This past week has been another whirlwind of activity.  I had my final two finals, followed by my commencement ceremony on Saturday.  Pending a final review, I graduate summa cum laude (with highest praise) from university.  I also started work at my first real job, which has been going well.  Making the transition to a 40-hour+ work week isn’t the easiest thing in the world.  Fortunately, I’ve still had time for anime.  This week, I want to share highlights from Nichijou, Deadman Wonderland, and Sket Dance.

Nichijou – He Wrestled a WHAT!?

If you read any of the synopses at the beginning of the year, you might have noticed Nichijou made a few promises.  We’ve already seen the robot hiding a rollcake in her arm, thanks to Nano.  We still hadn’t seen the principal wrestling any deer though.  Well, Yuuko got front row seats to the big event, thanks to her penchant for never finishing her homework.

Nothing says "badass" like a bald guy in kevlar lifting a deer.

You could use this to make some statement about animal cruelty, but it would only make you a prude.  Let’s just face the facts.  The deer was an honorable opponent.  The principle of this school is a freaking beast.  The German suplex was beautiful.  Microsoft Word doesn’t think the word suplex exists.  Finally, Yuuko reporting all this as normal says an awful lot about the school and their tolerance for the bizarre.  It was a pretty satisfying sequence if I say so myself.

Deadman Wonderland – Tag!

It’s still hasn’t surpassed Mnemosyne, but Deadman Wonderland is a solid second for most brutal anime I’ve ever watched.  Yes, I have little tolerance for brutality, and I haven’t succeeded at watching an entire episode yet.  I hadn’t seen anything memorable in a “good” way, though, until this week’s episode.  Little Ganta really doesn’t want to die, and you know what they say about cornered cats…

And you are it! No tag-backs!

He bled himself out pretty well just utilizing his power, and Senji’s furious assault leaves him broken.  His opponent shows a bit of mercy, but Ganta wants to win.  He drags himself up off the floor and switches things up with an indirect assault.  Senji quickly defends himself against the falling microphone, but the small gap is enough.  The kid quickly closes the distance and unleashes a focused attack at point-blank range.  He even targets the same area he injured the previous day.  With that, Ganta wins the award for tactic of the week.  In the end, Senji rather gruesomely loses an eye, but it means he can come back with a cool eye-patch!

Sket Dance – You Gotta Have Friends

I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but I love delinquent characters.  It gives the writers a lot of latitude to play with the character.  Sket Dance has been a rocky series up to this point.  Sometimes it presses all the right buttons, but other times I really wonder why I’m still watching the show.  Well, Momoka’s puppet show fell solidly in within the first group.

D'awwwww, it warms the heart! I loved those kids in the audience.

Many times, we view bullies as some sort of monster.  How dare they harm our friends or family!?  Some probably do it just for the sake of doing it.  On the other hand, you can’t forget they have feelings too.  When people shun you all the time, you can easily start to lash out at them.  Pushing people away is easier than bringing them close, after all.  The more you lash out, the more you increase that reputation.  Turning the tide around might seem like an impossible task.  I’m not saying bullies shouldn’t be punished.  I’m saying, rather than jump straight to the conclusion, maybe we should try to learn why they act they way they do.  I’m sure Momoka and her posse are glad they finally have a group of friends who accept them.  Their performance was glorious in my opinion.

Well, that about wraps it up for another week.  If you have any highlights you’d like to share, please feel free to do so in the comments or in a post of your own!

I haven’t written a game review in quite some time, and I can attribute it to not playing anything particularly noteworthy.  However, I managed to come into some Xbox games recently, and one of them stuck out to me.  I remember years ago I played a demo of Jet Grind Radio for the Dreamcast, and I always wanted to really play it.  I had my opportunity with its successor, Jet Set Radio Future.  It’s been nearly a decade since its release, so let’s see how it holds up over time.

The game has a fairly simple framework.  The city of Tokyo-To has come under siege by various gangs vying for control of the major city sectors.  In addition, a corporate enterprise led by the mayor of the city wants to enforce police rule and take away the people’s freedoms.  You play the role of the GGs, a group of teenage skaters intent on taking back the city.  Really, the story does nothing more than provide a means to move you from point A to point B to point C.  Along the way you seize control of sectors by tagging over your rival’s graffiti.  Taking the area prompts them to come out of hiding and confront you for a challenge.  In addition, you have to fight off the corrupt officers who want nothing more than your body on slab in the morgue.  All of this roughly translates to 10-15 hours of game play to complete the chapter-formatted storyline.

You might easily mistake this for one of the great number of “extreme sports” games like the Tony Hawk series.  You would make a terrible mistake.  JSRF is actually an action/adventure game with roller blades glued onto your feet.  Thus, you work with a stripped down control scheme.  The analog stick moves you around, and it must always be engaged to move.  Touching a rail with your feet immediately attaches you to it, and you do not need to deal with balance.  Pressing the X or Y buttons in a rhythm changes your grind and increases your speed.  You can only attain max speed while grinding, so you want to stay on rails as much as possible.  Air tricks automatically execute when you jump with enough speed, and you can again press X or Y to chain more air tricks together.  You need to pick up spray cans to tag objects, and you can sacrifice 10 of them to activate a speed boost.  Two big problems exist with the control scheme.  First, everything in the game handles loosely, including collision detection.  Second, the only way to disengage from a rail is to jump.  This can make for a frustrating time trying to get off a rail to land in a specific area.

You spend much of the first half running around the city reclaiming areas by tagging them.  This sounds very simplistic until you realize these gangs put their graffiti in the most out of the way locations.  A mechanic like this almost demands some level of customization.  The game provides many premade tags, and also gives you the option to design your own.  When the police show up, you switch into combat mode.  Your objective is to make the targets vulnerable and then spray them with paint.  Rival skaters and gangs will pose a variety of challenges.  Some areas naturally resemble a circuit, and so they challenge you to a lap around the area.  A team race also exists, where you and a CPU ally have to complete a lap without losing possession of a ball.  At other times, they literally challenge you to a game of tag, where you must spray them down until they submit.  All of these different styles of play help keep the action from becoming too repetitive.

In a game about the streets, much of the experience rides on the style and atmosphere provided by the game.  Over eight years, the graphics have lost a bit of their edge, but they still look decent.  The designers went with cell-shaded models, and all the characters have their own special touches.  The game also plays up the slightly futuristic setting in the main character designs.  The total area covered spans over a dozen different maps.  Each one of them contributes to a cohesive whole while incorporating new designs to make them unique.  You start in the bright streets and bustling bus station of the city.  Over time, you expand your influence to cover the suburbs, sewage system, slums, and skyscrapers.  My favorite area is a continuous hill made up entirely of houses, which you navigate by riding crisscrossing power lines.  The game provides a decent variety of music with 30 tracks in total, mostly in the hip-hop and techno genres.  Each area has a preset selection of tracks it plays in a cycle.  The soundtrack has some real winners, such as Aisle 10, Funky Dealer, and I Love Love You.  It also has a few very poor choices, like Birthday Cake, which made me want to mute the game every time it played.  Since you have no control over the playlist, you just have to take the good with the bad here.

Time for the bottom line.  The game will turn some of you off right away with its style and themes.  I can’t blame you, it’s not for everyone.  The game can be difficult at times, but for the most part, it maintains a fair difficulty curve.  They developers also packed the world with optional goals and collectables to keep you playing after the credits roll.  JSRF does have flaws, but they never detract too much from the experience.  If you can find the game used, it is definitely worth the low price of admission.

Final Score: 8.5/10 GGs