I was playing GameDevStory recently, and sequels? They’re grand.

With Gonzo’s revival and plans for more Last Exile, that got me thinking–what golden age early 2000/late 1990s show would I like? And LOL did I just call it golden age? It’s when anime was just making its strides over in America, so I have a particular attachment to that era. I don’t know if I can say the same about the shows from that era: they weren’t really that good. Maybe I could say the same about shows from any era, as long as the number of shows from then is greater than a statistically significant number. Anyways, here are some things I’d like to see–

More Vampire Hunter D. The original Vampire Hunter D novels are pretty much pulp hack-and-slash fics that kind of gimps on that visual kei imagery so stereotypically associated with those musical artists. Of course D is not about music, but about a badass half-vampire person killing things. And sometimes about his badass (usually) non-human acquaintances that often end up dead. I thought the original movie and the subsequent remake did pretty okay to convey a degree of grit, but they could do better on the glam and glitz. Even worse, the action was just not very, well, hack-and-slash. Don’t get me wrong, they had those things in it, but they were not so much a core part of the viewing experience beyond being token genre identifiers. I mean, we watch D  anime because it has cool action scenes. So a D anime with a lot of said cool action scenes would be the ideal way to go.

Witch Hunter Robin. Shoukou Murase bombed his Ergo Proxy bid, and not entirely because it sucked. It just lacked that something which Robin had a lot of. What is it, I don’t know, but I can tell you that Robin is still a character that charms me so many years after her last appearance. Like Last Exile, it is also ripe for a spinoff. It has a fairly open and easy-to-work-with setting. It has a very solid art direction and aesthetics, so a sequel would do well to follow suit. The story may be what’s weak about Robin, but it wasn’t its weakest point. Still it followed a rather straightforward template and people would enjoy even watching the same story unfold, just better executed the second time around, if it happens. Now it is actually besides the point if Robin or any of the original cast makes a return, but cameos would be more than welcomed.

I would totally say Trigun, but having seen Badland Rumble I think it puts that thought out of mind.

Like D, I think the world can use more Full Metal Panic. The problem is I’m not sure how much more we can pull out of that franchise. And I mean it in a spinoff-neutral sense. I wouldn’t really mind another TSR or Fumoffu equally, even if one is much better than the other and I do like Fumoffu much more than any other part of the series. In fact, I can barely stand anything else about the series, having tried them. Hopefully another spinoff anime would salvage the series in some degree for me.

While nothing can quite touch the original Boogiepop Phantom, it is a much more preferrable thing to see sequels of than, say, Serial Experiments Lain. Boogiepop just has the added attribute of a light novel series that has been milked dryer than the Gobi Desert. I think there’s a lot of treadmill crap in that series, especially when compared to the high bar the first book has set, but at the same time there are some stuff worth animating.

These are just a handful. I can continue, especially if I creep up on the time line and hit mid 2000s shows… What are some of yours?

Getting warmed up for MoshiDora fer reals dudes.

I exchanged a couple words with 2DT a couple days ago over twitter, and he reminded me how despite Spice & Wolf is a sheep in wolf’s disguise in terms of hard-hitting econ concepts (ie., it’s kinda basic as far as econ concepts go), it forwards some key big-picture notions to a hopefully-young-enough audience that they may be intrigued by them. In the first book the biggest one of these is the notion of silver content as it ties into the power, wealth and prestige of a country issuing them, and how even you could have a ton of money, it can still bankrupt you because some bits of information get leaked (namely, how your money has the just the tiniest less amount of silver than previously thought), despite that there is intrinsic value in silver. I thought learning how to charm a wolf-woman was the far more practical advice offered in the light novel series, the art of relating with somebody in which the bargaining chips are not so easily quantified.

We can extend the same views to Ouroboros Wave, the somewhat-neglected Haikasoru title from late last year. I think it came out with Rocket Girls (which I also finished recently), and since it is kind of this generic not-so-near SF anthology about human colonization of the solar system that feels almost too stereotypical, it didn’t get a lot of attention. I think the fact that it is an anthology hurts it; as a series of short stories there aren’t much in terms of the overarching threads connecting the story other than the setting. A few characters show up in a couple different stories, but it doesn’t matter if you read the story they were first from since only one interesting thing carries over, and it wasn’t a big deal if you missed it. At least, other than the setting, of course.

A strength and weakness shared by most of these short stories is that they all have the same kind of theme and concepts, may it be a story about catching a terrorist on Mars or investigating alien life under the polar ice cap of Europa, the same kind of “magic wand” gets waved around. The story is not very strong on characters, except perhaps the first of these. On the other hand, the strong similarities in theme and concept it has with other franchises like Crest of the Stars and Mobile Suit Gundam (UC timeline) enables some decent comparisons. At the same time though, it shows how those two series entirely overshadow this one when it comes to characterization.

What I want to pick on is Ouroboros Wave’s incessant notion of organization. I understand this is coming from a Japanese cultural context. And frankly Japan is not known for its progressive, productive and innovative management styles in their corporate environment. The social structures and culture just don’t allow for it. Looking at it from that perspective, the notions proposed in Ouroboros Wave in regards to its modular and performance-driven organizational society is a radical notion. It’s almost Borg-like in that there’s an unstated equality between everyone in terms of understanding their role in the mission of their lives, and it’s very Japanese. At the same time it goes to criticize hierarchy and the forceful fitting-in, that passive-aggressiveness in which is part and parcel with that sort of work culture.

It would be fine and another not-very-noteworthy footnote to Ouroboros Wave if I saw it from that perspective. To me, organization management is just like any other branch of information technology or logistics in which we can empirically march towards a technologically superior mode as t approaches infinity. Just like how we didn’t have airplanes 200 years ago and spaceships 100 years ago, we didn’t have the assembly line 200 years ago or Scrum 100 years ago…

And the problem is, while the proposed organizational structure in Ouroboros Wave escapes the worst kind of mistakes (that Nisioisin makes regularly: being outright outdated by today’s standards or completely wrong), they were kind of just there. It’s like telling the reader how there’s FTL drive, and you keep on talking about there’s this FTL drive, but you never even wave your hand to explain how it works beyond current understanding of these things. In other words there’s no equivalent of a “warp bubble” in Ouroboros Wave’s notion of organizational structure. It is as if the way people organized themselves today was not subject to any kind of rational reason as to why they do it in the first place. I guess “the webs” is kind of that? Or a break with tradition (which would sell to a Japanese audience I suppose)? But it seems like an answer to the wrong question. I mean maybe it’s just that the company I work for operates in a manner not too unlike the one described in the book (Earth is not exactly small, after all), so I know some of the challenges are in those situations. Ouroboros Wave addressed none of them, and that is a big letdown in my opinion.

Still, I guess to some people (since this is mostly targeted for young teens and teens) it can be an eye-opening kind of thing. Like how the popular understanding of technology applies not just to Dysonspheres and personal electronics, but also project management and corporate governance, or how currency trading involves large volume and fast reactions. It’s the usual head trick of applying today’s tech to illustrate a bright future, in the meanwhile teach some curious reader a thing or two about something they wouldn’t know. I just didn’t think Ouroboros Wave did a good job at that.