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Man, I was worried that RightStuf's current sale on Media Blasters merchandise would fuck me over before I could get paid, but instead I'm just reminded of how far Media Blasters has fallen from the company that once licensed Rurouni Kenshin. I mean, I remember when they had the license to Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei and Squid Girl?!, everyone thought they were making a bid to be at least on par with the fragments of ADV, but that's so far from what they are now. They've transitioned almost entirely to shitty Asian and sub-Asian live-action horror, and to hear the owner talk, it pays better than anime ever did. Depressing!

 

Anyway, if you want to own Bible BlackEiken, or random volumes of Genshiken, now's definitely the time.

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Hey CrunchyCast is back which is cool 'cause I still like it. (I wish they would stop censoring their swearing though because they swear a lot and man it's annoying.)

 

Also this was said by Victoria on the latest episode: "[harem anime] is sorta like watching football".

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oh my god the king kai speech fucking killed me

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Clannad update. On the off chance someone actually cares about spoilers, I'll go ahead and spoiler this one.

 

I watched two more episodes last night and whatever momentum I thought was building pretty much fizzled out entirely. There was no cool mystery, no secret microscopic dimension where cool stuff could happen, and no secret awesome history between the main character and the genius girl. Instead, it turned out that they were friends for a bit when they were kids but went their separate ways when her parents died in a plane crash. And instead of there being other mysterious stuff about their past, it turned out that the main character had just forgotten about their friendship because it was such a small blip in his life and he moved on. And I think the microscopic dimension stuff was just a reference to the string theory research her parents were doing.

 

The mysterious man I had mentioned earlier turned out to not be mysterious at all. He just wanted to bring the genius girl her dad's briefcase that had a teddy bear in it that he had bought for her. It was kind of touching, but kind of disappointing compared to all the awesome stuff I thought was going to happen. Also, it turned out that the envelope she had burned as a kid that she was working her entire life to atone for actually just had a teddy bear catalog in it.

 

There was also a lot of gardening being done in these episodes. The genius girl ended up having a meltdown at one point and locked herself in her house and the main character responded by spending all hours of the day doing yard work at her house. Luckily, he did a really good job with all that yardwork and she eventually started going to school again and everyone ended up pretty happy. But there's still like a dozen episodes left so I have no idea where things go from here.

 

This show... is kind of great.

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Clannad update. On the off chance someone actually cares about spoilers, I'll go ahead and spoiler this one.

 

Zeus, all your posts are making me nostalgic for the period from the mid-nineties to the mid-naughties when full-cour shows were a given. There's something weirdly charming about a show that has between fourteen and eighteen episodes of material, but has to fill up twenty-odd episodes to round out the season. In comparison to the rush of the last two or three episodes in a half-cour show, I almost miss the dead zone starting after the midpoint of a full-cour show...

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Zeus, all your posts are making me nostalgic for the period from the mid-nineties to the mid-naughties when full-cour shows were a given. There's something weirdly charming about a show that has between fourteen and eighteen episodes of material, but has to fill up twenty-odd episodes to round out the season. In comparison to the rush of the last two or three episodes in a half-cour show, I almost miss the dead zone starting after the midpoint of a full-cour show...

 

Yeah, it's certainly been entertaining to watch these arcs build up, reach their conclusions, and then the next episode everyone's moved on to something else and whatever huge important thing had just happened is now something they couldn't give two shits about.

 

This show continues to not disappoint. All that stuff with the genius girl? Old news. She has apparently completely come to terms with all of her issues and there is nothing else to be said because she has faded into the background completely and maybe said a whole 3 sentences over the three episodes I watched last night. All of her personality quirks have vanished and she is a perfectly well adjusted person now because she was cured by friendship or something.

 

So now this show is suddenly a high school dating drama. It's not about Fuko the coma ghost or Kotomi, the genius girl with the tragic past; now it's about literally every single girl having a crush on the main character, Okazaki, and trying to steal all of his attention. But Okazaki's too cool and too much of a delinquent to have a girlfriend so he just dumbly goes along with whichever girl is grabbing his arm and pulling him off to wherever. One of the girls, Tomoyo, has started waking him up every morning to make sure he gets to school on time, and she's fallen in love with him. Another girl, Kyou, has been forcing him to have lunch picnics with her and her sister, Ryou, because her sister has fallen in love with him. And also, Kyou has fallen in love with him. At one point, another girl pulled out a random spell book and her and Okazaki cast a fucking spell that resulted in Okazaki getting locked in the gym alone with Kyou, where it looked like they were both about to rip their clothes off and start boning, but Okazaki was really just taking his shirt off so he could chant the counter spell to get them out of there because he didn't really want to be in that situation after all. I'm starting to wonder if between the coma ghost, the spell casting, and the genius girl's brown note-like violin playing, if this high school is actually Hogwarts.

