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.

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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 »

Took too long to fin­ish this book; despite the fore­shad­ow­ing, this vol­ume isn’t any­thing like the movie’s events.

[takat­suki]

Bun­gaku Shoujo [Lit­er­a­ture Girl; I don’t like Yen Press’ local­ized Book Girl title either] takes its theme very seri­ously, with each vol­ume of this ongo­ing seri­al­iza­tion par­al­lel­ing one par­tic­u­larly famous piece of lit­er­a­ture. The expo­si­tionary first vol­ume cor­re­lates to the sec­ond best-selling novel in Japan: Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human. As the two titles would sug­gest, Book Girl and the Sui­ci­dal Mime is a dra­matic story about self-destructive indi­vid­u­als who had lost faith in their very own human­ity and thus, life itself.

Some peo­ple are inher­ently flawed; no mat­ter what they do, they can­not be saved.

But is that really the case? Read the rest of this entry »

How many times could you keep try­ing to solve the same prob­lem? liv­ing through the same events, the same day? Would 27,755 times prove too much?

“Kazuki Hoshino… I’m here to break you.” said the new girl who couldn’t take it any­more as she intro­duced her­self, once again.

Utsuro no Hako to Zero no Maria (lit: Box of Void and Maria of Zero), or Hako­mari as the title is way too long, is a mys­tery light novel series by Eiji Mik­age. It’s rather hard to explain Hako­mari, since it doesn’t fit into the mur­der mys­tery genre at all and can only be par­tially described as a super­nat­ural mys­tery. If any­thing, Hako­mari is a dra­matic slice-of-life mys­tery, and the oxy­moronic descrip­tion should give one a hint of just how unique it is. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, it’s done! We fin­ished our work on it! The leg­endary web novel that accrued over 6.5 mil­lion views on a per­sonal site has now been brought to English!

From merely the descrip­tion, Sword Art Online is a novel that’s easy to pass and ignore. Its premise is ridicu­lous yet hardly orig­i­nal. Its char­ac­ters are very cliche. Its plot and char­ac­ter devel­op­ment are rel­a­tively sim­ple and uti­lize some very com­mon tropes. Its art and char­ac­ter designs remind one of Rag­narok Online. Every­thing about it screams generic scifi/fantasy writ­ten for gamers by a gamer. Yet despite all that, Reki Kawahara’s work is a piece of art that leaves any reader with the sligh­est MMO expe­ri­ence doubt­less of SAO’s pop­u­lar­ity and why he is the grand prize win­ner of the 2008 Dengeki Novel Prize. The truth is a sim­ple one, eas­ily dis­cernible once you flip past the first few pages:

His sto­ry­telling style is sim­ply intoxicating

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Read­ing Eternal’s review on the themes of Fate/stay night has got­ten my brains crank­ing again regard­ing this epic sto­ry­line that Nasu (and Urobuchi in Fate/zero) have envi­sioned and brought to life before us. Eter­nal high­lights how the three paths of Fate/stay night — Fate, Unlim­ited Blade Works, Heaven’s Feel — are brought together to con­cep­tu­al­ize the ques­tion of “what is the def­i­n­i­tion of a hero”. Although, this same com­par­i­son may be made to sev­eral other themes within the Fat­e­v­erse. To broaden out the scope, one can say that Nasu’s writ­ings are a crit­i­cal analy­sis by sto­ry­telling on “the def­i­n­i­tion of ideal within dif­fer­ent scopes of black and white”.

Typ­ing this reminds me of the days when I played Fate/stay night before it was trans­lated, rely­ing on a dic­tio­nary and lots of guess­work… result­ing in migraines and a desire to never do so again.

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