D.M. Dutcher's Blog, page 5

Top Ten Anime Of All Time: #9 Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure

This is the second in a series of posts about my ten favorite anime of all time. The previous one was , and this time we’re discussing the mecha series Dual!.

Dual is an anime that I’d have a hard time defending on objective grounds. It was a part of the big boom of anime spawned after the release of Neon Genesis Evangelion in the 1990’s. Anime like Argento Soma, Betterman, Gasaraki, and others took advantage of the new interest in mecha shows that bucked the traditional Gundam formula. Dual was one of these shows, created by the person behind Tenchi Muyo!.

Objecively, it’s a little better than average. But so many of this shows tropes and ideas have hit me on a personal level that it will always be one of my favorites, and I legitimately enjoy every bit of it.

Synopis:

Kazuki is a teen troubled by visions of another world. In that world, giant robots fight it out in battles that he cannot understand and cannot affect. He’s gotten used to it, and even blogs about the battles, naming each mech and trying to make a story over it. One day, he runs into the school’s princess, Mitsuki Sanada, who takes an interest in him. An unhealthy one.

You see, she has plans to help her daddy prove his research about alternate worlds. So she lures him over to her father’s laboratory, and an experiment quickly goes wrong. There truly is another world where mechs fight, just as in Kazuki’s visions, one that forked off of the chance discovery or disposal of an alien artifact. Now Kazuki is in this world, and part of its battles. And others are there too, including alternate versions of some people he knows very well…

Review:

This is both an underrated and unusual anime. As I mentioned, it’s heavily influenced by Evangelion, but it’s actually the anti-Evangelion; it’s a fun adventure where everything ends well, and no one has the crippling psychological issues that everyone in Eva has. Where most of the Eva-clones tried to be a copy of that series, with darkness and death, this one just borrows some of the style of it and instead has its own identity. It works a LOT better than you’d expect, because of this.

That style tends to show in the unusual story itself, and also in the way it riffs off of Evangelion. You have Shinji in Kazuki, but a healthy, normal boy. He doesn’t chase the destiny in front of him, but he doesn’t whine or shrink away from it either. Asuka is here, in Mitsuki, but Mitsuki is a daddy’s girl, and a bit of a brat instead of emotionally abusive. We have the Rei clone in a green-haired girl named D, but unlike Rei, D reveals a personality, and an importance to the plot that isn’t as icky as Rei’s role was. You even have a Gendo clone in Professor Sanada, but one played for comedy as well as one who finds he actually likes to be a father instead of a person who uses his kids. The mix of familiarity and novelty works well, and none of the characters feel like ripoffs despite the obvious homages.

The animation is basic 90’s anime. Decent, but not really fancy animation combined with the use of CGI. This was novel at the time, and the subtle uses tend to be more effective than the blatant ones. This series has a decent cast, and is one of the few anime that has a dub that is a decent alternative to the original Japanese language track. It’s aged pretty well.

The major issue would be the pacing. The first 8 episodes are well done indeed, but the last five rush things. The last episode is a silly (by the series’ standards) OVA which ramps up the fanservice a little. It’s the personal aspects that really sell the series to me, though.

Personal/Spiritual:

I don’t think any other series has resonated with me as much as this one has.

Like always, there will be SPOILERS in this part, because a lot of the appeal is based on the plot.

One of the most unusual things about this series is the idea of war as a game. In the alternate world, Professor Sanada’s rival Rara discovered an alien artifact that in our world was just ignored. He uses its power to conquer the world, but does it in a wonderful way which I wish more series used.

Instead of violence, he has set up a game. Every now and then, his daughter, Miss Rara, declares a challenge trailer to the rest of the world. When that happens, the alternate world’s Professor Sanada tries to stop the robot Rara sends. If they lose, (or give up by sending a call sign) the Rara army wins more territory, If they win, the world is okay till the next trailer. Rara does this to limit the damage the artifact could cause, and is actually not a villain in the usual sense. Well, a very friendly one if he is.

This is INCREDIBLY appealing. The middle of the series, where Kazuki joins Sanada’s team to fight, is the highlight of the show, especially when he discovers that Rara’s not an evil mastermind, not one bit. And when he realizes Miss Rara is a counterpart of a certain person back home…

This idea, war as a game, has become a part of my mindscape because of this series. Very few anime have the “no villain, no hero” idea and yet make it into a positive force. There’s plenty of anime like Akame ga Kill where it’s perfectly fine to have everyone be villains and antiheroes, but not many that have people on either side be normal and even heroic in their own way. The true villains of the show are misguided if anything, or just selfish, and a certain heroine isn’t so pure herself in the end. But it always ends well.

The story itself hits all my buttons, too. It’s an alternate world tale, and a heroic one. The conceit of having two worlds with two different versions of the same people is interesting, and the first few episodes show how disconcerting it would be to travel to a world where YOU are the only one who is different. But it’s fine adventure, too. One of my favorite spots comes late in the series, where Kazuki has a choice. He can stay in the world he belongs in, or he can leave it to fix things left undone back in the alternate world. The scene where he looks up at his giant robot, nods at it, and says in effect, “Yeah, I have to go back. I can’t leave it like it is now,” has always touched me. There’s no normal life for you, not just yet.

I even found after I wrote Triune: Three as One that I made homages to many of the characters in Dual. Doctor Ion in his non-armored form was always close to Professor Sanada in my mind, and SARA shares some of D’s concept, although the two are night and day. I liked the contrast between daily life and a secret life of adventure that Dual had, and I like to think it is a part of my own work as well.

