John Zeitler

(Okay, the title’s a lie. This started out “quick” and spiraled out of control. I’d say I’m sorry, but really I’m not.)

On Sunday, Japanese telecom giant NTT announced plans to expand their e-manga business into North America. Initially, this sounds like a great idea, but when you get to the details, there’re a few flaws. I’ll just cover the most obvious ones as they pertain to the Barnes & Noble nook reader, as that’s the one I have– you’ll quickly see that the issues are more or less universal.

The biggest issue is the size difference. The standard, traditionally-accepted size for manga volumes in North America is 5 inches wide by 7.5 inches tall, giving a surface area of 37.5 square inches. The nook’s main screen is 3.5 inches wide by 4.75 inches tall, giving a surface area of 16.625 inches– only 44.33% of the paperback’s space; margins notwithstanding. This also doesn’t get into the issues of resolution, though in reality the resolution of the nook’s e-ink screen is far more than sufficient for manga. The size becomes a deal-breaker because the two most prominent e-book readers– the nook and Amazon’s Kindle line– don’t offer any kind of zoom functionality.

The size issue poses another problem; even if the images were to be resized so that it could be clearly readable in the adjusted speech bubbles, the image would still be distorted. The standard paper-bound manga has an aspect ratio of 2:3, while the nook’s screen has a ratio of 14:19– just slightly too short. Increasing the vertical size of the e-ink screen to 5.25 inches would solve this; if that were to happen, the device would need to be lengthened, or the color touchscreen (the nook’s defining feature) would have to be downsized or eliminated. In my opinion, neither option is feasible.

A slightly odd issue is the fact that manga is read right-to-left; most e-readers use a right-facing arrow to advance the page, and start with the left-most page. It’d be a tricky thing to program, I think, but it’s hardly a deal-breaker– just a matter of retraining, as it was when right-to-left manga was introduced to begin with.

Finally, there comes the issue of the logical size of a manga volume. My sample “standard” manga is volume 13 of Hayate the Combat Butler, which has 187 pages of actual content (about another 5 pages or so at the end– the leftmost end– are used for advertising and promotions). Even in monochrome, a high-resolution scan of one of those pages, uncompressed at 400 DPI, is 1.83 kilobytes. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? The full book is therefore 342 kilobytes. Slightly larger than an average text e-book of that length (I picked Coraline as my exemplar, at 323 kilobytes). Assume that the metadata and formatting for the e-book is negligible compared to the space needed for the content. Let’s now assume that the e-book is in 16-bit greyscale, and each page can be compressed by about 33%. Doing this changes the size of each image to 19.34 kilobytes, bumping the size of the full volume to a whopping 3.53 megabytes! In contrast, Quicksilver, a text e-book that is 927 pages in its print form (its very small-print print form it should be noted), is only 1.29 megabytes. Granted, these days that still doesn’t sound like a lot– unless you’re the one footing the bill for the data transmission charges on the 3G cellular networks that feed these devices. (Consumers don’t, it should be noted, or at least don’t directly pay the costs; they’re usually lumped into the cost of the e-book.)

It’s a sad thing to say, but I think e-manga is more or less dead in the water right now until the devices can support it better and data charges are brought down out of the ludicrously high levels that they are now. A firmware patch for the devices could solve that issue (at least giving zoom and RTL reading functionality a green light), and it’s a given that data will become as cheap as– well, let’s say basic bottled water– at some point. I’d probably estimate about three years for the tech to be ready (as a stupidly out-there outside guess)… but the market’s here now, I think. I wish NTT best of luck, but it’s gonna be a while ’till this really catches fire.

In 2002, I started what would eventually become the capitalized “The Collection” from some pretty humble beginnings: I had a single “CD tower” of Playstation 1 and 2 games, probably about four feet tall and barely a foot wide. I also had a handful of boxed up retro systems, and maybe a dozen or so anime DVDs (with a modest amount of VHS tapes as well). Obviously, I expanded; as most of you all know, I also had to sell off roughly 95% of my games and anime during a downturn between jobs. Today, the Collection is the largest it’s ever been, and it’s in no danger of having to be sold off anytime soon.

