Download the MP3 here!

Points of Podcast

1. Otakon and what panels we were doing
2. Spoiler 5′s progress
3. Tanto Cuore, the new anime maid cardgame overview
4. Why visual jokes do not work on podcasts
5. Tanto Cuore strategy
6. Mouth breathing
7. The differences between Tanto Cuore and Dominion
8. Our final Tanto Cuore review
9. Kemomimi Panic, when sweaty men sit around to pretend they are catgirls
10. Our impression of a Kemomimi Panic game
11. What celebrities we would play Kemomimi Panic with
12. The John Stamos story
13. Our review of german chocolate whipahol

Note: When we say Whippits we actually just mean eating alcoholic whipped cream randomly. We do not condone the recreational consumption of nitrous oxide. It damages your brain and is generally a bad idea. We do, however, recommend recreational consumption of alcoholic flavored whipped cream. That shit is nuts!

Double Note: We actually do have a lot of respect for Otakon, and we are happy they let us come back this year and do two really well received panels. But seriously, LET SPOILER BACK IN!!!

Be on the lookout for our Otakon recap podcast soon!

Koshi’s picks

Tiger and Bunny – A show about buddy-cop superheroes (with nary a zord or morpher in sight) and the crass commercialization thereof, and it’s from Japan? Color me impressed!

Besides the title heroes, it’s especially worth watching for the supporting cast which includes a tarted-up superhero who really just wanted to be a tarted-up pop star; a flaming energy magnate; and a ninja who made a career out of photobombing all the other heroes.

Admittingly, Tiger and Bunny is probably not as subversive as it could be if it were in the hands of, say, Warren Ellis, but that may be expected when actual companies bought up adspace on the characters.

Toriko – Because something has to step in and fill the Shonen void now that 2 out of Jump’s Big 3 have become an interminable slog. Toriko is the story of a manly man and his manly friends who have manly battles to eat manly food. They live in a world that’s kind of like that of Pokemon, except it revolves completely around food. I’m feeling hungry. I’m in the mood to get a food. Who wants to go out and get a food?

Once Naruto and Bleach kick the bucket, this show will have enough awesome to fill in all of their shoes. Unfortunately, this means Gintama will still be bumped out of being in Shonen Jump’s Big 3.

Dororon Enma-kun! *MeraMera* – Satan’s nephew is sent from hell to kick the asses of renegade penis demons (who in fact do have asses). There isn’t one part of that sentence I didn’t like. Add in the retro 70’s aethstetic, completely bizarre cast of characters, and increasingly more bizarre monsters of the week and there isn’t one part of this whole damn show I don’t like.

Since it’s based on a Go Nagai comic, it should probably go without saying that this show is unabashedly juvenile, but that never stopped me from liking anything. To paraphrase one Something Awful goon, “Panty & Stocking saw poop and sex jokes as a means to an end. Enma thinks that’s ridiculous; sex and poop jokes should serve no purpose but their own.”

Kirk’s picks

Ano Hana – Count on noitaminA to come out with a show more devastating than Tokyo Magnitude 8.0. Kannon figured that the best way to make the main character’s love interest emotionally impacting was to reveal in the last episode that she’s already dead. Ano Hana does this in the first scene. Juxtaposing happy little kids with sullen, damaged teenagers is the best thing since Nakige.

C: The Money of Soul and Possibility Control – In the fourth episode, the main character hits his opponent so hard that his two children and his wife’s pregnancy all vanish. C is an anime that’s directed by the guy that did Trapeze, written by the guy that did Durarara!!, has character designs by the guy that did Black Rock Shooter, and conceptual designs by the guy that did Big O. This is the best dream team since ProStars. It’s a testament to Ano Hana to say that I like it more than C.

X-Men MADHOUSE anime – It can’t be worse than the MADHOUSE Wolverine series.

Kirk’s Anti-Picks

A Channel / Nichijou – Two 4-koma style slice-of-life moe gag anime, neither are that great. I’ll just watch Lucky Star and Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru again this season.

Hanasaku Iroha – I would love to watch the adventures of a 16 year old city girl living the rough, dramatic life at her grandma’s bath house if I was half my age and the opposite gender. Though I guess the fact that I gave this a shot might say something about my age/gender identity.

