Category Archive

Okay, been about a month now since I wrote anything. Moving to Florida, starting college, etc caught up with me, not to mention having a fairly crappy internet connection. Regardless, figured I’ll do something, since I’m bored out of my mind right now anyway.

Clannad: Tomoyo Chapter: First Spice and Wolf, now Clannad. I’m loving these ‘3-months-later/DVD-only’ episodes. It’s just awesome to start up the video and hear the OP song of a series you liked, and thought was finished months ago. Anyways, they totally should have gone with this as the official ending to Clannad. WORLDS better than the rushed Nagisa ending they went with. Should have been a bit longer, but it was a great watch. Biggest BAWWWW of the series, although I’ve got mixed feelings on the engrish song playing near the end. Also: lolwut.

Hidamari Sketch x365: Never watched the first season of this, but judging by the first episode, it really dosen’t matter much. The main character is cute, it moves at a decent pace, has an enjoyable cast, good ’slice of life’-style humor, and the facial expressions are strangely enjoyable. Also; character moves away from home to live in an apartment and go to a new school? Sounds familiar (lol real-life relation. Although my experience won’t be anything as enjoyable as this will be.)

Strike Witches: Obligatory ‘LOL GONZO’, but god damn if this show isn’t delicious fanservice. Apparently mechanical devices that let girls draw on magical energy to fly and perform other feats is well within science’s ability, yet pants that conform to the female shape are strangely out of it’s grasp. Regardless, flying, pantsless, 10% furry lesbian lolis are, in my book, pretty damn awesome. Will keep watching, regardless of the fact that it’ll probably end horribly. Not like I really care. /In monthsb4 ‘GONZOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!’

Blade of the Immortal: First episode seemed a bit too rushed, but it has potential. Been a while since there’s been a bloody samurai animu that hasn’t sucked. Will keep watching for now. Apparently it’s only scheduled to run for 13 episodes though.

That’s about it for now, trying out Telepathy Shoujo Ran and Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu sometime soon. Should also finish up Mnemosyne, the last episode was released a while ago =\

Oh man, this is amazing. How in the hell did a show like this get a 3rd season? Seriously, what the hell? I watched S2 a while back, and it was god-awful. Then I watched the first episode of S3 yesterday, and they did it; they succeeded in making it even more of a joke then it already was. It pisses me off that crap like this gets a 3rd season before Haruhi even gets a 2nd.

First off, the dialog is pretty awesome at times. If the creator’s weren’t trying to be funny with some of this crap, they’ve got talent for unintentional humor at the very least. Also, the characters have got the be the most uninteresting lineup of fanservice-girls I’ve seen in a while. Not a single one of them is appealing in any way other than ripped clothing and skirts. Given it’s fanservice, so they’re not exactly building on character, but still, at least make them somewhat cute and appealing personality-wise.

Which brings me to another point. It’s fanservice, so why in the fuck are they actually TRYING with the one thing a fanservice show isn’t supposed to try with; the storyline? You go from ‘You stole my food bitch! *shirt-shredding kick*’ to talking about and quoting Sun-Tzu’s ‘Art of War’? What in the hell? This show would probably be better off done backwards from what they’re actually doing. Just make it full-on porn, with a storyline added in, instead of attempting a miserable storyline with pantyshots thrown every which-way. It’d be more respectable in it’s own genre at least….

I think she’s serious

Overall, if you want a good ‘QUALITY’-inspired chuckle with boobies thrown in, give the show a try. Otherwise stay clear of this crap. I won’t be wasting any more Harddrive space with it. I think [Chihiro] summed it up best though, so tl;dr - “lol, this is the shittiest show I’ve ever watched…”

About damn time this came out! Been bugging the hell out of me that I couldn’t mark this as completed on myanimelist.net.

Overall though, the episode wasn’t anything special. Back when the rest of the show was airing, everyone was ranting and raving about how it was left out because it was unfit for TV, a fanservice episode, etc etc. It wasn’t any of that. Just a normal episode of the show, nothing different than the rest of it. All it showed was how Horo ended up getting that other outfit (which I think is adorable, mind you), and the usual ‘loleconomics’ the show was based around. No boobies.