Finally, the gentle adventure always appeals to me over the violent one. This isn’t to say Dual is bloodless or cozy, but despite having some seriously good mech battles, it’s not about the carnage. It’s funny, but not ecchi. The characters have depth, but aren’t angsty. And the concept is legitimately interesting; the mystery of the world and the alien artifact is revealed slowly through most of the series, and quickly at the end. It gels into something that personally appeals to me, even though I admit I can’t call it a work of art or even a hidden treasure.

I’m not sure I can draw spiritual parallels from it, though. Sometimes a secular work can just be a good, moral work that appeals to what C.S. Lewis called sub-Christian values; the common moral values that we all strive for that are the best of the pagan world, whereas the Christian values are the best of the world beyond. Sometimes it’s okay to be refreshed by those pagan values, because they aren’t at all bad in themselves. Dual is a fine adventure tale, and adventure is a part of life as much as charity, humility, and self-sacrifice.

There’s also some nostalgia here too. Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventures will always be linked to the TV network TechTV, as it was one of the mainstays on its Anime Unleashed block. There’s also the 90’s aspect, where a lot of the bad aspects of today’s anime simply do not exist. There is no yuri, nor much in the way of pandering save for the last OVA episode. While it’s a harem, all of the characters aren’t types like modern harems are. Mitsuki is a tsundere, but only in romance; she treats Kazuki perfectly fine at times, and schemes instead of abuses him. D is an emotionless girl, but not underage nor cloyingly cute. Kazuki is obviously a mecha hero, but he’s awesome in a sense because he accepts his role. Contrasted to Shinji, he not only accepts the offer to become a core unit pilot right away but the next scene shows him studying a manual, his face set and serious, in order to be a better pilot.

You can contrast this with Dual!’s spiritual successor, Tenchi Muyo: The War on Geminar. Geminar is heavily inspired by Dual, with the same “alternate world” idea, the same “only male protag can pilot a mech” plot, and the same “secret of the world” kind of idea. But Geminar is different, and not just in its fantasy setting. It’s heavily sexualized, with characters that quickly become stereotypes and a plot that becomes nonsensical fast. Even the comedy falls flat, with it centering around all the girls wanting the hero and the hero being a perfect Mary Sue.

Dual! will always be something special to me. Not many anime hit me on a personal level like it does. It’s quirky, unusual, and a product of its time. But it’s a good product of its time, and a fun mecha show.

Next up in the series will be the science fiction “magical-girl” series Figure 17.

Top Ten Anime of All Time: #10 Love, Chunibyou, and Other Delusions

Over the next ten days, I plan on reconnecting with my favorite anime of all time. These are anime that may not always be considered the greatest series, but that I have enjoyed and connected with on a deep level. If you’ve followed this blog, you’ve seen me write on some of them before. I feel though that I need to get back to positively focusing on things I love, to counteract the fact that the current world has a lot of things I do not love. So this top ten list.

As a bonus for Christians, every single one of these anime will be PG rated, maybe a very mild PG-13. None will be considered objectionable in any real sense, and I feel that any Christian who is curious about anime can watch these with little risk or worry. The list is in no particular order, and the first one I wanted to cover was Love, Chunibyou, and Other Delusions.

Synopsis:

Yuta is a normal teen with an embarrassing past. In his middle school days, he was a chunibyou. Chunibyou is a syndrome that affects young teens of a certain age, and that gives them delusions of grandeur. While they are in the space between child and adult, part of constructing their identities means uneasily fusing childlike faith and adult intrigue. Yuta’s chunibyou manifested in his belief he was the “Dark Flame Master,” a badass gun mage with enormous dark magical power.

However, he views his past as so embarrassing that he changed schools to ensure no one else knew about it. His sole desire is to live a normal, ordinary, dull high school life. Unfortunately, he’s not going to have it so easily.

One night, a girl descends down a rope from the apartment above him. Her name is Rikka Takanashi, and she’s a chunibyou too. She believes a dark power is sealed under the eyepatch on her right eye, called “Wicked Lord Shingan.” She’s latched onto Yuta, and worse, she knows the secret of his past. She’s not the only oddball Yuta finds gathering about him; the ex-chunibyou Nibutani, Rikka’s “servant” and all-around troll Dekomori, and the sleepy airhead Kumin soon enter his life. How can he deal with so many weirdos, especially when he finds himself falling in love with Rikka?

Review:

You’d think this would be little more than a typical harem series. It’s not. It’s a funny and very touching story about love, and even a little about faith too.

All of the characters are wonderful. Rikka herself has to be the if not one of the cutest love interests in anime. Her cool “wicked lord Shingan” persona is combined with a shy, adorable, troubled young girl to make for a great heroine you quickly come to care for. Yuta himself is a full character, not just the self-insert straight man most harem shows have. He’s annoying, considerate, embarrassed about his past, yet a center others circle around. As a couple, they have great chemistry, and their love story is handled tastefully and subtly.

Special mention has to go to Dekomori, the bratty servant of Rikka DESU . Her feud with Nibutani, whom she thinks is impersonating her idol Morisummer, is often hilarious. Her voice actress makes Dekomori hilarious, and yet still makes her lovable too. Nibutani, an ex-chunibyou who actually is the real Morisummer, is good too. She’s Yuta’s counterpart, and her attempts to get free of her past fail frequently and funnily. There’s also Kumin, who is the straight girl of the group. She’s airheaded enough to take the others seriously, and also to befuddle them on a regular basis. It’s a great list of characters to base a series on, and they all sparkle.

The love story itself is done very well. At first, it’s a comedy of oddballs as we’re introduced to the main cast. But then, you can see Yuta and Rikka bond, and their love is subtly shown. Rikka herself is a far better heroine than most because you can see her in the shadowlands between adult and child, as the reality of love breaks into her chuni world. But it’s not happily ever after at first either, especially as you understand her true reasons for being chuni.

I think it’s not only better than your average harem, it’s one of the better love stories in anime, period. And that’s not getting into the imaginary battles.