Mike’s Pick

Steins; Gate – The story of a Mad Scientist fan boy and the damage he does to the space time continuum. Because everyone needs the ability send texts to the past. It also has a microwave that turns backwards and causes bananas placed inside to have been turned to Green Gel in the past. ARG time travel makes my head hurt.

Casey’s Anti-Picks

Lotte no Omocha – This anime season left me cold. “Ooh! Lotte no Omocha! It’s a show about a vampire princess! With a male harem! And she needs to drink something called ‘Sauzfryma’ to survive! I’m curious about this new spin on vampire mytho– oh. Sauzfryma means semen. And she looks like she’s 10. Oh she IS 10? Is that 10 in vampire year– no, really just an actual sexualized 10 year old girl being told she needs to start drinking semen right away.” You know what, Japan? Maybe you WERE asking for it.*

*Ohmigodohmigod I didn’t really mean it, I deal with tragedy and catastrophe with gallows humor and in no way meant to suggest that the current suffering of the Japanese is in any way deserved, no matter how bad Dance in the Vampire Bund was.

Maria+holic: Alive – “Oh, well, at least there’s another season of Maria+holic! It’s that shoujo-ai schoolgirl anime where the main lesbian character is essentially a horny teenage boy archetype and the tsundere character is actually a cross-dressing man, and women become lesbians because they HATE MEN and break out into hives when they touch one, and before the episode loads up, I’m really curious as to what this entire bottle of sleeping pills tastes like!”

Casey’s Picks

Trigun: Badlands Rumble – Badlands Rumble is the movie I’ve been waiting 5 years for, and while I knew it wasn’t going to be canon-shattering (Hey, check out Wolfwood in the poster, bein’ all alive and shit!), I think I had expected something slightly more awesome. Instead, this was a REALLY NICELY ANIMATED 90 minute Trigun episode. But random episodes of Trigun go like this:

Vash the Stampede shows up and people think he’s lame.

Actual danger threatens town where Vash is.

Meryl is vexed; Milly is darling.

Wolfwood smokes and is morally ambiguous.

Vash solves issue and someone has their life touched by the Humanoid Typhoon.

This is not a great 90 minute formula. There’s a villain, and I think his name is Gasbag? And a bounty hunter out to catch him because he’s really her father, a fact that isn’t a twist when you introduce two new characters separated by a generation who both have red hair. I remember immediately after watching the movie that I liked the bounty hunter and thought she was awesome and badass*, but now can’t recall why she was badass or what her motivations were or WHAT HER NAME WAS. I think Wolfwood was Gasbag’s bodyguard. Why? Well, because the moviemakers realised that as a fan favorite, Wolfwood needed to be back in, and that the audience wanted to see a firefight between he and Vash and that never happened in the anime. Oh, why is he a bad guy bodyguard in the narrative? Fuck if I know.

In short (too late), Badlands Rumble was a 90 minute pretty piece of fanservice. And there’s nothing strictly WRONG with that. Funimation is releasing the movie in theaters this summer, and I’ll be in line for it, along with all my Trigun fandom queens. But I’m still holding out for a Trigun series Blu-ray release to hug at night. And fanfic about Knives. Smutty, smutty Knives fanfic.

*and wanted to write Meryl/bounty hunter fanfic don’t judge

30-sai no Hoken Taiiku – So I hereby dub this anime season “bizarro time”, because, to recap, there are both a vampire series and a shoujo-ai series that I’m not interested in, and the movie version of one of my all-time favorites was just okay. So I figured I might as well give a shot to the anime that made me most likely to roll my eyes and make faces – 30-sai no Hoken Taiiku, “Health and Physical Education for 30-year-olds.” It’s based on a manga that’s based on a book series aimed at 30-year-old virgins, and might be the most charming thing I’ve seen so far this year.

Rob’s Pick

Dog Days -  This show is so awesomely bad. Have you seen Combat Butler Hayate? Dog Days is like if Hayate had been just as bad, but did it more awesomely.

It’s about this middle-school kid who’s obsessed with gymnastics and likes to play with big long sticks, though I was disappointed to find he’s way straighter than that description makes him sound. He gets transported to a world of furries, where a princess who’s also a pop idol wants him to be a hero and save her country from losing a war. And by “war” she means “Japanese game show.”