I don’t like to brag– particularly not about stuff that I own– so that’s not the purpose of this post. Most folks don’t see their piles of video games and movies and suchlike as collections– they see them, primarily, as just “stuff”. If they want to get fancy, they may refer to it as a “library”. Really, though, these are cop-outs: if one is really serious about becoming a collector, then there can never be a point where you just have a pile of discs. You have to start early, so that it doesn’t get away from you. I’ve been throwing around terms like the Reclamation List and all that for years now without really explaining the thought process behind it all; I figure, now that the majority of the work is behind me, it would be a good time to take a look at how I built up even this modest collection and how I go about expanding it.

I should note, though, that it’s perfectly okay if you don’t want to be a collector of DVDs, games, whatever. That’s fine. It’s not something that everyone can do or has an interest in doing. The thing is, of course, that some folks out there do want to be collectors, and there’s some stuff that I wish I knew when I was setting out. That’s the purpose of this post (actually, by the time I’m done, it’ll probably feel more like a lecture).

So, without further delay, let’s start with ( The Ten Commandments Of Collecting… » )

In the end, taking up media collecting as a serious hobby can be rewarding and fun, but it can also be really nerve-wracking if you’re not prepared for it. Obviously, I’m not setting myself up as an authority or anything, but these are all just stuff I’ve found out since starting the Reclamation project. It all comes down to what you get out of it; if you want it just to have it, or if you want it to watch/read/play it all at some point.

Now that I can talk about trademark stuff again, there’s a lot that I want to talk about– mostly because it seems like a ton of really awesome things happened while I restricted myself from mentioning them. So, while I know that in internet terms this news is mostly so old it’s ancient, dead and buried, there’re a few topics worth going over. This post is just a quick little list; some of it might be expanded on in the future (if I don’t go into ridiculous detail enough here).