So yea, the only reason they did it was to sell DVD’s. I can’t blame companies for trying to make money off of something that’s rightfully their’s, but it’ll end up on the internet the day it’s out anyway. Their best bet of making money off a series, as is most others, is merchandise. Posters, wall scrolls, PVC figures, etc. Stuff you can’t download. Given, supporters of the show will probably buy the DVD, as most people *do* actually buy stuff they liked. I would as well, expect I’m poor and have no money. Once I’ve got a job I full well plan on buying merchandise from shows I liked.

Oh, and the best part of this show is still the ED song. Click here for sunshine Pie.

…I started watching Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. God I suck at post titles. Was trying for a while to think of some lame pun or quote from the show, but no luck.

Anyway, I’m severely disappointed with myself that I put this show on hold; it ended up being one of the best series I’ve seen in a while. I had stopped at pretty much exactly the wrong point, right before everything started to make sense (Episode’s 16-21; bricks were shat) and the show became amazing.

The way the arc’s all tie into each other is well done; mechanics like that in entertainment are always a plus. A series of random, meaningless or seemingly unrelated events all coming together in the end to reveal what actually happened is just strangely appealing. Why is that? A sense of fulfillment? A possible hinting at higher forces at work, or something of the like? Bah, this isn’t a psychological post, so i’ll stop writing about that before I go off on a tangent about it. But still, the way everything worked and made sense all of a sudden at points was great.

Another element of the show I think that made it appealing was making it come off as a harem-type of show. One male lead character and 4 females, all cute in their own ways and attracted to the male character, standard moé-harem setup. Then the seemingly cute girls end up being batshit-insane psychopaths, turning the mood that the series first played off *completely* around and making for one hell of a good murder mystery.

The supernatural element of ‘The Curse of Oyashiro-sama’ played in nicely as well. Sometimes it was played off as a literal curse of an angry god. Other times it was used as a mafia-type cover up. Others it was used as a scapegoat, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of that book ‘The Crucible’ (as much as that book sucked), in the way that the supernatural/unexplained would just be blamed for everything that people didn’t want to deal with (’We can’t explain it, so it must be witchcraft!’, ‘We don’t know who killed them, so it must be Oyashiro-sama!’). Overall it played into the story extremely well in more than one way, and showed a bit of the darker side of humanity (in b4 LOLDEEP).

The only thing’s I can complain about in the show are probably the animation and voice acting (or, more acturately, a combination of both). Sometimes the character will be screaming insanely, and the character will just look as if they’re slightly angry. Other’s they’ll look extremely pissed off, and yelling, but only like they’re slightly annoyed. I guess the emotion of certain points in the audio just didn’t match the animation. The animation in itself wasn’t impressive at all, but the show was an adaptation of a doujinshi game, so it was relatively low budget. Honestly though, this show proves more then usual that animation does not mean everything.

School needs to fucking end. Noone cares about anything anymore, it’s just 7 1/2 hours of sitting here doing nothing each day, it’s mind-numbing. I’d prefer to do something for once, even if it was just to give me a reason to slack off. You can’t slack off when you’re not doing anything in the first place. Oh, and people in this class playing random flash games need to STOP FUCKING SCREAMING. You won Tetris/centipede/asteroids/whatever. We get it. Now shut up.

Didn’t watch Air the other day like I planned, instead decided to finish up Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni, since thats yet *another* show I started watching forever ago and didn’t finish. I thought i was farther into it then I actually was though (though I was around 17 or something, was only at 12). Up to 20 now though, i’ll finish it up later tonight. Maybe i’ll do Black Lagoon in the next few days as well. Air can wait, after F/SN and playing tsukihime, another VN-adaptation animu can wait.

Oh, thats right, get to try out that new Touhou fighting game, Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, when I get home today. Saw it finished downloading last night before I went to bed, but was too tired to care for trying it out. Hopefully it dosen’t suck.

