Super Spong Brothers

Brevity Two

2012-05-07T13:56:38Z

http://www.animenewsnetwork.co.uk/news/2012-05-07/mangirl-manga-about-editors-lives-gets-tv-anime

Discuss. ㋼

Pac-Man Vs. – Wii U’s Unexpected Origin

2011-11-09T08:48:25Z

“Funtime happy land? Or versatility and potential in a design where they’ve integrated basically everything built up to and learned from gaming up to this point seamlessly into one device, paving the way for pretty much anything? But really. Funtime happy land.”

Brother is excited about Wii U. I am more cautious.

The main problem that I foresee is this. The ~~gimmick~~ selling point of the Wii U is its controller. Building on the success of the original Wii Remote, they went and shoved a touchscreen in there. Like the Wii before it, it’s the unique controller, packing prolific technology into an Applesque user-friendly device, that makes the Wii U stand out from its competitors. However! Although the Wii U will, of course, support multiplayer, the controller will only be sold with the console. Yes, it’s an expensive device in its own right and the name Wii U implies a greater focus on single-player experiences, but I foresee a future in which prospective buyers ask their local games shop for extra controllers and, when told that they have to buy a whole other console, believe that they’re being ripped off and refuse to buy one.

But my predictions aren’t as dire as some other commentators, making scaremongering claims that Nintendo is dying and that the Wii U will be its final gasp. What nonsense. Yes, Nintendo is going through a rough patch at the moment (along with other Japanese companies due to the current value of the yen), but it’s been through worse – the never-released-in-the-UK Virtual Boy is remembered as a disaster, and the Nintendo 64 and Gamecube consoles were overshadowed by Sony’s PlayStations. They’ve seen it all before and they’ve always come through. For better or for worse, Nintendo is as proud company and it’s not going to listen to the media to decide what it does next. One article, “Never Count Nintendo Out” by Kotaku’s Chris Pruett, says that Nintendo succeeds because they’re willing to take risks. They don’t always pay off in the short term, but occasionally, as with the Wii and DS Lite, they strike gold. They don’t follow trends; they make trends.

But there’s one particular line in that article that caught my attention. “The key difference between Nintendo and Sony or Microsoft is that they build their hardware around their games, rather than the other way around.” See, when the Wii U was announced, I was reminded of a specific game that, today, has almost been forgotten…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8L4RCbRQxyI

This is Pac-Man Vs., a multiplayer remaining of the original Pac-Man game. It works like this: There are four players. Three of the players each control one of the ghosts and one player controls Pac-Man himself. As in the original game, Pac-Man has to eat all of the dots in the maze while avoiding the ghosts. This game, however, is played using the Gamecube’s Game Boy Advance connectivity functionality; while the ghosts use standard Gamecube controllers, they are only given a small window on the TV screen to find their way around. On the other hand, Pac-Man can see the whole maze on the GBA screen. The ghosts cannot be defeated (without a power pellet), but with the handicap of not knowing where Pac-Man actually is, it becomes a game of hide-and-seek. It’s designed as a party game; when a ghost catches Pac-Man, that player gets to switch controllers and have a go. I, personally, never got a chance to play it – it was only available with a couple of obscure Namco games in the UK – but if you can get four players in a room together, it sounds like great fun.

Nintendo seemed very proud of this game when they announced it, pointing out that the idea came from none other than legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto. But, aside from a DS re-release, it never gained the popularity they were hoping for. The GC-GBA connectivity was used in a few additional games (I had great fun annoying Brother with the Tingle Tuner in The Wind Waker), but it still required one to own a Gamecube, Game Boy Advance AND a connection cable. The Wii and DS shared some wireless connectivity, but, again, few games bothered.

So it strikes me, if we accept that Nintendo designs their machines around their games, that the Wii U is a console designed primarily to play Pac-Man Vs.. Think about it. One touchscreen controller per console with others relegated to Wii Remotes? Sounds like it’d be perfect! With the amount of Wii Remotes already sold, expense will not be a barrier to entry. So why hasn’t Pac-Man Vs. been announced for the Wii U yet?

Actually, it was one of the very first games we saw being played on Wii U. It just wasn’t called Pac-Man Vs..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUvdP2TNBHE

Chase Mii. Same game, different branding.

And Nintendo’s been working like this for years. Just look at the Nintendo 64. They wanted to give fine control over Mario’s movement, so they put an analogue stick on every controller. They wanted a controllable camera angle, so they added the C buttons, which would later evolve into a second analogue stick. They wanted to give greater immersion and feedback, so they made a force-feedback “Rumble Pak”, later built-into the Gamecube controller and Wii Remote. Nintendo pioneered all of these features primarily because these were the gaming experiences that they wanted to share. And, sure enough, its competitors followed suit – Sony’s DualShock controller, released some time after the PlayStation’s debut, added all of these features more than a year after the release of the Nintendo 64.

