Check Please! by Ngozi Ukazu
Showing posts with label college. Show all posts
Showing posts with label college. Show all posts
Thursday, December 3, 2015
Webcomic Review: Check Please!
I started reading this comic between late July and early September, I believe I got this recommendation from one of the many "webcomic recommendation" links I posted, and then realized I had actually seen this comic earlier. I had actually seen a banner for this at Otakon but since it was an image of Bittle holding a pie I couldn’t tell if it was about hockey or about a waiter whose customers just never seemed to leave/pay. I mention this not because I think it’s a bad banner advertisement, just because I think this would be a hilarious AU and someone should get on that now please!
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Webcomic Review Month 2013: Dumbing of Age
In another bit of business for Webcomic Review Month, in addition to not having a finished webcomics review I won't have one for Pokemon Nuzlockes either. Not because I don't enjoy them or because I didn't think anyone read it (quite the opposite there) but again, just didn't find any new ones to read this past year that I really enjoyed and I didn't want to pick up any more just for this. Ah well, that said if anyone knows of some really good nuzlocke comics, or regular old webcomics in general, please be sure to shoot me a comment or a tweet on twitter to tell me about it, one can never have too many recommendations after all!
Dumbing of Age by David Willis
It's the fall semester at a college in Indianan where you have both the upper classmen who are starting to become disillusioned with their college lives and the new freshman who are various amounts of excited and eager for this new part of their lives. And if there are two things guaranteed in life (death and taxes) then there are two more things guaranteed in college, drama (especially of the roommate variety) and just plain weird life events.
While the names of Willis' other webcomics are familiar to me (Shortpacked! It's Walky! It's Joyce and Walky! Roomies ) I hadn't read any of them prior to looking up a bit of background information for this review and frankly after seeing how different the characters are I'm rather confused. So if you're a new reader heed Willis' recommendation on the comic's about page, it's totally fine and possibly better if you come in knowing nothing to this story, the changes in character dynamics will just confuse you. Regardless of all of that, I only started reading this webcomic very recently but the humor clicked with me immediately and I was struck by how a lot of the characters have arguments on more, let's call them morale, issues and neither side is a strawman, both sides just debate themselves into a corner much the way arguments of that kind tend to play out in real life. The story also manages to balance a good sized cast, see banner above, and give all except one or two enough time in the limelight for character development which again is pretty impressive. I do wonder if the story will ever progress timewise (they still seem to be in the first semester of their freshman year) but as regular readers should know I always prefer stories where the cast does grow up and the story eventually ends (think For Better or For Worse) versus stories where that never happens (80% of all other newspaper comic strips out there). And who knows, hopefully this will remain the rare comic where the characters might not age and change a ton yet still keeps my attention for years, Girls with Slingshots and Questionable Content have all managed to do that so it is possible!
Dumbing of Age updates Monday through Friday on it's website and the first book is also avaliable for purchase at the series' store.
2012 "D" webcomics
2011 "D" webcomics
Dumbing of Age by David Willis
It's the fall semester at a college in Indianan where you have both the upper classmen who are starting to become disillusioned with their college lives and the new freshman who are various amounts of excited and eager for this new part of their lives. And if there are two things guaranteed in life (death and taxes) then there are two more things guaranteed in college, drama (especially of the roommate variety) and just plain weird life events.
While the names of Willis' other webcomics are familiar to me (Shortpacked! It's Walky! It's Joyce and Walky! Roomies ) I hadn't read any of them prior to looking up a bit of background information for this review and frankly after seeing how different the characters are I'm rather confused. So if you're a new reader heed Willis' recommendation on the comic's about page, it's totally fine and possibly better if you come in knowing nothing to this story, the changes in character dynamics will just confuse you. Regardless of all of that, I only started reading this webcomic very recently but the humor clicked with me immediately and I was struck by how a lot of the characters have arguments on more, let's call them morale, issues and neither side is a strawman, both sides just debate themselves into a corner much the way arguments of that kind tend to play out in real life. The story also manages to balance a good sized cast, see banner above, and give all except one or two enough time in the limelight for character development which again is pretty impressive. I do wonder if the story will ever progress timewise (they still seem to be in the first semester of their freshman year) but as regular readers should know I always prefer stories where the cast does grow up and the story eventually ends (think For Better or For Worse) versus stories where that never happens (80% of all other newspaper comic strips out there). And who knows, hopefully this will remain the rare comic where the characters might not age and change a ton yet still keeps my attention for years, Girls with Slingshots and Questionable Content have all managed to do that so it is possible!
Dumbing of Age updates Monday through Friday on it's website and the first book is also avaliable for purchase at the series' store.
2012 "D" webcomics
2011 "D" webcomics
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Anime Reviews: Moyashimon Returns
The other noitaminA show and a returning one at that, although Moyashimon had a really long hiatus and I'm baffled how it came back in the first place. Picking up right where the first season left off, so this is not the kind of sequel where you can jump right in if you haven't seen the first part, the story continues to follow the strange students in the Itsuki Seminar and their even weirder adventures with microbes.
Moyashimon Returns
Summary: Sawaki, a first year student at the University of Agriculture, has the odd ability to see microbes which, given that he's the son of a sake brewer and has fallen in with a group of people clustered around a microbes professor, comes up in his day to day life than one would expect. Especially now as the group gets ready for the school's fall harvest festival and plans to sell alcohol as a way to generate funds, but given that one of their number vanishes shortly beforehand that might be the least of their worries.
The Good: The first half of the series with the fall festival was rather fun, even though I wish it hadn't happened so soon after the spring festival (which was my favorite of the two for sheer whackiness). It was nice to see Kei again (I was worried that they wouldn't appear at all in this season since they still seemed to be sorting their own life out), really all the characters since this show's strongest point is its weird cast of characters and the hijinks they get themselves into.
The Bad: Moyashimon works best when it has it's entire cast to work with and just lets them all bounce off of each other. Given that the cast was split up for over half the season the jokes it can make gets really limited and I just got bored of the characters after a bit. On a related note, Hasegawa has always been one of the more fleshed out characters in the series but it still felt odd for her to have an entire character development arc while no one else had one. Also, she didn't really get any development here, she barely changed in the end (her motivation for staying in school may have changed but the end result, that she's staying in school to study microbes, didn't) and in such a short series it felt a bit out of place. I didn't like any of the new characters in the show either, Marie felt like the author combined Sawaki and Kei into one character and Hasegawa's fiancee felt flat the entire time (it felt like he had issues but I wasn't really sure what, inadequacy?).
The Audio: The ending does follow in the noitaminA tradition of having at least one song with odd images to accompany it (although I didn't pay much attention to the ED since I didn't like the song, it was quite catchy however, and it was done in some unattractive looking CGI) but the opening song looked and sounded so generic it was rather sad. Other than that, obviously most of the cast is the same as the first season and everyone was fine, I was more focused on how the show looked than how it sounded.
The Visuals: As this image sums up, the character designs changed a LOT for this season (poor Sawaki also looks more like a high school student than a college one now) which I have to admit frustrates me. Actually, why does a company need brand new designs for a new season, is there a technical reason they can't simply use the old designs for the reoccuring characters? Regardless, this whole season looks like it had a bit of a lower budget than before, I was unnerved when I realized that the mouths on Those Two Guys (Misato and Kawahama) only moved sometimes, I couldn't figure out if there was any rhyme or reason to it or if the animators only did it when they had the time. It's a bit of a let down from the previous season, and it's not like the first season had mind-blowingly good art either, and certainly doesn't help it out.
