Lest I Forget (to update this blog)

Public holidays in the middle of the week should really happen more often. Being able to sleep in on a Wednesday morning is a rare pleasure.

The last few weeks have been pretty hectic for me. Being on placement some 40km away from home is really making me realise how much I took it for granted when I could get to uni in a 15 minute bus ride. Now it's a 45 minute commute in the morning, and longer on the way home if I'm a bit late leaving and get caught up in the rush hour traffic. I don't really mind the time that much (at least I can listen to music and relax), but the fuel costs are putting the pressure on, especially since my car isn't very fuel efficient in the first place (~$100 a week).

The riverside "express"way. It would be about 5 more minutes before I got to that  overpass.

To make matters worse, last week I noticed my car felt a bit funny to drive. I was still half asleep so I didn't think too much of it, but as I drove it really started feeling bumpy, so I had to try and get through the traffic and off onto a sidestreet, where a quick look confirmed my suspicion: I had an incredibly flat tyre. Now, and I know this may come as a bit of a shock to you, I'm not very mechanically inclined. I knew there was a spare in the boot, but I had no idea what to do with it, so I had to call for roadside assistance. I then had to sit in my car twiddling my thumbs for an hour and a half before the guy showed up and changed the tyres over so I could get to my classes. I was worried about getting into trouble for being late, but thankfully everyone was understanding.

I then went to a tyre shop where the guy took a look at my flat and told me, rather succinctly, "Tyre's fucked mate". So in the end I had to pay almost $150 for a new one - I was almost definitely ripped off but by that stage I just wanted to get the problem sorted and not have to think about it any more.

Thank god I have exams in two weeks and that'll be the end of that placement. Of course my next one is even further away, but at least I get accommodation out there for the duration.

Late September? Heaps of time!

It's a good thing my figure preorders aren't coming in for a few months, I'm counting on being able to scrape the money together somehow. I'm looking at a pretty expensive May order (Panty and Saber Motored Cuirassier - I spelled that wrong and the first spellcheck suggestion was "circumciser". That's not a Saber figure I ever want to see made) but I should just be able to afford it, and then I've got nothing coming in until the end of July.

delicious Aoko

My copy of Mahou Tsukai no Yoru came in just a few days ago, and I'm excited to play through it. I've heard mixed opinions, though I'm trying to steer clear of internet discussion just to avoid spoiling myself. I'm sure it'll be a painfully slow read considering I'll need to make very heavy use of a dictionary but I think it'll be worth it. I got the first edition so it comes with this neat booklet with character profiles, concept art and some full-page drawing in it.

I'm hoping it will give me motivation to get back into VNs in general. There's a number of VNs that I've been meaning to read (Kara no Shoujo, Symphonic Rain, Deardrops etc) but it's hard to get the motivation to start knowing that I won't be able to read much per sitting and certainly won't be able to marathon them. I tend to get hooked easily, and staying up all night to read chinese porn games is just going to end badly. I remember when I first read Tsukihime - I just shut myself in my room for a few days doing nothing but sleeping and reading. I ended up feeling just like Shiki did during most of Hisui's route. Good times.

I was going to talk about this season's shows but I think that should probably be left to another post. My favourite show so far is Game of Thrones, but it's a solid season for anime and there's a lot that I look forward to watching every week.

The season that was

I watched a few shows that ended recently, namely Another, Black Rock Shooter, Chihayafuru, Nisemonogatari, Persona 4 and Rinne no Lagrange.

Another was pretty enjoyable, even though it didn't quite end up as I thought it would from watching the first few episodes. It sold itself as a horror anime, revolving around a curse that was causing students in a particular class to die rather gruesome deaths. It got a bit cheesy in parts, with things like cliche horror music playing before something bad happens, and I'm not entirely sure whether that was intentionally cheesy or not. The characters were a bit underdeveloped, particularly the side-characters, but the story of the curse was told quite well and I enjoyed the ride. 

Mei >>> Twintails. Not to say twintails was bad at all, but eyepatch wins out.

Just when you thought teen angst was bad, Black Rock Shooter introduces you to the wonderful world of pre-teen angst. Girls with ridiculous problems deal with them in the worst possible ways, then we find out it's all because of magic. And possibly rainbow birds. In its defence I did quite like the otherworld CGI animation. A lot of people dislike CGI on principle, but it can look good and this is a reasonable example of that. 

I do think it's time to lay the BRS franchise to rest though. It's come pretty far considering it's all based on some illustrations, but I'm not sure how much further it can go considering the lack of underlying story. Having said that, the characters and setting is very visually appealing and I'd quite like to see an OVA that just completely abandons story for some fight-scene eyecandy.

