「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.

「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.

「Mage Killer」/「三輪」

The first time I read Fate/Zero, I got through about half of the prologue before forgetting about it. That was before I read Fate/stay night.

One of the great things about Fate/Zero is that the particular Holy Grail War it covers is serious business. Instead of having a bunch of high school students kind of flail about, you have some powerful magi all scheming against each other. These dudes know what they’re doing. And actually, that all of these guys basically off each other one way or another kind of explains why we’re left with high school students ten years later.

The main draw of Fate/zero for me has always been that I’d heard it’s particularly brutal and that there was a magus going around ruining everyone with the help of modern technology. After reading Fate/stay night, Kiritsugu’s character became much, much more interesting. As much as people seem to think that Rider is the best (and I’ll admit he is pretty fantastic), Kiritsugu has always been the most compelling character to me.

Those who are familiar with Fate/ will know that it’s all about dealing with ideals, whether it’s defending your ideals, sorting out your ideals, or having your ideals challenged. It’s kind of an easy subject to bring up when fighting for the Holy Grail. Fate/stay night is essentially about Shirou sorting out his ideals. In Fate/zero, we have Kiritsugu, who has the same ideals as Shirou, but ends up choosing a vastly different way of realizing them.

This combined with the high calibre of opponents means that there is a ton of cool stuff that goes down in this story. The fact that these are people prepared for the Grail War and not high school students not only means that their fights are better just because they’re better, but they’re also much better prepared. Calling the Grail War a war in Fate/stay night always seemed a bit silly to me, but in Fate/zero, I think there are enough casualties and heavy weaponry to justify it.

Of course, that’s all after I went through Fate/stay night. So what drove me to try and read the books the first time? Well, I’d just finished playing Saya no Uta at the time. Saya no Uta probably remains one of the most horrifying and disturbing things I’ve read. So obviously, I was looking for more in that vein and found this light novel that the same guy wrote.

On the physical horror front, I think Team Caster’s got it covered. In terms of emotional despair, we’ve got everyone else who’s connected to the events of Fate/stay night. It’s mentioned somewhere in the notes of the first volume that there is basically no happy ending for Fate/zero given what we know plays out in Fate/stay night. Basically, everyone involved bets the house on winning the Grail and ends up ruining their childrens’ lives in the process.

It’s going to be a long three months once the first half of Fate/zero is finished. I guess there’s uncensored Team Caster fun times to look forward to in March, though.

「シュタインズゲート・瓦礫と助手」/「huke」

Even though the track record for anime adaptations of Nitro+ games has been abysmal, I couldn’t help but hope that Steins;Gate would turn out well. After all, it’s the best visual novel ever or something according to Japan. And if it didn’t pan out, I guess I’d just fall back on the visual novel with huke’s pretty art.

And as I was watching it, I thought it was pretty funny and all. I was still trying to figure out why Japan loved this thing so much. It wasn’t until someone mentioned something about 2ch jokes that I think I got it.

So I’d known that Steins;Gate was about time travel, based on the synopsis. What I didn’t know was that the story was basically based on the John Titor story. And it the connection wasn’t superficial either. It wasn’t just, there’s a guy calling himself John Titor from the future on 2ch. A lot of details, like the IBM 5100 and the mechanics of time travel and divergence numbers, are taken straight from the story. You can think of Steins;Gate as one giant John Titor reference.

This is fascinating to me, because even though I’m not intimately familiar with the details of the John Titor story, I’ve been on the Internet long enough to remember this whole thing. It’s kind of weird to see something that was sort of the early-web version of an internet meme be used as the skeleton of a more fleshed-out story. I guess something like Densha Otoko would qualify as well, but I think there’s a lot less you can do with it to make something unique like Steins;Gate.

This whole aspect of Steins;Gate got me because I am a nerd and nerds friggin love references. I mean, look at any Shaft anime. But yes, Steins;Gate has tons of references and where there aren’t any, it’ll just create memes. For the most part, these references are all internet memes. If it’s not part of the John Titor mythos, they’ll be working in a 2ch meme. And then there’s stuff like EL PSY CONGROO and tutturu~ which seems like it was designed to be spammed across the internet.

The characters themselves are exactly the same kinds of people. After all, they encounter John Titor on 2ch. What kind of people read and post on 2ch? Daru and Okarin are really obvious otaku. But Mayuri seems relatively normal, except that she works at a maid cafe in Akiba and buys doujin at Toranoana. Okay. Even the most respectable and well-adjusted of the cast, Kurisu-TINA, is a closet VIPPER.

So I guess what’s special about Steins;Gate isn’t that it’s just a good story about a bunch of friends who fall into some time travel conspiracy. It’s that it’s a good story about a bunch of friends who are just like the people watching it who fall into a time travel conspiracy based on an internet urban legend.

「一面の花」/「k野」

I’d been hearing about how awesome Heartcatch Precure was so I’d always intended to eventually watch it. The art was fantastic and I’d seen some great clips of the fights. The problem is that when I found out about it, it was already really far into the 50 or so episodes. So once I got a ton of time after I graduated and was looking for a show to watch, I figured it was time. After all, I rolled through Cardcaptor Sakura pretty quickly.

I’ve been thinking about whether I’d put Heartcatch at the top of my magical girl list, but I think it ends up coming second to Cardcaptor Sakura. Still, this means I think that Heartcatch is pretty damned good. I think it’s a better magical girl show than Madoka or Nanoha and I friggin love those two shows.

What makes Heartcatch so great is that it’s just good. It has a great cast of characters, the story is wonderful, and the production is stellar. Most importantly, it’s just a magical girl show. It isn’t magical girl with lasers. It isn’t magical girl with zombies. It is what it is and it stands toe to toe with all of those magical girl and x shows, where x is something that makes it more palatable to people who need an excuse for why they’re watching shows for little girls.

And Heartcatch is girly as hell. Yeah, the Cures might be throwing some punches around, but the show is tripping flowers and fashion. You can attempt to reframe Nanoha as scifi and talk about intelligent devices and stuff, but the Cures spray perfume to transform. At this point, Nanoha’s pretty much decked out in mecha gear in Force. Meanwhile, this is a show with tambourines and those spinny things that look way too much like their only function is to sell toys.

There’s also the characters’ boundless optimism and energy. There isn’t anything that’s especially dark about is show, even the villains are kind of goofy. Everyone’s got dreams and everyone’s fighting to protect their dreams and it’s terrible that villains use the uncertainty in people’s hearts against them. Here, the objective isn’t to seal away some rogue magics or befriend the opposition with lasers, but to restore people’s hearts.

The other Precure series are going to have a tough time measuring up to the Heartcatch bar, but I hope they do.