Animelog: Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni

I’d been beating around this anime for quite a long time. On the one hand it’s a horror show, which itself is a plus, and it can boast huge amount of positive reviews everywhere. On the other – very specific visual (and rather specific-bad than specific-good), and a very long and boring scene based on Umineko No Naku Koro Ni we watched during one of anime festivals.

Unfortunately, eventually Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni disappointed. The first arc was incredible, I was watching first 4 or 5 episodes non-stop (I’m a horrible anime fan and get tired pretty quickly usually) and was soo looking forward to such a story where tentatively the main character dies basically at the beginning.

When I saw the same character again I started suspecting something. When events of the second arc appeared to be different from those of the first one – I realized that I shouldn’t have hoped on the clever and gracious movement through time revealing the plot piece by piece.

Yeah, I know, the authors do show those pieces to us and probably that’s interesting to understand such things as that “Supervisor is Supervisor” is actually the doctor, or what the full history of the dam was. But being too sensitive and fragile I felt like it was just a sort of charlatanry. It was unemotional “Okay, that’s why Mion said that phrase the other day, because it actually was Shion, got it”. The characters, the event of the first arc were edgy, were playing with my nerves, it felt so great when, for example, the main character started training with a baseball bat because he wanted to defend himself or how he shut the door not paying attention that the Rena’s hand is going to get hurt. Other parts of the story… That’s the characters bursting out tirades about friendship and burying a corpse together, characters ferociously falling in love and characters shooting each other using water guns. The further it went the worse everything was getting – and ended up with multiple world. Oh, come on!..

This deserves a separate paragraph. The main character’s vest is probably the most terrible costume part I’ve seen in anime. And we have to enjoy it for perhaps 13 of 26 episodes!

 

 

 

 

As a weird conclusion… I still want to watch the second season of Higurashi… masochism maybe or maybe the synopsis inspired me – if I recall correct this is going to be about “live the same day again and again”.

PGW 2017

Ghost of Tsuhima looks amazing, imagining something like The Witcher but in Japanese setting (and probably without any jokes):

Another game I look forward too:

Looks like I’m the target audience of this anime because I was laughing watching that T_T

Fall season observations

“Recovery of an MMO Junkie” is a surprisingly non-irritating series. Despite having all that MMO stuff and love pentagrams it’s very cute and easy to watch. And luckily there’s going to be just 10 episodes – so probably I won’t get tired of it (inner voice is suggesting that I shouldn’t be too optimistic though).

“Just because” and Tsukigakirei look suspiciously similar (including even animation going askew here and there) but I couldn’t find any connections between them. Authors are different, productions studios are different, so apparently that’s just a coincidence (?).  Nevertheless, so far so good – not the best show of the season (we have “March comes in like a lion” after all) but it’s worth time we’re spending on it.

About best shows – unfortunately, “Kino no Tabi”‘s remake is not as wonderful as I thought it would be. No, it’s good, even very good and I look forward to every new episode – but the atmosphere is not as charming as I remember. And this new series is too colorful. *shakes his fists yelling that youngsters know nothing about good anime*

 

Thank you to all of the Eternals who joined our journey.

More details here: https://t.co/Ea6iHqdu09

— The Amazing Eternals (@AmazingEternals) October 26, 2017

I’m such a slowpoke! Turns out that Enlighten (a very popular GI tool) should now be licensed from Silicon Studio! This company is becoming quite a powerful force among graphics middleware vendors with a pretty solid portfolio: Enlighten, Mizuchi rendering engine and the optical (lens) effects library known under a name Yebis (which sounds very questionable for a Russian).

Couldn’t even have thought that I’d get a chance to attend a Judas Priest’s show – but here we go! March 27, 2018, Budweiser Gardens, London, Ontario!

http://www.lfpress.com/2017/10/23/judas-priest-will-play-londons-budweiser-gardens-on-march-27

Ergo Proxy: Cosplay

Animelog: Ergo Proxy

I don’t know what to say about Ergo Proxy. It’s certainly not a bad anime – yes, slow a little, yes, not all plot details are clear even at the point when you’re looking at the final titles (the latter, though, may be just because I’m not smart enough and don’t like thinking much about any anime if it’s not Evangelion).

Is it a good show? Probably… I really liked Pino as a character, enjoyed “weird” moments in this anime, when the authors tried to give some explanations how this world works, like an episode with the quiz show Vincent was participating in. Or a beautiful episode when Usagi got stuck in the middle of an ice desert and Reel (Real?) was desperately trying to find something, anything to do.

Visual, director’s work and atmosphere of Ergo Proxy are definitely its strongest points – they are charming and, to some extent, unique and deserve to be checked out. However, characters and the idea of that dying world Proxies should’ve helped to rebuild… is vague and not impressive. Reading reviews on some anime I often meet a phrase “it’s thought provoking”. Despite having many question: Why did they need Proxies at all – I must’ve missed something and humans had lost the ability to reproduce? Why Proxies kill each other? Why did humankind end up with only one or two functional Domes? What is the grand idea behind spreading Kogito virus? Anyway – despite having many questions I wouldn’t say that Ergo Proxy is a thought provoking anime.

Was it worth watching? Absolutely. Once you put up with its pace everything becomes much easier =) As I said it has some uniqueness. Check out MAL “similar anime” – there will be Psycho-Pass, Lain, Texhnolyze and all those anime are completely different.

Slowly watching Nisekoi when I have time. That’s amazing how SHAFT’s magic transformed this, to be honest, pretty ordinary show into something interesting. If it didn’t have such a great visual I would’ve dropped it after the first episode – all those 10-years-ago-I-met-a-girl stories are typically kind of boring. Not even mentioning keys and locks – this is just pure evil.

Kirisaki is very cute, of course. I wish her name was Asuka ^_^