So another miss for me and I'm really not sure what to say. I was hoping that this season would have a more solid ending so I could say "Yes, watch Moyashimon and Moyashimon Returns!" but now I feel like adding onto that "but there's not really an ending, the manga hasn't been published in the US for years, probably will never be published again, and I'm pretty sure it's still running in Japan but I think I've also heard it's been on hiatus numerous times, yeaaaaaaah." If you still want to watch it, and it is a fun show a lot of the time, crunchyroll is now streaming both seasons (which I take to mean that probably no one is ever going to license it now which is also sad). Finally, I'm probably alone in this but, can we make the segments with microbes talking about how stuff works a bit shorter? By the end of the series they were just getting on my nerves and I just couldn't care about how microbes play an integral role in the formation of yet another food.
Moyashimon Returns
Summary: Sawaki, a first year student at the University of Agriculture, has the odd ability to see microbes which, given that he's the son of a sake brewer and has fallen in with a group of people clustered around a microbes professor, comes up in his day to day life than one would expect. Especially now as the group gets ready for the school's fall harvest festival and plans to sell alcohol as a way to generate funds, but given that one of their number vanishes shortly beforehand that might be the least of their worries.
The Good: The first half of the series with the fall festival was rather fun, even though I wish it hadn't happened so soon after the spring festival (which was my favorite of the two for sheer whackiness). It was nice to see Kei again (I was worried that they wouldn't appear at all in this season since they still seemed to be sorting their own life out), really all the characters since this show's strongest point is its weird cast of characters and the hijinks they get themselves into.
The Bad: Moyashimon works best when it has it's entire cast to work with and just lets them all bounce off of each other. Given that the cast was split up for over half the season the jokes it can make gets really limited and I just got bored of the characters after a bit. On a related note, Hasegawa has always been one of the more fleshed out characters in the series but it still felt odd for her to have an entire character development arc while no one else had one. Also, she didn't really get any development here, she barely changed in the end (her motivation for staying in school may have changed but the end result, that she's staying in school to study microbes, didn't) and in such a short series it felt a bit out of place. I didn't like any of the new characters in the show either, Marie felt like the author combined Sawaki and Kei into one character and Hasegawa's fiancee felt flat the entire time (it felt like he had issues but I wasn't really sure what, inadequacy?).
The Audio: The ending does follow in the noitaminA tradition of having at least one song with odd images to accompany it (although I didn't pay much attention to the ED since I didn't like the song, it was quite catchy however, and it was done in some unattractive looking CGI) but the opening song looked and sounded so generic it was rather sad. Other than that, obviously most of the cast is the same as the first season and everyone was fine, I was more focused on how the show looked than how it sounded.
The Visuals: As this image sums up, the character designs changed a LOT for this season (poor Sawaki also looks more like a high school student than a college one now) which I have to admit frustrates me. Actually, why does a company need brand new designs for a new season, is there a technical reason they can't simply use the old designs for the reoccuring characters? Regardless, this whole season looks like it had a bit of a lower budget than before, I was unnerved when I realized that the mouths on Those Two Guys (Misato and Kawahama) only moved sometimes, I couldn't figure out if there was any rhyme or reason to it or if the animators only did it when they had the time. It's a bit of a let down from the previous season, and it's not like the first season had mind-blowingly good art either, and certainly doesn't help it out.
So another miss for me and I'm really not sure what to say. I was hoping that this season would have a more solid ending so I could say "Yes, watch Moyashimon and Moyashimon Returns!" but now I feel like adding onto that "but there's not really an ending, the manga hasn't been published in the US for years, probably will never be published again, and I'm pretty sure it's still running in Japan but I think I've also heard it's been on hiatus numerous times, yeaaaaaaah." If you still want to watch it, and it is a fun show a lot of the time, crunchyroll is now streaming both seasons (which I take to mean that probably no one is ever going to license it now which is also sad). Finally, I'm probably alone in this but, can we make the segments with microbes talking about how stuff works a bit shorter? By the end of the series they were just getting on my nerves and I just couldn't care about how microbes play an integral role in the formation of yet another food.
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Manga Review: Moyashimon (volume one)
*facepalm* Yep, next week's break will be good for me so I can finally get re-used to my blogging schedule. And I had even planned this one out, I talked about the first Moyashimon anime series early enough so that if anyone was interested they had time to try it out before the second season aired, talked about the second season on Wednesday, and then I was going to finish up with the first volume of the manga (which I stumbled across at a used bookstore and thought "why not?") so that the show would be even more present in people's minds and (hopefully) they would be more likely to try it out. So let's see if that plan still works, abet a day behind schedule.....
Moyashimon: Tales of Agriculture by Masayuki Ishikawa
Summary: Tadayasu Sawaki and Kei Yuuki are freshman at an unnamed agricultural university near Tokyo and somehow end up as lab assistants to an eccentric professor who has a passion for all things fermented. One might think that he would be more interested in Kei, the son of a sake brewer, but instead Professor Itsuki is more interested in Sawaki and his curious ability to see microbes and talk with them.
The Good: So far the anime seems to have been a rather good adaption of the story and all the strengths (and failings) of the manga transferred over well. The pacing is roughly similar, there's only one short chapter in here that wasn't animated and I can see why it was cut, overall everything just flows rather well. It sets a good tone for the rest of series and I now feel bad for holding off reading this series for so long now.
The Bad: Again, the manga has the same strength's and failings as the anime so some of the problems I had in the anime (such as the fact that an agricultural university doesn't seem eco-friendly, which seemed like a rather large research failing) are present here as well. I'll also admit that I preferred Professor Itsuki's long explanations of microbes in the anime to the manga since it was much easier to tune out after a few seconds in the anime than to try and skim in the manga, and even if you do try to read everything that panels are so packed that it's hard to make out the words as well (I don't know if the Japanese panels were as packed or if this is partially a problem that came because of translating it into a language which generally uses more space letter/character wise).
The Art: First off, I love how the US cover was done (the original Japanese covers, from what I've seen, were a plain green cover with yellow text on it, this one is quirkly eye-catching) and it looks like the trend of recreating countries' flags with microbes would have continued if the series had (in the US). As for the actual manga, the art doesn't use many screentones and the pen and ink style gives the series a surprisingly gritty look (which stands out even more compared to the anime, especially with the art shift for the second season). It's also much more detailed than I expected and the characters look much more distinctive, it's not what I was expecting at all but I rather liked it.
So, there was one more volume of the manga released in the US, which was partially why I hadn't tried it before (there didn't seem much point in trying out a dropped, two volume series) but now I'll keep an eye out for it. I don't plan on making an effort to go out and look for it but if the series popped up on say JManga or if it got re-licensed then sure, I'll go and support the series, otherwise I'll just follow the anime and that'll be it.
Moyashimon: Tales of Agriculture by Masayuki Ishikawa
Summary: Tadayasu Sawaki and Kei Yuuki are freshman at an unnamed agricultural university near Tokyo and somehow end up as lab assistants to an eccentric professor who has a passion for all things fermented. One might think that he would be more interested in Kei, the son of a sake brewer, but instead Professor Itsuki is more interested in Sawaki and his curious ability to see microbes and talk with them.
The Good: So far the anime seems to have been a rather good adaption of the story and all the strengths (and failings) of the manga transferred over well. The pacing is roughly similar, there's only one short chapter in here that wasn't animated and I can see why it was cut, overall everything just flows rather well. It sets a good tone for the rest of series and I now feel bad for holding off reading this series for so long now.
