Kon Is Dead. Good Riddance.

Yes, that’s right. I’m happy. Should have happened sooner, as far as I’m concerned. I mean, was I the only one who was tired of that kinda crap? Same ol, same ol, ad infinitum. Can’t even remember the last time any of it was creative.

Yes, K-on is finally dead to me. A hair episode? Cmon, man. This is just terrible. We couldn’t even get a decent concert in the concert episode. Twenty-one episodes of girls eating cake, and I’ve had enough.

Update: Um, it would seem I forgot a hyphen in the post title. This is awkward.

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A Brief History of Moe, Part 1

Moé, a passion in our time and an oft maligned character archetype has a long history in anime that has culminated in much of what we know of it today. The moé problem began many years ago, hidden within seemingly innocent series, waiting for the moment in which it could begin to creep out and steal the hearts of unfortunate viewers who just wanted to watch cartoon men kill each other in an increasing violent manner. While many believe its origins to be a mystery, I will reveal many secrets about this longstanding fad in the following paragraphs and posts to come. My first revelation may come as somewhat of a shock: The first known instance of moé occurred in a rather obscure and unknown series by the name of Hokuto no Ken.

Also known as Fist of the North Star, the series was one of the earliest sports anime about a man named Kenshiro who must coach a girl’s basketball team against their rivals at the Ken-Oh School for Women. His coaching strategies are considered a lost art at the time, referred to as the Moekko Shinken style. The series was both touching and poignant in its portrayal of Kenshiro’s dedication to his students and their desire to become true moekko. The most powerful scene comes in the last moments of that most important match when Rin, Kenshiro’s most promising student, is sitting on the bench with her head in her hands, weeping to herself as the scores lean ever stronger in Ken-Oh’s favor. She tells Kenshiro that she doubts their success, and regrets at this moment that she was never able to master his techniques and become the player she had always striven to be. Kenshiro puts his hand on her head, and as she raises her eyes to meet his, he utters that famous line that touched the hearts of so many: “You are already moé”. With newfound confidence, Rin raises herself up, returns to the game, and takes the game deciding shot, only to trip and fall flat on her face, as all the men in the crowd (and all the viewers at home) felt a sudden and inexplicable urge to descend on the court and help her to her feet while simultaneously trying to hide their raging boners. This was the birth of moé.

And it didn’t stop there. It went on to become a pivotal part of the backstory of a series I once loved before I discovered its hidden moé agenda. I’m referring of course to Space Adventure Cobra. You see, Cobra spent his time searching for cute helpless women with tattoos of butterflies on their backs. The butterfly, as you may not know, was once the symbol of moé. This originated with the Mirabal sisters, citizens of the Dominican Republic who opposed the dictatorship in that country during the mid 1900′s and went by the code name, “Las Mariposas”, which is Spanish for “The Butterflies”. While they were seen as a symbol of strength, they were executed nonetheless, proving both their helplessness and the fact that moé is pretty serious business to Hispanics. Their death elicited a strong response of both sadness and rage, emotions that can be seen to this day on any internet forum discussing the works of Key. As for Cobra, the only reason he did not suffer the dreaded “death by moé” in his series was because the writers apparently don’t know the meaning of the word suspense and made their main character invincible.

Allow me to speak more on death by moe and its first occurrences in Japanese animation. It is widely considered one of the worst possible ways to die, and those who would attempt to use moe for murder are by far some of the most sinister villains the world has ever seen. In previous eras, these attempts were more subtle. Nowadays, anime girls have been known to chant moé spells and cast evil death beams shaped like hearts as their faces flush with a bright red that can only be interpreted as a bloodrush to the head brought on by their overwhelming intent to kill. According to my research, this method has yet to hospitalize anyone, unlike the methods of the past. The most famous incident occurred in a series I know you’ve heard of: Pokémon. This incident, known as “Pokémon Shock” hospitalized over 600 Japanese viewers before the episode to blame, “Dennō Senshi Porygon”, was banned from television forever. But that’s not the whole story. You see, Porygon was the first manmade pokemon, created by the mad Professor Akihabara, and if that name doesn’t send off some serious warning signals, I don’t know what to say. You see, Porygon was designed with large inviting eyes, a pastel color scheme and a pretty useless move set in order to appear deceptively cute and vulnerable, when in reality it was an object of pure evil. It’s moé flash attack was only seen once, but that was all it took to nearly kill hundreds of people. The scariest part of this incident is the government cover up by moé sympathizers who were able to shift the blame onto Pikachu and remove the episode from television indefinitely to hide the truth from an unsuspecting public. Poor bastards never knew what hit them.

