Yamakan stated that he “didn’t appreciate” some of the comments about Fractale, which included such biting remarks as “really boring,” “generic mainstream mediocrity,” and “Yutaka Yamamoto doesn’t care about white people.” Yamakan proceeded to state that these remarks, which painted him as a shitty director, represented “the most disgusting moment of my career,” a statement that has drawn a great deal of media ire.

Members of the media believe that Yamakan, by declaring these comments to be “an all time low” of his career, gave far too much weight to the opinions of a few dumb Americans, and in doing so, seemingly brushed off far greater travesties, e.g. Lucky Star and “that fucking awful series about some guy’s wooden statue turning into a bitch with a toy wand and shit”. Lauer himself was so surprised by Yamakan’s reaction that he interrupted his guest, grabbing his microphone and declaring to viewers his belief that Yamakan was “the worst director of all time…of all time.”

This comes after only one episode of Fractale. We expect to have even more information to report after the airing of episode 2.

BREAKING NEWS UPDATE: Funimation Pulls Fractale Simulcast, Blames “Crap Directing”

Disclaimer

I’m watching less anime and playing more videogames. I have half a mind to ditch this blog and make a videogame blog instead, but there are some problems in that, namely:

A) I’m lazy.

B) I’m really friggen lazy.

C) I’m broke and can’t afford new games. I mean, I just got Shadow of the Colossus for Christmas. I am behind the times.

As for the upcoming anime season, I’ll be watching Kimi ni Todoke 2, seeing as I consider it the best romantic series since REC, and I’ll be trying to stick with Madoka Magic or whatever it’s called, despite the fact that parts of the first episode were simply painful to look at. Ume Aoki designs make for a reasonable excuse to watch some more. Other than that, it all looks like crap. Feel free to correct me on that assessment.

Whether or not I’ll get back into blogging really depends on whether or not I’m at the computer when I get a really bad idea for a post and NEED to write it. Until then, I’ll try to cook up something stupid to post sometime this week for old time’s sake.

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.

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.”

Visuals:

What do you expect? FFXIII is obviously a beautiful game. Everything is nice to look at, and playing it on a widescreen TV with HDMI is eye candy from start to finish. The cutscenes are beutifully rendered, only hurt by the fact that all of the characters are boring and the story is an absolute mess. My advice? Look and don’t listen. You’ll enjoy yourself more. As for the battles, nothing could possibly be more tedious to watch. Out of the six possible classes that each character can play as, only one of them actually moves during battle. Everyone else stands perfectly still, so if watching a bunch of people grunt and moan while they jiggle their arms is your bread and butter, prepare to be deeply satisfied.

The Battle System:

I don’t understand why people heap so much praise on this thing. You have no control over the AI’s actions other than to switch “Paradigms”. What a paradigm is, is a set of classes you establish prior to battle, and must reestablish every time you switch team members. Even if you use a certain set of 6 paradigms for a certain party for most of the game, the moment you swap in another character for a particular battle, you have just guaranteed yourself 2-3 minutes in the paradigm menu reestablishing your setup. For your average battle, you can simply choose any combination of an Attacker/Blaster Paradigm to deal damage, switching in more or less spellcasters depending on how low the stagger meter/damage multiplier is. Each enemy has this meter, and it is raised through continuous attacking, and falls while the enemy is not being hurt. For most enemies, the damage you deal is rather miniscule until this meter is filled, at which point you can start to really beat the hell out of them. How do you beat the hell out of them? Press X once to choose auto-battle, and once more to choose a target. You could take the time to scroll through the menu and pick abilities, but for the most part, the computer does a fine job. To switch paradigms, you press L1, likely the only time you’ll ever press a button that isn’t X during battle. If you want to have a ridiculously easy time with the game, just start each battle with a Medic/Enhancer/Jammer party and then switch to your attack paradigm after a minute or two. Rinse and repeat for every tough enemy you come across, and you have every battle in a nutshell. Brilliant apparently. If you plan on renting the game, you can pretty much ignore everything I’ve said, because for the first 25 hours of the game, you aren’t even allowed to choose your party.

