.
In the grand scheme of things, I’ve realized several things:
.
1. That trying to juggle working nearly full-time, full-time college, and any sort of private life is nearly impossible, at least not without killing myself. Ah, there’s some joy.
.
2. It’s also the fast road to sickness, judging how I handled a 35 hour work week in addition to Senior crunch time with was almost the same amount of time when factoring in my usual class and homework time. That’s nearly half the week there, and when you factor in eating, sleeping, and an hour and a half roundtrip commute, “free” time becomes rather scarce. Not that I’m really complaining or anything, if I was you’d be seeing a picture of my in mounds of black eyeliner and a bad black dye job since it is more or less that stressful.
.
3. It also puts the kibosh on updating blogs and other cathartic wastes of time. I did find some time this weekend to open up and play some FES, so that cheered me up, along with seeing Iron Man and Speed Racer.
.
I won’t promise that I’ll be updating more regularly, at least not until after finals are over this weekend, but I will more often.
.
Addendum: I’m currently trying to write a final paper on George Lamming’s Natives of my Person for a lit class, and considering the beating my brain took earlier today on my History final, I’m surprised at how coherent I am writing both it and this. Boy, deconstructing and phrasing the relationships between men and women in post-colonial colonial fiction in terms of nation and national (as in peeps, not things belonging to a nation) is actually sort of fun.
.
Please shoot me now. ]]>
Anyhoo, the important thing here is that it’s a laughable sort of idea to begin with, given that roguelikes as a whole aren’t exactly noted for their character and plot depth. And yes, I do know about Izuna, but that’s an exception rather than the rule. Upon further thought though, DnT: tAoU (God, I love acronym-ing things) might prove to be an enjoyable sorcery and steel hackfest, always a good thing for an old time Final Fantasy and DnD fan. The few vague hints I’ve heard about it seem to say that it’s not a turd either. Joy!
Also, enjoy the poster shot:
EDIT: Also, it appears that GONZO is more or less officially translating and subbing two of their shows, Druaga and Blassreiter, and is releasing them on a number of outlets. Blassreiter’s a solo GONZO project, so expect lots of CGI and boobs. Probably CGI boobs too!
.
Point two: I wanted to get some use out of those two years of Latin I took in college, so suffer with my nerdy tendencies please.
.
Point three: After watching most of the first half of Gundam 00 over the last few months, I started wondering to myself how the SEED series stacked up to it. That lead to watching both SEED series over again (third time for SEED, second time for Destiny) and this time actually watching SEED Destiny Final Plus (Basically the Death and Rebirth of G SEED Destiny). I think 00 is technically better than both SEED series, but mostly from a technical standpoint (ha). 00 obviously had far more time and money invested in it than either SEED series, but the characterizations in the SEED series (along with the music, as I love Toshihiko Sahashi’s work) seem less one-dimensional in comparison to 00. They aren’t, really, but the relatively more focused development in SEED’s casts lends it a more personalized aspect than 00’s so far. Since 00 is only half over, it’s a bit unfair I suppose, but the Gundam series need more kotetsu ojous like Lacus from SEED, and the current lack of one in 00 is hurting it for me.
.
Destiny in particular is a bit of a thorny subject, since it almost jumps the shark a few times in the second half, narrowly avoiding so by the thinnest of plot and character developments. Maybe it was intentional, or maybe the then current Hajime Yatate group was sleeping at the wheel. It wouldn’t be quite so irritating if it didn’t take me the second watch through to get all of the connections and other crap that justified the second half’s plot twists, and if the damned series didn’t end about ten minutes too soon. Destiny’s biggest problem wasn’t the narrative snafus, but rather the fact that it had an end but no ending. It literally ends with the final misguidedly evil guy going down with his overpowered space fortress and the defeated heroes-turned-villains watching in horror as their boss bites a flaming big one.
.
That wouldn’t be a problem if it was a mere season break, since cliffhangers are a time honored way of getting your audience back come next season, but if you end a flipping series on that note you get the torch and pitchfork crew coming after you. Destiny does it even more incompetently by cramming a barrel full of plot and character developments into three or four of the last ten episodes just to barely justify the second season’s plot by utterly ruining its pacing and concentrating all of two seasons’ plots into a large chunk of the final season. It then proceeds to leave all of the loose ends loose with its “end,” and it leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth. Apparently Sunrise realized this and released Final Plus, a sort of Director’s Cut of the last two episodes with a new 10 minute epilogue tacked onto the end to actually “end” Destiny. It also added numerous retcons and changes to fix a number of really irritating plot holes and OOC moments, and it’s generally what you should watch instead of the last two TV episodes of Destiny. Too bad Shinn’s still a whiny chump at the end though. ]]>
.
