The Ascendance of a Bookworm reminds me a lot of Inside Bill’s Brain. In a season where Dr. Stone also runs in the background, it’s pretty easy to see why that particular fantasy is fancy, where in Bookworm, the lead character struggled to get anything done given her circumstances, in the same amount of time.
The fundamental concept in world-building fiction is really a mapping of thoughts, the inputs, the modeling and the guiding principles behind how one relates to the exterior environs. In fiction, we have the luxury of moving that perspective outside of ourselves and inject unrealistic boundary conditions and shortcuts. A thought experiment is the kind of fiction in which we inject somewhat more realistic boundary conditions (and still unrealistic, or no weirder than undead cats). In JK Haru, you could tie that to prostitution and weave a powerful narrative about human condition as encoded in the language of isekai radobe. I think anything can be built by anything in fiction, and to an extent, real life. Compare that to a biopic/Netflix documentary, when we dig deep into how one person connects to the huge thing that person is doing, a similar image surfaces.
Putting aside Bill Gates’s reasons behind his quest to eradicate polio, I think of Main’s quest to become someone who has access to the tangible niceties enjoyed by bookworms in the same way. She wants to encode information as words in print, and to weave a set of words to depict a world in which Main lives in, through the fairy tales of her isekai mother. It is like building a world on the remains of another, minus the empires at war. Well, I guess there’s still Boko Haram in Africa.
Of course, this is only an interesting comparison because the Gates foundation has billions of dollars and massive resources at its disposal, compared to Main. The recap on Bookworm is that a book-loving adult woman got the usual “ran over by a truck” treatment and is reborn into a young girl in the Other, born to a middle-class rural family in what seems like late medieval Europe. Literacy is rare and the Main, the main character, has to first learn to read–well, she has to first find someone who knows how to read and make him teach her that. Books seemed very rare as well. As the story goes, Main became obsessed in creating her own book since she cannot purchase any. She then tried to obtain paper, or clay tablets, or wood tablets, or making papyrus paper, what have you.
And eradicating polio seems kind of hard compared to make paper at home in the 15th century, if you are a poor little girl. Well, maybe. Given that 1000s of species go extinct every year I don’t really know or can measure just how hard, given each’s comparative power levels, lack of a better term. And Bill is a smart, resourceful dude, definitely a 0.1%-er in terms of not just wealth, but as someone who is known as a smart business guy and a savvy technical guy. He is also a bookworm.
So maybe they’re tied? In her new world, Main might as well be its Bill.
PS. I mentioned JK Haru, because that story share a lot with Bookworm in that one aspect: A lot of the time (so far) Bookworm is focused on not just the world-building power fantasy, but the fact that knowledge portability does not always translate to power portability. In Gate or Slime, for example, the respective main characters gained tremendous power in the opening minutes of the series. In Bookworm, this seems to be entirely the opposite–and arguably Main is a better world builder than anyone in those series. It’s a great demonstration of how the isekai genre is both great (in distilling that power injustice to separate it from present-day reality) and terrible (in reinforcing that injustice). On that note, I kind of guh’d at Chouyoyu (Because how are these people any good? If this is “smart” for Japan then that country is in trouble) and I tried Noukin and couldn’t get into it. I’m okay on Isekai Cheat but behind. Am I missing anything worth checking out?
PPS. I can use an isekai fantasy where someone just runs a NGO.
In a bid to stave off jet lag and fatigue, and partly motivated by procrastination, I want to tackle the two-day festival taken place last weekend at Tokyo Dome now rather than later. I tweeted it enough, but in summary:
Bannam has a lot of stuff! But IM@s is where it’s at, for this show.
All the idols in under one roof is all one.
While it was short on the collab department, there were still some great ones.
Araoto, short for “Araburu Kisetsu no Otome-domo yo.” (…and complete with the period), is a manga-turned-anime written by Okada Mari. The story and the way the story is told, both in the manga and anime, are extremely signature Okada. Even the subject matter is a standard fare for her. The way Araoto blends in elements from her prior works, (borrowing the climatic pivot from Tari Tari, and basically condensing the emotional whiplash from Nagiasa, I don’t know, among many other things) it feels very much functional rather than meaningful so that the anime is about sex and teenage girls at all.
That being said, Araoto’s topic of sexuality is as a salacious of a topic as you would expect, given that this is entertainment for virgins? I don’t know how else to put it. It might seem both outrageous (funny) and exaggerated (lame), especially when it comes to Mr. Milk-substitute and his charge, the internet-sext-artist. Then there is the very cute story between Rika and her pairing. And the delicious drama bomb-polygon for the rest of them that makes this show even worth watching till the finish. (“Teenage girls and sex”? This is a dog whistle if I’ve ever seen one. Also sign me up already.)