Nintendo is constantly seeking out new ideas, new designs and new experiences. They may sound crazy at first, but you can be sure that they’re here to stay. Even if, sometimes, it takes a couple of attempts to get them just right. ㋼

Caving In

2011-05-30T16:57:25Z

♪ All the people are so happy now, their heads are caving in

I’m glad they are a snowman with protective rubber skin… ♫

There’s something that’s been bothering me about a lyric from a They Might Be Giants song.

The song is Nothing’s Gonna Change My Clothes and it’s the first line in the song. My problem with it is that it’s too ambiguous.

I’ve thought about it for a while, and I’ve narrowed-down three plausible interpretations of the line “the people are so happy now their heads are caving in”.

“The people are so happy now. On an unrelated note, their heads are caving in.” There is no direct correlation between the people’s happiness and the caving in of their heads.
“The people are so happy, now, that their heads are caving in.” In other words, the people’s heads are caving in as a result of their currently high levels of happiness.
“The people are so happy now because their heads are caving in.” A reversal of 2; in this case, the people’s heads caving in causes them to be happy.

Further inspection of the liner notes of Then: The Earlier Years reveals that the lyric is written with a comma after the word “now”. This would suggest that interpretation 3 is incorrect. However, we are still left with two possible interpretations of the line. Are people really suffering from caved-in heads due to extreme joy? And what exactly is meant by “caving in”? Are their heads literally collapsing or are they merely suffering from debilitating headaches?

Moreover, why are they a snowman? And how?

Carrots to this. I’m done. ㋼

They Might Be Giants’ new album, Join Us, is released on the 19th of July; a preview EP is available now. They will be appearing in London at KOKO on July the 15th. See you there.

Wish Upon the Pleiades: A Subaru & Gainax Collab

2011-02-07T17:11:29Z

The world of anime distribution is changing. But while us English-speaking viewers can enjoy all that Crunchyroll has to offer, the move to online consumption is happening a lot slower for Japanese end-users. Still, Black★Rock Shooter attempted to shake up the industry by distributing free copies of itself with magazines and merchandise (and by releasing an import-friendly Blu-ray Disc edition at a relatively reasonable price). So now we have popular animation studio Gainax trying something a little different by creating an online-only one-off episode commissioned by Subaru.

The result is Wish Upon the Pleiades (放課後のプレアデス, or Hōkago no Pleiades). One would assume, being sponsored by a car manufacturer, that said show would be about driving. Y’know, like Initial D or something. But no, that just wouldn’t cut it! Yes, Magical Girls are back in fashion this season, so what better way to promote your range of automobiles than with a cute, colourful cartoon that has nothing to do with cars?

Perhaps I’m jumping the gun here. It’s more representative of the Subaru brand than the Subaru product line; the word Subaru, as well as being the name of the main character, is the Japanese word for the Pleiades star cluster – hence the name of the show – and the girls do get to ride around on some magic wands that make engine noises… Yeah. It’s probably better if you just watch it first. And, thanks to a wonderful lack of region locking, you can! Right now!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmR3cqgoldU

They even provided English subtitles! That was nice of them. Not that you need them to tell what’s going on: A girl stumbles upon a secret room in her school, meets a boy…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMvrukJrrDU

In the second part, she stumbles upon another secret room in her school, discovers a secret extra-curricular club that one of her friends is in, joins said club, becomes a Magical Girl…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpUi8XMeqrE

It covers a surprisingly decent amount of character and story development for just one episode. Some shows’d take months to get this far.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BU2ayif4cs

So that’s Pleiades. I enjoyed it! It’s cute, it’s charming, it tells a nice story, it’s brevitic, the soundtrack is nice… The ending kinda reminded me of Black★Rock Shooter in the way that the title character defeated the bad guy with the Power of Friendship, but it’s a nice ending nonetheless. (I also detected some hints of Nanatsuiro Drops and the works of Makoto Shinkai in there, but they’re not that noticeable.) I’m not sure how well it works as an advert for Subaru, but it did give me that primal urge to purchase Pleiades-related merchandise. I guess that we can call it a success!

