review – Page 8

May 29, 2015

Four ways to forgiveness

There’s no two ways about this: Spirit Circle is a damn good manga. Unfortunately, it’s rather hard to discover this for yourself, as all the synopses I’ve read make it sound incoherent or unremarkable. Take this one, for example:

Fuuta Okeya is a normal 14-year-old boy, except for the fact that he has the ability to see ghosts. A cute girl transfers into his class one day, but acts particularly aggressive towards him. This girl called Kouko Ishigami is followed around by a ghost called East. Fuuta tries to get along with her but ends up failing after she sees the birthmark he usually keeps covered. She then declares him as her enemy, his birthmark as a cursed brand and claims they have a long history, while talking about reincarnation. Who is this girl and how are they connected?

“Oh, it’s another high school story,” you might think. “Is it like Bleach? I’m guessing from the art it’s a comedy-romance and the reincarnation angle is the only unique thing about it. Oh well, high school comedy-romances are a dime a dozen.”

Hell no. I would never have tried this manga out if I hadn’t known it was written by the same person as the one behind Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer, but I’m glad I did. I think I have enough samples of his writing now to say without hesitation that Satoshi Mizukami knows how to write a moving story.

Basically, Spirit Circle is about the dispute between a boy and a girl that stretches backward and forward to the past and the future and back again, through different reincarnations and universes. In the present day, the boy searches through his past lives to find the reason for the girl’s animosity, while in each life the two fight and try to find a way to stop fighting.

Don’t get me wrong, this manga is definitely funny. There actually is comedy and romance in this series. But each reincarnation of the two rivals lives rich and full lives with their share of tragedy and suffering and peace and joy. Some heavy shit goes down, and not in just the past lives of the two.

The series is available on Crunchyroll’s online manga service. I do have to mention that I read it on my tablet and the app has the annoying tendency to occasionally show me a page that I’d already read. If that happens to you, I recommend exiting the manga and entering it again; that should make the proper page show up.

I’ve found Crunchyroll’s online manga offerings to be rather sparse in number and in quality. One might call it hit-or-miss but in my case I’ve found more misses than hits. This manga, though, is definitely one of the good ones. It’s also being simultaneously published, which means that it’s still not finished. However, from the way the story is going I think it’s almost done. If it sticks the landing then it’s going into my list of favourite series.

May 25, 2015

Go, go, Power Rangers

Despite never having read the manga, I’m sure you already know the story of Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer. Briefly, the protagonist is awakened to his destiny by an animal guide and told to find his reincarnated teammates to fight an evil sorcerer bent on destruction.

It’s been done and redone by series as diverse as Sailor Moon and god knows how many tokusatsu shows (i.e., Power Rangers type shows). So you can kind of guess where the story is supposed to go, but it keeps going the opposite way. The series even gets meta with the characters watching a magical girl anime and snarking about the cliches to be found in the destined hero narratives that their own story deconstructs.

A woman cheerfully being recruited in her bedroom by a talking snake

This is a joyfully clever comic, and in small ways and large ways – like in this scene – it keeps pulling the rug out from under you. I’d be more specific but I don’t want to take away from the enjoyment of anyone who wants to try this manga out. Read it already, people.

April 30, 2015

Back to the future

Screenshot of fake Amiga-style computer GUI circa 1988

I just finished Christine Love’s game Digital: A Love Story and now I just want to proclaim my enjoyment for that particular visual novel. The game and its interface are set up to look like a computer system from 1988, which initially made me think it was a hacking simulator like Uplink. However, the game itself is quite small and, mechanically speaking, is not much more complicated than a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Savvy players could probably beat the game over one weekend. It’s essentially a game of clicking a succession of different buttons on the screen.

Like the Choose Your Own Adventure books, the appeal of this game is not in the gameplay but in revelling in the aesthetic presentation. I never thought I’d feel nostalgic for the whine and screech of a modem connecting to another system, yet here I am in the 21st century deliberately seeking out such a thing. This is a cute little game that could and I’m glad Christine Love was seemingly able to follow it up with commercially-successful titles.

I’m certainly looking forward to playing more of Love’s work. You can even see for yourself if her stuff is for you without incurring even the most minimal financial cost – the game is free to download from Love’s website. If anything I wrote here even mildly piqued your curiosity then go right ahead and try the game out. I think you’ll like it.

April 25, 2015

Wake me up inside

I was sick a few weekends ago so I watched all of Daredevil in one day. I’m not a huge fan of DD but I’ve read a bunch of the comics and I have to state that the show somehow translated the sensibility of the comics to TV. The consequences of living in a world with superheroes is an unspoken concern for the show and for its characters. It’s not quite The Authority in questioning the ability of weirdos in circus costumes to enact positive social changes through fisticuffs, but at times the show kind of hinted in that direction.

