Year: 2009

Ongoing Investigations: Case #035

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I think I will just talk about video games this week. We’ll start with Street Fighter IV. I had an interest in the game but since I don’t own an PS3 or 360 I had no real plans to buy it. Then everyone and there mom was talking about it. When I was on lunch break I even heard the manga cows in a bookstore talking about it. So I broke down and bought the game to play on my brother’s Xbox. Playing Street Fighter IV reinforced a valuable lesson. I am not very good at fighting games. I have enough knowledge to be above a button masher but not anywhere near enough skill or practice to be any sort of capable player. This is a well executed game with high level of technical finesse. It is also amazing that you cannot play arcade mode with the online challenge function on because you will get a request to fight every few seconds. I am not sure how long this amount of community will last but this is a good game to play if you like the idea of playing a fighting game online. I think Narutaki got a big kick of of it when he played it as well. Oh and for everyone who says easiest is to easy I stick my tongue at you.

I have started watching Zettai Shonen, I am four episodes in so far. It is an odd little show about a strange town in the country. Ayumu goes there to stay with his dad who he is clearly estranged from. In the midst of exploring the surrounding land and neighbors, weird things start happening and cloudy memories keep coming up. The towns folk are an odd lot that you just don’t know about them. They include a few kids around Ayumu’s age, a younger girl who seems to know a lot about what is going on, a news reporter, and a cat. The mystery of this town doesn’t seem to revolve around something horribly tragic and I am hoping it stays that way, but one never knows.

I am pretty much at the end of Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings which has been quite enjoyable. I amusingly enough have yet to play Final Fantasy XII itself. I would have gotten more out of the game had I played the original but was still worth playing. When characters from the old game pop into the story it would have been cooler had I already know who they are. Vaan, Panelo, and friends are still going around being sky pirates. They find an air ship that takes them to a series of magically sealed floating islands. Using their newly gained ability to summons creatures, they go about stopping evil pirates and the evil powers that control the island. I was interested in seeing Square do a real-time strategy game. It is a rather simplistic, enjoyable RTS game but you cannot go in expecting the next Warcraft. The end game extra material seems significantly harder than anything that came before but that is Square Enix side material for you. If nothing else the game has piqued my interest in playing Final Fantasy XII just to see more of Panelo. She is super cute.

I watched more Raoh Gaiden, up through episode five. My favorite episode so far has been the one I named Raoh: Horse Whisperer. His first meeting with Kokuoh is epic. Since Kokuoh’s army of horses takes out a good number of Raoh’s minions, Raoh decides to meet this beast. As they stand face to face a tiger attacks which Raoh promptly rips in two and tells it to not interrupt a conversation between kings (which actually just consists of staring at each other). Also Kokuoh’s size varies in every scene after this. He ranges from being the same height at Raoh to being about 30 feet tall. This show is so entertaining I can’t stop watching. And for some unknown reason the fan-subbers have skipped the sixth installment, perhaps it was too powerful for them.

I also played My World, My Way. Princess Elise falls in love with a handsome adventurer but he correctly dismisses her as a spoiler brat. So she decides to become an adventurer to win his approval. The king assigns a poor guy to run around and set up monsters for you to beat and tasks to accomplish that are challenging while not being deadly. You also have the ability to change things about the game by being so selfish that the world changes just to shut you up. The idea is cute and the story can be funny at times, but it very quickly becomes the same thing again and again. You go to a town; they ask you to collect x number of items; and defeat y number of monsters. When you finish the missions you get the key to the next town and have to fight a boss on the way out. They sometimes throw a dungeon into the mix but it’s not that much different from wandering around the world map. You eventually get a little mimic slime to fight along side you. This mixes things up a little but does not radically change the game play. It feels much more like a 20 dollar game than a 30 dollar game.

I read the second volume of Mixed Vegetables. I was a little disappointed in the direction they decided to take it though I felt it righted itself a bit as the book went on. The relationship between our two main characters has really changed.

I must end with Panelo, so this is the pic of the week:

The Shining Darkness Series: The Place Promised in Our Early Days

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There are simple love stories and there are complex love stories. Both of them have their place. Sometimes you need a simple boy meets girl story. Sometimes you need a love story with a little more dimensions and depth. I won’t say more real because sometimes love is not all that complicated. Angst does not make things more real. Love may be powerful, there might be numerous obstacles blocking it, and there might be hard choices involved with it but it is not necessarily complicated. Makoto Shinkai has progressed in his career and as such his love stories have gained more complexity.

I was so looking forward to this film. Seeing Makoto Shinkai jump from his little-over-half-hour creation to a full film was a very exciting prospect. What sort of story would be tell with a full cast, crew, and a more liberal budget? He brings the themes he cemented in our minds so well in Voices of a Distant Star and combines it with a more complex vision.

Japan is a divided nation. Southern Japan is allied with America and Northern Japan is allied with the Union. Since the division the North has created a mysterious tower that scrapes the heavens which can be seen from miles away. Two best friends, Hiroki Fujisawa and Takuya Shirakawa, decide to take a downed fighter drone they found and turn it into an airplane so they can examine the tower. One day the girl they both like, Sayuri Sawatari, tags along to visit them and becomes involved with their project. Sayuri disappears and it kills any momentum the boys had for working on the project. They grow up and go their separate ways each leading different lives and each dealing with the events of that summer in their own way. But what happened to Sayuri and what was her connection to the mysterious tower?

