The story of Haya's conception is genuinely amazing. Did you know that the character used to be owned by Sega? They also had an amazing history, like did you know that they weren't even a Japanese company at first? So back in the 1940s, they were called Standard Games and made a bunch of slot machines for service troops in Hawaii when that state was just US territory where bases would be made for the war. Later on, to reflect their business better, they rebranded into Service Games, abbreviated into Sega. Well in 1951 the US launched the Transportation of Gambling Decives Act, which made placing slot machines in US soil quite tricky. And that's why Sega moved to Japan, because Japanese soil ain't US soil lol. Of course, when you're knee deep into gambling, you're gonna get noticed by the underground gang. I don't wanna speculate, and maybe there are some surviving members out there that could kidnap me, but I believe that's where the yakuza rolled in. Now the yakuza were a group of organized crime syndicates in Japan created back somewhere in the Edo period. They're like those gansters you have in the US, but a lot more insidious. Cutting off fingers, kidnapping your relatives, pulling off hits. Oh, what a scary period. I've read and listened to stories about my family's encounters with the yakuza and it's genuinely chilling. Being forced to be used to steal goods, having your threads slowly ripped apart. My mom said she saw a picture of a mass burning of sack corpses and I really don't wanna see that. But yeah, gambling. Why was it allowed in Japan? Well in 1948, the Businesses Affecting Public Morals Regulation Act (BAPMR Act) was created which regulated two types of businesses: the food and entertainment industry, and the sex industry. Good thing the former included stuff like pachinkos and amusement arcades. And this act was subject to exploitation via loopholes by the yakuza. Sega actually dissolved for awhile after being pestered enough by the Japanese AND American government. But then the company was picked up by two companies that dealt with distribution and manufacturing respectively. After that, an American businessman at Sega created a bunch of photo machines, then coin-op machines all around the country. "There wasn't a city in Japan that didn't have one of our arcades", he said in an interview. Now this is just me, but having an American be able to so easily spread a bunch of his machines all around Japan, a country notorious for being difficult for foreigners to business themselves in, and with a business with close ties to organized crime? Obviously there's something shady going on. Anyway, Sega had a bunch of merging, some companies, and then in 1970 they moved into the video arcade business. Then when the BAPMR Act was updated in 1984, they manufactured some self-owned arcades. It was very difficult to know which video game businesses did or did not have ties to the yakuza. In Japan, "play" was very much an invitation for some dubious personalities to enter the scene. Namco stayed clean and, while Nintendo did have ties via the Hanafuda card industry (hanafuda's primary customer base was the yakuza; the gambling dems there were ran by them), it shedded away when it moved into being a video game business. It's not until 2015 where someone, going under a pseudonym, detailed how one of their bosses WAS a former member of the yakuza. If you wade through enough of the "[Redacted]", it should be easy to guess which company it was. When you tie in their testimony about them being sued for having an "Isolation Room" with Sega's lawsuit about having an Isolation Room. So now you know about Sega's deep ties with the yakuza. Let's go back to Haya actually. So back in the late 1980s, Sega tried to compete against Nintendo. You know, have a character that could smash and defeat Mario. So the team got hard and busy trying to create such a character. They focused on speed, then created a blue hedgehog. During that, the great Yakuza Bust happened. So what happened is that the gang bit off more than they could chew by trying to take control over the ancient B siblings. I didn't personally know them at the time, so when we all heard the series of events that led up to the Bust, I was so scared at what they would've done. I've heard this story of hers so much by now, and it's usually because I want it repeated to me, you know? My family was haunted by that group, so I really want to know what she did in more detail than what Wikipedia wants to write. Basically, they kidnapped B.B and tried to force Miss B under their control. I can't spoil how, but Miss B always knows where B.B is, and vice versa, so she easily found where he was. When she found him, she asked B.B to recall the faces of anyone he's seen while in captivity. When she listed them down, she personally went ahead and kidnapped any possible child that a member had to a save location on her planet. When 3 days of panic had passed, she then melted herself