The Bad: Again, the manga has the same strength's and failings as the anime so some of the problems I had in the anime (such as the fact that an agricultural university doesn't seem eco-friendly, which seemed like a rather large research failing) are present here as well. I'll also admit that I preferred Professor Itsuki's long explanations of microbes in the anime to the manga since it was much easier to tune out after a few seconds in the anime than to try and skim in the manga, and even if you do try to read everything that panels are so packed that it's hard to make out the words as well (I don't know if the Japanese panels were as packed or if this is partially a problem that came because of translating it into a language which generally uses more space letter/character wise).
The Art: First off, I love how the US cover was done (the original Japanese covers, from what I've seen, were a plain green cover with yellow text on it, this one is quirkly eye-catching) and it looks like the trend of recreating countries' flags with microbes would have continued if the series had (in the US). As for the actual manga, the art doesn't use many screentones and the pen and ink style gives the series a surprisingly gritty look (which stands out even more compared to the anime, especially with the art shift for the second season). It's also much more detailed than I expected and the characters look much more distinctive, it's not what I was expecting at all but I rather liked it.
So, there was one more volume of the manga released in the US, which was partially why I hadn't tried it before (there didn't seem much point in trying out a dropped, two volume series) but now I'll keep an eye out for it. I don't plan on making an effort to go out and look for it but if the series popped up on say JManga or if it got re-licensed then sure, I'll go and support the series, otherwise I'll just follow the anime and that'll be it.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Summer 2012 Anime Write-up
Following up last week's continuing spring shows I'm enjoying post it's time for me to talk about all of the new shows I've tried out in the past four days (yes, I've seen all of this in four days, fear for my sanity). As usual there were one or two shows that sounded like they might have been kinda interesting that I didn't get around to watch but might pick up later. I'm trying to be picker with what I watch so I have more time to catch up with older series and, since summer is one of the "weaker" anime seasons, I might actually have some luck with that this time around! So I'm just going to go and make one post for all the shows, sorry to anyone whose using an RSS reader since I probably just killed your feed.
Arcana Famigila (La Storia della Arcana Famigila)
The Premise: On a small island ruled by the local mafia, the head of the family is retiring and has ordered all members who have made a contract with the tarot (as in tarot cards) to participate in a fighting tournament to determine the next head and marry his daughter. His daughter is not happy about this and decides to fight as well.
Another anime adaptation of an otome game and I was looking forward to this one based on the original artwork, which was of course made rather generic looking for the anime (I know I know, it's easier to animate, still doesn't make me less sad about it). As for the rest of the show, that wasn't a very good opening episode, I'm hard pressed to think of a single well-done part of the episode. Everything felt clunky and wooden, all the characters felt like walking stereotypes (yes they haven't had character development yet but plenty of other shows manage better than this in their first episode), and the info dumps seemed rather pointless. Between all of that and news that the show is probably going for a romantic route I wouldn't like* I've dropped this show and am starting to lose faith that good, interesting reverse harems show exist.
Arcana Famigila is streaming on Crunchyroll and has been licensed by Section 23.
Campione!
The Premise: Japanese tourist Goudo goes to Japan to return an artifact owned by his grandfather, kills a god and receives the title (and powers) of Godslayer.
Honestly I tried out this show just because the idea of a "Godslayer" amused me and I certainly enjoy flashy action shows, provided that they have a plot that holds together. At this point it's a bit hard to tell if Campione has that however, the first episode was paced much to fast (according to fans of the original novel they compressed an entire light novel, which run about 200-ish pages in my experience, into one episode) and instead of starting out in media res (as the first novel does, I read some of that and it worked alright there) they also chose to adapt the third novel, which was a flashback to how Godou got his powers. I can understand why they did this part first and fast but the episode could have been much sleeker and really makes me worried how the rest of the series will be paced. For the moment I'm giving it another few episodes but I'm much less optimistic about it now.
Campione! is also streaming on Crunchyroll and has been licensed by Sentai Filmworks (another name for Section 23).
Humanity Has Declined (Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita)
The Premise: In the far off future the world may look bright and cheery but the human population has dropped precariously and many places struggle with things such as food shortages. Our protagonist, let's called her Mediator, is from the UN and her job is to mediate between humans and faeries, tiny, perpetually smiling creatures who now have a larger population and more advanced technology than humans.
Oh where to begin with this show, if you want weird, black comedy this is the show of the season, I'm torn between thinking the show is too strange and over the top and laughing at the worst of the jokes. All of the comedy involves some form of absurdism, dead-panning on the part of at least one character, and for good measure some of them involve puns as well (oh kami....). At this point I'm kinda torn about continuing the show or not, at times I find it too strange but I am enjoying it and it's only one cour so for the time being I'll continue following it.
HhD is streaming on Crunchyroll and has also been licensed by Sentai/23.
Lagrange- The Flower of Rin-ne (season two)
The Premise: Continuing about a year from where the first part ended, Madoka has never quite recovered from making the closest friends she's ever had, Lan and Muginami, to have them leave her, go to fight in opposite sides in a war, and her own abilities to pilot the mysterious Vox Aura have vanished as well. But all of a sudden Lan comes back into her life with Muginami in hot pursuit, although it seems like both of them want Madoka for their side's own, manipulative purposes, all the while Madoka's cousin attempts to puzzle out just what happened all those thousands of years ago to spark the legend surrounding the Flower of Rin-ne.
I am quite happy this show is back since it developed into a great show last winter that took a number of old, mostly mech, tropes and just slightly subverted or played with them. By now Madoka is broken for sure (she probably wasn't in the best mental state when the whole show started but by now she really doesn't seem to be in a good place), the politics seem to have gotten a bit more complicated, and Earth is in serious trouble this time when two of it's three Voxes, the only hope they have in case either of the "alien" sides decide to fight, are now possibly against them and the last is out of commission. While I don't like the new ED and miss the old OP the rest of the show is firing on all cylinders so far and, while I don't expect the show to end in tragedy, I am curious to see how much of a happy ending it can produce and what the characters have to do to work for it.
Lagrange is licensed by Viz media and can be found streaming for US audiences on Hulu.
Moyashimon Returns
The Premise: Not more than a month after the first season ended in-universe, the gang returns for more hijinks involving fermentation, college life, and microbes with microbe seeing Sawaki as the main character.
Well, if you've seen the first season you know what to expect and if you'll enjoy it, if you haven't you really need to start at the beginning of the show. Actually, the most note-worthy thing about this first episode (which, like many other shows, had weak pacing which I'm hoping will get better) was that the character designer was different this time around which resulted in some of the characters looking radically different, stolen from RandomC (here's the comparison for Sawaki as well, ultimately all the characters look much less detailed this time around). Between those two things it didn't make for the strongest first episode but I do like the series so I'll obviously be sticking around.
Moyashimon Returns has not been licensed/simulcast by anyone so fansubs are the way to go for this show (unless you know enough Japanese to keep up with a discussion on microbiology and fermentation that is).
Natsuyuki Rendezous
The Premise: Hazuki, a man in his 20s, has a crush on the owner of a local flower shop and gets hired on as part time help after several months of stopping by nearly every night to buy flowers. He's trying to grow closer to her when he discovers that not only is she a widower but he is the only person who can see the ghost of her husband who is constantly nearby.
