Nothing to do with RPGs (unless I ever do one about basketball players – hmm, that could be an interesting challenge) but I’m editing Takehiko Inoue’s Slam Dunk and it really is as good as you might have heard. I just hit a scene in volume 22 that perfectly foreshadows the end of the series nine volumes later in volume 31. I’ve read ahead of our translations (we’ve currently got up to v.17 in print and scripts up to 23 in the works) and while I thought the end of the series was pretty brilliant (roughly half the book has no dialog and covers the last 30 seconds of the championship game in totally kinetic panels), seeing it set up in such a cool way in v.22 made my hair stand up.
I don’t know if Inoue had the whole thing plotted out to the end when he drew this one little scene – he might have – but he and his editor were really on the ball to have been working on the ending and then reached back nine volumes to this one little three page scene. And it’s not just those three pages, there’s a lot of story and character development before that and when you connect it to the ending, man, it’s good!
Seriously, I don’t watch or have any strong interest in basketball at all, but Slam Dunk is as much about basketball – even with most of it taking place on the court – as it’s about the characters and their story, and because they’re good characters and Inoue invests you in them, you get hooked.
Inoue followed up Slam Dunk with Real, which is about wheelchair basketball and is, if anything, a more realistic if darker story and just as compelling. Then he went on to work on Vagabond, which is currently on hiatus but is certainly his magnum opus. Takehiko Inoue is a manga genius, no lie, and there’s a reason Slam Dunk is one of the most loved manga in Japan.
Could I do a basketball rpg game? There’s the one you want to use the chess clock for!
p.s. The anime is ass, read the manga!
