The Gaming Den

If you're looking for lowbrow humor and also believe that the latter seasons of Ren and Stimpy (but not the relaunch, which just sucks) are a bit too tame for you, Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is up your alley.

Fate/Zero's second season has started, it's excellent. It's a story about a bunch of 1990's contemporary wizards summoning heroes of legend to fight for the Holy Grail.

I'm also watching Medaka Box, which is a self-aware shonen anime. It's pretty stupid, but I enjoy turning my brain off every once in awhile.

after a week worth of PAth to Korra, i cheated and watched the Souzin's Comet movie, and then the first episode of Korra last night on-demand before it airs.

Looks like Avatar will be heading full force with keeping the story fresh and having an NA created anime.

Polyphonica Crimson S
ef ~ A Tale of Memories/Melodies
Rozen Maiden Traumend

have been getting my attention lately with free TV time.

next month will be Secret World of Arriety on DVD. looking forward to that.

no telling what Toonami will have when it come back on Cartoon Network, but they claim it is after the April Fool's Adult Swim night with TOM and Sara after the spamming on twitter to #BringBackToonami. hope some golden oldies like they showed then:

Yu-yu Hakuso
Tenchi Muyo
Samurai X
Outlaw Star
Gundam
etc...

The anime club started watching Boku ha Tomodachi ga Sukunai a few weeks ago, and it is hilarious. The title means something like "I don't have any friends", and it's about a club intended to teach people how to form friendships. The male lead is just an ordinary guy, but everyone thinks he's a terrifying delinquent. Other characters include his younger sister who's obsessed with some vampire anime, a popular girl who's never had a close friendship with anyone, a brilliant scientist who sees sex in everything, and the loner who started the club and comes up with most of their activities despite having no experience making friends herself.

The series is pretty short, but the character interactions are pure gold.

sounds a bit like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromartie_High_School
to me somehow O.o

rampaging-poet wrote:Boku ha Tomodachi ga Sukunai

I wasn't impressed enough with the first episode to give future episodes a try. Guess I should watch a few more then.

It definitely gets better after the rest of the cast is introduced. The rivalry between Yozora and Sena really isn't enough to carry a whole episode on it's own.

I've only seen the first couple episodes of Cromartie High School, so I can't really comment on the comparison. The male leads seem to fulfill the role of normal, relatable person in both series though. Haganai's characters have a little more depth to them than what I got out of the bits of Cromartie I've seen, but that might just be a result of not watching enough Cromartie for deeper characters to express themselves.

Koumei wrote:

rampaging-poet wrote:Boku ha Tomodachi ga Sukunai

I wasn't impressed enough with the first episode to give future episodes a try. Guess I should watch a few more then.

It's a fairly generic harem-lite type show, as far as I could tell, but if that's your sort of thing it's not bad. Most of the characters are introduced by episode 4, so you should be able to tell by then how you're gonna feel about it.

Watched "The Sacred Blacksmith" over the last week or so. It was decent.

I'm currently watching "Spice and Wolf" and the banter is awesome. The ending theme song by Rocky Chack is awesome.

I really am liking it quite a bit.

both seasons endings are by Rocky Chack....is it the first or second?

1st: Wolf Whistling song
7 apples on a witches tree
7 seeds to plant inside of me

this theme is definitely one that could go much farther in anime if someone had the guts to make it run lengths of things like Naruto, Dragonball, One Piece, Sailor Moon, Pokemon.

sadly there are so few merchant oriented anime.

Spice and Wolf makes me want a RPG with a working economy system to roleplay with.

Spice and Wolf was pretty good, but I wasn't impressed by the second season.

I started watching Aquarion last night, and it's been decent so far. It's a super robot show with a giant heroic mech battling the monster of the week. The Mechanical Angel Aquarion is formed by combining three fighter jets, and it has several different designs depending on what order they merge in. One person controls the arms, another the legs, and the third controls the guns on its back. There's some magic involved, and Aquarion can't combine if the pilots aren't in sync.

The one thing that disappoints me is that the heroes really haven't accomplished anything yet. They've won every battle so far, but the villains have manged to attain their primary objective every time. I'm also hoping to see more of the main character's previous incarnation because of the contrast between who he is now and who he was 12,000 years ago.

EDIT: It appears I was wrong about the way controls are split between pilots. It looks like all three pilots share control of the entire mech somehow, as the guy in the legs can take over targeting for the guy in the head when required. I guess each pilot controls whatever the head pilot of the merge decides they do.

spice and wolf suffers like many anime, from developing something into 12 episode bursts, not expecting a second season. also the studio not getting a big enough slice of the pie since they cant always claim merchandising since it really doesnt involve them.

also the Amarti bit took too long, and the other part was rushed.

it made what could have been a much longer story, seem like it wasnt a big deal with how far they got as fast as they did.

I heard that S&W is really impressive for the first few episodes, until you realise every episode follows the same formula. But, as someone who fell in love with Sailor Moon*, which is the poster child for "every episode follows the same formula", I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing. As long as you like what is happening, it's okay that it's the same every episode, right?

*The anime, not the character**. Just thought that needed clearing up.

**Sailors Mercury and Neptune are the ones I fell for.

its kind of hard to be something different when billed as:

"Kraft Lawrence is a traveling merchant who find a girl in his cart while trying to make money to open a store of his own. The girl turns out to be a harvest god named Horo, trying to make her way back home; and Lawrence agrees to help take her there while on his travels."

or something like that...but you sort of know what to expect. outside of of some world background that develops, it really is what it says on the tin.

The last anime I watched was Soul Eater, which made me desperately wish that Japan would enact a law saying you can't do a straight adaptation of a series that isn't finished yet. Soul Eater was awesome until it got to the BREW arc, and from then on it just started sliding until the point where the ending was 100% infuriating bullshit.

