Apr 28, 2008 Comments Off
The latest chapter of One Piece introduces a whole load of new characters, who are essentially the peers of Luffy and Zoro in terms of notoriety. And a couple whose notoriety exceeds theirs. Most have obvious historical references in their names but a few are bit tricky.
Read the rest of this entry »
Apr 27, 2008 Comments Off
Eureka Seven: Vol.10
Ah! My Goddess: Flights Of Fancy Vol.1
Kurau: Phantom Memory Vol.4
.Hack//Roots: Vol.6
More single volume nonsense. The AMG volume can be found for a tenner, so that might be worth your while if AMG is your thing. Though you’d probably be better buying a Kosuke Fujishima artbook, as that will look far better than any anime adaption is going to, and you want to have to put up with his insipid writing.
Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex – 2nd GIG: Individual Eleven (11)
Another GITS series chiseled down to a 2 hour film. Not really sure who these are aimed at, and it smacks a little of double dipping. What’s worse is you can pick up the 2nd GIG Box Set for about 20 quid now.
Apr 27, 2008 Comments Off
So after a session of MERP, this new gaming group introduced me to the most popular RPG on the planet – Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
AD&D was such a sprawling game, that I’m going split this up as during the time I was playing AD&D, I played and ran such a wide variety of campaign systems that they deserve some comment of their own. Today, just some comments on the game itself.
AD&D 2nd Edition came out in 1989, I didn’t start playing until 1993, but that 1989 date is pertinent. Effectively the second edition is a document of TSR’s needless contrition to the 80′s witchhunt from Christian groups and spurious psychological claims that dogged them throughout that decade. The 2nd edition purged all references to devils and demons, and significantly toned down the artwork to try and placate criticism.
Backing down like this never works out well for the person backing down. The right move would have been to ride the storm of controversy and fight the criticism. There was an opportunity to become an anti-establishment subculture here and use the furor to sell more games. Instead, like the US comics industry in the 50′s, they kowtowed to their critics and cemented themselves as pawns to the establishment. Three years later a merger in the small press gaming world, would create a true anti-establishment gaming company. But we’ll get to them later.
The rules themselves were fine at the time. In retrospect, they are full of logical contradictions, albeit ones that long time D&D players were intensely fond of. Mainly they fondly remember the combat rules that revolved around the classic acronym THACO (To Hit Armor Class Zero).
The rule books were fairly horribly laid out, but fairly typical of American publishing – I remember seeing US console magazines in 90-91 and being bewildered by the poor typesetting they’d have, particularly compared with UK and Japanese magazines, they felt more alien to us as British readers than the magazines that read back to front in a language we couldn’t read, such is the power of layout.
However they way they replaced their “Monster Manual” from the first edition was a masterstroke of layout and design. The Monstrous Compedium was a ring binder containing sheets of monsters, normally one monster to a page. You could find the information with ease, and didn’t need to take a whole book with you to wherever you were playing the game. Of course later on they’d go back the old style monster manual in the sort of double dipping that must have played some part in TSR’s financial downfall.
Artwise it was the usual clash of styles that characterised TSR material at this time. It often felt like uncommissioned fantasy art that they’d purchased, rather than work created specifically for books. I’ll be coming back to TSR’s terrible handling of art in a later installment.
I’m probably being over-critical due to disillusionment created by TSR’s handling of the product line, and 3rd Edition that Wizards of The Coast released (yup, I’ll be getting to this too, very later). At release, and through the early years, this edition was very successful. And you can still have fun times with the rules, and definitely fun times with some of the material published for it, which I’ll start to get at next.
Apr 26, 2008 Comments Off
Alphabeat resemble an master race breeding programme at the exact point the inbreeding kicks in.
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Television, stop trying to be the internet. TV shows that broadcast “funny web videos” – I’m talking to you. Anyone who wants to watch these can find them on the internet, they don’t need Lenny Henry, fucking Alex Zane or whoever is presenting Have I Got News For You this week to introduce them. In fact the people want to watch them have most likely already seen them, and so you, television, just look old and out of touch. It’s not 1998, we have hugely popular video websites, we don’t need a “So Graham Norton” to fill us in on internet goofery anymore.
