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Kings of Power 4,000,000,000% is something I found about a week ago and I must have played it about 20 times now. It's, basically, a distillation of every cool moment you've seen in an anime or a 16-bit videogame. It's like someone ripped the graphics out of Gunstar Heroes and made them work as an animation project. KOP runs entirely in a 2D (except for certain "cutscenes", which is odd to write considering you don't play it), side-scroller format, just like an old SNES game. One character fights a load of baddies like a scrolling beat-em-up and a trio of Powerpuff-esque superheroines fly through Egypt and fight a gun-laden Sphinx in a pisstake of Parodius.
To my mind it's the logical conclusion to a big bloody number of Anime Music Videos or AMVs. If you've been on YouTube you've seen them: fighty anime videos set to the angriest screamo song your little brother's downloaded recently. KOP4B% is the ultimate animated music video, but not in that bad sense. It's custom made. Every sprite hand-drawn and the soundtrack made especially to fit the thing. There's no individual sound-effects for any of the characters, any noise is made entirely by the soundtrack, which makes it even more of an AMV.
One thing that struck me while writing this was how much the video lends itself to freeze-framing. In the two most manic sequences, the "The Resurrection of New Ultimate Jesus!" and "God Rush!" there's so many pop (and otherwise) culture references that you can't catch them all on first viewing unless you slow it down.
For instance, The New Ultimate Jesus is formed via chibi-replicas of (deep breath) Captain Picard, Ash Ketchum, a cat, Pee-Wee Herman, Alice Cooper, Freddy Mercury, Phoenix Wright, Saddam Hussein, The Fresh Prince, Weird Al Yankovich, Alf, Leon Trotsky, Hollywood Hulk Hogan, Sigmund Freud, Bomberman, Ultraman, Terry Bogard, George Washington, Servbot, Bruce Lee, Karl Marx, Jeffrey Rowland and Plato.
The God Rush! attack is pretty much the same thing. But bigger. I won't spoil that one but it contains a cameo from "God"zilla, which is bloody hilarious.
It's a love song to video games and anime. There's one point where a character fights his undead twin (shades of Liquid Snake) and knocks him off a cliff (shades of Barrett and Dyne from Final Fantasy VII) only for the twin to come back on the back of A FUCKING F-16 (back to Metal Gear Solid 2 and Vamp).
The fact that I could recognise nearly all of them without Googling is not only an indicator of how good the animator's caricature skills are but that this video was made very much with a nebulous, 18-30 "Internet Generation" in mind.
Is there any plot? No, not really, but maybe? In the words of one brilliant comment the story is that "there's a bunch of naughty, alien schoolboys, but two of them have been captured. The boys aren't scared of death but the worst thing imaginable is being confined, so they invade earth to rescue their comrades. Only they're too late and they transform into the horrible VIOLENCE KINGS who kill and destroy friend and foe. The heroes summon the power of God, who helps, then turns on them, making this story the observation of a sick and insane universe/deity". Heady stuff. I can't help but add that it seems the VIOLENCE KINGS symbolise desolate urban wastelands, war and violent tv (their mini-forms have static-screaming TVs strapped to their heads, I shit you not, and their ultimate form has skyscrapers jutting from it's back while it lumbers blindfolded). The heroes, on the otherhand, are every 16-bit hero (n)ever made and summon help from positive thought-forms ranging from Jesus to Hulk Hogan.
Funnily enough there's a cross-observation here. I'm an rpg gamer (or used to be) and one thing that's struck me over the last 4-5 years is an increase in "Rule of Cool" gaming where, eschewing the layers-upon-layers of rules and guides and sourcebooks etc, certain games simply allow you to do whatever you want within the confines of your character but the cooler it is the easier it is to pull off. Something similar has happened here were the video simply strips away almost anything boring or slow-paced and inserts every cool moment it can think of from the context/design of it's characters.
In summary, it's awesome and you should give it a go.
WARNING: Really NSFW, contains flashing lights pretty much all the way through for any photo-sensitive epileptics. Also, the end contains a boss who attacks via self-harm/mutilation if any of that might set you off.
But you can find it here |
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