Where will it stop? The moé threat only seems to grow larger with each passing of the seasons, and I don’t know who to turn to in my desperate attempt to expose the awful truths about this abhorrent subculture, so I can only inform and hope to rally others to my cause.

Next time: Gundam – “One Does Not Care to Acknowledge the Moé of One’s Youth.”

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2010 Series All Up In Here!

New decade, new anime to watch. For me, the new version of Cobra the Animation and sequels like HidaSketch and Nodame Cantabile were obvious, but what of the rest?

So far, the only first episode that completely disinterested me was Chu-Bra. I wasn’t amused or turned on by it so if the series actually has any appeal, I guess I missed it.

As for everything else:

So Ra No Wo To

I was blown away to learn that Kanata’s VA had no previous roles, but I guess everybody starts somewhere. Her voice is ridiculously cute. The first episode itself was a mediocre beginning and I thought nothing of it. It wasn’t bad but it wasn’t great either. Same goes for episode two.

As a once-Boy Scout, when Kanata fell into the water with her pack on, my immediate thought was, “oh, she’s going to have to remove her pack and let it sink” and then next thing I know she’s easily swimming to the surface. That confused me about as much as her god-like hearing and the fact that an owl would steal something shiny and drop it off on a rock somewhere, but I guess this owl does seem somewhat mentally unstable.

Ladies versus Butlers!

It’s porn, right? Kanokon strikes again! By which I mean there is practically nothing interesting about this series other than the character designs and the over-the-top fanservice and that’s enough for me.

Dance in the Vampire Bund

I’d dance in this vampire’s bund if you know what I mean.

I’m always down for a good vampire story, and this one could be ok. I’m not a big fan of werewolves and the whole convenient vampire sunscreen shit was kind of lame. The whole thing makes me think of those shitty Underworld movies with their vampire/werewolf in love  battle the evil vampires story. Not sure if want.

Durarara!!

I find it very hard to make any sort of comment on this series after only the first episode other than “oh yeah, there was a 2nd season of Spice and Wolf I forgot to watch.” Isaac and Miria on the background TV’s got a chuckle out of me. Since it’s written by the guy who did Baccano! and produced by Brain’s Base I’ll probably like it a lot, but the first episode with all its message-board screentime gives me little to go on.

Also, the author needs to realize that the amount of exclamation points he tags on the end of his titles has no determinable relationship to the interest I feel when I read about them. Even so, I put an exclamation point on the title of this blog post to make it sound more interesting. If you feel that the inclusion of this punctuation had an effect on your desire to read this post, then I stand corrected.

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George Bush Doesn’t Care About Darker Than Black People

This new season of Darker than Black is pretty good. It follows in the footsteps of its prequel by having way too much going on at once, but I’m not minding that just yet. What really makes me excited about this season is the stellar cast. I mean, they’ve really covered all the bases when it comes to character types you expect to see in this kind of series. We’ve got the cold badass, the whiny teenage girl, a set of creepy twins, the talking flying-squirrel, the killer with a sense of humor, the mysterious posh lady, etc. Pretty typical stuff, but mash it all together and what would probably fail as a totally srsbzns series succeeds with a touch of zany. They attempted putting two quirky characters in the first season to lighten the mood, and while they certainly made me laugh, they never felt like a part of the series.

Sadly, as of three episodes, all I have is questions.

For example, “Misaki is fine and all, but why am I being robbed of delicious Yin?”

or better, “What the fuck kind of power is making a giant gun, and why did the scene in which it manifested seem like the beginning of a magical girl transformation sequence?”

All kidding aside, as soon as Hei puts down the booze and shaves, I think I’ll have zero problems with this sequel, other than the whole “let’s kill off our best new characters immediately” mentality.

HE WILL BE MISSED ;_____;

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Don’t get mad at your elitest anime bloggers because they’re weeaboos, man

Bright says "Shut the hell up, please."

Dear lord, here we go again. I’m such a dick.

