「正月２０１２」/「ZEN」

So my predictions have been a bit off, but there’s still plenty of time for Little Busters to get a KyoAni anime on that timeline! What I think is more surprising (other than Haruhi getting more anime before LB) is that the translation for the visual novel is finished and I’ve played through it, long before a Little Busters anime has even been announced.

Little Busters is an interesting experience for me, because it’s the first “real” Key visual novel I’ve played without knowing much going into it. Sure, there’s Planetarian, but that’s relatively short, so I don’t count it. Sure, there’s Angel Beats, but that’s not a visual novel. And sure, I’ve played Clannad, but it’s Clannad and I know everything about Clannad.

I mentioned before that Angel Beats made me wonder whether I really like Key or if I just really liked Clannad. Even better than an anime, I think the Little Busters visual novel is a perfect opportunity to see where my tastes lie.

Like any good Key work, Little Busters has to have a theme. That theme happens to be adolescence or childhood. Alright, then. From this, there are a bunch of things that are pretty similar to Angel Beats. We’ve got the setting down and there’s a good chunk of the game that’s spent on trying to put together a baseball team. At a glance it seems like it’s all about living out your youth and all that. The common route mostly just made me wonder why they bothered to create Angel Beats when they had this lying around.

You’ve got your usual suspects in the cast: socially awkward childhood friend who likes cats, disgustingly cheerful nice girl, shit-stirring genki girl, suspiciously combat-hardened and cool onee-sama, quiet book girl, and dojikko with verbal tic. But, the main character isn’t the usual Key template blank but mildly snarky dude. Instead, you’re a Hayate (from Hayate the Combat Butler) except you’re kind of weak instead of absurdly competent. You’ve also got a bunch of childhood friend bros, the Little Busters, who watch your back and are actually pretty important to the main story. Obviously, every important character ends up on the Little Busters baseball team.

Structurally, the whole thing is pretty similar to Clannad. You’ve got all of your routes that you have to do before you get a swing at the route that ties everything together. What’s different is the common route, where you’re building up stats and rounding up people and comedy happens. I actually like the common route, if I ignore being put through it about six times.

Where I’m pretty dissatisfied is with the side routes. I went in expecting the usual Key stuff with fatal sickness and astral projections. I think the main problem with this stuff in Little Busters is that the writers realized that they couldn’t fall back on the same old stuff again, so they tried to spin up some new awful tragedy for each character.

Before, the tragedies were pretty grounded. Someone lost a family member or someone is terminally ill. That stuff is easy to empathize with. The most outlandish stuff is the astral projection or animal spirit stuff, but even then, that stuff is sort of left to mystery.

In Little Busters, they take something simple and try to add another layer to it to try to make it new. So someone loses a family member, but they also regress into a catatonic state whenever they remember. Or someone is feeling out of place because they’re half-Japanese and struggling with their cultural identity, which is a real thing and you can empathize with that. But then they add this crazy backstory about their homeland under civil unrest and it’s like what.

And it’s not like they succeeded in making these developments new. I’ve watched and played almost all of the Key anime and visual novels and that basically let me SEE THE ENDING, so to speak (not that they weren’t making it extremely obvious). When I didn’t predict how a route would go when I got halfway through it, it was because there was the aforementioned ridiculous thing that was bolted on.

The “real” story, as in the right girl’s path together with the final route, is better in that the twists were actually kind of interesting instead of dumb and it’s where it differentiates itself from Angel Beats. How the story unfolds is a bit more clever than Clannad’s handling of the After Story route.

It’s definitely not as great as Clannad and I don’t think even the main route came together all that well. Even though it was better and actually interesting, a lot of it was still kind of ridiculous. I’ll let light orbs go, but this was kind of pushing it.

This all makes me kind of worried about Rewrite, but that has a trailer where a guy fights a dinosaur, so who knows?

He will use this knowledge in less than 24 hours.