The second noitaminA show of the season and I enjoyed the first episode much more than I expected it to. It was a paced quickly but perfectly, no scene felt too short or too long and, considering that the original manga is only four volumes long (and completed!), I think this show might fit perfectly into the 11/12 episode constraint of the timeslot. I'll need another episode or two to really like the characters but already they've started being fleshed out and I also really like the look of this show (I know everyone is talking about HhD and SAO but I really liked the use of color here and the character designs were nice and distinctive). The show is a slice of life romance, not my favorite combination of genres, but hopefully with older characters I'll enjoy it.
The show is both streaming on crunchyroll and has been nabbed by Sentai (proving that they don't really care what a show is as long as it stays still long enough for them to grab it).
Sword Art Online
The Premise: The year is 2022 and full immersion virtual reality video games have finally arrived and the creator of the technology (a helmet like apparatus) has created his own game called Sword Art Online and limited the sales to just 10,000 volumes. But after the beta has ended and all the new players have logged in they discover that there is absolutely no way to get out of the game, unless as a collective group they beat all 100 levels of the game without dying since death in the game means death in the real world too.
Probably the most hyped and anticipated anime of the summer season, written by the same author who wrote the Accel World light novels^ I seem to be in the minority here by finding the pacing a bit rough. Funny enough it's similar to the problems I had with Campione!'s first episode, I can see why they had so much happen in one episode but felt like a few things could've been cut down (do we really need to know so much about how the mechanics of a game that we can never play work?). Also unlike most people it seems (well, unlike most non-light novel readers anyway) I actually didn't have any problems with the "there is no way out of SAO except my way" part, I'll admit that I've read so much background on the show that I've forgotten exactly what was outlined in the episode (and hopefully the parts that were left out of the first episode will be addressed soon) but they went to such extremes to show how there really is no way to get out of the game internally or externally^^ that I have no problems with the set-up. So with all of that out of the way hopefully the pacing will smooth itself out a bit and make for an interesting ride.
While not licensed, people are speculating that Aniplex plans to release this series themselves (oh god those prices) the show is legally streaming on crunchyroll.
Tari Tari
The Premise: After screwing up in her club's musical performance last year, Konatsu isn't allowed to sing this year. To get around this she finds four other classmates to join her club so that she can sing as part of her new club.
I feel so odd for saying this but I do like slice-of-life, there just happens to be more than one kind of sol and this isn't the kind I like. The characters, even the Austrian exchange student (do the Japanese really think the travel guides are written so poorly?), are just too mundane to be interesting and sadly the characters look just enough alike that I started confusing some of the female characters, something that I do rarely. The show looks pretty, really pretty and makes me wish that I liked the show more, but it just bored me and I see no reason to continue further with it.
Tari Tari is streaming on crunchyroll and has been added to Section 23's ever-growing horde of anime titles.
UtaKoi (Choyaku Hyakunin Isshu: Uta Koi)
The Premise: A "liberal interpretation" of the hundred poems used in games such as karuta, each episode focuses on one or two of the poems, all of which are love poems, and speculates on how they came to be.
I'll admit it, I wouldn't have looked twice at this series if it wasn't for Chihayafuru and I imagine most wouldn't have either (which makes this either great planning or the luckiest coincidence ever for the show). Love stories on their own generally aren't my cup of tea but, due to their short nature and the visuals of the show (which indulges in the non-moving plaid technique and adds a thick line around all of the character which produces an effect I rather like) I'm hooked. I'll admit the animation isn't very high quality (and considering I normally can't tell that's a bad sign) and the ending song is the strangest pairing I've ever found for an anime (the opening song is hit or miss it seems, the singer certainly could be less nasally but the song has charmed me) but so far I've had fun with this show and at one season I can spare the time to watch some more.
UtaKoi is streaming on crunchyroll.
There's an interesting bit of variety for me this time around, including my continuing shows I'm watching two mech shows, one or two more with strong sci-fi elements, three action heavy shows, two romance heavy shows, a few that are half slice of life half something else, a mystery show, and two shows where one of their genres is "just plain weird." It's a nice mix, and I'm watching some high fantasy on the side to balance out the sci-fi, so here's to a summer with a few unexpected gems and hopes that none of these shows crashes and burns!
*the only reason I'm squicked out is because it appears they are going to pair up Felicitá with either her cousin or her nephew, which I do recall noticing in the preview material but ignored. Actually, I agree with this poster on what the best route would be since that would totally be the route I'd go for in the game (well, if there wasn't an option for dating everyone, if it's a dating game I demand the option to date as many people as I want!)
^all the author has given a no-comment comment on whether or not the two series are related thus far (from what I can tell there is an extra story somewhere where the leads from the two series have a duel, somehow) although I'm inclined to think that they are alternate universes. Honestly I just can't believe that the NerveGear technology from SAO had progressed so far in just eight years (it's only about six or nine month's old at the start of SAO) that people were putting the internet connectors onto babies (which is one of the rules for brain burst in Accel World and the oldest brain bursters would have been born around 2030). Someone could probably make a very good argument to convince me otherwise but for the moment I'm sticking to my position.
^^unplug them? Has a battery. Battery is unconnected too long? Explodes. Try to disconnect battery? Same idea. Hack the servers? Government tries, fails, can only monitor from the outside. Take helmet off? Explodes. People die of starvation? Creator left a two hour window and info for all players for the government to move everyone to hospitals. Shouldn't safety concerns have been raised? Dude created SAO AND Nervegear and was the first to completely take advantage of all of it. Plus, see that this platform is less than a year old and has a battery that likes to explode when people mess with it, might not have been reverse engineered yet (I will also say that the original web novels for this were in 2002, before everyone and their mom started jailbreaking iPhones and the like, it was written in a slightly different culture). I'm also betting on the theory that he did almost everything on his own and that the company doesn't really exist so there was no one to stop him.
Arcana Famigila (La Storia della Arcana Famigila)
The Premise: On a small island ruled by the local mafia, the head of the family is retiring and has ordered all members who have made a contract with the tarot (as in tarot cards) to participate in a fighting tournament to determine the next head and marry his daughter. His daughter is not happy about this and decides to fight as well.
Another anime adaptation of an otome game and I was looking forward to this one based on the original artwork, which was of course made rather generic looking for the anime (I know I know, it's easier to animate, still doesn't make me less sad about it). As for the rest of the show, that wasn't a very good opening episode, I'm hard pressed to think of a single well-done part of the episode. Everything felt clunky and wooden, all the characters felt like walking stereotypes (yes they haven't had character development yet but plenty of other shows manage better than this in their first episode), and the info dumps seemed rather pointless. Between all of that and news that the show is probably going for a romantic route I wouldn't like* I've dropped this show and am starting to lose faith that good, interesting reverse harems show exist.
Arcana Famigila is streaming on Crunchyroll and has been licensed by Section 23.
Campione!
The Premise: Japanese tourist Goudo goes to Japan to return an artifact owned by his grandfather, kills a god and receives the title (and powers) of Godslayer.
Honestly I tried out this show just because the idea of a "Godslayer" amused me and I certainly enjoy flashy action shows, provided that they have a plot that holds together. At this point it's a bit hard to tell if Campione has that however, the first episode was paced much to fast (according to fans of the original novel they compressed an entire light novel, which run about 200-ish pages in my experience, into one episode) and instead of starting out in media res (as the first novel does, I read some of that and it worked alright there) they also chose to adapt the third novel, which was a flashback to how Godou got his powers. I can understand why they did this part first and fast but the episode could have been much sleeker and really makes me worried how the rest of the series will be paced. For the moment I'm giving it another few episodes but I'm much less optimistic about it now.