See, everyone in this world is so nice and polite, they have “wars” where everyone’s really friends and you turn into a chibi-furry instead of dying and the heroes do big spectacular spells and combat stunts to show off because it’s all on TV. Oh, and when you take damage your armor falls off, where “armor” means “metal wristbands” for the guys and “all your clothes” for the girls. And he’s not even missing anything on Earth because it’s spring break and his parents are away. So he’s fighting in a war, if war was like paintball, and paintball was like Exalted, and Exalted had more doggie ears and underaged boobies. And the writers have absolutely no shame about any of this.

I keep waiting for them to go, “oh, haha, it’s a Last Exile spoof, get it? Isn’t war and the dramatization of war ridiculous?” But no sign of it yet, they just keep playing this ludicrous concept 100% straight.

Awesomely.

If you’re a Persona fan like we are, you’re probably aware of Catherine, the new game from the Persona Team.  If you’re not a Persona fan, get on that shit.  Really.  Either way, here’s the lowdown.

The game is about Vincent, who’s afro has made him a 32-year-old man child.  He’s dating Katherine, who’s kind of lame and kind of hot.  But she’s pressuring him into a marriage which he doesn’t want and is carrying his baby which he doesn’t want.  He meets Catherine, who’s kind of hot and probably evil, and they have fun sexy times.  Then he has nightmares where he dreams that horrific versions of these three or four characters want him to play a box-stacking puzzle game.

In between his nightmares, Vincent does stuff that Persona protagonists usually do.  He makes friends, eats pizza, plays video games, gets laid, and generally hangs around with (other) suspicious people.  In fact, he even hangs around with other Persona protagonists.  His cameo in Persona 3 Portable was likely irrelevant to the story though, because there’s only ever one bar in a Persona game.

The game promises branching plot lines based on player decisions, multiple endings, and has a day-by-day structure, which are all standard issue for Persona Team games today.  The real difference is that Catherine isn’t a JRPG.  It’s a survival horror puzzle game.  With dating simulator elements.  In a similar fashion to the Silent Hill series, all the horrific elements are metaphoric interpretations of the characters in the game, and their various misdeeds.  Also like the Silent Hill series, there is more geometry involved than is thematically appropriate.

This is where the meat of the aforementioned demo comes in.  The puzzle aspect of the game is the part that demands skill over… macking.  Every night Vincent climbs up a block tower in his boxers and a set of sheep horns,  to get away from a horrible version of someone he knows or created.  The sheep seem to be a symbol of him being a thirty year old loser, and the presence of other sheep in the nightmare world is an indicator that there are others like him being sucked into oblivion.   The controls in the nightmare are offsettingly digital-feeling.  Vincent is controlled via the d-pad, and each time you press a direction he moves exactly one block in that direction.  It’s odd at first, but eventually the precision provides a degree of comfort in your ability to navigate quickly.  Which is great, because there’s a horrible giant monster trying to kill Vincent with a salad fork.  The demo is mostly about pushing and pulling blocks, but you can tell that more mechanics will be enabled in the full game.  At first I wondered if the puzzle aspect of the game would hold it together game play-wise, but after a couple of minutes of being stabbed at with cutlery I felt confident that the precise controls would make for some interestingly testing challenges in the future.  I died 5 times in the demo alone, and it’s on mandatory easy.  One of the nice (and rather unique) options in easy mode is to press select to undo your last block-move.  I anticipate the game being pretty tough, so it’s good to know that devices such as this one are there to help people who weren’t that great at Q*bert enjoy the rest of the game.

The game has a 2/17/2011 Japanese release date, and no known North American release date yet.  So be ready to see tons of bullshit about it before you get your hands on a full version.  I know I’ll be watching for it.  Here’s the first trailer, if you’re still not psyched.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Edit 2/7/2011:  According to the official Cathrine Twitter account, they pulled the demo yesterday after the download limit was reached.  Smoke if ya got’em.

A Matter of Will wasn’t bad, but it encompasses a lot of flaws that a large chunk of fanfic writers commonly commit.  I hope that Enendar’s example can help some other people with their writing issues, too.  Reading the fanfic isn’t necessary to read my critique, but it’s as good as most fanfic and it might help put some of my notes into perspective.  I’ll break down the main issues into catagories.  Fanfic quotes are in bold/italic.