 

But it gets even better. Somehow, in the midst of all of this, they decided that if they were going to get an advisor for their fledgling drama club, they needed to play a basketball game against the basketball club to convince the fledgling choir club to recognize their passion and consider either abandoning their ambitions for club-ship or share their advisor since he would be the only available advisor. Totally logical and it totally worked. But surprise, the student council are a bunch of assholes and won't allow it so the basketball game was in vain. 

 

Oh, and Fuko keeps randomly appearing here and there to try to defuse random conflicts and fails miserably every time. Nobody remembers her of course and nobody seems to mind that a random girl holding a giant fucking wooden star keeps materializing out of thin air right in front of them.

 

This show is the best.

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yo rokka continues to be great and fuck the haters

 

also durarara i think durarara is really great

 

also ore monogatari? longer legs than i ever expected it to have: a++++

 

also gate still hot, beautiful, seductive trash

 

also i kinda wanna drop overlord because it's not good but i still like the basic premise so i'm gonna keep watching in the hopes it goes somewhere interesting, despite not actually having much hope

 

also legend of arslan continues to be really solid, like an anime version of game of thrones, more light-hearted, more forgiving, more fun, but still has that sort of political intrigue, but you know it's still an anime so yeah anyway it's good

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So I caught up to the latest episode of School-Live! and I gotta say it's not good at all. There was some merit to the first episode, but I really think it should've just been a standalone thing. A one-off, short story deal. I think I'm going to drop it, although I don't know. It might do something clever by the end of the series? I really doubt it.

 

It doesn't help that I hate all the characters.

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I've been watching Steins;Gate, and I liked it at first, but now 20 or so episodes in, it's lost its appeal. I'm at

the part where they're undoing all the texts to prevent her from dying

and it feels like what the show is about has changed. I liked it in the beginning when it was them exploring the capabilities of their time machine, doing interesting stuff with it, and having witty banter, but now it feels like it's mostly a character drama.

With people retaining their memories whenever the plot calls for it and the whole Groundhog Day deaths thing, the time travel no longer makes sense, it's running on rules of drama rather than logic, which is so disappointing to me because it started out perfectly logical. I was getting a bit of a Primer vibe from the early episodes and boy did that lead to a letdown.


I kind of want to quit, but before I do I thought I'd ask some people who've watched it all the way through: Where does it go from there? Does it change, or am I in for more of the same (heavy character drama and time travel that doesn't make sense any more)?

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For me, the payoff in Steins;Gate was huge and I feel like in the last couple episodes, everything tied back into the events in the beginning about as perfectly as you could hope. I actually didn't care much for the show in the first 12 episodes or so but I loved everything after that and it's probably my number one favorite anime now. No guarantees that it will work for you though as I enjoyed all the stuff you aren't enjoying.

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^^I've been watching this under the recommendation of all of y'all and some other internet sources that love it and omg it's so good and I love teen romance anime so much.

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I finished Clannad. There were parts of it I didn't like that felt a little too disjointed with the rest of the story (like the Fuko arc and some of the stuff with the genius girl) but the rest of it ended up coming together pretty nicely and I'm happy with the way it concluded. I'm still having a hard time though comprehending why they threw some of that supernatural stuff into an otherwise normal story about high school students doing high school things. It just detracted too much from the main story and didn't really go anywhere or result in anything meaningful.

 

But taking the less favorable stuff out, this show managed to grab my interest with the high school drama and relationships in a way that Kids on the Slope didn't. The characters were more interesting, they acted way more mature and did less of that "I'm giving you the cold shoulder" bullshit that Kids on the Slope kept trotting out over and over, and the relationships that came about felt more natural and believable. Spoiler for the rest.

 

What really worked for me about this show is how some things worked out for the characters and some things didn't. For instance, the main character, Okazaki, did manage to realize his feelings for Nagisa and ask her out. But instead of it being a "happily ever after" kind of thing, the final episode actually showed them struggling to really connect and effectively communicate their feelings to each other. I really liked that and appreciate that their relationship was presented in a fairly realistic manner.

