Otakuism

Subaru loev Zafira. How about some Subaru x Zafira now (in human form please)?

Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere? You were on a show a while back. Something about…ferrets maybe? Were you on Animal Planet? Discovery Channel?

WHAT HAS SCIENE MAGIC DONE?!

No, don’t listen to the bad man, Lutecia! All he speaks of is lies! Oh yeah, he better get party vanned.

What’s with all the tentacle monster symbolism in these summonings? What are they trying to tell us? Lutecia is pretty awesome, though. Mainly just for being a loli rider. And I guess being able to kick ass without the help of your big, scary bodyguard is cool, too.

Oh Shi-! Subaru and Tea go emo, Tea more so because she has an inferiority complex and doesn’t believe in hard work and guts like Subaru. Vita was pretty nasty, too. Guess she still hasn’t gotten over Nanoha’s injuries in the past. And Teana thinking she’s the weakest is just funny, because when it comes down to it, she’s the leader for all of them, even if they’re a bit more powerful.

Guy has a “Ohoho I’m going to rape you Hayate,” face. I blame the QUALITY animation, though, maybe he does want to rape her. The animation was noticeably down this episode. Not that it we ever exactly stellar, both in StikerS and the other series, but still, it’s getting downright awful in some places. How am I supposed to enjoy Subaru and Healthy Fate with bad animation?

More emo Tea. Poor Subaru. She wants to be supportive, but Tea won’t let her at all. And despite being all hot blood and guts, Subaru really isn’t confidant at all. That’s why she and Teana are perfect together, they compliment each other. Without Teana, Subaru is useless, and Teana needs Subaru’s optimism to make up for her emo nature, if she’ll just listen to her. Not time to wait for episode 8 subs. Can’t wait to see the White Devil own Tea. As all good anime has shown, a good ass-whoopin’ is the only cure for emoness. The only one.

Hot.

Lol spoilerz. Anyways, guess it’s time I finally talked about Claymore, seeing as how it’s like my second favorite manga and I spent most of last week reading it. I’ve been mostly mum on the anime, and there’s a good reason why: It’s boring as hell. Maybe this is because I’ve seen all this stuff before, since the anime is literally a scene by scene adaption. Or maybe it’s the bland colors and boring animation. Seriously, I hate the animation. The art in the manga early on was kind of sketchy, but it got real good and detailed later on. The anime has none of this. Epic scenes like Awakened Priscilla appearing in all her sexy glory are rendered mute by how un-detailed and QUALITY she looks. The lack of a full-body shot also didn’t help. Claymore, even though they’re monsters, actually look cute in the manga. In the anime, they just come off as psychotic chicks on too much steroids. Maybe it’s more “realistic,” but it’s also ugly. I want hot chicks killing monsters, dammit!

To new fans of Claymore, this probably doesn’t matter. The story still shines through and the action scenes are pretty good. Anything that gets more people reading Claymore is good I guess. I would still reccomend reading the manga asap, though. As for the shocking event of ep.8, Teresa’s death, all I can say is, “eh it’s alright.” I never found the event that particularly shocking, even in the manga. It was a pretty simple deduction to know she’d die. Teresa in the past, no Teresa in the present, “huh, I wonder why?” It was still pretty cool, though, mainly because it was like, “Oh, my arms are over there now. Why is my head rolling on the ground?” Naturally, this is pretty bad for Clare, but she’s alright later. I think she’s more gar than Teresa was, especially when she dresses as a man. And just to note (Huge Spoilerz) Flora and Jean’s deaths are ten times more shocking and emotional than Teresa’s. Oh well, I’ll continue watching the anime to see what happens, and for the music. Excellent soundtrack. Can’t wait for the OP and ED. Next time introduces Miria, my favorite character, and the sexiest Claymore in my opinion (unless loli tentacle demon Riful is more your style).

P.S. Neko Miko Reimu from the new IOSYS album is made of epic win and nekomimi mode moe. She even says nya over and over again in the refrain!

I’m rather proud of that title, just so you know. Three more interesting Lucky☆Star videos I found that I though I’d post: Cowboy Bebop OP, Higurashi characters, and scenes from SHUFFLE. All really good actually.

While I don’t care for Bebop, that’s an excellent and well put-together video. Especially loved the cornet as the spaceship ;).

Higurashi one. Mad props for actually being kind of animated.

Because SHUFFLE is always great. Forgot how much I missed this show. Normal fanservice rules apply.

China heads this meta-blogging editorial.

Some negative comments I got on my use of spoilers in my recent Gurren-Lagann got me thinking, not about spoilers in particular, but in the fact that I assumed my audience would already be aware of those spoilers, since I myself was. A mistake on my part it seems. But that got me thinking about what I, and other bloggers, assume about their audience. We all have certain individual perceptions about our readers. Because of my disjointed writing style, where I go from thoughts on an anime, to a manga review, to an irrelevant youtube post, all in a week, I tend to assume whoever reads my blog is aware of what I’m talking about, whether that be the most recent Gurren-Lagann episode or an allusion to Gaogaigar.