Ok, guys, listen. There’s these people out there, ok? These people operate under an assumption that Japanese culture is difficult to understand for stupid Americans. Further more, these people. You know, these people? They get a smug sense of satisfaction out of understanding it. I don’t know about you guys, but jerking off over the fact that you do understand Japanese in-jokes in anime seems pretty silly. In fact, it’s weeaboo to the point of absurdity. What I imagine the issue is, and why these poor souls think so highly of themselves, is that, quite bluntly, they are Elitest As Fuck. You know that right from the beginning of 99% of their blog posts, which usually begin with a statement in which they place themselves on a pedastal over every other anime blogger for some trivial bullshit they understand but nobody else cares about.

This isn’t really the case with many other fine anime bloggers from the great nation of America. I mean, it shouldn’t be surprising. American anime blogs aren’t aimed at Japanese people-they’re aimed at Americans. As such, shows that are steeped in varying degrees of cultural quirks are hard to “get”, and it is the duty of these bloggers to warn their readers that they might not understand them either! A weeaboo blogger wets himself over a joke that references something he experienced in the few months he was in Japan and this makes him feel good about himself. Oh, but not you. You’re one of those goddamn Americans aren’t you? You have no idea what the shit he’s going on about! But it’s ok. You really don’t care.

The issue here is that people are scared of creepy weeaboo bloggers. Creepy weeaboo bloggers are offended by people’s lack of knowledge concerning their creepy weeaboo hobbies. This isn’t your fault-it’s theirs. No, it’s not their fault for being elitest. They were just born that way: abhorently close-minded. It’s their fault for expecting Americans to praise series whose humor is completely incomprehensible to them rather than writing them off completely. It’s their fault for not opening their mind to the fact that not everyone cums buckets over how fucking great Japan is. Japan isn’t some magical promised land and you don’t live there, so you don’t give a shit. (I came up with a  joke here concerning Japanese bloggers trying to write about Monty Python, but it’s racist and in bad taste so I won’t make it.)

I’ve now run out of ideas for this parody, and will shut up. I mean, hell, how does he write so many paragraphs about this shit?

Fuck. I’m going to turn this blog into a blog about other anime blogs because I don’t watch enough anime and I really enjoy taking the piss out of other people even when I agree with most of what they’re trying to say.

Next up – bloggers I’m not actually friends with!

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Laughing along with all the K-ON! Fakesubs

A clear troll win, though it went on a little too long. The initial CoalGuys release was able to trick a couple hundred people (myself included), and I actually thought the translator notes for “-chan”, etc at the beginning were a funny attempt at trolling by CoalGuys themselves before I even realized the thing was a fake. So congrats to the trolls on pulling that one off, though the subs were terribly unfunny a good five minutes in. I skipped the Chihiro sub since they’re a terrible group and grabbed the qq sub just to see what it was, and lo and behold, it’s the MST3k episode – “Space Mutiny”. I actually encourage all of you to grab the torrent before it gets removed from TT (assuming it does). If you miss it, then JFGI. I ended up watching the whole thing for nostalgia’s sake.

I was going to download the rest of the bunch to see what they were, but they’d already stopped working by the time I checked back. It would’ve been better if the series were released on Wednesday, but I got a good laugh out of it anyhow.

On a related note, the K-ON ED is definitely the best part of the series so far.

Watch In HD

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Impressions on the TH12 Demo

The Demo for TH12 (Undefined Fantastic Object) has been released and it is all kinds of fun. The game adopts a new UFO system for gaining lives and bombs that, once you have the hang of it, makes it much easier than Subterranean Animism.

Basically, some enemies, when killed, will release little UFOs that bounce around the screen and come in 3 different colors: red, green, and blue. By collecting one of each color or three of a kind, the player summons a large UFO that stays on the screen for ten seconds. By destroying this UFO, you get a mulitplier (if you collected 3 blue UFOs), a green star that gives you part of a bomb (like the stars in SA gave you a part of a life, if you  collected 3 green UFOs), and a purple star that gives you a part of a life (for 3 red UFOs). The large UFO will suck any  on-screen items towards it, and if it collects enough before you kill it, you’ll get an extra bomb, life star, or multiplier.

As it stands, there is no other way to gain lives or bombs then destroying UFOs, so if you want to survive, you need to collect them. It’s easier to stockpile bombs than gain lives, so if you’re quick with your trigger finger, going for the green UFOs is probably the better choice. I, on the other hand, tend to be stingy with my bombs and die before I use them, so I settle for the red UFOs.