1) The K-On! manga was licensed. I still need to see the anime. Or perhaps I should say I still need to see the animoe?
2) NIS America enters the NA anime market with Persona and Toradora!, online-only sales. I think it’s a pretty smart move, in point of fact. It certainly makes as much sense, if not moe, as K-On.
3) Halo 3: ODST didn’t suck. Well, okay, it’s just too short, but with Nathan Fillion as your commanding officer (and playable character in certain circumstances) it’s hard for the game to suck. Also, Halo: Reach continues to look interesting, though rumors are it’ll retcon some if not all of the Fall of Reach novel.
4) Video Games Live! Bonus Round wasn’t quite as good as the first time it landed in Pittsburgh– I think they were using a different choir last July, and unfortunately this one just seemed to be phoning in their performance. The rest of the orchestra was good for the material they were working with (they picked some weak selections, I think).
5) Watching the Olympics at my family’s house was fascinating. I made mention of how curling is such an interesting sport to begin with– and I reiterate that my interest is completely without irony– but hearing the genuine Canadian commentary on it was a real treat. Sometimes I miss living near the northern border.
6) I read through all of Miyuki Miyabe’s The Book of Heroes over that same trip; overall I thought it was a little weaker than Brave Story was, but still enjoyable. It has this weird metafiction-meets-Lovecraft-meets-juvie-lit thing going on, and I kinda think it should have been about a hundred pages longer. Might be worth grabbing from the library if you liked the other book.
7) Speaking of books, my late-Christmas gift arrived. I now own a Nook e-reader, and so far I really like it. I loaded The Baroque Cycle onto it first thing, and am going through that– it’s nowhere near as easy reading as anything Miyabe writes. Hell, it makes The Lord of the Rings look like The Cat in the Hat by comparison. Fortunately I’m not carting around three monstrous tomes to read all of Stephenson’s big show. It reads PDFs as well, with a minimal amount of fuss; this basically means that I have a new tool to bend to my will in interesting and unique ways.
8) Funimation announced that they’re re-releasing Trigun, with its original (Pioneer) dub. That’s good news for folks who don’t yet have it (I managed to swing a good deal on it at the beginning of ‘08). Now moe folks can watch Milly being her inimitable self!
(Call this “8A”: Come to think of it, there was another interesting Pioneer-related moment, but restricted to being just me: I managed to locate the El-Hazard OVA set for extra-cheap. The first VHS episode of El-Hazard was the very first anime tape I bought– $30 for a half-hour episode, dubbed, that was practically not even engaging enough to get me to get the rest of the series. Fortunately I got to see it marathonned at Tekkoshocon a year or so ago and loved it, and so when I found it in Erie, I only hesitated slightly.)
9) Once my sister figured out how to play completely broken card combos in Munchkin Cthulhu, she became uber. Once my mother figured out the scoring in Carcassonne, she became vicious.
(9A: The iPhone spell-checker recognizes “Cthulhu”, but Firefox does not.)
10) Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei was licensed by Media Blasters. At the time, there was no news whether or not a dub would be produced. Insert remark about uncertainty leaving many people in DESPAIR!!!, but honestly I think it’s still pretty damn good news no matter what (well, it would be better if there was a season set instead of old-style single-disc releases, but I’ll take my Pink Supervisor where I can get it).
11) I am totally not sorry about all the moe puns up top. In fact, there’s gonna be a whole lot moe. (No, there’s not. Yes, I know how it’s really pronounced with two syllables.)
12) Media Blasters also managed to rescue Record of Lodoss War from the defunct-company pile. I haven’t seen the OVA series, but do have CPM’s DVD set of the TV series– and have not seen the ending to that, either. If Media Blasters does a decent job repackaging the OVAs I may pick them up.
13) On a slightly related note, remember all that nonsense I wrote up about how the anime market in Japan worked? Turns out it’s really skewed towards DVD sales… and, in some somewhat unsurprising news, revenues from those sales, both domestic and foreign (read: Japan and not-Japan), are dropping sharply. Japanator estimates that a core market of only about 300K North Americans can be counted on for sales. Honestly? That’s more than I expected. At least NA localizers offer their series in reasonably-priced sets– the two-episodes-per-disc model still reigns supreme in Japan.
14) Working with the Nook a little bit more, I managed to find Calibre, which converts pretty much every document format into the open ePub format used by most portable readers. I’m gauging the interest for an e-book release of A Civics Lesson; keep your eyes on Linguankery to see if and when it’s available for purchase/download.
15) My rant on the 24th was directed at Wal-Mart. Trust me, folks, as soon as I move, I’ll be making a concerted effort to never shop there again. The problem lies in that it’s close to my house and I tend to value time pretty highly, so long trips out are “costly” to me. Gonna find a new apartment close to a grocery store, or at least a bus line to somewhere decent.
16) The reason I was in Wal-Mart, though, was to get passport photos. (Won’t make that mistake again.) I fudged my travel plans a bit– I’m planning a trip to Canada for a day or so in the immediate, but will probably wind up planning a trip further abroad later on– but odds are good that within a month or so I’ll be prepped to go fully mobile.
17) The 24th was rough. But it was all made up for by the Nintendo summit. In (extreme) brief, and in descending order of OMGs: Cave Story Wii has a date for March 22nd (three weeks from today– mark your calendars, there will be a test on it); Picross 3D lands on the DS on May 3rd; Super Mario Galaxy 2 hits May 23rd; the end of June sees the release of Metroid: Other M; and Monster Hunter Tri lands on NA shores on April 20 (free-to-play, Wii Speak integration (for the three people worldwide who own Wii Speak units), and a March 8 demo disc and a $5 Nintendo Points card for GameStop preorderers). I think I speak for everyone when I say “yay gaming”.
18) Oh, and on the 25th, Grandia became available on PSN for the PS3 and PSP. It’s a great game, easily one of the best of the PS1/Saturn-era RPGs, and unfortunately it didn’t age well… and its sequels got overlooked (II) or sucked (III). I reclaimed the first game in early ‘09 and have the second one, on Dreamcast, on order as I write this– more on that in a bit.
19) Just as I hit the 14K mark on Gamerscore, Pez decided he wasn’t gonna play 360 all during Lent. This makes him, officially, more Catholic than me, ’cause I’m not exactly sacrificing anything this season. I don’t know how that’s really making me feel, honestly. Also, there’s the question of, can he play if it’s on someone else’s profile (ie Rock Band nights which we have to get back to doing)?
20) For some silly reason, whenever I wanted to kill some time gaming, I spent a not-insignificant portion of time playing Modern Warfare 2’s multiplayer. I’ve said before that I’m not a huge fan of multiplayer gaming, first-person shooters in particular; but for some strange reason, I just wanted to play this. Anyway, the solution was quite simple: I sold off the two CoD games yesterday towards my FF13 and Pokemon SoulSilver pre-orders (which was a good time to do it given the 50% bonus value promotion going on). I really only wanted Call of Duty for the single-player story; by the time I get the itch to play them again (read: near the end of the 360’s life span) they’ll be ludicrously cheap because the market will be flooded with copies.
21) Oh yeah, the Grandia II thing. See, I was out of town during the middle of February, and unfortunately that’s when an order of mine was sent out. The USPS says it landed on my door on the 19th; when I got in on the 21st, there was no package. I’d assumed it hadn’t arrived yet and waited until the 25th to talk to the sender… and that’s when I realized someone stole it. Long story short, it’s amazing what threatening to call the police and then feigning actually going through with it will do; the package spontaneously generated itself on my doorstep yesterday afternoon. Who knows, maybe I’ll run Grandia II as my next game before FF13!
22) But probably not, because yesterday I also managed to swing an incredible deal on Borderlands. The best phrase that can describe the game is “first-person gleeful redneckery”. It’s not immediately obvious that the game is going for the sci-fi-western thing that Trigun pulled off, at least not until you’re actually playing the game, but when they say “bazillions of guns” on the back of the case, you better believe it. You get guns for anything in this game. My only gripe right now is the excruciatingly dumb pickup system: when you pick up a new gun it’s automatically equipped, and whatever gun you were using gets put back in your very limited inventory space– or dropped, if your bag is full. I hit level 10 (it’s got RPG elements, but then again these days what doesn’t?) and I’ve had my bag full on more than one occasion, which cost me a really nice shotgun that was a quest reward (yeah, it takes its cues from MMOs). While some folks may not have cared for the single-player campaign, I think it’s pretty damn good, and I might give it a second run as a different character class once I’m through; nor would I terribly mind mixing it up in the online co-op mode.