So back when I was moving in at the start of the school year, I decided to try out my BD player on my hot new Dell monitor. Since I didn’t want to take out my Kara no Kyoukai BDs from their box, I opted to crack open the cheap flimsy Summer Wars case and throw in the disc. I hadn’t actually tried playing it yet anyway. I opted to skip the OZ introduction and go straight to the opening. First of all, I was disappointed that Funimation set the credits in goddamn Arial. Seriously, what? I find it difficult to believe they didn’t have Helvetica already from one of countless projects they could’ve used it on already.

More importantly, Funimation translated the chapter title of the book that Kenji was reading on the train. It turns out he was reading about Shor’s Algorithm. Shor’s Algorithm is the quantum algorithm that can factor integers in polynomial time. I alluded to it when I talked about Summer Wars and cryptography a while back and now’s as good a time as ever to get into it, since, you know, this means Kenji really is a quantum computer and all.

In quantum computing, instead of dealing with bits that are 1s and 0s, we deal with quantum bits, or qubits, that are denoted $|1\rangle$ and $|0\rangle$. These are really just quantum states. Quantum states have interesting properties, the most famous of which is being in superposition. Essentially, what this means is that we can have qubits that are in a state where it represents 1 and 0 simultaneously.

This turns out to be a very neat property to have. If we’ve got $n$ qubits, then we’ve got like $2^n$ inputs simultaneously. That’s great, right? We can compute things exponentially fast now! Well, it turns out it isn’t that simple.

Suppose that we do end up running an algorithm or something on our $2^n$ states. What happens when we want an answer? Well, we measure the state. The problem with that is that on measuring a quantum state, you won’t get all $2^n$ results. You’ll only get one of those results with a certain probability. What’s more is that once you measure a quantum state, you’re stuck with whatever it gave you and you can’t go back and check for another result.

That is obviously no good, because we want not just any answer, but, you know, the right answer. So it looks like approaching our problem from the naive interpretation doesn’t seem to work. And in fact, that immediately tells us that quantum computers aren’t a magic bullet that can help us solve SAT in a reasonable amount of time.

What we can do is manipulate our resultant quantum state so that the actual correct result we want is the one with very, very high probability and reduce the probability of getting any of the other results to near-zero. Of course, the problem is that we don’t know which result is the correct one to begin with. It’s actually this exact hitch that prevents us from efficiently solving general NP-complete problems.

Luckily, if we want to factor some numbers, we can take advantage of this. We can reduce the problem of factoring any old number into prime factors to the problem of order finding, which I’d mentioned before. For an integer $N$, there’s another integer $m$ such that $k^m=1\bmod N$ and we call $m$ the order of $k$ in the integers modulo $N$.

So suppose we have $k\bmod N$ with order $m$ and we decide to keep on taking powers of it, like $k\bmod N,k^2\bmod N, k^3\bmod N$ and so on. Eventually, we’ll get up to $k^m\bmod N$, at which point, that’s just $1$ and we start our cycle over again. The thing to note here is that this sequence is finite and periodic, which narrows down what we have to search through.

So what do we do? We create a quantum state for our period that’s in a superposition over all the powers of $k$ in $\bmod N$. We don’t know what our period is (that’s what we’re trying to find), so we just choose a large enough one that our order will be in the period. Now, in order to find this order, we do some magic with a Quantum Fourier Transform.

What?

So I mentioned at the beginning that when we look at a quantum state in superposition, we can think of it as returning one of the possible states with a certain amount of probability. How the probabilities for these quantum states work is actually more complicated and it’s from this that we can massage an answer out of our magic quantum algorithm.

Quantum states have something called amplitudes, which are kind of like probabilities, except that amplitudes can be basically any complex number as long as all of the amplitudes $a_i$ for a quantum state satisfy $\sum|a_i|^2=1$. If we’re just measuring a quantum state, this really doesn’t change anything, we just get state $|i\rangle$ back with probability $|a_i|^2$. But when we’re manipulating quantum states, there’s more to the amplitudes to consider.