Your move, Honda. Put that power of dreams to use and sponsor a cartoon of your own! ㋼

Squid Girl-Related Blog Post

2011-01-24T09:36:14Z

It’s said that of the 70% of planet Earth covered in ocean, mankind has only explored a small fraction; it’s practically an alien world down there. Indeed, when video game developer Tomihiro Nishikado created the iconic aliens of Space Invaders, he drew inspiration from author H.G. Wells and designed them based on marine life such as octopus and squid.

It cannot be a coincidence that Squid Girl, too, is an invader.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzBQsnNhfYg

In Squid Girl (Shinryaku! Ika Musume), the invader comes not from space, but from the bottom of the sea (as the subtitle, “The Invader Comes From The Bottom Of The Sea!”, emphatically declares). A self-proclaimed ‘messenger of the sea’, Squid Girl comes ashore with determined ambition to conquer the surface world, punishing the human race for polluting her home.

Any underlying ecological themes are, however, promptly brushed aside; as it turns out, Squid Girl is no better at subduing humanity than Invader Zim was. Despite her special squid abilities (bioluminescence, a personal armada of tentacles and a seemingly never-ending supply of squid-related puns), she only gets as far as a beachside café before she, herself, is subdued by the kitchen staff; a demonstration of her squidly powers only results in her being forced to work there to pay for their newly tentacle-damaged wall.

Having presumably lived as an ocean-dwelling squid her entire life, Squid Girl harbours a childlike naïveté when it comes to land matters; many episodes feature Squid Girl discovering a new, exciting aspect of human culture, getting to grips with it and factoring it into her plans of conquest, often with hilarious consequences. But as the series goes on, Squid Girl makes many human friends & acquaintances and discovers that there’s much more to the surface world than she anticipated…

Broadcast last Autumn, Squid Girl is one of Japan’s latest animated series to make a splash online, inspiring many fan tributes. And it’s not hard to see why; the title character’s counterpoint of cute innocence and overzealous would-be dictatorship stirs up appeal in all facets of the Japanese – and international – fandom. But it’s more than just a simple cute-’em-up; Squid Girl’s interactions with the colourful cast of characters (including a scientist who’s convinced that Squid Girl is a space invader; a young boy who becomes her playmate; even her own personal fangirl) provide some great scenes, and there’s even the odd moment of melancholy: the final act of episode five, in particular, is a beautiful dialogue-free short subject guaranteed to leave you in tears.

At just twelve episodes, Squid Girl doesn’t require a huge time investment, and earns a hearty recommendation from me. With its cute, clean character designs and universal appeal, Squid Girl is a charming comedy with real laughs and real heart. Squidalah! ㋼

An English-subtitled version of Squid Girl can be watched for free on Crunchyroll.

First Impressions: Crunchyroll and Milky Holmes

2011-01-24T11:11:54Z

From last year’s Hollywood retelling starring Robert Downey, Jr. as the eponymous detective to the recent BBC television adaptation and Mitchell & Webb’s poignant series climax, Sherlock Holmes is making a comeback in the modern media. In a not entirely unusual turn of events, it seems that even Japan is getting in on the action.

The image that you see above has been my desktop wallpaper for four months now. It is also the primary reason that I have been highly anticipating this particular show. Milky Holmes, a franchise that has so far spanned the media of card game, UMD, plastic figurine, wrist towel and audio CD alongside desktop wallpaper, is now receiving its inevitable anime adap. And, like much of today’s animated fare from Japan, it’s getting an English-language release much sooner than one would have expected in the past.

See, piracy is an ever-existant problem. Television series are posted online within hours – or even minutes – of their broadcast, and, with the rise of easy-to-use subtitling tools and the fall of translation quality standards, an episode of a popular Japanese television series could be ripped from its home, slapped with a quick-’n'-nasty subtitle track and hoist, kicking and screaming, out to thousands of BitTorrent leechers. The English-language anime distribution industry, recognising this problem, decided to counter these “fansubs” by lowering themselves to their level; with permission of the Japanese publishers, anime episodes are released to the masses as they are broadcast in Japan, with a slap-dash translation that at least bears the privilege of being legitimately funded. To the end user, the benefit of not having to wait the 10-18 months for the traditional home video release is apparently worth sacrificing almost all other benefits.

This New & Exciting™ distribution method is known as simulcasting, which, as you may infer, is all about simultaneous broadcasting. Usually, the term refers to the transmission of the same programme on more than one television channel at once, such as an international sporting event or some other live broadcast along those lines. As anime simulcasting relies on pre-subtitled, pre-encoded files streamed from a server (as a couple of premature leaks have revealed), it’s not strictly simulcasting in the literal sense, but that’s what everyone calls it for some reason. Perhaps the most popular service of its kind is Crunchyroll, a once illegitimate anime-on-demand website that has since changed its tune and now makes an honest profit out of giving fans the newest – and, therefore, best – anime series that they can get their hands on.