I had to admit I read up on the wiki summary before going in, because seeing a bunch of comedically chaste girls talk about sex can only go so far. (I also wanted to know what dirty phrases Mocho got to say, it helps.) There needs to be that money shot, so to speak, in this emotional porn exercise. It is not an indictment of the show–it’s more just recognizing when you open a bowl of instant noodles, you’re gonna get instant noodles, even if it’s labeled Ichiran ramen or something fancy. Short of going into spoiler territory, let’s just say I’m all for a good student rebellion, and as always I am disappointed.
Looking back to this Okada formula that Araoto walked, it is clear that Okada has really crystalized that formula to a tee and is able to tweak it at will. She knows what will bring the squeal and how to poke us in our most sensitive moments. Now she just needs to go deeper.
T1: Playing a lot (log in several times a day, do all the stuff):
Princess Connect! Re:Dive
THE IDOLM@STER Million Live Theater Days
T2: Playing occasionally (daily logins only, with bursts of normal play):
THE IDOLM@STER Shiny Colors
Magia Record (EN)
T3: Playing rarely (log in occasionally–just to gacha really):
Hachigatsu no Cinderella 9
THE IDOLM@STER Cinderella Girls Starlight Stage
Granblue Fantasy
I didn’t mention it on my blog much, but I have been playing Princess Connect! Re:Dive since its launch in 2018 and have been playing it regularly ever since. We are about 1.5 years since launch. I still enjoy that game a lot. Let me write about it.
Princess Connect (Pricone for short) franchise, which first launched in 2015 as a browser game, shut down in 2016. Princess Connect! Re:Dive (Pricone or Pricone-R) launched in 2018 as a mobile app game as a continuation. Pricone-R was originally an Android/iOS game, now also available on PC via DMM. An anime has been announced with no air date, but Studio Wit has extensively provided animation for the app/PC game.
Why do I play it so much? Because it scratches a RPG itch that sort of is at the core of the Cygames RPG theme, yet unlike their other entries, Pricone manages to provide all the flavors with the least amount of filling. “Grinding” this game usually means playing a set 30 or so minutes a day, which completes your dailies and maybe spending a bit of extra time to “tower” or “PVP.” For people who actually are into grinding, this game is going to run dry pretty quick. For people already playing other things or have obligations in RL, it’s an easy thing to keep tabs on and is not laborious.
Re:Dive also balances well between free and paid play, and given its PVP slant there has to be decent balance for the game to still be taken kind of seriously 1.5 years into it. In usual Cygames fashion they are pretty generous with in-game currency, and instead monetize by providing frequent and cheap options to augment your teams. Spending the currency to improve your existing team members usually trumps spending it on gacha, but both do happen.
What I refer to by the Cygames RPG theme I mean generally the following: a stats building core in traditional JRPG sense, the usual rock-paper-scissors damage/defense model, evolving meta (a bit like Shadowverse except it’s with characters and not expansion sets), and clan battle and coop events. In some ways if you are familiar with Cygame’s original properties over the years, you can see those themes progress from one game to the next. In that sense PriconeR reflects a level of maturity in both Cygame’s development process and experience in game design.
One huge way PriconeR reflects mature development process is how it is one of the best quality-of-life games, both in the UI design and in terms of mechanics. Over the last 18 months the game consistently improved its user interface, and updated to add several common shortcuts and to removed mechanics that reduced player enjoyment/added tedium. It’s very clear they are tracking how players are playing the game in a very direct sense, like what menus are being opened and what stages people run, not to mention obvious things like which characters people are raising and using with others and where.
There used to be a player-matching PUG mechanism that gave out pretty decent rewards, but the fights for that feature were so easy that it was just pure grind. The challenge was actually doing the PUG part. That feature got axed pretty quickly because most of the time the players are dealing with the matchmaking interface rather than actually playing the game. You can see that they even upped the reward to get more people to play prior to axing it, but a lot of people cannot be arsed to wait for matches.
Visually, the game is a cute-girls-gets-stuck-in-a-mmorpg kind of a theme. It is very cute and generally the visuals roll between the SD models that you see in the 2D game engine and the full-on anime visuals, or the 2D static graphic for the dialog/adventure game/VN portion. There is a lot of skeuomorphism which adds color to the whole experience of this rustic RPG vibe circa Ragnarok Online. Once in anime mode, though, the game, complete with Kouhei Tanaka-style sounds, reminds me more of Sakura Taisen. The next-episode preview bits for its in-game events and main story chapters drive that home.
