The Shrine

I remember reading InQuest for Magic the Gathering that has these MTG puzzles that involves fairly improbable situations where you've one turn to overcome seemingly crazy odds. Obviously Duel of the Planewalker has a lot of these scenario. However unlikely these scenario might be, I always thought it's pretty neat if someone make a story out of that. Of course, there's no shortage on game like stuff (Yugioh probably the biggest one). Recently Gambler Legend Zero resumed so I picked a random one, and I noticed these are invariably bad. Not just in terms of story quality or whatever, but that if you're an average person playing against these so called masters of real or fictional games, you'd totally own them even if you're fighting against some pretty ridicuouls stuff like guys who can shoot laser from their eyes to blow up your MTG cards or whatever.

In fact, it seems to be a consistent trend that people who draw a manga about a certain subject seems to be inexplicably bad at the subject. Guys who write about sports usually actually have no idea what the rules are in that sports. Again, I'm not expecting a guru but I shouldn't wonder if the author of this manga has ever played or even watched a game of basketball, Texas Hold'Em, or a fictional card game (all the guys in Yugioh are spectcularly bad at their own fictional MTG clone). The one notable exception I can think of Hikaru No Go. I'm sure like me, when you read/watch Hikaru no Go they might as well be talking in Klingon about why soandso has an advantage. HNG is actually fairly rigorously researched, though that's really not the point because realistically, since nobody in real life can play at the level of Sai and Toya Koyo (they're clearly supposed to be at the pinnacle of human limitation) it doesn't matter how well it is researched because you'd never ave a human player that play as well as Sai or Toya Koyo. And yet both of these characters certainly gives you the feeling that they do play at a level at the pinnacle of human limitation.

Then again, I was reading the notes for Billionaire Girl, a manga about a girl who made a billion dollars through day trading and it was basically like: "My day trading investment ends in failure so I figure I'll write about someone who doesn't suck as much as me". And, to be fair, Billionaire Girl isn't about how to apply some mad crazy computer skills to earn a billion dollars from day trading, but rather what the heck will you do with a billion dollar you earned from an ability that looks like a cross between 'crazy computer skills' and 'I sensed a disturbance in the Force'.

I came in here to mention Hikaru no Go but you covered that. I vaguely recall a manga I enjoyed about brothers who played baseball and I think one of them passed away in it? I don't think I'd remember the name of it with a gun to my head, though.

I think the problem with making quality manga about games is progression. You either have to carefully plan things out or you get something ludicrous like Prince of Tennis. Hikaru no Go did this especially well since Hikaru started as a beginner and his learning process was feasible... for a boy being taught by a ghost.

Whether something is real or not isn't really that important. Plenty of manga about games featuring guys that absolutely suck at their fictional game. Prince of Tennis is actually very consistent with the rules minus the bleeding (I guess later it's decided people bleed too often so they just threw that rule out) or that refs randomly get ignored (very rarely used). That is, there is no rule in tennis that says I can't shoot laser beams from my eyes and kill you and then win because you died. There is no rules against that becuase tennis was not designed for people who can shoot laser from their eyes. If you look at that fairly well known video where Tezuka does a smash and the ball goes around the solar system and comes back as a meteor and incinerated the opponent, there's nothing that says you can't do that in tennis if you can actually do it, whether you really can do that or you can somehow project some kind of mind assault to make the enemy halluincate. These are all completely fair game.

If you go to MTG's homepage they have a section updated regularly about cool/broken deck ideas. They're usually pretty powerful and creative and sure that's probably why those guys get paid to write this, but I'm sure I can settle for something slightly worse than the latest cool deck idea came up in MTG. Instead we have a game like Yugioh where if a guy knows how to discard a powerful creature and animate dead that's supposed to be 'awesome strategy'. I mean, it's even easier in Yugioh because the game is fictional so you can actually just invent cards to counter certain strategies that otherwise would be difficult to beat. Duel of the Planewalkers 2013 is going to have these games where the enemy is going to draw in a fixed deck (i.e. always draw the certain cards) so he can always pull off certain combos and you've to beat it with your deck (which is of course random). That's the sort of stuff I'd expect to see in manga especially given in this case you, the player, gets a rigged deck (obviously the hero of the story can draw whatever he needs precisely to beat the enemy's fixed deck).

A fairly popular and glaring example is Kuroko's Basket. For example there's this move called the Solar Flame Shot where the guy throws the ball straight up while jumping, catches the ball that's going up in midair and shoots again. I'm pretty sure this move violates not only the law of physics but is thoroughly illegal in basketball because that'd be passing to yourself. That is, even if you could double jump or do whatever is needed to catch the ball twice in air, you can't do that in basketball because basketball rules forbid passing to yourself.

Major League which ended like half an year ago has this guy who busted his right arm and continued pitching with his left arm. Beyond that no team in Major League would allow this, the most hilarious thing is that this guy has a first-ballot Hall of Fame carrer (3X Cy Young or whatever) and he ends up being a poor guy starving in the street, and no the point wasn't that he's a guy who wasted all his money on his 15 McMansions. The author actually thought it was possible for a person who spends money normally to run out of money after pitching 15 years in MLB winning Cy Young award 3 times. All the critcism I have basically all points out that "The author clearly has no idea how much money people make in the MLB". It's stuff like that I find to be more insulting than just violating the laws of physics.