Lions, and Robots, and Anime, Oh My!

I don't get Voltron. I mean I get it, I understand it, but I don't get it. It holds no nostalgic value for me. It came out some time after I traded cartoons for girls, you know, waaay back in college.

For those of you in my situation, I'll refresh your memories. "Voltron: Defender of the Universe" was an animated series in the early 1980s that was edited together with segments from two earlier Japanese animes called "Beast King GoLion" and "Armored Fleet Dairugger XV." It was done in much the same way "Power Rangers" was put together, only not live-action. In the American compilation, the Voltron Force are five individual who fight the forces of evil in five different colored robot lions, that can combine into one giant robot and fight the bigger badder menaces they can't on their own. It was a huge hit here in the States for boys and girls.

As I said, it was past my time, much like G.I. Joe or Transformers. Still, I like giant robots, and especially monsters, when I saw that a game called Voltron: Defender of the Universe was available for free download from the PlayStation Store, I thought, why not?



The game starts with a whole lot of animation, old animation, which makes me think it's probably from the original American TV series. There's a bunch of it, so much of it, that you expect that to be what the game is like, but no, that's not the case at all.

Had the game had a Japanese anime feel to it, it might have been a bit juvenile, but it would have worked. The game however is nothing like that. It's like a crisp high definition version of what the old 8-bit and 16-bit video games for Atari and Nintendo used to look like. If you were told that blue and red pixilated blur was supposed to be Superman, you just nodded and blindly accepted that.

This stolen-from-the-web pic is 100% clearer than what I saw in the game...

It's like that here. After about five to ten minutes of running my black segmented blob of shiny metal through bad obstacles and having it gobble up good obstacles, it occurred to me that might supposed to be the Black Lion. Yeah, it's like that. What I was able to see of the game was pretty, indistinguishable, and pretty primitive. I gave up out of boredom, not frustration. If there are giant robots or monsters, I wouldn't know. I didn't get that far.

If you got a hankering for Voltron, get over to Netflix, not to your PlayStation, just my opinion.