That really about covers it… I know, far from “quick” or “little”. But honestly, that’s all, there ain’t no moe. (You knew I had to sneak one more in there.) From here on out, I should be up to “current” with my talking points, so let’s just get into March, folks.

As promised, a mere Youtube bailout. A little bit of prefacing is needed to explain this pick. At Kurokiiro Festival last October, this video took first place in the Romance category, and as a result it got played several times… which isn’t hurt by the fact that it’s a bit of an earworm. Still, it is a pretty good video, and the creator (not me, it should be noted) should be proud of the work.

Tomorrow we should have the Game Clear notice and maybe even the Save and Quit for it, too. We’ll see. Catch you folks then.

There was an announcement today on ANN that certain sites in Japan were refusing to sell North American imports, specifically anime DVDs and Blu-Ray discs, to Japanese addresses. On the surface it seems like such a ludicrous problem: these people live in Japan, why do they need to buy our anime? Wouldn’t it make more sense, and logically be cheaper, to buy the anime they already have over there?

As with everything, the answer is not quite so simple. And, as can be expected, the problem arises from an attempt to fix a pre-existing issue.

To understand the issue, a brief history of the DVD format is needed, along with a modicum of understanding of the differences between the North American publishing and distribution model, and the Japanese pub/dist model. Let’s start with the DVD thing, since that’s easier. When the DVD format was first introduced in the mid 90s, region encoding was added into the specifications to avoid a major flaw that existed in the VHS standard. Primarily, it came down to wanting to maximize profitability and rights control for the various parties involved in distributing a film or TV show on DVD. Because VHS has no region restrictions, a film sold in one part of the world can be taken anywhere else in the world, and possibly resold. This could happen at a price cheaper than the “local” going rate, depending on the film and how long the film has been out in the two areas, and as a result, someone could quite easily make a profit– and a handsome one at that– buying VHSes from one part of the world, overnighting them across the globe, and selling them where the demand was higher. Problem is, though, that this undercuts and subverts the legal rights holders in the destination region– which, ironically, may be the region the film was produced in to begin with! (Take, as a specific example, The Passion Of The Christ. Not going to be a big seller in a predominantly Muslim country, like, say, Malaysia; therefore, bundle up a pallet of copies bought for pennies on the dollar in Kuala Lumpur, send ‘em even just as far as Hawaii, and rake in the dough.)