As for the playable characters, Reimu is back again with her straight and homing attacks, Marisa with a laser (Master Spark is back!) and wide attacks, and Sanae is introduced with an incredible attack that shoots forward and then arcs sideways at a 90 degree angle to take out enemies on both sides of the screen, and a shitty exploding frog attack. Seriously, her B shot type is awful :V.

I beat the demo on Normal with SanaeA with practically no effort, and this was before I even realized that you could fill the UFOs to get extra bonuses. I’ve made it to the last level 3 spell card on Hard and I’ll probably beat the thing tomorrow on that difficulty. As per usual, Lunatic tears me a new one.

The only complaint I have is that dying lowers your power by 1.00, but you only release about 0.07 worth of power items on death, whereas in other games you would release enough power items to restore your power completely. In other words, dying is very bad.

The enemies are cute even though I have no idea what they’re saying, and the spells are pretty unique, at least level 3′s are. Giant fists of doom! I pretty much can’t wait until the full game is released.

If you have a nico account, here’s some dude beating it on Lunatic despite the fact that it was just released. Some people…

Edit: Beat it on Hard. Replay here for anyone interested.

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Metal Gear Solid 4 – Meh

It’s got guys nicknamed Otacon and Akiba, so I can review it in an anime blog. No? Well I’ll just insert random images to make it seem legit.

Metal Gear Solid 4 was a good game and I really enjoyed it, just to get that out there. I’ve only played MGS 1 and 3 and I need to get around to picking up 2, though I’ve already spoiled myself on the plot so that the 4+ hours of cutscenes in MGS4 wouldn’t be lost on me. I’d forgotten how long those things were. I spent more time on my first playthrough watching the scenes than actually playing the game. On a second play, I was able to beat the game on Normal in 4 hours, 15 minutes with 0 alerts, 0 kills, 0 recovery items, etc. I suck at sneaking games, so the fact that I was able to pull that off says one thing to me. This game was too short and it was too easy. Yes, I could still get my ass handed to me on Hard or Extreme, but I imagine it would take a lot less time for me to pull off a perfect run than it did with games 1 and 3.

The problem I had with this game (other than Snake’s old age and back problems) was that it didn’t stand out in anyway from it predecessors except graphically. MGS 3 had great villians, awesome boss battles and much more in depth mechanics. MGS1 was groundbreaking, funny and really well told. What can people say about MGS4? It was a good end to the saga, but it wasn’t anything special. The only fights that will really stick with me are the ones versus Liquid Ocelot, but that’s because the guy is a badass. Coughing, moaning and wheezing “Old Snake” is not.

One of the other things that Metal Gear usually promises is attractive women, and I guess depending on your tastes you’ll agree that MGS4 provided. I’d say it didn’t. There was only one girl in the whole game that I thought was drop-dead gorgeous, and no, it wasn’t Sunny. Suffice it to say I took a lot of pictures during the Laughing Octopus photo shoot on my second run.

The only place that MGS4 exceeded my expectations was with the extras. While they may not live up to the Ape Escape extra from MGS3, the special weapons, ammo and customizations were a lot of fun to play with. The Tanegashima is beautiful to watch in action, the Solar Gun is hilarious to use, the emotion ammo provides numerous possibilities (shoot a guy with Rage and entice him to run over a claymore), and I imagine it’s quite a bit of fun to run around with the unlockables you get from a perfect run of extreme. I can’t imagine it stays interesting for too long though. Most of the stuff is cool for a quick laugh and that’s about it.

After thinking about it a bit more, I’d say the one thing that really made the game stand apart from its predeccesors in a good way was the ability to “team up” with the mercenaries in the first two levels and listen to them sing your praises as you headshot every enemy in the area. The problem here is that a good few of the areas are infinite respawn points, so no matter how long you sit in one place sniping, enemies will never stop coming. I think I literally sniped 100+ enemies without moving during Act 2, and that totally kills the fun of it, because you aren’t accomplishing anything. I also had the game screw with me at one point in a place where the enemies are supposed to blow a wall in a scripted event, but they just kept going around the wall instead, so the game never progressed and I had to quit to the title. It made me rage.

I haven’t tried multiplayer and I probably wont. I’ve only got until the end of the week before I’m separated from my consoles again, so I’m spending most of my time finally getting around to beating RE4 Wii on Pro.

As a final note, if I had to just throw a score out there, I’d give the game a 92 or so, but it’s certainly my least favorite of the series thus far. And this concludes my nearly half a year late review.

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