Description issues:

Enendar doesn’t seem to understand what needs to be described carefully, and what is safe to gloss over in favor of pacing.  Sometimes his description provides information that is needlessly reiterated; and sometimes the reiteration actually seems contradictory to the information provided by the description.  Below are a few particularly rough examples.

Although he was covered in furs so that he could survive in the cold north, the man’s armaments clearly showed that he knew how to fight.

A man in furs looks more fearsome than a man without furs.  By mentioning the furs, Enendar portrays a character as rugged, suggesting physical prowess.  The use of the word “Although” seems to suggest that the read should consider the furs a sign of weakness, which is counter-intuitive.

A small round clip with glowing symbols on it was attached to one side of her hair. Going right for the clip, Sazan lifted it and turned it over.

Since the clip was clearly the focus of the narrative, Enendar didn’t need to write that Sazan “went right for it.”  This implies that he had other possible options, which is confusing to the reader because none were mentioned.  When description is used to cast focus on anything, character focus should only be made more explicit if it diverts from the entity in focus.

“Well of course, those registry books only fill entire towers in Stormwind. Of course you just happened to come across it. It must’ve taken quite a lot of time away from your duties as High Commander.” Hollis insinuated irresponsibility on Sazan’s part.

Enendar did an alright job showing that Hollis was openly offensive.  His tone and the context of his words properly expressed his accusatory actions.  Reiterating by explicitly mentioning that Hollis was “insinuating irresponsibility” was unnecessary.

The shadows cast by the vault’s contents danced about the walls, giving the large main room a very eerie look.

This is all the description of the inside of the Shadow Vault Enendar provided.  It’s a weird fucking place, and an excellent opportunity to provide a description of the setting.  This line helps establish a new scene.  This is an excellent opportunity to use one’s desire for description to establish the tone of the scene via the character’s surroundings.  Since Hollis is a character that’s weirded out by Death Knights, a colorful description of the Shadow Vault would help the reader understand why he’s so on edge.

After regaining her composure and healing her hand…

It’s mentioned that Lelyndra was hurt, but since the extent of her injuries wasn’t already specifically addressed, it’s odd to see the hand injury mentioned particularly as it’s healed.  The reader would better understand the situation if the wound was described explicitly when it was inflicted, and the healing implicitly.  But all in all, it’s an unnecessary detail.  Her wound didn’t have any bearing on the narrative, and only served to distract the reader from an exciting scene.

Characterization issues:

Hollis is generally portrayed as a senselessly negative character, because Enendar never provided a reason for his reactions.  This could be as easy as mentioning how Hollis’s upstanding adherence to orders has saved lives, or how he survived his family’s slaughter via Scourge Deathknights.  Hollis’s initial revulsion toward Adriscimnya at the start, for example, seems out of place.  It would be understandable that he could be taken aback by the former Scourge member.   But he wouldn’t be ignorant to the fact that the dead don’t feel pain, or that they generally don’t give a fuck.  His revulsion toward her robotic disposition is understandable, but seeing her fall off a dying gargoyle is an understandable event.  The reader never really understands why Lelyndra values Hollis, how important he is to the Alliance, or why the piss he’s there in the first place.  After reading the fanfic, I got the impression that Lelyndra and Hollis could have been combined into one character.

Enendar refers to High Commander Triscn Sazan by High Commander, Sazan, and Triscn.  The choice of name seems arbitrary, and it actively and needlessly confuses the reader.  Referring to a character via their first name or last name creates a sense of familiarity or formality.  Think about situation where people say your first name, and ones where you are referred to by your last name.  This applies to phrasing in fiction as well, even when the narrator is the one using the name.  If Sazan is doing something less human and more commander-y, Enendar can call him “The High Commander” or something.

The scene where Hollis and Lelyndra have a fight while Sazan is getting killed was annoying and distracting.  Before their bickering, it was an intense scene.  Hollis didn’t necessarily have to immediately agree to help Sazan, but to break up the action for Hollis to whine some more killed all the scene’s momentum.  Enendar was focusing too much on these character at an inappropriate time.

