There’s usually been plenty of interesting (or at least decent) character designs in Tekken series, but this time Namco fails big time. Tekken 6’s two new characters, Leo and Zafina, are both quite boring. Leo has blonde hair, red and white jacket, blue jeans… He’s a total rip-off of Rock Howard for crying out loud! And Zafina, well she’s much too plain. Dark hair and skimpy outfit, I’ve seen plenty of women like her before. Her fighting style looks like dancing but don’t we have Christie and Eddy already? There’s still demand for more dancers?
I know Namco can do interesting and unique designs, too bad those are usually Soulcalibur characters instead of Tekken. Asuka’s 2nd player outfit looks pretty cool, but I don’t really play with her. I don’t play Tekken that much to begin with, but I usually get the games anyway. Tekken 5 wasn’t enough to get me seriously into Tekken but I’m going to give Tekken 6 a try when it comes out.
Master of Epic: The Animation Age is an anime based on an online-RPG Master of Epic (MoE for short). The first thing in episode 1 were two characters who explained that MoE is an online game and so on. It’s quite fun to think that everything in this anime is part of a game. The music is similiar to what you hear in RPGs and lots of things like spells reminded me of real RPGs.
There was a handful of short stories in the first episode, mostly for introducing the characters. They were all very funny and I’m looking forward to seeing more of this anime.
We go two months back in time, to the day the mysterious transfer student, Tatsuma Hiyuu, transfers to Magami High School. I wonder why every time there’s a transfer student in anime or manga, all the other students are making a fuss about it. When I still went to comprehensive school there was a few times when new students transferred to my class. I’m not the kind of person to get excited about new people and I don’t remember any of my class mates making a big number about transfer students. None of this has anything to do with Majin Gakuen…
Anyways, in this episode there’s more action and even more confusion than in the first episode. Also the opening and the ending theme were played for the first time. I like the opening theme but the ending theme is not that interesting. They’re both played by some band called ACID of which I’ve never heard of before.
I’m probably not going to write about every single episode from now on, but I’ll write an overview of the series when it’s over.
Touhou Tsuki Tourou is the 3rd album of arranged Touhou music published by IOSYS. The songs were originally composed by ZUN for various Touhou danmaku games and they’ve been arranged by a handful of different artists for this album.
Unlike two previous albums, Touhou Tsuki Tourou is an album entirely made of songs with vocals. It’s not like the previous two didn’t have many tracks including vocals, but this time every track has been sung. I think this is what makes this the most solid of IOSYS’s Touhou albums so far. I don’t know any of the singers, but most of them do an excellent job on this album.
Majority of this album is pretty great stuff, but a few of the latter tracks weren’t as good as the earlier ones. Doesn’t really matter as there’s way more good tracks than not-so-good tracks. The genre of the songs is mostly J-Pop, but there’s some more rocky ones and a few balladish songs too. If you liked the previous Touhou albums by IOSYS or Touhou music in general, you should definitely check this one out as well.
Here’s a flash movie made for promoting this album. Not exactly my favourite song on this album but one of the best none the less.
This anime seems to be about some students who hunt monsters that can turn people into zombie-like creatures. The character designs are pretty cool and the monsters were well designed as well. There wasn’t much action in the first episode, but most of it was quite well animated and interesting. Most of this episode was used to introduce the characters and the setting so I can’t really say much about the story. Things were pretty confusing at some points but this is one anime I’m definitely going to keep watching. Looks very promising.
The official website
Also known as Strawberry Marshmallow, I refer to it with it’s original Japanese title in this review. It’s not that new release or anything, I just bought it and I wanna write a review about it.
Ichigo Mashimaro is a slice-of-life/comedy manga drawn and written by Barasui. It’s been made into an anime as well, thus some might already be familiar with the series. The manga actually starts out as quite so-so. The artwork isn’t that great and the stories are not always very funny. But it gets much better later, trust me. You can really see how much Barasui improves his style between the chapters. In latter volumes his art doesn’t change that much from what it was at the end of the first volume but I think his stories get a lot better in latter volumes.
Tokyopop’s translation is something I have a lot to say about. While the content of the dialogue is well translated, all the honorifics have been omited, which left me with mixed emotions. Instead of calling Nobue onee-chan or Nobu-nee she is either just called Nobue or Noby. Matsuri is either called by her first name or Mats instead of being called Matsuri-chan. Ichigo Mashimaro is extremely cute manga and it just doesn’t sound so cute without the -chan suffixs. Mayby I’ve been reading too much stuff by Del Rey, who always keep the honorifics and stuff, but this just sounds all wrong. You can’t take honorifics away and replace them with some bad nicknames and think it still sounds cute. It just doesn’t work that way. And I really wish that Tokyopop would translate the sound effects. Also the first four pages which were full-colour in the original Japanese version are black and white in Tokyopop’s version. I really wished they’d been in colour but I was expecting it to turn out like this.
To sum it all up, I still think that this release is worth buying. Hard-core manga fans like me are gonna notice the missing honorifics and those who are more familiar with this particular manga will sulk about the coloured pages being printed in black and white, but none of this changes the contents. It’s still very funny and cute manga and people who are into such stuff will like it. I still haven’t bought the second volume but I suppose that I will get it sometime soon. The third one isn’t out yet but I suppose it’ll be on sale in few months.
The arcade scene in Finland is weak. Really weak. In smaller cities there’s hardly any arcade games. Where I live there’s two or three machines. In Helsinki (the capital of Finland) there’s a couple of small arcades with 5-10 games each. I passed by one today and checked if they had gotten any new games. They had Metal Slug 5! I played it for some time but I was outta coins and couldn’t pay for more than three credits. It was really a lot of fun for the time it lasted.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen a 2D shooter in a Finnish arcade. For some reason both shoot ‘em ups and fighting games are rare here. There’s always plenty of driving games (in some arcades half of their games are driving games), few pinballs and dancing games in some places. Having Metal Slug 5 is definitely an improvement but I think there’s still plenty to do to make the arcades enjoyable for a bigger group of people. Then again, fighting game maniacs like me probably represent the minority of people who play arcade games. That’s a shame.
Posted by Kunimura 
Posted by Kunimura 
Posted by Kunimura 
