[ azumi ichiju＠tsuitta ]

Angel Beats! was a lot of things. It had an ambi­tious goal, striv­ing to present the many aspects of life within the short span of thir­teen episodes. It tried to be deep and philo­soph­i­cal, yet couldn’t put forth the time and focus. It attempted to be log­i­cally con­sis­tent, even though the set­ting had lit­tle of it to begin with. I could lit­er­ally pick it apart from its sto­ry­writ­ing flaws. But… Maeda Jun had set out to bring us life in under five hours of screen­time, and his work gave us joy, laugh­ter, and tears from so many per­spec­tives. It brought such an enjoy­able time while pre­sent­ing one beau­ti­fully touch­ing scene after another, all of them cumu­lat­ing towards a breath­tak­ing cli­matic con­clu­sion… what­ever its flaws are; I loved this show. Read the rest of this entry »

The shoujo com­edy genre is mostly known for its flow­ers, sparkles, and sug­ary bub­bles, so for the longest time I couldn’t under­stand the use of orga­nized crime as a premise within shoujo com­edy (shoujo smut is a dif­fer­ent story). Out­side the whole ‘bad boy’ image, what’s so great about get­ting deeply involved with a pack of uncouth and rough-looking thugs, espe­cially given the social stigma and the pos­si­bil­ity of get­ting involved in their gang wars?

Well, Ban­cho pol­i­ticks aside, Arakure (or Wild Ones as Viz Media calls it; no clue) sure taught me that I’ve never paid atten­tion to the Japan­ese Roman­ti­ciza­tion of Yakuza. While Arakure mostly avoids the ‘crime’ part, it really high­lights the beau­ti­ful ide­al­ism sur­round­ing them, from the broth­erly love to their ver­sion of chivalry; plus, the Yakuza humor is just hilar­i­ous. Read the rest of this entry »

I can’t remem­ber why I dropped the show dur­ing its first air­ing, because it con­tains every­thing I love…

Simoun is an under­ap­pre­ci­ated title that has much to be praised for: a well-executed expo­si­tion that fully out­lines one of the most cre­ative fantasy-scifi set­tings in just two episodes; a diverse cast that makes leaps and bounds in char­ac­ter and rela­tion­ship devel­op­ment with skillfully-written melo­drama; a war story that is deep and engag­ing, pro­pelled by the themes of love (in its many forms), pos­si­bil­i­ties, and becom­ing an adult; not to men­tion one of the best anime sound­tracks of the decade with its awe-inspiring clas­si­cals. There’s also the mat­ter that it’s pow­ered, lit­er­ally, by the divine power of yuri~

But to me, Simoun’s bril­liance shines the most in how every­thing cas­caded from the cre­ativ­ity of its premise, its use of sharp con­trast between beauty and cat­a­stro­phe to drive ide­o­log­i­cal themes… Read the rest of this entry »

Tales of sav­ing the world usu­ally involves adven­tur­ing and con­fronting dif­fi­cult adver­saries right? Well, what about sav­ing the world by befriend­ing a lit­tle girl and savor­ing cakes, stars, and the joy of every­day life? Momo is rather unique in this, and despite being a shoujo slice-of-life which usu­ally falls to extremely slow pac­ing, the series quickly sucked me in with its plot hooks, rapid char­ac­ter devel­op­ment, and some light drama that touches the com­mon inse­cu­ri­ties and issues in real life.

It’s also nice to read a shoujo manga where fawn­ing over guys is the last thing on the heroine’s mind, where she is not only inde­pen­dent and strong, but also very level-minded. Com­bin­ing a lack of unnec­es­sary angst and no per­fect bishies steal­ing spot­lights goes a long way to adding real­ism to the char­ac­ters and their actions.

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My first impres­sion was that this game is just out­right ridicu­lous: premise of steam-powered trans­form­ing mechs launch­ing from a secret base beneath a Broad­way the­ater, stereo­typ­i­cal char­ac­ters as flat as their card­board cutout pre­sen­ta­tion, plenty of super-shounen tropes in the story… It’s even got wee­aboo cul­ture all over — espe­cially when the open­ing scenes involve a half-Japanese half-Texan cow­boy samu­rai fea­tured as the main hero­ine… Wat? （￣～￣;）

But you know, I love not grind­ing, or wor­ry­ing about expe­ri­ence dis­tri­b­u­tion, or max­i­miz­ing expe­ri­ence gain from every bat­tle. Because in Sakura Wars V, you level up by talk­ing and forg­ing inter-party bonds, visual novel style; kind of like Per­sona social links, except bet­ter since it actu­ally lev­els you up. So take all of that frus­tra­tion out and add some fresh inven­tive­ness to each bat­tle (Valkyria Chron­i­cles style, this is by the same dev team) and you have some real Tac­ti­cal RPG gam­ing, like hop­ping between sky­scraper roofs destroy­ing artillery or an aer­ial bat­tles in the New York City sub­way — yes really.

