Found something on a Danbooru raid.

Well that should whet your appetite for this absurdly awesome version Miku… I have no idea when or why but DO WANT! I was lurking around an irc channel and someone mentioned danbooru and ads, something I’d never seen before (thank you lolifox, for blocking that crap) and I started two day raid, yesterday I just wandered around comparing the place to moe.imouto and then stumbled across brs miku and proceeded to grab every picture I could possibly find of her. (Today has consisted of mostly Saber searching, some Vita, some Illya and now Agrias…)

Apparently it spawned from a niconico video. (youtube version for the nico-less) Checking the comments there’s a claim that it’s not an alt. Miku but an original character. Looking at her though either it is an alt. or very heavily inspired by here.

Subs vs Dubs aka ‘The state of the DVD case 2′

Now anyone who knows me, or has been into the ‘About’ section… or read a few posts knows one thing.

I’m anti-dub. Now of course this means a lot of people are going to decide to stop reading right there because I’m an anime downloading pirate who’ll not pay for anything any chance he gets. I obviously don’t really care about anime blah blah blah and I just nitpick dubs because I’m a weeabo, wapanese, japanophile … whatever other terms there are to negatively imply my Japan worship.

This isn’t entirely true. I’ve bought some anime, but I have rules… well… mainly I buy it whenever it’s priced normally. Which means I’m not paying near fifty bucks for one disc that contains three, and if I’m really lucky, four episodes. And heck I buy manga all the time at store values. Not much mind you, three volumes of Shugo Chara, one volume of The Third and one volume of Shrine of the Morning Mist (which was on sale for about five bucks) But manga quality is good. I’ve got a whopping total of about twelve dvds of anime, one disc of Project Arms I found in Giant Tiger for under 3$ and a couple discs of Chobits and three (I think) of Mahoromatic one of Blue Gender, one of Vandread season 2, one of Dual!, three discs of Niea Under 7 and two discs of something called Great Dangaioh that I bought because it was cheap. Then technically I guess I own the Appleseed cg remake… and I bought Howls Moving Castle for my sister… and I have Princess Mononoke on vhs somewhere. One needs to keep in mind at least half of what I watch has or will never be ‘localized’ for North America. then again Higurashi no Naku Koro ni got turned into “When They Cry” So pretty much anything is possible.

See popular opinion of us people who’re anti-dub is that we all just want anime for free… which isn’t the case for all of us, though I won’t pretend that part of our numbers feel that way. I’d be willing to shell out the same money they want for a dubbed DVD for one that just had the .jp audio and subtitles. Well presuming they start adding stuff to the DVD’s again. Mini-posters, keychains all that random collectible stuff they get over in Area Eleven, we want it two you jerks. Heck I’d start buying regular price dubs if they included stuff with the dvd. Face it, as a continent we get gypped. The onyl DVD’s in my collection that had something were Mahoromatic, Chobits and one of the three Niea Under Seven’s. Which gives me four mini posters and one paper doll… erm not paper dall… those little paper people where you fold them and there’s backgrounds and they stand up after. Not one of those little punch out things with various outfits you can put on it… though I wouldn’t mind a couple of those. >.> What?

Then there’s the other major flaw a lot of us find other than voice actors lacking talent and being overused. (This of course ignores those dubs that have gone and hired actual talent, like the Disney version of Howls Moving Castle, which had Billy freaking Crystal in it.) Like I said I like them (well I said don’t mind) when they’re done right. Oddly enough my sister hated the english Howls Moving Castle… one of the whole three dubs I didn’t mind. Then of course there’s the issue our man Rets brings up. THat’s a link to a webcomic and if you don’t like cussing I advise you to avoid it… and like anything I link to it’ll open in a new window… or tab if your browser is capable of it… but if it’s not you need to be slapped in the face anyway.

