Kurogane’s Anime Blog

BAWWWWWWWWWWW~~~~!!!! Yoshiyuki, T.T.

Yume has suddenly became extremely awesome. She chose to confront the fact instead of running away like Otome’s doing. Makes me root even more for the Yume ending.

Also, what’s with all the random Nanaka cameos in the episode?

He’s both at Ashford and in China?!!

This is bad, I gotta stop getting so surprised at every twist and turn they throw at us.

But, you gotta admit it… the ending of this episode definitely made me go “O.O EEEEEEHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”. Sunrise had better have a good explanation of how Lelouch managed to “clone” himself.

Otherwise, rather normal, mecha fighting episode, with Xingke getting the upper hand fighting against Zero, but Lelouch seems to have a few more good tricks up his sleeve, so we’ll see what happens next week. Aside from that, nothing worth mentioning I guess, except for the fact that all the Knightmares that have “faces” look pretty damn ugly.

I wonder what will happen to poor Kallen though… I bet the doujin-ka already have pretty good ideas on that, XD.

I’m surprised it’s not being hyped much, but Gainax is gonna release a series of music videos, set to a track from the TTGL soundtrack, with all the characters of Gurren Lagaan set in to a parallel world. The first one’s out it seems and it can be watched here.

Starting the series off with the perfect track, 「Rap is a Man’s Soul! (Dai-Gurren-Dan Theme)」, this music video has the TTGL cast in a medieval setting, with Simon, Kamina and Viral playing as knights out to rescue poor damsel-in-distress Nia from the hands of the Spiral King. Yoko makes her appearance as one of the guards of the castle.

Pretty awesome as music videos go, and as a plus, we get to see adult Simon side-by-side with Kamina himself.

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Author says:

This looks like a good time for me to say something about superiority of actually buying the episodes (I spent 1100 BOST points, or about 22 U.S. dollars thus far), and to lampoon Kuro’s cheap-ass lameness. But I won’t. What Crunchyroll is doing is just nasty. The deal was to show the series for free on YouTube. We don’t know why GONZO agreed to that, and the deal made little sense to me, but since they did, they should have followed through with it. Now we know that either Cruncyroll or GONZO is not trustworthy (if GONZO made the decision to truncate the episode, it’s them; if Crunchyroll made it behind GONZO’s back, then the obvious).

In short, Kuro is still lame for not paying for his show, but he made his decision based on the information available at the start of the season, and was deceived. That is inexcusable and outrageous.

While Author has gotten the point of my post right, i.e. they promised us free streaming but instead didn’t fall through, I feel compelled to reply to his accusations that I am “lame” because I do not pay for my anime.

Yes, he has it right, I do not pay for the show, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I am “lame”. Given an unlimited amount of money, I would probably choose to spend at least 50% of it on anime, but sadly, being a student and also living in a country where the exchange rates make all but only the upper middle classes and above to be able to afford splurging on foreign stuff, I’m just plainly too poor to afford anything beyond the usual necessities every month.

But that doesn’t mean I do not support the buying of originals. I purchase a number of english-translated manga imported from the US every month, at the price of RM 34 or so, per book, and I have actually bought original DVD’s before. There’s also a whole bunch of Megami I import in each month to the tune of RM 50 a month. The prices are all of course, converted accordingly to the exchange rates.

However, let me put in to context, the imbalances of our buying power compared to the exchange rate. 1 US Dollar is equivalent to Ringgit Malaysia 3.2 at current rates, so a USD 10 manga is priced at around RM 32-36 here, after the inclusion of shipping fees and such by the bookstores. Yet, the buying power of the ringgit and the dollars are roughly the same in their respective countries, so a dollar converted to ringgit here immediately gets 3x more buying power (rough estimates again), but in reverse, a ringgit converted to a dollar has its worth reduced 3x. Not very fair.

So imagine paying USD 34 for a single volume of manga, USD 50 for a magazine and USD 180 for a DVD, and you’ll get the idea of how horrendously expensive to be a paying otaku over here. It’s hard not be “lame”, but hey, if you can’t afford it, you can’t afford it. I wonder if Author would’ve been willing to spend USD 70 (that’s the amount of ringgit that 22 USD converts to) on Druaga, if it were priced as such.

Beach episode finally. I’m surprised it comes in so late in the show’s run, considering it’s one of the customary cliché’s that every ecchi/romance harem anime must have.