You see, sometimes the pov shifts and we see things as Rikka or Dekomori might imagine them. Real life becomes their delusion, and we have some short, spectacular battles as Wicked Lord Shingan busts out some movies, or Dekomori shows off her Mjolnir Hammer. They are better done than many series that play the supernatural aspects straight, and approach Beyond the Boundary levels. The anime blends elements of action, comedy, romance, and sadness so well that you’re rarely bored. And it does so while making some deep statements about life.

There is also a second season. However, while still fun, it’s less than the first. It consists mostly of side stories and a new character, and some dislike how the Yuta/Rikka relationship doesn’t progress. They also try to amp up the Nibutani/Dekomori friendship into a quasi-yuri thing, too. It’s not bad, and has a very important point too; it’s just not as good.

Personal/Spiritual thoughts

The last time I reviewed this series, we had a big debate over it. I don’t think my position has changed much. The thing about this series is that if you take out chunibyou and replace it with Christianity/Religion, the series not only still makes sense, it captures a lot of issues about believing and not believing in God.

This involves some discussion of SPOILERS, so go watch the series first and come back later.

That being said, the point of chunibyou as explained in the series is similar to The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumaya. The reason teens fall into it is a belief that you alone are special; that you as a person matter and aren’t just one face of many. LCAOD goes past this though, because Rikka’s delusions are explained as having what most of us would call a profoundly religious bent.

A few years ago, she lost her father to an illness. Her family thought to shield her by not telling her his illness was worsening, but instead made the problem ten times worse because it seemed his death came out of the blue. She became obsessed with finding the invisible boundary lines of the world, due to the idea that her father was there, waiting for her. This isn’t just a delusion of grandeur, but a religious hope for life beyond death, started by a chuni vision of the lights on the horizon opening into another world. And in the series, the big argument is between accepting reality as it is, and the “delusions.”

This really echoes Christianity and Atheism to a western viewer, but from the point of view of well-meaning atheists. Christianity as chunibyou a delusion of self-importance that people should grow out of. But from the other side, Atheism/Reality as people telling you to suppress your feelings in order to please everyone else, to not cause trouble, to not be so weird and alienate yourself from everyone. It is so close that it can be uncomfortable at times, especially towards the end where Rikka “falls away” and becomes absolutely miserable by being normal. It’s a very subtle and evenhanded treatment though, and never once is Rikka shown as a loser. Even Dekomori’s issues can be seen as funny or sad, but never with annoyance.

Another great point that comes from the series is that you will always have that persona inside. In a way, it’s similar to always having God with you, even if you fall away. The joke is that for all Yuta and Nibutani’s desire to be normal, they are at their best and their most comfortable when acting to type. Yuta as Dark Flame Master really is cool, and the Morisummer who cared about all living things is in a way better than the one who curses people and tries to social climb. The delusions are a part of them, and in the second series you see those two slowly begin to make peace with them as opposed to try to use them to get what they want or desperately forget them. Once a Christian, always a Christian; once a chuni, always a chuni. Neither God or your delusions let you go.

Yuta also shows a danger of losing faith. In his desire to help Rikka by helping her to overcome her delusions, he loses her because he helps her right out of being her. He suppresses his instinct that you can’t change her just to please others, or even to make her a better, more rounded person. You can’t live for others only, or bury yourself to please people. Rikka winds up pleasing them so much that she decides to live with her parents and attend school back home. But that makes no one happy, and it takes Yuta finally accepting that Rikka needs her chuni, her faith, to keep going. It’s not fully on the side of either faith or reality, but more a recognition that you cannot extirpate either, because this is what being human is.

Although reality gets a bit of a dressing-down in Toka. A running joke is that she plays with Yuta’s younger sister by playing “divorce.” She is the reality side, and is utterly pragmatic, even in her caring about Rikka. But the series really shows you how little she can even understand her own sister, and she blackmails Yuta into helping because she can’t even help herself. She will always be the priestess who is Rikka’s enemy, and it’s not entirely Rikka to blame for that.

It’s a series rich in parallels if you look at it as a Christian. It’s not always comfortable, but it can be deep. The second series is even more striking, in that the point is that you don’t have to choose between reality or chuni, as one character did. You can have both, and accept both. As well as the way Yuta slowly becomes at peace with his Dark Flame Master past. I think no better description of lost faith was in Yuta’s letter to himself:

But he slowly becomes at peace with it, and even regains it somewhat. It is his adopting of his own Dark Flame Master side that enables Rikka to make peace with her father’s death. The only way he can help her is to once again model what she first became attracted to.

One of the things that I want to say at this blog is that God doesn’t let people go. It is not all us; we do not believe in works, where we must constantly maintain our salvation through our own efforts. God also acts and changes us inside, even when we don’t live up to our ideals. I think in Love, Chunibyou and Other Delusions, we see a similar messiness in the lives of those dealing with their middle-school delusions. It’s very close to how faith is, with all of its messiness and doubt.

This is the first of ten of my top ten anime of all the time. The next one will be about Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventures.

Review: Criminal Girls, Invite Only

Yes, I bought this game. It’s not like there’s a lot of games for the Vita exist. Yes, it gets pretty ecchi. But what’s surprising is that the game is a lot more spiritual than you’d expect.

Description

Criminal Girls is a top-down traditional RPG from Nippon Ichi Software. The Disgaea guys. It concerns a guy from the normal world who gets summoned down to Hell to engage in the Reformation Program. Seven girls, each who died much too early, are being run through a series of trials in a gigantic labyrinth. Your job is to help those girls reach the top of the maze, and become reformed and able to move on to their next life.

And also you, err, molest them in the guise of motivation.

No really. Next is the gameplay, and I’ll get into that there.

