Author Archives: omo

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September 2, 2017

Some Thoughts on Magireco, HatchiNine, Msute & Milishita

By omo

I have some kind of a mid-season anime thing going but I also want to capture these tender sprouting opinions, fresh off the grill. Not to mention on some level, what’s the difference these days…

Theater Days I opined a good amount already here, so just to update, I’m definitely getting used to Kaori and Tsumugi. I guess they fit well, after all, as engineered, but what helps the most is seeing other fans going at it. Kaori particularly is the kind of idealistic being that engenders a quick reaction.

The first competitive event has come and gone. During the event period, I went to Otakon and was ranking in Million Live vanilla as well, so I only managed tier 2. Got my 3* PST Shiho and I was just happy that I managed a FC on Shooting Star MM, so I can clear all the checkboxes and make a neat screenshot.

How was it? As someone who expected fierce, greemas-like competition I got somewhat part of that in Theater Days, which should surprise no one who knows Million Live Producers. If anything I thought T3-5 were too casual, but my non-greemas producers did not fare that well either. Is this how Deresute is today?

All in all I think if I had the extra 3-4 hours in the ranking period I could have gotten T1 without any issues, but life just didn’t let me have them. So yeah, to me Theater Days ranking event was about the right amount of hard, which is not that hard, but hard enough to be a real challenge. I might not try for tier 1 again though (Matsuri rewards excepted).

Hachigatsu no Cinderella Nine, or Hachi9 as I spell it, is basically the Princess Nine or Taishou Yakyuu Musume of mobile games. I got turned on to it when I noticed Takagi Miyu was guesting on an episode of the mobile game’s radio show, hosted by one of the five Walkure girls whose name I can never remember (Nishida Nozomi). I checked out the visuals, the concept, and eventually the game itself. I was sold very hard, let’s just say. In short, Hachii is my aesthetics. It’s got that good mix of shoujo manga x sports manga x actual baseball thing. It’s snappy. It’s a game focused on character development, and not so much managing a roster or doing any rhythm game nonsense. Imagine if Oofuri was not about middle school boys holding hands? A-1 did a couple animated bits for it. The voice cast, asides from the aforementioned two, includes the full HRR cast and some more of those baseball nerds in association.

The game ultimately is what sold me. At the same time I did not spend much time in it, the game isn’t really primed hard for competition or is that community that hardcore. In a nutshell, the game is a pile of mini-game type things, each playing towards a type of statistics or currency that you accumulate as you go through what the game offers you. During events, typically what you do is trade stamina for a chance at a RNG against an opponent team, whichever team with higher score, boosts and other abilities included (including weather conditions and what not, and spot checking your roster against theirs, to keep it concise), usually wins each given game. Winning a game gets you prizes, which you can use invariably to either roll the gacha, or upgrade your players. Upgrading players is a complex thing in Hachi9. There’s straight up levels. There’s your player’s mood/condition. There are plus and minus traits you can upgrade or remove. You can awaken cards. You can level up skills and there are like a dozen of those for each given player, and skills benefit your team differently for each position your player happens to be playing.

The mini-games outside of actual matches are basically Msute-ish, because that’s also made by Akatsuki, the same developer as Hachi9. Basically a bulk of the game is story modes that you can unlock as your coaching rank goes up. During each story mode, your goal is to do the best possible (at the end of each story mode run you will get a letter grade) in order to reap the most rewards, as more rewards allows you to unlock/upgrade your characters more. Each run of the story mode is broken into chapters. Each chapter is a series of commu interspersed with a training game (think FGO-style card picking but with a deck you build with 9 players instead of 3, rarity included). Each round of card picking reflects 1 week out of the full time period, which usually runs for 9 months or so (9 * 4 worth of moves). As you pick cards you increase your 3 base stats (str dex end I guess?). Those are consumed in order to unlock traits at the end of each story mode run. While you pick cards, each round, some players are eligible for leveling up, and the more powerful you pick for a particular suit (red orange green purple) the more they level up. Each time a player levels up, you get into this second minigame that lets you try for these colored orbs which also is prereq to improve your team’s chances at the tournament at the end of the story mode, and as material for unlocking traits. The better you do in both of these minigames, the better you will be rewarded at the end. Some weeks you don’t train, but you play games instead, so those are just  your typical vs computer matches.

