This is the best full-length RPG text I have read in a long time, since maybe Paul Czege's The Clay that Woke.  It's not an easy manual to read in terms of trying to understand game play, but it has so much to offer, that I don't mind its difficulties at all.
 
Before I go into details, let me state first that I have not played the game, only read the text twice.  These thoughts are not about actual gameplay but about the text itself and the way I understand the mechanics from that reading.  Take this evaluation for what that's worth.
 
I was excited about getting to read Champions Now for a number of reasons.  First, the second edition of Champions was the first RPG I spent my own money on.  My older brother had brought D&D and Traveller into the house, but Champions was mine.  Sadly, I was only 10 years old and couldn't figure out how to run the game or find anyone to run the game with, so I was stuck building characters and having an occasional battle between them.  Given that history, I was excited to see what Ron Edwards would bring to the game.  He had stated that the first generation of Champions games, editions 1-3, were his favorite, and I knew that this edition was his own rendition of what that game would evolve into if they were guided by his own thoughts.  And I'm quite fond of the way Edwards thinks; even when I'm not in full agreement with him, I always enjoy his perspective and insight.
 
Edwards is a good writer, but I always find that I need to approach his texts slowly and with patience for two reasons. First, there is a lot of thought behind each sentence to the point that, to employ an overused metaphor, each sentence is the tip of the iceberg of his thought.  Second, Ron does not like to repeat himself, so you only get that one chance to understand his meaning.  This book lived up to those expectations.  What makes Edwards's books such excellent reading is not only his writing skills but his analytical and research skills as well as his total conviction in the conclusions he draws.  Everything about Champions Now is drawn from his thorough knowledge about comic books and their history, specifically the comic books of the 70s. Other superhero games focus on superheroes across media and time, as a genre.  But in Champions Now, Edwards is interested in the way superhero comic books were made in the oversightless days before superheroes and their stories were controlled by corporate interests and creativity-choking generic conventions that make everything safe and consumable.  As he says:
 
"For three or four decades more, as the corporatism gelled and its lowering gaze turned more attentively toward the little pamphlets [i.e. comic books], creators dodged subordination here and there, but less and less.  As of the 1990s, the paper no longer smelled bad, and that was the beginning of the end.
 
"By the 2010's the ultimate villain Doctor Franchise has won.  The comics are engineered adjuncts for other media, a clever way for customers to pay for the advertising, like buying t-shirts with logos on them.  Although a movie can be a good movie and a TV/Netflix show can be a good show, their superheroes are solid commercial fare, with no garbage and no diamonds.  They are comfortably dramatic, broadly enjoyable, intelligently reminiscent or deconstructive - and nothing more.  They have suffered the inescapable death of legitimacy" (5).
 
That passage is a great example of both his conviction and his writing. If you follow Edwards work, you already know that he prefers garbage with diamonds in it to anything reliably good.  Diamonds really only appear in garbage, where mistakes can be made and brilliant ideas are allowed to bubble forth.  And that's his guiding principle in constructing Champions Now.  If you run your game following his rules and your own taste, free from genre and pre-constructed plot points, you will have not only a solid game, but these amazing moments of creativity and originality that lift your game experience far above what you could get otherwise.
 
The rules themselves are exciting.
 
Before you get to any character building, you have the two guiding statements.  You, the person who is planning on gathering people together and GMing them through some series of sessions, begin by creating two statements about the game you are going to play. There is no special setting for the game, and you are assumed to be setting your game in the world as it is today, just as the comic books that inspired the game were set in the concurrent world.  Similarly, there is no set genre, mood, or tone for the game.  So your two statements become the guiding aesthetic principles that anchors all the players to the same rough vision.  Your first sentence is "one solid bit of content about superpowers, heroes, or villains," and the second is "one solid bit of fictional style and specific types of problems" (32), along with a city or location in the real world.  So to give an example from the book, the guiding statements might be: A superhero stands for something and means it, and you got your family in politics; you got your politics in my family, set in Hartford, Connecticut.  Another example from the book is, powers require effort, pain, practice, sacrifice, and dedication, coupled with military life and careers in Portland, Oregon.  These statements are your responsibility, and then the other players take them and create their heroes.  They don't need to run anything by you in creating the heroes as they are guided by the two statements, free to make their own interpretation as they please.  This is an incredibly simple tool that has ramifications throughout the rest of the game.  It becomes a constant touchstone as the villains, in opposition to the heroes, are tied to those statements, perhaps challenging them, twisting them, or taking them to their logical extremes.  And since all players get to express their own interpretation of the statements through their characters--both in their creation and in the way they are played--everyone's creative energy is channeled through the statements, even as they tug at and play with the other visions.  The other great thing about creating such statements is that it demands that the GM has some “take” on the game about to be played.  If you as the GM can't find two statements your excited about, then you probably shouldn't be running the game, because you won't have the excitement and personal interest to make it all hum.  This is a first-rate bit of tech.
 