This post looks boring, theres no pictures of anything in it. That’s what happens when you proxy-post from school though, I guess. Oh well, possible Higurashi-thoughts-post later, so that’ll probably looks prettier. Why does ‘Prettier’ look like it’s spelled wrong for some reason?

…I watched the first episode of Fate/Stay Night. Tonight I watched the last. This is by far the longest it’s taken me to watch any series of anything ever. I probably watched all of Dragonball Z way-back-when in a shorter period of time than this. Overall, this show gave me the same vibe as Shakugan no Shana did; it didn’t do anything wrong, but it was something I had to force myself through, just for the sake of finishing it. I did however, enjoy the ending a bit more then SnS, as it provoked at least some small slivers of emotion, whereas I was just glad to be done with Shana. Only good thing that came of this was getting a good chuckle out of finally seeing the ‘People die if they are killed!’ scene, and a bit of suggestive fanservice. Maybe the visual novel will be better, should I decide to play it. People said the tsukihime anime was pretty shitty as well, but so far the VN is entertaining enough (aside from stupidly random sound effects scaring the crap out of me.)

Oh and trill, if you’re reading this, I know this show was always your trump card when I told you to watch Kanon. Now it’s not, so uh……..yeah, watch Kanon >_>

I’ve got nothing to do tomorrow, so I might try to marathon Air or something, since I never got around to that. 13 Episodes even I can manage to do in a day.

From AnimeNewsNetwork (Article Link):

The Sci Fi Channel in the United States lists two episodes of the Gurren Lagann science-fiction anime series on July 28 at 11:00 p.m. ET/PT during the first hour of the Ani-Monday programmng block. Bandai Entertainment announced in April that it had acquired Hiroyuki Imaishi and Gainax’s anime, after ADV Films had announced Gurren Lagann last July but then removed the anime from its catalog. Both Bandai Entertainment itself and its newly hired producer Toshifumi Yoshida had indicated that he would be working on the localization for this anime on an accelerated schedule for July.

Impressive, although I’m a bit surprised it’s Sci-fi airing episodes and not adult swim. I wouldn’t doubt the possibility of AS picking it up in the future though. I remember hearing somewhere though, that Bandai wouldn’t be releasing a dubbed version untill sometime near 2009. Maybe that’s just misheard on my part, or maybe they’re dubbed episodes, since it’ll only be the first 2? The article does say they’ll be ‘working on the localization at an accelerated rate.’ I highly doubt we’re lucky enough to get a subbed version to air on Sci-fi. Here’s to praying for good dubs.

Watched Mnemosyne 04 the other day and was planning on posting something about it, but never really got around to it.

Personally, I think this was the best episode in the series so far. This episode SCREAMED Ghost in the Shell, from start to finish. Time-skip to the year 2025, and theres a virtual reality world simply known as ‘2.0′; and due to it, a good portion of the youth is in an almost vegetative state most of the time. Think (Everquest + WoW)². And since it’s a literal virtual reality, it’s every possibility of real life, without repercussions. Basically sex, drugs and crime without penalty(why don’t we have this yet? Get your asses in gear Japan!)

Anyways, the liberation of the conscious from the body, even though temporarily, and the crime-solving aspect of it just made this episode an awesome GiTS-like experience. And it even has a cliffhanger ending! For the first time in the series, I’m eagerly awaiting the next episode to find out what happens! It’s the first time the series seems like a ’series’, not a collection of small, related-but-not-continued OVA’s. Before this it was going on an episode-by-episode basis; not a bad thing for a series to start out with, but when the show is only going to be 6 episodes long, one would think they’d limit that type of separation to the first episode exclusively.

Thought I had more to say about the episode, but I guess that’s enough without turning this into a summary/review type thing, and I’d rather not do that. How some of those blogs out there write 3,000+ word summaries for each episode of a show, and do it for 3-4 shows at a time is beyond me. I’m lucky I update this blog with posts like this twice a week.

Inspired by a comment in a previous post, Lucky Star still seems to be a show that baffles the anime community for some obscure reason, causing flame wars and thread de-railings at the mere mention of it’s name.