Sayuri’s first interactions with the boys, from the audiences perspective, are very different from each other. However, through them we see a girl who is full of life but constantly running from an unknown force. Everyone in the story is connected around the tower whether it is through relation to one another or helping to get there. While the story takes place in a warring and dysfunctional era, it is merely the back drop for an endearing story about love and friendship.

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Ongoing Investigations: Case #034

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Picked up the Gundam SEED movies in a Right Stuf sale a few weeks back and just sat down to watch the first of three. I was pretty blown away by the amount of fan-service inserted into just a 90-minute movie. Kira, Athrun, and Cagalli each have an individual shower scene. Flay is also pimped out quite a bit throughout her appearance. And one scene between her and Kira that was merely implied in the TV series, is full blown in the movie. It was almost laughable how quickly events were flying by but since I’m watching these after knowing the plot it didn’t really matter. I was looking for an abridged version of the series that I could sit down and watch once and while because I loved SEED that much! It’ll be interesting to see the other two now, where is the Mu fan-service?

I for one appreciate more naked Cagalli and only regret there is not more. They seem to focus on the battles as opposed to the people. This makes for good robot porn but makes the people less important which was not the case in the original TV series. I guess in a way the purpose is to increase the fan-service while giving you a good recap of what happened. I think the SEED movies really only work as a supplement to people who already saw the TV show. You could figure out what was going but it would take some effort. That should not be the case. On a somehwhat unrelated note is it ever important that they discovered an alien skeleton in the Gundam SEED series? They make such a big deal about it in episode 14 and then it just fades into the background like it never happened.

I had been wanting to try High School Debut out for a while, I finally found a copy of the first book on the cheap at the Strand. The basic premise is as follows: Haruna was a complete tomboy who did nothing but play softball in middle school, now in high school she has made it her goal to be more girly and find a boyfriend. She totally sucks at this and decides she needs a coach, like in softball, enter tall, dark, totally cool Yoh. After some coercing, he agrees to be her coach on the condition that she DOESN’T fall in love with him. Now, I have mentioned before that a predictable plot doesn’t really bother me if the characters are good. Haruna is a rather enjoyable protagonist and it did have me laughing out loud a couple of times. However, it wasn’t sticking out of the crowd and it used its tropes a little too frequently. I’d say pass on this series, even though Yoh is incredibly cute.

After going to NYCC, having Mr. Scott VonSchilling talk about it several times, hearing generally good reviews, and finding a buy one get one free sale I picked up Scott Pilgrim volumes one and two. I guess I was curious about this title in two major respects. How was it as an OEL manga and was it entertaining overall? The first question is simple. It’s not an OEL manga no matter how some people may market it. It’s a comic from someone influenced by manga but it never tries to pass itself off as anything other than an American comic. This is certainly to its benefit because it does not try to fit itself into to some fictitious manga template. In fact,  most OEL manga would be much better served to adhere to this philosophy. As for the entertainment value, it was entertaining but nowhere near the level of awesome the hype would have led me to believe. Scott Pilgrim is a unemployed slacker dating a high school girl until he meets a girl in his dreams that he can’t get out of his head. If he wants to date her, he has to defeat her seven evil ex-boyfriends. It has a quirky sense of humor and likes to make music and video game references. It sort of reminds me of Blue Monday in that respect but the sense of humor is different. The main characters are interesting but the side characters are numerous and not as developed. That might change as the books go on but they mostly seem thrown in for no reason other than to be there. Its quirky sense of humor will either endear it to people or turn them off. It’s mostly a matter of having a resonance with the author.

Read Kekkaishi 16 and loved it through and through. Karasumori is really getting out of control and everyone is starting to take notice. Even giving an appearance to a character we had only heard tell of. It is great to see the overall mystery of the series starting to be explored though we are still without too much information at this point. Middle of the book are some funny chapters about a girl who falls in love with Yoshimori when he saves her after she falls off the roof of the school. She then proceeds to stalk him much to the amusement of the audience and the chagrin of both Tokine and Yoshimori. These chapters were just supposed to give us a break between arcs but it was nice to see Tokine finally taking a little more notice of Yoshimori. There were a number of cute moments throughout this book. And we end, where I had been reading the Japanese, with the start of Yoshi helping his brother on a mysterious mission. I love that they always give Masamori two-sides when he appears. You can just never really figure him out. Great as usual! Why isn’t everyone and their mama buying this again?

They are too busy reading Soul Eater so they can’t be bothered to read Kekkaishi. And so I weep for anime fandom. I finished off the original Space Pirate Captain Harlock. Overall an enjoyable show that earns its place in the pantheon of anime space operas. Though it’s a little more pulp sci-fi than stuff like Legend of the Galactic Heroes and Banner of the Stars. It stays the story of one ship vs. the most powerful armada in the galaxy. The plot would probably throw feminists into hysterics because the alien invaders have a military made of beautiful women who use trickery and deception to beguile men’s minds. While it can be seen as misogynistic, it’s mostly done so they can have willowy women on the screen. Tadashi Daiba and Kei Yuki sort of fade into the background as the series goes on in favor of the man that is Captain Harlock and his amazing ship/friend the Arcadia. They realized that Harlock is the selling point of this series. The audience wants more Harlock then you better give it to them. But every named member of the crew gets their day in the sun with at least one episode having back story. I must also point out that randomly in one episode we have full frontal nudity in a series without that much fan-service. It also has the odd habit of having episode titles that clearly says who dies and shows them being killed in the preview. I would suggest fans of old school anime should check the series out but I think most of those people have already seen Harlock.

Because one must ALWAYS share the Kekkaishi love, this is the pic of the week: