Super Spong Brothers

Uta∽Kata To Be Released In North America

2010-08-17T22:08:33Z

The day that I thought would never arrive has arrived.

Uta∽Kata, an anime series that I consider to be the one of the greatest ever made – second only to Giant Robo The Animation, in fact – is to be released this November on DVD with full English subtitles. This release is being handled by Section 23 and Sentai Filmworks, who, along with their collective predecessor, ADV Films, have produced some of the best English-language anime releases in North America and the UK, and I can think of no company that I would rather have produce an English adaptation; I’m sure that they’ll do a worthy and respectful job.

Instead of explaining the series, I’m just going to copy×paste the synopsis from the press release. It’s a better description than I could ever give.

“Before you make a deal with a girl in a mirror, reflect seriously on the source of the offer. Ichika Tachibana fails to take this advice in order to retrieve a lost charm, and as a result suddenly ends up with the magical forces of a Djinn at her command. Sounds like a good deal, right? Wrong. At first things seem wondrous, with her new friend Manatsu assisting her via text messages and the occasional spell; but as her powers grow, Ichika’s situation quickly goes from magical to nightmarish, and she finds herself drawn into an ever expanding web of deceptions, lies and increasingly dangerous situations. For what she’s really done is subjected herself to seeing mankind as the Djinn see them. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to place a high value on human life. Not all fairy tales are for children as small charms lead to deadly conclusions in UTA-KATA- {sic} THE COMPLETE SERIES!”

I urge all of you to buy a copy. It’s a Region 1 USA-only release, so you’ll have to use a computer or a multi-region DVD player. Trust me. It’s worth it.¹

I cannot thank you enough, Sentai Filmworks. Now, if you were to release Angel Beats!, I think that I’d have to marry you. ㋼

The Super Spong Brothers would like to take this opportunity to remind you that Everything Is Subjective™.

Price Per Episode — The Great Devaluing of Anime

2010-06-24T14:10:02Z

I am angry again.

The second series of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is being released in the United States. This is a good thing. The licensees, Bandai Entertainment USA, are giving it the same care and attention that the first series received, including a proper, full-cast English translation. This is a great thing.

And the whole 14-episode series can be had for under £40.¹

This is a brilliant thing.

There are some people, however, who have chosen to throw a wobbly over this last point.

If you’ve seen the series, you’ll be familiar with the Endless Eight storyline. The characters are trapped in a time loop for eight episodes. Instead of running the same episode eight times, the producers handed the same source material to eight different teams, who each produced a similar yet slightly different episode. These were broadcast over a period of two months. Viewers complained that it was a waste of schedule. Now, people are complaining that it’s a waste of money.

I used to measure the value of anime videos in terms of “price-per-episode”: the price of the video divided by the number of standard 25-minute episodes included. Overall, this isn’t a fair measurement system — it doesn’t take into account bonus features, quality of translation or distribution medium — but for the purpose of this blog post, it’s as good an indicator as any.

So. £40 for 14 episodes. That’s about £2.85 per episode. “But Endless Eight was just the same episode over and over again,” you cry. No it wasn’t, I reply, but let’s go with it anyway. The Endless Eight are now one. £40 divided by seven episodes. £5.70 an episode. That’s not too bad, I reckon.

But it is here that we discover the problem. Apparently, £5.70 per episode is too bad.

All of a sudden, anime is just too expensive. People are up in arms about the recommended retail price of Haruhi series 2 — how DARE they charge this amount of money for this amount of content! — despite the price of anime in the UK and the USA now being cheaper than ever. It was just a few years ago, in fact, that I bought my first four-episode volume of My-HiME for £20. If people are complaining about spending more than a quid or two on a single episode, English-speaking anime fandom has surely lost its way; for years, £5 per episode was considered a fair asking price for a professionally-produced anime translation. (I’m sure that older fans will tell me how it was “even worse” in their day.)

But even that’s not enough.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I bought copies of the Magipoka boxsets. As it doesn’t have a proper English release, I had to import them from Japan.

4 episodes to a set, plus one DVD-exclusive bonus short episode each.

All together, I got about 13-or-14 episodes’ worth of content. All together, it cost me £242.70.

£242.70. That’s £18 per episode.

Let’s look at a more contemporary example. The first volume of the popular new anime series Angel Beats! just went on sale in Japan. It’s done incredibly well; even in its first day on sale, over fifteen thousand copies were sold.