The powers themselves are a list of basic powers with additional lists of advantageous and limiting modifications so that you can build any power to work in whatever way you want.  More importantly, the fiction you create surrounding those powers is inviolable, so you can describe it in whatever way you want, regardless of the way you constructed the power. In later versions of Champions, once it was made to be a part of the Hero System, powers and the system became the main focus so that everything in our world could be built by those power definitions, and if you could build it right, it would be that thing.  Ron wants none of that.  In Champions Now, the fiction is always the thing itself, and the powers are merely the mechanical teeth that let the fiction grip the dice.  As he explains it, using the concealment power, it's not that having Concealment lets you describe creating a brooding pool of shadow; it's "because you generate a brooding pool of shadow, you can use the game-mechanic called Concealment" (44).  That distinction is enforced again and again in the rules, especially in the way that it means that a single power can be built in a number of different ways depending on how you want your fiction to be enforced by the mechanics. Your armor might give you a blast power, but it's up to you how you build your powers to how that armor is treated by the mechanics.  Can it be broken and stripped from you?  Can it run out of juice and die on you?  Is it essentially inviolable?  At first, I was overwhelmed by the math and possibilities, but before I had finished my first read-through, I began to see all that the system allowed for and got excited about its application.  And I say that as a person who doesn't care for much math in my RPGs, so that's saying something.
 
The “Now” of the title refers to a “rule” in the game.  I put “rule” in quotes because there are no mechanics that force “GMs” to use the technique, but to call it a bit of advice or a mere technique is to underscore the importance Edwards puts on it.  The essence of the “Now” is to create a living, breathing world of consequential actions.  At no point does the GM plan for an event or engineer a “plot.”  Instead, the GM is to look at the world of PCs and NPCs (including institutions and large-scale forces) that the players themselves introduce when they create their characters and to ask him-/her-/themselves what those entities are up to and how are they responding to what has come before.  For the PCs actions to have meaning, they must have ramifications, and the evidence of those ramifications comes in the way the world responds to them and pushes back.  GMs are urged not to try to force the game to follow generic conventions (even at the level of, say, trying to put in a big battle in the second half of a session), but to let the “story” take care of itself as a matter of hindsight.  Keep in the Now and everything else will take care of itself.
 
I would love to see mechanics that make this kind of play happen, but they are not in this book.  Instead, the game is constructed to make that style of play natural and easy.  Characters come with a stack of choices that essentially build the world and the Now, giving the GM a ton of things to hold on to.  Similarly, the villains the GM creates, through the process of building them just as the PCs are built, also contribute material to the Now, including how they will respond to the PCs.  As Edwards notes in the text, the character sheets, both for the heroes and the villains, are everything that is needed to perpetuate play.
 
The main tool on those character sheets are the “Situations.”  The original Champions called them “Weaknesses,” but Edwards wisely changed their title to reflect their actual purpose.  The player decides what aspects of the heroes lives are to be the subject of the story by selecting 100 points worth of Situations for their character.  Do you want your hero’s secret identity to be a driving part of the narrative, pick that situation and get 15 points for it.  Without picking that situation, you can still declare your character has a secret identity; it just doesn’t factor into the narrative in any interesting or meaningful way.  This lets you build not only the character you want but give permission upfront for the what about their character might be the meat of any part of the narrative.  Villains likewise have situations that let the GM know how they will interact with the narrative and the heroes beyond simply having goals that are occasionally opposed.  It’s elegant and easy, and the list of possible situations creates reliable dramatic channels that create, without trying, the kinds of stories the game will naturally tell.
 
