Suppose a Kid from the Last Dungeon Boonies Moved to a Starter Town?

Is the name of a Winter 2021 Fantasy Anime I haven’t watched.  I recall trying to but didn’t finish even the first episode.

However I can’t stop thinking about the title.  The implication of that title is that ‘Starter Town” is functionally synonymous with being a bustling Urban Metropolis and what I recall of the first episode confirms that.

So it confuses me because these LN based Fantasy Anime are operating on a very Meta level, the title implies that because its audience would expect it to be the norm.

But my general experience with the Fantasy Genre is the opposite, the Hero’s Journey usually starts in the Boonies, from The Hobbit and LOTR starting in The Shire to Luke Skywalker growing up on a farm far from the big city on an outer rim planet to Pokémon starting in Pallet Town (which in the Games and Anime seems smaller then it’s real world inspiration) to even Zelda usually starting Link off in some obscure settlement like Kokori Forest, Outset Island or Ordon Village.

But only one of those fits all the requirements for counting as a JRPG and even it is an edge case. 

In Japan the by far most popular JRPG franchise is Dragon Quest with Dragon Quest III specifically being the main blueprint for what most of these Japanese Gamers would think of as a standard RPG formula.  And indeed that adventure does start in the Castle Town where the King lives.

Even the original Final Fantasy also has the first city you visit be the Royal Capital of a Kingdom.  And VII starts in Midgar.

In the Mairo RPGs Mario’s house seems not to be in any town but located very close to Toad Town where Peach’s Castle is located.  The Thousand Year Door starts in Rogueport, a Mos Eisley style port city.

I also notice in Anime about playing MMORPGs you usually spawn in what seems like an Urban Center so that meeting up with other players can be done conveniently.  

And I think that is why RPGs so often depart from the Tolkien set precedent.  RPGs are a kind of game where the Multiplayer form is the original and the Single Player form came later.  The Quest needs to start in a place where players from diverse backgrounds can believably happen to meet up and form a party, like the opening premise of the Anime Ningen Fushin.

The association of the Last Dungeon with the Boonies I still don't get though.

Update December 22nd 2024: Well I have watched it now.

It doesn't really confirm or deny the thesis I originally made this post for. 

The central Meta Gamer Logic Joke is that this MC comes form a late game area and so is overpowered in this early game area without realizing it because in these "boonies" the the most common monsters are stronger then early game bosses.

In a typical RPG you will reach a point where even the lowest Mooks you do battle with technically now have higher states then Bosses you fought early on.  For example in Super Mario RPG the Gu Goombas of Bowser's Keep are stronger then the Hammer Bros of Mushroom Way.  But because the player has leveled up along the way they feel just as easy to one hit KO as regular Goombas.

Update October 2025: I think I do fully get what the title is going for now. 

It's taking the common cultural perception that people who grow up in rural areas are probably tougher then city folk because they grew up in a harsher environment living a more labor intensive lifestyle.   And mapping that neatly onto those RPG conventions I talked about above. 

No movies are not worse now then they used to be.

People have always somewhat felt like the present quality of Cinema is the worst it's ever been, exactly how prominent that discourse is does have it's spikes and we seem to be in one right now.  "Justified" by how financially poorly the film industry did in 2023.  People are going to theaters less because of the lingering impact of the pandemic and normalization of streaming, I don't think it'll be permanent, I think it's gonna go up and down, but it definitely does not speak to the quality of 2023 films.

I even saw the title of a YouTube video I didn't watch explicitly saying "No you aren't just nostalgia blinded", I refused to even dignify such a claim with views.  I guarantee you in 20 years people will be Nostalgic for Phase 4 MCU and DCEU films and Live Action Disney remakes.

The current Golden Age people look back on is the 90s and early 2000s, but I unlike most my age don't just remember the movies from that time, I also remember the internet discourse around them, and it was essentially no different then now, only the details of the theories on why things got worse might have changed.

To an extent what percentage of movies are considered to be good or bad isn't actually viewed as being any different.  It's just that the "forgettable" movies of the past are forgotten and the old "bad" movies still considered bad people talk about in ways that emphasize their charm, how they're a product of their time made in ways you won't see today, or from a respected director who's fanboys refuse to see no value in even their "worst" films.  While everything today is just "soulless" focus tested corporate mandated garbage. 