Gameplay

Gameplay is split up into two parts. The main part is a standard top-down room-based RPG. You fight enemies to level up and get CM, which acts as both currency and “technique points” to gain new abilities and stats. The combat is interesting because you don’t actually have direct control over the girls. They suggest abilities and spells, and you choose a single command from their choices. You can only directly swap in and out party members, and use items. It’s works better than you think, save for the last boss where you wish you could just spam your most powerful attacks.

The second part is the problem, though.

To gain new abilities, you need to molest the girls in various ways. You play a minigame where you have to use the touch screen to banish “temptations” off of the ecchi pictures of the various girls. You tickle them, drip water on them, shock them, and whip them. The minigames are clunky in that the rear touchpad on the Vita is a pain to use, but the developers must have realized this, as the penalty for missing is rather minor.

The whole ecchi aspect of the game feels oddly tacked on. It doesn’t really figure into the plot except very, very minorly, and the girls and you rarely remark on it. I think NIS did the right thing in removing the voices that would happen every time you banished a temptation, and it’s still pretty sketchy as it is. You have to do these games a LOT, too, which kind of decrease the tempting appeal when you need to do a full 8-9 minigames per single girl to max out one of five ability tiers.

The girls are all various anime archetypes as well as game archetypes (tank, thief, mage, etc), but what’s interesting is that every single one of them is actually useful to play and has more depth than you’d think. More on the latter in story. The girls in combat are surprisingly effective, possibly to counter the randomness. The thief character has some powerful status effects, the paladin character tanks pretty well, the mages are balanced, and more. But where the game shines is in the story.

Story

The story has a lot of feels. Each of the girls is an anime archetype, true. You have the lolis, tsunderes, violent girl, ojou-sama, and more. But as you climb the tower of trials, they start to grow as people and the nature of their sins are revealed.

I’ll break this down further in the “spiritual” section, and it will make heavy use of spoilers. If you want to play the game, skip that section. In general though, each of the girls starts to show serious depth and the realities behind the anime archtype masks they all wear. The fourth dungeon in the game becomes very sad as one by one, the girls must face their pasts in order to repent and be able to be reborn in the new world.

The only problem I had with the story is a certain aspect seemed ill-explained towards the end. It felt like it was rushing some, and it could have been handled better. Despite this, the game feels like a ecchi anime that at first glance you’d dismiss, and that you get hooked on as you keep watching.

Spiritual

This is where it gets interesting. SPOILERS, so be warned.

This game is one of the few games I’ve played that seems to get the concept of sin and repentance. The metaphysics of the game aren’t Christian, as these girls have been condemned due to dying early and having the potential to cause a lot more sin. They also have the chance to repent and be reborn because of this. But the idea of sin and repenting is done really, really well.

Each girl has her own specific sin, and that sin is something that has caused serious harm in their own lives and the lives of others. The game doesn’t soft-pedal what they did, and by the time they start revealing them, it becomes surprisingly emotional. They each have to face a mirror image of themselves, which embodies their own specific sin.

For example, Tomoe is the incredibly beautiful ojou-sama in your team. As you ascend the last floor, you find that everyone loved her for her beauty and grace…and she was aware of it and loved to make everyone else unhappy and broken. She would toy with others, and once incident with her own family sealed her damnation. When she has to face herself, who confronts her with exactly what she did and who she was, she is paralyzed and has to be rescued by your party. Only then does she truly repent, and become ready to be reborn. The others suffer things like this, too, with some very sad pasts and secret sins.

It’s not just framed as a bad past, or a emotional trial to overcome; it is sin, and they have to repent of it. Not many games use that language.

There’s also hints of more in that the main character has descended from the human world without dying to help guide the girls in their trip. Only someone blameless of hell could help the girls overcome it, and the game has a few interesting things about false messiahs or trying to make someone blameless without true repentance first. It’s not nakedly Christian, but you can find yourself thinking of it especially when they detail the plans to make a “knight” to save the girls.

It shines mostly because most games never even touch on religious themes. It’s still ecchi, but it gains depth by focusing on the things of the afterlife. NIS unusually has a few games that do this, like the Awakened Fate Paradox games. Even Disgaea was about heaven and hell in its own way.

I don’t think this will matter for most Christians, as the ecchi parts will drive them away quickly, but it can make you realize that sin is sin, and repentance is not something taken lightly. The repetitive nature of a roleplaying game actually helps this, as you keep striving for hour after hour to get the chance to escape hell and lead the girls to repentance.

Rating and Content Guidelines

I’d rate this game three out of five

The game is a PSP port, so the graphics are mostly functional. The sprite art is decent, but this is just PS2 level quality. The voices are good, and the story is better than expected. The gameplay is good, but you’ll be doing a lot of random encounters and long dungeons.

For Christians, the ecchi aspects are probably a deal-breaker. You can’t escape needing to molest the entire party repeatedly in order to power up, and while at first it gets humorous (“gym shorts? is that your thing” the girls ask. You are such an otaku Jesus) it’s pretty raunchy. Definitely R rating due to content and some near nudity, and the only benefit is that you do get desensitized to it pretty quickly. Less naughtiness, more annoyance at trying to get a full score using the fiddly rear touch controls on the Vita.

It might make a few non-Christians think, though. Saving your waifu as well as ending up with her.

The single playthrough I did lasted maybe ten-twenty hours. I beat it in a weekend of playing, and beating it unlocks an art gallery and a gallery of scenes from the motivation sessions. Most of the trophies involve choosing a different girl to end the game with, so make extra saves when they tell you too and beat the boss with each girl.

Final Thoughts

Criminal Girls: Invite Only is a fun little RPG on a portable system that doesn’t have all that many games. The ecchi is present and raw, so it’s not ideal for Christians. However, the spiritual aspects are decent, and might make some people think about the idea of sin and repentance. If you have a Vita, chances are you own this, but it’s not a system seller.