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THE POINT IN TIME WHERE I DECIDED PANIC AT THE DISCO MUST BE CRUSHED: 2:08 minutes into their Nine In The Afternoon Video.
Apr 24, 2008 Comments Off
My first thought after watching this was “Why am I even bothering watching any of the other new anime?”.
There’s two reasons for this. Firstly, and most obviously, it’s better animated than anything else right now. There are two wonderful set pieces in this first episode. The opening where Kaiba/Warp is chased by “Skronks” through the alien looking architecture, and a more slapstick section where Cloak is running trying to board a spaceship. One thing that Yuasa doesn’t get complimented enough on is his ability to direct physical comedy in animation. The scene with Cloak and Vanilla is a fantastic combination of the sort of desperation, pain and sadism that great slapstick comedy is born from. Also there’s moments of subtle beauty, such as when a child flies her toy bird through the hole in Kaiba/Warp’s chest.
Secondly, and to an extent it can be seen as an explanation of the first reason, it’s not an adaptation.
Now, part of me likes adaptations, it can be fun to see your favourite thing from one medium in another medium and I’m like an eager little puppy with anticipation for the Iron Man film. Some things do transfer to film wonderfully with little effort, some require panel beating until they are unrecognisable.
But there’s things that bother me about adaptations. One is that they are done often for the wrong reasons, film wants the respectability of literature so it adapts novels to film. Comics wants the respectability of film, so you get comic companies setting up movie studios. Manga wants to sell more copies, so it makes anime to advertise it.
However the main one is that even if you willfully ignore the source material, you are still a slave to it. The very act of denying the source is influenced by that source’s existence. And I think that, in general, gives you less worthwhile results than if you build something from scratch just for the medium it’s made in.
As good as the animation and design is on something like Soul Eater, it still has things that would work far better on the printed page than in animation dragging it down (I’m actually hoping that Square-Enix and Bones pull what they did on FMA and create new stories halfway through).
Whereas, what Kaiba has, and Kemonozune before it, is a sense that every creative decision made was to the benefit of making a cartoon. For instance, I’ve seen people complain that there’s too little talking, which is slightly bewildering to me. You’re watching a cartoon, surely you’d prefer storytelling to be told via animated drawings rather than static talking heads. But when so much anime comes from manga, and increasingly novels, people are more accustomed to anime ruled by writers, rather than animators. Plus talking heads are often cheaper to animate…
It’d be nice to see more original shows from animators with a particular voice, but I’m not sure how many have the cachet to be allowed to do so or how many outlets there are for this sort of work. So let’s be thankful we get things like Kaiba, Mononoke, Denno Coil and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.
That all being said, this didn’t grip me quite the way Kemonozume did. I’m not overly keen on science fiction and this story, with it’s own strange world and rules of physics, wasn’t as immediately relatable as Kemonozume’s setting and characters were. So I’ve only watched it twice so far, rather than the three times in a row I did with Kemonozume’s first episode.
Apr 20, 2008 Comments Off
I think I’ve covered all the games my first gaming group played. If I recall any others I’ll have to come back to them. And so onto the first game I played when I joined my second group – MERP or Middle Earth Role Playing as it was known in its unacronymed form.
MERP was created by US company Iron Crown Enterprises, using a simplified version of their Rolemaster system to create an RPG for the lucrative Tolkien licence. I’ll go into Rolemaster (and it’s sci-fi cousin Spacemaster) later, let’s just say the cut down version of the rules was a good move. ICE’s fortunes were pretty much tied to this game, when the license was withdrawn in ’99 the company only lasted another year.
Due to my lack of interest in Tolkien, I suspect some of the appeal was lost on me. However that also meant I wasn’t ever going to argue “THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKED IN THE BOOKS!”. The first session I played involved a bunch of hobbits goofing around in some wizard’s tower. We didn’t play it that often, the GM for the game moved onto AD&D soon after I joined in.
Apr 19, 2008 Comments Off
This was a funky little 2-4 player card/board game from Games Workshop. Of course it turned out it’s funkiness was due to it’s inspiration from the more established German boardgame Ogallala, and so it disappeared from the shelves when this was pointed out.
