Anime
My first experience with Anime was all the way back in 1980. I remember it so vividly…hustling home from school, grabbing a snack and plopping down in front of the TV before I begrudgingly got to my homework.
Flipping through the dial (it didn’t take very long back in the day. We only had like 20 channels), I came across something both weird and wondrous. It was a cartoon. But not like any I’d ever seen before. The look and the feel of it. The music. It was all so inspiring and full of life.
The show in question was Battle of the Planets, or Gatchaman as it was known in Japan. At the time, I had no idea what I was ogling…just that it was super cool and far, far different than anything Hanna-Barbera, Disney, WB or their ilk had ever conceived.
I was hooked after the first episode. From then on, I’d race home every day to make sure I was in front of that 26” Zenith console (that’s a television for all you Gen Zers and beyond) at four o’clock. My love for Anime grew exponentially — Mobile Suit Gundam, Fist of the North Star, Vampire Hunter D and Macross just to name a few. While these amazing shows are quite different, what they all have in common is an unbridled sense of creativity, energy and excitement.
I often dreamt of being transported into those amazing worlds…interacting with the myriad of eclectic characters and creatures that inhabited them. Fast forward to today, and that childhood dream of mine is quickly becoming a reality.
Anime Village is a social Metaverse platform that takes Anime, Manga and gaming fans into a reality that they’ve only experienced in their imagination. Put another way, we’re building a world that literally transports you into an Anime.
In the coming months, we’ll be launching our two first worlds, or Villages — the hub of our Metaverse, Village 555 and our action-genre Village, Fury Falls. Aside from that, what makes us different it that we’re taking a storytelling approach to our virtual worlds, allowing you can engage in quests that are based on narratives we’ll be introducing in our all-original Manga series. You’ll also be able to take characters from these titles and use them as your trusty Avatars.
Fury Falls is based on our Manga, Adamanto the Unbreakable. The chief protagonist from this series is Shin’ichi Tanso, a 7th century Japanese warrior/bladesmith who dons the most powerful weapon in creation, the Nexus of Adamanto! If Shi isn’t your cup of tea, you’ll also have the option of building your very own custom Avatar. Whichever you choose, Fury Falls will not disappoint.
And we’re just getting started. The team here at Anime Village is made up of fans, first and foremost. As such, we’re just as eager as you to introduce characters and worlds that are inspired by our favorite shows and films.
Following the release of Village 555 and Fury Falls, we’ll be debuting three other Genre Villages, which include Legends Gate (adventure), Mystic Valley (supernatural) and Harmony Hills (slice of life). We’ll be dropping Manga titles for each, along with Avatars that you can use to explore our Metaverse.
From there, our plans are to delve even deeper into the rich lore of Anime by adding subgenres to the Anime Village Metaverse mix. We’d love to hear from you to let us know which one we should tackle next. Speaking for myself, I’m ‘all in’ on mecha (I’ve been working on a character for that genre, and he’d make for a literal ‘monster’ of an Avatar) .
You can learn more by visiting our all-new site, MyAnimeVillage.com, which will include a demo of our Metaverse. It’ll be ready for a test spin in a few weeks, and as soon as it’s good to go, we’ll let you know.
As always, we thank you for your time and support of Anime Village. We’ll be back next week as we continue to give you updates on how we’re progressing. In the meantime, we encourage you to visit and follow us on our social channels as we post additional news bites and content on a regular basis (including the imminent launch of our first series of NFTs featuring none other than Shin’ichi Tanso).
media@animevillage.net