Random Things, 2/3/15

It’s been too long since my last post. In the meantime, southeastern New England has been hit by about three feet of snow in the past week. Thankfully the impact of the snow has been gentle. We’ve never lost power or internet, and apart from not being able to attend classes, life goes on. It does kill the desire to write posts though, even as I write other things. So I will emulate others like Fred at Frederation and Medieval Otaku by doing a random list post. Hopefully this will spark more energy in me.

1.

I’ve noticed that with anime, I have a hard limit of five shows per season I will follow beyond the first few episodes. I’ve slacked a bit with the preview posts this year, and I’ve already chosen my five. They are:

The Rolling Girls. Imagine Kill la Kill and FLCL mashed together with none of the downsides of both. No flagrant T&A, and a narrative as well as style. Honestly, check this one out if you haven’t; it’s wonderfully joyful and stylish too.
Unlimited Fafnir. It’s Infinite Stratos, but with better characters and better writing. It’s similar to Invaders of the Rokujyouma in that it uphelds the harem tropes, but is a lot smarter than normal.
Kancolle. I can’t explain why an anime with such an absurd premise is so cool. I just get it on an almost celluar level.
Assasination Classroom. Absolutely loved the manga, like the anime.
Saekano. More of a dislike watch. It changed from the first episode, but arguably for the worse. Less and even no fan service or dirty talk, but you just have the unlikable characters, and all they do is talk. Kind of hoping it gets better, expecting it to get worse.

I don’t count Military, mostly because it’s three minutes long. A lot of the other shows are meh to me. I haven’t really seen any of the other Christian bloggers write on the new series this season, but if they do and a series I haven’t watched gets better, I may try it. I can’t really find myself following six plus series a season though.

2.

Non-current anime I’m watching: Rideback.

The first few episodes have been much better than I thought. The robotic motorcycles are a lot cooler than you’d think, and it’s one of the series where the heroine has serious justification for why she’s a riding prodigy; she’s an ex-ballerina with superb balance and body skills. I also like how the series shows the joys of riding as well as the coolness. Motorcycles are fun, and hopefully that joy will heal the troubled protagonist of the series.

3.

Non-anime things I’m watching: Shaw Brothers Kung-Fu Movies.

Kung-fu movies are, well, odd. They are often sumptuously made, with great cinematography and incredible fight scenes. You’re use to them being these cheap, funny things that you watched as a kid, but when you pick up a modern collection of them and sit down to watch, you realize that they work as movies, too.

Yet for all of this, the weirdest thing is that they seem to be written by eight-year old boys at times.

A great example of this is Heroes Shed No Tears. It’s the story about a student, who is given a sword marked with a teardrop on it. It’s prophesied this sword will stop a great calamity, and he is told to seek out the best kung-fu leaders of his time and meet them. Especially the mysterious man with the box, who is possessed of thirty-nine different weapons, and is a kung-fu god.

The story is borderline crazy. People become sworn brothers in seconds, and enemies all the same. They fall for tricks that a perceptive twelve-year old would see through, and events happen one after another with little sense. In one of the most hilarious scenes ever made in cinema, a disgraced woman asks her lover if he loved her dancing legs. When he says yes, she cuts one of her legs off and hands it to him, hopping out of the room when she is done. It is absurd like nothing doing.

Yet it goes past absurdity into awesomeness. The main villain is devastatingly effective in how he manipulates all of the heroes and manages to make them defeat themselves. After the cheesy scene mentioned above, you have a hard scene where her lover grieves her as she dies, and then vows to cut out the heart of another disgraced hero whom he had a feud with. The man with the box is insane; the first scene of him has him kill people from such a far range it felt like he was overwatching for the kung-fu equivalent of a sniper rifle. There’s this weird paradox where it’s awesome and yet its horrible all at the same time, and many kung-fu films are like this. And this is one of the sober ones!

When it gets weird, like the legendary Taoism Drunkard (aka Drunken Wu Tang) it gets weird.

Taoism Drunkard is about the monk Rat Face (who looks like a rat) who gets kicked out of his temple. He’s told to get enough donations to fix the mess he’s made, as well as get a new male virgin as a monk candidate. Meanwhile, Old Devil, who has powerful kung-fu involving a cannonball that shoots mini cannonballs, wants this insignia found deep within a temple or something. I started to lose track of the plot by then.

Call in Cherry Boy, and his surprisingly masculine grandmother. While the Watermelon Monster manages to hold off Old Devil (and you have to see the Watermelon Monster to believe it) Cherry Boy must team up with Rat Face in order to beat him. There’s also a pair of cultists, a rat car that Rat Face drives around, bodies that obey no laws of physics or gravity whatsoever, and more. No really, watch the trailer. That stuff is crazy.

4.

Cool geek thing of the day: Power Records.

Back in the day, you used to be able to find a surprising amount of geek audio dramas for children from the company Peter Pan records. They had a sublabel called Power Records, which made 7″ book and record combos for children. They would adapt Marvel and DC comics as well as TV Shows and movies into short, well-produced children’s drama. With the advent of Youtube, you can catch all of them in all of their 1970’s glory. These weren’t made for adult fans, but are incredibly entertaining all the same.

You can find a neat blog about them here.

5.

Christianity.

It kind of sucks, being in a period of decline. It feels like Christianity as a public force is in disarray and held captive to a few tribal factions. You have the bald-headed, beard-wearing Reformed, the mommy homeschooling brigade, the High-Church intellectual faction, the “I can’t stand Catholicism so I’ll be Orthodox but not Putin Orthodox” converts, and more. It feels like you have to reduce yourself to fit in somewhere.