If we think about amplitudes in terms of waves, we can see that we can cancel waves out. For instance, the states $\alpha|1\rangle$ and $-\alpha|1\rangle$ have the same probability if we were to measure them (since $|\alpha|^2=|-\alpha|^2$), but if we put them together and add them, they’d cancel each other out. What’s more is that since amplitudes are complex numbers, so we can think of them as having a direction (like a vector on the complex plane) and we end up with weird stuff like having things partially cancel out.

So just like a regular Fourier transform extracts some information about frequencies from a sequence, we can use the Quantum Fourier Transform to extract some information about all of this amplitude stuff that we can’t see just by measuring the state. And this is exactly how we can manipulate our state so that it increases the probability of the answer we want when we go to measure it and depress the probabilities of all the other answers.

Now after rambling about amplitudes and Fourier transforms and orders, we should probably step back and see what we’ve done in perspective. What we have is a way to find the order $m$ of an element $k \bmod N$. Well, actually, we don’t even have that quite yet. What we get out of all of that quantum stuff is just some information about $m$ that we have to manipulate further, except we just do that with plain old number theory instead of quantum computation. But, what we’ve kind of stumbled through is kind of a vague description of Shor’s algorithm.

Like I mentioned in the first Summer Wars post, this is the only way we know of so far that lets us factor large numbers (especially the ones that are used in cryptography) within a feasible amount of time. Again, Kenji (or at least his brain) is basically a quantum computer. Coincidentally, I played around a bit with what the implications could be if our brains were quantum computers in an earlier post on Kaiba.

But even if Kenji isn’t a quantum computer, he’s goddamn smart for a high school student. The theory behind the computing part of quantum computing is really just a ton of linear algebra, so an understanding of quantum mechanics isn’t really necessary (which is great, because I don’t know any of that crap). The quantum computing course that I took in my undergrad only had second year linear algebra as a formal prerequisite, but that was mainly to allow students from different departments to take it and also implies that you’ve got first and second year math down at the very least.

「魔法少女まどか☆マギカ」/「ゆーげん」

This show was made for me.

I think that should be your sign that you won’t find a paean to the greatness of Madoka and why it is man’s greatest work.

I mean, I was sold on the show already back when it was just “Shinbo makes an original anime”. That’s all it took.

And then it became “Shinbo makes an original magical girl anime” and I’m like, whoa, even better. I mean, I liked Nanoha. More of that? Yes, please.

And then it became “Shinbo makes an original magical girl anime with character designs by Ume Aoki, music by Yuki Kajiura, and script by Urobuchi Gen”. By this point I’d gone nuts. Magical girls! Designed by Ume-tentei! I mean, yeah, Kajiura and Urobuchi were kinda weird choices for a wide face magical girl show, but still, they’re great too. This will be amazing!

And then the characters! The character designs! Aoi Yuuki! Friggin Chiwa Saitou voicing mahou shoujo Senjougahara. Mizuhashi Kaori voicing a magical girl WITH GUNS. KitaEri voicing swords girl. An adorable mascot character!

If the anime that we got was the anime that was presented through only these CMs, I would have been ready to call it anime of the year already.

And then the actual first episode happened. I watched most of the episode going THIS IS AMAZING and then we get to the witch barrier.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

And then Mami comes with her Gate of Babylon and her GUNS.

I mean, you can probably imagine my mental state as I wait for each week of this cartoon. And so this goes on and I flip out each week and once episode 3 rolls around I go, screw this, I’ll just watch the live stream.

Yes, I watched episode 3 raw when it aired.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

And of course, each week while I’m watching this, I just send my friend a series of FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFs.

And then we get to episode 10. I don’t know if it was apparent, but my favourite character is Homura, probably largely because Senjougahara is one of my favouritest characters. So yeah, we get to episode 10 and this is the best anime of the year and possibly of all years.

The end.