I like Mistakes of Youth… Heck first ever got there because of Kodomo no Jikan scans

I’m done my mini rant now… mostly because I need to get to the store before it closes and I have to finish watching a few episodes of Abenobanshi so that I can watch more MacGuyver… and there’s dishes that need to be washed. And you should feel happy I babbled on and on for another three or four hundred words but I removed most of it because it was cost comparing and in general repetition of these earlier thoughts of ‘I want the product to match what I pay for it’ Which is why I outright refuse to buy anime discs that are priced over 20$ running time is less than a movie, it should priced less than one dammit. Just because ooooooh you imported it from Japan and re-recorded your own audio for it… wait a tic that means you did practically none of the work, you spent far far less than those guys who made that movie did and they want twelve dollars and forty seven cents for it. “But we have a smaller market!” Yeah, and it’s shrinking all the time because you guys ask a lot of money for your product and apparently don’t give a flying fu….rry little squirrel about the quality of your dub. Yeah that means less and so less money you can spend to dig yourselves out of that little hole.

(and I was done ranting >.> anyway some recent dubs have been okay, When They Cry, what I heard of it was good and the new Haruhi too but I haven’t bought any of that, largely due to never seeing any though, as opposed to price. Without a credit card this stuffs hard to track down in the middle of nowhere Canada.

Anime Home Planet Blog

Okay so pretty much everything I’ve ever posted winds up pinging me back from this place (http://blog.animehomeplanet.com)… something I can’t quite comprehend because for some reason absolutley everything I post gets put on there wuth a different name and links back to here… Which I find kind of annoying… It’s not just my stuff that winds up there though there’s stuff from all over the place, it’s like some big webspider archive for any posts that happen to mention specific keywords. I’ve got nothing at all to do with them and it kind of annoys me a little… of course it’s also sent traffic my way once or thrice so I suppose it’s not all bad. ;p

Arcana Heart

I thought about whining about Mana Khemias two whole flaws, that I’ve run into anyway… but I’m kind of busy doing that somewhere else and so I figured I’d blurb about my other latest aquisition… Arcana Heart.

Now, any of you people who’re gamers probably recall a little thing from a while ago known as Rumble Roses… okay maybe I should stipulate just a little more, any of you who are gamers, and male… though that is the majority… vast majority… sadly… It was a wrestling spinoff game with an all female cast. Complete with ‘humiliation’ moves and mud wrestling… although on the ps2 version the mud looked like a completely different semi-liquid that only scat fetishists would get turned on by… That and it was completely devoid of loli… -.- However it was nice for those of us who wanted wrestling and not look at huge mostly naked steroid engorged men who would prance around the ring flexing and cussing for twenty minutes before each match.

That’s why Japan, in all it’s sometimes strange wisdom, invented Arcana Heart. Take Street Fighter and add a dash of Guilty GEar and then the very base idea from the aforementioned Rumble Roses… All female fighting game. But no, that’s not all, let’s take all the characters with their own skill sets and then mix in another set of ‘characters’ to choose from… so that each character has a total of eleven different freaking things to pick from… Which as their promotions keep throwing at us, (as if we can’t do simple multiplication, or in my case some complicated addition) adds up to 121 different setups you could use altogether.

The great thing, in my opinion is it jump starts the 2d fighter market, I hope anyway. Sure there’s the ever present Street Fighter, sure they dabbled in the 3d fighter buisness and they haven’t put out a new game in… a long time… (I don’t count things like Capcom vs SNK) but heck they’re what you think of when you hear the words arcade and fighter… well either that or King of Fighters … Anyway, a while back ‘they’ made Guilty Gear and it was awesome… and it had… what four or five installments and if I recall correctly it hasn’t done anything as of late. But one thing it did new, aside from more cartoonish art style, which was awesome as Capcom’s sprites haven’t changed in the last… forever… (Though I will stop and say that SNK’s sprites are frikking awesome) Where was I? Oh right Guilty Gear added music, not just background music though. Good Background music, music good enough that I think I have some of the songs kicking around somewhere on a disc. Guitar heavy and just… well awesome.

