Her direction is natural, intimate, soft, gentle and sweet like a hand cradling your chin. She makes you feel like you are physically sharing the same space as the characters. It’s no surprise that her works have forged some pretty intense connections with their viewers.
"...what I truly love about Sega’s arcade games is that they have always pursued a kind of magical realism. They’re obsessively detailed... but they aren’t actual simulations of real life. They’re exaggerations of it. That’s where you find the magic."
After Thanksgiving this year I got pretty sick. On the one hand it was a pretty nasty cold, and the cough didn’t completely leave after two weeks. (After that, family emergency followed, wiping my December clean.) On the other, I had just purchased a brand new gaming PC, and
I’m seeing a lot of people in the fighting game community get curious about Virtua Fighter 5 now that it finally has decent netplay coming via the re-release VF5: R.E.V.O., and I’m really happy to see it! Virtua Fighter 4 and 5 were games ahead
We can say that an anime is officially “for old people”– or, charitably, "a nostalgia title"– when it gets the pachinko/slot treatment. Incidentally, there are two different Code Geass slots on Gapoli.
Before I go any further I need to explain the weird, fascinating legalized prize-room gambling going on in this app.
(This will contain spoilers for the now over 40-year-old original Gundam films. These plot points are so old and so well-known that even if you haven’t seen Mobile Suit Gundam, you’ve probably seen an anime that’s made a joke about them. Giving you a spoiler warning for
I saw a major Japanese idol group a few years ago. I won’t say who because I don’t want their fans to read this and take it the wrong way. That’s how idol stuff is, I’ve learned. There’s a reason for that word, “idol”, and
"For example, the game gates progress with gear that only stays equipped for one dungeon and which costs medals to use: how interesting, you know what we call that? An ante!"
(This ran quite long so I decided to split it into two pieces: one is a general introduction to the concept, and the other is about the various bingo games I played.) Recently I got hooked on watching a Youtuber play various Japanese medal games— fake money gambling games with
If you want to get better at riichi mahjong, studying and evaluating one’s own games is a must. A major part of sharpening your technique is looking at your own decisions honestly, asking yourself “why did I do that?”, and using that information to correct bad habits. Lately, a
I came to the Kimagure Orange Road movie as part of an ongoing discussion between myself and other otaku friends who are likely reading this. Drawn in by the virtuosic opening sequences and Akemi Takada’s drawings of the heroine, I watched about 13 episodes of the TV series before
(I've got hardly any photos of interest from Sunday, so I'm going to continue to use Saturday shots, and use this space to show the cool cosplays that I didn't have room to put into prior reports.) You partied hard on Saturday and you
Friday was quite a night and I was really in no hurry to wake up the next morning. I don’t think I was at the convention center and about until about 11 or so. From there we hit the artists’ alley for quite a long time, because… Saturday is
(When I wrote this I realized I had written thousands of words more than I expected; if you're wondering where I've been for a couple weeks it's been this. Breaking this up into pieces was the only way to make this not just a
The dealer's room hasn't significantly changed in the last few years, and as such I already know who my dealers are. They’re Discotek for their best-in-class blu-rays of classic anime, and Retro Saikou for their affordable, well-curated random treasures from across the years. These are
At the start of the convention proper… I slept a little more. I always think I'm gonna be up at 9 to check out fan panels and stuff, and I have been in the past. But y'know lately I have a couple drinks and watch videos
(Due to the sheer unexpected length of this convention report, I will be posting it in multiple parts, with some of those parts paywalled to subscribers. Barring any hiccups, this should come out daily on weekdays. I'm posting the first one on a Friday because I think my
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In this video you can see what Arc has in mind for the 3v3 mode, ideally. It’s not what happens when you play it for the very first time with a bunch of randos. The other weekend Arc System Works beta tested a new 6-player, 3vs3 game mode in
The first event of Train to the End of The World is the activation of 7G internet exploding the world. Things get significantly weirder from there. Train to the End of the World is a mellow travelogue in a comical, surreal post-apocalypse, like if the Yurucamp girls were trapped in
Now I wasn’t at Evo– for those of you not in the know, the biggest fighting game tournament in the world and something of a Super Bowl/Anime Expo at the same time for our subculture— but I did spend my entire weekend holed up watching the tournament final
Nothing has ever burned out my brain quite like playing competitive riichi mahjong. To play the game at a high level in person (as opposed to in an online game), you need to maintain a state of intense concentration for a long, sustained period. You’re not just struggling to
anime
"(Oshii's) thinking about everything we make... human attempts to build a purer, better form of ourselves without all the original sin. Something innocent."
Nobody likes battle passes, but they’re tremendously psychologically effective. Players in a battle pass game are dished out a cookie-crumb trail of little tiny in-game prizes the more they play the game. The “premium”, as in paid, battle pass hits players with FOMO over some attractive grand prize; if