Before I begin, I want to talk a little bit about the relatively common plot device in anime of the “circumstance that can’t be avoided”. I realize that, without conflict of some sort, there’s not much in the way of a plot, but to be completely honest, a large number of writers and producers are abusing the concept. Between Ouran and Crest, it really only differs in the characters and the dressing of the circumstances. There’s really only so much that can be done with the “fish out of water” concept, and after a certain number of iterations, one begins to be able to predict the scenarios with an almost frightening– or disappointing– accuracy. It’s not exactly uncommon across media of all nationalities, but of late it’s popping up almost too frequently in anime. As time goes on (read: next season), it should drop in its ubiquity.
So, now (at last), the results of Part Two:
Ouran Host Club: I caught some of this at Tekkoshocon back in April, but (ironically) circumstance prevented me from watching more. Starting from the beginning, then, I have to say that I’m still interested in Ouran’s premise. The fact that the art and directorial styles resemble Fruits Basket’s helps it considerably. I still don’t like the ending theme all that much, but it’s got a bit more going for it than I initially thought. Plus, the characterizations are quite fasscinating.
Strawberry Marshmallow (take two): Again, it falls into the Azumanga class of anime, but it’s quirky. I hesitate to say it’s extra-quirky, but that about describes it. The art style’s beauty bears not only repeating, but emphasis. The show has a tendency to descend into surreality at times– not always a bad thing. It does pick up after the first two episodes, though, and the pacing could be a little quicker. Oh, and the dub is terrible.
Kodocha: All right, it automatically loses points for non-skippable trailers on the disc. I decided to do the dub as the last Funimation dub I checked out was Fruits Basket, and that was… impressive to say the least. I was not disappointed. I have to admit that I can see where the show inspired Excel Saga, to a certain extent. I can’t help but think, judging by the delivery, that most of Sana’s rants come from a very deep place in Laura Bailey’s history… the singing is pretty good too (when it’s meant to be). It’s on the list to continue, without a doubt.
Banner of the Stars III: This one really, really deserves its own entry, but like I said yesterday, I’m not about to stretch this out over three days. Anyway, I felt it was a fitting ‘midpoint’ to the series (while there is still one book yet unfilmed, three more in the series are as of yet unwritten), offering a bit more in the way of humor than the previous stories. That’s not to say it was all light-hearted; it had some very interesting moments of drama that worked quite well. I’m hoping the series will continue, but at the same time I’m not about to hold my breath.
That about covers it; there will likely be many more series for me to catch after Otakon, but for the time being I’ve got plenty to watch.
While I’d love to say that I’ve got everything nice and neat and typed up with respect to my anime binge from Thursday, I didn’t. I neither binged nor typed. All right, I watched a little, but not enough to warrant stretching this out over three entries. So I’m holding off until I can finish watching what I promised to, and can type it all up. Expect the report sometime tomorrow afternoon.
So, Die Hard. I am a well-known devotee of all things Bruce and I have to say, this film did not disappoint. Obviously he’s getting too old for this stuff– wait, wrong series– but the movie came down to “McClane made jokes and s%$# blew up”. Which is all you really need for a good Die Hard movie.
Eric, you might want to see this. Without ruining the surprise, all I can say is that there is no way that that game will be balanced if she’s a playable character (which, of course, she would have to be– after all, it’s her freaking game). It also gives new meaning to the phrase “power creep”.
More anime tonight, going over what I missed yesterday. Catch you folks later.
Yes, this didn’t show up when it was supposed to. That would be because I forgot to hit “publish”. Good thing I caught it before I left for the movie….
All right, last night I went on a bit of an anime binge. I checked out the first one or two episodes from a bunch of shows I’d been accumulating without actually watching. For your perusal, here’s the series I watched, the series I didn’t get to, and my opinions of each:
Lucky Star: Comparisons to Azumanga are probably inevitable with this one, primarily because both started life as 4-koma strips and deal with more or less the same subject matter. Whereas Azu eases into it, however, Lucky Star just gets right into it. I’m mixed on it, though, as LS has the odd tendency to linger way too long on its gags. Plus, while the characters are cute, the writing is a bit uneven and the pacing stinks. The Street Fighter II gag near the end was inspired, though.