I really liked Chihayafuru. I'd never even heard of karuta before watching it, but I do like game/sports anime in general and this one was certainly presented in an interesting way. The shoujoesque parts (i.e. the Taichi-Chihaya-Arata love triangle) don't get a lot of attention with the anime squarely focusing on the game itself, which to me is a good thing. I also quite like the way that the protagonists don't win all their games, and while I've seen some complaints about the fact that they seem to lose more often than not, you can still look back and see how far they've come over the course of the show.

The characters are all very likeable (except for Taichi being a little brat as a kid), and I really enjoyed the show as a whole. I hope it gets a second season.

I didn't like Nisemonogatari as much as I liked Bakemonogatari. The clever dialogue was still there but the plot felt very pointless compared to Bake and the fanservice was really ramped up to compensate. My memory is probably playing down the amount of fanservice in Bake, but I remember feeling like there was an underlying story and that it was pretty important, whereas I really don't get that feeling with Nise. The character designs are still great, but I wouldn't be eager to watch it again. I'll still probably watch future adaptations in this series as I hear that the plot picks back up again.

Persona 4 was alright. As an adaptation it was pretty good, especially considering the scope of the game and the limited number of episodes, though it did feel a bit rushed leading up to the ending. The fight scenes were also fairly short, and it's a bit annoying that the final episode/OVA won't be out until October. It was a good watch if you've played the game (which was obviously the target audience for the show), but I'm not sure how much you'd enjoy it otherwise.

Rinne no Lagrange was my mecha show for the season, although I'm considering watching Aquarion at some time as well, since it seems to have been fairly well received. Rinne was a good show from the visual aspect, as to be expected from Production I.G., and I really liked the three main girls - Lan is damn cute, Madoka pulls off being relentlessly positive without it just getting irritating, and Muginami is fine too. 

From a story perspective it's less impressive, with the whole mecha thing being largely sidelined for slice-of-life school activities. This creates a jarring contrast on the few occasions where shit suddenly gets real, since afterwards the characters invariably cheer right back up and move on like nothing ever happened.

The OP was the best of the season. I liked the show and will watch the next season, but you may be disappointed if you're watching it only for the mecha.

As for the coming season, I really haven't looked at what's coming up. I know I'll at least be watching Fate/Zero but I'll play it by ear for the rest. What do you think looks interesting?

On break

I'm finally on holidays after finishing all my exams last week. It feels weird having a week of holidays while most other uni students are still in their first month back, but I'm relieved to have a break after all the exam study. I'm pretty sure I did well, though I won't find out for sure until the end of semester results are released in July.

Though in some ways I would prefer if I didn't have holidays. History shows that I never do anything much (useful or not) when I have time off, and I usually end up thinking too hard about depressing things that I don't otherwise have the time to. This time I've been considering my rather paradoxical problems with interacting with other people. 

I have absolutely no problems with talking to people I've never met before in a professional context, even about very sensitive and private matters (which is good, since that's essential for my planned career), but when it's in a social context I become completely retarded. It's not that I'm anxious or anything, it's more a problem of knowing what to say. Not in an autistic way, but it just seems like such a bother to wade through the small-talk only to find out that you don't have a lot in common with them anyway. It doesn't help that I'm a very private person and would never reveal my "powerlevel" as such, and carefully selecting what I do and don't tell people just makes me come across as boring. Because of this, I pretty much never initiate any relationship. I have a few friends, though I have no idea how it happened.

I still wish I had people I could talk to without having to hold back certain hobbies/interests out of fear of being ridiculed for them.

I can fully see myself becoming one of those people who work incredibly long hours and drink too much alcohol, both of which are very effective ways of taking your mind off personal problems (even if they're useless for dealing with the cause of the problem).

Onto less self-indulgent things. I just finished watching the two Vocaloid concerts that were on last weekend: Mikupa and the last 39 concert. Echoing the thoughts of everyone else who's written about it: it was thankfully far better visually than the 2010 Tokyo concert. No giant TVs on stage this time. Thank fuck.

Mikupa was on the first night, and though the setlist was fairly conservative the visuals were stunning. The projection's advanced to the point where they can now use more varied lighting (e.g. you can see a silhouetted Miku when the stage lights are off, and she can run outside a spotlight and become 'darker' as you'd expect). The physics in general were looking really good, and she moved around the stage a lot more than I remember in previous years. The songs had also been retuned a bit, which was very welcome since some of them really needed it.

Some of the costumes were pretty eye-catching

The 39's Giving Day final was impressive in its own way, with a full backing band including a full strings section, trumpets and a sax. The instruments worked in really well with the songs and made it more of a concert experience. Meiko made her first appearance (and Kaito showed up for a song at Mikupa) but while her model was pretty nice it really showed how poorly her voice compares to the Vocaloid2 crew.

