Unless the animation studio has the budget for it, official product placement in anime is rare – especially in older titles. The easiest way to get around this is through product displacement, which is basically a harmless legal spoof of an existing brand name or product.

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This tactic was used in anime that featured characters who were either casual or professional gamers. Given how big a cultural impact gaming has, it would be weird for anime to not mention a console once or twice. This plus product displacement led to some hilarious bootlegs that you won’t find in a flea market any time soon.

10 Sailor Moon – The Godlike God Driving! Arcade

10 Funniest Knockoff Video Game Consoles In Anime, Ranked Unless the animation studio has the budget for it, official product placement in anime is rare – especially in older titles. The easiest way to get around this is through product displacement, which is basically a harmless legal spoof of an existing brand name or product. This tactic was used in anime that featured characters who were either casual or professional gamers. Given how big a cultural impact gaming has, it would be weird for a

Given its age, it’s unsurprising that the original Sailor Moon is full of nostalgic artifacts of video gaming’s past. One of these is the arcade cabinet, which isn’t as ubiquitous as it used to be, but is still fun to hang out in. This one, in particular, is God Driving!, a generic driving arcade clone (think Initial D) that Usagi seems to be failing at.

Understandable language barriers aside, what makes this arcade hilarious are the questions it unintentionally raises. What exactly makes its driving game godlike? Is there a God of Driving to appease? Does the player become the God of Driving, or is the title referring to the car itself? What is Mina doing that’s making Usagi lose her cool the way she is?

9 Re:Creators – Screen Is The New Windows For PC

Meteora's Copy Of Avalken Of Reminisce

An important part of Re:Creators is how the creations’ worlds are literally pieces of entertainment in reality. This is the case for Meteora, an expository NPC from the Final Fantasy clone Avalken of Reminisce. To get a better idea of her creator’s intentions, Meteora plays her game, which had “Games for Screens” clearly plastered on its cover.

This is a clear copy of the label “Games for Windows” that almost all PC games come with, confirming that Screen is the Windows of Re:Creators. What makes this fun is that, like Windows, “Screen” is such a generic and mundane name for the anime’s stand-in of an operating system that changed the world. On second thought, that’s exactly why it works.

8 Hunter X Hunter – The Ridiculously Expensive JoyStation

Hunter x Hunter The JoyStation Is Used To Play Greed Island

One of Hunter X Hunter’s most memorable arcs is the Greed Island arc, which is basically an isekai event starring Gon and Killua. The titular game can only be played on a JoyStation, and dying in the game means dying in real life – which is exactly why every hunter including Gon and Killua has to play it.

There were only 100 copies of the game sold, which is why a JoyStation and Greed Island combo sold for more than one billion Jenny in an auction. The in-universe PlayStation (which only uses memory cards, for some reason) is fairly commonplace, though, surviving three generations. Expensive lost media isn’t surprising, but one console and game costing as much as a small country’s gross domestic product is just nuts.

7 The Squid Girl – The Strong Ika Drive & Destructible Mintendo Products

Squid Girl & Her Consoles

In Squid Girl, the squid girl Musume finds herself caught in slice-of-life shenanigans after failing to declare war on the surface world. While above ground, Musume slowly grows fond of human activities, especially video games. Over the course of the anime, Musume entertains herself with various knock-off games on off-brand consoles.

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The most notable is the Ika Drive, based on the Sega Genesis that was called the Mega Drive outside of America. The Ika Drive became so synonymous with Musume that it got a fan-made replica. She also plays on some Mintendo consoles like an unnamed DS clone, the hilariously named Game Men, and a Super Mintendo that has ridiculously breakable cartridges.

6 Neon Genesis Evangelion – Hikari Horaki’s Amazing Seca Gaming Rig

Asuka Plays On The Seca Genesis

An easy way to show a character’s wealth is to give them tons of expensive technology. Hiraki Horaki got this in Neon Genesis Evangelion, seen in her Seca Saturn and a giant official Seca TV. Adding to the TV’s value is that it may either an expensive CRT TV or a really big Japan-exclusive Fuji Divers 2000 Series CX-1 (i.e. a Sega console built into a TV).