Actually the composers for the game range a lot. Tanaka wrote the main theme, but just eyeing through the in-game music store (you can unlock songs from events and the story to use as in-game menu BGM) you see composers like InoTak, for instance. Which is lols.
Day-to-day play
Usually Princess Connect! Re:Dive means clearing the daily quests. It requires stamina (generated over time, the primary gameplay driver) to clear 20 nodes, 3 hard nodes, do 1 Arena battle, do 1 Princess Arena battle, buy mana once, skill up a character, star up a piece of gear, give someone in your clan an “ii ne,” do 1 dungeon battle, do 4 “explorations,” and you get 100 free stamina from noon JST and another 100 stamina at 6pm JST. Occasionally there are events, which are self-contained areas which have their own daily and event-specific quests, plus the monthly Tower of Luna daily and Clan Battle daily.
To do the daily quest as someone in UTC-5, I log in once in the morning and once at night. You have a “room” (similar to Deresute) in which you can grow and farm bonus stamina, exp pots, skip tickets and mana. Harvesting twice or three times a day keeps everything under their maximum limit. Also, that lets me collect the daily quest stamina. So I would probably do the “early day” stuff and finish as many quests as I care for when I log in at night after work, and log in once in the morning to clear out the accumulated stuff in order to finish all the dailies.
I would probably play a bit harder on evenings for Clan Battle nights to save the clan battles for the morning, since it require using up 900 stamina. It’s just easier to wait for the bonus daily stamina. Tower I generally hate so I try to play it only when I’m in the mood for, and have time for.
Since I have been playing the game fairly closely since launch, the routine also carry me at the top of the player level cap all this time, as the level cap extends once or twice a month. Having access to all the content probably makes all this easier from the start. Events are a breeze to grind through, where the challenge is in only clearing the VH boss with 1 try, and the exhibition mode/special mode. In recent months the game has been sort of trying to be more relaxing in order to allow late comers to enjoy the later content.
Meta
Given the PVP drive of the game, there is a lot of advantage for being first mover. To use a recent example, the latest meta-altering character, Neneka, dropped into gacha as a limited character about a couple weeks ago. For the first 2-3 days people were easily topping Arena and Princess Arena. Now it’s full of people with 5* Neneka (and 6* Kyaru) a week since. To get 5* Neneka to rank 14, that is a fairly significant investment that even I was able to make (despite being mostly a free player).
There is definitely an online community for the game in which a meta exists, either because that’s what “gamers” read on the internet or seen others do. Obviously, a social game that is Pricone, with clans and all, people talk about what works and what doesn’t. This especially matters when it comes down to arena and princess arena, which are really just a giant puzzle where if you can recognize the hand the opponent fields, you can figure out your counter. The fun is figuring it out, mostly, because it’s not so fun to play janken when you know what your opponent throws, unless you just want to enjoy winning (and it is enjoyable).
This is at odds with the social/meta nature of this Cygames game (think Shadowverse) where people competitively come up with “teams” (or decks) in which you can beat via some kind of RNG (since you can’t control play). If your team is “rock” enough against an opponent team that is “scissors” enough, you will more likely win than not. So in the end everyone tend to pick teams that are really the rock/paper/scissors that has the most difficult counter. It isn’t even like janken where you have to guess, or like “arena janken” where you have to think about if the opponent’s teams are like rock or paper or scissors, it’s just a matter of balance.
So when a new winning combo drops due to a new character, it becomes fun again. Until the meta settles or is altered (like how Neneca is kind of replaced by Kyaru 6*), it’s kind of fun again.
Conclusion
This game fits my lifestyle. Reality is I don’t have a lot of time to sit down and play. Console games are rough. I can do stints with Steam, although lately my PC needs an upgrade to really enjoy that. Half of that time I am either watching anime or sportsball, or catching up with tons of free seiyuu content online in radios or promotional talk shows or weekly streams. I can grind, and the game has grind-type content if you want it, but I’m never forced to do that, nor does grinding convey so much advantage. I can just put in my 20 minutes a day if that is all I have time for. I can even skip if I really want to.
The game is also fun, which is why I have not gotten bored with it. The QoL changes over time makes the game less painful to other entries. The art and voice over (fully voiced game) is top notch and the anime style really apes from that Sakura Wars-shaped hole in my life.
It also helps that the main story is kind of interesting, although I don’t really care too much about the characters themselves. It is a serious game with silly characters and I’ve had enough of those. They are features I don’t need, but enjoy, and maybe others like them more.