Nodame Cantabile: Quite fascinating. It definitely has the whole Kare Kano vibe going for it. I could probably get into it more if Chiaki wasn’t such a jerk, but I think that’s just an odd first impression meant to make the viewer grow sympathy towards him. Noda also seems artificially ditzy. I suppose it’s worth following more.
Maburaho: To misquote Paul Oakenfold and Pharell Williams, “Girls just want sex and magic.” Failed. I only have the disc because I won it at Tekkoshocon; it’s getting sold off ASAP.
Strawberry Marshmallow: I’d watched the first bits of this back in February, but I was a little distracted at the time. Now that things have calmed down, I could take a closer look, and found that it has a lot of the problems Lucky Star does: nice art (actually, freaking gorgeous art) but a relatively weak script compared to Azu. It’s still on my list to watch through so as to prevent Aerobic Brooding, but a lower priority until then. I’m also going to watch another episode on Thursday just to make sure.
Kodocha: (Thursday)
Ouran Host Club: (Thursday)
Banner of the Stars III: (Thursday– saving this one for last)
Anything I didn’t get to last night, I expect to check out Thursday evening (going to Live Free or Die Hard tonight). On my list for con acquisition are Bottle Fairy, Kaleido Star, and possibly the Haruhi box; I’m also planning on re-watching through Risky Safety, Kare Kano, and Escaflowne “eventually”.
I’m so glad I’m a diverse nerd. I think if I stuck to just one particular area of nerdiness, I’d go absolutely crazy.
Been a while since I posted some quality Bailout, huh? Aaaaanyway, for those of you who missed it or didn’t feel like downloading a huge AMV, I managed to track down that particular Kaleido Star/Andy Hunter track. It’s shown below for your viewing pleasure.
One thing of note, though: the rest of this week’s entries are largely going to be anime-related, as I’ve sorta neglected that recently and there’s lots to discuss in the runup to Otakon. Not the least of which being Hitoshi Sakamoto actually in attendance at Otakon.
Without further adieu, the wonderful “Clear Skies”:
Just as a quick aside with regards to the DDR pad thing (and yes, this is a rare Double Post, as I don’t think it warrants consuming yet another day with gaming stuff that not everyone can enjoy): I did try the “dance mode” trick that Slipgate mentioned, on both adapters. Neither one worked, sadly. Regardless, the metal pad is not an “unnecessary” expenditure as I’ve been talking about getting one for years now, and the time has finally come when I am actually able to do so (the last time this happened, I elected for the Pop’n setup instead). Anyway, yeah. Dinner now, and then more SRT.
I called it a night early last night, retiring to advance more in Super Robot Taisen. As it turned out,t he story took a decided turn for the pervy at around the Mission 25 mark, shortly after the two teams joined up and Lune joined the cast. Most of the inter-mission dialogue was centered around which of the newly-added female pilots were the hottest.
Granted, none of them are exactly unattractive, but with a war going on one would expect the hormones to be just a little subdued. Apparently, the pilots subscribe to the M*A*S*H theory of combat psychology.
I give up. Over the last 24 hours I have fought tooth and nail to try to get any of the three dance pads I owned to work with Stepmania on the Mac. And, while there is a solution available within my reach, I’m going to call it quits completely and just bite a pretty big bullet.
After looking at the sheer size of the Manhunt 2 rant and realizing, “Hey, that’s way too big”, I’m starting to use this “hide long rants” thing more often just because I don’t want to flood folks with really long, drawn-out diatribes for no reason. So… Read the rest of this entry »
…No, I have no idea where that title came from either. Anyway, played a pair of 360 demos this morning:
Band of Bugs: An XBLA offering which is about to be mine as soon as I snag a Points card. The game is basically Final Fantasy Tactics, with bugs. So, call it “A Bug’s Life Tactics” and be done with it. Played through the tutorial and a few first missions, and I loved it (as I am want to do with most FFT clones). If you’re a Tactics fan with a 360 this literally should be your first Arcade purchase– skip Geometry Wars for this if you only have cash to buy one game.