It doesn’t help either that I discovered that I’m not really fond of people. I’ve been trying to attend church for a bit, but the thought of going into one and having all the parishioners eyeball me when I don’t raise my hand to declare I’m new really makes me worry. It’s like I want to go there, do whatever the Protestant version of receiving the sacraments would be (praise and worship and communion?) and get out before people try and corner me. Mostly because I doubt sometimes that conversation would be enjoyable, and because I’d have to hide my likes and dislikes.

Even know, I don’t feel completely at ease. One of the things I’ve noticed recently is that Christians will absolutely savage someone who fails to live up to the faith, even in minor ways. Mark Driscoll was an eye opener for me, and now we have a progressive version in Tony Jones. Just the glee and the scapegoating and the endless moral recriminations made me wary of fellow believers. It was personal, in a way which I didn’t like.

So I have to resist my own tendencies more. Maybe the danger is not in trusting God too little, but trusting people too little.

7.

Is it wrong that this is my ideal of the perfect church?

Not in it being secular books. The original novel had them remember books of the Bible. But Truffault’s Fahrenheit 451 always made me a little sad in the end, and between it and Haibane Renmei shaped my idea of the church. The sense of outcasts existing on the fringe of society, in a small community keeping a Book inside their heads and hearts, waiting till the day when the world will collapse under its own weight and they are needed again; what a lovely, romantic image.

Or in Haibane Renmei. To wake up into a new life, with the old one gone. To follow all the little rules, but they are each occasions of joy. To wait patiently while one by one your friends leave to their new lives, and new friends arise.

I know reality isn’t so romantic, but I wish we could be a little more this, and a little less “meet in a ratty building and act bored together.” Just a little romance, even if large doses are unhealthy.

Winter Anime 2015: First Impressions, Bear Edition

It’s time to preview Yurikuma Arashi, aka “what in God’s name did I just watch?”

The story; apparently a planet blew up somewhere. It’s fragments showered the earth, causing all the world’s bears to get intelligent, get magical powers, and decide they want to eat us all. More on this later. In this world, we see a girl’s high school inhabited by girls whose names all have “yuri” in them. This is not a subtle hint as to the direction of the series.

We meet two girls in obvious Yuri love. We also meet two bears, who have taken the form of young girls and crossed over the gigantic Wall of Severance to eat as many young girls as they want. More on THIS later.

Of course, they set their sights on the cute obviously yuri couple we first meet, the ones who vow to keep their love alive.

The main character’s girlfriend gets taken by the bears. This is bad, because the main character lost her Mom to the bears too, and has been practicing on the hunting rifle in order to get revenge. The bears apparently call her to the roof, and then I lost all track of what the heck was happening. You see, there is a court of bears for some reason.

The three male bears try the two female bears who are masquerading as humans. Why? Because…

Oh, that’s his NAME, too. I mean Sexy is his name. Anyways.

The bear court finds in favor of the two bear girls, who proceed to eat the poor huntress. By eat, we mean transform back into humans and have thinly disguised lesbian sex with. No, seriously. I can’t even post pictures of it. It’s even worse than the intro. It gets weirder later on when you find out the bears actually ATE ate the huntresses’s girlfriend.

I’m sure there’s more, but I gave up trying to figure out things at the end.

So plot? Makes no sense. Not even on a metaphorical level. There’s a parallel drawn between the human and bear “couples” and some junk about not giving up on love, but considering the bears want to either have sex with or outright eat girls, and the girls want to love each other in that old fashioned chaste yuri way, I’m at a loss to figure out what they mean. If it’s supposed to be a celebration of yuri and how we shouldn’t wall people out, showing the bears eating away a rival for their bizarre affections isn’t helping. The whole thing with the male bears judging the two female bears is weird too. Heck, the entire thing is weird, from start to finish.

For Christians, a big don’t bother. Honestly it feels like the director (who did Revolutionary Girl Utena) is just throwing pretty girls in bear suits (or naked) in yuri situations, with little to no rhyme or reason. The intro and the yuri scenes are explicit enough to give it a hard R, and there’s very little about the rest of the anime to even bother with. It’s not that I am against yuri anime, (except in the Christian sense of homosexuality being sinful) because there are good ones like Simoun, Kashimashi Girl Meets Girl, and Blue Drop. But this one is so pointless it beggars belief. I’d even think a lesbian would dislike it, because of all the mixed messages about the bears being lovers and predators in the same boat.

Really, pass on this. Little of value save for a good OP song, which you should only listen to without the opening video. This still is the series in a nutshell:

Winter Anime 2015: First Look, Part Two

This time, I watched “Saekano: How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend” and “Military.” Mixed feelings on these two.

Saekano is about Tomoya, who longs to make an awesome game powerful enough to lure all the girls in the world to him. He assembles a small doujin circle of himself and four beautiful girls, and gets to work. Although the girls seem more interested in jumping his bones than anything.

This anime starts in the middle of things, with episode zero taking place in a vacation resort where the circle researches their game. After a wince-inducing two full minutes of blatant hot-springs nudity teasing (and I mean blatant) the scene shifts to them researching their game. The episode is clever in that they are talking about making your average visual novel while doing an episode which is pretty much a visual novel in content. One scene has them criticizing how to do exposition in a game, while actually doing the exposition the “right” way in the anime. It can be interesting at times. However:

The cast itself could be a lot better.

You have Tomoya himself, aka “Mr. Ethical.” Only cares about his game, to the exclusion of romancing one of the four willing beauties by his side. A funny scene has him try to do a rousing speech about keeping the doujin circle going when three of the girls are playing rock paper scissors to see who gets to deflower him. Then you have the cast, which are slight variants on the usual tropes:

The ice queen, who has the hots for our hero (and who loses all cool whe she gets worked up enough about him)
The tsundere childhood friend who resents not being noticed and is clumsy
The sporty musician girl who is unhibited and free.
The wallflower girl who probably is the best of the lot, as she doesn’t care and mildly snarks about everything.

