Thoughts on Megatokyo?

Thoughts on Megatokyo?

Followed it like 7 or 8 years ago, then stopped following it.

Mediocre levels of line-art do not make up for an impenetrably overly-complicated storyline on romantic relationships. Kudos to the author for finding a way to make magical girls and clandestine government operations boring by making them ancillary to his NEET protagonist's melodramatic but consistent inability to get to second base. (Shit, did he even get to first? I honestly can't remember, this comic read like white noise at low volume.)

Can't recommend, no intentions of picking up where I left off.

i like how he draws cities and backgrounds, but everything else is bad.

I had the first four collected editions in highschool and I'm not sure I ever understood what was happening.

Liked it until the two original creators parted ways. The initial basis was two slacker geek friends needing to jump the country for a while and opting for Japan. Once the real life Largo left it became this over complicated visual novel wannabe with Piro as the only sane one while Largo descended into being this completely out of touch wannabe badass.

Scheduling was also terrible. The way the comic was paced it was like buying a book and having the pages only appear weeks or months apart. Other webcomics were good at making each update at least fulfilling in its own right. Megatokyo never got that down in my opinion.

He's an architect before a character artist or a storyteller and it shows.
>Other webcomics were good at making each update at least fulfilling in its own right.
This is also true, the wait was almost never worth it because whenever the comic does update the plot rarely fucking goes anywhere. It's like Berserk-tier pauses between chapters but instead of a chapter it's just one page and instead of great art and story it's just some retards who are too stupid to get deported.

It's like BLAME! of American webcomics. Beautiful background buildings, incredibly shitty character drawing.

how do some webcomic artists just work on one project forever, especially without visible improvement or story developement for years at a time?

it's crazy to me, at least the manga that go on forever are of professional quality. shit like TwoKinds and MegaTokyo are amateurish and they've devoted so much of their lives to it. just end it and work on something else.

I only remember the high-school tier drama of the creator and that other guy that ended up leaving the project.
Never got in to it, never understood what was going on, never looked back.

Did you just really compare Nihei to Fred Gallagher?

>what year is it?

Also the "Artist" screwed over his partner in a low T bitch ass way.

Guy looks like a cuck SJW before it was a thing

Is it still going? Didn't he try and turn it into some kind of harem manga rip off but full of emo robot spy shit?

I remember it getting very confusing and weird.

I am amazed that he manages to profit from this shit going nowhere.

So why haven't the American Embassy rounded up Piro and Largo ( that's their name's right?), booted them back to America and foot them with a bill?

I stopped following it ages ago because he never updates.

I also completely lost the plot of the story some time around Largo building his PC. I opened up a page and realized I didn't have a single fucking clue what was going on and just sort of never checked back in.

Rodney Caston (Largo) wanted to make a Penny Arcade but manga-ish kinda comic with Fred Ghallager (Piro) because it was a fresh fun idea at the time, but they unwittingly created a huge monster.

The comic itself was okay (at least at first: it certainly had appeal in the early webcomics days and was a gigantic audience magnet-- you gotta give it that) but frankly speaking Piro doesn't have any discipline whatsoever as a writer and that and Rodney's short sightedness lead to the comic becoming what it is: a terrible precedent.

The creators parted ways early on and Fred taking over lead to constant delays and late comics and the story spiraled out of control into becoming the artist's venting/therapeutic vehicle. It went from having funny video game/cultural jokes amid two gamers' misadventures and turned into a vague melodrama. Comic Largo stopped being a real character and just an in-universe jester while Comic Piro turned into a huge pariah surrounding himself with anime girls and this went on. And on.

And on and on and on....

Finally we're here today: the comic is still shambling along, it doesn't make any fuck sense and real Life Piro took nearly 300 grand from fans to make a damn visual novel a year or two ago and has nothing to show for it.

Megatokyo may have been enjoyable early on but it's a terrible example of a webcomic coasting on its success without delivering enough product and Fred's own behavior as a 'celebrity' of the comic world is a terribly bad example to set for other would be webcomic artists who thought at the time they could just leap onto the internet with their ideas and passion but without the endurance to keep such projects going.

That would honestly be a perfect end to the comic. Some pencil pusher in the Japanese government notices their visa's expired years ago and promptly deports them.

It could happen in the middle of some adventure as well.

Between the delays, the art degrading (protip: moar sketchlines! isn't the same as better art), and generally crawling up it's own ass plot-wise I dropped it too.

It's firmly in the curious realm of "Wait that's still a thing?" for me. I don't know why he keeps it going, I can't imagine that it's paying the bills anymore.

Mega Tokyo fans are sycophants with disposable income.

MT started as a slapstick with entirely forgettable, albeit decent jokes.
It started adding characters as needed for puns and amid the utter chaos which resulted a comic which did not intend to have a coherent plot tried to string one up. Largo (writer) opted for simply killing off the deadweight to make the thing readable. Piro said no and the two split up. Since then Fred build lore which we are yet to comprehend. The plus of currently running (yes, it's updating again) comic is that the harem of females surrounding the selfsorry, selfinsert protagonist moved on and are emotionally unavailable to him. Overall a tale about being overwhelmed by you own emotions. Lots of whining, but has a few brilliant moments.

>and Fred's own behavior as a 'celebrity' of the comic world
Who?
Who thinks of Fred as a 'celebrity'?

He also successfully crowdfunded a VN that's been going nowhere.

Hasn't the comic only covered a few months? Isn't it still 2002 or something in this comic?

How can you write every day for years and still be able to only draw TWO faces.
I had to reread every single page not featuring Largo because I couldn't understand who the fuck was supposed to be who.

Yes.

>Megatokyo is still a thing

His art has stagnated. I can't believe he has not improved at all over time, or bothered to improve that sloppy pencil art.

Don't want to ink and color? Fine, but at least use a cleaner technique.

The last bit of interest that I had in Megatokyo was when I looked up the nudes he drew when I was in high school. They were terrible.

Yeah I read a lot of it as a teen but I couldn't tell you anything about the plot beyond the fact that 2 guys go to Japan and there's an emo girl with powers.

Don't drag Blame! Into this you fuck

More infamous than famous... when he decided to break it off with Largo, instead of talking about it, Fred changed the locks to the office and changed his phone number and just ignored Largo like an ex girlfriend.

Largo was pretty cool about and excepted it, but if it were me, I'd cause a "ruckus"

I need to catch up on this, given that he's putting some work into the VN again and I want to know what they heck is currently going on in the story.

greatest comic of all time.

can you really accuse him?

I liked the fairy, the robot, and the depressed former idol girl. But apparently now they all hate each other? It was more than a decade ago and apparently nothing happened aside from that.

Megatokyo apparently went into hiatus for several years, or very infrequent updates, so it's understandable the story hasn't made much progress on that front. I think nearly everybody forgot about it around the same time, so nobody really noticed. Although, to be frank, I don't think the plot was really going anywhere to begin with. When I stopped reading, it seemed more interested in generating new plot twists than resolving any existing ones.

It's not horrible but the fact that it takes months between pages and every character has an identical face makes it impossible to tell what's going on