I Don’t Know What To Title This Article

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Ubu Roi

So make one of your own up.

Every season, there’s always that one show that I say “no way I’m going to watch that.” And then not only do I try it, I end up enjoying it. Well, this season, I’ve got two of them. Ben-to and Boku ha Tomodachi ga Sukunai have both surprised the hell out of me with decent (but not Maken-ki overblown) fanservice and sly humor. There’s no real punchlines, but the characters, just by being themselves, provoke the laughs. I’ve got an article half-written on Ben-to, which I might complete in a couple of days, but I thought I’d just gift you with this from Tomodachi:

Mildly NSFW

Class A. And a class ass too. (Shaddup, ya perv!)

Sometimes, less is more, with fanservice, and the animators of both shows clearly understand that as opposed to the in-your-face aspects of Maken-ki and MajiKoi.

The funniest thing about Tomodachi so far is the the relationship between the two female leads — they’re kind of like…. well, no, they ARE a co-dependent pair that can’t stand each other, but can’t end their relationship. Or even admit they have one Um. That sounds less funny than it actually is…

Well, watching their co-op PSP game devolve into a PK-fest was pretty hilarious (I have SO been there, done that!), but I’m wondering when the other girls we see in the OP will show up I’m not looking forward to the loli-nun. I really hope that character is very minor.

Whether these two shows can remain good for the entire cour has yet to be seen, but I’m liking what I see so far. Much less slapstick, much more character driven comedy than I would have bet on. Their next game was a dating sim, which went just as wrong…)

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Now That’s What You Call A “Point Failure”

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Ubu Roi

It’s already over with by the time I noticed but this couldn’t have been good:

Research In Motion (RIM), the company that owns Blackberry, has experienced a worldwide infrastructure problem. RIM identified a core switch failure and noted that their fail-over to a redundant core switch failed to perform properly. There has been a cascading effect in message queues backing up worldwide as a result of the failure. RIM states that all messages will eventually be delivered as the system catches up on the backlog. In fact, RIM now states that most overseas customers are returning to normal operations. However, there continues to be a backlog of messages to be delivered in the North American markets. RIM continues to state that they are unable to provide an ETA as to when the backlog will finish processing. Thus these issues continue to have a sporadic impact on various City of Houston users of the Blackberry Services.

One switch fails and the whole world’s Blackberry messages back up? I sincerely hope our military and civilian leadership is ready for this node to either fail or be taken over by the Chinese if/when a war occurs.

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Guilty Crown — the Stupid, it Burns!

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Ubu Roi

I pretty much gave up on it when the stormtroopers showed up to stomp/arrest little miss secret agent/idol singer, but couldn’t be bothered to search the room or even question the male lead for the macguffin. Hello? Right there in the same room — obvious suspect or co-conspirator? Hello? Hello?

Then the resistance let him run off with it during the later fight, rather than taking it and handing it to someone, you know, who knew the terrain and/or had some survival skills. But hey, if they did that, then he couldn’t just happen to run into the girl again, and the vial couldn’t be broken by a near miss from the equivalent of a tank cannon at point blank range — that didn’t even muss his clothing. Or hers. While it was in a pocket sandwiched between them, and on the other side from the mecha to boot. I mean, we don’t have a good shot to judge from, but I think the bore of that gun was on the order of a half-meter in size. That’s five hundred millimeters. Forget the test-tube, at twenty yards range, the shockwave should have pulped both of them instantly.

Big mech, little girl.

Appropriate wear for a music video. Not appropriate for secret-agent skullduggery, fleeing custody, getting shot at by mecha, or war zones in general.

That’s fanservice? Sorry, I have to go back, once again, to Maid Guy‘s classic job description:

Application Criteria: “Girls with breasts larger than D-cup. For every centimeter larger than 95cm, 50 yen will be added to your wage. Anything less than D-cup will not be recognized as breasts. B and A-cups with large stupid gaps for cleavage are absolutely out of the question. Are they even really breasts?”

Posted in Episode Reviews, Snap Reviews | Tagged | 2 Comments

Majikoi vs. Horizon

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Ubu Roi

Yet another in a long series of articles that started out as a comment at Steven’s, and had to be moved here. In this case, as the title suggests, I am talking in part about another series, and wanted to avoid the derail in his comments. (I’m a little more hands-off on that kind of thing, but his blog, his rules.)

Steven complains that Majikoi has degenerated from being Dog Days (edit: or BakaTest, if he’s not pulling my leg) to something that’s terribly derivative. I don’t quite get that complaint — after all, if it was all about harmless fights between rival groups of young people, it would be derivative of Dog Days, right? Don’t slam a show for not being the sequel to a recent fave.