Where’s the challenge? I’ll tell you. Unlike every other rpg you’ve probably ever played, in this game, your party leader (the one you control) is the lifeblood of the party. If the leader dies, it’s game over. Your other members can die all they want. I’ll often just leave them dead when they bite it because characters are fully revived and healed at the end of the battle, so as long as I can finish the fight on my own, who needs ‘em? Some of the battles in the game are designed to last a very long time, and there’s nothing quite like watching in horror after 10 minutes of pressing X as your party leader gets targeted by a one hit kill move and you don’t have enough time to raise his defenses. This happens a lot. You’d think the AI would prioritize the life of the party leader, but this is not the case. The medic AI is broken as all hell, never prioritizing Revive or Esuna to help out dead characters or remove debilitating status effects because they find it far more important to cast heal 5 times on someone with half health, even when the first 3 heals were enough to fully restore their HP. If you want someone healed right, you better make damn sure one of your teams healers is you.

Menus:

Oh god the menus. The leveling system in this game is the most tedious thing ever created. Instead of directly applying experience points and raising your stats all around, you must use collected XP to charge a beam of energy along what amounts to a huge coiling string of beads and crystals. The beads are HP/Strength/Magic bonuses, and the crystals are abilities. Instead of choosing one bonus and then moving on to the next bonus in line, you must hold X anywhere from 1 to 5 seconds (depending on the amount of XP required for the next bonus) and wait for the string of energy to make it from one bead to the next. To fully level all 6 characters in each of the 6 classes, I am willing to bet you would have to hold the X button down for a grand total of 2-3 hours. Since this is the only way to directly strengthen your characters, you will have to do this every time you reach a point where the enemies become too difficult, or instead of waiting, just do it every 10 minutes. Try to spread out those hours of holding down a button as much as possible, and maybe you wont notice how much the idea sucks.

As well as leveling characters, you can also level items. Each weapon has three levels. You start at level 1, feed the weapon loot for experience, and once it’s maxed, feed it a transformation catalyst to take it to level 2. From here, repeat the process to get to level 3 and then repeat the process again to max the weapon out. Not really all that bad, but there is of course one problem. All the best loot worth the most experience costs money. A lot of money. And you don’t get any from battles. Until about 30 hours into the game, I had amassed maybe 100,000 bux. The most expensive major XP loot costs 50,000 a pop, and to fully level a single weapon, you may need about thirty 0f them. This means that in 30 hours of gameplay, I had 1/90th of the money I’d need to fully level all 6 of my weapons. The only good way to make cash is also the only way to get the rarest transformation catalyst needed to make all of the top tier weapons: Killing a dinosaur whose only move is stomping the ground and instakilling under-leveled players and hoping he drops the loot you need, which he seems to do only 20% of the time. Fucking hell.

The one complaint I’m not going to go into much detail about is the “linearity” of the game. Yes, for the first 25 hours every map is effectively a straight line, and yes, the one large area in the game is simply a circle with more straight lines poking out from the center in every direction like a child’s drawing of the Sun. But instead of being delighted when I was finally given the chance to explore, I was so used to stuff being right there in front of me that I didn’t even want to. In FF 12, the world is huge. You revisit old areas to find newly opened paths that might end up leading you to another area, reinforcing the idea that your in one big interconnected world, but it is ridiculously easy to get yourself lost. I don’t mind it but I can understand why they might want to eliminate that aspect from 13. Give the people what they want, and if FFXIII and W+M1 pyros in Team Fortress 2 are any clue, what the people want is to hold a button down and run forward for hours on end.

I think that about covers it.

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.

The beauty of a shared kiss…

And the crush of a young girl on the man who has gently touched her face slapped the shit out of her so many times in the past.

Ahhh, love is in the air!

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 ;_____;

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!