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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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Zen­ryoku Zenkai!!!

“Mad Sci­en­tists + Rag­ing Les­bian Super­heroes”, that’s what I call To Aru Kagaku no Rail­gun in five words. Frankly, I enjoyed this show immensely, high­lighted by the fact its one of the few series I kept up to date with despite hav­ing my atten­tion con­sumed by the release of FF13; yet on the other hand, I had a great deal of trou­ble pin­ning down just what I liked about it. For starters, this show is all over the place, and “incon­sis­tent” hardly begins to describe it. Most of the episodes are dom­i­nated by slice-of-life com­edy and seinen yuri/moe shenani­gans. Yes, Rail­gun does an excel­lent job of tying filler episodes together and weav­ing a main sto­ry­line out of them, build­ing up the sus­pense while still tast­ing the sweet crepes. But while it does a good job at chain­ing together details, it also has one of the most incon­sis­tent mood and logic pac­ing ever. The atmos­phere rou­tinely changes with com­pletely abrupt­ness, ruin­ing what oth­er­wise could have been a dra­matic buildup. Author Kazuma Kamachi also shows that he’s too obvi­ously a very ama­teur­ish fantasy/scifi writer: despite hav­ing the name of A Cer­tain Sci­en­tific Rail­gun, any­one who took basic elec­tro­mag­netic physics can eas­ily pin­point all the far­fetched BS in the series’ mechan­ics that com­pletely con­tra­dict sci­en­tific laws.

But despite its many flaws and overused cliches, Rail­gun never tried to be over-dramatic or deep. Instead it pre­sented its ama­teur bak­ing skills with a glit­ter­ing layer of icing, rang­ing from action-packed eye-candy to Kuroko’s hilar­i­ous antics and expres­sions. It may not pass the test of any cake anime con­nois­seur look­ing for the next gem, but it sure tasted good for some­thing you just want to enjoy on a shal­low, sur­face level.

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George Lucas can take his fran­chise and call it some­thing else, because this is the true Star Wars, and not one of those super-cliched eye-candy. For one, Leg­end of the Galac­tic Heroes (LOGH) is any­thing but the story of the gal­lant hero ver­sus the evil empire, even if those pilot suits look remark­ably similar.

There are no antag­o­nists within the main cast, only pro­tag­o­nists with dif­fer­ent moti­va­tions, tak­ing dif­fer­ent paths to become leg­ends in their own right. There are no stock worlds, only Star Sys­tems care­fully molded to the Author’s needs. Yet just when you think you know what is going to hap­pen next thanks to the detailed fore­shad­ow­ing, the plot tosses a wench at you to spin it in a some­what dif­fer­ent yet com­pletely log­i­cal direc­tion that you should have seen com­ing episodes ago. Char­ac­ter, set­ting, and story, this is when you know the series succeeded.

But that’s not where Yoshiki Tanaka, author of the orig­i­nal nov­els, truly shines. No, it’s the themes of the show, the unbi­ased side-by-side com­par­isons of ideals and morals between the Demo­c­ra­tic Alliance and the Auto­cratic Empire, that allows LOGH is shine brightly even from amongst the best. This is where the series’ orig­i­nal­ity and pro­found depth comes from: the con­flict of ideals that is not only given bal­ance in pre­sen­ta­tion but also expanded to epic pro­por­tions by exem­pli­fy­ing almost every kind of mis­take made by man to date.

If any anime truly deserves a per­ma­nent spot on the MAL top 10 list, LOGH is it, even if it has a few crit­i­cal flaws (which I might get to later in another post). I think any­one who has a taste for explo­ration of the intel­lec­tual, philo­soph­i­cal, and espe­cially in tick­ling moral­ity, would greatly appre­ci­ate this epic story and pile lav­ish praises upon it, as many have done so like here, here, and here. It may have been my biggest under­tak­ing as an anime fan with its 110 OVA episodes of 28 min­utes each (as opposed to the nor­mal 21 minute TV episodes), but many of its 3–6 episode sub­arcs had given me more to thor­oughly savor and enjoy than entire full-season series. Don’t be fooled by the length either, cause this show has vir­tu­ally no filler, and even a sin­gle episode skipped can leave one bewil­dered on a later event.

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