The main thing discovered in and through play is what is your character about, what are they willing to push themselves for, to fight for, to risk their lives and their loved ones’ lives for.  Learning this not only comes through the general decisions the players make on behalf of their character, but in all the tools the game gives them to show that determination.  Chief among those tools is Endurance.  Most things characters do, especially in battle, cost endurance, so characters need to choose wisely how to marshal that critical resource.  Better yet, activities that use Endurance can be “pushed,” meaning that you can sink extra Endurance into an action to hit harder, run faster, strike more accurately all to get what’s important to you.  This mirrors those best moments in superhero comics and it immediately makes the players’ decisions meaning and consequential.
 
At the highest level, Edwards does a great job organizing his chapters, introducing concepts in a compelling order that builds logically and powerfully as it orients the reader to what is important within the game.  However, in spite of that, there is bad news.  There is no index, and information is scattered throughout the book, tucked in here and there so that you'll have a lot of moments where you remember reading a thing but have no idea where to find it again.  If you have an electronic file and least you can do a word search.  If you're reading on paper, you'll have a job to do.  On my second read through the book, I created an index of my own with information I figured I would need or want later. 
 
In addition to having no index, it feels like the book was never given to a reader who had no familiarity with the game for the purposes of feedback.  There were a lot of confusing moments that I thought would be clarified down the road but never were.  I had to do a lot of detective work, bouncing
back and forth between the rules and the example character builds.  In the end, 99.9% of the information is all there, but you can't just casually pick it all up; you have to work for it! Or at least I did.  Because I was interested in the material and the book, I found the work enjoyable if minorly frustrating.  I expect a more casually-interested reader will not want to deal with the struggle.
 
The other thing that I imagine is a difficulty is communicating all the rules well enough to my friends for them to play the game.  Obviously, the rules of play can be explained during play, but there is a LOT of information players need to know and understand in order to even build a character.  Hell, even if you were to give preconstructed characters, you would need to explain a ton of the game in order for them to use those characters well in play.  The downside to having incredible freedom in building powers and characters, and the downside to having battles be determined by strategic play, is that players need to understand all the subtleties that allow for those strategies and that power.  If this kind of thing revs your motor, you are going to purr all night long with the joys of the system, basking in the satisfied feelings that comes with system mastery and the endless possibilities the rules present.  But if you can't find the friends to share that excitement, you're going to be like 10-year-old me making a few characters by yourself and dreaming of possibilities.  Online play and groups that help you connect with other players are not uncommon now, so perhaps this won't be a problem for many. Also, Ron has an Adept Play Discourse channel where people can find other people with whom to play the game.
 
I don’t much play superhero games, and I don’t much care for either mathematics or strategy in my RPG play, but I am genuinely excited to run this game for my friends.  Beyond that, I really enjoyed the act of reading and thinking about this game and the way it works.  I expect its success will be pretty niche, and that is a shame, given all it has to say.

​Here we are with Greg Stolze’s Usagi Yojimbo game, the first of the breed, published by Gold Rush Games in 1997 and using the Fuzion system created by Mike Pondsmith and the folks at Hero Games.  Of the 3 RPGs based on Stan Sakai’s IP, this one is the simplest and the quickest read, while still holding all the flavor or Usagi’s world.  It’s not a super-exciting system, but it does have a few cool features.
 
Let me note that I have not played this game, only read the text, so take my thoughts and evaluations for what their worth.
 