The first volume contains 2 episodes and costs ¥5250. Assuming that you don’t want to splash out on limited-edition bundles or Blu-ray discs, you’re looking at £20 per episode. No translations. No bonus features beyond an equally untranslated commentary track. No frills.

Angel Beats! isn’t even that expensive. K-ON! is dearer. Haruhi Series 2 is dearer still. Don’t believe me? See for yourself.

You see, in Japan, when you buy an anime DVD for the domestic market, you’re not just paying for the right to watch a couple of episodes on your television. You’re funding the series. Next to sponsorship deals, domestic DVD sales are the main source of income for anime producers.

Some English anime consumers complain that the prices of anime DVDs should be brought in line with the average costs of locally-produced television series sets before they’d consider buying them. This point of view doesn’t take into account the fact that British and American television shows tend to be commissioned by a broadcasting corporation or suchlike, while anime producers have to pay the Japanese TV stations to get their shows on the air. It’s only through merchandise and DVD sales that the average anime series can break even, let alone make a profit.

Needless to say, with English-language anime DVD prices as cheap as they are, the anime producers themselves don’t see overseas earnings as being particularly significant. Don’t get me wrong — every officially-licenced English-langage DVD purchase results in royalties going back to the original producers — but your purchase also subsidises license costs, translation costs, marketing costs and so forth on the English-speaking side. Imagine how the revenue shares for each purchase are split. Imagine how little each party must receive.

Sadly, this undervaluing of anime is happening among the licensees themselves. Companies like FUNimation release slim boxsets for peanuts and dump anime series on their website for viewing at no charge to the consumer. While you may think that a copy of Kanon for £13.03 (54p per episode!) is a good thing, consumer demand for cheap-as-free anime will soon cause the major companies to stop making profits, declare bankruptcy and cause the Great Cheap Anime Bubble to implode spectacularly. That’s my theory, anyway.

Let’s step back and take this all into account. A 14-episode series can set you back up to £300 if you live in Japan. In North America, however, you get the same content for only £40; maybe even less. Even in the glory days of £5 an episode, you were paying 25% of the original asking price. Now the English price-per-episode is less than 15% — or, in the case of the 54p-per-episode Kanon, less than 4%² — of what a Japanese fan would pay. And that’s not even taking into account all of the lovely extra features, like, for example, a full English translation, that you don’t get in the Japanese release.

So, Haruhi fans, what’s it going to be? £320 for the regular edition of series two? £382 for the limited edition of series two? Or £40 for a special, English-language 14-episode collection with bonus features, lovingly put together by people who love the series just as much as you do?

If you’re still not convinced, I can’t force you. If you don’t think that it’s worth the asking price, don’t watch it. If you’ve got better things to spend your money on, spend your money on them instead. You don’t have to watch anime, you know. ㋼

Prices for Japanese DVDs were taken from CDJapan. XE and Wolfram|Alpha were used for currency conversion and calculation.

At time of writing, the complete series set can be pre-ordered from RightStuf for $58.74 (postage inclusive), which comes to about £39.24.
Eight Japanese DVD volumes at ¥6300 each ≈ £375. Incidentally, the Blu-ray disc edition is ¥62580, or £466.83.

MangaGamer Revisited — Oral Stage

2010-04-22T07:47:47Z

I’ve had it. I can’t take anymore.

MangaGamer, as you may know, sprung onto the scene about a year and a half ago, offering a variety of poorly-translated hentai-style novel games. You may remember that I was less than impressed at the time, but I had hope that, with time and the support of fans like me, they would improve.

They got worse.

I should point out that I have continued to support MangaGamer with my money. After Da Capo (which I played the grand total of one-and-a-half playthroughs of), I purchased Kira☆Kira (which held my interest for several sessions of several hours before I started playing something else) and Shuffle! (I only got as far as this screen before closing it in disgust). If you’ve had a conversation with me in the past few months, you can probably tell where I’m going with this post.

One of MangaGamer’s translators updated their staff blog a month or two ago, responding to concerns about their translation quality. In their words:

…we are taking much more time in editing and proofreading than we did before. Because our resources are limited right now, we are putting more emphasis where it’s needed, but changes are steadily being made.

This is all well and good, you may think. They’re clearly making an effort. Why get so upset over the odd spelling mistake here or there? While the presence of spelling mistakes in media in this day and age of digital spell checkers warrants a blog post of its own, this isn’t why I hate MangaGamer’s translations.