Yes, I know a lot of people have problems with it and a lot of what people have said about the show is pretty hyperbolic. Maybe there it does strain itself in trying to be deep and all. Maybe the characters weren’t amazing. I will admit that it very likely is not the best anime ever.

But I don’t think there’s been an anime that has been quite so attuned to my brain. And that is why I love it so.

「little world」/「momoc」

Yeah, I made the same joke last year. But who would’ve thought that we’d get two Utena derived shows within a year? Certainly not me.

But yes, Mawaru Penguindrum is a show that has penguins in it.

It’s fascinating how different Penguindrum is from Star Driver but still manage to be so heavily evocative of Utena. Having Penguindrum as a comparison, I realized that there really was no reason to expect that Star Driver would make as many callbacks to Utena as it does. I mean, it’s not like Igarashi and Enokido hadn’t worked on stuff together before.

Like Star Driver, Penguindrum exudes its own sense of style. In Star Driver, a lot of that is constrained to the more fantastical parts of the show, like whenever we’re dealing with Cybodies and the Glittering Crux. There’s no such separation in Penguindrum. Even in the real world, the architecture and shots of the locations are still really surreal. So while in Star Driver, there’s a clear delineation between real and fantasy, we’re often left wondering which is which in Penguindrum.

And the penguins don’t help very much in this department either.

Looking back at Star Driver, there actually isn’t that much weird stuff going on during the school life section of each episode. I mean, yes, weird events happen and all, but what you saw was pretty much what happened. In Utena, weird things where we’re not really sure how to take happen in the school life parts, which is the route that Penguindrum takes.

Structurally, Star Driver resembles Utena much more because of the clearly defined events that take place in each episode. On occasion, we’ll be missing, say, a song or something but for the most part, we know how each episode goes down. Penguindrum is not very repetitive at all, at least not in how each episode goes. Yeah, there’s SEIZON SENRYAKU, but those are really more diversions than a shadow play and then ZETTAI UNMEI MOKUSHIROKU followed by a substantial duel or APPRIVOISE followed by GINGA BISHOUNEN and a substantial duel.

Of course, all three still make use of visual symbols and phrases and keep on repeating them a lot. The obvious messages are pretty obvious because they’re shoved in front of you, but it just sort of piles on to you to the point that there are probably some other messages hidden under this mound of symbols you’ve suddenly got. I mean, every goddamn thing that shows up on the screen or uttered by anyone is probably a symbol. Has anyone dissected the Triple-H/ARB songs yet?

Penguindrum also differs from Utena and Star Driver by not being about a prince who strolls into town and upsets the establishment trying to revolutionize the world. Certainly, we’ve got our shadowy cabal trying to revolutionize the world, but it’s really more about two brothers trying to save their sister, which is much less grand. Of course, the penguins would probably deflate any sense of awe pretty quickly.

Not that I don’t appreciate the penguins. I think they’re an awesome part of the show. It’s an interesting way of adding another layer to all of those symbols we’re buried under, in that they supposedly are reflective of the state of mind of the characters they shadow. More importantly, their antics are just plain enjoyable and the show would be much more depressing without them.

Does the choice of penguins mean anything or does Ikuhara just really, really like them? It is a mystery.

Man, I wish I had a penguin that mirrored my internal thoughts and did errands for me and was invisible to everyone except me.

「FF系　マブラヴタイトル」/「ぽかり＠ぴくしぶ」

Muv-Luv is a journey.

Maybe saying it’s the longest visual novel I’ve played is a bit unfair because it’s really two or three games, depending on how you see Extra and Unlimited, and there was a good two or three years until Alternative was released. Still, going through the entire thing takes a ton of time.

The way I like to think about Muv-Luv’s unique structure is by comparing it to Clannad, where the really good stuff, Alternative and After Story, requires a lot of time invested beforehand in the content that comes before it. That’s not to say that the non-Alt/AS stuff is bad, but it’s definitely not earthshattering. And in the case of the Clannad visual novel, it’s probably not as important.