Campione! is also streaming on Crunchyroll and has been licensed by Sentai Filmworks (another name for Section 23).
Humanity Has Declined (Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita)
The Premise: In the far off future the world may look bright and cheery but the human population has dropped precariously and many places struggle with things such as food shortages. Our protagonist, let's called her Mediator, is from the UN and her job is to mediate between humans and faeries, tiny, perpetually smiling creatures who now have a larger population and more advanced technology than humans.
Oh where to begin with this show, if you want weird, black comedy this is the show of the season, I'm torn between thinking the show is too strange and over the top and laughing at the worst of the jokes. All of the comedy involves some form of absurdism, dead-panning on the part of at least one character, and for good measure some of them involve puns as well (oh kami....). At this point I'm kinda torn about continuing the show or not, at times I find it too strange but I am enjoying it and it's only one cour so for the time being I'll continue following it.
HhD is streaming on Crunchyroll and has also been licensed by Sentai/23.
Lagrange- The Flower of Rin-ne (season two)
The Premise: Continuing about a year from where the first part ended, Madoka has never quite recovered from making the closest friends she's ever had, Lan and Muginami, to have them leave her, go to fight in opposite sides in a war, and her own abilities to pilot the mysterious Vox Aura have vanished as well. But all of a sudden Lan comes back into her life with Muginami in hot pursuit, although it seems like both of them want Madoka for their side's own, manipulative purposes, all the while Madoka's cousin attempts to puzzle out just what happened all those thousands of years ago to spark the legend surrounding the Flower of Rin-ne.
I am quite happy this show is back since it developed into a great show last winter that took a number of old, mostly mech, tropes and just slightly subverted or played with them. By now Madoka is broken for sure (she probably wasn't in the best mental state when the whole show started but by now she really doesn't seem to be in a good place), the politics seem to have gotten a bit more complicated, and Earth is in serious trouble this time when two of it's three Voxes, the only hope they have in case either of the "alien" sides decide to fight, are now possibly against them and the last is out of commission. While I don't like the new ED and miss the old OP the rest of the show is firing on all cylinders so far and, while I don't expect the show to end in tragedy, I am curious to see how much of a happy ending it can produce and what the characters have to do to work for it.
Lagrange is licensed by Viz media and can be found streaming for US audiences on Hulu.
Moyashimon Returns
The Premise: Not more than a month after the first season ended in-universe, the gang returns for more hijinks involving fermentation, college life, and microbes with microbe seeing Sawaki as the main character.
Well, if you've seen the first season you know what to expect and if you'll enjoy it, if you haven't you really need to start at the beginning of the show. Actually, the most note-worthy thing about this first episode (which, like many other shows, had weak pacing which I'm hoping will get better) was that the character designer was different this time around which resulted in some of the characters looking radically different, stolen from RandomC (here's the comparison for Sawaki as well, ultimately all the characters look much less detailed this time around). Between those two things it didn't make for the strongest first episode but I do like the series so I'll obviously be sticking around.
Moyashimon Returns has not been licensed/simulcast by anyone so fansubs are the way to go for this show (unless you know enough Japanese to keep up with a discussion on microbiology and fermentation that is).
Natsuyuki Rendezous
The Premise: Hazuki, a man in his 20s, has a crush on the owner of a local flower shop and gets hired on as part time help after several months of stopping by nearly every night to buy flowers. He's trying to grow closer to her when he discovers that not only is she a widower but he is the only person who can see the ghost of her husband who is constantly nearby.
The second noitaminA show of the season and I enjoyed the first episode much more than I expected it to. It was a paced quickly but perfectly, no scene felt too short or too long and, considering that the original manga is only four volumes long (and completed!), I think this show might fit perfectly into the 11/12 episode constraint of the timeslot. I'll need another episode or two to really like the characters but already they've started being fleshed out and I also really like the look of this show (I know everyone is talking about HhD and SAO but I really liked the use of color here and the character designs were nice and distinctive). The show is a slice of life romance, not my favorite combination of genres, but hopefully with older characters I'll enjoy it.
The show is both streaming on crunchyroll and has been nabbed by Sentai (proving that they don't really care what a show is as long as it stays still long enough for them to grab it).
Sword Art Online
The Premise: The year is 2022 and full immersion virtual reality video games have finally arrived and the creator of the technology (a helmet like apparatus) has created his own game called Sword Art Online and limited the sales to just 10,000 volumes. But after the beta has ended and all the new players have logged in they discover that there is absolutely no way to get out of the game, unless as a collective group they beat all 100 levels of the game without dying since death in the game means death in the real world too.
Probably the most hyped and anticipated anime of the summer season, written by the same author who wrote the Accel World light novels^ I seem to be in the minority here by finding the pacing a bit rough. Funny enough it's similar to the problems I had with Campione!'s first episode, I can see why they had so much happen in one episode but felt like a few things could've been cut down (do we really need to know so much about how the mechanics of a game that we can never play work?). Also unlike most people it seems (well, unlike most non-light novel readers anyway) I actually didn't have any problems with the "there is no way out of SAO except my way" part, I'll admit that I've read so much background on the show that I've forgotten exactly what was outlined in the episode (and hopefully the parts that were left out of the first episode will be addressed soon) but they went to such extremes to show how there really is no way to get out of the game internally or externally^^ that I have no problems with the set-up. So with all of that out of the way hopefully the pacing will smooth itself out a bit and make for an interesting ride.
While not licensed, people are speculating that Aniplex plans to release this series themselves (oh god those prices) the show is legally streaming on crunchyroll.
Tari Tari
The Premise: After screwing up in her club's musical performance last year, Konatsu isn't allowed to sing this year. To get around this she finds four other classmates to join her club so that she can sing as part of her new club.
I feel so odd for saying this but I do like slice-of-life, there just happens to be more than one kind of sol and this isn't the kind I like. The characters, even the Austrian exchange student (do the Japanese really think the travel guides are written so poorly?), are just too mundane to be interesting and sadly the characters look just enough alike that I started confusing some of the female characters, something that I do rarely. The show looks pretty, really pretty and makes me wish that I liked the show more, but it just bored me and I see no reason to continue further with it.
Tari Tari is streaming on crunchyroll and has been added to Section 23's ever-growing horde of anime titles.
UtaKoi (Choyaku Hyakunin Isshu: Uta Koi)
The Premise: A "liberal interpretation" of the hundred poems used in games such as karuta, each episode focuses on one or two of the poems, all of which are love poems, and speculates on how they came to be.
I'll admit it, I wouldn't have looked twice at this series if it wasn't for Chihayafuru and I imagine most wouldn't have either (which makes this either great planning or the luckiest coincidence ever for the show). Love stories on their own generally aren't my cup of tea but, due to their short nature and the visuals of the show (which indulges in the non-moving plaid technique and adds a thick line around all of the character which produces an effect I rather like) I'm hooked. I'll admit the animation isn't very high quality (and considering I normally can't tell that's a bad sign) and the ending song is the strangest pairing I've ever found for an anime (the opening song is hit or miss it seems, the singer certainly could be less nasally but the song has charmed me) but so far I've had fun with this show and at one season I can spare the time to watch some more.
UtaKoi is streaming on crunchyroll.