The aim of the game is to build three battle lines of your orcish army and accumulate more Victory Points that your opponents. The battle lines are assembled from cards representing different orcish army units that you draw from shared deck. You could also use any completed lines to attack your rivals.
The game design, wherever it came from, is really solid and for my small first gaming group this was a fun, quick, game to play. One other big appeal to this was, like a lot of Games Workshop’s board games at the time, unified consistent artwork. This had John Blanche at his slimiest providing a variety of mould encrusted cartoony orcs on the cards. Nothing’s worse than a boardgame where the artwork is done by many hands with styles that don’t gel. OK, maybe there are plenty of things worse, but you get my drift. This issue will raise it’s head again later in this series, when I get to a true abomination of games design.
Apr 16, 2008 Comments Off
High School ninja-ry amongst whey faced Japanese teenagers plays out against the nicest looking background paintings I’ve seen this season.
Waif like teenage boy Rokujo Miharu has some kind of ninja weapon of mass destruction bound in him. This is revealed by his teacher, the extravagently named Thobari Kumohira Durandal, a secret ninja who wants him to become the ruler of ninjas and aims to protect him from the ninja clan that the technique belonged to originally. Oh, and when the secret ninja power is activated Rokujo comes over all Jinsei Shinzaki with his body covered in MYSTICAL NINJA SCRIBBLE.
Rewatching this now as I write, the animation has more flaws than my early morning watching caught. The main “flaw” being some scenes are lacking any inbetween animation at all. But this is anime, shortcuts and limited animation should be expected. The other flaw is the character designs are a little too detailed to be consistently animated to the same standard. That being said, when the ninja malarky kicks off we get some funky action direction that didn’t disappoint.
But as I said at the start, what really impresses is the background painting. Most resemble pencil drawings, painted with water colours, giving the show a soft edged organic look that sets it apart from the usual overly glossy digital fare we get nowadays.
The background paintings and action scenes excited me enough that I’ll be sticking with it to see if director Kunihisa Sugishima can live up to promise the early episodes of Speed Grapher had.
Apr 15, 2008 Comments Off
Takao Saito’s iconic assassin comes to TV in this 40th Anniversary series. And I’m not disappointed. Yay!
Episode 1 acts as a Duke Togo primer, focussing more on his methods than anything really resembling a narrative. Golgo 13 is hired by the US government to kill a CIA informer turned hijacker. In terms of setup, it’s plain and simple. Without a gimmicky mission, the episode introduces Golgo 13 through his preparation for the hit. Which, as a character without internal monologue for the most part (most his thought bubbles in the manga are ellipses), offers the best way of understanding the character.
The animation is like Golgo 13 – it does it’s job. The Answer Studio provide some slick, if not breathtaking visuals, with 3D CGI roughly on a par to their FLAG work. The best use of 3D is in the bullet camera which follows Golgo’s final shot, offering something you can’t get from the manga.
I mentioned in my Cinderella Boy post yesterday that Saito’s peer, Monkey Punch, often has adaptations that don’t capture his look 100%. Thankfully, unlike some Lupin III works, this doesn’t feel like Duke Togo just walked into another anime. It’s solidly the world you’d expect to find him in. In part this is due to the Saito Pro house style not being so idiosyncratic, however a number of the supporting cast characters, the CIA agent for example, do have a carved in stone look about them that makes them look like they have stepped straight off the page of a Golgo 13 manga.
I’ll be interested in how this does in the ratings, as the more general TV credits of the writing staff, and film and TV actor Hiroshi Tachi in the lead role, suggests they are aiming for a general adult audience, rather than the typical late night anime audience. There seems to be a definite market for revivals of 60s and 70s series – the Kitaro revival has been huge and Yatterman has matched that too. I think similar numbers to the recent noitaminA slot Kitaro series must be what they are hoping for.
A satisfying opener, and the episode features so many recurring elements to the Golgo 13 stories, that I’d say if you don’t like this first episode, Golgo 13 probably isn’t for you.