And why? To this day I still don’t get why it causes such controversy. Was it a bad show? Not at all. Was it the greatest anime of our time? Not by a long shot.

The main argument I hear from people bashing the show is ‘All they do is talk about food!’ Tip: Get past the first 10 minutes of the show, and it’ll change. I’ll agree with this though, those first few minutes were like something out of Napoleon Dynamite; you keep waiting and waiting for the punchline, and theres plenty of opportunities for one, yet it never comes.

Beyond that, the insults evolve to things like ‘The show relied on outside references to make jokes’ and ‘It’s Azumanga Daioh. with less funny and more moé!’ Yes, the show used a metric shitton of outside references, specifically to Haruhi, since it was easy to use something made by the same studio. However, I’m still unsure why exactly references are a bad thing, and saying the show ‘relied’ on them to be funny is a bit of a stretch. The humor was much more of a ‘Hey, that’s funny because it’s true!’ or ‘Hey, that’s happened to me before!’ Example being the Comiket episode. That was all funny and good in itself when I first saw it. But after going to my first anime convention recently, watching it over made me able to appreciate the humor a bit more. It’d probably be even more true if you’re someone who’s gone to comiket specifically.

The next comment, ‘It’s Azumanga Daioh, with less comedy and more moé!’, is more or less true, yet it’s acting like a show being cute is also a bad thing. I mean cute? In anime? Wow, totally new concept, huh? It was an enjoyably cute series, it didn’t go overboard with cuteness, it balanced it out with comedy and slice-of-life in general. Theres plenty of cute shows out there, still don’t see why exactly that’s a specific directed at Lucky Star. Aiming that at the whole ’slice of life’ genre in general is fine I guess; you either like the genre or you don’t, there’s no right or wrong. It just seems like a spewed out insult with no actual backing.

Now saying all that makes me look like I’m praising the show, where I’m really not(putting my bias towords Kagamin’s awesomeness aside at least). Did I enjoy the show? Absolutely. I caught it around episode 16ish, looked forward to the next episode each week, and was sad when it was over. My main problem was with the characters. You really didn’t get to know a huge deal about them emotionally, or hear anything about their past, save the last 2-3 episodes, and even then, it was light. Sure, you’d know a bit about the characters habits, hobbies, spending of their free time, etc. But life isn’t *that* good all the time, and they really didn’t focus on much of character-development type problems, once again save the last 2-3 episodes. I guess it can be attributed to the slice-of-life genre generally being more episode-based then having a continuing story, but it still could have done a little more with it.

So why all the shitstorming? Honestly it’s probably going to rage on as long as all that never-ending ‘Pirates vs. Ninjas’ crap, which is older than the internet itself (Seriously, it is, I took a one-hour class on it. I shit you not), and never reach a valid conclusion. I just don’t think theres much to ‘get’ about it per say; it’s a cute show about a bunch of high school girls going through everyday life, just with a bit of outside references thrown in. Which, now that I think about it, means this entire post really went nowhere, and accomplished nothing other then burning up a bit of my free time. So thanks to you siegetank55, for keeping me occupied for a bit :P

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL3I1PsPH1M

I think this is what a Siren sounds like.

So I managed to get a working copy of Clannad, voiced, translated and everything! Wanted to play it for a while now after seeing the anime, and see some of the other routes that they cut out of the show. I’ll probobly start off with the Tomoyo route, since her’s was mashed together with the twins, and only had about a 10 minute flashback to explain anything related to her. After that probobly Kyou, since apparently her route was butchered in the anime as well (or so the internet tells me). Kotomi and Fuuko will be last, since they actually had their own arc’s and whatnot.

Installing it was a pain though, because as per usual, nothing I ever install on my computer want’s to coopterate for reasons unknown. I ran the game the first couple times, and it’s still in moonspeak with no voices. Then one time I get voices, but it’s still in moonspeak. After a few more times it finally works right. What did I change, you ask? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! I love my computer. Seriously, it’s awsome.

