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3 months agoI can’t offer anything other than armchair hypothesising, but Tezuka Osamu, the most important person when it comes to making manga and anime what it is today, and whose influence can also be felt in video games (e.g. Mega Man clearly taking influence from Astro Boy), liked to do things like having a character rip out the gutter between panels and break it in half in a fit of anger. So these kind of meta-hijinks have been part of modern Japanese popular media since the beginning.
I always have a hard time putting things into rankings, because different games have different qualities that make them hard to compare to each other, but if I had to choose, there is one game that I keep coming back to and is pretty much my “comfort food” game: Twinkle Star Sprites.