Well we’ve fin­ished trans­lat­ing 1st vol­ume and it’s a sum­mer anime, so here’s the review!

Siko­rsky really isn’t the best illus­tra­tor, but he gets better.

I wasn’t par­tic­u­larly impressed by Cam­pi­one! when my friend first dragged me onto the project, its first chap­ter open­ing up like a typ­i­cal harem romance-comedy and the sec­ond fea­tur­ing a clas­sic shounen contemporary-fantasy bat­tle. But I was promised GAR enough to slay gods and the mythol­ogy to come along, so I kept with it, and for once I was taught not to judge a book by its open­ing chap­ters either. It’s still a harem series, but when author Taket­suki Jou decides to fight blas­phemy with blas­phemy, lead by a male com­pa­ra­ble with the demigod heroes of Greece and a hero­ine that manip­u­lates every­one (espe­cially her team­mates) under her fin­ger­tips, this becomes quite the cre­ative endeavor into mythol­ogy — of Heretic Gods.

Fans of mythol­ogy, of super­pow­ered GAR leads, of a harem that just might actu­ally work? Well this is the story for you.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tyranny may flour­ish under the wis­dom of one.
— Yet unre­strained, it takes but another to ruin the works of all.
Democ­racy may ensure a bal­anced hand.
— Yet dis­so­ci­ated, it con­cedes to the desires of the now and many.

Thus, the Philoso­pher King shall be united with the Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Repub­lic.
— Grant the liege his orders, for civ­i­liza­tion must advance.
— Grant the peo­ple their voices, for the liege must answer.

Rev­o­lu­tion is the bat­tle­field on which author­ity is founded.
Bureau­cracy is the bat­tle­field in which progress is endorsed.
— But an Imper­a­tor has his allies; he need not walk alone, he must not walk alone.

This was the story of a col­le­giate cor­po­rate scion raised in occu­pied ter­ri­tory, who stum­bled through to the last bas­tion of mankind, saved by the hands of the black­est ops, and involved with a team that deemed no action too atro­cious for their goals, all to redis­cover the legacy of a dis­tant Utopian dream that will alter the oncom­ing strug­gle for dom­i­nance in the frac­tur­ing new world.

I men­tioned in my last post that I’ve been work­ing on a light novel project and that it was close to being made avail­able for open beta. Well, above is the syn­op­sis, and it’s ready now. Actu­ally been ready for a week after I revived the Projects page.

Avalon Beyond the Eclipse

It’s a scifi/fantasy drama, in a set­ting I spent a lot of time build­ing that would hope­fully be one that truly melds magic and tech­nol­ogy, and my themes were def­i­nitely some­what inspired by the series that really left an impres­sion on me: The Twelve King­doms, and Crest/Banner of the Stars. Just add some more shoujo ele­ments cour­tesy of things like Hakushaku no You­sei and this is my production~!

I also returned to my role as an edi­tor on Baka-Tsuki light novel trans­la­tions, after a friend there dragged me in to help a slow­ing project — Cam­pi­one!

It’s actu­ally quite an amaz­ing series~ (and def­i­nitely one of the most orig­i­nal action rom-coms I’ve seen; planned for Sum­mer[?] ani­ma­tion). Although due to the lack of staff I’ve dou­bled up as a trans­la­tor as well… no bet­ter way to rein­force my rarely used Chi­nese skills~ I’ll put together a review after vol 1 fin­ish translation.

I finally brought up enough courage to log in again…

It’s been a while, and I deeply apol­o­gize for those who still fol­low me for my sud­den death and long-time dis­ap­pear­ance. Some life issues hap­pened, plus I was a lit­tle… trau­ma­tized (too strong) by a cer­tain expe­ri­ence with aniblog­gers dur­ing Otakon and wanted noth­ing to do with aniblog­ging for a while. I think I may be recovering…

Nev­er­the­less, given my per­sonal and career com­mit­ments nowa­days, it sim­ply isn’t pos­si­ble for me to blog anime any­more — Major Arcana as an anime blog is for­ever dead.

Good thing I never made it to be an anime blog. I think that’s part of where I went wrong was when I pre­tended to use this place as an anime blog.

In fact Major Arcana orig­i­nally started up as a project/personal blog, and I fully intend to return it to its roots. I might still write about anime-related stuff every once a while, and def­i­nitely try to squeeze time for light nov­els again (Because almost nobody writes about light nov­els!!! Does the ani­fan­dom read any­thing with­out pic­tures!?!? Hon­estly the lack of trans­la­tions for excep­tional light nov­els, espe­cially out­side the seinen sec­tor like Hakushaku to You­sei or Saiunkoku Mono­gatari is one of the great­est tragedies of ani­fan­dom!!! /rant). But hon­estly, there are more than enough peo­ple aniblog­ging as it is.