This is my first time reading a game using the Fuzion system, so I was interested to see what it entailed.  Basically, or at least in this game’s version of it, it’s a roll+bonus.  Your character is made up of stats and skills.  The four stats are physical, mental, combat, and movement.  Those stats will start out ranging between 3 and 8 here.  In addition, there is a pre-set list of skills that define how well you can do certain things.  Because this is Usagi’s world, you character has a species (dog, cat, rabbit, fox, etc.) and an occupation (bodyguard, wanderer, monk, etc.) that give you bonuses to your stats ands skills along with special powers.  After you make those basic decisions and, you have a small pool of points to finish off your character by buying skills and stats.  In the end, your stats will range between zero (if you put no points into buying them and got no bonuses due to your species and occupation choices) and 8 (technically, the numbers go as high as 10, but the game limits how much you can begin with.  Then, during the game, when you go to do a thing and want to roll to see the results, you roll 3D6 (always) and add your relevant stat and relevant skill scores.  So let’s say you have a 5 combat and a 4 kenjutsu skill (that’s skill with a sword), you’d roll 3D6 and add 9.  If it’s an opposed roll, as it would be in combat, you compare your total with your opponent’s total, and the highest roll wins.  If it’s an unopposed roll, the GM sets a “task number” for you to hit to be successful, scaling that number to reflect the difficulty of the task, with 14 being easy and 26 being nigh impossible.
 
And that’s it for the basic mechanic of the game.  It’s a rather uninspiring system, from the concept to the stat names.  On the plus side, it’s really easy to understand and use.  Like all the other Usagi RPGs that would follow it, this game saved its most exciting mechanics for combat. In order to create dramatic rounds of one-on-one dueling, Stolze creates a little rock-paper-scissors set of strategies at each combatant much choose from in any given round.  The three strategies are “total attack,” “cautious attack,” and “total defense.”  Depending on what your opponent chooses, the outcome varies from no one takes damage, to someone takes double damage.  Stolze recommends using a selection of playing cards for each combatant so that choices can be revealed simultaneously, each suit representing a strategy.  That sounds fun, and it allows for dramatic pauses in the conversation that mirror the full-page panels in the comic as both characters stare each other down before battle.  This technique will go on to be developed even further in games like Burning Wheel, but this is a cool, stripped down version that can make for solid battle scenes.
 
The improvement system is simultaneously wishy-washy and interesting.  The game doesn’t come down with a single method to say “this is how you gain experience.”  Instead it offers several without a strong commitment to any.  And the way you spend experience points to improve your character is as dull as the skill system.  But one of the suggestions that Stolze makes for gaining experience is actually pretty fun and could serve to fuel a story in addition to improving a character.  Here’s the single sentence pitch: “To improve a skill, or gain an ability, you and your Game Master agree upon three tasks which will educate you in that ability or skill.”  So you say to the GM, I want to improve my physical stat, what can I do?  Then you can work out, say, that you’re going to climb the three highest mountains on Honshu, or you’re going to challenge the best wrestlers in three of the various towns you pass through, or whatever else strikes your collective fancy.  It’s a great way to give characters drive and purpose, and it’s both simple and malleable.
 
I also give the game credit for knowing exactly what it is.  All your skills play directly into your ability to find trouble, avoid trouble, or cause trouble.  We don’t need to worry about encumbrance, drowning, falling, or any of that jazz.  Everything beyond the event horizon of trouble is left to freeplay.  You aren’t in danger of building a cool character with a bunch of suggestive skills only to find out that you don’t use any of them and should have buffed up your combat stat instead.
 
I really like the look and layout of the book.  There are a lot of panels using Sakai’s art, and it’s pretty easy to find what you’re looking for, in part because the book is so short.  The whole book is about 90 magazine-sized page, with lots of pictures.  Stolze keeps it light on history and setting information, to his credit.  While there is plenty to draw on within the text itself, he clearly expects you to be familiar with the comics, the world it depicts, and the kinds of stories it tells.  Sadly, there are no tools for the GM, only advice.  Standard fair for a game in the late 90s, but disappointing all the same.
 
I’d happily play or run this game.
 
I think my favorite iteration of the three Usagi games is Jason Holmgren’s first edition for Sanguine, but I do prefer the way this version strips out all the small stuff, leaving healing to between adventures.  In all the versions, the systems put all the heavy lifting on the GMs and give them very little tools to lighten the load.  I hate to say it, but there’s still room for a fourth Usagi game.