In order to better explain this, let’s look at a counter-example; another visual novel lucky enough to be translated into English. Ever17: [The] Out of Infinity, now sadly out of print, is a seminal title that any fan of the medium should try.

Sora is the one on the right.

Unfortunately, the English release suffers immensely from lack of quality control. Words are misspelled, dashes and other characters are replaced with question marks, some of the sentences have awkward phrasing, the English interface is inconsistent. There are parts of the script that one can tell were the victims of an overzealous find-and-replace job — it’s annoyingly obvious that the Kid was going to be called the Youth at some point in the translation process.

And yet the translation of Ever17 is far superior to any MangaGamer title.

Take another look at that screenshot. The player character, Takeshi Kuranari, is referred to by Sora as Takeshi. Not Kuranari-san. Not even just Kuranari. Takeshi. Because this is how we greet people in English. We use first names. The people translating this understood this fact. They understood that calling someone Lastname-san in this context is equivalent to calling someone by their first name in English. It’s familiarity. It’s simple. When he is called Mr. Kuranari in the script, it’s in the context that an English-speaker would refer to someone in that way. It’s natural. It never feels awkward.

MangaGamer doesn’t follow this school of thought. Instead, it leaves all of the Japanese honourifics intact. Characters are called by their last names with the suffix of -san, -kun, -chan or -whatever. Playful nicknames are left alone without explanation of why they’re playful. Characters with meaningful names are robbed of their meaning. But it’s not all doom and gloom; if ever you see a term that you don’t recognise, all that you need to do is shatter the verisimilitude and alt+tab over to the handy dandy translation notes, free with selected purchases!

It’s not just names. Occasionally, you’ll see words like, ooh, say, ‘mangaka’ (comics artist) inexplicably left to float without a life jacket in a sea of mostly English words. It’s bad enough that there are few translators out there who have the integrity to translate character names. In the context of MangaGamer, the Shuffle! translation notes have some really silly examples. ‘Sempai’. ‘Sensei’. ‘Nekomimi’. Sure, one could argue that the average Shuffle! player would already be familiar with these terms, but what’s really ridiculous about this is that some of these ‘translation notes’ just list the English word next to them. Example: “Otoh-sama: Father; Otoh-san: Dad”. See, what you’ve done there is explain that there are perfectly good English equivalents for the Japanese terms! Why didn’t you just use them? Your current method is pointless!

The defenders of this practice (yes, there are people out there who deem this to be acceptable) say that removing the honourifics also removes the mood/feel/emotion of the work, and that their inclusion helps the end user better understand the character’s relationships/motives/social standings. But it doesn’t. It really doesn’t. Here’s why.

To properly understand the significance of honourifics in the Japanese language, you have to be a Japanese person. You have to have been immersed in the language from a young age. You need experience. You need fluency. A sheet of translation notes isn’t going to help you truly understand the meaning behind these terms; you need to speak the language, meet the people, know the culture. Even if you’re a student of the Japanese language (or have watched enough subtitled anime episodes to convince yourself that you are), Japanese honourifics in an English work or an English translation are out of place. They have no context. Japanese is a highly context-sensitive language. By removing the context, you’re removing the point — the significance — of the honourifics. A visual novel isn’t a lesson in Japanese, nor (in the case of MangaGamer’s titles) should it be. Translations exist so that one doesn’t have to learn a foreign language to appreciate a work of art. Yes, there is no one correct way to translate. This, however, is an incorrect way.

Using Japanese honourifics in English translations doesn’t “make the experience more authentic” or “maintain the proper atmosphere of gameplay”. All that it shows is a lack of care, understanding and respect on the part of the translator.

In short: The problem is not the quality control (or lack thereof). It’s the translation policies that MangaGamer have put in place. No amount of proofreading can fix a broken script if you ignore the very reason that it’s broken.

But that’s not the worst part.

The worst part is that it’s not MangaGamer’s fault.

Back in 2008, a representative posted a forum poll on behalf of MangaGamer asking fans whether or not their releases should ignore Japanese honourifics.

The results were horrifying.

There aren’t that many things in this world that I care about. When it comes to politics, there’s not a lot that gets on my nerves. The results of this poll, however, make me truly angry. This poll implies that there are more people out there who would rather spend good money on an inferior product than those who favour quality, accuracy and appreciation for the work in question.

These misguided ‘fans’, desperate to protect their prized franchises from redaction, are instead pushing them towards an equally catastrophic opposite extreme.