The DVD standard specifies seven primary regions, though in truth only four or five see any real use. The big ones for English-speakers are Region 1 (North America), Region 2 (Europe and Japan), and Region 4 (Australasia). The idea between fusing Europe and Japan into a single region was based on the theory that physical distance and minimal demand would keep them more or less separate. Naturally, when Internet commerce began its rise, the concept of physical inaccessibility became more or less complete bunkum. Still, the DVD regions held up, since they were split up in a reasonably sane manner.

Flash forward to the mid 2000s, when the Blu-Ray specification was being hashed out by Sony. Sony, as we all know, is a multi-national corporation that does a significant amount of its business in North America and Japan. However, they also realized that major content provider studios– that is, the people who make the stuff that goes on the Blu-Rays– would not sign on to a standard that had no region encoding. The compromise was that instead of seven regions, there would be only three. This sounded fair. It wound up that Japan and North America were lumped into Region A. And all hell broke loose, because consistency is a silly thing.

Now we get to look at the differences in distribution methods. In North America, when a product such as a game or a movie or a CD is sold in stores, it’s actually been sold up to three times before or more. It’s sold by the manufacturer to the publisher– the publisher grants the manufacturer a license to make the thing in the first place, but the publisher must then place an order for the physical objects. Then, the publisher sells the physical objects to a distributor, who in turn sells the objects to the retail stores. In the case of big-box retailers like Wal-Mart or even GameStop, the company is both the distributor and retailer, but the principle remains largely the same. At each step of the way, a transaction is brought to completion. In most cases, however, there’s a return clause that says if the product doesn’t sell, it can be returned all the way back up the chain. As time goes by, the value of the products changes, and their prices drop– which is reflected in the retail price of the object. This reflects a change in the risk that the retailer is taking by holding on to the product. After a certain amount of time, the product is dusted off, boxed back up, and shipped back up the chain to the manufacturer, who sells it on the extra-cheap to a closeout retailer like Big Lots. There they stay until sold, but at the same time, Big Lots is stuck with the goods. They have taken on less risk, but the risk is all on them. (Then again, there are some places, like Gabriel’s, which are what my dad always used to call “where Big Lots dumped the junk they couldn’t sell”. Yeah, imagining someplace less classy than Big Lots may be difficult, but believe me. It exists.)

In Japan, however, the security blanket of being able to return items is either nonexistent or very much frowned upon, as by and large products like video games and CDs are sold flat-out and without any wiggle room for pricing. Put another way, the price of the product is tied irrevocably to its SKU (Stock-Keeping Unit, a number that uniquely identifies the product class; for example, a movie offered in full-screen and in wide-screen formats, on separately-sold discs, is said to have two SKUs even though it’s the same movie). If there needs to be a price drop, it is up to the publisher to delete the existing SKU and re-issue it as a new one, at a new price. To avoid taking a bath on a large, high-priced debut, print runs in Japan are usually small, which is also a function of the smaller population compared to North America’s market. That’s why games sometimes come out many different times in Japan, with labels like “The Best” or “Greatest Hits” or the like. (The principle has been applied to video games in North America, but it’s tied to lifetime sales of the game, and not necessarily that it needs to drop in price.) As a direct result, goods stay at higher prices longer in Japan unless they reach popularity sufficient to warrant a new print run, and even then they’re likely to stay at the standard price for a couple of printings.