Project Sylpheed: I probably should not have played this, because I’m nauseous now. However, Square-Enix’s first “real” offering on the 360 is damn pretty and damn good. Plays a lot like Wing Commander and X-Wing did, which is always good. Overall I thought it was a little difficult, and the battles were sufficiently chaotic, so I’m probably going to wait for some reviews before I make a decision on picking it up. Oh, and in keeping with the grand tradition of Japanese space-opera, it has well over 2.3 metric Gundam Wings of overblown drama.
Over the past few days, in case you’re a gamer who has been too engrossed in Pong to check the news, Take Two’s latest offering from Rockstar, Manhunt 2, was given the rating AO (for Adults Only) by the ESRB. As a result of this, major retailers such as Wal-Mart announced that they would not be carrying the game per their pre-existing policies to not stock AO games, and Nintendo and Sony also announced that the game would not be licensed by either company for their respective systems, again per pre-existing policies. Almost immediately the cry of censorship came up.
Those cries are, to be completely honest, total bullshit.
I’ll preface my explanation by saying the following: I was, believe it or not, looking forward to playing Manhunt 2. I certainly was turned off by Rockstar’s latest paean to gloriously excessive violence and depravity, but dammit, it was going to use the Wiimote in an interesting way, and I’ll try just about anything once (with respect to gaming– I’m looking at you, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named). It was going to get at the very least a rental from me. There, I said it. I was interested in what could adequately and possibly objectively be called a “murder simulator”. To say I am a little disappointed that I likely won’t get the chance to is pretty much accurate.
Now, that said, let’s take a look at what we know. By and large there are virtually no titles listed as AO in the gaming world– somewhere on the order of 23, out of how many tens of thousands of titles already rated and released? Not even a fraction of a percentage point. Put bluntly, we’re not missing much. Nintendo and Sony are well within their rights to control what gets released on their systems. After all, that’s the whole point of the licensing system anyway– quality control. The publicity surrounding being the one console that has Manhunt 2 would be quickly drowned out by the very real cries of glorification of violence that would be the death knell for that console. I don’t like it either, but the fact that there is a significant portion of the population who will be very upset that a game as violent and unapologetic as this one gets released means that publishers have to be wary of pissing off those people. At this point, to protect themselves and their shareholders, Take Two’s choices are either change the public (not gonna happen– at least, not overnight) or change the game.
Getting back to N and S. Both companies have the “no AO” policy in place for one very simple reason, completely unrelated to violence: porn games. Japan is a seriously messed up place at times, and porn games are a not-overlookable chunk of the market. And let’s face it, puritanism is not a strictly American trait; other countries are just as capable of being as morally uptight as we are. Nintendo’s early runaway success in the US came from their original plan of being the Disney of video games– family-friendly and beyond almost all moral reproach. As time wears on, however, moral stances shift and change– look at Disney itself, whose animated features are gravitating out of the G-rated range after decades! Nintendo, and by association Sony, need to keep AO games off their consoles to avoid scuttling their “games aren’t all bad” platform. In this day and age where even one innocent mistake can seriously annihilate all the good you’ve done (right, Howard Dean?), the companies need to have a zero-tolerance policy towards anything that could jeopardize that position. After all, if Nintendo and Sony make an exception for the violence-oriented Manhunt 2, what’s stopping, say, Hustler’s new media division from pressuring the companies into licensing a sex-oriented game? (And before anyone gets up in my grill over that, I have no problems with a sexually-explicit game that’s marketed and labeled properly. My position wouldn’t change if it were, in fact, a sex game under fire, but neither would I be harsher on it.) Allow one AO game, and the floodgates open. Microsoft is in a similar position, but they have never explicitly said “no AO”.
In his column on Joystiq, Dennis McCauley laid the accusation that Nintendo and Sony were “two-faced” for sticking to their “no AO” policy, adding that the decision was malicious, “as if the system makers had no clue until Tuesday as to what Manhunt 2 was all about”. This is patently false and pure FUD. Nintendo and Sony, and to a lesser extent Microsoft and the ESRB, knew full well what Take Two and Rockstar were birthing with the Manhunt 2 project. You would have to be a monumental idiot to hear the hype and see the preview shots and think that the game was not going to be violent. What killed the deal was that nobody save T2 and R* could have predicted just how far over the line the game went. When the extent of the game’s vault over said line was revealed, the reactions were exactly as warranted.
