Letters from the New York Otaku A "what the hell are those American anime fans on about" column at a Japanese industry site. Every weekday because I CRAZY
Again, I usually keep stuff like this to the Twitter. But this show is way too important. Ladies and gentlemen, I present Japanese Cartoon of the Century:
Not a particularly exciting trailer on its own merits, but at the same time if you're not pumped about this show you're wrong. Giant Robo's Yasuhiro Imagawa directs, which, for any of you who have seen Giant Robo, pretty much sells the show by itself. The theme song is a cover of Kanjite Knight by Hironobu Kageyama's old band Lazy. The original band are reuniting for this, along with recordings of the members who've passed away, two guys I don't know anything about, and the rest of JAM Project: the resulting combination is "ULTIMATE LAZY for MAZINGER". Plus I hear Groizer X is gonna be in this shit! Can you really afford not to get hype?
Super Robot Wars Z has been out for a little while, and I can't afford to buy it or anything, but you only need to look at Youtube for proof of its brilliance. Original Generations had really amazing sprite animation, but SRW Z has boiling, raging blood that demands it push forward and go beyond: a lot of these battle scenes break past the sidescrolling videogamey look into outright recreations of the source material.
IT'S GRAND FINALE!
By contrast to those last two, you'll note that the battle scenes for the classic Dynamic Pro robot shows like this Getter Robo G scene take great pains to replicate the 70's Toei animation look, down to the Go Nagai shading and the famously choppy explosion animation that would be parodied for years and years to come. The Final Dynamic Special this time around is awe-inspiring, but I won't go spoiling that for you.
Meanwhile, the Banpresto originals-- those ultra-modern, ultra-excessive mechanical designs I came to love in the OG games-- are not being skimped on. Not even their theme songs. Though you could say Gunleon is a lot like Gaogaigar. Except with a wrench instead of a hammer. But otherwise they're pretty close!
The really good, mainline SRW games are labors of love, and if this game were just a compilation of battle scenes, it would still be soaked in love all the way through. Never mind that you can actually play a videogame on this thing, too! I sure wish I could justify the $80 that it costs to myself, but until then, I'm going to listen to the new JAM Project theme song while I wait for my copy of the single to come in. I can wait on buying SRW, but I can't wait on buying JAM.
I want all of you to watch this journey into the mind of a special young gentleman. Hi! He's Michael! This is good work. It could probably stand to be tightened up, though: a couple of parts drag on without jokes (I guess in the name of authenticity?), and the gag distribution is a little uneven. I'm thinking it should be three to five minutes, ideally. But then the dude pops up and says "YOU'RE THE BEST!" and it's all worth it! It also totally needs more of those side shots where the dude turns his head. Those make me laugh my ass off.
Still, this is a pretty class idea, and I am watching the video responses eagerly. The one that's already been posted is magnificent. Semper waifu.
What I love about this is that everybody does exactly the wrong thing. I have supplied the original opening for comparison purposes, but I can't find the one with the original Japanese text on Youtube at all. Forgive.
This is totally relevant. Fast-forward to two minutes and bear with me here. Once a wise man said to me that like God, moe is unknowable, and I guess that's why a chick who stares wide-eyed into a camera can become an e-celebrity. I just see an unusually focused stare, you know, and get a weird living-doll vibe, but obviously somebody out there in the rest of the world is seeing something transcendent. Like The Glow.
This video was shown to me a couple of days ago, and I realized I do see something moe here. It's teeth. Look at how Magibon covers her mouth. Then catch a couple of glimpses of her teeth. See? This girl's teeth are the clearly bane of her existence, her fatal flaw. It makes so much sense!
If you want to do a moe character right, you have to put something like that in there. If you're feeling lazy you can just make it so that they die at the end, but you can always make her a ghost, or uncomfortable with her body, or terminally ill, or be upsettingly clingy due to a lack of self-esteem and a fear of abandonment, or biologically incapable of existing in the same universe as the protagonist, or maybe her android expiration date is in a couple of years or something. Something about love or something about death. Or you can combine factors like they did in Welcome to the NHK. As such, I do honorably pronounce that bad teeth are a little moe. Jeez, this is all so negative. Is moe so condescending?
Anyway, according to the comments, this show fixed her teeth so it's right on back to non-moe, far as I'm concerned. Even moe is fleeting!
If you're not a pussy, that is! Give that video some time to load: it's apparently so high-quality that it breaks Youtube's face.
I bought myself Wounded Man for Valentine's Day, because it's not really love unless God's Pornographic X-Rated Film has you and your girlfriend locked up in a cell together because you love her too much to let GPX make a movie where you fuck a tennis player, and they've shut off the water so you have to drink each other's piss so that you don't die of thirst. People like to bitch about their miserable states of being on Valentine's Day but if you ask me, them's some real problems.
It's a lazy Sunday afternoon, so why not sit down and watch an old video promo/strategy guide for Virtua Fighter 2? It's got funky AM2 music, awesome English, super techniques, and if you're not careful, you might just learn something. Five ten-minute parts here, and I've only embedded the first, so be sure to click and check out the rest of it too.