Here’s where things get tricky. In general, goods in North America drop in price faster than Japanese goods. This means that, if you’re in Japan and want an American good, it’s cheaper to import it from America yourself than to wait for a company to do it for you. For nine items out of ten, that’s completely irrelevant; I can’t see too many Japanese desperately wanting to see the latest season of CSI so badly that they can’t wait for the WOWOW dub. However, for games and anime, it’s a whole new ball game, particularly because North American products contain the original Japanese track on them (usually). In short, it’s getting more than the local product for less money, and screwing over the local companies who produced the product to begin with.

That’s capitalism for you, folks.

Now, the major issue here isn’t that the products can’t be reverse-imported (the term for such a circuitous purchasing route). As I said, it’s capitalism; anyone can go ahead and do this, consequences be damned. The article in question singles out a particular retailer and a particular NA publishing company (Funimation) who are restricting reverse-imports.

If you ask me, I’d say that all online retailers should restrict reverse-imports. There’s a very good reason why.

Funimation has to jump through a TON of legal hoops in order to get licenses of the shows they put out here in NA. We saw a little of the hot-dog factory last year when the simulcast servers were hacked, exposing an episode of One Piece before its Japanese air time. The crapstorm that followed, I imagine, probably involved a lot of screaming into telephones on both sides of the Pacific. In the end, though, it came down to issues that existed before: Funimation can’t guarantee that their products won’t wind up on Japanese shelves eventually, particularly when you take a look at the prices involved. In Japan, DVDs are usually on the order or $30-$50 for two or three episodes (though they usually come out shortly after the episodes air on TV). In NA, that same $35-$50 will buy you an entire series, usually with an English dub track on top of the DVD-released episodes (the tradeoff being that the series is usually a year or so old by the time it’s out over here). We can assume that this is not some huge revelation, considering it’s been going on since region-free DVD players were introduced, oh, about ten minutes after people figured out there was region encoding on discs.

What’s happening now is that the Japanese license holders are starting to see the availability of cheap reverse-importing cutting into their profits. As a result, series are not coming out on permanent media nearly as quickly as they used to be (streaming and simulcasting are, however, making it feel like series are coming out with minimal turnaround). Licensing houses like Funimation and Bandai USA (even though they’re nominally linked to Bandai Japan) have to balance between a fast release or a cheap release. There’s been some move towards a split between the two, with half-season sets for the more popular or more recent series being offered (even though it’s relatively older, El Cazador de la Bruja was released in two half-season sets, though rather oddly the two pieces were released simultaneously), and some studios are cutting costs by not dubbing their acquisitions (which, in the case of Clannad, is a damnable shame). Still, though, it all comes back to the presence of the original Japanese track on the discs. And removing those would cause the total and final collapse of the NA anime market, I think. Funimation is probably facing pressure from the Japanese studios, and the cessation of reverse-importing is probably just another price tag on the licenses they’ve recently acquired.

In short (too late), I don’t see the restrictions against reverse-importing to be as drastically anti-competitive as some people do. The fact that it’s blatant protectionism isn’t lost on me. But in all honesty, when faced with a choice between a little less profit and no profit at all, any sane company will self-regulate in order to stay in business. This works pretty well for people on both sides of the Pacific in that it keeps the cels flowing. I could be completely wrong on this, of course, but truthfully, it’s all the same in the end. The announcement is just business as usual and nothing to get too worked up over.

So, Stellvia… wow. I did finish the last disc (of 8) tonight, just now in point of fact…

How do you really sum up a series like this one? When you know how it’s going to end, when you know that there’s going to be a tomorrow for you, and for the characters, what keeps you watching? It’s not the destination, but the journey; and for a series like Stellvia, it is all about the journey. The series’ primary conflicts are always there, hanging over the characters, but it is the characters themselves who drive the story. If the cast were not as developed as they are, I imagine that the show would have fallen apart before half the season had run its course.

But it continued on. And some days– some nights– it is all that matters, continuing on.

I don’t think there’s anything else, really, that I can say about it. Besides the obvious “go watch it now” and the lamentable “too bad they couldn’t arrange a second season”.