Note that this review is based on having read the game thoroughly, but not having played the game.  I hope to play the game soon, but as of this writing, I have not.  So take this for what it’s worth.
 
If you read my review of Sanguine’s second edition of this game, you know that I wasn’t overly impressed.  This version, however, I find much more intriguing, and I find the mechanics much more exciting. 
 
There is still the cumbersome section on the history, map, and culture of Japan, all of which were cut and pasted pretty much in their entirety from this edition to the second edition.  I was glad to not have to reread those sections as they are a huge information-dump without connection to rules, mechanics or gameplay.  The information itself might be useful but the presentation makes neither for ease of learning now nor ease of reference later.  In 2005, this failing would have been in line with standard RPG practices, so I don’t fault this book as much as the second edition, which had nearly 15 years of progress to learn from and chose not to.
 
Where this game really shines is its dice mechanics.
 
Each character has the same 5 “traits”: body, speed, mind, will, and career.  Each of those traits is given a die size: one gets a d8, one gets a d4, and the rest get a d6.  Career is a unique trait, insofar as its die size applies not to itself, but to the set of “skills” that are associated with that career.  So if you are a bodyguard like Usagi, you get your career die applied to the weapon skill of your choice, to the leadership skill, the literacy skill, and the observation skill.  In addition to the career die, you give skills “marks,” which simply mean that you have a point in that skill.  Those points are translated within the game into die sizes.  So one mark is a d4, two marks is a d6, three marks is a d8, four marks is a d10, and five marks is a d12.  If you go over five marks, you get a second die for the skill, starting with d4 and working your way up again until you add a third die, and on and on.  So if you have a the skill in observation from your career, that gives you one die, and you have an additional 6 marks in observation, then in addition to the career die you get a d12 and a d4.  So when you roll for your observation skill, you’d roll 3 dice to see if you’re successful.  We’ll get to what that means in terms of play in just a moment.  Beyond your traits and skills, characters get a set of “gifts,” which are either narrative advantages, combat advantages, or packages of additional marks in related skills.
 
Alright. Remember those three dice you get to roll for observation in our example character.  Let’s say their career is a d6, so when they make an observation, they have 3 dice associated with that skill: the d6, d12, and d4.  When skill checks are made, they are made using the skill dice plus the relevant trait dice. So if our example character is making an observation skill check because they are watching out for would-be assassins on the road, they might use their mind trait coupled with their observation skill, given them their d6, d12, d4, and let’s say a d8 for their mind trait.  All die rolls in the game are opposed die rolls, by which I mean your dice results are always compared to other dice results.  In this case, the GM might roll dice for the would-be assassin, taking, say, their speed trait (d6 we’ll say) and their stealth skill (let’s say it’s a ninja with the stealth skill career dice of d8 and 5 marks in stealth, giving them a d12). Both players roll their dice pools and compare the results.  The dice are not added up, but looked at individually.  If the player has the highest single die roll, their character sees the ninja before they attack.  If the GM has the single highest die roll, then the ninja is there before the PC can prevent it.  In the case of a tie, the game leaves it in the GM’s hands to make a “complication,” which means that neither side has a clear victory.

Once it’s decided how the contest goes, then you look at the remaining dice.  If everyone of your dice scores higher than your opponent’s highest die, you get an “overwhelming success.”  If, on the other hand, everyone of your opponent’s dice scores higher than your highest die, then you get an “overwhelming failure.”  It’s an elegant system that makes the roll exciting, easy to understand, but with just enough mental work to make the moment of comparison and evaluation exciting.  And this basic system allows for some neat variations.
 
For example, if everyone of your dice is a 1, then you have “botched” the job and especially bad things befall you. In itself, that’s a pretty bland additional rule, but the beauty of it becomes apparent when you think of all the dice you are rolling.  When our example character rolled 4 dice to observe the ninja, there were very low odds that she could botch the roll.  If, however, the character trying to make the observation didn’t have a career that included the observation skill, and only had 2 marks in the skill, then they would be rolling 2d6 instead, which has a much higher chance of botching the job.  Or lets say they didn’t have the observation skill marked at all and only had a d4 assigned to their mind trait, then to make the observation, they would role a single d4, giving them a 25% chance in botching the job.  So where you put your marks and your career dice make a difference in both your chances of success and chances of failure.  Stylistically, that’s pretty cool.
 
