Transformers: Kiss Players (manga)
Despite being the "main" Japanese Transformers franchise for 2006, the storyline of Kiss Players was not rendered in animation. Instead, it was related through two separate media - story drama segments on a Japanese radio show, and a monthly manga in Dengeki Daioh magazine. Additionally, several chapters of the Teletraan Go! Go! mini-comics published in Dengeki Hobby magazine featured tie-ins to the Kiss Players story. The series is set in the Generation 1 cartoon continuity, specifically during the five-year period between The Transformers: The Movie and Transformers 2010.
In December of 2006, Kiss Players transitioned into its second (and apparently final) phase, Kiss Players Position.
Media
Radio drama
The Kiss Players segment began airing on the Japanese radio show "Lyrian Moe-tchao" on April 3, 2006 in Japan and ended on the final week of September. Each week would feature a 1 to 3-minute story narrated by one of the voice actresses who played the three main characters in the series.
In the first week of October, the format was revised, and the entire half-hour show became "Transformers Kiss Play: Transformers News Center," broadcasting at an earlier time and starring the same trio of voice actresses. Highlights included a brief introduction explaining Transformers to new listeners, a "Tell Me Please! Transformers News Center" section during which Takaratomy employees or related professionals discussed Transformers news with the voice actresses, and a section in which the actresses ad-libbed dialogue based on reader-submitted scenarios. The first-year story drama ended with a cliffhanger (and the first episode ever to feature all three voice actresses) in the third week of December, 2006 and was concluded in the drama CD included with the Autorooper X Atari toy set released to stores the following week.
A self-contained adventure taking place during the second-year story was performed live by the voice actresses at Tokyo Toy Festival on March 18, 2007. Yuki Ohshima created over 30 new pieces of color artwork that were displayed to illustrate the story over the course of the performance.
Manga
The Kiss Players manga by Yuki Ohshima - who also designed the characters and provided the packaging artwork for the toyline - began publication in August 2006 in the monthly Dengeki Daioh[1] magazine and ran in three 16-page installments. Several story installments also appeared in the monthly 1-page Teletraan Go! Go! comic published in the Dengeki Hobby magazine. These primarily served to introduce readers to the Kiss Players story and characters at the line's beginning, and to summarize the final few radio dramas at the end.
Teletraan Go! Go! also notably incorporated the further adventures of Glit, Sundor and Rosanna, the Kiss Play Position cassette trio who were rather confusingly dropped from the Year 2 radio storyline in its second week and never mentioned again.
Major characters
- Marissa Faireborn (voiced by Lyrian) with Optimus Prime (v. Tesshō Genda)
- Shaoshao Li (v. Yui Kano) with Hot Rod (v. Ryōtarō Okiayu)
- Atari Hitotonari (v. Satomi Akesaka) with Autrooper Ne-04 (v. Keiji Hirai)
- Legion (v. Hirofumi Tanaka)
- Rosanna (v. Lyrian)
- Sundor (v. Satomi Akesaka)
- Glit (v. Yui Kano)
- Angela (v. Lyrian)
- Star Dust (v. Satomi Akesaka)
- Zangetsu (v. Yui Kano)
Storyline
- (Note: The general brevity - not to mention the general lack of any substance of worth - of many of the various installments of the Kiss Players storyline means that individual articles for each radio play chapter would be a bit on the pointless side, so the whole shebang is covered here. For an itemized list of the contents of each radio play and manga chapter, check out this list at TF:KissKiss, translated from the official Takaratomy timeline. Note that the chronological order of the radio stories is very different from the broadcast order.)
Kiss Players
Following the events of The Transformers: The Movie in 2005, in which Galvatron is hurled into space by Rodimus Prime, the Decepticon leader crash-lands on Earth, his impact utterly devastating Tokyo. This event shatters Transformer-human relations, and the government agency known as the Earth Defense Command is formed (its headquarters constructed at the heart of Galvatron's impact crater) to purge the Earth of Transformers. To accomplish this, the EDC constructs a fleet of its own man-made Transformers known as Autroopers, back-engineered from the remains of Galvatron himself. With the Autroopers' added power and the establishment of an anti-electron field around the Earth, they succeed in forcing all remaining Transformers to flee the planet. Horrified at what his defeat of Galvatron has wrought, new Autobot leader Rodimus returns the Matrix to Ultra Magnus, and becomes Hot Rod once again.