And people who insist on maintaining that the reevaluated films shouldn't be reevaluated blame it on Meme Culture, on people watching bad movies ironically and Memeing themselves into liking them.  And that issue may tie into a potentially entirely different thesis, I may write something about the concept of "So Bad it's good".  With movies like the Star Wars Prequels it is well documented that the people who like them always existed, the GenX haters just lost their control of internet discourse.

However an interesting case study here is The Mummy film from 1999, the people hyping it up as an unironically great example of the kind of 90s/early 2000s film they don't make them like anymore seemingly don't even know there ever was an Internet Echo chamber that considered it a very bad movie and an example of how 90s and early 2000s attempts to "rip off" Indiana Jones pale in comparison to the real thing.  My memory of the era is that people who liked the movies existed but GenXers who hated it for not being a pure Horror Movie also largely dominated Internet Group think.

There are plenty of films, even Hollywood Genre films in 2023 that are not all that controversial to consider good, the Super Mario Bros movie, Across The Spiderverse, Dungeons and Dragons Honor Among Thieves, each considered perfectly fun movies that at the very least succeeded at what they were going for.

Now as far as the movies that I liked just fine but that enough Internet Group think makes them be perceived as failures, no thesis about why current movies are so bad fits.  Peter Coffin's "Wookieepeditis" thesis doesn't explain The Flash which made Canon more flexible then ever.  And culture war stuff influencing both films and internet discourse about them isn't new either, it's just the exact terminology that has changed.  

On the subject of Indiana Jones anyone who thinks Kingdom of The Crystal Skull is worth redeeming but not Dial of Destiny has no consistent logic, both are exactly parallel in how much they either follow or break from the formulae of the 80s Indiana Jones movies.

I'm also going to just assume Anime films aren't being considered in this Normie discourse since it's technically a completely different Industry.  But at any rate we got the best Detective Conan film in a decade, Maboroshi which I was not expecting but was awesome, a new Psycho-Pass movie that was great though I had issues with it's message which stem from those I always had even of the original show.  And a new Miyazaki film which I haven't seen and probably won't but most people seem to think lived up to the expectations.  I will see the Sailor Moon Cosmos films when they are Dubbed and I'm fairly confident they will be great.

There is a common claim some people make that children will enjoy everything they see and thus potentially be Nostalgic for it as Adults so the existence of very young people who liked something can never be a vindication.  Well I hated Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory as a kid, I have Anti-Nostalgia for that movie.  And it's not just that, even at my youngest there is plenty of stuff meant for my age demographic I saw and didn't enjoy.

My firm position is that if anyone liked something no matter how much I don't like it that vindicates it as being Good in some way, even children, especially children if they were even partially the target audience.  

The problem with Nostalgia, the thing that can make it Toxic, isn't the positive feelings it provides you for your happy memories of the past, that is objectively what's good about it.  It's when it causes you to irrationally hate the present by seeing every difference as only for the worse.  So what bugs me now is people ironically using their critiques of Nostalgia to justify saying movies are worse now because Hollywood can't make anything that isn't pandering to some generation's Nostalgia.

New IPs are being created for future generations to be nostalgic for, it just may less often be movies and Triple A Video Games.  And the truth is I think these people are massively underestimating how much of what they're Nostalgic for was also in part made to appeal to the Nostalgia of their Parents or Grandparents or even older siblings.  Millennials have Nostalgia for Tiny Toons and Muppet Babies and Adult Swim Cartoons which were made by GenXers to parody cartoons they were Nostalgic for, and Degrassi's reboot which seems to have overshadowed the original.  Hell I have a lot of Nostalgia for watching Nick at Night reruns of Happy Days.

Nintendo was right to stick with Cartridges for the Fifth Generation

So many YouTube videos on gaming history still repeat the old conventional wisdom that Nintendo’s refusal to jump to CDs right away was one of the greatest blunders of all time.  And I’m tired of it.

No one denies that Nintendo 64 Games like Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time were the key groundbreaking developments of true fully 3D Gaming.  The original PlayStation and Sega Saturn never made a fully 3D game like those.  And what is more well known to non industry insiders now than it used to be is that if Nintendo had jumped to CDs that console Generation they would not have been able to make those games for it.  So many 3rd Parties wanted the CDs because they wanted FMVs and less limited audio options, but there was a trade off for that which fans and journalists didn’t understand at the time.  Nintendo then like now prioritized actual innovation in how Games are played over flashy cosmetic things that look cool in a trailer.  