I've already amassed a fair pile of Milky Holmes-related rubbish.

With all of the promotion that Milky Holmes has been receiving, a Crunchyroll simulcast was inevitable. I was perplexed that they announced it only one day before its premiere, though, when they really should’ve coincided their announcement with Hyper Japan 2010, a recent London event dedicated to Japanese culture featuring a prominent presence by Bushiroad, the driving force behind the Milky Holmes franchise, who brought along the four lead voice actresses as well as a few boxes of merchandise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DSY3ElFCGM

During the Q&A at the presentation, one audience member asked the panel what Milky Holmes was actually about. The brevitic response from the translator: “They are all detectives.” Aside from the characters being named after famous detectives and possessing a variety of obligatory superhuman abilities (called TOYS – I assume that the T stands for “telekinetic” and the other letters also stand for words), mystery-solving would appear to be the sole premise. Coupled with the fact that the show is currently only available online, this’d be the sort of production that I’d usually skip. But I’d been looking forward to this one; I wanted to at least give it the benefit of the doubt. So, although Crunchyroll’s subscription-only episodes become free-to-view after a week or so, I decided to give their free trial a try and experience the first episode of Tantei Opera Milky Holmes in glorious subtitled H.264.

Being a simulcast, I wasn’t expecting a particularly good translation, but alarm bells started to ring when I checked the announcement and found that they had referred to main character Sherlock (or “シャロ” for short, which I read as Shirley) as “Sheryl”. This is to be expected from a hastily-transcribed press release, but, remember, this is simulcasting that we’re dealing with; this apparent mistake was, indeed, present in the show’s subtitles. Aside from a couple of other questionable decisions (TOYS is now lowercase & plural, some of the names are given in Japanese order for seemingly no reason), the subtitles are cheerfully adequate. The awkward phrasing and timing issues are certainly not something that I’d expect from a home video release, though.

The episode itself begins with the title characters locked in combat with the bad guys, a standard issue four-strong group of “Gentlemen Thieves” who, we can assume, will serve as the sole antagonists throughout the series. As the evildoers make their escape, there is an explosion and, in the confusion, the Milky Holmes girls realise that they have lost their TOYS for seemingly no reason. We’re then treated to a sample of what their life is like a month later; being students at the prestigious Holmes Detective Academy, losing their abilities has also lost them their powers of deduction and their high social standing within the school. What’s more, the bad guys from earlier are now stationed at the academy, posing as students and/or members of staff, whose nefarious goal is apparently to drive the girls out of the school and generally make them miserable. Still, despite their accommodation being downgraded to a wood cabin at the hands of the villain’s leader/student council president, they appeared to be in reasonably high spirits as the episode came to a close.

With my expectations as high as they were, disappointment was guaranteed. But from the first episode alone, which was practically nothing but exposition, it’s hard to gauge an opinion. The animation was passable, I suppose. The art style didn’t make me want to kill myself. And I’ve got to give it credit for actually succeeding at being cute, unlike the attempts of other popular franchises. I think that the thing that annoyed me the most was that this preview clip (which appears to represent the PSP game) featured a lovely little activation jingle when their TOYS are enabled, but in the show they just made a generic “ka-shing” sound. Maybe they’re saving it for when they inevitably get their powers back. I dunno. Seeing as they didn’t actually solve any mysteries in this first episode, I’ll be suspending further opinion until later on in the series.

Signing up for Crunchyroll, by the way, was relatively painless, although I had to give them credit card information in order to begin the free trial (which, I’m told, I can cancel at any time). It does automatically sign you up for their e-mail newsletter, so watch out for that. My main issue with Crunchyroll is not so much that it’s also a social network, but that there appears to be no way to disable social features like comments on the video page. I don’t need to join yet another social network and I don’t want other people’s opinions showing up whenever I’m watching something. If I wanted commentary, I’d go to Twitter. I did, however, think that it was nice – if a little tacky – that they have an achievement system.

My very first Crunchyroll achievement. Emotions overflowing.

I’m not going to continue my subscription after the free trial’s up. Crunchyroll still doesn’t have many shows that I care about; I prefer watching my anime on the ol’ CRT; I am morally against simulcasting; they put their shows up for free anyway. But for the time being, at least, I’ll be sticking with Milky Holmes. It’s cute.

And so are these exclusive Milky Homes statuettes, individually bundled with the upcoming home video release of the series. I must have them. Even if they do end up costing me another £250. ㋼

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