Whoa, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything here. Sorry about that all, I’ve been see busy with end of term projects (which started around the beginning of April ish?.) Since my last post, I’ve: beaten DQV and wrote my mini-review for it (which I forgot to post,) gotten TWEWY and beaten it, gotten addicted to Europa Universalis III, started some manga series and finished others, and rewatched the ending of the Gundam Trilogy a billion times I also got the Samsung N120, a nice little subnotebook.

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The single for “Kiseki,” by NIRGILIS, came out today. “Kiseki’ is the OP from the new season of Tetsuwan Birdy: DECODE. I’ve been waiting for this single to come out for a while now. Out of all of the OPs from this spring (or is it still winter?) season of anime, it’s probably the only OP I particularly like. It’s a very energetic song.

This is actually the only song I’ve heard from NIRGILIS before. The PV is pretty interesting, for the sole reason it uses people to anime some of the lyrics. As in, at a certain point, the people use their own bodies to combine into romanji.

The PV of the song uploaded on youtube a couple of weeks ago. It’s embedded below. You can get the single at the usual places.

NIRGILIS’s website

Since I wrote about the previous one, I really won’t write that much here. I thought of the previous game more as multiple ADVs with a side of RPG. That feeling was kinda of reversed for this title though. By mere virtue of AT 2’s RPG side not sucking, it now feels like the ADVs were added to the RPG part. The funny thing is, besides being non-sucky, it’s actually pretty good.

To a make a long story short, the game is about the mystery of who has been targeting and killing people in the little town of Inaba. The victims have all wound up in strange positions, dangling from television poles and such. The police have no idea of who the suspect could be or how they are doing this. Also odd is the fact that victims appear on the Midnight Channel, a channel that only appears at midnight, before they are killed.

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As with every drama, I’m fashionably late with this one as well… This time, it wasn’t a Chinese one. *gasp* For once, I actually decided to watch a Japanese one. I know, big surprise since I’m a big fan of wuxia. Initially, I wanted to see if I could find a historical drama based during the Sengoku Jidai period or at least something with people dying. Alas, I could not find a single one (I suppose they’re not very popular.) I did, however, settle on a comedy: My Boss, My Hero. I wasn’t disappointed and hope to see more comedy jdramas in the future ^^.

This one stars a 27-year old son of a yakuza boss, Sakaki Makio. If there’s one defining trait he has, it’s that he is utterly stupid. This is demonstrated when his failure to count and compare numbers ruins a deal that his father sets up with a foreign mafia. Angry that his son is so dumb, he makes a deal with Makio: either he returns to and graduates from high school, or his younger brother, Mikio, will take over the group.

So, Makio is enrolled into a high school as a senior, attending school with a bunch of kids ten years his junior. In his school, only one person, the principal, knows his true identity as a yakuza. If anyone else finds out, Makio will get expelled. Quite a bit of the comedy comes from how hard Makio has to restrain himself to not give himself away (the rest of the comedy coming from the hilarious faces he makes.)

The whole drama is pretty hilarious, though. The whole thing is pretty much ridiculous.

Of course, there’s always some kind of cute love interest in these types of dramas and for this one it’s Umemura Hikari, played by Aragaki Yui. Her name seems oddly familiar, I think she may have done some gravure before. Anyway, on the cuteness scale, I’d rate her an 8, right below Horitaki Maki (10 <3 ) and Shida Mirai (9).

Unlike the female leads I’m used to in most of the Chinese dramas I’m used to watching, Umemura doesn’t really become annoying at any time during the drama. Even when there’s an inevitable (and hilariously caused) big misunderstanding between Umemura and Makio, she doesn’t spend half of the series hating him.

There is also Sakura-something Jun… Unfortunately, Makio only utters his full name once or twice during the series, so it’s hard to remember. He literally calls him Sakura-something throughout the whole series, which I find hilarious. Anyway, Jun plays the role of Makio’s best friend/conscience. The thing I most remember him for is the way he talks. More like, what kind of motions he uses when he talks. They seem a little feminine to me, but that’s ok, he’s a fun character.

Besides being really funny, I think this series can be pretty touching at some points, especially towards the end. Even though Makio is still, at heart, a yakuza, he’s actually a pretty good guy in the inside. Later in the series, the extent he goes to protect his friends without letting them know he’s a yakuza is pretty sweet, especially when he can’t fight in front of them.

Anyway, if you don’t watch this one, I’m just going to say that you’re missing out. It’s one of the few dramas that had me actually laughing out loud.

Just really busy lately. For some reason, even though I don’t have a money source right now, I’ve been buying a lot of douijn and games lately. Oh boy, have I gotten a lot of games. I ended up double dipping and picked up Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI for PC. I enjoy playing on my computer much more than using my PS3 to play it. The interface feels a lot better/quicker. I also ended up creating my own force for once. Maybe I could start those gameplay diaries again.

I also got Valkyria Chronicles and Little Big Planet.. I haven’t played the latter as much as I’ve played the former, even though I’ve only had Valkyria since yesterday. I think I’m already on the 10 hour mark. I’m at chapter 9 right now. It’s a pretty good game. It’s one of the few recent SRPGs that requires ACTUAL strategy (unlike a certain grindfest *cough-cough*.) Having troops fire on you while you move your own units really does add another element to strategy. Hopefully I can beat it by the next weekend so I can do a little writeup on it.