While the show is clever, you can’t be sure whether or not it’s criticizing or pandering to certain anime tropes. The large amount of nudity and sexual positioning would give this an R, even though it’s all fan-tease: no nipples and no tentacles or whatever. The positioning in particular is very bad, especially with the sporty girl. The first two minutes is pretty typical of the entire episode.

So positives include some clever writing, negatives include a lot of teasing and pandering.

Military! is the first three-minute show of the season. This is pretty much the show in one picture:

In a funny intro, Souhei finds out that his salaryman dad signed the wrong work papers, and is now a mercenary in a faraway kingdom. He has enemies that will also target his son, so he sent two subordinates to guard him.

Two pint-sized absolutely crazy subordinates who might just kill him first.

Imagine if the two girls from Kill Me Baby! had to guard someone, and this is the short. It’s not bad, and at three minutes is the perfect length. Any longer, and the girls will annoy you. Except for a scene with bunny panties, it’s a mild pg-13. Not really great, but it’s three minutes. You wont miss the time you spend watching it.

Unfortunately it seems like Funimation is getting a lot of licenses, and their streaming service is horrible for me. I won’t be able to comment on Yuri Kuma/lesbian bears and other series till they hit Hulu. But as much as I can. I’ll try to give a full impression on all the series coming up this season.

Anime Winter 2015: First Look, Part One

Yeah, it’s that time again. A new season of anime has begun. It’s time to take a look at the first three series coming down the pipe. We’re looking at Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE, Kantai Collection, and The Testament of New Sister Devil.

Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE! is the first series I’ve watched, and like all first series of the season, it’s pretty sketchy. Two boys are bathing in a bathhouse before school. Out of nowhere, a pink wombat-like alien breaks through the roof and tries to get them to defend the earth. After a lot of pleasing, the two boys and three others agree, only to be transformed into the Sailor Scouts. I mean magical boys.

Yes, it’s as bad as it looks, right down to the anime nudity transformation scenes. The five boys are direct copies of the five sailor scouts, with Sailor Moon combined with Sailor Venus in the form of the center teen. The one saving grace is that the characters are aware of this, and there’s some parody of magical girl tropes in the show. Giving random names to random attacks has never been so fun.

However, it’s painfully apparent it’s meant to appeal to the fujoshi with the entire cast being pretty boys. The best comparison I have is imagine Meganebu! but with the characters aware of how absurd things are. The satire is more gentle than laugh out loud funny though.

Apart from the magical transformation sequences (which remind us that guys cannot pull off the exact same transformations with “pure nudity” as the girls, it’s a mild PG. Not really offensive, but it starts out dull.

I liked Kantai Collection much better, but I like Strike Witches too.

Earth has been invaded…by a fleet of pretty girls who have the powers of battleships. Our only hope is to find girls with the spirits of ships themselves, and train them to fight. One such girl, the spirit of a new, advanced destroyer named Fubuki, is getting used to her new life when a sudden offensive happens. Can she emulate the oh-so-cool carrier Akagi?

I was looking forwards to this, and it didn’t disappoint.

It has the same vibe as Strike Witches, but so far with far less fan service. The first episode introduces us to a ton of fleet girls, and has them fight against the invaders in a battle. The story centers around the girl-ships of Torpedo Fleet 3, and it was animated well. I haven’t played the game, but I haven’t seen complaints about how faithful it was to it. Especially cool moments involved how they get the battleship parts on the girls, and Akagi fighting the invader flagship like a boss.

It’s a silly concept, but done really well. Maybe Pg-13 because the girls get “clothing damage” when hit, just like the game. Still, I look forwards to future episodes.

The Testament of New Sister Devil, not so much.

This is how I feel about this series.

Basara is a teen boy happily living with his dad. Out of the blue, his dad says he is remarrying, and now he has two cute little sisters. Dad, being the anime dad he is, leaves shortly after. The first half is the usual “new anime sister” stuff, and is a pretty bad ten minutes.

The second part reveals that his “sisters” have their own reasons for being there, and Basara has a few secrets of his own. Imagine High School DxD combined with the tired old “demon lord” tropes, and you’ve got this series. The main character honestly is a dead ringer for DxD’s lead, and the wince-inducing nude intro sets the tone that this is going to be yet another sexy fanservice harem show.

R mostly for nudity and gratuitous loli onee-chans. Not really keen on it, as it seems to just be blending some really tired tropes other series have done better.

That’s it for the first shows of the season. As more become available I’ll add my impressions of them.

How Far They’ve Come

It’s hard to believe that in under thirty years, anime-styled video games have come from this:

To this:

The first game is Golgo 13: The Mafat Conspiracy, released in 1988 for the NES. The second is Guilty Gear XRD sign, released in 2014. The second video is a demo of instant-kill moves. If you can hit it just right, you can finish your opponent with a single attack, done in a spectacular (and often hilarious) cut-scene. It’s amazing how seamless the transition is. My favorite is pirate girl May packing her unconscious opponent into a cannon on top of the Super May Ship.

It’s not just that, though. Even in regular gameplay Guilty Gear sparkles. The animation is so fluid and detailed that you can make out the facial expressions on the characters. In this combo video you can see with every single move May’s facial expressions change.

It’s funny also that the animation in video games seem to be overtaking the animation in anime itself. If you compare this to World Trigger, or even Sailor Moon Crystal, there’s no contest. Something like Karen Senki, which also uses the cel-shaded style, looks low-budget.

I think a lot of people forget how much change we’ve had in not even a single lifetime. This is a fun little comparison of how a single sub-genre of video games has improved in only 27 years. Can you imagine what it will be like in fifty? Eighty years?

