Marisa, drawn by DaDa on pixiv, wishes you a Happy (Belated) Halloween~

A bit late, but I haven’t been posting. That’s an unavoidable, inexplicable fact. I write more often on Lang-8, and that’s in Japanese, mind you. And I update Poupee more than I update this site |D Speaking of poupee, I found some guy who actually posted stuff there and dressed up his poupee and shtuff. *trauma trauma* And then I just LOL’d.

I’ll be talking about games I’ve picked up/ have wanted to pick up, as well as the anime I’ve picked up and dropped.

I figured I should try and use my holidays to play some game that I’d wanted to play, so I did. I’m playing Pi Story now, but I lag up in dungeons/ maps/ whatever you call the places the pi bring you to because the connection’s pretty bad for some reason. I don’t usually like to team up with strangers, so it’s quite horrible for me when all the monsters spawn like crazy (i.e. Petite Forest, with the dang orbs). I’d play Mabinogi, but I don’t live in North America. I tried the bypass thing but uh I kept getting problems. So I gave up. ._.u I considered the Japanese server but I couldn’t be bothered in the end.

RO2 is coming soon. I’m not sure I should join or not with my grades in the gutters already.

I think I shall make it a habit to post Miku fanart in every future post… or not. Fyi this is by ぷちでびる (read: puchidevil) on pixiv.

I’ve also picked up some new anime, such as Skip Beat! (quite horrible, but oh well the manga was good I heard and I can’t be bothered to read the manga) and Garei Zero (the plot kind of goes nowhere though ep 4 was funny, but I just had to watch each episode to get to the bottom of it but I’m at my limit and gonna drop it damyou). *Edit, I’ve dropped it. Although Kemeko’s not that bad, it’s just not my taste (Fanservice aka ’saggy bwbs’, and Crazy-with-barely-any-logic-nor-meaning?!), so I’m watching it with little enthusiasm. I’ve picked up Tales of the Abyss (just because it’s one of the ‘Tales’ and I liked the cheagles and Luke didn’t irritate me as much at first and I have no means of getting my Tales of Symphonia for my Wii since I’m broke), Kuroshitsuji (the butler’s pretty much the only character who prevents me from dropping this), Clannad After Story (I don’t quite mind KyoAni works), Toradora! (despite whiny tsundere Al-gone-wrong, the duo are funny) and Michiko to Hacchin (this has potential I believe) although none of these shine quite as much as Kannagi does. Do I have to add in a ‘Kya’ or ‘Squee’ to show just how much I love it? Kya~! Squee~! (I don’t normally do this, you know.) I just love the puns, the tsukkomi, most of all the comedy duo themselves, etc., so that might be my weakness, but the bottom line is I just love this anime. Also, Nagi, tsundere as she might be, doesn’t irritate me much since she’s more like Kana from Minamike than a tsundere. Kugyu voices too many tsunderes already, and I don’t even like her that much :\ 

I dropped Hyakko (bad art and bored me despite a Kana-like character, sorry Jazzu), Yozakura (average but boring too), DMC (too vulgar and way too random for me, dropped quite a while ago, although I did enjoy Gag Manga Biyori) and Index (average and reminding me of Mx0 but ohwell, nothing special). 

Ah, gone are the days when I enjoyed Mahou Shoujo and watched anime (as well as the Powerpuff Girls) in Chinese. Akazukin Cha Cha was one of them… Ah, fyi this is by yukke.

My gut tells me that at least 99.9999% of the people who bothered to visit this page just went ‘tl;dr’ as usual and to those who actually know me in real life, this post probably wasn’t relevant to your interests (I don’t really post about my life here so please do look somewhere else where I do if you can even find one in English |D). I wrote a lot of run-on sentences today orz. And I probably abused the parentheses a little too much.

In any case, to sum up, please do watch Kannagi if you haven’t/ don’t plan to |D ! Especially if you love funny anime

And the Kannagi Girls are (from left) Zange-chan, Nagi and Tsugumi. Jin, the main guy and chibi in the centre, is pretty funny, as are his fellow art clubbers. Especially Akiba-kun, who has the same voicer as Simon from Gurren-Lagann. Btw, this is high res so click for fullview.

*Technically, the above image was a highres scan that I had to tweak a little in Photoshop in order for it to look better.

Busy week of anime – between the couple summer shows finishing up and the many new shows to catch, there was hardly time for much else. I’m pretty happy with the autumn season so far; many of the shows are starting off very well and there’s been a few that have even been able to surprise me.