Forget the parliamentary election. This is where we need radical change. ㋼

Planeview Bench

2010-04-17T10:18:04Z

Ever been to Kew Gardens? Lovely place. Go during the spring; it’s far too hot (or far too wet) in the summer.

Now, Kew Gardens is located just a few miles away from London Heathrow Airport. As such, aeroplanes fly over it. A lot of aeroplanes. An awful lot of aeroplanes.

One thing that sits in my mind in particular is a bench that I usually end up taking a break on whenever I visit. You get a nice view across the green with a few trees at the end. But this bench is underneath a flight path. From behind one of the trees, a plane appears. It flies towards the gardens. Before it disappears overhead, another plane ascends from the tree. Again, it flies overhead, only for another aeroplane to grow into existence. On average, I’d say that there’s a turnaround of a minute or two.

It doesn’t really annoy me; by the time that they get to Kew, the planes are high enough to make only a small amount of noise. It’s just something that I noticed.

If you’ve been following the news lately, you’ll be aware of the giant cloud of ash that’s been holding up (or, should I say, holding down) European flights. Across the United Kingdom, aeroplanes are grounded and incoming flights are forbidden. To some, this is a bad thing; many, many tourists are trapped in foreign nations, with limited means to get home. Ferries and trains have been overwhelmed. Personally, I’m just glad that we chose to visit Venice a week earlier.

But there is one party surely overjoyed by the airspace closure: people who live near airports. For the first time, people living in places like Hatton and Yeadon can leave their houses without fear of engines roaring overhead. Just this morning, the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 ran a lovely story on how beautifully quiet London is now. If I lived in Hounslow, I know that I’d be making the most of it.

So if you’re in Richmond, Twickenham or somewhere else on the Tube map with money enough to get you there and back again, get yourself down to Kew. This may be the only time in this lifetime that it’ll be aeroplane-free.

Or you could just come up here and visit Harlow Carr. Your choice. ㋼

Venish

2010-04-12T10:20:24Z

“It wasn’t as wet as I was anticipating.”

This time a few days ago, I was in Venice. (The one in Italy.)

I was told about a month earlier that I’d be taking an Easter holiday in Venice. Unlike previous Easter holidays, this excited me. Last year’s trip to Pisa was well-received, but a severely late flight on the way back was an experience that I would not want to repeat. The holiday a year prior to that took place in Amsterdam. It’s probably a lovely place if the weather’s not torrentially snowy. And if you’re a pothead.

So when I heard that we would be visiting Venice, I thought that this time we’d got it right. I only knew Pisa for its leaning tower and Amsterdam because it was a lyric in that song about a little mouse with clogs on. Venice, on the other hand, is a place that I had been made all too aware of through my exposure to anime.

I was warned before I went that it would be packed with tourists, possibly Japanese. It’s possible that Japan has some fascination with the city, but it’s likely that it’s a worldwide thing. Whether or not the Japanese in particular have a fascination with the Venetian city of Venice (it could well be universal – Brother told me that authors who have been to Venice generally write about Venice), there are several notable Japanese things with Venice in them. And while I could dedicate a blog post to the heart-wrenching, life-changing experience that is Pokémon Heroes (set in the sunny city of “Altomare” – like Venice but with Pokémon and CGI excessives), I will instead focus on Aria.

It goes like this: In a post-apocalyptic world, mankind is forced to abandon mother Earth and colonise new planets through the ~~magic~~ science of terraforming. One such planet to’ve undergone this operation is Mars (probably because it was the closest one that they could find), now renamed Aqua (presumably because it’s got water on it now). It’s important to note that this backstory is only alluded to in the show itself; Aria is actually a slice-of-life story about a group of young, modestly-attractive female gondolier operators living in the city of New Venice¹, Aqua. They live their lives. They wander the city. Sometimes they discover things. Everyone’s happy all of the time.

It’s very relaxing.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOUbZ6Aqn0g

Aria has the odd distinction of being both underexposed and overrated, but it’s by no means a bad show. Providing, of course, that you are not driven insane from the constant annoyances of the repetitive, repetitive, repetitive catchphrases (“No sappy lines allowed!” “Ehh?” “My, my! Ehehe!” AT LEAST TWICE PER EPISODE) and the awkward antics of series mascot ‘President Aria’, a disturbingly personic cat-thing that looks more like a dog-thing who spends most of his time being as “cute” as possible. It’s a jolly good thing that the rest of the show makes up for these potential blood-pressure-raising shortcomings with its gentle pacing, charming soundtrack and general lack of plot. If nothing else, Aria proves that filler is not always a bad thing.