I did have a little I wanted to talk about tonight, actually. I got through Disc 5 of Stellvia, and the story is starting to get very, very interesting (though I wish the supporting cast hadn’t just up and vanished from the plot temporarily in favor of making an anti-war point).

All of the details of that got erased once I saw a picture of someone who carefully and lovingly skinned his own arm such that the scar would resemble Princess Peach. Complete with bloody towel beneath it.

The phrase “nightmare fuel”, somehow, just doesn’t cut it in this instance.

Quiet day, folks… I watched through a bit more of Stellvia, not yet completing the fourth disc, but that’ll be a project for the weekend, I think. More than anything, though, I want to relax a little bit more before the madness of NaNo starts, and that probably means not accomplishing much of anything for the next couple days. It doesn’t make for good blogging, but them’s the breaks.

Standing at a sharp, almost diametric, contrast to yesterday’s anime selection is Stellvia. Where To Heart was involved with a single genre which it handled poorly, Stellvia is a bit harder to pin down. The series revolves around young Shima Katase (it should be noted that I managed to remember names for this one), who is beginning her attendance at the space station high school aboard Foundation II, the titular Stellvia.

It has a strong similarity to something like Harry Potter, in that it’s about an unusual school, but the similarities end there. Where Harry is unsure of himself because he’s thrust into a world he knows nothing about, Shima’s insecurity stems from her lack of understanding about herself. Fortunately, she has an excellent cast of classmates and teachers to help her along, including the extremely boisterous Arisa and the enigmatically wise Kouta. She’s learnign her trade and her self quite well, but there’s a deadline– the second wave of a collapsing star, which devastated Earth two hundred years ago, is but two months from reaching the edge of the Sol system, and the Foundations are humanity’s only lines of defense.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Quite the contrary, the series is upbeat and cheerful, even when Shima is beating herself up for not being perfect (about the one flaw I can think of off the top of my head, because it would kind of veer her off into Mary Sue territory if she wasn’t genuinely trying to improve). In fact, the sense of impending disaster is shuffled to the background; it’s certainly a concern, but everyone seems just so confident that things will work out. Such optimism is kind of refreshing, in its own way. I’m sure that once I get more than about a quarter of the way through the series, it’ll start to be a bigger issue, but for now the series seems content to develop its characters more– and who am I to argue with that?

That’s probably what I like most. Rather than the flat, cardboard cutouts of To Heart, the cast of Stellvia takes those basic concepts– the energetic girl, the ingenue, the mysterious boy, the tragic accident girl– not as absolutes, but rather as starting points. Each character seems to have some room for growth, and in these early episodes they’re all showing it– not just the potential, but the growth as well. Haughty girl Akira has been taken down a peg or two but is softening up, learning to relax; Yayoi is letting go of the accident that set her so far back. If To Heart had managed to give everyone a little time in the spotlight, and give everyone a little room to breathe within the corsets of their archetypes, it would have been leaps and bounds better than it was. But still nowhere near as well-managed as Stellvia, honestly.

The fact that it’s at times laugh-out-loud hilarious does help, too. In the first two episodes alone, some of the most funny moments I’ve seen in a long time came about. Shima’s space suit seemed to be a little… tight on her, and she was less than confident about her figure; while it didn’t show any skin, it certainly left no curves to the imagination on the rest of her class, either. Her solution was to, obviously, wrap a bath sheet around her to hide her figure. That certainly got a chuckle out of me, but what crossed it into hilarity was that she was not the only one who did this. Even Kouta, a boy, did so (though around his waist).

Overall, though, it manages to understand something that I wish a lot more science fiction would get right, and portrays it well: life is not going to radically change in a mere three hundred years. There’s never going to be a point where people don’t wear slacker-type clothes, there’s never going to be food pellets replacing a full, sit-down meal with friends, and there’s never going to be a lack of need for shopkeepers and the basics of life. If you think about it, the world may have taken some pretty interesting and sweeping changes in the last two hundred years here on our Earth, but there are many things that we still do today that won’t ever change. When science fiction starts handwaving away the toilets, you lose my willing suspension of disbelief. (I was about to say that Stellvia doesn’t actually show a toilet on-screen, but then I remembered that it did, during a cleaning montage, which itself was greatly funny.)

