Monthly Archives: April 2009

Shoujo manga roundup

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Ever since I finished finals, I thought like I should start something that I could finish pretty quickly. During finals I started and caught up with Cross Game and Negima. I really liked both, but I felt bad after catching up because I need to wait for them weekly now.

Why shoujo? Well, there were a bunch of stuff that I’d wanted to read for a while and most of those are a lot shorter than the shounen I had on my list, so I guess you could chalk it up to laziness.

Kimi ni Todoke

The first one I took a look at was Kimi ni Todoke. It’s not finished yet, but there weren’t that many scanlated chapters. It’s about a girl who looks like that girl from The Ring and really bad social skills, so everyone’s afraid to talk to her. She meets a really nice and popular guy and bla bla bla, predictable stuff happens. I would have thought about keeping up with it, except it appears to have been abandoned by the scanlators.

Lovely Complex

Lovely Complex is about a short guy and a tall girl who aggravate each other and are the butt of their classmates’ jokes. Guess what? They get together. What a surprise. I did like that their relationship didn’t suddenly change and that the guy didn’t immediately reciprocate feelings. I didn’t like the art very much. Oh well.

Special A

I picked this up back when I’d heard about the anime and I’d just finished catching up in the Ouran manga, so I was looking for another shoujo thing to get into. I guess it wasn’t that bad and was kind of amusing up until the last quarter where it sort of got dragged out and ended weakly. Special A is about this girl who’s always competing against the main guy, who is the best at everything and who she can never beat. Turns out they get together.

Koukou Debut

This one is about a girl who sucks at getting guys to hit on her and asks a guy who knows everything about what guys look for in girls to coach her on the subject. He says he’d only do it if she doesn’t fall in love with him. Well, of course she does, but what surprised me was how quickly it happened in the story and how receptive he was to it. I’d say out of the bunch, this was my favourite, because it didn’t contain any situations or characters that annoyed me like in Lovely Complex and it ended pretty well, unlike Special A.

Do the impossible, see the invisible: Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann Gurren-hen

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Seeing as how it’s basically a summary of the TV series, I wasn’t planning on watching it. But then, seeing a certain GIF of the final battle scene tided me over.

Even though it’s basically a compressed version of the TV series, it’ll probably be incomprehensible if your only exposure to Gurren Lagann was through the movies. I’m not sure about the new intro. For people who’ve seen TTGL, it’s awesome. For people who haven’t, it might be confusing.

Everything from Simon’s introduction to the fight with Viral was essentially the same, just with some cuts. Some of the cuts were pretty awkward and required an eyecatch to do the transition, which I felt was kind of a cop-out.

Where the movie is destroyed for newcomers is when we meet the secondary characters. The part where we meet Kittan and Rossiu and their respective “crews” and the bathhouse episode got turned into some sort of giant musical montage. I’m not a fan of those episodes, but unfortunately, they introduced some pretty important characters. Of course, this might mean that Rossiu and Kittan’s roles may have changed in the next movie. Either way, suddenly, we end up with some more party members.

The fight to take the Dai-Ganzan is relatively unchanged and happens just as it did. The excellent part of the movie is in the fight with the rest of the generals, which they changed completely. Nia and Yoko get slightly more expanded roles and the time that Simon is emo gets cut down. In the end, we’re treated to some awesome. I would definitely replace what was in the series with the movie version.

I feel like ending with taking down the generals is a strange place to end the movie. Does this mean the Spiral King gets taken down in like fifteen minutes in the next movie? How will they compress the Anti-Spiral episodes into less than one movie? Does this mean we won’t get those terrible Rossiu drama episodes?

All in all, not bad. The new material was great, but as a standalone movie, it’s a bit lacking.

Old animu: The Daughter of Twenty Faces

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So this was pretty much a disappointment all around. The Daughter of Twenty Faces started off really promising, featuring Twenty Faces, master thief and all-around classy guy, and Mikamo Chizuko, rich heiress and one smart cookie. The two meet for some reason and Twenty Faces takes Chiko along, educating her in the art of conning people and being awesome. Then they and the rest of Twenty Faces’ crew go off on various escapades and shenanigans, stealing priceless treasures.

So what’s wrong? Well, the fact that what I’ve described makes up too little of the entire show. At a very early point, Chiko returns to her mundane life and eventually starts fighting cyborgs and mutants and supersoldiers. I am serious. This actually happens. This is why I am disappointed. It turns out the show has nothing to do with high thievery and more to do with 1920′s science fiction. Oh well.

Also Live-eviL is a terrible subbing group. People offering services for free need to learn that “but I’m doing it for free!” is not an excuse that absolves you of your responsibility to deliver whatever you’ve promised.

Spring 09 anime: First Impressions IV

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Higashi no Eden

Best OP of the season, right here: pretty good song and fantastic animation. It stands out for using real English. The concept is interesting and intriguing. The writing has been pretty good. It’s not an adaptation of anything, so it’s completely original. This should be a winner.

Sengoku BASARA

This is just… There are no words.

Guin Saga

It looks like fairly standard serious fantasy. Kingdom in peril, prophecies, heirs to the throne, warrior with amnesia, evil empire, etc. This seems to be a really high budget production. I mean, the art and animation look fine and they managed to get Nobuo Uematsu to do the music. Of course, the characters are a bit on the uninteresting side. I’ll keep it for now.

Hatsukoi Limited

I’m tempted to give this one a pass, being what appears to be a romantic comedy that is being adapted by JC Staff. It’s not their big project of the season (that’s Hayate). It was kind of amusing. It’s the only thing in this genre for this season though, but I’m not sure how long I’ll be staying. I guess it helps that it’s only 12 episodes, but I guess that fact didn’t help Munto TV.

3A: Over the halfway hump

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Even though my carefully crafted course sequences were thwarted, I’ve gotta say that 3A has been my most enjoyable term so far.

PMATH 346: Group Theory (Lawrence)

I was expecting this to be as killer and awesome as PMATH 345. Fortunately, it wasn’t as killer, because the prof was nicer to us on the midterm. Unfortunately, I don’t really like groups as much as rings. Oh well, still pretty fascinating. In theory, groups come before rings, but rings are so much cooler. The prof is pretty good.

PMATH 340: Elementary Number Theory (Ingram)

I was expecting this to be easy and interesting. I was right about the easy. The first half of the course was essentially MATH 135 over again. I didn’t think the prof’s lecturing was terribly interesting, but he had excellent course notes which allowed me to not go to class. I would have loved to have Vanderburgh though.

CS 360: Introduction to the Theory of Computing (Biedl)

This class is pretty awesome and the prof is pretty awesome. One of my favourite classes, this one starts with finite automata and regular languages, moves on to context-free languages and grammars, and ends with Turing machines and solvability. It wasn’t hard to pick up the material and it’s super interesting. The prof is so awesome that I reworked my course sequences so that I could take CS 466 (Algorithm Design and Analysis) with her.

CS 341: Algorithms (Shallit)

This is also another fascinating course. Basically, the course is structured so that in the first part, you go through techniques to design algorithms and examine problems and various algorithms to solve those problems. After that, you move on to looking at lower bounds on problems. Then, you have a look at graph problems: minimum spanning tree and shortest path algorithms. The final part of the course is the most interesting, looking at complexity classes and NP-completeness in particular. The prof is also really awesome. I’m looking forward to having him again for CS 462 (Formal Languages and Parsing).

CS 350: Operating Systems (Aboulnaga)

Operating system theory is kind of interesting, but not enough to keep me concentrated after the other two CS lectures. Oh well.