NSFW:

Here's some of that inventive censoring that some folks demand.

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A New Light on Midway

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Ubu Roi

Wonderduck hits one out of the park, and answers a question I’ve had ever since reading Walter Lord’s Incredible Victory!: Why did the Hornet’s flight group shatter even before reaching the Japanese at Midway. It hardly seems possible, but the answer is sickening… total incompetence. And the culprits were promoted for it. I strongly recommend you read it.

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Some Other Fall Stuff

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Ubu Roi

Well, I’m not up for a full article right now but I thought I’d make a few observations.

Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai: This is turning out to be the surprise of the season. I figured it for a sappy, slice of life series, or worse, the kind where you watch people making idiots out of themselves. Instead, they’re all delightfully eccentric, and the antagonism between the two female leads is hilarious — and the surprising third member of the “Neighbors Club” is the most popular girl in school! She has plenty of followers it seems, but no friends… The OP hints that this may have some fanservice, or given it’s paucity in the show, it may just be bait-n-switch.

Cursed X Cube X Curious (C3): So far, about what I expected; that is, complete mediocrity. There’s just nothing here to hold my interest.

Persona 4: Might watch if I get too bored this weekend. I’ve got a whole lot of time on my hands, but at least it coincided with premiere week, so it’s not a total loss.

Manwaru Penguindrum: I didn’t realize this was a two-cour series. I dropped it a while back, kinda squicked by the sis-con elements, but checked episode 13. Some answers, and a hell of a lot more questions. I’ll check back around episode 24.

Phi Brain, Kimi to Boku, Mobile Suit Gundam Age, Bakuman, Cross Fight B Daman, Fujilog Second Season: No, No, Hell no, Just no, Nononono, and Oh, freaking gods no.

Un-go: Probably….not.

Guilty Crown: Waiting for the first episode on this. Will it be a better-paced Code Geass? Without so much mecha inflation to sell toys?

Mirai-Nikki The show that explains why the pretty girl would fall for the loser lead male…she’s insane! Cosmic deathmatches to become God are just a side-story, I assure you.

Shiryakui? Ika Musume: Lost interest in Sgt. Frog before the end of the first season, lost interest in this knock-off before the end of the first season’s first episode.

Working!! It just never grabbed me in the first season. No idea why.

On the “mildly interested” pile: Shana III, Lupin III, Ben-to, Last Exile. Shana will be made and broken by the angst. (Yes, and) Ben-to might be worth it if it can balance fan-service and wicked humor. If either are missing, the premise is too absurd to carry it, unless the other is truly exceptional. And I don’t know if I can spare that many brain cells. Lupin….I suspect my sense of nostalgia isn’t enough.

Well, I think I’m going to make the rounds of a few other blogs and see what people think.

Edit: And raws of Shana III have hit the web.

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Maken-ki

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Ubu Roi

You remember the old days, back when the number of panty shots found in Najica Blitz Tactics was the exception? Now it seems odd that of the three shows thought most likely to contain fanservice galore at the beginning of the season, only one is delivering on all the expected tropes. Maken-ki is the story of a rather, ahem, healthy young man who picked a high school because it didn’t have an exam (this appears to have been changed to no fee), and also because it’s going co-ed for the first time, and he’s been stuck at an all boy’s school for junior high. “Those three years at that sausage-fest had me on the verge of going mad!” I don’t know if that’s courtesy of the fansubbers or in the original, but I attended an all-boys jr. high myself, and my experience there was much the same, so that line had me in stitches.

Speaking of the fansubbers and the writers, it’s entirely possible that both are taking liberties. JNE did this fansub, and it’s obvious that English is not their first language. (Edit: Actually, it turns out the fansubber was using a google translation based on the Dutch version that came out a couple of days ago.) There were a few botched lines, bad spellings, and the ED was translated into either German or Dutch, not English. However, in contrast to my earlier comments about writers not altering the original properties for the better, it looks like there has been an active attempt to polish this turd, and it’s not going too badly. They’ve dropped Takeru’s slightly homo-erotic vision to start, changed up the first boob-grope to make it a bit funnier, and altered the first pair of duels to make them a bit more logical. I’m afraid to be optimistic, but maybe it means something at least not too vomit-inducing or brain-cell killing. The manga it is drawn from was pretty much a total trainwreck, but at least the anime handles the tropes a bit better.

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Posted in Episode Reviews, Fansub Review, Manga | Tagged | 2 Comments