There's an interesting bit of variety for me this time around, including my continuing shows I'm watching two mech shows, one or two more with strong sci-fi elements, three action heavy shows, two romance heavy shows, a few that are half slice of life half something else, a mystery show, and two shows where one of their genres is "just plain weird." It's a nice mix, and I'm watching some high fantasy on the side to balance out the sci-fi, so here's to a summer with a few unexpected gems and hopes that none of these shows crashes and burns!
*the only reason I'm squicked out is because it appears they are going to pair up Felicitá with either her cousin or her nephew, which I do recall noticing in the preview material but ignored. Actually, I agree with this poster on what the best route would be since that would totally be the route I'd go for in the game (well, if there wasn't an option for dating everyone, if it's a dating game I demand the option to date as many people as I want!)
^all the author has given a no-comment comment on whether or not the two series are related thus far (from what I can tell there is an extra story somewhere where the leads from the two series have a duel, somehow) although I'm inclined to think that they are alternate universes. Honestly I just can't believe that the NerveGear technology from SAO had progressed so far in just eight years (it's only about six or nine month's old at the start of SAO) that people were putting the internet connectors onto babies (which is one of the rules for brain burst in Accel World and the oldest brain bursters would have been born around 2030). Someone could probably make a very good argument to convince me otherwise but for the moment I'm sticking to my position.
^^unplug them? Has a battery. Battery is unconnected too long? Explodes. Try to disconnect battery? Same idea. Hack the servers? Government tries, fails, can only monitor from the outside. Take helmet off? Explodes. People die of starvation? Creator left a two hour window and info for all players for the government to move everyone to hospitals. Shouldn't safety concerns have been raised? Dude created SAO AND Nervegear and was the first to completely take advantage of all of it. Plus, see that this platform is less than a year old and has a battery that likes to explode when people mess with it, might not have been reverse engineered yet (I will also say that the original web novels for this were in 2002, before everyone and their mom started jailbreaking iPhones and the like, it was written in a slightly different culture). I'm also betting on the theory that he did almost everything on his own and that the company doesn't really exist so there was no one to stop him.
Friday, June 15, 2012
Comic Review: Will Supervillians be on the final?
....oh come on, with a title like that how could I NOT pick this one up? When I first came across this, via a review on ANN, I thought that the title made the story sound like a train-wreck waiting to happen, especially when I found out that the author was the same author of the "Napoleonic War with dragons" series. Also, I've noticed over the years that I tend to like less/think aren't done as well stories that have a prose writer at the helm with an artist or comic adaptations of a book. Granted, I know that DC and Marvel don't always (often?) have someone who both writes the story and draws the comic and their stories seem to work (well, sometimes) and I have seen many collaborative webcomics that have one person who is the primary writer and another who does all the art but in those cases the result generally feels like a cohesive work. Here, well it's not so much that the story doesn't feel cohesive, rather, I'm not entirely sure why this story was told in comic form at all (although I can't see it working any better as an all prose work either...)
Will Super Villains Be On the Final? Written by Naomi Novik, illustrated by Yishan Li
Summary: Leah Taymore is nearly at the end of her rope, with prodigious super powers she's been enrolled in the college for superheroes two years early but with all of her (orchestrated by a villain of course) bad luck it doesn't seem like she'll be able to remain. Will she somehow be able to stay, save the day, and get the guy?
The Good: Leah isn't a terribly well-rounded character but she's likable enough and despite her powers and hardships doesn't feel like a Mary Sue. I also liked two of the side characters, twins who are the resident advisers for Leah's floor managed to get more fleshed out than I expected and I found myself wishing that they had more screen time (especially the girl of the pair). The story also concluded better than I expected, it's clear that there is much more to it than just this volume but it ended at a good place.
The Bad: A classic episode/chapter in a school story is to have the characters go to a philosophy class, have the teacher propose a question about morals (which doesn't have a "right" answer) that is strangely relevant to the plot, and then have the characters mull over it. This time this scenario is partially explained by the fact that the philosophy teacher is the villain but the question was so dumb I nearly threw the book across the room. It's a question dealing with events that happened before the story so I won't get into details but believe me when I say that it wouldn't have generated much debate in my high school classes let alone my college ones and nothing makes a writer appear dumb when they try to pull off something "clever" like this and fail. And this whole story feels like someone was trying to be clever with a new idea (never mind the fact that the idea of "school for superheroes" has already been done plenty of times before) but didn't have any new ideas to bring to the table to make it work. Also, I can't tell if some of the guy characters (and apologies that I'm not using names here, I honestly cannot find them online and forgot to write them down) were out of character at times or if the artist actually drew the wrong one which is a first for me. Also, co-ed bathrooms, really? Sure I've been in dorms that have a small, gender-neutral bathroom so there can be mixing of the sexes, but the idea that the only bathroom for an entire floor (which appeared too small, I've been in dorms with only one huge bathroom for 40+ people) that is mixed gender was a pretty stupid detail.
The Art: Another complaint I have with these collaborative works is that the art more often than not is just boring. By which I mean, sure the art is there and I saw over 100 pages of it but don't expect me to recognize the artist if I saw their work again, the art didn't feel like it had any style to it at all, rather that the publisher said "we need a comic with generic, 'manga-inspired' art" and that was it*. Interestingly enough there were a few pages in the back with original sketches and prompts for what the characters should look like which were kinda interesting but most so for Leah's roommate. The prompt calls for her to have a more chubby, best-friend look, and I wouldn't have described her as anything except average weight/build. Perhaps that idea was scrapped but it did make me think of all the talks and writings I've seen about re-enforcing the idea that only thin is beautiful, both because the best friend, not the star and the second most important female character, was supposed to be not thin and that if that's their definition of "not thin" then they have a sadly screwed up definition.
The story did turn out better than I expected (probably because my expectations weren't high, think a few inches above the floor) but still had enough weird, dumb details and didn't do anything new/interesing with material I've seen before that I have no intention of recommending it to anyone. No idea if there will be more books forthcoming, the publishing date was last year but Amazon doesn't seem to list a volume two (also worth noting is that you can get new and used copies online for just one cent, never a good sign) and I really have to wonder why Del Ray financed this project in the first place.
*ironically enough, did a quick search on Amazon and it turns out Yishan Li has done a number of "how to draw manga" books before.
Will Super Villains Be On the Final? Written by Naomi Novik, illustrated by Yishan Li
Summary: Leah Taymore is nearly at the end of her rope, with prodigious super powers she's been enrolled in the college for superheroes two years early but with all of her (orchestrated by a villain of course) bad luck it doesn't seem like she'll be able to remain. Will she somehow be able to stay, save the day, and get the guy?
The Good: Leah isn't a terribly well-rounded character but she's likable enough and despite her powers and hardships doesn't feel like a Mary Sue. I also liked two of the side characters, twins who are the resident advisers for Leah's floor managed to get more fleshed out than I expected and I found myself wishing that they had more screen time (especially the girl of the pair). The story also concluded better than I expected, it's clear that there is much more to it than just this volume but it ended at a good place.
The Bad: A classic episode/chapter in a school story is to have the characters go to a philosophy class, have the teacher propose a question about morals (which doesn't have a "right" answer) that is strangely relevant to the plot, and then have the characters mull over it. This time this scenario is partially explained by the fact that the philosophy teacher is the villain but the question was so dumb I nearly threw the book across the room. It's a question dealing with events that happened before the story so I won't get into details but believe me when I say that it wouldn't have generated much debate in my high school classes let alone my college ones and nothing makes a writer appear dumb when they try to pull off something "clever" like this and fail. And this whole story feels like someone was trying to be clever with a new idea (never mind the fact that the idea of "school for superheroes" has already been done plenty of times before) but didn't have any new ideas to bring to the table to make it work. Also, I can't tell if some of the guy characters (and apologies that I'm not using names here, I honestly cannot find them online and forgot to write them down) were out of character at times or if the artist actually drew the wrong one which is a first for me. Also, co-ed bathrooms, really? Sure I've been in dorms that have a small, gender-neutral bathroom so there can be mixing of the sexes, but the idea that the only bathroom for an entire floor (which appeared too small, I've been in dorms with only one huge bathroom for 40+ people) that is mixed gender was a pretty stupid detail.