 

One other thing that never really got resolved was Okazaki's relationship with his father. His father was an alcoholic and compulsive gambler and throughout the entire show, Okazaki's hatred for his father continued to grow until he decided to just move out of his house and into Nagisa's house. At one point, Nagisa did make an attempt to get them to resolve their differences but it was clear that it was too late and the last thing Okazaki ended up saying to his father was "Don't drink too much.", which his dad silently acknowledged before walking away. That was actually pretty powerful for me.

 

The final episode ended up being an alternate ending where Okazaki had never started hanging out with Nagisa and instead, had been dating Tomoyo (the transfer student who beats everyone up and whose sole reason for transferring and running for class president was to preserve some cherry trees that were of personal importance to her) all along. This episode was fantastic and gave me some real actual feels. The way it played out with Okazaki breaking it off because he knew he would squander all of her potential felt believable and kind of tragic. And again, the characters being straightforward about their reasons and motivations and acting maturely about the situation gave it so much more weight than it would have had otherwise. I felt some legitimate sadness watching the subsequent scenes where Okazaki just quietly starts pulling his shit together so he can be a better person, but is obviously horribly depressed through all of it. He manages to graduate and find a shitty job at a recycling plant after some difficulty and realizes that he is never going to go anywhere or do anything and will continue to live in this town for the rest of his life. Then, when he is walking home one day on the path with the cherry trees, he runs into Tomoyo, who had been waiting for him. She had been able to fulfill her goal of saving the cherry trees and had realized that she still loved Okazaki and wouldn't be truly happy unless she was with him. His feelings were mutual and it had a happy ending. It was definitely a little cliche and hardly original but that mini arc through that episode just worked really well for me and told a satisfying love story.

 

All in all, I enjoyed this show and if you trim away some of the fat, it has a really good core. I'll be moving on to Clannad After Story next and am hopeful that they keep the focus on the things that worked for me and have zero coma ghosts.

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Since I'm finished with K-On I watched an episode of School-Live, knowing it was more that it seemed and...

 

I did not expect the main character to be in denial, when I saw the grave next to shovel girl I expected it to go in another direction, now I only have a few questions I'll hope the next episodes will answer. I assume the horticulture club is just growing food so they don't go hungry and I'm kinda positive the School Living Club and the teacher are the only ones alive.

 

What I'm really curious about is how the rest of the series will go.

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I have just finished watching two seasons of working!!! and are now a good way into the third, & I may to my surprise have very much have enjoyed the journey despite the utter lack of plot development in the first two seasons(which had been made up for by a third season which seems to be rapidly trying to tie up all the plot threads in a rapid succession)

I think this may be the case of it being exactly the sort of anime that i needed at this time I my life, a light hearted, busy, junk food anime that i could digest with very few functioning brain cells when i have been mentally exhausted

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OH GOD! THIS IS REAL! It's happening! Ore Monogatari MOOOVIE!

 

 

Do you think this guy's problems could all be solved by shaving his sideburns?

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Do you think this guy's problems could all be solved by shaving his sideburns?

I think that would create problems he doesn't have. ):<

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I'm thinking FMA:Brotherhood might be the answer to: What should I watch during Dwarf Fortress?

I think that would create problems he doesn't have. ):<

I miss your butt avatar already and I have nothing else to say... rest in pepperonis butt avatar, you were one of the good ones.

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IT WASN'T A BUTT IT WAS THIS FACE

 

U,:

 

i guess a butt is better than zeus' crying penis

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I have just finished watching two seasons of working!!! and are now a good way into the third, & I may to my surprise have very much have enjoyed the journey despite the utter lack of plot development in the first two seasons(which had been made up for by a third season which seems to be rapidly trying to tie up all the plot threads in a rapid succession)

I think this may be the case of it being exactly the sort of anime that i needed at this time I my life, a light hearted, busy, junk food anime that i could digest with very few functioning brain cells when i have been mentally exhausted

 

Yeah, I've really turned around on Working!! as a series. When it was just two seasons of pattern-holding, it was everything that I despised in gag anime, but now that it's proving itself so determined to finish up in its final season, it's going to be one of my favorites instead. Especially because the final season is so Yamada-heavy...

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All in all, I enjoyed this show and if you trim away some of the fat, it has a really good core. I'll be moving on to Clannad After Story next and am hopeful that they keep the focus on the things that worked for me and have zero coma ghosts.

 

Yes! The Tomoyo episode is a fucking heart-breaker. That and I liked her the most made her episode a real tear-jerker. God just reading your synopsis made me well up a bit. God damned that episode is excellent. Who cares if it's a tad cliche, as long as it's told well right?

 

I haven't gotten through all of after story, but I think? It resolves some things more resolutely. Also you see more of Nagisa's parents, which is a constant source of delight for me.

