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Fullmetal Alchemist - Brotherhood - 02

post from Xebek?s Blog on 19 April 2009 10:40:00 PM. © Xebek?s Blog

Ed and Al’s past is revealed as we see their choice to attempt human transmutation.

Impressions:

Well this episode really felt like we were back in Fullmetal Alchemist. They managed to speed through a lot of events, but glad they gave a lot of time to the failed human transmutation. It was a pretty shocking scene with limbs being lost and Al being lost entirely. Interesting to see Ed going through that gate and gaining so much information. Though the cost of a leg is a pretty high one to pay. Considering Al lost his entire body I wonder what he got in return. It doesn’t seem like he got anything since there was no memory of it on his part. Those kids paid a pretty high price for trying to bring their mother back. That was a pretty ugly result though with the body in such a state after being transmutated.

I’ll give Roy credit for doing a good job selling the army. Managed to make it look like the only path that would mean struggling forward. For someone like Ed, telling him that not joining is like quitting will only make him do the opposite. Ed didn’t want to quit so becoming a state alchemist was his only option. Well anyways I suppose Ed would have done something crazy eventually. But still cutting a 3 year procedure and rehab down to a year was crazy. Had to have been gruelling to endure.

Watching their childhood have to say Ed could give Winry a bit of slack. Seems like he always was hard on her and not appreciative of her concern. Makes you wonder why she bothered caring at all about the guy. Al at least has a clue about Winry’s motivations for wanting to support them. Guess we’ll see if anything goes on with those two before this long series is over.

Overall the series did a nice job showing us what happened in the past and how Ed became a state alchemist. Was a pretty nice trick pulling that move at the test, though good thing he wasn’t really trying to assassinate Bradley. Managed to make quite an impression with his abilities and personality.

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http://xebek.animeblogger.net/2009/04/19/fullmetal-alchemist-brotherhood-02/

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needs more time paradox selfcest

post from blog?? on 19 April 2009 07:00:00 PM. © blog??

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http://blogsuki.com/archives/2009/04/19/2530/

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Tears To Tiara Episodes 1 & 2

post from Cinnamon Ass on 19 April 2009 05:53:00 PM. © Cinnamon Ass

I’m going to be so pissed off if this show turns into a harem love fest, is all I can say.

Tears to Tiara is apparently based on what was at one point an ero-game but is now just your average RPG - that just happens to feature several female characters that become your wives, from a quick glance at Wikipedia. Oh, Japan, you and your crazy wish fulfilment stories. I sure know I’ve always wanted to be a demonic bigamist!

Anyhoo, I’m going to try and cast this out of my mind because without the foreknowledge that things could get annoying the first couple of episodes of Tears to Tiara are pretty entertaining. It’s not the kind of show where you really want to engage your brain very far, and that’s not to say there aren’t things about it that annoy me, but it’s a pleasant little watch for a fantasy show.

I think my biggest gripe, unsurprisingly, is with Rhiannon. I actually quite liked her in the first episode; she stood her ground until the stupid children showed up, didn’t really whine all that much, and then spent the rest of the episode completely zombie-fied which may have helped. However, then the dictations of ero-games are such that in the second episode her voice goes up about an octave and for almost no reason she declares that she’s going to marry a scary demon because she saw him crying bloody tears from within his soul. I hope the length of that sentence adequately conveys my annoyance with her - especially as she goes on to just stand in the midsts of a horde of dodgy CG skeletons looking panicky whilst the Manly Men beat them up, but hey ho.

Speaking of the Manly Men, on the flipside the three male characters we’ve really been introduced to are surprisingly interesting. Arthur veers close to the milquetoast lead but actually seems a pretty decent bloke; Arawn is surprisingly amusing for a tortured demon, and Ogam is appropriately jolly (although why no whizzy spells in the second episode? Whoever’s animating this clearly pays their effects animators well, there’s some very nifty pillars of light in the first episode…)

So I’m hopeful that Tears to Tiara will turn out to be more entertaining in the long run than I’m perhaps expecting it to be. Fantasy anime are a big weakness of mine, although I didn’t even make it to halfway through Tales of the Abyss last year (not sure why, I was quite enjoying it) so based on the first two episodes I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

The minute some mewling cutesy brat gets “married” to Arawn, though, my estimation of this show will plummet.

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http://www.ass-no-ryu.com/animeblog/?p=1191

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DaiCon - A celebration of Japanese Modern Visual
Culture

post from Kurogane's Anime Blog on 19 April 2009 02:00:48 PM. © Kurogane's Anime Blog

By now I am pretty sure everyone has seen the DaiCon web banner and/or noticed the DaiCon link on my sidebar, so what is it about?Well, basically it’s another Malaysian ACG event (or another anime con as Americans call them) and it’s being held in the Grand Hall of the Multimedia University, Cyberjaya branch on [...]

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http://kurogane.animeblogger.net/2009/04/20/daicon-a-celebration-of-japanese-mode
rn-visual-culture/

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Do You Guys Know Adachi Mitsuru

post from Riuva : Research Institute for Unicultural Visual Arts on 19 April 2009 12:57:18 PM. © Riuva : Research Institute for Unicultural Visual Arts

Judging from the otaku and normal people crowd’s responses in general, I found that not many of you actually know who Adachi Mitsuru is. At this moment, I bet you’re screaming "I KNOW I KNOW!!!", then OK you win.Cross Game is his most recent manga, and with its adaptation into an anime, Adachi’s fame amongst [...]