I was somewhat surprised at the very oblique appearance of mystical Oriental hoodoo. I’d thought that the show was going to be completely grounded in the street level stuff and would be just about DD versus the Kingpin. By the way, Wilson Fisk is never called Kingpin in the show, nor is Leland Owlsley ever referred to as The Owl. Anyway, I assume that this Orientalism is for setting up the Iron Fist kung fu show that’s coming later. Perhaps we’ll soon see the Seven Capital Cities of Heaven.

Finally, I have to wonder just how much Marvel’s New York is like the one of our world. The battle in the Avengers couldn’t have turned present-day Clinton to this show’s Hell’s Kitchen no matter how badly the reconstruction was mismanaged. The widespread police corruption, at the very least, couldn’t have happened in just a couple of years (one of the cops says 18 months). The only explanation I can come up with is that Fisk was already entwined in the fabric of the city long before aliens invaded.

Anyway, I did like the show. I almost never binge watch, so when I do, it’s because a show is exactly on my wavelength. If this is what Netflix’s Daredevil is like, then I’m looking forward to the rest of the superhero shows that are coming. Personally, it’s Jessica Jones that I’m most interested in.

March 9, 2015

The festival of dolls

Hinamatsuri is a manga about a powerful young psychic who’s adopted by a yakuza gang member. You might think it’s an action series fill of violent battles, secret conspiracies, and barely disguised metaphors comparing child soldiers to the academic pressure placed on modern Japanese kids. However, it’s actually a comedy about the daily nothings in the lives of a group of slackers and screw-ups.

The main character mostly eats, sleeps, and watches TV, while she uses her powers to move her video game controller so she can keep her hands free for eating potato chips. Of the people sent to capture her, one ends up homeless and sleeping in the park, while the other almost starves to death in a crappy apartment because she ran out of money. Her adoptive yakuza father accidentally gets her to attack a rival gang, but otherwise the most he’s done to exploit her is to use her existence to elicit a sympathy date from a woman he was pursuing.

Wisely, the author knows how superb the side characters are and does not hesitate to shift focus to them. Over time the series becomes more of an ensemble comedy. For instance, there’s a running gag about the protagonist’s 13 year old classmate that begins with her accidentally getting a job as a bartender and slowly builds up over time, culminating in the classmate being trained as a sniper at a Special Forces boot camp.

Continue reading “The festival of dolls”

March 7, 2015

April showers and May flowers

I just watched all the episodes of Your Lie In April that have been broadcast so far. I rather liked this teen-romance-between-classical-musicians thing. At first I was afraid it would be too much like Nodame Cantabile, where a free-spirited pianist slowly teaches her fellow student how to appreciate music again, but this show is different enough to be interesting on its own (nice shout-out to Nodame, by the way). Anyway, I don’t really have a review so much as a bunch of scattered thoughts.

First, there’s a lot of crying on this show. Do classical musicians cry this much in real life?

Second, I had no idea that Peanuts was that widely read in Japan. Teenagers can actually quote Charlie Brown out of the blue without having to explain where the line is from? Although “I’m not always going to be around to help you” sounds more ominous in the show.

Third, I think the book that the protagonist is reading in one of the early episodes is The Little Prince. The illustration on the cover looks familiar.

And fourth, I can’t tell the difference between a good or bad performance in classical music. Well, maybe if something was egregiously terrible and dissonant, but otherwise I have no idea what the characters mean when they say one rendition is rough and another is full of honest yearning. This reaction is to be expected, of course, since classical music is an elite pastime specifically meant to exclude those without the proper background, but what that means is that I’m watching the show for the characters instead of the music. I do kind of want to take up piano again, though.

Addendum: Based on further research (i.e., asking people who can read Japanese) the book in question is actually The Genius Liar by Ulf Stark.

March 1, 2015

The gray world

I’m currently reading Ran and the Gray World, which is a manga about a girl growing up in a family of sorcerers. It’s a whimsical and beautiful magical realist story, like one of the more child-oriented Hayao Miyazaki films. The manga contains scenes of childlike exuberance on the one hand, and scenes of terror and crushing sorrow on the other, but the tone never feels dissonant. Describing more of the plot would make the story sound nonsensical – like I said, it’s magical realist – but it does hold together with its own internal logic.

I think the series does a good job of showing how kids can handle more than adults tend to give them credit for. The art is wonderful, so the manga is enjoyable just on the visual level, but I do like how well it shows the eternal resiliency of children. I can see why it’s big in Japan.

February 2, 2015

Would you like to play a game?

Well, I finally finished Mass Effect 3. After all this time, I’m done.

I liked the Citadel DLC. It’s really big and it’s nice that the stakes are much lower. I also liked the combat simulator, it’s a lot more fun than the Pinnacle station from the first game. Plus I got to play with Zaeed again, who I sorely missed in the regular game. It was nice to see him, Javik, Wrex, and Grunt all hanging out shooting up empty beer bottles. I thought at first they were playing “cuckoo”, which was said to be a game played by bored Russian officers from the tsarist era – basically you turn off off the lights, hide behind furniture, then shoot at anyone who shouts “cuckoo”.

