Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider

This isn’t nostalgia as comfort—it’s nostalgia as resistance. The show pulses with the quiet, almost painful sincerity of adults who’ve kept their childhood mythologies alive not as escape, but as compass. It’s surreal because reality feels thin around them—Shocker-inspired crimes blur into municipal paperwork, idol performances double as covert transmissions, martial arts drills bleed into subway commutes. You don’t laugh at Tojima; you feel the lump in your throat when he adjusts his homemade belt for the seventh time, eyes locked on a distant, impossible horizon. It makes you think about how much courage it takes to love something unironically, publicly, inconveniently—and how often that love gets misread as delusion instead of devotion. The feeling is warm, aching, defiant, and deeply human—not childish, but child-true.

That emotional DNA thrums in Team Fortress Classic, where nine wildly mismatched archetypes—Medic, Spy, Demolition Man—clash in chaotic, physics-defying team battles. Its player review calls it “simply the best nostalgic game… I have dreams about this game.” Not dreams of victory, but of being there: the voice chat crackle, the absurd class-specific taunts, the shared delirium of coordinated chaos. Like Tojima’s crew, TFC players aren’t roleplaying heroes—they’re enacting them, with full commitment, inside a system that rewards belief more than skill. The comedy isn’t parody of heroism—it’s the joyous, sweaty, slightly unhinged practice of it.

Then there’s DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue, described as “one of the funniest action-RPGs to date,” where the hunt for absurdly named artifacts (“Thongs of Virtue”) unfolds across whimsical, hand-painted kingdoms. A player notes it’s “a romp of misadventure… to bring about the second coming of justice.” That phrase—second coming of justice—lands like a perfect echo: Tojima isn’t chasing first-time glory; he’s answering a call he’s carried for decades, resurrecting ideals others dismissed as obsolete. Both Tojima and DeathSpank wield sincerity like a blunt instrument, swinging it at bureaucracy, entropy, and bad taste alike—never mocking the myth, only expanding its ridiculous, necessary scope.

Even Devil May Cry® 3 Special Edition resonates—not through its demon-slaying spectacle, but in Dante’s refusal to outgrow his flamboyance. The description says he returns “to his roots,” mastering multiple fighting styles while confronting his past. A player calls it “fantastic”—but crucially, “awful port” doesn’t diminish the core: the character’s unapologetic, theatrical, embodied belief in his own legend. Like Tojima rehearsing henshin poses in a public bath, Dante flips mid-air not just to win, but to affirm—his identity, his style, his right to be this much himself, even at forty (or however many centuries old he is). The comedy isn’t in the absurdity—it’s in the relentless commitment to it.

This pairing is for the person who still has a worn-out Kamen Rider belt stashed in their closet—or who once spent three hours modding a Skyrim NPC to recite tokusatsu catchphrases. For the one who cries during a Prince of Persia sandstorm not because it’s beautiful, but because it feels like remembering something they never lived. It’s for those who know the difference between pretending and practicing, and who understand that sometimes, the most radical act an adult can make is to kneel, press their palm to the pavement, and whisper “Henshin”—not hoping someone will hear, but because the truth of it lives in the bones.