Joking aside, the real reason I’ve been busy is the sheer amount of work I’ve been given as of late. I haven’t even been able ot play most of the games I’ve gotten… One of my classes has a lot of projects. If you’re really interested (for whatever reason,) you can look at the processor we had to ‘make’ that was due Thursday. Anyway, you can expect more posts in the future (like, one or two days.)

Top picture source: Minoharu

After waiting for a year, I finally got the DS version of DQ IV. I have just now realized how much I must suck at DQ games. I’ve been wiped out like 25 times in the 20 hours I’ve played. I actually had to grind to fight a certain boss :-/

I haven’t really played that many DQ games before… Outside of playing one of the Dragon Quest/Warrior Monster games as a child and playing Dragon Quest VIII, my experience in this area is pretty much nothing. I thought that this would have a pretty similar feel to that.

In therms have battle systesms, they’re both pretty much the same, except that the fourth iteration is a whole lot faster than the eighth. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were the fastest turn based RPG system I’ve ever seen. It’s a wonder how much having minimal animations and low HP, maybe the developers of the Xenosaga.

There is sadly not that much character development in this game. They took out the party talk feature in the Western versions of the game. For those unfamiliar with the series, party talk is basically exactly what it sounds like. It basically allows you to get the insights on the current situation from your party members. It’s also pretty useful if you haven’t played the game for a while and you have forgotten where to go. It’s not that bad, but wtv.

Truth be told, I’m more looking forward to DQV right now. Even though IV has the best music in the series, imo, it seems as though V has the better character interaction, especially since pary talk isn’t in any of the Western editions.

Well, this is great. I finished most of this post last week when I had just gotten the game, and now I’ve finished it :-/. GREAT timing. Anyway, I might as well give you my important end-game stats.

26:12 with Hero at Lv 33
Battles: 761
Monsters Defeated: 1928
Victories: 696
Times Wiped Out: 17
Times Fled: 46
Max Dmg: 282

I think most of the wipeouts was with Torneko and the twins. At some point in Torneko’s chapter, being wiped out doesn’t really affect anything, so I got a bit crazy >.> With the twins, one of the bosses was kinda hard T_T

I got my replacement PS3 last week and have been out on a honeymoon with it. I’ve missed playing Folklore and Pixeljunk: Eden. It’s a shame that I couldn’t finish either of the two before summer ended. I doubt I’ll be able to play them very much during this semester.

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One of my favorite doujin artists is a fellow by the name of Urotan (うろたん). I recently came across his latest doujin on FAKKU, a Strike Witches hentai book by the name of Milkie Strike. It pretty much embodies two of Urotan’s three loves (loli and bukkake, the third unrepresented one being big breasts).

This project is really reminding me how many kanji I really don’t know. I think I’ve had to look up almost every kanji used (thank god for Jim Breen’s website and the multi-radical section.) I think looking up the kanji took more time than the actually translating.

The other problem is, even though I probably do have enough grammar skills to translate the title, my vocabulary leaves something to be desired…. Well, by something I mean a lot of somethings… My vocabulary plainly sucks. At least, while doing this, I should learn lots of new words (probably not the best words to learn, but whatever.) As a result, my translations are probably somewhat off, at least for the beginning monologue.

Anyway, I’m not sure what I should do with this once I’m done. I probably suck at editing, so the likelihood of me editing the translated text into the doujin is pretty slim. Maybe I’ll just upload the RAW + a rtf file with the translations somewhere on this site. I shouldn’t really worry about it right now, since it’s obviously going to take a while going at the rate I’m going at..

Atlus finally got the preorder bonuses to Amazon, which means they could finally get the bonuses to the unhappy preorderers such as I. It was kinda worth the wait. Because of it, we don’t have to deal with the material being bent to conform with the DS box.

This makes me wish Romantic Fool did more art for games… and more art non-featuring the creepy, injured one-eyed girl. I rather like his art featuring …uh… melons instead, if you know what I mean. Anyway, feel free to take a peek at the melon filled mini-poster below, as well as the reversible cover for the game.

Romantic Fool

You all might as well be trying the demo for the DJ Max Portable 2. For those who have never heard of the DJ Max series, you can think of it like Beatmania or something. The demo is actually pretty freakin hard XD. Took me about 3-4 days to beat the demo, which is only about half of one of the songs… It’s actually deceptively hard, since it’s only in 5 button mode…

You can get the demo, and find out how to install it, here. Yea, it was released over a year ago, but oh well. You can see an interview PM Studios did with Siliconera about DJ Max Fever here.

Image courtesy of Moai

My PS3 is dying. No two if and or buts about it. I’ve been experiencing graphical glitches and auto-shutdowns for a while now, but I was able to stomach it. Now, it’s gotten so bad that some games just up and freeze during gameplay. I made the call to SCEA and I’m sending it in for repairs, quite possibly never seeing the same unit again.

Farewell, my 60GB PS3. I will miss you and your backwards compatibility (I god, I hope that they can fix you, or at least send one of those 80GB units with BW compatibility.) You were a good soldier.

EDIT: I guess this means more manga posts from now on, amirite?