And the thing about Final Fantasy VII is that the FMVs are exactly the part of the game that visually hasn’t aged well.  Most of the time I find these failed attempts at “cinematic” animation ugly and would much rather have watched those scenes play out with the charming 32 bit models.  The only one that works is the opening Cinematic, but it’s so minimalist compared to the others that when I look at CutScenes in N64 Games like Jet Force Gemini and Majora’s Mask I see no reason the same scene couldn’t have been done on it.

And another thing, the Sony PlayStation launched in 1994, it was on North American store shelves in September of 95.  Yet the great Iconic PlayStation games didn't start coming out till 1997.  It took seeing Nintendo break 3D ground in the spring of 96 for them to even start tapping their own inferior console’s full potential.

Yet still so many of those 97 PlayStation Games do nothing in the actual game play that couldn’t be done on the N64, in fact I see little that couldn’t be done on the SNES.

And it’s not like only Nintendo themselves could make great games for the N64.  Rare had a slew of Classics.  And then look at what Star Wars did on the Console, Shadows of The Empire, Rogue Squadron and Pod Racer.  George Lucas had a similar innovation over superficiality spirit to Nintendo so it makes sense his IPs were among the few licensed games on the N64.

The FFVII we got was a great game, but it could have been so much better on the N64.

By the next gen things had advanced enough so using CDs wouldn't hold Nintendo back mechanically anymore. 

Princesses can outrank Queens

 So there's a YouTube Vidoe that fully breaks down the History of the title "Prince of Wales".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_AP3Z6KvkM&pp=ygUeaGlzdG9yeSBvZiB0aGUgUHJpbmNlIG9mIFdhbGVz

And one thing I realized is this is largely the origin of the use of the English Word Prince as we know it entirely.  And one major point is when certain Welsh rulers started using the Title it was due to it's connection to the Ancient Roman Imperial title of Princeps viewed as outranking the title of King.

On the show The Tudors set well after all that history you'll notice that a King can also be called a Prince even while they are a Ruling King.  Machiavelli's book titled The Prince was always intended to be about a status equal to that of a King not inherently lesser.

Princess is the feminine form of Prince, even though we all know that we fail to think of it the same since Reissuance Germany and Italy never had any ruling Princesses, all the states called Principalities always had male rulers. 

Yet at the end of Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra the Queen Cleopatra is called a Princess by her handmaiden.  This was based on a quote taken from Plutarch's biography of Marc Anthony.

When translating The Hebrew Bible into English multiple words get translated "Prince", most notably Sar, Nagyim and Nasi, but the only uses of "Princess" in the KJV are the feminine form of Sar, Sarah.  However the use of "King" in these translations is more consistent always being a form of Melek.  Yet I remember being told once that at least Assyrian Sources definitely thought of Sar as being a higher ranked title then Melek.  In fact the oldest version of "King of Kings" seems to Sar Sarrani, the Melek version came later.  And none of these Prince words are ever used in The Bible with the meaning of "Son of a King".

And yet because Princess in modern dictionaries gets defined as meaning only a Daughter of a King/Queen or Wife of a Prince, lots of Internet Nerds get all pedantic about certain Nintendo characters being called Princess when they are also clearly presented as being the ruling Monarch.  Princess Peach/Toadstool, Princess Zelda in some eras of the "Timeline", Princess Daisy.  And I think we even see it beyond Nintendo in some other Video Game Franchises like Final Fantasy.

A lot of this could be read as just making fun of Nintendo's very make it up as they go world building.  The NES Games never thought about about how the world works beyond the handful of Sprites we actually see, and then later games with more needed worldbuilding didn't want to make the female leads of these franchises subordinate to someone else.  But I also think it's a little influenced by Star Wars where Leia was still called a Princess after her Parents were dead.

But occasionally someone says this with a more serious criticism in mind, that it demeans or infantilizes these characters who are actually Queens to call them the same title we do Disney Princesses.  But I say just remember how the English word Prince originated.  I would rather not see Zelda or Peach or Daisy ever demoted to being a mere Queen.