Comments on that column varied from a tacit acceptance of McCauley’s valid points to flamewars regarding a perceived crackdown by the “Jesus freaks” who want to “tell us what we can and can’t play”. I’m actually extremely disappointed in the gaming community’s complete and total refusal to accept that this is not an act of censorship by the government. Sony and Nintendo are not saying, “Take Two, stop making Manhunt 2″. They are saying, “We will not license this game for our systems because it will hurt our image more than it will help.” It’s not about protecting you from what ‘they’ don’t want you to play. It’s about protecting themselves from the “Jesus freaks and old grannies” who would love nothing more than to see all video gaming ended.
I’m not saying that Manhunt 2 should not be made. As a society we need to push the envelope; we need to explore our boundaries and to question our morals once in a while. I’m very, very disappointed that Take Two has opted to shelve the game for the time being.
The refusal of classification by the Australian OFLC, the German USK, the Irish IFCO, and the British BBFC, along with the AO rating granted by the American ESRB, may have been completely warranted. I would lay a good chunk of my Rabbit down-payment savings on the fact that Take Two’s prior history made each and every one of those organizations go through every frame of the game with a fine-toothed comb. However, there is one possibility that has to be mentioned. What if Take Two and Rockstar deliberately sent an ultraviolent version of the game to these agencies with the intent of producing just such a sequence of results? Undoubtedly awareness of the game within the gamer community has gone through the roof, and I certainly would not put it past T2 to pull such a stunt. It would be free publicity, especially if the game was still lagging in development. Create a fake “controversy” that required the game to be “retooled”, which buys you more time to actually finish the game according to its relatively tamer original plan. Bonus: drooling Rockstar fanboys line up in droves to pre-order the game “to show support”. You might as well just go ahead and buy that money printer.
Yeah, it’s a conspiracy theory. Sue me; I’m a fiction writer, I (ostensibly) get paid to think up crazy stuff like this. The fact remains that it’s not outside of the realm of possibility. More importantly, it allows for the potentiality that the ESRB et al are finally doing their jobs.
Let me restate that. The ESRB is working as designed in this case. You and I haven’t seen the cut of the game delivered to the ratings boards. One Joystiq commenter said, “Maybe Manhunt 2 really does deserve the rating.” Even He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named gave the ESRB the thumbs up in this instance– probably the first, last, and only time I will ever agree with ol’ Flash Thompson. Did JT “win”, as some overzealous gamers have lamented? No, he did not, unless standing on the sidelines and having no effect whatsoever on the process could put him in the purported ‘game’ enough to “win”. He didn’t “win” any more than I “won”, because neither of us had any role to play in the process. Neither did the ESRB ‘force’ the game to be banned or dropped from retail; admittedly they knew that an AO rating would be undesirable but that must bear no importance in the consideration of the content nor the actual issuance of the rating. Of course, the only way that we can be certain is for transparency in the ESRB process; we need to see the materials that were provided to the ESRB and the full report on their findings. If we’re going to give the ESRB the same respect that we give the MPAA (with regards to ratings, at least), then we should hold it to the same level of transparency in its activities.
What will happen to the title now? Take Two would be insane to scrap the project completely at this point; they would be laying all their eggs in the GTA4 basket, and as powerful as that franchise is, I know they won’t be keen on doing that. Most likely the game will be edited down to a “barely under AO” M and released, probably in early 2008. One way or another we’re not going to see it until after Grand Theft Auto 4.
My point– and I do have one– is simple. This is nothing more than complete and total business as usual. No policies have changed, no reversals of past decisions, no magical Offensiveness Fairy or Puritanism Goblin to blame here. Every system and organization that has reacted to Manhunt 2’s arrival has done so completely within their charters and their expected parameters. This is as much news as Paris Hilton belching a little too loudly in her prison cell. In other words, there’s nothing to see here– yet.
Still, it is going to be interesting seeing what gets left in to take the game down to M level. I can just imagine the conniptions some folks will have when the game is finally released.
