Kurogane's Anime Blog

Finally got my hands on my order of Evangelion 1.01. Amazon.jp is impressive. Ordered placed on Saturday, processed on Sunday, delivered on Monday morning, arrived at Tuesday evening. That’s what you call service, eh. But I must say, for the 1,700 yen I paid for the shipping, they could’ve used a much more better packaging. I was surprised at looking at thin boxpack(or whatever it’s called) used for the DVD. I was expecting a box, heh.

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The show is slowly picking up, in terms of interesting-ness and awesome-ness.

Didn’t expect to see even Hocchan in this show, much more as Miyako, the siblings mom at that. I just can’t see anyone with Hocchan’s voice as a mother. Really. Especially when she’s using that normal, Hocchan voice of hers.

The main star of this episode has to be Kou-chan. Kou-chan is “oh she’s so cute I wanna glomp her! wwwww”. Miko + dojikko + strong desire to protect master = win. Not to mention she’s got one awesome “uuuuuu :\” face.

“Uuuuuuuu~~~ :\”

The story goes like this…

The other day, I bought 2 x 1GB sticks of Crucial Ballistix RAM from Shawty (popular seller in LYN forums). Got the RAM yesterday, then took it to test on my new rig today. Booted up fine with all 4 sticks. Then decided to test with only the Ballistix. Guess what? The POST BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP of Doom struck. orz.

“Fine,” I thought, “Might have seated the RAM’s wrongly.”, so I reseated the RAM’s. POST BEEP of Doom again.

“Right, calm down…. let me try with the other slots.”, so I changed the slots pairing from 1-3 to 2-4. POST BEEP of Doom again.

“Shit, this looks bad.”, so I changed to the original sticks of Corsair Twin2x XMS RAM. Tried with 1-3 and 2-4. POST BEEP’s of Doom again.

“Oh f-ck, not good.”, so I reset the CMOS twice and tested with different set each CMOS clear. POST BEEP’s of Doom again.

“Great.”, so I tested the sticks INDIVIDUALLY, on each INDIVIDUAL slots.

16 POST BEEP’s of Doom (4 sticks x 4 slots) later, “F*ck, this is bad. real bad.”, so I asked for riku2replica’s(LYN forumer and friend) help to eliminate the RAM as the cause. All the RAM’s worked fine on his PC.

“Sigh… looks like my mobo is f***ed.” Called jy14(the original seller) to RMA the board and he said it takes 2 weeks.

So, there is how I killed my mobo in just one month of setting it up, har har har. Thank god the mobo is still in RMA period.

Moral of the story: Shit happens.

Oh, i’m taking the chance to sell my current casing as well, the LYN thread is here. You can also contact me directly via email if you want to buy it (no outstation buyers, thanks).

Tsundere Yume is tsundere~~~

The Christmas festival finally arrives in this episode.

Yume continues on her tsundere-ness, which is pretty funny, especially when she goes all robotic when Yoshiyuki greets her at the start of the episode.

As expected, poor Koko gets KO’ed, and Otome saves the day with her very emotional rendition of Sheryl in the puppet play. The play is probably going to foretell the events happening later on in the series.

The episode ends with the Asakura sisters, Yoshiyuki and Sakura celebrating Christmas together (funnily, Jun’ichi seems forgotten most of the time), ending with Sakura’s ominous wish for this happiness to last forever.

Rollo gets mindfucked.

WTF!
WTF!
WHAT THE FUCK!

Oh god, Lulu, or should I say the Sunrise scriptwriters, are masters at such plot twistings. Hell, I felt a bit of pity for poor Rollo myself.

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Bunny girl Chizuru kinda fits her character. But it’s weird to see a fox cosplaying as a bunny girl, really.

Who would win though, in a shootdown between Bunny Girl Kallen and Bunny Girl Chizuru?

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Finished watching the DVD version. In the end, I reordered the DVD, despite the lack of Asuka and no thanks to the remastered Operation Yashima. If my paycheck had arrived a week earlier, I wouldn’t have to had to do this… oh well. Says much for my fanboyism, looks like it’s gonna be bread all the way until my next paycheck arrives again. Man, my parents are gonna throw a fit when the DVD arrives home orz.

Impressions on the 1.01 version?

I still feel that the start was rather cut-and-paste, so for anyone already familiar with the series, it’s best to skip it. The real goodie is of course Operation Yashima, where clearly a fuck ton of budget has went in to the CG, and seeing it full DVD-glory is definitely impressive. Very impressive.

I still think that the Shinji in the Rebuild is less “emo”, and as I’ve stated earlier when I watched the cam-rip, he seems more quick to pick up on his role. I think it’s mainly because of his actions during the actual Operation Yashima, where he actually recovered and struggled to get a second shot at the Angel, despite his father ordering Rei to do it instead. I think it clearly shows that he has accepted the fact that he is an Eva pilot, unlike in the series where he keeps on rejecting the fact throughout the series. I do hope that the following movies will continue with a less “emo” Shinji.

What I find most intriguing is the end of the movie with Kaworu awaking up in a coffin-like box, overlooking a pit housing what I conjecture to be Adam, on the Moon. This already hints for big changes ahead, further reinforced with the preview of the second movie.

So far, no news of the second movie as of yet. It will probably be released late this year, maybe on September as well, just like the first movie.

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Megane Sheryl!

Sheryl loves her little pranks~

Sheryl is love, pure love.

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A heartwarming ending

Yup, nearly a month late, but I finally completed the last 2 episode of the series.

Fuyuki’s character and plot were really rather bland, and I still think it’s the weakest part of the series. Glad they finished it off at episode 12. I really shared Chiaki’s annoyance at the fella, although in my case, I wish he would GTFO the series, really.

Ending off the series with Haruka’s offer to go overseas was quite okay, and it resolved a hanging plot thread nicely. Of course good ol’ Haruka won’t just leave her siblings off like that. I was really touched when the two actually started doing housework, in anticipation of Haruka leaving. Poor Makoto and Touma for having to become their taste testers. But ahh~ in the end, still ended with crying scenes.

The sports episode in episode 12 provided with some good laughs too, when Fujioka got “borrowed” by Chiaki in the Borrowing Items race. I laughed so hard when it was revealed that Chiaki had to borrow “Father”, dealing poor (14 years old) Fujioka quite the mental shock, ahahahahah. Even more LULZ ensued when he cornered Fuyuki when Kana was being overtly friendly to him.

Hosaka, despite his really limited show time, which is a big shame really, truly provided the much needed dose of the familiar Minami-ke comedy in both episodes. Most especially in the finale, after hearing about Haruka getting transferred, he immediately went to procure a passport. Best part was definitely at the end of the episode, when he’s in a plane to France. Oh god, he’s so GAR.

Spinoff series, “Hosaka in France”, needs to be made for great justice.

In conclusion, while it hasn’t been as good as the first season was, being weaker in terms of eliciting the laughs and also in the production quality at times, Okawari still manages to be entertaining enough to live up to it’s series name. It has been an interesting experiment by the copyright holders to split production between two studios, and while the results are mixed, it has given us a nice, feel-good, comedy series in the end.

Finally, after much persuasion by Owen.S, I’ve made the jump and joined MyAnimeList. Now I can stalk read Owen’s miniblog in it.

Feel free to add me, my username’s kur0gan3. “Kurogane” got taken up by some UK-fag, while “Kurogane Shiroikaze” was too long T.T. Currently, still need to add OVA titles and movies to my anime list, probably will take quite a while to add the manga and other sections of the site.