The setlist here was pretty conservative too, though there were a few new ones. I can understand it seeing as it's the last concert and most people want to hear the favourites. I'm not sure what the future plans for concerts are; they're popular enough that I'm sure they'll still continue in some way. I hope so anyway.

As a side note: they really make the audience work for the encore.

Belated thoughts on Katawa Shoujo

Well shit, I've gone and not posted in almost an entire month again. Sorry, real life has been giving me a lot to deal with lately, and I haven't really even had the time to read blogs let alone write anything of my own. I don't really feel like blogging about my life tonight though, so I think I'll attempt that review of Katawa Shoujo that I was originally intending on doing many weeks ago. No pictures because I'm lazy, sorry.

As anyone reading this almost certainly already knows, Katawa Shoujo (aka KS or the ultra-classy Cripple Girls) was released in the first few days of the year by Four Leaf Studios. This marked the fifth anniversary of the VN's conception, with the idea being born on /a/ in 2007, inspired by a sketch by Raita showing the characters in a hypothetical game about disabled girls.

The most remarkable thing about the history of the project, aside from the sheer unlikeliness of /a/ actually banding together and accomplishing anything worth mentioning, is the amount of time it's taken. Five years is a damn long time spent in development, even for a small independent project arising from 4chan. The main problem here is that the longer something takes, the more people expect from it at the end. After five years and a rather impressive demo I think it's fair to say that people had very high expectations for the finished product.

I do not believe KS lived up to these standards.

But that's not to say that I thought it was bad. Some parts of the game were done very well, and I'm going to start with them.

Technical details were done very well. It's not a subject that lends itself to a whole lot of discussion but the game came across as very polished. There was a lot of attention to detail in the menus, and the CG gallery and event library were done nicely. The save menu perhaps sacrificed a bit of function for style and I'd have preferred to be able to see more saves without scrolling but that's neither here nor there. The rollback functionality of Ren'Py is another nice touch, although I think normal scrollback is probably more useful.

Sound was another area I thought KS did very well in. The tracks used were good quality and were well fitted to the scenes they were used in. Several of the tracks got stuck in my head after I'd finished with the game as well, which is always a good sign. The game wasn't voiced, but I certainly wasn't expecting it to be and didn't hold this against the game at all.

The graphics are the first area where I've got some mixed feelings. Although I thought the CGs were generally quite pretty, they weren't all on the same level of quality. One of Emi's sex scenes in particular had much more of a comic effect than was probably intended. The game could have used a few more positions for each of the character sprites in general, and Emi's sprites looked quite rough around the edges. I understand she was redesigned significantly after the demo, but the result is a sprite that doesn't quite fit the same style as the other characters.

The animations used at the start of each girl's route and at the start of the game were a nice touch. I wouldn't rave about the quality but it's certainly above and beyond what I was expecting from a game like this.

The story is something else altogether though. The other parts are nice but a VN is nothing without a well done and compelling story. I'll go over the separate routes briefly, but I have three main criticisms of the story in general:

• Consistency. The five routes have different writers and it shows. The writing style shifts completely between routes, and the characterisation moves along with it. This really breaks the narrative as you might expect, it's hard to feel attachment and immersion when you're given a constantly shifting style of writing to work with. It's particularly jarring going from the common route to the first stages of the various routes: early on in Emi's route Hisao comes across as a guy who's really trying to get over his disability and move on with life. Early in Rin's route he's suddenly an emo kid who can't see the point in anything. What lifechanging decisions set these two apart? Uh, whether he tried his hardest one morning track session or not, plus one or two other minor decisions. I can see how you could argue that this reflects his personality and his thoughts about his disability but that's not how the question was presented and it's not something that could believably manifest so quickly.
• Length. As I said before, after five years I was expecting something pretty substantial. The routes weren't very uniform in length (with Hanako's route being especially short) but none of them seemed to go for a very long time (except Shizune's, which seemed to drag even though I don't think it was actually any longer than the others). I feel that the short length got in the way a bit, and that I didn't connect to the characters as much as I should have because of this. Generally, I think that every girl could have had another major problem/conflict show up in their route that has to be resolved. This would extend the length and provide more chances for characterisation and connection.
• Time. This is a relatively minor one, but I felt quite disoriented at times during the story. The transitions between days are marked, but you don't know how much time has passed. A day? A week? A month? Sometimes the writing suggests that it's been a while since the previous 'day' but I never quite knew how long. This is a bigger deal than it seems, as developments can seem plausible or ridiculous depending on how fast they happen.

I'll take a brief look at the routes in the order that I did them.