But there is a problem. Aria is set in New Venice. Not Regular Venice. Neither is Pokémon Heroes. In fact, very few of these Venice-based fictions are actually set in Venice itself. They’re always some idyllic utopian place based on Venice, liberties taken as the story requires. In short, these stories take place in what Venice should be like.

And even though I knew all of this, I had set my expectations unreasonably high. I had managed to convince myself that Venice was a place where miracles actually happen. A soul-cleansing place of purity, untainted by the progress of humanity.

This, as you must be aware, was not the case. Rather than an escape from reality, Venice was just another facet of it. I didn’t mind so much about the thousands of tourists piled into the scaffolding-enrobed St. Mark’s Square everyday, but even the quieter residential areas recommended by the guidebook had people there. Brother said that he doesn’t like being away from humanity for too long; I’m the opposite. I suppose that complaining about the level of tourism during the first major holiday of the year is just being picky.

As it turns out, Aria is more a depiction of what Japanese life, rather than Venezian life, embodies. New Venice celebrates the same holidays as the Japanese; they have the same customs, the same expressions, the same language (although the latter’s justifiable). In the second series, they dedicated a whole episode to New Venice’s postal service (far more efficient than Italy’s postal service) that appeared to be based directly on the Japanese post office, even down to the logo. Must be great if you’re Japanese. Familiarity with Aria does not equal familiarity with Venice.

Aria aside, Venice wasn’t as wet as I was anticipating. The weather forecast predicted a wide range of rains throughout the holiday, but this didn’t happen, making the weather, at least, correlate with the more idyllic depictions of the city (if dangerously high sun levels are your idea of idyllic weather). But I pictured Venice as being almost entirely laced with canals. I imagined paths at sea level. I imagined the impossibility of getting around on foot. I imagined not being able to find a large patch of land without a significant body of water a couple of metres away. Once again, I had set my expectations too high. I found Venice to be a highly walkable city, clocking up over 30,000 steps on one day. (Step counts brought to you by the Pokéwalker device. I’m not a Pokémon fan, by the way.) After a poor night’s sleep upon arrival, I strove to thoroughly tire myself out during the day to ensure peaceful sleep on subsequent nights. I set myself the goal of walking to each “corner” of Venice, but my enthusiasm was significantly diminished after a distressing discovery in the north-west corner of the island: an industrial district complete with train station, sky shuttle and car park. Cars on Venice‽ This is madness!

I won’t say that I was disappointed. Like I said, I knew what to expect. It wasn’t the first time that I’d been to Italy. Even so, it wasn’t the same. One thing that impressed me in Pisa was the ubiquity of anime and comics. One channel (we had satellite television in the hotel) was showing GTO at 11 in the morning. If I was familiar with GTO, I’m sure that I’d've been impressed. In Venice, however, we only had analogue. (We didn’t watch much TV.) At the airport newsagents last year, I was impressed to see a wide variety of graphic novels on sale alongside the newspapers; at Venice Marco Polo’s newsagency, I was disappointed to see a much smaller selection hidden away in a corner. Okay, so maybe I was a little disappointed this year.

But I don’t regret going. Venice isn’t a magical place in either the literal or the figurative sense, but if you’ve the money (like all good tourist traps, prices are significantly higher in Venice than in Tesco) I’m not going to ruin your fun.

Just don’t expect a miracle.

Incidentally, I found out that Aria is Italian for Air. I walked past a sign that said “Air conditioning” in both languages. ㋼

The subtitles use the transliteration Neo-Venezia. The “Neo-” prefix appears to be the Japanese equivalent of the English “New” suffix, and Venezia means Venice, so New Venice is the way that it should be written. Probably. Ignore me.

Brevity One

2010-03-06T08:52:35Z

www.youtube.com/watch?v=oavMtUWDBTM

www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_6HmHcjU3k

Discuss. ㋼

The Potential Iguanodon and the Onion

2010-02-19T09:49:15Z

“ROOOOOAAAAAAAAR! I am the Potential Iguanodon!” said the Potential Iguanodon to the Onion. Such was his usual form of introduction. “Hey, Onion, I wrote another short story. Wanna read it?” This was not a so much question as it was an order.

The Onion, rightly sceptical based on the Iguanodon’s previous attempts, made a point of ignoring this. “What’s it about?”