The other neat variation comes in during combat.  When you roll to swing your sword (or fire your bow, or throw your shuriken, or whatever) you make the same kind of skill check: the dice associated with your weapon skill (both mark dice and career dice) plus the die associated with your relevant trait versus your opponent’s dice.  Only in this case, success means a single hit.  Extra successes, by which I mean additional dice of yours that are higher than your opponent’s highest die score, translate into extra damage and “criticals.”  Each weapon has a list of critical effects which you can apply your extra successes to.  So if you’re fighting with a chain, for example, you can use the critical to entangle your opponent.  What this all means is that the greater your skill, the more dice you will roll, and the more chances at doing critical things.  If you have no skill in the weapon of your choice and you are only rolling one die for your relevant trait, your roll, no matter how good it is, can never achieve more than basic damage.
 
This approach to dice seems to me inspired by Sorcerer, but since there is no acknowledgment of influences or inspiration, I can’t be sure.
 
In addition to these basic dice rules, the game has neat additional combat rules that determine how a character can react to attacks and how gifts affect the die rolls.  For the sake of brevity, I won’t go into them here, but the game’s rules make combat a narrative and tactical experience for which play slows down naturally into a slow motion unfolding of action and mayhem.  In fact, the text encourages you to use miniatures and a map to keep the game state clear during combat, and since the game cares about distances you can run, reach of weapons, and keeping tracks of whether you are “focused,” “reeling,” “flanking,” or whatnot, it seems like good advice.  And as a miniatures war game, I could see this being really fun.
 
But of course this isn’t a miniatures war game, but an RPG.  At no other point in play, however, do things naturally or mechanically slow down to create drama outside of combat.  In running the game, you can put all kinds of things that require skill checks, but its clear that the climactic points, by design, will always be combat, which brings me to the less exciting parts of the game.
 
Yeah, there are encumbrance rules, climbing rules, falling rules, rules for destroying property, and rules for making purchases.  None of these rules are bad in themselves, but they are limited to success and failure and have little to do with narrative drive or story creation.  Let’s look at healing as an example.  On the one hand, characters don’t have hit points, so that’s cool.  They have a set of conditions that mark how healthy they are, from scratched to wounded to crippled to incapacitated to devastated.  That seems concise and narratively-focused.  But to heal from one state to another, you need to make successful healing rolls. A LOT of healing rolls.  To move from wounded to no injury takes 10 successful healing rolls.  Considering that you can roll 4 dice at once, plus the person nursing you to health and roll and if you have a doctor, they can roll as well.  That might take you two attempts to heal.  How many successes do you suppose you need to heal from devastated to merely incapacitated?  1200.  Yeah, 1200 successes.  Who the hell wants to roll dice that many times or play out that many months of healing?  If you want to keep damage that real, then just say you need to jump 6 months of in-game time if you want to be like that.  Better yet, follow your original guiding star and make your game follow not the limits of physical healing but the nature of stories told in the Usagi comics.  Characters in Usagi either die or have a few minor injuries; that’s it.  In short. while the game’s design does a lot to create the feel of the comics, there are these odd hangovers from what an RPG “should” include.  I suppose it’s a predictable state of affairs for 2005 in a non-Forge-inspired game.
 
This is definitely my favorite version of the game, even for its shortcomings.  To play it, you just have to do what GMs have been doing since the hobby began; use your own energy and skill to make the game interesting and meaningful outside of combat.

I’ve decided to read through the 3 Usagi Yojimbo RPGs, and I’m going to move backwards through time, starting with Sanguine’s second edition, which was funded via Kickstarter and released in 2019.  I didn’t back the Kickstarter because I had heard unflattering reviews of Farflung, Sanguine’s other foray into Powered by the Apocalypse rules structure.  Also, while I’ve been reading the comic books since 1986, I can’t think of any of my friends who would like to play the game, so putting money into a potentially bad game with no real prospect of playing it didn’t seem like a great idea.
 