So overall this is a great little gem of a game that could take off in the right situation. In South Korea the game apparently is doing very well, and it isn’t too bad in Taiwan/HK/Macau either. I believe there is even a Chinese knockoff of it now. Pricone shows that a quality product that does many of the little things right will still find an audience.
When the word dropped for Otakuthon this year with its concert lineup, I decided to go despite the somewhat more fitting lineup out at the usual Anirevo event. Otakuthon, in Montreal, is a cool city to visit because it’s as European as it gets in North America, and frankly it’s not that far from me.
I was able to carpool with 3 other folks and split hotel with 2 others. The good exchange rate between USD and CAD helped. What didn’t was our tough schedule leaving so late, and the strong storms in upstate NYC which made driving challenging in rare spurts, both to and fro.
The tough schedule was a late arrival into Montreal and getting up early to move my car, and to work remotely for the rest of the day. I did sneak out of the room to get an autograph from the lovely Marina Inoue, who played a role of Japanese CV here to see her fans and dispense answers to questions. She took on a pretty strong persona and it felt a bit intimidating, but she was enjoyable overall to see in person.
There were two autograph sessions and a panel and it was fun as you would expect. I missed part of the panel due to another autograph session with Rica Matsumoto, but overall it was pretty educational.
For Matsumoto, I was only able to see her at the autograph session on Saturday. Frankly the con didn’t do a good job keeping her events on time. The lineup and the handling of the guest didn’t sync up in terms of info, and I see how the line control struggle to implement whatever they were doing from the industry group that brought over the guest.
JRock North did what they could for TMR, Matsumoto and Faky, another Avex Trax idol group. Unlike Wa-suta, Faky has a lot of international appeal with 3 multilingual performers. One of the even speaks French fluently and that won her tons of brownie points in Montreal. You can look them up here. The group recently just had a member change so 2 out of 5 were finally getting a song that’s coming out just now? Well.
Here are some Youtube teasers for their new single, which they performed at the con: Akina (From California), Hina (New member from Kyoto), and Taki (New member from Tokyo, speaks Fr/En/JP). I guess the rest will come up shortly…
Somehow Otakuthon also scheduled all their Japanese guests on top of each other. I wasn’t able to do much else besides get 2 autographs and catch part of the panel for Marina. I didn’t see Faky’s panel, nor Matsumoto’s panel, nor TMR’s panel… And also there was Miyavi’s stuff by Fake Star and I didn’t participate at all in any of it.
Oh yeah, TMR was great. His abridged set is collaboration with another Nishikawa brand, TNNK. So it was TMR x TNNK. TNNK is mostly just his later output from Thunderbolt Fantasy and the like, and it was great since I dig those songs a lot. I had a good spot for the live too, thanks to premium badge.
Otakuthon this year had a $200 CAD premium badge. The concerts were 20 or 30 each. I went to two. So I am still spending $95 or so on top. I also got some perks from going to the TMR concert, like a poster watashikai/handshake. Well, I’m more here for the luls and to enjoy the show, so it was not a big deal. The badge helped me get a front-ish seat without having to camp much, so I think value-wise it was a push. If I wanted to I probably could have gone to another concert on Saturday if things were less CF than it was.
What else did I do? I got an autograph from Irie, which I will have to frame somewhere. Takkyu Musume is great stuff. There was fooling around with the locals at night. I mixed some drinks and sang some karaoke, while trying to buy Million 6th SSA tickets.
Overall Otakuthon was fun, laid back, and I approached it kind of small. Part of it was that I also worked for much of Friday so not much was getting done. Montreal is a fun and enjoyable city.
PS. I drove to the city, and dealt with the EV infrastructure. It was educational. Montreal uses its Electrify system and FLO, which is largely interoperable. The parking situation in downtown is kind of bad, but I still only paid less than 50 CAD for the weekend. There are some street-side chargers which are level 2, and the Indigo deck under the con also has level 2 chargers.
I also rode on a Lime scooter, which went live in Montreal just a couple weeks ago. It was fine. I was going somewhere out of Downtown but since I couldn’t park in that area I ended up walking half of the way.
PPS. La Banquise was dinner on Friday, Reuben’s Deli was dinner on Saturday. On the way up we stopped in Queensbury NY at a local diner, and on the way down we stopped at Albany for Five Guys (even if we had only 4 Guys). Aforementioned scooter ride was to get some bagels at St. Viateur to bring home. There was a huge parade on Sunday downtown which obstructed traffic but celebrated LGBT rights, a push in my book, so I had to uber, ride, and walk to get those bagels.
Also, I finally got to have some orange julep. It’s a Montreal specialty that probably most closely resemble SunnyD but more like actual juice. The recipe is really more just orange juice with flavoring extract and egg whites.