And let me just say that Kai Leng’s stupid ponytail and black trench coat annoyed the hell out of me. All he needs are sunglasses to complete the Matrix douchebag look. He’s like a prepubescent child’s vision of “awesome badass”. I enjoyed shooting him in the face with my sniper rifle.

As for the infamous ending, it wasn’t as bad as the online hyperbole made it out to be, but I still found it disappointing. First, this is a video game – where is my final boss? Yeah, I killed like a dozen Banshees and Brutes while defending the missile battery but that didn’t feel like a climactic battle. There was Saren in the first game and the Human Reaper in the second, but all we got was Space Boy in this one.

Speaking of which, none of the choices he gave seemed representative of what my Shepard tried to accomplish. The Destroy ending would have been the best choice for my character, except that it kills all synthetics and there’s no way my Shep would kill EDI and her geth allies.

Anyway, I discovered there’s a fourth ending. Just like Global Thermonuclear War, you can also choose not to play, or rather, you can circle “none of the above” and shoot Space Boy in the head. He’s unaffected but he says that the cycle will play out like normal and galactic civilization ends up destroyed. In the epilogue we see the warning Liara recorded for the next cycle, then we see some future alien telling her kid tales of “The Shepard” and how they owe their lives to this person. The end. I wanted a good-ish ending, so I reloaded and went with Synthesis because what the hell, let’s just end this.

Whatever ending you choose, the setting will be irrevocably changed, which is really too bad because I like this space opera galaxy of theirs. Why did we need to be fighting genocidal robot space squids, anyway? We could have had a spy game in the style of Alpha Protocol about the secret war between the STG and the Shadow Broker or a Seven Samurai one about recruiting mercenaries to defend an outpost against Batarian slavers or one of any number of scenarios. I know there’s a Mass Effect 4 coming but I don’t know how that’s even supposed to work.

January 25, 2015October 20, 2021

Danger Zone

I’ve been sick with either a cold or a flu, so yesterday I stayed in bed and watched Point Break. It’s really a perfect Saturday afternoon movie. I’d never seen it before, but it had been on my list for a while and the other movies I had on hand seemed too deep to watch while fever-tripping (Atonement, The Sound of My Voice, and Never Let Me Go).

I’d forgotten how shitty the early 90s looked. The clothes and the boxy cars gave me a feeling of constriction and heat stroke, like I was wearing too-tight clothes in a noisy office with no air conditioning. And it’s got that L.A. River again from Terminator 2, probably one of the crappiest rivers in the world.

I do wonder how the surfing scenes were shot. It would have been hilarious if the director had used the same greenscreen trick as Elvis in Blue Hawaii, but the actors and their doubles were actually out there on the waves. And kudos to all for the sky diving scenes. They make no sense and are barely justifiable in plot terms, but they do tie in thematically to the whole “freedom” thing the surfers are into. I must mention that my only exposure to surfer talk is from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, so it was kind of weird hearing people say “radical” with no trace of irony.

I also have to give props for how the action unfolds. The movie zips along from scene to scene with nary a slow part. The biggest negative to the movie is, once again, Keanu Reeves’ acting. I forget every time how wooden he is and am reminded whenever I see a new movie with him in it.

Overall, though, I found this movie diverting.

December 22, 2014

The end of an era

Well, Legend of Korra ended. The final finale for the fictional universe first depicted on Avatar: The Last Airbender has aired. What do I think about it?

I think it had a suitably awesome ending. No deus ex machina and an exciting use of the dubstep laser, so this is ahead of other Avatar finales.

I liked that Korra won not by beating up her enemy, but by being a better person. And let me get a hell yeah for our heroine not ending up with Mako (that was a close one) and walking off into the sunset hand in hand with her beloved.

Having said that, though, let’s not forget that another, more obscure and less noticed series ended as well. Yes, I’m talking about Argevollen.

You know, calling the finale of Argevollen good or bad implies that it could have ended any other way. I honestly don’t see how else the show could have ended and remained true to itself and its deliberately low-key approach. I mean, looked at what happened: the relationship between the two leads remains platonic, there was no giant battle, the angry rival dies in his suit without ever crossing swords with the hero, and a suicidal man gets talked down from his ledge.

It’s as if they tried to make the opposite of a typical giant robot anime. I hadn’t realized how entrenched the clichés were in this subgenre until I saw this finale. I seriously doubt Argevollen will be a big earner for its studio, considering how different it is from Valvrave and whatnot. I predict that the Blu-ray and DVD collections will end up remaindered and become collectors’ items among a very small subset of anime fans. I liked Argevollen, but I have to ask, how in the hell did this show get made in the first place?