Showing posts with label anime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anime. Show all posts

Honorable Mention: Gakuen Alice - 18

It's not what you think. Or is it? Well, no matter what, I'm sure we've all seen a scene like this a million times. However! This one left an impression on me. The faces are undeniably cute and effective. The sounds are funny and spot-on. And Hotaru's reaction is legendary. Also, there's a youtube video of it at the end of the post, so be sure to check that out!!

Mikan and Natsume are trapped in a section of a haunted house attraction after a power outage.

Natsume makes a comment about Mikan's strawberry panties. A funny moment.

Luca and Hotaru have entered the haunted house to find Mikan and Natsume.

They find the wall that Mikan and Natsume are trapped behind and Luca knocks it doen. But what they find behind it is not what they expect!

Bum bum bum!! Natsume and Mikan getting friendly.


Now here's the best part. They switch the camera between a far out view and close ups of everyones' faces. It really worth checking out.



Hotaru's face is definitely the best. It's probably the reason I posted this honorable mention in the first place.


Here's a video clip that I found on youtube. The subs are in Spanish, but it's the only clip I could find that worked. Just click play and it will jump right to the scene automatically. You really get the full effect of the scene here because of the sound and stuff. Enjoy!

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Quite a Haul - Onion's Happy Day


It all started with konpeito. I wanted to try it. I thought about ordering it online, but the shipping is annoying. So, I searched for maybe possibly some stores where I live that might sell it. Well, guess what? Just a 30 minute drive from my house is a store called Mitsuwa. Their website advertises them as the largest Japanese Supermarket in the United States. And on top of that, the store closest to me is in fact the largest one in their chain! Not only was there a supermarket filled with amazing amounts of Japanese food and snacks, but there was also a whole food court inside the building! There was ramen stall, and a bakery among other things.


   But this is not the end of my story! The best part is the bookstore that is adjacent to the food building. This bookstore is fantastic. There was 2 whole aisles of magazines, and about 6 aisles of manga. And the best part is that about 90% of everything in that store was in Japanese. I really went crazy in here, and I bought a whole bunch of stuff, as you can see in the pictures. I was going to take pictures inside the store, but I chickened out.


    I walked away with Volume 5 of The World God Only Knows manga, 2011 Vol 1 Megami Magazine, 2011 Vol 1 Newtype Magazine, 2010 Vol 13 Nyantype Magazine, 2011 Vol 1 G's Magazine, 2010 Vol 11 Shounen Ace, and one final magazine whose name I can not read... (It's full of text, but it had index on the cover, so I bought it xD) This magazine also came with a disc that has something like a card maker... I think... Like New Years Cards, and Birthday cards and such. It comes with images as well to decorate the cards. G's Magazine came with a nice mini figure of chibi Kiririn. And last but not least, all of the posters! Too many to count. I'll be taping these to my ceiling later, and I'll follow up with a post about that haha.

Excuse the crappy pictures D:
   In the end, after searching for the konpeito for 15 minutes, I still hadn't found it. So, I bought some pocky and some other candies and that was that. It's a great place to visit. It's like being in Japan for a while, and I was smiling the whole time. When I brought that load of books up to the cash register, I'm sure the cashier was thinking some weird thoughts, but oh well! I was surrounded by Japanese books, there was no shipping fee, so it was time to go all-out, or go home with nothing!


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Infinite Stratos Episode 1: My Classmates are All Girls

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to watching this series, because since I saw the last few trailers some few months or weeks ago, I managed to alienate myself from the previous season’s final ending batches; the next few weekends will be my friends as I marathon these lot.
Harem/comedy/romance usually gets the job done to hook me in, since I’m a sucker for the genre pairs, which would probably explain why often times I’d bellow out my disappointment if X does not end up with Y, or why X didn’t end up with anyone at all, which seems to be happening a lot recently. Given that context, I came to anticipate this show, and during the break in-between seasons, I managed to dig up some materials of the same content in different versions to try and keep me sane while waiting through spoilers.
That being said, onwards to the first episode impressions!