“You’ll find out,” the Iguanodon persisted, so that the Onion was obliged to take the still-warm sheet of printer paper. The story went as follows:

“A pane of glass separates me from Them. It’s probably not enough to hold Them for long. Glass is like the heart; eventually, it will be broken. Trying hard to ignore my reflection – each time our eyes meet, I feel it judging me – I perceive in the dark of night a shape moving. A monster. Slinking along the garden path to get me, mumbling incomprehensibly to itself all the way. Cold-hearted with fear, I flick the switch for the outdoor lights. “Darn it!” I hear the monster shout, and then, remembering its status as a monster, a torrent of language inadvisable for anyone – of this world or otherwise. Noticing the rate at which it is decomposing in the light, the monster makes a hasty getaway. I will leave the lights on, I think, but watch in silent horror as the bulbs flicker and die, one by one, and the darkness outside brings back my reflection. “Darn it,” I whisper, restraining my more monster-like tendencies. My heart is a block of ice in my chest, able only to smash or melt away completely as more shapes pile into the garden. Perhaps time will stop if I grow colder and colder, freeze up through and through. It’s a case of sinking into my own darkness or theirs. The glass breaks, and so do I.”

The Onion carefully lowered the sheet to see the Iguanodon’s big toothy grin. “So, whaddaya think? Is it good? Deep, ain’t it?” The Onion had to admit, the quality of writing had improved since the days of “Tom And His Big Elephant That Wants To Be A Pilot But Couldn’t Because It’s Is Big And Was Heavy,” but still…

“There’s one thing I’ll never understand,” the Onion explained. “People like being depressed. They have this strange idea that depressing things are profound and that profound things must be, by nature, depressing. They think that, if you look hard enough, you’ll always end up sad. They think that naivety is being happy, and being happy is naive. That attitude is just lazy. It’s the easy way of getting through life. Don’t achieve anything, don’t strive for the good things in life. Just wave them away, saying they’re superficial and untrue.” She sighed deeply. “People want to be happy, right? You’ve got to look past all the sad things. Learn from them, but don’t let them crowd your vision. You have to actually try, to learn how to really see. Maybe it’s just easier for me, being an Onion.” She looked right at the Iguanodon and his beady eyes. “Let me tell you something deeply personal. When I’m older, I want to have lots of wrinkles. Deep ones, smile lines on either side of my mouth. Until then, I’ve just got to keep on smiling. I’ll be able to point to each one and say “This is from the time I saw a dog in a car smile at me,” and “This is from the time we saw that film and couldn’t stop laughing for hours,” and “This is from the time we walked through that restaurant dressed as pirates.” I’ll be able to point to each one and say “These make a life worth living.””

The Potential Iguanodon was stunned. “So… Does that mean you don’t like it?”

The Onion laughed, not at him, or with him, but for him. “You’ve got potential, I’ll tell you that. But for the moment, put those big teeth of yours to use and give me a smile.”

The Iguanodon did. “Onion? I want to have wrinkles too.”

“We’ll have wrinkles together.”

Quite forgetting about glass and monsters and the night, they both started laughing. “Whoa,” said the Iguanodon. “The sky sure is huge.”

“Yeah,” said the Onion. “I bet that if we tried hard enough, we could fall right into it.”

The Innocence of Noby Noby Boy, or Why Video Games Need to be Fun

2010-02-18T10:02:46Z

There are now two reasons to own a PlayStation 3: Noby Noby Boy and Heavy Rain.

Seeing as I’ve already spent half a post talking about the latter, it’s time to examine The Young Man of the Twin Nobs.

But first, a little personal history. It’s been about 10 years since I was given a Christmas gift of a Nintendo 64 console and a handful of games (Banjo-Kazooie, GoldenEye 007 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time). Now, when I was a child, I was, like many children, stupid. Although I had figured out by this point that consoles needed to plug into a television to work and didn’t communicate via power sockets,¹ my grasp on reality and its associated concepts was tenuous at best. So, when I fired up what critics had called The Best Game Ever, I was content to roam the Kokiri Forest, talking to the various inhabitants, walking, jumping, collecting rupees, picking up rocks, throwing rocks, more jumping, listening to Navi and so on without continuing to the rest of the game. I was vaguely aware that there was more to explore — I had, after all, read the manual which talked about all kinds of items that I didn’t have, like, for example, a sword — but that didn’t bother me. Besides, there was this one location that had a frightening boulder scaring me off.