Far too many… and they don’t need me to squeeze in, and I never did like crowds…

As for projects go, well using Major Arcana as a VNRPG project blog was a chap­ter of my col­lege that won’t return. But, after I stopped blog­ging last year, I finally real­ized what part of me I had to shelve for one-and-half years to make this blog work. My spe­cialty has never been about build­ing my own per­son­al­ity, a skill rather needed for blog­gers. Nope, I’d much rather go back to the cre­ation process, work on set­tings and char­ac­ters— besides, there are few things that allow one to appre­ci­ate oth­ers’ sto­ries more than writ­ing some yourself.

In 2011, for the first time in my life, I man­aged to fin­ish NaNoW­riMo.

It’s been going through revi­sions upon revi­sions of edit­ing ever since, thanks to my friends whom I (forcibly) drafted~

So there you have it. My love of light nov­els fully extends to writ­ing them… and that’s where I’ll be tak­ing this blog down again.

But for those who fol­lowed me to talk about anime, well I guess this is a (belated) good­bye! \o/ Hope to catch you every so while, still around the sphere.

Some­how, I tend go miss­ing for a while and then fin­ish edit­ing posts in batches xD

[Deisel-turbo]

In many ways, Moshi­dora could be seen as a fic­tion­al­ized, dra­ma­tized man­age­ment text­book that started off with pure tech­ni­cal­ity and even­tu­ally brought audi­ence sym­pa­thy to the screen. Many of its char­ac­ters were never given proper depth, and for much of the series it felt more like an aca­d­e­mic case study than a story. It’s hardly sur­pris­ing (in fact I expected it), as the name dic­tates that the entire theme was cen­tered around a sin­gle book. But just as its own Mar­ket­ing went, it accom­plished this goal won­der­fully. My only regret is that I didn’t have the chance to watch it years ago— because man­age­ment skills often come into play way before you expect it.

Ducker’s Man­age­ment is def­i­nitely not just for ‘busi­ness­men in suits’… Read the rest of this entry »

Cul­tural shock always inter­ests me— assum­ing I’m not the one expe­ri­enc­ing it xD

Expe­ri­enc­ing the dif­fer­ent man­ner­isms of far­away cul­tures can be bewil­der­ing, espe­cially when one has no clue how to inter­pret or respond to what is obvi­ously an extremely seri­ous ges­ture. Ikoku Meiro comes as one of the only anime I’ve seen which shows this in full impact, as Yune’s per­fectly pos­tured Dogeza left Claude com­pletely off bal­ance and, in his case, utterly out­raged. It’s not really sur­pris­ing either— the Dogeza, or any form of pros­tra­tions that’s so deeply set into tra­di­tional Asian man­ner­isms, had always been mis­un­der­stood by west­ern­ers not accom­mo­dated to the cul­ture. Read the rest of this entry »

When I told my friend I was going to buy a com­mer­cial OELVN to check it out, the response was “Why would you do that!?”

Even west­ern fans of Japan­ese visual nov­els often frown upon the OELVN (Orig­i­nal Eng­lish Lan­guage Visual Novel) com­mu­nity. Pro­duc­tion qual­i­ties are always a con­cern, as the ama­teur teams formed by west­ern enthu­si­asts sim­ply have no chance of com­pet­ing against fan-translated famous Japan­ese visual novel titles. But there’s always a start— the Key staffers’ first big title, ONE, cer­tainly had nei­ther good art­work nor detailed sto­ry­writ­ing, even com­pared to ani­ma­tion from back then. But just as the early visual nov­els offered some­thing dif­fer­ent from the ani­manga medium, OELVNs have their own appeal. Yet as far as I can tell, OELVN groups haven’t made much progress at all in expand­ing over the recent years, espe­cially in com­par­i­son to vis­nov local­iza­tion com­pa­nies like Man­gagamers. Read the rest of this entry »

Menma, always there yet out of sight… [Ayazaka]

Ever won­dered what AnoHana would be like if we, the audi­ence, couldn’t see Menma either? Would we believe Jinta from the start? Would we, like the rest of the gang, feel that he was hal­lu­ci­nat­ing, stuck in the past, and slightly out of his mind? It cer­tainly would be a very dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence, watch­ing the reunion of friends unfold from the other (and major­ity) per­spec­tive. But would it still be as inter­est­ing and grip­ping? Read the rest of this entry »

Because the anime comes out this fall~ ^o^

Fate/zero is the pre­quel to the pop­u­lar visual-novel and anime Fate/stay night, tak­ing place ten years prior with Emiya Kir­it­sugu, Shirou’s adop­tive father, as the lead­ing role in yet another holy grail war, a seven-way bat­tle royale between mages and their sum­moned heroic spir­its. It is a action-packed, thrilling adven­ture, pro­pelled for­ward by the tremen­dous ide­o­log­i­cal con­flicts between its carefully-sculpted cast of char­ac­ters. Writ­ten by Urobuchi Gen (main writer for Madoka and Nitro+ works), Fate/zero not only makes a fan­tas­tic addi­tion to the exist­ing FSN saga by enhanc­ing many of its key yet once glanced-over details, but also breathes life into its own set of char­ac­ters and con­flicts, unique enough to stand out as more than just a ‘deriv­a­tive work’. Read the rest of this entry »