Monthly Archives: December 2011

12 Days XII: Make a contract with me and （ｒｙ

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「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.

12 Days XI: Zettai Unmei Seizon Senryaku

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「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.

12 Days X: A tale of love and courage

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「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.

12 Days IX: Hello, Gii

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「現象数式使い」/「あや波平」

I don’t remember where I heard about Sekien no Inganock, but when I was trying to figure out which visual novel to play next, Inganock jumped out because of how different its premise was. I mean, the last few visual novels I read before it were Cross Channel, Tsukihime, Sharin no Kuni, and Muv-Luv and all of those started off with high school shenanigans and even if they did end up in very different places, all of the principal characters were a guy in high school and other high school students.

Sekien no Inganock is set in a steampunk city inhabited by half-human, half-animal people and is about a travelling doctor. He goes around healing people with, uh, math, I guess? So you can tell that I like this guy a lot already. Besides that, he’s fairly calm and unmoved and his brand of snark is pretty deadpan.

Anyhow, I really love everything about this visual novel. Yeah, the story is kind of obtuse, especially once it gets close to the end. And yeah, that internal monologue system is convoluted and impossible to beat without a walkthrough. But everything else? Fantastic.

The art is stunningly gorgeous, even the character sprites. All of the landscapes are great, but it’s the monster event CGs that are amazing. It’s one of those games that I probably don’t want to see as an anime because an anime will never be able to capture the art (kind of like how the Steins;Gate anime can’t retain huke’s texturing). The music is really fantastic. I really liked the voices, whenever they were present. All of this adds to the great atmosphere and setting. This is something that’s shared amongst all of the games in the What a Beautiful series and this alone is enough to get me to pounce on the rest of them if I ever get the chance.

What separated Inganock from Sharnoth was the characters. I already mentioned our travelling doctor main character Gii. He’s great. But the other character that I thought was awesome was Ati. She’s a catgirl tsundere bro, kind of like Ami from Toradora. Regarding Gii, she waffles between the line of friendship and romance. They help each other out in various business ventures and get drinks at the pub. She’s more of the street smart one, since Gii is kind of a nerd, being a doctor and all. These two really made the game for me and when I got to the end of Ati’s story, well, I mad.

A lot of people complain about the repetitiveness of the story. I guess that aspect of it reminded me of Star Driver because it wasn’t too long after it had finished and we all remember all of the people complaining about how Takuto always wins. Well, it’s the same thing here. We get an encounter and Gii figures the monster out, so he stretches out his right hand. And then after Porshion, who we are assured is not human, burns the monster up, we cut to some dudes with a clock or watch trying to climb some stairs. This is the sort of stuff I enjoy.

I didn’t go in with the expectation that it would answer every question I had and I didn’t really have a desire to understand everything I didn’t get. It was just a really nice thing to experience and I was quite satisfied with having gone through it once I got to the end of it. Well, not quite satisfied in that I’ll be jumping at every bit of news of more WAB games getting translated.

12 Days VIII: Actually, I don’t think I quite caught the bunny allusion

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「うさぎドロップ」/「ゆーた」

Single dad manga? Why not? Yotsuba&!’s great!

I don’t know whether there’s much I can add about Usagi Drop. The whole thing is fairly straightforward. It’s a great story about a guy who ends up having to look after a kid all of a sudden and gets into the ups and downs and details of it. I’m sure we’ve all been told that raising a kid is hard and doubly so if you’re the only doing it. Although I guess Daikichi lucked the hell out because Rin is probably the best kid you could hope for.

Okay, maybe I can say something about the much more contentious second half of the story, in which Rin is no longer an adorable child but is a teenager. The immediate reaction is “NOOOO why can’t Usagi Drop be about Daikichi taking care of little Rin forever?” but you know, it doesn’t work like that. Kids grow up and parents should get a chance to feel proud if their kids turn out to be decent human beings, which Rin is in spades.

But also important is that it has some loose threads that need to be resolved. Does anything end up happening between Rin and her mother? Do Daikichi and Kouki’s mom get together? Or do Rin and Kouki get together? I’d imagine a ton of people were interested in seeing how the last two questions get answered. Which of course leads us to the ending.

I’ve already talked about the ending and I’ve tried to understand where it came from. So a lot of people are pissed at the ending because it’s weird as hell and came out of nowhere. But more importantly, it was basically a punch in the gut for everyone who was waiting on those last two questions because it basically resolved the “problem” (because if you think about it, you can’t really have both happen) in the worst way imaginable.

Really, that’s the only snag of the entire thing and I’ll admit it’s a pretty big one. One of the great things about Usagi Drop is its realism and believability, which this development was not. Of course, this is only a concern if you’re at all interested in the manga. If your only desire is to remain in bliss solely in the realm of a guy tries to raise a kid without knowing how, then stick to the anime and the first half of the manga, which is the most adorable thing.