The Art: Another complaint I have with these collaborative works is that the art more often than not is just boring. By which I mean, sure the art is there and I saw over 100 pages of it but don't expect me to recognize the artist if I saw their work again, the art didn't feel like it had any style to it at all, rather that the publisher said "we need a comic with generic, 'manga-inspired' art" and that was it*. Interestingly enough there were a few pages in the back with original sketches and prompts for what the characters should look like which were kinda interesting but most so for Leah's roommate. The prompt calls for her to have a more chubby, best-friend look, and I wouldn't have described her as anything except average weight/build. Perhaps that idea was scrapped but it did make me think of all the talks and writings I've seen about re-enforcing the idea that only thin is beautiful, both because the best friend, not the star and the second most important female character, was supposed to be not thin and that if that's their definition of "not thin" then they have a sadly screwed up definition.
The story did turn out better than I expected (probably because my expectations weren't high, think a few inches above the floor) but still had enough weird, dumb details and didn't do anything new/interesing with material I've seen before that I have no intention of recommending it to anyone. No idea if there will be more books forthcoming, the publishing date was last year but Amazon doesn't seem to list a volume two (also worth noting is that you can get new and used copies online for just one cent, never a good sign) and I really have to wonder why Del Ray financed this project in the first place.
*ironically enough, did a quick search on Amazon and it turns out Yishan Li has done a number of "how to draw manga" books before.
Monday, June 11, 2012
Anime Review: Moyashimon
I plan on someday getting around to just about every anime that has aired on the noitaminA block in Japan and so when I heard that the show Moyashimon was getting a sequel this summer I decided this was the perfect time to watch the original show. The premise was a quirky one but I hadn't tried it out before since it wasn't licensed, although the manga was at one point and Funimation streamed the live-action tv drama version a couple of summers back, but by this point it looks like it probably won't be licensed in the US (unless this was the "classic" anime license that Funimation hinted at in an ANNCast from a few weeks back). In any case, there's still enough time before Moyashimon Returns for people to catch the original show so let's get on with the review so I can explain just what this show is about.
Moyashimon: Tales of Agriculture
Summary: Tadayasu Sawaki has been able to see microbes floating all around him since he was young and by now it's a normal, if annoying, part of his life. But when he and his best friend Kei Yuuki head off to college they find out that his skill is quite valuable indeed and, as the sons of a yeast maker and a sake brewer respectively, find themselves dragged into the schemes of Professor Itsuki and his students.
The Good: I had forgotten that Wandering Son was not the first noitaminA show to have a transgender character (actually, Paradise Kiss probably was) and I thought that character was very well done. I had remembered hearing there was one before, and from the snippets I had read about reviews of the live action series I had guessed who it was, but there were some very good visual foreshadowing to tip off the viewers. Actually, the show had a good sized cast and managed to give several of them much more character development than I would have thought possible in 11 episodes. The show was also paced well, I've heard that they had to skip some things to get to the point they did but I thought that everything flowed well and that none of the events took too long or were too rushed. I will say though that I feel more confident recommending this series knowing that there's a second half coming since the show really needs more time.
The Bad: It's clear that the show didn't have a really good place to end so they chose the end of an arc and made it work as well as they could (and after the credits make it clear that they really want a second series). The show does provide a bit of closure, the characters have started to grow and move on but the ending still feels rather abrupt and there doesn't seem like there was any way to fix that. Tvtropes has also pointed out that, for a college set at an agricultural university the story doesn't seem to like some of the newer, "green" advances in technology which is a bit odd when you think about it*.
The Audio: While both songs were a bit odd, especially the ending song, neither of them really stuck with me and I listened to both of them the full 11 times. The voice acting was fine, I especially liked how all the microbes had different voices (even the ones that were just variations and not something completely different). Overall there's not much to discuss here, although for an 11 episode show that doesn't put the characters through a roller-coaster of emotions or through scenes requiring dramatic music that's not especially surprising.
The Visuals: The show continues with the un-official noitaimA tradition of having a really weird looking opening/ending sequence (in this case a live-action/CGI mash-up opening and closing) but aside from that everything looks rather normal. Some of the character designs are a bit odd (both body-type wise and the fact that an awful lot of characters have blonde or a reddish-orange hair color) but nothing that would throw a non-newbie anime viewer. There's actually not that much else to mention here, everything remained consistent and there weren't any scenes that merited extra fluid animation or such so the visuals were never pushed to the animators limits, everything just worked in a very quiet way.
While not one of my favorite noitaminA series it's a cute little series and I would recommend it to people who like more comedy/slice of life titles, just be prepared for some really disgusting descriptions of how fermentation works (I normally watch anime while eating lunch/dinner and found that was not a great idea for this show, I didn't even know humans ate that much rotten food).
*full disclosure, I'm minoring in green technology at a school that's got a fairly good department in it so I have to raise an eyebrow when the characters can't get a biofuel tractor running, in my town the school's buses use so much biofuel that we use the oil from I think every fast food place in town. So I'm quite biased here, although I am willing to cut them a bit of slack since it has been a little while since the original manga was published.
Moyashimon: Tales of Agriculture
Summary: Tadayasu Sawaki has been able to see microbes floating all around him since he was young and by now it's a normal, if annoying, part of his life. But when he and his best friend Kei Yuuki head off to college they find out that his skill is quite valuable indeed and, as the sons of a yeast maker and a sake brewer respectively, find themselves dragged into the schemes of Professor Itsuki and his students.
The Good: I had forgotten that Wandering Son was not the first noitaminA show to have a transgender character (actually, Paradise Kiss probably was) and I thought that character was very well done. I had remembered hearing there was one before, and from the snippets I had read about reviews of the live action series I had guessed who it was, but there were some very good visual foreshadowing to tip off the viewers. Actually, the show had a good sized cast and managed to give several of them much more character development than I would have thought possible in 11 episodes. The show was also paced well, I've heard that they had to skip some things to get to the point they did but I thought that everything flowed well and that none of the events took too long or were too rushed. I will say though that I feel more confident recommending this series knowing that there's a second half coming since the show really needs more time.
The Bad: It's clear that the show didn't have a really good place to end so they chose the end of an arc and made it work as well as they could (and after the credits make it clear that they really want a second series). The show does provide a bit of closure, the characters have started to grow and move on but the ending still feels rather abrupt and there doesn't seem like there was any way to fix that. Tvtropes has also pointed out that, for a college set at an agricultural university the story doesn't seem to like some of the newer, "green" advances in technology which is a bit odd when you think about it*.
The Audio: While both songs were a bit odd, especially the ending song, neither of them really stuck with me and I listened to both of them the full 11 times. The voice acting was fine, I especially liked how all the microbes had different voices (even the ones that were just variations and not something completely different). Overall there's not much to discuss here, although for an 11 episode show that doesn't put the characters through a roller-coaster of emotions or through scenes requiring dramatic music that's not especially surprising.