Prior to that, though, I liked the show. Hell, I even liked Black Star, which I'm told is the most widly disliked main character. For me, that was Death the Kid. It was fun to watch people poke his neurosis whenever he got too full of himself (Which is regularly), but he is such a prick and his preference for weilding guns upside down makes me want to swallow my own skull for how stupid it is.

Desdan_Mervolam wrote:The last anime I watched was Soul Eater, which made me desperately wish that Japan would enact a law saying you can't do a straight adaptation of a series that isn't finished yet.

I dunno. Apart from a few crap filler episodes early on, I thought the first FMA adaptation was a good bit more satisfying than the actual manga, which dragged and wandered quite a bit.

Unfortunately, there's no way to enforce that rule DM. One Piece has been going on for over a decade and shows no signs of being complete anytime soon. Hell, unless a manga was specifically created as a loss leader for an anime series (like Kampfer or Seikon no Qwaser or Ikkitousen or Gravitation) it probably already has several years worth of material backed up before people go 'hey, let's turn this bad boy into an anime'.

Desdan_Mervolam wrote:The last anime I watched was Soul Eater, which made me desperately wish that Japan would enact a law saying you can't do a straight adaptation of a series that isn't finished yet.

(see Inuyasha) to prevent much filler, they just canceled the series when the anime caught up to the manga.

the thing is that manga takes more time to convey some thing than anime. a simple 2 minute conversation could be a month worth of the manga.

also consider if the manga is ended, then already many people in Japan are over it. you have to start the anime when the manga is at its height. that is the only way the TV stations broadcasting will be able to sell advertising during the show, because people will be watching it due to popularity. after the series has ended, you end up with decaying interest that doesnt lead to good chances for advertisers to want to jump to promote your station at that time.

Shonen Jump and its siblings, get most of the merchandising, while the mangaka gets few royalties, and the TV station only gets the advertising dollars. the studio that makes the anime needs to make its money and can do that in home video sales, but those are hurting everywhere, especially in the turmoil of recent years switching video formats 3 or 4 times in the last decade. SL-SD-DVD, DL-SD-DVD, HD-DVD, BD....finding overseas licensers that will adopt the series and maybe show it on TV.

so the studio that acts quickest to get a series at its height of popularity, has the chance to make the most money.

smaller series or studio creations (anime only) have the greatest chance of finishing, but more times than not things get Gainax'd and the series doesnt even end and leaves you wondering.. what's next?

also often manga are canceled before the story ends, either the manga isnt as popular so the mangaka has to rush an ending, or they jsut leave off where they were. (see Kekkaishi)

also there is the studio itself or TV station (like TBS) that cancels a series or doesnt renew or order more episodes even for completed stories such as Spice and Wolf. its ending left you wondering "what next?" then a second season was ordered and still it doesnt finish the story in the 7 light novels. right now people are HOPING for a third season to see if Horo makes it home and what Lawrence does when they get there. (only those with the light novels know, but it seems the anime left off before the series ended.)

also a series may just pick up after it ended. Rozen Maiden took a year or so hiatus and the anime went a different way in the second season, even as far as renaming characters, so how does the anime pick back up with the new magazine the series is in since it switched form one manga company to another; and have the series make any sense, or just not bother with the continuation.

the majority of anime is only a small part of the actual series, or squished into just 12 episodes to show a year worth of time.

i doubt ANY anime has reached DBZ size with nearly 600 episodes over the course of the series. (i dont count pokemon because it isnt a comic first turned into anime, just a cartoon like looney toons) Naruto, Bleach, One Piece and Detective Conan, are the closest long running series that may reach DBZ heights.

but you are NOT alone in wanting them to work more to showing the full story of the series, and it is a reason that is hurting the anime industry in japan as well as abroad.

I took a small hiatus from anime after the first season of Spice and wolf. Over the last week or so, I watched the full 24 episode run of "Darker than Black." It's fairly decent but the second season is really rushed and the last couple of episodes could have been done better. The deux ex machina of revealing Hei's actual power in the second to last episode and then having him suddenly become a messianic figure who saves everyone was a bit annoying. Normally this kind of thing doesn't really annoy me. It was just the fact that nothing actually built to this. We knew that he was already a super awesome dude with cool powers. But they never showed those powers moving from acrobatics and electric shock to something crazy powerful.

Upotte!! is silly.
In this School-Girl-Slice-Of-Life-MOE-Blob-Anime, the School-Girls are GUNS.
Antropomorfied GUNS. Like . . SMG's. Assault Rifles. Battle Rifles.
Upotte!! is silly.
It is, basically, the very definition of Gun-Porn.

been watching Pumpking Scissors recently. It's decent. But the cool part is the ending song has some zydeco music as part of it. Having Zydeco jpop is interesting.

I didn't watch the anime, but I recently read History's Strongest Disciple Kenichi.

I think the best thing I could say for it is it doesn't take itself too seriously. The little extras--like a villain bitching Kenichi out for bad manners when Kenichi's cell phone went off right before a fight--and foilibles help make a fairly standard shonen manga/anime go down better.

I'm vaguely toying around with the idea of going through the entire Gundam cycle in appearance order.

So start with Mobile Suit Gundam and work my way slowly through the decades of shows. SO basically, it's going to be something I'll finish by the end of the year.

Of course, I've never actually watched Legend of Galactic Heroes but I can't really find a good copy anywhere *ahem*. LOGH would definitely be easier to watch because it's not like 1000 episodes.

Anybody who hasn't watched Cowboy Bebop needs to do so now.

That is all. Thank you.