As amazingly expensive as Hiraki’s gaming set-up is, its appearance in Evangelion was anything but funny. It’s shown in Episode 23, which takes place after Asuka’s traumatizing mind-invading fight with the Angel Arael. Having fallen into clinical depression, Asuka crashes in Hiraki’s house and plays Seca games as a form of desperate escapism.

5 Monster Rancher – The Nameless PlayStation

The Nameless PlayStation From Monster Hunter

As an isekai set inside a video game, it’s unsurprising that Monster Rancher would feature a knock-off console. The machine itself doesn’t have a name, but it’s obviously an original PlayStation,. The console appears many times, most notably in Genki’s introduction and later entry into his favorite fantasy game, Monster 200X.

What makes it hilarious is that normally, anime would make a new company name and logo, or just slightly edit a pre-existing one. Monster Rancher goes the extra mile by not even bothering with product displacement, and just settled with giving Genki a brandless PlayStation. At least he got to play it during an e-sports contest right out of The Wizard.

4 The World Only God Knows – Keima’s Excessively Decked Out PFP

Keima's PFP & Virtual PFP

For the most part, the Play Field Personal (PFP) that Keima Katsuragi uses is an accurate recreation of the PlayStation Portable (PSP). That said, The World Only God Knows does its best to make the PFP more extreme than the PSP could ever dream of being. Not only is the PFP a god-tier device in Keima’s hands, but he uses the Virtual PFP as well.

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The Virtual PFP is an obvious Nintendo Virtual Boy rip-off. While the PSP and Virtual Boy did exist, they were never used in tandem. In hindsight, the way the anime hypes up Keima’s PFP is hilarious since it’s the combination of two now discontinued consoles, one of which was one of Nintendo’s biggest financial failures.

3 Danganronpa 3 – The Hilariously Patronizing Nantendo Game Girl Advance

Chikai's Nantendo Game Girl Advance

One of the worst things about the gaming community is how, for petty and childish reasons, gamer girls were viewed as outsiders who should use their own games and consoles. Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak High School solved this by giving its women characters their own gaming device: the Nantendo Game Girl Advance.

To be fair to Danganronpa 3, the Game Girl Advance is used by just about everyone, though it’s mostly seen in Chiaki’s hands. Aside from the patronizingly silly name, what makes the Game Girl Advance hilarious is that its clunky design and size have more in common with the bulky Sega Game Gear, not the actual Nintendo Game Boy Advance.

2 New Game! – Knock-Off Game Consoles Are This Anime’s Point

The Eagle Jump Crew Buys PZ3 Games

New Game! is explicitly about video games, where aspiring game developer Aoba Suzukaze gets her foot into her dream career by becoming Eagle Jump’s newest 3D artist. At work and play, Aoba uses a bevy of knock-off consoles and games.

The most notable console imitations here are the PZ3 and the WillU, which are thinly disguised copies of the PS3 and WiiU, respectively. The consoles are used for two of Eagle Jump’s latest releases, specifically the RPG Fairies’ Story 3 on the PZ3 and what looks like an Animal Crossing recreation for the WiilU.

1 Gintama – The Battle For The Bentendo Owee

The Bentendo Owee

Gintama spares nobody in its parodies, and Nintendo and gaming culture as a whole were not safe from it. What makes this particular spoof stand out is that the Odd Jobbers didn’t just mess with an off-branded Nintendo Wii, but they also lampooned the craze that the console inspired at the time.

Here, the entire Gintama cast converges in Akihabara to get an Owee. Stocks are too limited, leading to a gameshow duel between the Odd Jobbers and Shinsengumi where the prize is the latest Bentendo console. Slapstick, countless references, hilarity, and chaos ensues. This was all for naught since a few days later, Bentendo discontinued the Owee.

NEXT: Gintama & 9 Other Anime That Did A Sudden Genre-Shift