Otaku Review

Yups, that’s right I’m sitting here closing out 2008 by getting another review posted. I’m just that kind of wild and crazy guy. Anyway, I’ve posted my review of the laughably bad Nighthead Genesis Vol. 2: Regret from Media Blasters. Hope everyone is having a happy and safe new year’s eve out there!

In the next five episodes of the bishie brothers drama, they will return to the place where they grew up only to find an empty lot and no one has any idea that there was even a house there to begin with. Looking for answers, they instead are asked to help with an odd string of suicides happening at a local school. One by one, members of the same circle of friends are killing themselves. Visiting the school, the brothers will spend three episodes meeting the students and eventually finding out the hidden truth.

After that, the brothers will meet the friend of the psychic Shoko from the first volume. The brothers will have to help her in order to get more answers to their past and how the young psychic plays into it. But finally the volume wraps up with a story about the brothers coming in contact with another psychic named Kamiya. He sees many things and one of them is the downfall of mankind with the brothers playing a large role in this. Eventually the three of them reluctantly begin working together in order to discover who the real source of the disaster will be and how it can be stopped.

If you’re an otaku planning to travel to Canada anytime in the coming year you should probably be aware of this. A report went up on Dannychoo this morning detailing an incident an otaku had while trying to cross into Canada with manga in his possession. According to the original account :

“Saturday, I was surrounded by six officers, two watching me as the four others went page by page through my books looking for pornographic images and other evidence I was a sexual predator.

As more and more officers were called in, the six manga books I had were examined in detail. They were looking, they told me, for pornographic, obscene and adult material. “The age rating is on the back of each book.” (each manga book has ratings like 13+ or 15+ - mine were 13+).

I was informed that I could have put different covers on or done anything else I could to get the pornography in and that if I spoke anymore, the books would be seized. So I stood there and watched my previously new books get examined page by page, thumbed through and pressed open because it was assumed if I read manga, that I was a sex offender.”

Apparently Canada has been cracking down on any manga being imported into the country or being brought into the country. The blogger who wrote about her account mentions that it actually has happened to her before. Two weeks ago in fact and for the very same reason.

It’s hard to imagine that Canada is seriously trying to enforce some kind of ban on manga coming into the country but they did pass this ban earlier this year.

ANN posted a notice this morning from Toei. 2009 is going to be a big yea r for anniversaries as ‘One Piece’ will be celebrating its 10^th anniversary with a movie release and Gundam will be celebrating its 30^th anniversary. ‘One Piece’ will be releasing its tenth film to Japanese theaters sometime in 2009. Generally these releases take place in the spring but with the opening of the live action Dragon Ball movie happening, this year they’re going to change the date.

Sunrise is planning on some big events to celebrate the 30^th anniversary of arguably one of the most popular mech franchises in history. To celebrate this, they have opened a new website which features statements from the creator and director of Gundam Yoshiyuki Tomino and Sunrise President Kenji Uchida.

Those of you who follow me on twitter have also followed my experience with the series ‘Akane-iro ni Somaru Saka’. You heard me when I started it, you heard a few of my comments along the way and then on Monday night you heard my stunned silence as I got to the conclusion. Now that I have gotten to that conclusion, it’s time for another edition of my additional thoughts.

As always, you should be warned when I write one of these it’s generally because there were things in the story that just bothered me but I can’t talk about in a normal review because they are spoilers. So yes, this entire article is going to be filled to the brim with spoilers. If you plan to watch the series and don’t want to know what happens, this would be a good time to stop. Ok, now that we’ve trimmed down, thoughts after the cut.

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If you’re an anime fan, there’s a good chance that you have one those friends. The friend that doesn’t actually have any interest in anime but you know that if you just found the right title, they could be swayed. Naturally, I have a friend that fits that description. When it comes to anime, her and I are on two different planets and there’s nothing wrong with that but no matter how long I’ve known her, I’ve always wanted to sway her over. Not for any real reason, mostly just for the challenge.

My first attempt at getting her into anime was with the series ‘Higurashi no koko ni’ (released in the US as  ‘When They Cry’). This is one of my favorite horror series of all time and I really thought that the psychological aspect of this series would be right up her alley. Instead she couldn’t past the early cute stages between Keiichi and Mion. ‘It’s the eyes,’ she would later confide in me.

Over the months, certain progress has been made. She’s grown to enjoy bishie art work and she thinks yaoi is one of the greatest inventions known to man. Not quite the victory that I was hoping for but certainly enough to call it a half win.

Fast forwarding a few months though brings us to yesterday when I got an IM from this friend. So, there I was sitting in front of my laptop just kind of getting some work done when suddenly a message appears on my screen. It is from my friend and contains a link along with the message ‘whoever made this obviously owns cats.’ My curiosity piqued, I clicked the link and proceed to fall to the floor.