So anyway Arcana Heart… kind of like Guilty Gear and Street Fighter and KOF all rolled into one and as mentioned, all female. But it doesn’t really end there, because all the characters are anime archetpyes… more or less anyway. There’s a twelve year old in a school swimsuit with one of those little red backpacks… there’s a different girl in a school uniform witha sword, dog girl ninja (named Konoha). There’s a glasses girl witch complete with stupid pointy hat and absurdly large SENTIENT staff… robot chick… absurdly happy girl… maid with a BIG sword uhm… goth loli… I mean you’ve seen all these before just neevr all in the same place trying to kick, stab, maim eachother.

Heck I’ve not even played story mode yet so I don’t even really know WHY they’re all trying to kill each other. Yes, I’m not even sure what the game is about yet. >.< I saw a promo video over on gamefaqs.com and saw Kira Daidohji being all cute and eleven years old and in you know… mizugi >.> *cough* So I bought the game… and my research whilst awaiting shipment threw sword girl, maid girl and Aino Heart at me…

The game has a steep learning curve. But no in the usual upward direction of fighting games, where there’s your easy stuff and your absurdly hard combos. Anyone who has even played Street Fighter has the general idea of what to do in Arcana Heart down. But as I’ve experienced, Street Fighter was a whole lot more forgiving than Arcana Heart. It’s kind of particular about how you do your joyctick/dpad movements and your button input… which means when someone like me tries to play Maki (I think that’s sword girls name anyway) and we try to super move we may be doing different motions but we wind up doing the same move over and over and over because doesn’t like the way we did our dragon punch and so defaults it to a fireball motion. -.- Anyway it starts simple and then it spikes upwards while you learn what to do with whatever Arcana you’re trying to use and then skyrockets some more whilst you try to comprehend ‘homing attacks’ and ‘homing cancels’ and then clashing which you’re sort of used to anyway if you’ve played Street Fighter 3 Third Strike, or Soul Calibur… (just without impact guard) That’s where all the learning happens which is why I call it a downward sort of slope.once you figure that out it’s all downhill since you know all this stuff already. If you’re totally new to fighting games… grab a few quarters and head to an arcade and look for a street fighter or a capcom vs snk or a marvel versus capcom or a marvel versus streetfighter or a… you get the idea. ;p

Now I’ll break things down into a pros and cons list and wrap this up so I can go watch MacGuyver (which is 305 of why I have no anime updates atm.)

Pros:

Great Character Design

Great Artwork on both sprites and backgrounds

Big arenas, in a vertical way more than horizontal

Arcana can make even a character you know how to beat a pain in the neck (yes I count that as a pro)

Cons:

First off, no custom palettes. After several years of capcom vs snk pro I kind of require a palette editor so I can colour anyone I don’t like absurd colours. BUt in the games defense there’s eight colour sets for each character.

Secondly: THere was supposedly more audio for the game, in the way of between battle taunts. THese have been cut down to text in the english release. But I’ve never played the arcade version so I can’t really vouch on any claims about it. But on the chance it did once exist and was removed… WE ARE HIGHLY UNAMUSED! Any sequels should have that stuff left alone. The vast majority of us actually want that in there, sure a very large chunk of the portion that wants it doesn’t actually understand it… but you don’t go choppign out taunts and move names just because it’s not in english do you?

Mehs:

Dash is completely and totally whacked out. There’s still double taps but it’s not for running it’s just for hopping in and out of the way of things ‘running’ is done with a dash button.

So now, before I leave I’ll cross my fingers and hope there’s an Arcana Heart 2 and that it gets released here… and that they don’t cut out the between battle character audio.

Upcoming?: I just tracked down a couple older titles, Magical Shopping Complex Abenobanshi and Shrine of the Morning Mist… they might be what I blab about next… they might not be. No promises.