This isn’t true for Muv-Luv. If you’re only in Muv-Luv for the sci-fi, going through the school life hijinks of Extra is going to seem torturous but it is absolutely vital. This isn’t the same as Clannad’s school life routes or Fate/stay night’s Fate route. Extra matters, possibly even more than Unlimited does.

So when I say school life, I mean Muv-Luv Extra is basically your standard school life harem thing. Unremarkable guy goes to school and all of the girls he knows is inexplicably attracted to him. You’ve got childhood friend, mysterious rich transfer student, kuudere, and class president. Other characters include a bro and two teachers. And comedic and romantic things happen in this part and by the end of it, you’ll have a girlfriend. Congratulations!

So you finish Extra and suddenly the title screen changes and all of the heroines are wearing different uniforms. Here is where I’d really like to have been around for when this thing first came out because I have no idea if anyone expected this and what the reaction was. Even more so once you start a new game and find something called Unlimited. Now in Muv-Luv Unlimited, we start with some scenes from Extra. See, because you’re the same guy from Extra. Except now you wake up, walk outside your house and find that the city has been destroyed. HMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

Essentially, this entire thing is about Shirogane Takeru, a normal guy who gets thrown in to an alternate universe in which humanity is under attack by aliens and are losing. How does he deal with this? By breaking into a military base to steal a mecha and save the day, of course. Except that he can’t because he’s a high school student from 2000s Japan and doesn’t know about anything and knows no one.

That last thing pretty much guarantees he’s dead, but with some luck, he ends up becoming a trainee at the local UN military base and he gets a chance to show off his chops. Except, again, he’s a high school student so he fails miserably and holds his entire squad back because of his ineptitude. Unlimited is basically him learning the ropes and somehow getting it. This part ends fairly uneventfully, which brings us to Alternative.

In Alternative, Takeru mysteriously starts over at the beginning of where he was in Unlimited, except he’s retained all of his memories and experiences from Unlimited. This time, he’s going to do it right, which, as it turns out, is quite difficult even if he’s not the complete failure from before. It turns out saving the humanity is hard!

Here’s where everything exciting happens. Political intrigue! Mecha combat! Alien horrors! Military briefings! We finally get to see the mecha in action and there are some really fantastic action sequences. Yes, this is a visual novel and yes, it relies on tricks similar to Fate/stay night that use sprites and the visual novel engine to create a sense of dynamism to the combat. The other thing that adds to it is how the characters work together. Good squad combat is not something you see a lot of in mecha anime, but it’s here and I’d say it’s plays a pretty big part in the story’s themes.

This is also where all of the emotional payoff (read: gutpunches) is. And this is where all of the time you spent with Extra comes in, as the nature of the world you’re in is revealed and casualties mount. While Unlimited and Alternative take place in the same world, Unlimited doesn’t have quite the sense of danger that Alternative does because the aliens do not mess around when they show up. Sometimes we kind of forget that there’s a reason that humanity’s losing. All of this causes a number of oh, shit moments.

As we move from Unlimited to Alternative, the goal changes from trying to get the hell out of crazy apocalyptic world and get back to fun times high school to trying to save that world and the people in it. So now, he’s invested in that place, except that’s a scary place to have people to care for, especially if they’re fighting aliens bent on their destruction. What’s more is that even if he does end up finding a way to gtfo, can he bring himself to abandon everyone so he can chillax with his harem back in Extra?

Muv-Luv is not really about saving the world. It’s a lot more personal than that. How else would you explain Extra? It’s about Takeru coming to terms with this incredible situation he’s been thrown into and rising to the challenge of dealing with it. And it’s something that’s true for all the characters in Alternative. Everyone has things they would rather be doing, but instead, they have to deal with this terrible world filled with aliens and loss and it’s up to them to deal with it and decide to do something about it.

The game’s genre is “a tale of love and courage” for good reason.