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 »

A story of unre­lent­ing revenge, heart­felt redemp­tion, and ever­last­ing love after ten years of agony…

G-Senjou no Maou [Lit: The Devil on G-string] is an Akabeisoft2 visual novel released in 2008. Made by the cre­ators of Sharin no Kuni (my favorite), the acclaimed G-senjou with its com­bi­na­tion of a sus­pense­ful crim­i­nal schemes & detec­tive mind games, brilliantly-executed char­ac­ter drama, an awe­some & well-developed core cast, and one of the best story finales ever. For fans of non-generic visual nov­els who enjoy either a mys­tery thriller or a won­der­ful romance/drama, this is def­i­nitely a must-play~ (Much thanks to TLwiki for their won­der­ful Christ­mas present to the com­mu­nity) Read the rest of this entry »

Com­bine cul­tural ref­er­ences imported from across Asia, a duality-world built of Shaman­is­tic inpira­tion, and a focused cast of real­is­ti­cally devel­oped char­ac­ters— what comes out is a vividly imag­i­na­tive fan­tasy adven­ture that falls only one aspect short of ‘epic’.

Orig­i­nat­ing from a children’s fan­tasy novel series by Uehashi Nahoko and directed by the Kamiyama Kenji (GITS:SAC, Eden of the East), Seirei no Moribito is eas­ily amongst the best fan­tasy anime series of recent years with its Ghibli-esque high pro­duc­tion val­ues and character-driven sto­ry­telling. But at the same time, its per­for­mance was notably con­strained by the tar­get demo­graphic of its source mate­r­ial, for the poten­tial of its fan­tas­tic world was never prop­erly brought out. Read the rest of this entry »

“This game is insane… I don’t mean insanely good or insanely bad, but that it leads to insanity.”

Remem­ber 11: The Age of Infin­ity was devel­oped by KID in 2004; it’s the last title in the Infin­ity series, which includes Never 7 and the hugely-popular Ever 17. It’s a mys­tery thriller visual novel that’s com­pared with the likes of When They Cry series at times. The story is fast-paced and addic­tive. The strange ‘body-displacing’ phe­nom­e­non will suck you in quickly and bog­gle your mind. But it’s also rather short— I got both good end­ings and most of the infor­ma­tive bad end­ings in just ~15 hours of game time; also unfor­tu­nately, the end­ing to Remember11 is extremely unsat­is­fy­ing, and although amaz­ing in its own rite, the lim­ited rev­e­la­tions cer­tainly don’t match up to its pre­de­ces­sor Ever17. Nev­er­the­less, much thanks to its trans­la­tion staff over at TLWiki. 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 »

[Yoshino]

On the sur­face, Nat­sume Yuu­jin­chou seemed merely a super­nat­ural slice-of-life series about the daily life of a timid boy. Nat­sume Takashi may have inher­ited both the abil­ity to see Ayakashi (spir­its of Japan­ese folk­lore) and his grand­mother Reiko’s pow­er­ful Book of Friends, but his life was hardly the adven­tur­ous one Reiko once led and appeared to lack the over­ar­ch­ing plot we expect of main pro­tag­o­nists — except Natsume’s jour­ney through fan­tasy was not a sim­ple phys­i­cal one, but a spir­i­tual trip which encom­passed many of the most fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples of Bud­dhist phi­los­o­phy. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s unfair to clas­sify Hourou Musuko as merely a gen­der­ben­der. Where the aver­age merely uses gen­der iden­tity as a plot device, Hourou Musuko addresses it seri­ously, real­is­ti­cally, as a coming-of-age topic; and that made all the dif­fer­ence — enough to enter its upcom­ing adap­ta­tion as the Win­ter 2011 Noit­a­m­ina slot anime~

[CH65 fan-art, by KL]

Writ­ten by Shimura Takako (Aoi Hana), Hourou Musuko fol­lows the story of Nitori Shuichi, a fem­i­nine boy with a seri­ous case of con­fused gen­der iden­tity. Yet as he meets other friends, includ­ing ‘Takatsuki-kun’, a boy­ish girl who wishes she was born a man, Yuki, a gor­geous post-surgery trans-woman, and Makoto, a boy who is con­fused between tran­sex­u­al­ism and homo­sex­u­al­ity, Shuichi’s desires of want­ing to become a girl slowly blos­soms, all at the same time as he under­goes puberty, falls in ado­les­cent love, and watches hor­rif­i­cally as his own body mature into that of a man. 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 »