Hmm, everything i’m watching this season seems to be getting subbed slower than hell. Either that, or it download’s slow as hell. Kurenai 04 took about 3 1/2 hours today, it was pathetic. So I started watching Mai-HiME in the meantime, only to realize I can’t find past episode 8 subbed anywhere either. Static Subs did it a while back, but their subs are taken down for licensing reasons, and amazingly nowhere else seems to have them. [KAA] is doing it right now as a side-project (I think), but they’re only up to episode 8, and even 05-08 is taking forever to download.

Uh, I think that’s it, gonna go play clannad for a while before sleeping.

Kept delaying writing anything on this blog because of images, not having full control like before, and just a general lack of not wanting to write. But I guess it’s better to rant to the internet then to myself, no?

Okay, I guess i’ll give my 2 cents on what new-season animu i’ve watched so far.

To LoveRU - So far one of the better fan-service/comedy shows I’ve seen. Not quite sure why it’s good, but it’s just got a certain appeal to me. It dosen’t go overboard with the fanservice like Kanokon does (although strangely enough they’re both being produced by the same studio), it has just the right amount to make it enjoyable, yet not on-par with softcore porn.

The main character is a damn-near clone of Nono from Diebuster though. Same drawing style, same look, alien/girl-from-space, fends for herself in an almost playful manner, etc etc. Even the name’s (Nono and Lala) are similar!

Kure-nai - Not sure what to think of this show so far. Started off with a strangely dark tone to it, revolving around some rich little girl being targeted by something (I say something because it’s not explained yet. Or maybe it was and I didn’t catch it, it’s confusing), but the 2nd episode seems to be making it out to be a mix of drama with loli fanservice. If it can manage to pull a decent storyline out of what it’s set itself up with, it’s got potential, but it’s kind of confusing at the moment.

Kanokon - Ugh, fanservice done wrong. It’s overly gratuitous, and i’m not liking it. Fanservice should be lighthearted and humorous, developing around a plot with characters that seem like actual characters. This is just constant ’sweatbead’ humor, the main character getting breasts shoved in his face, and……..well, that’s it really. Seriously, just watch a hentai or something. Just go all the way, being this overzealous and not having any actual porn is dumb.

Soul Eater - Wow, 1 episode and I’m liking this show big-time. Dosen’t seem like it’ll be anything industry-changing, but the action was good, the characters are pretty decent (save some horrible dialog), and the animation is awsome. The humor is a bit…………bland, I guess is the word, and way too general, but It’s overlookable. Sprinkle some light fanservice into the mix, what could be an interesting storyline, and theres a show that looks promising.

I’m just loving the general ‘tone’ of the show most of all though. The characters look like they live in a mix of Halloween Town from ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ and the Jersey Devil games for PS1! It’s strange, and it certainly is something new, so props to whoever designed/drew up the scenery. It’s dark and creepy, but cartoon-ish and non-threatening at the same time, and it’s probably the #1 draw factor to the show for me.

Mnemosyne - Not a new-season thing, but I guess i’ll say something. The fact that it takes a month for each new episode to come out is a turn-off, but each episode is almost 50 minutes, so they’re like short movies. Regardless, episode 3 didn’t seem to do much that was all that interesting. Episode 1 seemed promising, if not just for the piercing-torture scene. That was brutally awesome, something you don’t see much of. And it gave some crazy immortality-seeking organization a part in the storyline, which I liked better than the whole ‘Demons and Yuri’ it’s become in episodes 2 and 3. Now given, i’m all for demons being the antagonists in a show, and I’m surely not complaining about the main characters being lesbians. It’s just not what I expected from the show.

However, the show gives off a strange 90’s vibe, which i’m liking, even though my knowledge of 90’s anime is limited. I’ll keep watching given I don’t forget to download the next episode in a month.

Okay, thats pretty much it for anime. I’ll sample other stuff I guess, should I see anything that catches my interest, and maybe write about that I guess. Anyways, probably a non-anime related rant coming on in a bit. Maybe i’ll even upload some photo’s I took today.

Oh, and this keyboard still blows.