I should probably point out that I have a terrible fear of things in video games. Like monsters. And insects. And glitches. And polygons. To this day, I won’t go near games like Half-Life or Bioshock. I’d always disable items in Super Smash Bros. Melee in fear of getting an appearance from a Like Like or Redead. And Banjo-Kazooie is still the scariest video game that I’ve ever played. Scarred me for life, it did; after one particularly shocking scene (played by Brother whilst I watched) I was reduced to rolling on the corridor floor, trembling, whimpering “they’re crawling on me”. True story. But, as usual, I digress.

The point that I’m making is that when one plays a video game for the first time, be it as a child, a curious parent or a technophobic senior, one doesn’t care about advancing to the next level, unlocking any of the achievements or upgrading one’s character. One cares only about having fun. And this, I believe, is the essence of what a video game should be. The moment that one is forced to do something in a video game, it stops being fun. When it stops being fun, it stops being a video game. It becomes a job.

In my mind, a true video game does not force the end user to do anything. It may gently guide the player to the next destination or give the player some ideas on what to do next, but my favourite games are the ones that offer freedom. Burnout Paradise is one of my most favourite games of recent years, and it’s not hard to see why: The player is given a car and placed in a city. And that’s it. Of course, there are objectives; you can unlock different cars, you can compete in races, you can discover hidden locations, you can perform stunts — and, in my personal favourite mode, you can slam into other cars, shutting them down and sending them to the junk yard. But it’s all optional. There aren’t any menu screens between you and the city. You can start the game and just drive. No obligations. No messages telling you off for going the wrong way. No game has better captured the pure joy of driving since the original OutRun.

It’s important to note that a game like this can only work properly if it’s coded properly. For me, a game needs to feel good to play, to experience. Sloppy programming and poor execution have ruined too many exciting game concepts. Staring at the word “Loading…” on an otherwise blank screen is not fun.

So what of Noby Noby Boy, then? A software toy criticised for its lack of focus? A game that many would describe as an “ungame”?

Noby Noby Boy has been misunderstood. So-called “hardcore” gamers have looked at it, maybe tried it for a while, before moaning that there’s no point to the game and going back to playing Call of Duty or something. But they’re missing the point. The fact that there is no point is the point. Wait… No, let me rephrase that.

Designer Keita Takahashi (also the man behind the Katamari franchise) has stated that when he’s done designing video games he would like to design playgrounds. And that’s exactly what he’s done with Noby Noby Boy. Although he’s stated that he’s not entirely happy with the finished product due to lack of budget, the game nonetheless is a well-produced physics-based playground. The player is given control of BOY, briefed on the controls and left to explore the rest of the game for themselves. The graphics are beautiful in their simplicity. The soundtrack is diverse, consisting of a range of pieces played by a single instrument, further pushing the simplicity idea. The control experience is great (Noby Noby Boy being the first time that I’ve ever used a PlayStation controller for more than a few seconds); barring some problems with the L3 and R3 buttons (which may or may not be the fault of the controller) it really adds to the experience, really giving one the sensation of space and free movement. And although there are Trophies² to earn and an overarching long-term worldwide goal of stretching enough for GIRL to reach other planets, that’s not what makes the game engaging.

Noby Noby Boy takes one back to a very primal stage of their gaming life. Much like the fun I had exploring Kokiri Forest in Ocarina of Time, Noby Noby Boy presents players with an infinite number of randomly generated worlds to play with. This is a game that perfectly embodies the spirit of a child given their first video game. This is a game that shuns obligation; a game that gives the player complete freedom to play and have fun. Let me emphasize that. Play and have fun. How many games today allow one the pure, unadulterated joy of playing and having fun? Sure, you have open-world sandbox-type games like the annoyingly prolific Grand Theft Auto series, but few of them — perhaps none of them — are as much of a joy to experience as Noby Noby Boy. In this sense, Noby Noby Boy’s focus on fun pushes it much closer to my definition of a pure video game than any other.

So, if you, like me, are tired, disgusted or put off by the complex, miserable, unrewarding nature of hardcore gaming, or just looking for something a little different, Noby Noby Boy may just prove to be one of the most happy, fun and joyous experiences of your life.

If you will let it. ㋼

Ooh, one more thing. There’s an iPhone version of Noby Noby Boy coming out really, really soon (assuming that Apple’ll allow it on their App Store). Judging by the incredible preview videos that they’ve placed on YouTube, it’s shaping up to be the best iPhone and iPod touch application ever made. So now you’ve got a reason to get yourself one of those devices.

Most — all, actually — of the images in this post were taken from Eurogamer.