That’s a very high level description of the main minigame mechanisms. I also glossed over a ton of details, and probably have some inaccuracies since I am still quite new at that game. Awakened cards go up in rarity, which is cool, but this also means actual SSRs are a little bit devalued. Melding a copy of a card (or something appropriate by the same player) also unlocks stuff, so dupes are welcomed. By the way, players call you director (kantoku) in Hachi9, which I thought was the final straw that broke my “THIS IS SUCH MY GAME” back.

This brings us to IDOLM@STER: SideM – LIVE ON STAGE. It’s made by Akatsuki, and so far most people are familiar with its bond-based minigame/stage otoge combination by now. It’s definitely much more casual if you came from Deresute, but I personally think this is more what IDOLM@STER is about. It was not a pure otoge, and somehow it has become more and more so, out of laziness or limitation, whatever. But we can do better. The bigger question is can the market appreciate it?

I’m not going to play Msute seriously, but I did the “reset marathon” thing and start with a SSR Tsubasa. It’s a good way to learn about SideM, so I am just doing that. Funny enough all these other mobage is just taking my time away from this one. I can say just by messing with it for a couple days, I have more than doubled my SideM idol knowledge, LOL.

On that note, the system in Msute feels right at home coming from Hachi9, and it comes down to enjoying the mini games and the stuff available as story and character development. The gameplay is not hard but I’m no otoge player so it works for me.

Lastly, a bit about Magireco, or the Madoka mobage. The full name is Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story: Magia Record. So Magireco. It’s basically the same game as Fate Grand Order, but shelled with widefaces. What’s different is that it’s an improved version of FGO all around. It also has one of the best gacha animation I’ve seen, where when you draw a magical girl you get her transformation sequence. Too bad the draw rates are terrible like FGO.

Shamelessly so, the main “Mashu” character is Mocho, so I’m playing it. Shamelessly because Aniplex put Trysail in this game front and center. In this game you play the role of a fledgling QB and guide your group of magical girls to…something. Well, it’s Madoka. The graphics and visuals reflects all that we have known and come to appreciate about the franchise regarding magical girls.

I guess the last note to make on Magireco is that the developer has built a check in the app to see if the app has been installed from the play store, which makes sideloading tricky. Nothing you can’t get around. I personally had some issues but was able do continue playing after cloning the app. Maybe I’ll fix it in Japan or something.

Leave a comment | posted in Idolmaster, Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica, Modern Visual Culture

August 21, 2017

Your Name, Shinkai’s Portfolio

By omo

This is really a defense of the movie, from who I don’t know, people who hate blockbusters? But reading it reminds me that I’ve been following this Shinkai Makoto guy since his groundbreaking movie about SMS, mainly because Tenmon’s soundtrack up to Beyond the Clouds were sublime. (By the way he’s writing music for Tsuredure Children this season.) Shinkai’s movies were actually no different than how they are today, from little clips like his NHK-funded cat anime, or the movie about showing your feet while eating chocolate and drinking beer beneath a raining Tokyo sky? I’m just saying.

To me, as a fan of his works, Shinkai has peaked at 5cm. The reasons are twofold. First of all, as I mentioned, many of his works, and certainly all of his major works, are iteratives of the same ideas as expressed in the narrative. Sometimes the themes are even the same. Your Name, especially now that I’ve slowly and watched it at home (thanks Amazon Japan) for the…5th time? Is like someone took 5cm and made it into a crowd pleaser, necessarily by making the work acceptable to a wider audience. This means it’s not a 3-vignette series of films, but a full films in three clear acts. It means spelling things out–by acting it via the characters and other means that are less usual in his films. It means a clear and satisfactory end for all tha shippers. It also mean the experience is now about being carry forward by attention-grabbing edits and lense flares, jokes about sex or romance, plus that whole comet thing. It’s not so much about what makes 5cm such a poignant work–Your Name was a bit diluted, if you will.