So I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going to force myself to do something I don’t really want to do just for the sake of experience. After reading through the unfinished draft of my NaNoWriMo novel, and going through the bits of the things I was planning on doing for the webnovel, I surprised myself. For all that my writing skills had improved over the course of two writing classes, most of the stuff I’ve done since NaNoWriMo ended lacked “something.” My NaNoWriMo draft had that “something” along with a paper I did for my Brit Lit class of all things. In my drive for greater technical skill and experience, I’d forgotten about the really important thing, the stuff that has to be there for a project to be truly “creative.”
.
Put another way, a lot of those writings lacked the passion I’d put into that paper and poured into that NaNoWriMo novel. Maybe it’s just me, but you can tell the difference. It’s the difference between technical elegance and art, and neither craft or inspiration alone really does the trick. Par for my course, I’d forgotten about the inspiration and passion part in my drive to become a “good” writer, which if nothing else makes me an idiot. Nothing new perhaps, but I still feel stupid nonetheless.
.
So no, no webnovel from me. Instead I’m going to finish and edit that NaNoWriMo novel, posting chunks of it at a time, and I’m going to infuse that work of passion with all the skill I’ve got. I’ve slowly lost sight of why I wanted to write in the first place, and doing this is the way I’ll get that back, and maybe get a sweet novel out of the deal. Who knows? ]]>
.
Excerpt here ]]>
.
But hell though, if I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it BIG, y’know? No point in half-assing half-assing something, right?
.
Anyway, while I’ve got the story, characters and setting mostly nailed down, I still haven’t decided if I’m going to do this weekly or bi-monthly. Odds on bi-monthly since I want time to edit the chapters and stuff.
.
More than likely I’ll add the novel chapters as sub-tabs under a general tab on the right (like the About and Article tabs that are already there), and just create blog entries whenever I post a chapter for people to comment on. ]]>
.
Anyway, Utawarerumono’s pretty awesome actually. It’s mostly a straight up visual novel paired with a simple, yet entertaining SRPG backend. You’ve still got your mountains of text and static backgrounds and character portraits, but the setting, characters, and slowly unfurling plot are all pretty entertaining. There hasn’t been a whole lot of really risque art yet either, a plus for those of you uncomfortable with hentai and a minus for those who “play” vis. novels and eroge for it. Uta’s awesome enough to justify the sheer amount of timesink that any normal vis. novel enjoys, not to mention the extra time spent playing the SRPG half of the game.
.
It’s why I love that vis. novels let you save and pick up anywhere, although Uta won’t let you save during a battle sequence or when the game does a scene in the battle engine rather than the standard vis. novel static backgrounds. Timesinks aren’t quite so painful to the rest of your life if you can pick it up and play whenever you want, and something like Uta would be really nice on the DS or PSP I think.
.
The fan localizers did a pretty good job on the game itself, some slight Engrishy-ness and grammar quirks aside. It makes the game that much better when you can understand just what the heck peeps are saying this time around.
.
Also: Music’s pretty good. ]]>
.
For those of you who don’t know, one of the “innovations” that Japan wrought upon the computer scene was the visual novel. If you compound the original words’ meanings, you’ll be pretty close. If you think of a more traditional adventure game or something along the lines of the Myst series with about a metric ton of text you’d have a visual novel as well. Some focus more on wandering around and “player” choices, while others focus far more on the storyline. Others focus more on undressing the ladies and having your virtual way with them. Sadly, with Japan there are a lot more of the porno “hentai” games (actually visual novels with a lot of porn content). In Japan though, they don’t use the “hentai” title for porn, “hentai” being the nicer JP word for “pervert.” Anything with “ero” attached to it is likely gravure or straight porn of some sort, and given that Japan doesn’t have a sexually repressed culture behind the wheel, there’s a lot more of it out there.
.
Anyway, there is a difference between ero-novels and visual novels that contain some nudity/sex/gravure images in them, and you can mainly tell the difference by the cover art, actually. The tamer dating-sims and mostly-straight visual novels won’t have any, uh, risque box art or screenies on the back, and you can probably imagine that the eroge (JP term for porno games/vis. novels, rootword ero-geemu) boxart isn’t quite so restrained. Considering that porn is all about instant gratification (or however long it takes to, uh, entertain yourself), sandwiching said material between largish chunks of text isn’t exactly efficient, and so most people on either side of the Pacific leave the really porn-ish (ooh, invented a word) stuff alone.
.