I topped the night off by watching the first episode of Gurren Lagann again, though, and sadly it was still a little hard to get through. I’m more receptive to it now than when I watched it at Otakon ‘08, of course, but after the subtlety and charm of Stellvia, GL wound up being like a screaming maniac getting up in my face. That’s kind of a bad simile, because Kamina is a screaming maniac who does invade the personal space of the cameraman. And he’s pretty much the main character. So yeah.

Anyway, it’s the last week before NaNo starts, and I’m more or less completely prepared for the thing. I’ve managed to get most of my outlining done, but there’s definitely some tweaking I’d like to do; I’ve also tinkered a bit more with a couple more Wii games, so I may do some writing on those later on.

Catch you tomorrow.

No, not that moeblob. This one. (okay, so you have to use your imagination on that second link)

After spending a little more time with the remake of A Boy And His Blob, I have to confess that I’m in it mostly for the puzzles. WayForward took a pretty straightforward PC-style adventure game from the NES and redid it from the concept stage on up; while it’s certainly different from the old game, the old game just wouldn’t work in this day and age. The NES original relied a lot on obscurity: you didn’t know where to go or how to accomplish getting off the planet. A quick trip to GameFAQs nets you a precise set of instructions, with sometimes video links to speed runs. So, instead of a single challenge, the new version presents the game as more of a puzzle-oriented platformer: Get both characters from the start of each level to the finish, using specific tools. It sounds like an oversimplification of the concept, but in all honesty that’s what makes it work; by removing superfluous elements, you give the player a bit more guidance without feeling like you’re hand-holding. (The numerous signs in the backgrounds of the gorgeous levels do offer heavy-handed assistance, but it’s not always clear how their advice could work, and nothing’s stopping you from trying something different.)

Oh, one word of caution. If, like me, you have a strong reaction to seeing hurt children, you may want to be very, very, very careful playing this game. Seeing the boy collapse after a hit will mash that particular emotional button. Hard. Like a frigging jackhammer. Fortunately, equilibrium is only as far as the “hug blob” button. Which will get a lot more use than you might expect.

On the other side of the emotional manipulation scale, we have To Heart. A ten-year-old anime series that seems at times to have been scripted by a ten-year-old, possibly one who has never left the house and isn’t allowed near sharp objects. I’ll grant that being old means you have to accept certain concessions to the state of the art, but honestly the visual aspect of the series is not at all what I’m complaining about– quite the opposite, I found it to be rather well-animated and with good character designs. It’s just that those character designs are completely wasted on lifeless, soulless caricatures whose approximations of living, thinking human beings are about as accurate as I would be with a longbow twice my size. There’s no character development, the conflicts are weak when they even exist, one episode was so mind-numbingly boring that the characters themselves made mention of it– and the sad part is, that episode was supposed to be dramatic evolution of the two characters supposedly at the center of the romance! Instead we got the twenty most inane minutes of homework-doing ever put to celluloid. There was a punchline at the end of the episode, almost as if the production staff wanted to apologize to the viewers for the preceding atrocities, but a gag about a sick girl wanting her friends to bring her pudding kinda works better when the ill girl in question isn’t an annoying, irritating bi*AHEM* I think I’ve made my point. I stopped watching after the series went the bog-standard “we have a robot girl now and she’s going to be deactivated and mind-wiped soon” route… even for 1999, the robot girlfriend was a little overdone.

Still, I have to admit, this is just an outlier on the whole scale of anime that I’ve watched and given up on. Certainly there’s series out there that do romance properly (any given Key series, Ai Yori Aoshi, etc), so this is just one of those ones that got hyped up a little too much and wound up falling flat. Anyway, next on the list is Stellvia, which I have it on good authority is far better (and not a romance, so double points already).

Your last thought for the night, and this is more of a weird dub-actor-following thing than anything else. I haven’t heard Lia Sargent doing much of anything since Xenosaga Episode III ended, which is a shame because I always thought she was a good actress on top of being a talented voice artist. Did she retire, or has she just not done anything because other people are doing stuff?