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http://www.riuva.com/?p=1410

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Guin Saga Episode 1 - A Leopard Head Mask

post from Cinnamon Ass on 19 April 2009 11:22:00 AM. © Cinnamon Ass

I find it incredibly difficult to spell the word “leopard” correctly. I ALWAYS get the o and the a the wrong way round. Drives me crackers. Writing about Guin Saga could prove to be difficult…

Well, it’s more difficult to write about Guin Saga generally anyway. Something I’ve been having a lot of trouble doing recently is trying to consider things on their own merits; admittedly anime recycles itself over and over again anyway, but I find myself constantly referring to other shows I’ve seen or books I’ve read etc. As for Guin Saga, the only way to describe it as a Western fantasy.

Anime fantasy tends to normally go for the more glamorous side of the swords-and-sorcery trope. Dashing swordsmen and all that sort of thing (I’m going to watch Tears to Tiara after I’ve typed up this entry and that’s fully the kind of show I’m expecting to see). Guin Saga, on the other hand, begins with the glamorous nobility being destroyed and a hulking great beast of a man with - unsurprisingly - a leopard head mask on beating people up and being very animalistic about it.

I’ve never read the original Guin Saga books (and indeed DigiKerot has basically put me off them) but I am a total trashy fantasy junkie - I’ve read David Eddings and still like his books, for instance. Guin Saga seems to be cut from a more “hard” fantasy cloth; wars and politics and all that mixed in with the leopard man beating up lake monsters, I suspect.

Anyway, enough babbling that doesn’t really make any sense. An opinion is in order!

Guin Saga comes across as something of a second-tier project for Satelight as an animation studio, certainly compared to Basquash. Although there’s clearly money behind the show, and there are some excellent visual touches - the final action sequence of the episode where Guin and his young charges are attacked by forest creatures is very well done - the character designs and general animation have the look of shows like Angelique or Glass no Kantai, where everyone looks simple and has no nuance to their movement.

From a story point of view, it is somewhat frustrating that we’ve been landed with a whiny male lead in the shape of Remus. Rinda, his sister, is at least a bit more of a go-getter, but Remus started to annoy me within the first few minutes of the show and things didn’t improve from there. I’m sure there will be plenty of character development but it’s not an auspicious start really.

As for Guin himself…he’s an amnesiac strong man. As long as he keeps beating things up he’ll fulfil his purpose, no doubt.

I can’t decide whether this show has much in the way of potential, strangely. There are flashes of interest, but mostly that’s just when Guin hits things; the story itself in the first episode moves surprisingly slowly given all that happens, and I think this might have worked better with slightly longer episodes to get more story telling done. As it is, 22 minutes isn’t a lot of time to get properly invested in a hardcore fantasy world like this, so I should probably give it the benefit of the doubt. We’ll see if I have time.

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http://www.ass-no-ryu.com/animeblog/?p=1190

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Asura Crying Episode 1

post from Cinnamon Ass on 19 April 2009 11:05:00 AM. © Cinnamon Ass

This show is all about throwing all sorts of standard anime ideas at the viewer and hoping that at least one of them will stick. Clearly the team behind Asura Crying (I have no idea what the original novels are like) think that they need to show almost all their cards in one episode to make an increasingly experienced anime audience stick around for more. Most series would dribble the information given to us out over the course of the first few episodes, but not this one - we’ve got mecha oozing out of suitcases, various mysterious unexplained factions fighting each other, and plus every high school character you can think of, all wrapped around the potentially more interesting concept of a “ghostly” childhood friend.

Now, clearly she’s not going to really be a ghost (I’ve forgotten her name, I’m afraid, it’s been a week or so since I watched this); the show has already established some kind of parallel world thingy is going to be going on here, and the teaser before the OP makes it clear it’s science fiction mumbo jumbo. On top of that, the character herself is fairly standard childhood friend material. It’s an interesting little twist, though; it’s almost quite sweet, in a way,how her interaction with Tomo plays out. Tomo himself, regrettably, is the standard no-interest male lead, but then complaining about that is entirely futile.

Asura Crying is hardly bad - the animation is competent, the character designs cookie-cutter but not unattractive, the acting generally good etc. etc. It just smacks slightly of a lack of self-control; like the author just sat down and went “wouldn’t it be cool if…” and somehow crammed all these fairly adolescent ideas into one show. I doubt I’ll watch any more of it, but it’s inoffensive and mostly entertaining; it just also happens to be filled to the brim with cliches that I’ve seen before and am not particularly interested in seeing again.

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http://www.ass-no-ryu.com/animeblog/?p=1189

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eden of the east 2

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http://blogsuki.com/archives/2009/04/19/2516/

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K-ON! Impressions

I finally caught up on this show. This show needs to be taken to task on the fact that it has both the laziest and crappiest animation this season. It’s criminally bad, in spite of all the shortcuts taken. The BS 4:3 aspect is actually welcome, the art and animation are so [...]

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seaslugteam/~3/v0OvTt1hOlI/

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[Hynavian] Correlation Diagram Generator

post from Riuva : Research Institute for Unicultural Visual Arts on 19 April 2009 12:43:21 AM. © Riuva : Research Institute for Unicultural Visual Arts

A just for fun test pointed out by Blowfish, I did a correlation diagram test. For this test, I seek to discover my relationship with Ascaloth, Tj_han, LianYL and Kokanaden. Purely just for fun, behold the results.More tests can be found at Genzu.netAccording to the diagram, I clearly have some unfinished business with Ascaloth. It [...]

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http://www.riuva.com/?p=1409

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