The second reason is just that, by fleshing out his ideas, and pivoting around a mainstream-sensible notion of star-crossing, time-spanning, body-swapping hook-and-sinker, Your Name is Shinkai’s most challenging movie to date. It is like trying to execute on the perfect chocolate ice cream. Or maybe in this case it’s more like Stracciatella gelato where you have to keep Shinkai’s distinctive and signature visual cues and awesome display of art and still produce a very solid and familiar, tasty and digestible familiarity. However as a director of that, his flaws are now showing, where as they were previously less obvious in his more experimental works.

There are a lot of incremental improvements between Your Name and his prior works, so the Sakugablog post I linked up there is a good sampler of that. And it’s true, without experimentation of these new techniques people are not going to get better at doing it. That alone makes Your Name a curiously welcome item, and I don’t get why anyone would hate its success, however unwarranted it may be. I think it’s just something you deal with–commercial success is not at all related to how well the craft it is, although craft itself may be a prereq or a limiter. It’s true for Hollywood, it’s true for the rest of the world; if anything too many bad movies make too much money.

But the point I want to make, which I chose the word “peaked” deliberately, is that I don’t think he can make another movie that will resonate with me as much as 5cm. He has spent much of his adult life creating art around these core set of concepts and I think he has still some tricks up in his sleeves, plus room to improve, as an animation creator. But as an artist with a message I don’t think he came louder and less of a diluted message than those three short stories. Which is to say, maybe it’s time Shinkai go make that new movie that he ought to make next, and not the same thing?

I think you can easily counter-argue and say that Your Name is Shinkai’s best film yet because it required him to be a more well-rounded creator, relying on more people in his team to lift the overall movie, to address his earlier inadequacies, and make something that isn’t especially weak in any one area. Unfortunately, those are not the things that made me a fan of his films.

PS. I’ve been reading the Chinese SF trilogy from Liu Cixin, The Three Body Problem, and it is quite a read. Like Shinkai, Liu also professes that he is a fan of the stuff that he is now contributing to. And it shows; both of their works are works as two people who are huge fans of their respective medium and genre. In Liu’s case he literally name dropped Asimov and Legend of Galactic Heroes in the first book. It’s funny, because when I read that reference I thought back not only to my recent viewing experience, but that the last time I saw Shinkai at a con panel he mentioned that he was slowly working through the same OVAs.

Leave a comment | posted in Kimi no Na wa

August 16, 2017

Otakon 2017: Wrap

By omo

This year marks the 20th consecutive time I attended Otakon. Maybe that’s deserving of something, but probably no more than just this mention here. It’s probably better noted that it marked the start and end of an era where Otakon existed as a thing in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, as Otakon ’98 actually was at Hyatt Crystal City in Arlington, VA, and now Otakon is at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC.

Guest-wise, the main thing about Otakon this year is Anisong World Matsuri. Like Anime Expo, this was my main reason for going. Otakon’s AWM featured Yousei Teikoku, Flow, TM Revolution and JAM Project. Otakon itself brought over a bunch of guests, mostly regulars like Maruyama and Matsubara, Aoki Ei, and probably most notedly the lead seiyuu in Welcome to the Ballroom, Tsuchiya Shinba, plus your usual producer types. There were some movie premieres, like the new Eureka 7 Movie. Actually was that it? There was a promo for This Corner and the new Gundam movie I guess?

Anyways, it was a good time to take it easy, as we have to also deal with the new con center, setup, new places to eat, new hotel, new routine, everything. So my scattered thoughts below…

(Too lazy to crop photos sorry)

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4 comments | posted in Conventions and Concerts

August 9, 2017

Anirevo Summer 2017: Wrap

By omo

I’m trying to rapidly wrap up this post only because I have to prep for Otakon? LOL. Turned out I had a lot to say about my first trip to Vancouver. Vancouver is the other part of Canada that’s worth visiting, I guess? The west coast bastion of … Chinese immigration in North America? Well, one thing that is for sure is that culturally it is very asian, and very diverse. Lots of different East Asians and Asians in general, too. It feels like New York City in the sense of its cultural and racial diversity, except it leans very heavily towards Asia, where as NYC is leaning towards Latin America, Africa and Europe a lot more by comparison.

