Kurogane's Anime Blog

LOL CONTRAST. First episode goes “I don’t believe in fate.” then the next one starts with the opposite statement. Yeaaaaaaaaaaah.

This was also another curveball episode, starting off with the twins stalking someone and finding out that she’s a stalker herself. God damn, I always get reminded of the “chain of stalkers” episode of SZS whenever this happens.

The new character, Oginome Ringo, is also quite an interesting albeit intense character. At first, I had a pretty nice impression of her as a normal girl with normal dreams… but this show really takes all the normalcy it establishes and then smashes it. When I saw how deep in to crazy she was… hurrrrrrrrr.

Although, the real scene stealers this week are the penguins. God damn, just seeing them walk is so damn cute… sending them off to do infiltration missions and such was just so cheating lol. Now I wish I had one of them myself lolol.

The music is also pretty cool. I really liked the music that plays at the lingerie shop scene. Not forgetting the “those holes lead to the cosmos comment” ヽ( >∀<)ﾉ AHAHA AHAHA AHAHAHAHA. Oh man, Kanba, y u so naughty!

Show needs more Charlotte Miki. She really is a scene-stealer. More Azusa and Takane is nice too.

A drastically more enjoyable episode than last week’s although it still didn’t go much anywhere. I will admit I am a bit disappointed at the lack of stage performances, but it looks like they want the show to go through the “working hard to achieve our dreams” phase before that. Well, I guess this show IS about a fledgling idol talent agency…

Ok, silly gripes aside, I liked the episode for the “showing our individuality via photo shoots” part. It did give us a lot of nice eyecandy of everyone, but the focus on Iori’s efforts to highlight her individuality ironically painfully shows how unsuitable she is for this line of business. The twins were funny, though sadly Yayoi continues to not make much of an impression for me.

Otherwise, I’d say the show is slowly picking up steam. I just hope there will a performance of GO MY WAY!! before it ends.

Earlier this month, I finally splurged and bought myself a PS3. While I mainly wanted it to watch my Blu-Ray orders *coughmadokacough*, I’ll admit it’s also almost 40% because I have been dying to play the Alchemist of Arland games and since then I’ve been spending any time not working, watching anime or reading the news playing Rorona.

While there’s so much one can read from reviews, nothing really beats actually sitting down and playing the game itself. To be honest, Rorona really plays like Recettear, mainly due to the time limit system that kinda does force one to plan ahead properly on time… or use a walkthrough. Yes, guilty as accused here. :P

But, the cool thing about games like these are that walkthroughs can’t essentially destroy the experience of actually watching the character interaction events and conveying Rorona’s cuteness. I’m so happy that Rorona isn’t as big a ditz as some friends describe her, and she’s just all around a really good girl who’s earnest at her work although a little oblivious towards things. Kadowaki Mai’s voice really suits her quite well in that aspect. I definitely enjoyed the events where her friends and the characters made fun of her airheadedness, most notably when Astrid goes “Oh you’ll never find such a talented idiot like Rorona in a hundred years!” … while she is just a few paces away doing her work saving Astrid’s Atelier. And everytime Rorona has an event with Hagel… it never fails to be funny. Drunk Tiffani was unforgettable too XD.

Even the gameplay starts to get quite engrossing after a while, since the alchemy system is, while quite simple, starts becoming pretty addictive as I tried to mix the right ingredients with the right traits and quality to get the final item I wanted. Thankfully, it’s not super hard to get good items… although hitting the basket limit during gathering sessions started to get a bit annoying lol. Overall though, it’s a fun system to play about with, just to get the right outputs from it.

Anyways, I just finished the first year of the game, which means I’ve still got about 2/3rds of the game to go through. Hopefully the second year will go as smooth as my first year, and there’s still a few more characters to meet yet!

Holy shit, Aki’s character in this show is fucking hilarious. I think she just saved the entire show for me. Thank god I gave this show another watch before I decided to ignore it for good. The first episode was pretty bland, but who would have thought they were hiding such gems for the second episode! Gawd, Chitose and her “fantasy” mode is so fucking funny.

And it’s not just Chitose too. The two rival/friends with their tsun-tsun actions towards each other was pretty damn entertaining just to see how hard they are restraining their homolust for each other and channeling it in to spiteful actions between them. I was laughing and d’aaaaw’ing equally at their parts lol.