The scores:

Soul Eater, episode 26 – 12+/12

Natsume Yuujinchou, episode 13 – 12+++/12 (end)

Ryoko’s Case Files, episode 13 – 12++/12 (end)

Toradora!, episode 2 – 12+/12

Hyakko, episode 2 – 8/12 B+

(previously reviewed)

Kannagi, episode 1 – 7/12 B

To Aru Majutsu no Index, episode 1 – 12+/12

Shikabane Hime: Aka, episode 1 – 12/12

Tales of the Abyss, episode 1 – 04/12 C

Yozakura Quartet, episode 1 – 8/12 B+

Kemeko DX, episode 1 – 10/12 A

Ga-Rei Zero, episode 1 – 9/12 A-

Chaos;Head, episode 1 – 11/12 A+

Thoughts and Highlights

Would you do it for a scooby snack?

Let’s start with the only holdover from the summer season that I watched this week – Soul Eater. I was impressed by this episode a lot. I think the set episode count of this series is causing Bones to eschew the typical structure of a shounen show. After letting the Demon God go, I would have expected this anime to show the main characters training to power themselves up (like after the end of the Soul Society arc on Bleach). Instead this episode shows that some of our characters getting dispatched to the next trouble spot. The other reason that I liked this episode was that we got a lot of Crona, who is fast becoming one of my favorite characters. I feel odd saying that but then again, Sylar on Heroes is becoming one of my favorite characters especially lately with the writers making Hiro act stupid beyond belief.

One more of the fox spirit, I hope he's back in the second season

I thought it was funny how everyone had a different name for him

Slice-of-life shows don’t, by definition, have a convenient plot structure that allow them to have an “ending” but it’s nice when some sense of closure can be given the viewer. I was really curious how Natsume would end, especially with the second season starting in the winter – would they try to give the show an ending or just act like the show was going on hiatus for a season? I wouldn’t have minded if this season didn’t have an ending but was happy that one was given. Having the chance to meet many of the ghosts and people one last time from the show was the perfect way to end one of the year’s best shows.

She's standing on a tank, in case your wondering

Ryoko’s Case Files’ last episode was likewise the perfect way to end the show. I hope this gets a second season, it really deserves it. If any of the fansubbers of [AonE-AnY] read this, thank you so much for providing a high quality fansub with a super-small file size.

Toradora

Finally, onto the fall shows that had their second episodes this week – Hyakko and Toradora. The first, Hyakko, didn’t really impress me again. I want to like this show but I can’t quite figure out what it’s doing wrong or what’s wrong with me. I’m not even holding the drop in animation quality of episode 2 against it. On the other hand, the second – Toradora – was very awesome. This is definitely shaping up to be a more original show then I imagined and they haven’t even introduced the fifth main character that shows up in both the opening and ending. Also, Toradora is reminding me of another of J.C.Staff’s wonderful shows – Honey & Clover; I don’t know if this is intentional or just something I’m reading into the show that’s not there.

Note the heights of the two girls on the right ...

... and compare that to this screen shot

Alas, he doesn't have any cabbage

My first unplanned anime title of the season. I have a younger brother who’s re-re-replaying Tales of the Abyss right now and I thought he might enjoy watching the anime. Since he’s only twelve, I wanted to watch a couple of episodes to make sure nothing would be objectionable if he was to watch.

Rating: 4/12 C

That was a chore to get through – the things I do for my little brother. In the end I decided not to even mention the existence of this anime to him, his time is better spent elsewhere.

The show starts off on the wrong foot with at least two minutes devoted to introducing the world. Don’t they realize almost the entire audience for this show is made up of people that has already played the game and don’t need an introduction? Then there’s the storytelling principle of showing and not telling. It’s better to show the reader/listener what’s going on instead of just telling what’s happening. Sometimes a narration is necessary but that wasn’t the case here.

In Hyakko, they can jump out of the second story window

Merely saying this first episode was blandly generic doesn’t do this show justice. Towards the end of the episode when our “hero” faced a group of animals, I was seriously wishing that the animals would win just for something expected to happen.

I’ll stop here, I’m sure this is someone’s cup of tea – just look at the dozen or so groups that are subbing this – but it’s not mine. Personally, the next time they make an anime adaptation of a video game, I’m hopeing for Katamari Damacy done by either Shaft or Gainax.

Never a good idea to interrupt a couple when there fighting :)

I found the maids and gardener to be the most interesting characters of the episode