In the realm of spoilers, I tend to not worry about them at all. Since whenever I write about anime I usually neglect to tell the story at all, since I hate writing summaries, I’ll just assume whoever is reading it already knows the story. Since I read a bunch of anime blogs and visit 4chan daily, I’ve become disentized to spoilers. They just represent an aspect of the story that I now know ahead of watching that episode, and in my mind more information is always better. Now, if there’s something I really don’t want to spoil for myself, I’ll know where to steer clear of, but I also assume other people do the same. This is probably part of the problem. I assume my audience is similar to me; a highly anime literate fan who reads anime blogs, knows of nano and animeblogger, knows of the usual sites like TT, and maybe visits 4chan. For a large part, this is probably true, but there are always the people who won’t know of those things.

Which raises the question of is that a problem or not. Naturally there are people who don’t like what I write and thus steer clear of it. It’d be nice to gain their readership, because all writers and naturally egotists, but I’m not going to change the way I do things for it. But what if I assume something wrong about the people who do enjoy my blog? Would I need to apologize, or just write them off for not fitting my assumptions? Fortunately, I’ve never been in this position, and I hope I’m not anytime soon. But it’s an interesting thing to think about. I usually think more about what I’m going to write, than who I’m writing for. This mostly works fine, but I wonder if I have to look at it in a different way in some situations, such as spoilers. Any other bloggers ever thought in such a way, or have particular assumptions about their audience? I’m interested in hearing what other people think about these things.

OH GOD SO MUCH MANLY TEARS! I’m crying rivers here, in a manly way, of course. Greatest hot-blooded, mecha episode since the end of Gaogaigar FINAL. Kamina’s death was perfect. Ok, so he died, that wasn’t so great, but the way it was handled was awesome. Rises from the ashes, transforms again to unleash his ultimate final attack before passing away quietly in the cockpit of the Gurren-Lagann. A brave life cut short in defense of his friends. Oh man, I feel those tears coming again!

Kamina is no pansy man. When a woman kisses him, he kisses her back, hard, like a man. With the promise that he’ll rock her world all night long later. I really liked seeing Yoko the one to initiate the kiss. One, Kamina wasn’t going to do anything anytime soon, and, two, it’s refreshing to see a strong female go after what she wants. Despite being dressed in almost nothing, Yoko really knows how to be strong. She’s easily a valuable member of the team, even without a ganmen. Too bad her love for Kamina came at the most inappropiate time. Not only did Simon get messed up, but Kamina died because of it in the end. It will be interesting to see how this turns out for Yoko. She may try to find solace in Simon, but he’ll be too busy being emo/saving Nia. Hope she doesn’t get pushed to the wayside any.

Gathering of the forces. Kamina in the role he was born to be; a leader. GL is starting to see some of that epicness the opening showed us. Galactic space battles have to start somewhere. Now we know who the main enemy is, the Spiral King. He’s supposed to an alien, so we’ll see how the beastmen fall in this. It’s interesting in how Viral was set up as a main villian, but he’s been pushed aside by bigger baddies like Chimiruf. He didn’t even get the killing blow on his rival. I wonder if there’s a Soldat J moment in his future, where he’ll switch sides to regain his honor. Man, that’d be awesome.

Kamina Punch: similar to the Bright Slap, except this will knock some teeth out also.

OH SHI-! KAMINA DIES IN LAVA!

Gurren-Lagann Punch: when you need 50 tons of metal to knock the emoness out of someone. Notice how Kamina tore his own arm off just to throw it. Badass.

Throw away your logic and kick reason to the curb!

Beautifully following the golden road!

If there’s a wall, we knock it down!

It’s a road built with these hands!

The Magma of the Heart’s Final Ignition!

Perfect Unification Gurren-Lagann!

Who do you all think we are!!

HEEEEEEEEEEEELL YEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

Gl owning all kinds of ass. GIGA DRILL BREAKER!!

We have all lost a great man; an irreplaceable man to us all. A man who never stood down, never gave up, never retreated an inch. Who always looked forward to the stars. A man who taught us all not only to believe in him, but to believe in ourselves. You shall live forever in the realm of great men, Kamina! Aka. future Saigar winner.

BELIEVE IN ME, WHO BELIEVES IN YOU!

Finally, it’s here! A glimpse at the newest Touhou game, Mountain of Faith. If the demo is anything to go by, than MoF will defintely be different than its predecessors.

Several things have changed in MoF, especially the power ups and bombs. This has to do with the introduction of options. Options are just little things that fly around your character shooting more bullets, used to popular effect in Gradius. You start off with no options and can move up to five total. Your power up system is like this: Instead of a gauge, your power is numbered through decimals, like 1.0 or 4.75. Each whole number grants you a new option, with a total for four at 5.0. This new gauge also dictates how many bombs you can use. One bomb is equivalent to 1.0 on the power gauge, so you go down every time you use a bomb, except for when your at 5.0, then you can use one bomb for free. There’s also belief points, which are the green stars and circles floating around. Getting those activates your belief meter, which goes down over time. To stop it temporarily, all you have to do is kill more enemies. The higher your belief meter is, the higher points you get.