The story goes there used to be a large anime con in Vancouver but it went under due to some con drama or fraud or something. It went away and AniRevo is the survivor in the subsequent con shakeups in the region after various smaller cons gave it the good old try. Now AniRevo runs twice a year, with the Winter version focused more on gaming and the Summer version focused more on anime and Japanese content.

A couple years ago I tried to go, but couldn’t pull the trigger. Since then it’s been aping me for all this time so I jumped on it when Itou Shizuka got announced several months ago. That’s a no-brainer guest–she is one of the pillars of seiyuu otaku scene in the last major meta, to borrow some card game lingo here. Bucket list, even. I was thinking that I would be glad just to be able to see her at a panel or get a thing or two signed, while doing some culinary tourism in Vancouver.

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Leave a comment | posted in Conventions and Concerts

July 28, 2017

Eventing Do’s and Do Not’s

By omo

Since I sort of just tossed up my thoughts there, some people might want an easier-to-digest version.

  • Do what you like.
    • The problem is some people like to do things that are stupid/dumb and are context insensitive. So for those people, no, don’t do what you like if it’s those dumb things.
    • There are things that are common sense. It’s a vague and grey area so I’ll leave it at that.
      • But know that it can be a grey area, so have some grace/mercy when dealing with such.
    • Try to not be KY. We are KY I know but do your best.
    • …and some of you are just trolling, so welp.
    • Unfortunately this also determines if you are yakkai or not. Honestly? It doesn’t matter, from a western point of view.
  • Learn about the time/context/place of the thing you are at, and the things you want to do.
    • Wotagei is a type of nerd dance style and is generally inappropriate at a public venue, outside of chika idol shows, anikura, etc.
    • For anime/2D idol/anison fests, calls are appropriate usually, and even if you don’t want to do them, sometimes you should at least learn about them and do them for show at critical junctures?
    • Learn about the acts and the show you are at, if you can. Why are you there, anyway? Festival events are different than solo lives for this reason, usually.
      • Go prepared. Learn ahead of time. Watch some live footage. Read concert reports. Get an idea of calls if not learn them outright.
      • Send flowers, bring gifts, make call books, whatever. But these are bonus round items, don’t get your undies in a wad if these things don’t work out.
        • Definitely don’t make trouble if they don’t. Instead, think positively as a fan, what would you do to make the best of it?
      • Meet other fans! Socialize!
      • Don’t get hung up by penlights or stuff that are secondary to your enjoyment of the show.
      • If you learn what you should do, you can also avoid what you shouldn’t do. And maybe, just maybe, you can get more enjoyment out of these events.
  • Don’t cause trouble, especially if you are a foreigner in a foreign land, but when you invariably do so, just play dumb and be yourself :)
    • To paraphrase a good teacher, if we are to enjoy these gifts that are the reasons in which we attend events, the best way to get along is with love, respect and charity.
  • It’s okay to [insert any Frequently Asked thing here]. Just don’t do it when you know it’ll cause problems. If you don’t know, it’s better err on the safe side. Or you could always ask some people who are also going to the same event, or the management if necessary.
  • Bonus: Don’t get hung up on jizos or house tigers. It’s a waste of your time, it’s a waste of my time. People have the right to enjoy themselves by doing nothing (or even sitting down at a seated venue), or by having a good time “moving” (assuming it adheres to the rules). Yes, there’s a fear that young people or people who don’t know any better may get the wrong idea, but this fear will never end if you let it control you from having a good time. Yeah, there will be people who go too far and need to be disciplined, removed, what have you, but don’t let that get in the way of your fellowship.
    • But it does make good whine material and troll bait.
    • As Tadokoro Azusa said, “So what?”
  • Extra Credit: Go to different live events, learn what it is in different countries, for mainstream and indie bands, for EDM, metal, pop, rock, country, classical, opera, whatever. Widen your perspective. Go to a Hanshin Tigers game and watch real cheering.

Leave a comment | posted in Conventions and Concerts, Modern Visual Culture