The Visuals: The show continues with the un-official noitaimA tradition of having a really weird looking opening/ending sequence (in this case a live-action/CGI mash-up opening and closing) but aside from that everything looks rather normal. Some of the character designs are a bit odd (both body-type wise and the fact that an awful lot of characters have blonde or a reddish-orange hair color) but nothing that would throw a non-newbie anime viewer. There's actually not that much else to mention here, everything remained consistent and there weren't any scenes that merited extra fluid animation or such so the visuals were never pushed to the animators limits, everything just worked in a very quiet way.
While not one of my favorite noitaminA series it's a cute little series and I would recommend it to people who like more comedy/slice of life titles, just be prepared for some really disgusting descriptions of how fermentation works (I normally watch anime while eating lunch/dinner and found that was not a great idea for this show, I didn't even know humans ate that much rotten food).
*full disclosure, I'm minoring in green technology at a school that's got a fairly good department in it so I have to raise an eyebrow when the characters can't get a biofuel tractor running, in my town the school's buses use so much biofuel that we use the oil from I think every fast food place in town. So I'm quite biased here, although I am willing to cut them a bit of slack since it has been a little while since the original manga was published.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Webcomic Review Month 2012: Finished Webcomics
Last year I put the finished webcomic entry at the end of the month but I decided to stick it at the beginning of the month this time around since I'm reading several comics by creators who've already finished up one series and it's interesting to compare their various works. That and one series I'm reviewing is a direct sequel so I figured I should simply talk finished comics first. Some of these webcomics finished up in the last year and others were already finished and I only discovered them during the past year and here are the ones I talked about last year (warning, I got better at writing this past year so these old ones don't flow as smoothly).
A slice-of-life esque comic about the lives of three college girls, Ivy, Marlene, and Cleo, as they navigate from their sophomore year of college to graduation. They fall in and out of love, attempt to be adults, and try to figure out what they actually want to do with their lives once they’re done and gone.
It took me a bit of time to get into this comic, mostly since these three girls are just not ones I would like to be friends with (they’re a bit dumb, over-dramatic and have too much romantic drama for my taste, in a nutshell they’re realistic college girls, just not the kind I am) but this summer I was having a few bad days and just wanted something I could read for hours and this comic really clicked with me. They have real, messy lives with odd, and often comical, problems, I had to double check that this wasn’t an autobiographical comic since I could easily believe it was which I think is the highest praise you can give realistic fiction. It also has one of the greatest strips in existence (read the second line of panels) which has somehow ended up on one of my teacher’s doors since all my friends who’ve been through a beginning photography class sympathize immensely.
Rich Richarson, called "Bucko," didn't want to get mixed up in a murder mystery, he just wanted a job and another chance to talk to a cute girl he met at a party, but he keeps getting mixed up in weird crimes which delights his new friends who think that this is a great time to play detective and prove Bucko's innocence.
I liked Moen's (NSFW) other comic, DAR, so I was happy to see her working on another comic and I'm sad that this one wasn't any longer since I found this to be a really funny story. The humor is more adult but in a similar vein to DAR, people make sex jokes and innuendos yet it never feels like the comic is trying to be "sexy," this is just adult life. Well, maybe not ordinary adult life, the story has some veins of magical realism in it (although I was creeped out to discover that Juggalos weren't created by the comic) but all of those moments were played for humor and didn't break the narrative flow. The overall mystery is also clever and I just really enjoyed this story and hope they print it in physical book form someday.
Erdemoglu Selim is a lieutenant in the Turkish army who now feels that he owes his life to a Ms. Delilah Dirk, even though she was technically the one who endangered it in the first place, and has taken to following after her as she leads a much more adventurous and dangerous life than he ever wished to have.
Another comic where it's short length surprised me, although a one shot sequel to it was announced just this morning, but it certainly packs a lot into it's short length. The art here is stunning, especially the landscapes, and the characters are fun. Delilah Dirk is a crazy adventurer and Mr. Selim undergoes some nice character development, more so than her actually, and I really wish there were more of their adventures to read. Oh well, and if anyone here hails from France the story is already avaliable in a printed edition, the English printed version is still being worked on.
Six years after the world ended, and 23 years after the 12 people who did it were born, Whitechapel (England) has seen better days. 11 of the original FreakAngels look after the town and try to care for all the refugees but some of them are starting to get bored. Their boredom vanishes however when a brainwashed and crazy normal girl, Alice, appears and the rest of the group discover that she's being controlled by the remaining FreakAngel, the one they thought they had killed off years ago.
This is one of the earliest webcomics I started reading because, even though the gore is more realistic looking than I prefer, the art in here is simply gorgeous. It's strong from start to finish with distinct character designs, loving attention to details, and amazing backgrounds, give it a look through for at least that, just look at this page (which is a tiny bit NSFW, one character isn't fond of wearing panties). The story is equally strong, I'm not that fond of the dystopian genre (especially with the recent overabundance of books with that setting) but the setting is very well thought out and there is a clever explanation for it towards the end which I appreciate more in retrospect. A quick warning however, as I already mentioned the gorey scenes are quite detailed and this is a violent comic at times making it NSFW so just be careful where you try it out (I also remember some nudity but honestly can't recall how much).
Starting off as light hearted comedy following a rag-tag band of misfits with the exiled elven prince Sangwine Schloffel main character as they stumble around the country on various quests. The comic gradually undergoes Cerebus Syndrome however and the characters grow and develop as they plot to overthrow Sangwine's brother Fang.
This comics has one of the more dramatic cerebus syndrome changes I've seen and it's accompanied by a fairly dramatic art evolution as well so I would advise people check out both the first few pages and the last few pages of the story before deciding if they're going to drop this story or not. I like drama in my high fantasy and didn't mind the silliness in the earlier parts either, even if some of the characters are exceptionally dense about the feelings of those around them. This one does have a sequel that is being worked on, the aply named Lintier but I'll be talking about that later in the month.
The story begins with the night that Holly’s, our main character, house burns down and how even years later she has insomnia and still hears the strange laughter she first hear that night. Eventually her past catches up with her as she is drawn into the conflicts of the local fae, one that has had deadly consequences on the human world.
It’s a gorgeous looking comic and I liked the overall story but I did have a few issues with it, namely that it came off as vehemently anti-Mormon (I do believe that every Mormon character in the comic was evil for the sake of being evil) and I get uneasy whenever I see a group of people, any group of people (in reality or fiction), get lumped together like that. The comic is supposed to be partially about religious superiority and the dangers of thinking that your way is the only right way but that still doesn’t explain why every Mormon character had to be a complete and utter douchebag and that has really made me hesitant about recommending the comic to others. Was also a bit surprised by the ending, I simply didn’t expect the last arc to have as few problems as it did, but the ending worked with the previously established themes.
It starts out with a simple wish from Mallori on a shooting star, that she won't be boring and from that day forward she never knows what the next day will bring for her. It could be epic adventures, a pet toaster or anything in between.
This is another comic that undergoes cerebus syndrome in the final parts of it and sadly I only found it during it's last few months so I check the last few pages, liked what I saw, and then was frustrated how silly the earlier part of the story was and didn't find a lot of the gags (both the single strip and small arc ones) that funny. This comic also has one of the more extreme art evolutions I've seen in a comic so that also really threw me, I'm much more likely to recommend this comic to someone who likes humor rather than drama since this comic is 90% and only the last arc really gets serious. So the comic wasn't exactly my cup of tea but I really did like the last arc so it all balances out.
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