I have just finished watching two seasons of working!!! and are now a good way into the third, & I may to my surprise have very much have enjoyed the journey despite the utter lack of plot development in the first two seasons(which had been made up for by a third season which seems to be rapidly trying to tie up all the plot threads in a rapid succession)

I think this may be the case of it being exactly the sort of anime that i needed at this time I my life, a light hearted, busy, junk food anime that i could digest with very few functioning brain cells when i have been mentally exhausted

 

Yeah, working is fantastic. I'm loving every episode in season 3. I also feel so sorry for popula. She's kinda thrown by the wayside so far.

 

Also, for junk food anime, I wholeheartedly recommend Himouto Umaru-chan! It's the kinda cute comedy anime fluff that's so enjoyable to watch, and I seem to just want to eat up. It's really similar to Denki-gai, I think. Here is an adorable gif of the show to make you interested:

 

d202fdd440425029028aeffca320aedd5b0836e0

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Hokuto no Ken 2 - Yeah, I decided for some reason to watch this and still good in a way only Hokuto no Ken can be and that I mean really goofy and old and awesome at the same time, after all what you can say about a anime  that part of the lyrics of the opening is - "we are livin´ in the nineties, we still fightin´ in the nineties", I often don´t like post apocaliptic worlds, but I can get around in HNK, given how crazy and colorful it is. One of my frustrations while playing Fallout 3 is that I couldn´t, even with mods, play a Kenshiro like character...

 

 

Idolmaster Cinderella Girls - I am enjoying this a lot, it is nothing that special, but it is good. While my favorite characters are Ranko, Rin, Mio, Uzuki and Anastasia, the later chapters did helped flash out bit more the rest of the cast. It allways crack me up how the Producer look like a out of place Fate Stay Night character, I mean he looks like a cross over between Kiritsugu Emiya, Caster master (Souichirou) and Kirei Kotomine. 

 

Since you are talking about Clannad, I have to confess, the first time I heard the ending song, it bring tears to my eyes. The VN and the anime are really good.

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Oh man, I started Clannad After Story and right out of the gate it produced tears... of laughter. Nagisa's father decided he wanted to put a ragtag baseball team together to compete against a rival shop and one of the players they managed to recruit was a guy named Yoshino who was apparently really popular and someone a lot of them looked up to. It took a little convincing to get him to join but he obviously knew that people looked up to him because his first at-bat resulted in this:

 

 

Then his second at-bat:

 

 

I just love that everyone else is more or less playing it straight and trying to do well and this guy is just absolutely obsessed with living up to his role model status and making sure that he creates these "lasting memories" for all the people that look up to him. Just awesome.

 

But episode 2 started getting a little weird. Nagisa's mom is pretending to be Sunohara's (Okazaki's delinquent douchebag friend) girlfriend to help encourage him to get his life on track. But Sunohara thinks that she is actually Nagisa's sister and they are all fully aware of this and playing along anyways. Please don't let this go to a dark and gross place.

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I've been watching Steins;Gate, and I liked it at first, but now 20 or so episodes in, it's lost its appeal. I'm at

the part where they're undoing all the texts to prevent her from dying

and it feels like what the show is about has changed. I liked it in the beginning when it was them exploring the capabilities of their time machine, doing interesting stuff with it, and having witty banter, but now it feels like it's mostly a character drama.

With people retaining their memories whenever the plot calls for it and the whole Groundhog Day deaths thing, the time travel no longer makes sense, it's running on rules of drama rather than logic, which is so disappointing to me because it started out perfectly logical. I was getting a bit of a Primer vibe from the early episodes and boy did that lead to a letdown.

I kind of want to quit, but before I do I thought I'd ask some people who've watched it all the way through: Where does it go from there? Does it change, or am I in for more of the same (heavy character drama and time travel that doesn't make sense any more)?

 

I realized I was only four episodes from the end and decided to finish it. Huge disappointment. I wanted it to be the Primer-esque exploratory sci-fi the first half leaned towards, not the character-piece-oh-and-also-there's-time-travel-incidentally that it turned into.

I'm mystified by the total change of direction it underwent. If it weren't for

the video he receives at the beginning

suggesting the writers planned the whole thing, I'd think they were making it up as they went along.

Spoilered question about one of the plot's loose ends:

So the first time he sends a D-mail, the streets suddenly become deserted. Is that just some unexplained time magic? I get that he shifted to a different worldline, but it's not like the new worldline is one where the streets of Akihabra have been evacuated.

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