But then Epidiah Ravachol created a little twitter thread regarding the game after he had gotten his copy.  Epidiah is a huge fan of the first edition, so I was eager for his thoughts about this edition.  He talked about a few of the game’s features (such as dividing the conversation into “casual,” “dicey,” and “combat” “moods”; the way story points become support points so that as you use the points to do awesome things you are then set up to help your friends do awesome things; and the way moves build upon each other in combat by giving you bonuses if your next move is also a combat move), and it was enough to spur me to action.
 
Please note that I have not played the game as of this writing.  Everything here are simply my thoughts on the rules as I have read them.
 
My reading of the first 30 pages or so did not go well.  I was put off by a number of things that weren’t specifically about the game.  First, there is no acknowledgement section of games and designers that inspired this edition.  In spite of using a ton of Meguey and Vincent Baker’s language, there is not one mention or nod to them or Apocalypse World.  I’m used to the indie game publishing scene, which is very big on acknowledging influences and inspiration.  And sure, Apocalypse World is pretty big, but it’s still tiny compared to the big games in the hobby, and I still encounter roleplayers regularly who have not heard of it.  To use the language of moves, +1 forward, playbooks, and even MC for the gamemaster without giving credit is underhanded.  In addition, the game disconnects moves from the fiction in a way that sent me reeling (or at least making diatribes in my marginalia).  For example, players declare their characters will use their negotiate attribute and then roll the dice to see what they can do.  The results are essentially either getting characters to do what you want or getting a character to believe some deception, which are two very different things.  The move is not triggered by trying to deceive someone or trying to convince someone to do a thing, which adds an extra layer of work or knowledge, undermining the very thing that makes moves so effective in RPGs.  Another example is the move Buddhism.  On the result of a 7-9, you are given the following “menu” of options: “Perform strong doctoring on a sickly person. Or, invoke a strong aspect of Buddhism (banish spirits, etc.). Or, take five minutes and spend 1 support to remove 1 impairment from a friend. Or, give someone +1 back to a roll they just made. Or, spend 1 support to give someone +3 back.”  Buddhism is essentially 4 moves in one.  You can doctor an NPC, you can perform Buddhist rituals for narrative effect (banishing spirits is the only example given), you can spend some time with a fellow PC and remove an impairment, or you can act quickly enough to help a roll just made by them.  On the one hand, I can see the argument that creating this one move instead of 4 is an act of concision.  On the other hand, it demands that the players know the 4 things that the Buddhism move does and turns them into mere actions with effects rather than things that spring from fiction and then propel the fiction forward.
 
I’ve seen some criticism that the designers don’t understand the pbta engine, as its popularly called, but I don’t think that’s it. This is a purposeful reimagining of how it works, but it removes everything that makes the engine worth using.  The fictional triggers are removed and the gears that tie the move back into the fiction after the dice are thrown are equally removed.  There are no GM moves, which means the GM does nothing in response to the dice except to interpret them and to offer an occasional hard bargain, make a ruling due to the situation, or declare a compromise. 
 
While I’m bitching, let me also say that the game presents the history, culture, and map of Japan in one of the least useful ways I’ve seen in an RPG.  It’s block after block of text (yeah, with pictures and a few bullet points), but it’s all pretty mind-numbing and it needs to be plunged for inspiration rather than offering it up.  Each section comes back to back following character creation and preceding the MC section.  In addition, the game gives you a 26-page summary of various characters from the comic books, but they are presented in alphabetical order with tidbits of advice thrown in for incorporating the characters into your game.  In the end it neither makes for a pool of inspiration or an easy-to-access resource to grab something you’re looking for.  In other words, the information is fine, but the presentation is not the reader’s friend.
 
Okay, so that’s all my complaining.  Let’s get to the good stuff, because in spite of my extensive whining, there is some good stuff.  The game has a cool approach to combat, on several different fronts.  The game considers positioning in battle in a brief but meaningful way by saying that a character is either exposed, flanking, covered, or out of the combat.  When you’re exposed, you are vulnerable to the enemy, but you can demand their attention, meaning that they can’t disengage with you at will.  While you’re flanking, you are not the person all the enemies are attracted to, but nor can you demand their attention.  Covered means that you are protected from enemies, but you can’t engage with them directly.
 