She found an anime. An anime that she enjoys and finds entertaining enough to watch more than one episode of.

It was ‘Chii’s Sweet Home’.

The impossibly cute series aimed at children about a kitten with three minute episodes. For months I racked my brain trying to find the proper adult series for her and THIS is what it took in the end.  It took me ten minutes to form a reaction to this but when I did all I could say was ‘I think you just broke my brain.’

Originally I saw this vid posted to geeksaresexy and thought that it was worth sharing with everyone. This humvee mech model was built from the ‘Bioloid Humanoids Robotics kit’ . Building a mech from home just got that much easier though with a price tag of almost $900, I don’t plan on purchasing one of them myself or anything. The filming is very cool but does the mech really move and transform that fast or was the transformation sped up during filming?

A couple of new series and OVAs have been announced over the last day or so. The first of which being a sci-fi yaoi series. ‘Ai no Kusabi’ will be seeing a thirteen volume OVA release reports AnimeVice. No website or release date for the series is available beyond 2009 but names being floated around as being part of the project include: Katsuhito Akiyama will return to direct and the animation is being done by Ken Media (who you can basically only know from ‘Melody of Oblivion’).

ANN is reporting that an OVA is being produced for ‘Akane-iro ni Somaru Saka’. The series was originally an adult romance game and premiered as an anime series this past fall. The OVA will be released on June 26^th which is also the same day that the final volume of the TV series DVD is released. I actually just started watching this series last night and while there are more than a few things about it that bother me, overall I’m finding it to be a very enjoyable series to watch. Though if one sees a rant from me in the near future to get those little bothers off my chest, it shouldn’t be too surprising.

So, not so long ago a question was posed to me. Well, actually it wasn’t. I’m making that part up because if I don’t, this introduction makes no sense. But anyways, not so long ago a question was posed to me about what did I like about anime besides the anime itself. The short answer to that is the community. Anime fans by and large are a fairly open and accepting bunch and it’s always nice to meet someone new and have a friendly chat about this series or that.

But breaking that larger community as a whole down a bit into the more social circles of anime and you have what I’m really getting at. I didn’t come from the generation of anime clubs unfortunately and I got into anime a bit too late to join in the anime circles while I was still attending school. There are many places that still have anime clubs but they aren’t nearly as prevalent anymore which is kind of sad but just how things go.

The good news is that they aren’t gone entirely and finding a good group to hang out with can be a very rewarding experience. Before I moved to Oregon, I used to hang out with the Tacoma Anime Meetup crowd and still consider one of the organizers a good friend of mine. Sometimes though it’s not as easy as that and you have to stumble through some less than entertaining evenings before you find the crowd that’s right for you. I’m sure that there are more than a few of us who have those uncomfortable party moment stories when you suddenly realized that the crowd you were hanging out with might not be right for you after all.

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The first episode of ‘Maria Holic’ has a story but get comfortable anyway, this is gonna take awhile.

The Story

In this first episode of ‘Maria Holic’, the audience will be introduced to a number of characters and situations. Within the first few moments of the series, the heroine of the series makes her appearance, a second year high school student named Kanako Miyamae. Entering the same private all girls high school where her parents met (and no, no one bothers to mention the creepy teacher student relationship), she wants to meet her own yuri lifetime companion.

Upon entering the grounds, Miyamae will meet a number of new people and be put into the worst of all situations. First she’ll meet a maid named Matsurika and the one she serves, the granddaughter of the ex-chairman Maria. After entering the dorms she’ll meet the cat eared dorm leader who doesn’t really have a name besides ‘god’ and her first roommate Ryouken.

In the final act of the episode though, the conflict of the series is waiting. Taking her up on her offer of getting a tour of the school, Miyamae will learn Maria’s big secret and be forced to accept a situation that she never could have foreseen before arriving.

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Wow, talk about a complete and utter turn around! I’ve posted my thoughts tonight on the absolutely phenominal conclusion of Emma: A Victorian Romance Season 2 from Right Stuf.

Season two of Emma begins a month after the first season ends. After the death of her madam, Emma leaves London and William behind with no intention of ever returning. Finding employment with another madam in the countryside, she does her best to move on with her life. Back in London, William has become a depressed mess while Eleanor has no intention of being forgotten so easily and does her best to make her way back into his life and heart.

At first William is happy with this replacement and even goes forward with the engagement bringing the Jones family and Campbell family that much closer to a business arrangement that will make them both very happy. After a chance encounter brings Emma and William back together though, William realizes who he truly wants to be with.

Throughout the twelve episodes of season two, William will be forced balance what he truly wants with the expectations of polite society. The Campbell family is none too happy about this embarrassment and will do everything in their power to keep the two of them apart while simultaneously destroying the Jones family. The quest for true love begins here and both William and Emma will have to learn how to bridge the gap between them in order to find happiness being helped along the way by friends and family.