Coincidentally, the potential of home power sockets to transmit data was realised a few years later with the HomePlug standard. My mind was ahead of its time.
The PlayStation equivalent of Achievements.

Kiddy Girl-and [Kiddy Grade 2] — How We Became Friends

2010-02-14T23:24:16Z

Recently, some copypasta sauce spread over an Internet or two proposed that there are two types of anime fans. The first type enjoys story, substance and animation quality et cetera, and the other kind enjoys lighter, character-driven series and doesn’t care so much about where the story is headed.

Like most generalizations, this is complete rubbish.¹ Different people like or dislike different things for different reasons. There are several qualities that may make a series seem good or bad, each entirely subjective. At least, that’s an idea. By my reckoning, likes and dislikes (in my case, at least) occur more-or-less at random. But I digress.

About a year ago, the sequel to Kiddy Grade, which had previously existed only as a pilot episode and some sketches, was greenlit for a full-fledged series. Now, I believe that Uta∽Kata is the best non-Giant Robo anime ever made, so although I wasn’t the biggest fan of the original Kiddy Grade I was really looking forward to this new series from gímik, the production triforce behind all aforementioned (non-Giant Robo) titles. I even made a blog post anticipating it!

It didn’t live up to my hype. Of course it didn’t. Things tend to not. But I continued watching. I sat through episodes filled with in-jokes and references that remain impenetrable to anyone who doesn’t spend most of their life on Nico Nico Douga. Sure, there was plot, centimetring away under the everyday antics of the maids-who-are-actually-secret-agents, but it lacked the interconnectedness of Kiddy Grade, the subtle foreshadowing of Uta∽Kata.

One (half-)episode was nothing but a string of Lucky☆Star-esque voice actor-related gags. I’ve said that the presence of Norio Wakamoto is never a bad thing, and, well, it wasn’t. But I maintain that it was a thoroughly pointless episode; it introduced no new running characters, had no effect on the overall storyline and was never mentioned again.

But I persisted.

I’d watched the original Kiddy Grade. I’d watched Uta∽Kata. I knew that we were being lulled into a false sense of security, building to a massive plot turnabout.

And then it happened. Two major characters died, leaving our heroines without idols/mentors. Sad. Moving.

Meh, I thought.

It seemed that after eight or so episodes of nothing really happening, attempts to shake up the formula didn’t faze me. Maybe I thought that it should’ve been this way from the start. Maybe I was just in a bad mood that day. Either way, the series did become generally less painful to watch after this point, even though the overlying plot still didn’t make much of an effort. You could say that I had the mindset of a “Type A” anime fan at this point.

After an episode of mourning, episode 11 gave us a look into the lifestyles of the antagonists. (There are a bunch of characters in this show.) I thought it was a great episode; it may’ve been low on plot, but it was low on unfunny gags, too. Plus, we got to know the bad guys a lot better. They have feelings and stuff! Who’d've thought it?

Episode 12 added some much needed plot, featuring some well-appreciated continuity in the form of acknowledging the original series, revealing what happened to the principal members of the original cast and definitively linking both storylines. This is it, I thought. The halfway point in the series where everything changes. From now on, everything’ll be deadly serious.

The next episode was a beach episode.²

As beach episodes go, it was okay. It turns out that some computer broke down which trapped them there and they had to fix it or blow it up or something in order to save everybody. But the story isn’t why I find it notable. (No, neither was the mandatory dress code.)

As this episode played out, I found myself emotionally connecting with the main characters. I smiled along with them, cheered them on; they looked so cool in the denouement when they defeated the whatever-it-was terrorising the other characters that they were keeping their ES-Member-status a secret from until now.

And it was then that I realised that, for perhaps the first time ever, I wasn’t watching a show for the story. Sure, I enjoyed the plot and I continue to look forward to seeing where it goes, but that’s not why I care.

Over twelve hit-and-miss episodes, I had shared the adventures of these two girls. Together, we dealt with the strange situations that we were placed in, and, with time, it almost felt like we had become friends. It didn’t matter that they just happened to be a pair of young, good looking female-types; it was their personalities, not their bodies, that won me over. Going back over the older episodes looking for screenshots for this post, I found myself appreciating the show a lot more now that I knew.

I cared for these characters more than I cared for the series that brought us together.

And I still managed to write this whole post without mentioning their names. ㋼

“Every generalization is false, including this one.” – Mark Twain
Technically a holiday resort episode.

MangaGamer Revisited

2010-02-12T12:32:16Z

I feel violated. ㋼