Then, when you’re engaged in combat, each playbook has a fighting style and a weapon chart that tells you which weapons are within that style.  In and of themselves, the styles don’t mean anything: the chart of what a 6-, 7-9, 10-12, and 13+ is the same for each style.  But when you are using a weapon within your style, you get extra combat options when you roll a 10 or higher.  For example, if you are using a bo staff, and it’s within your style, and you roll a 10 or higher, you can declare that you will use its “retreat” feature, which allows you to make a strong hit and then fall back to a covered position.  Or if you are using a Daikyu bow, you can use the “aim” feature, which means that you don’t do any damage this turn, but next turn you get a +6 to your attack with that bow.  These little features can make for all kinds of dynamic combat as you sweep, grapple, riposte, bind, retreat, and overextend yourself.  The only weird feature in this approach is that you can’t declare one of these features as your intent since you can only use them on a strong hit.  So you don’t say, “I’ll hit the thief with my bo staff and retreat to the cover of the building”; you say, “I’ll use my bo staff” then roll and see what you get, fashioning the fiction in response to your results.  It’s not a bad way to play, but I imagine it can cause players to stumble who like to declare their intention before the dice are rolled.  Same with that +6 with your bow.  Your intention may have been to shoot a enemy, but the strong hit might make you change your mind, not fire, and take aim instead.
 
There are actually a lot of bonuses to your future attacks, like that +6, during combat.  The reason for that is that enemies are rated by the MC as weak, strong, or grand, and if you want any chance of landing a blow on a grand enemy, you’ll need a 13 or higher with your two 6-sided dice.  When you roll to attack, you don’t add an attribute; instead, you roll +story points, which you accumulate as you play, so the farther you are in the story, the better violence will work for you.  It’s a clever idea, even if I’m not a fan of the way story points are distributed (each adventure gives a story point to all characters after each act of the story, essentially—meh).  I’m not usually a fan of giving enemies a rating as a GM, but I think the weak/strong/grand division is easy and natural, and I can see using it without a problem.  There’s even a system for assigning points to an encounter so that the PCs chisel away at the points to overcome the enemies.
 
Combat is a series of turns, with the PCs making their attacks, and then the PCs rolling a “response” to the enemies’ return attacks.  It’s a workable system, and a necessary replacement to MC moves.
 
I also like the damage system, which is inspired by a lot of indie games, going back to Sorcerer. There is no hit point system.  During combat (or possibly other situations), PCs get “setback” points, and each time a PC receives a setback point, they have to roll minus their current total of setback points.  Depending on the final score, some number of their attributes might become “impaired.”  When the attribute is impaired, it doesn’t necessarily hurt their ability to do things, but if the player ever rolls doubles using an impaired stat, a negative event happens, hurting the characters narratively.  As your setback points rise, you are more and more likely to have impaired attributes.  If you setback attribute is ever impaired and you roll doubles making your check against setback points, then your character suffers grievous injuries or is taken out in some way.  It’s a system that has a built-in curve to it and a nice element of chance.
 
There are 4 adventures outlined at the end of the book, and each one is fine and useful.  I feel like the game could have benefited from using more indie techniques to make scenario-building a fun element in and of itself.  In a lot of ways, the Trollbabe system of scenario-creation would be perfect for the game as the players point out on a map of Japan where they want to go next.  As in Trollbabe, the PCs are a set of outsiders walking into a relationship-web and interfering with the goings on there as they see fit, usually in the name of righteousness and helping the weak.  Of course, as an MC of this game, you can crib Ron Edwards’s and others’ techniques, but it would seem reasonable to build something directly into the game to empower young MCs, especially since the game seems to be directed toward them at times, if I’m reading the tone of the writing and advice correctly.
 
So my initial thought on reading the game was I’ll never play this.  But having sat with it, thought about it, and played it through in my head, I’d definitely play this game, especially as a light-hearted hero romp.  I’d be interested to see how the moves join together and how players navigate the relationship between the moves and the fiction.