Continuity/narration issues:

In the paragraph that begins with Through this, the Ebon Blade pacified the Vrykul and kept them from aiding the Lich King in combat. Enendar makes a seemingly mistaken connection.  The preceding paragraph is about the Vrykul’s battle rights.  By opening the next paragraph with this sentence makes the reader assume that the Ebon Blade is responsible for these battle rights, and are using them to supress the Vrykul.  What Enendar clearly means is that the Ebon Blade occupies the Vrykul via the occasion raids that are described later in that paragraph.

Later in the story, Enendar wrote …a blue translucent hand reached out of the vrykul’s back and grabbed his arm. The High Commander struggled against the arm, but another quickly shot up and grabbed his throat. In the next paragraph, he wrote Using her other hand… I don’t think she’s supposed to have three hands.

The short paragraph that started with The High Commander’s netherdrake was named Kairaku, is a good example of a fun idea executed poorly.  That paragraph should have started with the bit about the netherdrake’s appearance.  Then there should have been, at most, one sentence about the other things Sazan did when he went back to Draenor.  Then the actual focus of why the return trip was important.  The placement of the paragraph sugguests that it’s opening a new scene, so the first thing that the reader needs is to establish its context.  In this case, the context is that Sazan is flying his netherdrake to the section of Jotunheim where the Bone Witch lives.  Since the paragraph started with the netherdrake ‘s name, it makes the reader think that the scene is still in the camp.  The name of the netherdrake wasn’t important enough to mention.  Enendar should have esablished the scene first by describing the netherdrake’s flight to Jotunheim, then gotten to explaining why Sazan’s trip to the Outlands was significant.

There’s either a continuity error, or something was explained poorly.  It’s mentioned that Sazan goes back to the Outland to look for Adriscimnya after he breaks free from the Scourge, and that he did some Burning Crusade-era stuff while he was there.  But chronologically, the battle of Light’s Hope Chapel took place after the events in the Outlands that Sazan helped with.  This is either a continuity error, or Enendar should have explained that Sazan was some sort of irregular, pre-Light’s Hope freed Death Knight.

What I liked:

Other than the run-on sentences, most of Enendar’s spelling and grammar was correct.  It’s a little sad that fanfic writers score extra points for this.

Using Granger for the last name of the Commander was cute.  It’s a reference that a lot of Alliance players will pick up on.

The battle scenes at the end of the narrative were often exciting, and had just enough detail to seem visceral without holding back the pacing of the battle.

Adriscimnya’s crowning moment of awesome was a pretty good payoff.

If you want us to review your writing publicly, for the good of all, send us an email and we’ll give you your 1464 words of infamy.

All the other Narita Ryohgo fans out there are on this already, but if you somehow missed Baccano! back in ought-seven then let this be your introduction to anime so awesome that exclamation points are compulsory!  Baccano! was proof that you could have a story about immortals over the course of three years that flows like hot grease, and Durarara! is what we all wanted Persona: Trinity Soul to be.  Brain’s Base does the animation again, and they have Baccano! and Spice and Wolf references in the first episode so we don’t forget.  The animation quality makes those of us watching anime in the 90s weep.  GG is all done with Trapeze and they’ve taken on Durarara!, so you know the fansubs are quality.  Download it off Animesuki now!

Second, I hung out in the Hetalia video room for a while because it was empty and cold and Hetalia is funny. There was a loud, talkative, silly girl in there dressed as Italy. I think you get a pass on being annoying if you’re doing it in character and in the right place.

List of fictional dogs, current revision as of 05:01, 3 November 2009

In case you didn’t see it yet:

Just wanted to share.

These links explain the references, and make the picture less funny.

So I’d like to deviate from the current topic for a minute.  Here’s the trailer to the game The Last Guardian:

Now here’s a picture of an adorable grade school named Yuuki with his older sister Mirai, from Tokyo Magnitude 8.0.

I call this game, “Who’s going to die?”

This is easy mode.  You got it right.

Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 did a great job killing it’s adorable grade schooler though, because it gave his older sister PTSD and she doesn’t realize he’s dead for two episodes.  Then everyone in the show spends the rest of the series crying.

I rate this show 5 disaster-scarred children out of 5.