Setting aside Japan’s large pervert subculture for a moment with the rightful observation that true eroge are a largish fragment of Japan’s porn industry and a smallish chunk of the overall vis-novel market, we move onto the real vis-novels. Visual novels are insanely popular, even the ones who include teensy bits of sex and nudity, and they’re so popular that even the slightly less risque ones are ported to your console of choice sans the risque bits. They also tend to have very low system requirements, so most people with a computer less than ten years old, or have access to a PS2 can play/read/whatever a vis-novel in their free time. In most of them you can save your spot wherever, so you can pick up where you left off at some other time. While the eroge generally have C and D-grade porno stories, some of the visual novels actually approach something resembling excellence and originality, and the studios responsible for them have approached or far exceeded Rockstar status in terms of popularity and fame.
.
The vast majority of it is crap, and comprised of the usual cliches that Japanese pop culture has been circulating for the last thirty or forty years, but some of the really popular stuff can inspire even new cliches that transfer over into video games and other forms of mass culture. That’s really something considering that Japan is basically a house of cliches stacked so thoroughly on each other that if you start to remove some of the oldest and most popular ones the country would probably implode. Thankfully, the medium hasn’t intruded too far over here, but so far only dubiously translated and localized eroge are available here through the fine auspices of Peach Princess and J-List. You can also get a large amount of morally dubious Japanese crap through J-List as well, although I’ve so far resisted the urge to get a Domo-kun hat. *cough*
.
ANYWAY, tl;dr version: Visual novels are popular. Some are porn, most are slightly porn-ish, and all are extremely popular and can be played on your toaster or clothes washer with extra vibration function for eroge!*
.
This post sponsored by the author paying way too much for a copy of Utawaremono a few years back, hooked by the intrigue of a visual novel with a good story, light amounts of the good stuff, and with a good SRPG muxed in to boot. Also sponsored by the fan-tl patch for Uta that just got released a month ago!
.
Joy, for I am Nerd.
.
*This is an absolute falsehood. Hopefully. Really Hopefully. ]]>
.
Anime fans this year are going to be deluged with bucketsful of mecha anime; Gundam 00’s first half is coming to a close, the second part coming in October. Then there’s the second part of Code Geass, a sort of CLAMP-designed revisioning of Gundam, and finally, Macross: F[rontier].
.
It’s been about six years since Macross Zero, the prequel to the whole shebang which we still haven’t gotten here. It’s odd for a number of reasons, perhaps the most important being that Macross in the form of Robotech, and earlier the Star Blazer [Space Battleship Yamato] series are the biggest reasons anime has any sort of foothold in America at all. Beyond the living-in-Mom’s-basement crowd, anyway.
.
At any rate, this is important because it’s also the first full length Macross series since 7 fourteen years ago, and its being animated by Satelight, arguably one of the best animation companies in Japan especially with their computer animation. Considering the sheer energy of the special first episode that was aired a few months back as a teaser, it’s hard not to be excited. Granted, it’s not high art, and the series’ continued focus on music and its strange power (in the Macross Universe, anyway) is bound to show up in one form or another.
.
Personally, I just love the idea of fighters jetting around in space and blowing the hell out of anything that moves. ]]>
.
Now that I’ve utterly disgusted everyone, on the to the positive end of today’s topic!
.
When it first came out, Rental Magica didn’t really win much of any attention, since beyond its premise of a modern day magical society renting out mages to solve various magical problems it was decidely formulaic. Mysterious young boy suddenly inheriting a position of power with strange and unique powers of his own, two tsundere girls (one foriegn, one Japanese) that are his main squeezes, an older man who acts as a mentor, a young girl mage prodigy who fills the little sister role, and a ghost girl who fills the big sister role (with some romantic feelings for the main to boot).
.
If you’ve followed me so far, I’ve just described the setup for any number of action, drama, or romance series, so most people sort of wrote it off and went about their business. What makes RM (The show’s title refers to the association mages, who are the Rental Magica) more than a formulaic exercise in supernatural action is the surprisingly deep characterization and the way they mix up the chronological order of the episodes to greater effect. The places which the episodes fit into the show’s timeline are fairly obvious as you watch them, and the effect on character development would be lost if you reordered the episodes into chronological order (the mistake ADV made with Haruhi Season 1). There are loose threads of an underlying plot present, but as of yet they haven’t been fully explained or resolved.
.
At any rate, the real reason I wanted to talk about Rental Magica is its excellent soundtrack, which is an outstanding effort from a pair of guys who haven’t really done much so far. It’s not on the par of Yoko Kanno, but the majority of the soundtrack is very atmospheric and easy to listen to in with it’s mixed orchestrations/electronica/ethnic instrumentation. Good reading/writing music, or for doing homework to. The soundtrack itself is called Uta Magica -Sound Magica-. Definitely worth a listen if you’re into that style of music. ]]>