We start out with a short battle scene between a party of six against a single IS pilot, where three of the characters from the said party are introduced in the remaining length of the episode. It ends with everyone else unable to do anything worthwhile and Ichika having to play the hero-of-the-day by bum rushing the single IS pilot. 6 VS 1. Hardly a fair fight and guess who's already having trouble keeping up.
Time warp back into the beginning of the story, at least supposedly. In a room full of...
Girls. Typical anime male lead reaction ensues, which isn't really surprising anymore given the amount of shows released recently that illustrated the same board draft action. One thing about Ichika though, which I think is a good character quality for any male protagonist, is that he doesn't really mope around trying to comprehend the heavenly mess he's in. Unlike Muneakira (Hyakka Ryouran), it doesn't take him the entire episode to man up to the situation he's in, while being surrounded by girls, who, in the future, will eventually be fawning over and stalking him. If given the chance and with the right set-up, it'll only take a single episode to turn every girl in that class into mindless yandere stalkers, which raises the potential of having multiple nice boat endings by an exponential amount. It's School Days in a larger scale.
The story starts off mentioning that Ichika is the only male capable of piloting an IS. Quite the sentiment for the world since until he showed up, IS suits only responded to women. Where does that leave us?

Another thing I'm pleased about is the nice character introduction from the get-go for Ichika's sister, Orimura Chifuyu. The episode informs us that she's the first generation IS pilot that represented Japan in an IS competition some years back, but due to unknown (then) circumstances, she retired as an IS pilot, disappeared, and is then later revealed that she became an instructor and first-year dorm leader at IS Academy.



Of course everyone else knows how famous she is... The situation looks grim for Ichika as he competes with his sister for the perfect harem ending.





It is also revealed that the IS suit is in fact designed for use in outer space, but due to several unexplained reasons, development in that area was stopped. Luckily enough, the suits were prevented from being used in the military, and in turn, are now instead an object used for sports purposes.

Shinonono Houki (voiced by Hikasa Yoko from K-On!'s Akiyama Mio and Seikimatsu Occult Gakuin's Kumashiro Maya), Ichika's osananajimi, is a lovely character, despite being generic. I don't really mind it though since I've always liked these types of styles, which in this case, puts her above all the other girls in my favor. Excluding Chifuyu. She's already at the top.

The second half of the episode deals heavily with Cecilia Alcott (voiced by Yukana from Full Metal Panic's Teletha "Tessa" Testarosa, Sekirei's Kazehana, and Amagami SS' Nanasaki Ai) and her antics about her position of great achievement. Given by her looks, her words speak on the same wavelength as her appearance. Character-wise, we've already seen a lot of the type, and almost always those characters end up as supporting roles at best. However, I'm not quick to judge given that this is only the first episode. I am optimistic that 8-bit, despite being relatively new, will do a good job in giving her a nicer and edgier character definition--in relation to the novel (and manga...at least). I hope.

And of course, the obligatory fan service for this episode... you get a Houki! And some other girl. The scene was rather bland in my opinion, and only until Houki started destroying the door did things got a tad interesting.









Obligatory filler shots.



















Well, for a first episode, I personally liked it. Despite being generic, it had something to offer at the very least. As per my anime schedule, I haven't really worked out a definite one due to classes, but there's a good chance I'll be blogging an episode impression for Infinite Stratos every week.

ED theme: SUPER∞STREAM by Hikasa Yoko


Last but not the least, many thanks to Ayako Fansubs for picking up this series (although they already planned to prior its start). It's very comforting to know that there's a great dedicated group for this show.

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Failed Trading Card Games of the Fall

As you may have noticed, I like my trading cards. And if you've been stalking me, then you'll probably know that I like to make a lot of my own cards. Well, I'm always experimenting with new styles, systems, and graphics. Just this past fall I made 2 new trading card sets, both of which failed. I can tell that they failed because I got bored with them fairly quickly. So I'm just going to post the 2 card games because I feel like honoring their failure.

Firstly, Tenekusu! Funny story, I was sitting in a math class and the teacher was repeatedly saying 10x for some reason. As he said it over and over, I suddenly realized that it could make an awesome name for a card game. So I scribbled down the name Tenekusu in my notebook and went to work that night. I wanted to do something different for this card game. So I decided to take my existing template and I cut the width in half. I thought it would give the game a cool, fresh contrast to what I usually do. This card game didn't fail as horribly as the second, but it never really got anywhere. I printed some demos, but then I dropped the project for some reason... Here are some pictures.


The second card game is the bigger failure of the two. For this card game, I wanted to go for something more practical. I wanted to use screen shots from actual anime episodes and put them right in the card. I'd then try to use the situation of the episodes to give the cards descriptions and such. Well, this game died pretty much immediately. I made a total of either 2 or 3 incomplete cards. It was pretty much because of the horrible graphics I used and because I hadn't thought of any solid system. More pictures.


Yes, so, I think for my next card game, I'll try and reuse the concept I had from the 2nd failure. Except this time, I'll be starting at the beginning of the anime season, so I may be able to work out some sort of nice system for making the cards. It'll also be much nicer if I can somehow make my own graphics for the backgrounds and borders. Hopefully it turns out well!

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