Some other game differences are there’s only two characters at the beginning, Reimu and Marisa, each with three different styles of shooting. Bombs don’t appear to be anything special, just clearing a certain area of bullets. You can also auto collect all the items on screen if you move to the top of the screen. In previous games you had to be full powered to do this, but you can do it whenever you want here. The other difference is continues. Instead of continuing right from the spot you were killed at, instead you start that stage all over again. It can be pretty annoying, especially when you rely on continues to complete a stage, but you do have unlimited continues. To me, the difficulty here is harder than the previous games, especially on the bosses spell cards. Stage 1 is alright, but it really cranks up on stages 2 and 3. And that’s just on a normal mode. I’d probably get killed if I played hard or lunatic.

In all other categories, MoF is looking to be a winner. Graphically, this is the best game ZUN has ever made. The motif this time is autumn, so the screen is constantly filled with floating leaves and colors. The backgrounds are more detailed and lively, too. You end up looking at the background more than the bullets about to kill you. But the in-game portraits are downright terrible, worse than even emodiment of scarlet devil. Please ZUN, stop drawing while drunk and get the artist from Immaterial and Missing Power to do the portraits. The three new characters introduced are interesting, in that weird Touhou way. There’s Minoriko, the stupid goddess of the harvest; Hina, the gothloli goddess of curses, and Nitori, a weird kappa thing. Aya might also be in the full game, as Nitori mentions meeting a tengu. The plot seems to be Reimu heading up the mountain to talk to a god that wants to close down the shrine. I’m interested to know who the god is, and if we’ll see Mima at all, since she is a god of the shrine, so to speak. Musically, things are good. No stand out tracks yet, but they’re nice to listen to. The remixes will probably be better anyways.

Zombie Reimu will eat your brains.

Overall, the demo is a hell of a lot of fun to play, and I can’t wait for the full version now. Shouldn’t be that much longer I guess. I need to polish my skills some before than. Despite loving Touhou games, I’m really bad at them orz.

Story:

The sibling trio of Shannon, Raquel, and Pacifica continue their journey of being on the run from the kingdom in order to protect Pacifica, the Scrapped Princess who will destroy the world. While trying to get to the outer territories of the kingdom, the group meets the Inquisitor Berkens, a rather odd priest with massive muscles. He’s on the search for a heretic group in the area said to be lead by the Scrapped Princess. Eventually the group ends up trapped on the island where the heretic group, Blasphemer’s Garden, has its hideout. Lead by the man in the iron mask, Reynard, and his false Scrapped Princess figure head, Elfitine, the group plans to “condemn” the Mauser Church for its persecution. And, wouldn’t you just know it, but that “condemning” involves killing a lot of people?

Impressions:

I wish I could say SP decided to move beyond its generic fantasy trappings into something greater, but it hasn’t. Instead we get another standalone adventure about heretics, which isn’t too bad since they are a new part of the SP world we haven’t seen. Fortunately, volume 3 proves more interesting than volume 2. It’s a concise story free of any of the random sidequests from the previous volume, like Shannon in drag, instead moving at a brisk and steady pace throughout. The new characters introduced are mostly a mixed bag: Berkens is great as the amoral yet lovable priest, and Reynard is interesting as the anti-hero/villian, providing the main twist of the book that even I didn’t see. Elfitine, the other Scrapped Princess, isn’t so great, mostly wallowing in her own self-pity throughout the whole book until Pacifica cheers her up. This seems to be a running theme now, starting with emo Winia and now emo Elfitine. She is hot, though. The plot of volume 3 doesn’t really add much to the overall SP plot, if there is one, but does a good job of being entertaining, if at least for a little while.

One complaint I have for the story is the overexplanation of magic. While the mechanics of magic have been shown to be complicated in the previous book, it’s on a whole different level here. Ichiro Sakaki seems to thrill in describing the inner workings of one big spell after another. Too bad they aren’t that interesting and just come out confusing, messing up the flow of that particular sequence. And when your magic has such names as “Fenrir” and “Thor,” I don’t want to know how they work. On the publishing quality, everything is the same from the previous books. Same gaudy and inappropiate cover (I mean, a genie doesn’t even show up in the book!), pages with way too much white space, and Yukinobu Azumi’s beautiful, in more ways than one, drawings. This volume is also noticeably thicker than the previous ones, which seems to bode well for the series.

Volume 3 is mostly an improvement over the previous volumes in the series. The developed plot of Shannon, Raquel, and Pacifica falling into trouble and solving it is used to better effect here, providing a more engaging, if still generic story. Textbook fantasy at its best you could say.