Lilly

In contrast to what I've just said, I quite liked Lilly's route. Her blindness was an integral part of the story yet she wasn't defined by it - she could work around it but it was still present and affected her interactions with Hisao. The major conflict about her proposed move back to Scotland was definitely on the melodramatic side, but I don't mind a bit of melodrama now and then. Probably my favourite route.

Hanako

Despite the amount of 'feels' she apparently induces on /v/, I didn't really feel much of a connection to Hanako. I think the pacing is to blame here, it seems to take a while to get anywhere then suddenly everything happens and it's over. And it's over very quickly. There was so much more that had to be resolved; her route should have been twice as long, or had a substantial epilogue at the very least. This route had potential but it really needed more substance.

Emi

I thought Emi's route had the best writing style. None of the writers had written VNs before to my knowledge, but the writing in Emi's route was the best fit to the VN medium. The content, however, was a bit lacking. Her having trouble opening up to others is certainly realistic, but it unfolded fairly predictably, and it hardly related specifically to her disability. Change a few details in her backstory, give her her legs back, and no one would even notice. 

Rin

The writing style bogged the route down. There was rarely a noun without an adjective, and the heavy monologue style (which was also a problem in most other routes) didn't do much for me. Rin is a very odd girl and you start the route really not knowing much about her. The problem is that by the end of the route you still don't know much about her. The choices you make are also very arcane and often I didn't want to pick either.

Shizune

This route took a long time to get nowhere. It didn't help that the only choice (yes, the only choice) is whether you want to fuck Misha or not. And you'd need to be a bit slow in the head not to understand that one of the options was obviously going to lead to a bad end. I also found it completely ridiculous how quickly Hisao became fluent in sign language. 

In conclusion, I thought it was fairly mediocre. It could have been worse, sure, but it could have been a lot better, and I was expecting it to be better. It's still the best OELVN I've read, but that's not a bar that's set very high at all. I would recommend it to anyone who hasn't read VNs before since it's very accessible (well, depending on the route), but for people who are already familiar with the medium I would suggest that you play a route or two if any of the characters particularly grab your attention, but that'd be about it.

It's far from being terrible, but it's even further from being great.

As a postscript: I'm not sure whether or not to be grateful about it being a hit with newcomers to the medium. I like the prospect of more and better OELVNs, but I'm not convinced it'll happen. Besides, western fandoms have a habit of being all sorts of stupid, especially when they become a little bit less obscure. Tangentially related, there's been some rather amusing drama surrounding http://www.fuwanovel.com/ lately if that sort of thing interests you.

Generic Post Title

I wish it snowed here, ever

I am so sick of summer. It's been raining a lot but that doesn't seem to lessen the heat at all. The air is practically dripping with moisture and I can work up a sweat just by sitting in front of my computer. We're already in the last month of the season though, and I'm eagerly anticipating a cooler Autumn.

I really feel like I haven't had much time to enjoy myself lately. I started classes for the year three weeks ago, and it's been 9-5 every day so far. Add in the hour commute each way, and the few hours it takes once I get home just to cool down enough to feel like doing anything, and I've got precious little time left to really do anything. Most of the people I know are still on holidays for a few more weeks, so I've been feeling quite disconnected from everyone around me. Shit sucks, though I suppose it can't be helped.

I still haven't really started watching anything from this season. I finally got started on Nisemonogatari, but the only other shows I've been watching are continuations from last season: Chihayafuru and P4A. I'm still considering trying Another, Rinne no Lagrange and Milky Holmes, it's just a matter of when I manage to get around to them. Rather than start anything new, lately I've felt like rewatching some series that I've already seen. Over the last couple of weeks I've rewatched Kara no Kyoukai, Eve no Jikan and The Tatami Galaxy. I might start on Shiki again next, or perhaps Aria depending on my mood. I also need to find time to work on my VN backlog, but that might be a lost cause for the foreseeable future.

I've recently become hooked on The Binding Of Isaac, which is a very addictive roguelike game where you control a child who's stuck in a monster-filled basement in an attempt to escape his mother, who believes God told her to kill her son. I'd recommend it as a good way to waste a bit of time, it can get quite difficult and there's a heap of stuff to unlock.

I need to go take another cold shower. I'm still planning to write a post about Katawa Shoujo, and I also have a few purchases from Japan headed my way in the mail right now, but in the meantime please excuse this shitpost. I hope you're all taking it easy.

Japan trip - the rest of it

Comiket was hardly the only thing I did while I was in Japan. I won't go into the details of all the 'normal' touristy stuff I did, but there was certainly a lot to see. A few places I went seem particularly relevant though, so I hope you find this somewhat interesting.

Japan trip - C81

I have returned from my travels. Actually I've been home for a few days now, but I came down with a rather nasty cold in the process and haven't felt up for much. Although it's a bit late by now, I have a bit to say about how it all went.