As 2006 settles in, Earth is completely devoid of Transformers, and the rebuilding of Tokyo gets underway. However, Galvatron's impact has had a much greater effect than anyone could have predicted - the blast caused by his impact has scattered his Unicron-empowered cells throughout the planet's atmosphere. When they come into contact with other animals and objects, from marine life to cars, they fuse with them, becoming one of many monstrous creatures referred to as Legion. This catastrophe has also created the means to defend the world against the Legion, however - when Galvatron's cells come into contact with a human being, they also become able to fuse with other entities containing his cells by kissing them. With their Autroopers being the perfect candidates for this "ParasiTech" fusion process, the EDC begins recruiting and training these "Kiss Players" as combat squads to battle the Legion.
Some time after the death of her parents in a Legion attack, Atari Hitotonari finds herself pursued by one of the monstrous creatures. EDC operative Syao Syao Li comes to her rescue, but the time-limit of her fusion with her Autrooper, Ne-04, expires. Atari discovers that she is a Kiss Player when she kisses Syao Syao's Autrooper (to the delight of squad commander Hitoshizuku Amaō) and fuses with it, defeating the Legion.
Atari subsequently joins the EDC Tokyo Autrooper squad, and proceeds to have several inane, fluffy adventures, including getting carsick, being embarrassed by the Kiss Fusion, and accidentally swallowing a Legion and having to have her Autrooper shrink down and venture inside her body to remove it. Her most significant escapade during this time was when she was possessed by Starscream's ghost, who had her seek out Doctor Arkeville in order to have the scientist create him a new body, only for it to be almost immediately destroyed by the EDC's Autroopers.
Following his death in 2005, the legacy of Optimus Prime became something of a rallying point for those disgruntled with the government's anti-Transformer movement. An anti-EDC commando force begins to establish itself; among its members is Marissa Faireborn, who befriended Prime when she was a child. When it is decided to move Prime's body from America to Tokyo, Marissa and her commando squad stage an ambush on the transport vehicles, attempting to liberate the Autobot commander's remains. The whole affair, however, turns out to be a trap when Prime's body is revealed to be a decoy concealing an Autrooper unit piloted by Ringo, who guns down the whole team, save Marissa herself. Realizing that she has been duped, Marissa turns her attention to a familiar container trailer in the convoy, which conceals the real Prime's body. As an out-of-control Autrooper attempts a ParasiTech fusion with Prime's body, Marissa discovers that she too is a Kiss Player when gives her childhood friend a goodbye kiss, only to wind up merging with Prime, resurrecting him in a new body.
Shortly thereafter, Hot Rod arrives on Earth. He crashes into the EDC Headquarters (built on Galvatron's impact crater), arriving just in time to save Syao Syao from some bizarre form of human experimentation that the EDC has secretly been conducting using its Kiss Player operatives and remnants of Legion creatures. The Legion begin to attack Hot Rod and attempt to fuse with him, but before the anti-electron field can cripple the Autobot, Syao Syao kisses him and he is reformatted into a new body. Like Marissa and Optimus Prime, the pair soon find themselves on the run from the EDC's forces.
Numerous adventures ensue, including tales of stolen underwear, seaside dates, and reflections on the summer. Along the way, Marissa semi-befriends Atari, Syao yearns for her childhood friend Marissa, and Hot Rod accuses Optimus of being an imposter as both of them fight the destructive impulses and nightmares caused by their new Galvatron-cell-infused bodies.