Review: Unbreakable Machine-Doll

It’s hard to give this one a rating at all. It’s objectively a bad anime, on Infinite Stratos level. But somehow in manages to hook you despite the one-note characters, bad writing, and scatter-shot plot. Two stars for that.

In an alternate-world London, a young puppeteer named Raijin, and his automaton Yaya arrive at a school for puppetteers. His reason? To get revenge on the man who killed his entire clan. Even with the strength of Yaya, it will not be an easy thing. But his own ideas may need to be put on hold, as events surrounding the school may claim his attention first. If he even can survive long enough to do anything about them.

It sounds cool, and the anime has some serious style and flash to it. There’s some great voice acting and some strong character performances, notably from Charlotte and her dragon automaton Sigmund. The world is decent, and the action sequences strong. It draws you in, with little downtime during or between episodes.

However, once you finish the series, you realize how awful it is.

The characters that started out great become idiots or caricatures. Yaya is sex-crazed to the point of absurdity, and most of the female cast seem to lose their brains whenever Raijin says something that can be twisted into naughtiness. Raijin himself heals impossibly fast when the plot demands it, despite hinting his connection to Yaya drains his life force. We’re talking healing from near-fatal injuries in the same day fast. He tends to pull off plans of incredible foresight, yet he’ll challenge his enemies in broad daylight or do stupid things. Charl’s sister Henrietta is one of the stupidest characters I’ve seen in anime, period.

The plot itself quickly loses focus. The initial revenge story is lost in what feels like an adaptation of just one or two books of a manga. It sets up an entirely different enemy only to reveal their true nature, and then the anime ends. This wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t the only season made. Don’t expect any closure.

Yet despite this, it was a lot of fun to watch the first time. It can succeed in spite of itself. Charlotte is a tsundere, but she’s written surprisingly well for one. Sigmund and Yaya both have great identities, and Raijin still manages to be a decent action hero despite having to be idiotic often. It’s a good rental/one-time anime to watch, and the ending song is very catchy ear-candy. Bon!

However, for Christians, serious caveats. This one hits NC-17 levels at times solely on the raunchy dialogue. It takes the traditional “interpret what the hero says as perverted” and takes it up to such ridiculous levels that it actually manages to be funny. One scene with Henrietta is such a ridiculous overreaction that it actually makes you wonder what the writers were thinking; literally NC-17 material. There’s a lot of suggestive dialogue overall, although sometimes like the end (where Charl’s “secret” is revealed and actually consoles Henrietta-she pads her bra) it can work despite itself. Yaya constantly wants to jump Raishin’s bones, or throttle him when she thinks he’s looking at “vixens.” Some nudity, but not as much as you’d think. Violence approaches R levels.

Not really much in the way of Christian themes. A missed opportunity was to delve into Raijin’s character through is relationship with Yaya. He steadfastly refuses to do the deed with her, despite him having every reason to. It’s shown that he sees automatons like people, and there’s nothing stopping him from loving Yaya, but instead of making it clear he values her as a person there’s an explanation he is still betrothed to someone. This despite the fact he is on a suicide mission, more or less. I think it would have been better if he actually did marry her, and there could have been a lot more focus on the nature of “banned dolls.” Do automatons made of human parts have souls?

Nothing really is done with it, though. The ending concept of the machine-doll, a perfect fusion of humans and doll. goes nowhere. It winds up taking its stylish beginning and fizzling out at the end. It’s a decent anime despite this, but the raunchiness will probably put off most Christians from wanting to watch it.

New Years, 2015

It’s a new year, and with that comes new resolutions. No, not resolutions, but planning instead. The past year was spent resolving some internal questions about the nature of my writing and my nature both as a Christian and a writer. Having come to peace with this, I can now plan with a clean conscience.

For 2015, my goal is to write four chapter books in four unique series for self-publication in 2016. These are early/middle grade books, so total word-count would be in the 10-50k range apiece. I have the series already determined in my mind, and they’ll mostly be fantasy, with a single science-fiction book. They will also be secular.

I also plan to write two Christian spec-fic novels. Probably around 50-70k word count. However, I am writing these to get God off my back.

What I mean by this is that every Christian author has an internal conflict about their writing. Should I write for God, or for man? Should I be using my gifts as a ministry, or as a profession? This conflict has slowed my desire to write for some time now, and it was only recently that I resolved it. I will do both, but I have little faith in the Christian market. The novels I write will be mostly for God, and if I choose to publish them, I’m not expecting much.

I say this because I do not see any real desire from Christians for distinctively Christian works. I see a lot of talk, because people are afraid to say they don’t like them and like secular things better. But the market to me has shown that currently Christian speculative fiction is a writer-driven thing with a tiny readership, and Christians would rather believe Harry Potter is a Christian book series than read Christian books of their own. This is not a mindset that inspires me to make writing Christian spec-fic my sole aim.

I still in my heart really want to see a vibrant spec-fic culture, but I think writing books is not the way to do it. The only way to do so is for people with money to back the creation of the genre and the fandom with serious capital. You cannot bootstrap a Christian geek culture; you need people who are willing to invest real assets into it and fund high-quality projects and fan culture to have any chance in swaying public opinion. I would like to do this, but I’m not sure it’s possible for me to and even if I could, it would take ten or twenty years to amass the resources. So I feel the need to bury the idea of Christian spec-fic currently and focus on developing my career as a writer and amassing resources and capital to maybe one day spark the culture into life.

This is going to mean a lot of learning and effort. It’s going to be a busy year full of learning, and in a way I look forwards to it. It’s better to be busy and struggle with serious plans than to be idle due to a divided conscience. I hope that all my readers face the New Year with clear plans and an untroubled conscience, and that we all move into the future productively.