down, spread herself all across Japan, and loosened the infrastructure of any underground or abandoned building she could see. She told me she primarily targeted any building with a group of people wearing full-body tattoos or lacking parts of their finger. When I told her that's not that good of a criteria to start collapsing a building, she shrugged. Asshole. Still, she actually did that, and it caused a catastrophic amount of property damage all across Japan, with cave-ins, traffic, flooding.... Miss B often says she's neither a hero or villain, but this was genuinely evil of her. She could've been more covert, more targeted, but she just decided to be a terrorist because she got slighted in the grand scheme of things. (I should help you remember, NOT EVEN MISS B OR B.B KNOW HOW TO DIE. B.B WASN'T IN ANY DANGER.) Some interviews with Miss B after the Bust said that this is what she was warning of back in February of 1944, which was when she returned from vacation, stopped the war before having, ahem, The Most Impactful Televised Event in History. But what she did was too far. I;m saying this as her friend. 2 days after the loosened infrastructure, she then finally went after every syndicate, every member, and changed them into horrific ways. She likes to affectionately call this "Noodle Mode", but it's more of a gross desecration of the human body. Everyone looked horrible. Some lacked facial features, some were just fleshy versions of random objects, some separated into millions of pieces where she threw each piece into a shredder (they all felt it by the way). Tajer told me, as Miss B's girlfriend, that she got to see photographs of members who suffered the worst fates that didn't leak out on things like sites on the dark web and case files. She was incredibly disgusted looking at some of them. Miss B did tell the news that she left some members who were parents mobile enough for them to take care of their kids after she released them. Even then, like, some of them only had a giant eyeball for a head or looked like Goombas. A lot of people begged to be killed, so that ramps up the death count some more. So you can tell that, with how Miss B irreperably changed them, that the yakuza kinda dissolved. And that dissolvion then lead into a bunch of other businesses falling apart since they had ties to them. Just, countless of them which lead to a massive power vacuum the size of Japan (lol). And that was the great Yakuza Bust. One of those companies was Sega while they were developing their blue hedgehog. In order to even stay afloat, they liquidated a ton of their assets, most of them bought by other companies. One of those companies were Nintendo, who bought the hedgehog which led to the original development team moving to Nintendo to further develop the characters. Of course, it wasn't just an easy "I buy your character" type deal. No, Nintendo decided to act really petty because they knew this character of Sega's was designed to compete with Mario, so they decided to buy the character on the condition that the character would have to share the same world as Mario's. While chaos erupted over at Japan, development on the hedgehog was shockingly smooth sailing from them on. The character was originally named Sonic the Hedgehog, but was renamed to Haya the Hedgehog after the acquisition. A studio would also have to be created to house Haya, which lead to the 2nd-party studio titled Heya, which sounds like Sega to honor the company. So how's the game? Well, definitely replayable. You have to replay a lot of the stages over and over to even know where to maneuvre without hitting a wall. It's like an arcade game, essentially. A lot of people see this as a positive, but for me it's just tedious. Like, I know how to get through Marble Zone in under a minute and a half now, but the stage is still designed to punch people at a wall. And the screen crunch is even more annoying. What I'm saying is that some of the newer ports are better since they built it with the wider screen resolution in mind. Newer players will definitely get through the stages easier, much easier than I did when I first played it. Another thing you should know is that, during development, they wanted to americanize the IP. You know, re-interpret it for American audiences to make him more appealing? Even when Sonic's whole design was built for Americans in the first place?? Well, when Haya was forced to be part of Mario's universe, you can't just change a world per region -- Nintendo put a stop to that. But still, there were some documents about the localization that went unused, like changing Dr. Eggman's name into "Dr. Ivo Robotnik"? You should also see the scrapped American redesign they did for Haya. He looks so stupid lol Ahh... But I really like the game, and the tie-in manga they did for it too. (localized of course) so it's definitely a good game despite my gripes about its forced replayability. 5/5 |
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