Ultimately, Marissa and Prime attack the EDC, settling their differences with Syao Syao and Hot Rod after a battle and teaming up with Atari to investigate the sinister goings-on beneath the public facade of the EDC. Venturing into the "Genital System" in the basement of the EDC headquarters, they discover that Commander Amaō has been experimenting with Kiss Players and Legions in an attempt to find some way of resurrecting her daughter, who died when Galvatron's impact destroyed Tokyo. Galvatron's remains are also hidden in the basement, and Amaō's plan is foiled when all the Legions and Autroopers fuse with Galvatron, bringing all his cells together and reconstituting his body. His cells are also extracted from the Kiss Players; consequently, Hot Rod and Optimus Prime revert to their original forms, with Prime returning to his state of death. The anti-electron field is shut down, and Galvatron's body is blasted back into space, where it will crash on the planet Thrull.
Kiss Players Position
With the deactivation of the anti-electron field, Ultra Magnus and the three Cassettrons, Sundor, Rosanna and Glit come to Earth in 2007 to make peace with humanity. Marissa, Syao Syao and Atari join together the Cassettrons as the "Kiss Players," a group of singing idols who perform to promote human-Transformer relations and good will. As they perform at the Brave Maximus Fortress stop of their tour, the human trio are approached by Angela, Star Dust and Zangetsu, the mysterious Sparkbots, who instruct the girls to kiss them. When Marissa, Atari and Syao Syao comply, the Sparkbots whisk them off through time and space aboard Brave Maximus, leaving the Cassettrons behind (who go on to have unrelated adventures with Teletraan 15).
Marissa, Atari and Syao Syao reappear in 1984, where they witness Optimus Prime's battle with Megatron atop Sherman Dam. Invisible to that time period's natives, Marissa is directed by Angela to kiss Prime; when she does so, a portion of what the Sparkbots claim is the Allspark is released from within Prime. This, the Sparkbots explained, is their mission - to gather all the fragments of the Allspark from within Autobot leaders throughout time and space. The Kiss Players go about their appointed task, travelling to both the past and the future, at one point paying a harrowing visit to Quintessa, and eventually gathering up all of the fragments. It is that this point that a mysterious, giant golden hand appears and steals the fragments, travelling back through time with them. The Kiss Players pursue aboard Brave Maximus, only for the spaceship to strike the "Wall of Time," scattering them throughout the multiverse.
While Brave Maximus rematerializes above the planet Master and crashes onto its surface (the implication being that he either became, or was the inspiration for, G1 Fortress Maximus), the three girls are blasted into the Unicron Trilogy universe. The giant golden hand reappears and rescues them, bringing them back to their native timeline, to Earth's prehistoric past. There, it is revealed that the hand belongs to the Transformer diety Primus, and the Sparkbots are, in fact, servants of Unicron that have been lying to the Kiss Players - they have, in fact, been gathering the scattered pieces of Unicron's lifeforce. There, on prehistoric Earth, the Sparkbots succeed in resurrecting their master, but Unicron is defeated by Primus, and his lifeforce is sealed away within the planet. Completing the circle, Primus creates Brave Maximus to serve as the guardian of the planet and Unicron's lifeforce, and the Kiss Players are returned to their own time.
Notes
- Kiss Players is notable - if headache-inducing - for consolidating several previously discrete Transformers continuities into one. Timelines officially published with its products incorporated not only Generation 1 events, but also those of other time-and-space-bending Japanese G1 spin-offs, Robot Masters, Binaltech and Binaltech Asterisk.
- Most notably of all, Kiss Players appears to have been the first affirmation of the recent retcon that Takara has been propogating in several official timelines - that Car Robots is part of the Generation 1 continuity. The storyline links Brave Maximus to Fortress Maximus, offers an actual origin for Brave Maximus that links him to the story of Beast Wars II, and explains why Unicron's lifeforce was sealed within Earth in that series, while at the same time remaining in line with the BotCon story "Reaching the Omega Point," which had Unicron's essence on prehistoric Earth.
- Hilariously, when Teletran Go! Go! briefly recaps the conclusion of the Kiss Players Position storyline, Unicron is drawn as his big fatty-fat original toy prototype, while Primus is rendered as the repainted Rodimus Prime toy available through Transformers: Generations.