Surprisingly, it’s “normal” episodes like this, free from youkai hijinks and shouta gattai’s, are the ones I enjoy most in Kanokon. Just the whole gang having a bit of normal fun, spiced with some extreme swimsuits (note: bandaids ARE NOT swimsuits) and a little bit of character development (I “awww”‘ed when Asahina went to thank Tayura for saving her from a watery doom) are the episodes that I can lay back and enjoy.

Anyways, time for the slideshow. Not really much, but enjoy ^^.

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So apparently, the people behind the free, subtitled streaming of The Tower of Druaga (Crunchyroll I presume), decide to only upload the first 5 minutes of episode 11 on Youtube, while helpfully providing the link to the Crunchyroll streaming with the full episode. In fact, the sidebar description now reads “Watch the full episode (It’s free!): (insert CR link)” instead of “Free streaming of this episode also available at: (insert CR link)” that has been the usual of the previous 10 episodes.

I find it highly annoying, especially because I have been using Youtube much more, and I do not really like the CR site much. This blatant attempt to force the Youtube viewers to their site (meaning account registration and etc. etc.) is highly insulting and reeks of profiteering, even more so when the show is actually nearing it’s end, especially with the story turning a lot more darker and deeper in tone compared to most of the series. I had been looking forward for my usual fix of Druaga on Youtube, but this has left me in despair.

In fact, hints of this had emerged already during the upload of last week’s episode, where a sizable portion of the upper half of the Youtube upload was basically a billboard for Crunchyroll. I was quite irritated, but merely shrugged it off, but this tactic of uploading only the first 25% of the episode and forcing the rest of the viewers to their own site really takes the cake.

I sincerely hope it might be all a mistake and a botched upload, but the evidence points all to the contrary. I do hope that the people behind this realize that this is not the way to attract more viewers to their sites, and in fact causes quite the opposite, especially since there was a promise to fully stream the show on all the three sites that signed up initially.

Meanwhile, I await for my HD raw of Druaga episode 11 to finish.

To all my Malaysian readers, I’m selling off a bunch of my manga, due to a serious lack of space on my bookshelves and money as well. I’m looking to sell them for about RM 10 - 15 per book and RM 40-50 for that Full Metal Alchemist artbook, and if you buy a lot, I can sell for a cheaper price. If you would like to buy all of them, it’s RM 275. The list of titles is as follows.

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It started off pretty well, above-average even but not exactly exceptional. Sadly though, things really started falling apart for me around the middle and the end.

Let’s just say the cheese factor really rose up around then, with episodes dedicated to… um, “character development” such as the one where Tina gets framed, where Galahad became, of all things, a farmer and finally had to kill his lover, and so on, while not really advancing the plot much. Hell, they even missed the oh-so-important 14-day deadline like it wasn’t really a big matter. That kinda ruined the show’s enjoyment for me, mostly due to the sheer corniness the show takes around then.

The final episode was just as bad as well. Prince Gernia is really a fucked-up guy, seriously, and I really gotta point out he managed to finish his cup of tea before dying via debris-crush. Also, the good guys managed to bring down a whole fortress by shooting a small-bore cannon (it was small enough to be lifted on one hand, at the least), which just made it plain unbelievable, since they were claiming it was neigh impenetrable just moments before. That’s just some awesome plot cannon there.

Didn’t really help that Starlight’s translations got really out of hand towards the later episodes, with tons of glaringly obvious translation errors, that seemed to have been made up along as they went. Lucky enough the language used wasn’t overtly technical, so I still understood it. Too bad the subs were hard ones, not soft ones :P.

Well… despite the cheese and corn of the later half of the show, it’s still pretty much watchable, if you really want to. Just be ready to brace for some really /facepalm inducing “WTF? LOL!” moments then. It’s an okay watch, if only for it’s short length and Mikako Takahashi. If only Rita kept her long hair…. (god I’m starting to sound like a long-hair fetisher orz)

… wonder how would she look like in twintails.

A ponytail is fine too, by the way.

Frequent blog reader (and emailer) Skane pointed me to this awesome MAD of the Lucky Star OP performed by the Suzumiya Haruhi cast. The twist is, it’s all done in 3D, so the results are pretty quite awesome, since most of the actions have been rendered properly. I really salute the group behind this who did the MAD. Must’ve been quite the job to render the scenes.

Without further delay, please enjoy ^^.