Ahh… hoping to see more of Chitose next week just to see how overboard her “fantasy” mode can go to lol.

Yune HNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGH

Yune attempts French cuisine and gets to go out to the market this week. The cuteness levels of this episode is way over 9M. Poor Claude trying out umeboshi for the first time though. It’s seriously quite a shock.

Oh my god, this show is going to kill me. Seriously this show is going to kill me. I don’t think my paternal instincts have been awoken up so powerfully before this show. God damn it, I cannot watch this show in public at all. I don’t think I can restrain myself at the bundle of heartwarming cuteness that is Yune.

Sure feel like baguettes and cheese for breakfast tomorrow.

“Yep, this is how school trips should be like; working at the inn I’m staying with!”

So in the end, they avoided a direct confrontation between Ohana and Yuina, instead choosing to shame Yuina in to realizing her mistakes with Ohana’s hard work.

Mmm, made for less drama than I hoped for, but it was a lot better resolved in this way I guess. Yuina isn’t totally wrong about wanting to find something to do by herself, it’s just that her half-heartedness and narrow-minded view of what it means to be in the service industry made her rather… spoiled about the whole idea of working properly. That and her upbringing probably needs to be stricter. I found it utterly hillarious that she didn’t even know how to properly rinse the floor after scrubbing it when she tried to help clean the baths lol. She’d definitely not be a great wife candidate until she knows at least how to do the bare minimum of housework…

“What do you mean Ohana would make a better wife than I would?!”

Well, that said, the Yuina arc didn’t really bring on much big developments as I hoped it would be. It was pretty much introducing more of Yuina’s character properly, showcasing her negative side and resolving that for the better. Still we did get our fanservice, what with the swimsuits last week and the naked ofuro wrestling in this one (albeit tree censored)… so it wasn’t all that bad too. I was just expecting it to be a bit more… dramatic? Ahaha~

Next week looks like another Jiroumaru episode. God, I can’t believe he’s getting another one. The preview looks creepy though, so it might be more serious than I expect!

It’s only the second episode and Subaru’s already GET the first girl of the team. Sasuga rorikon coach ヽ( >∀<)ﾉ AHAHA AHAHA AHAHAHAHA!

Ok, on a more serious note, Ro-Kyu-Bu’s story is a lot more solidly constructed than I expected. I’m a little surprised to the revelation that Momoka was previously an intense enough person about winning that she managed to alienate her team mates and peers. Wouldn’t have guessed it from my first impression of her.

Anyways, the reason for the match between the girl and boy basketball clubs is out in the open, so now it’s up to Subaru to see if the can pull a miracle out of that team. He’s probably gonna have a hard time whipping Hinata and Airi in shape…. well, good luck!

P.S. Man, I’m glad they toned down that fanservice level from last week. It would’ve made me a lot more uncomfortable to admit I enjoy the show for other reasons than that…

What I watched: The IDOLM@STER
What I expected: WORKING!!
What I got: The IDOLM@STER

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Oh wow, that was probably one of the best pieces of animation I’ve watched all year. Holy shit, this scene really blew me away when I first watched it and it still does. I never knew walking down a staircase could possibly be that epic.

So for a show with zero information and expectations from me… this is how first episodes should be more like. To be frank, it wasn’t even the animation that sold the show to me at first, I already started liking the show with the exposition about the three siblings and how little sister has a deadly disease that would kill her any moment. Contrasting the blissful peace with the morbidity of her fate was executed really well, especially after she DID die on her, supposedly last trip to the aquarium holding fond memories of her.

And while some might probably hold very opposing opinions, I quite like the colorful-ness of the show that pervaded throughout the show’s settings and backgrounds. I’m not sure what different here, since there’s probably even more colorful anime around, but the colors worked in the show really well here and made it a very visually appealing show for me was well.

Story-wise, thematically it seems very nihilist as some pointed out, but the simplicity of the structure might just make it fun enough to watch. At least they aren’t trying to create elaborate crazy setups yet so far but since this is coming from the director of Utena, it may perhaps get more “stylish” later on.

Frankly, I’m quite excited to see what’s coming next week, but this might be a winner if it doesn’t lose steam by the middle of August. Ah, I shouldn’t be saying that so soon, I end up eating my words way too often after doing this.

This is how I know I’m going to watch this show to the bitter end even though it turns out to be vapid fanservice.

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