So I’m back a little sooner than I thought but, I came across something that I just had to write about. There is going to be an anime adaption of the Devil Survivor 2 video game, which I reviewed on here sometime ago when it came out early last year. I kind of feel dumb for not seeing until a couple days ago given I’m a huge fan of the series. It’s slated to start airing in April sometime, and the episode count has not been announced yet. The anime is going to coincide with the release of the 3DS “remaster” of Devil Survivor 2 also coming later this year. So I’m very excited for this and after the Persona 4 anime, I’m hoping this will be as good as it was. I’m going leave a link to a site with all the trailers and photos for to peruse at your leisure:
Hey there, hope your having a great day. So this is a topic I wanted to touch on for while now, but I put it off in favor of other things to write about. However, recently something happened that made me need to rush out and write about how being an anime\video game fan can affect your relationships. I’m going to address this in general and add my own personal experiences. So let’s get into it.
Its probably pretty likely that most anime fans have a story of someone they know questioning their maturity because that person thinks watching and enjoying anime is only for children. Its a narrow minded view and it really annoys me that people I know have that view about something I really enjoy. Similarly, with video games some people take the view that if you play video games your a child in an adult’s body. I would always hear from my mother that games are a waste of time and that I needed to grow up, but I just told her it was something I enjoyed and would continue to do so. There is always times in anyone’s life when someone questions one of their passions because that person cannot do it as good as you or just because that person thinks its worthless. You just have to have the backbone and confidence to tell them that they are mistaken.
Now, I want to get into the romantic side of relationships and the effect being an anime of video game fan can potential have on it. When it comes to my personal experience with dating and being an anime\video game fan, its mostly positive. I do have some horror stories to share with you about some close minded women I had the displeasure of coming across. Since, coming to South Korea I have quite bit of experience dating Korean women, of which the majority has been good. That said, I have two stories of women that didn’t like the fact I played video games. The first one didn’t last long because during our first chat on the website we met on she asked what were my hobbies and I listed them all along the fact I play video games, and she basically flipped out told I me was a child and then she left the chat. The other story lasted a bit longer as I dated this women for about two months. She was actually half Japanese and Korean, she was fine with me being an anime fan. However, when it came up I was a gamer was when she decided she didn’t want to be together anymore, and I never got a straight answer as too why she dislikes video games. This raises a question in my mind; when is best or right time to tell a women\man that you are an anime\video fan? Some people might say to not mention it, but its eventually going to come up, so I would recommend telling the other person as soon as possible because you know almost from the start if that person will cool with your hobby or not. Honest is also important in an relationship and I’m sure the other person will appreciate it.
Recently there have been many announcements that manga magazines in Japan are closing shop. Whether it is a lack of fans, sales or other important figures the number of magazines announcing there last issue has increased on Anime News Network, especially in the lats few months. The mangas move to another branch of the manga company, so you will still be able to read those mangas you love, but is this a sign of a shrinking industry?
If we look at America we see our print new industry has taken a huge hit with online new and media. The reason is clear; with online news you get your articles sooner, there is less cost, and of course, it’s free. many news outlets have gone to a digital form in order to keep with the times, dissolving there print media. truly, it is a smart move as it is a more cost effective a green business strategy. But what of those who love physical media?
Many people like to read there books on the iPad, using things like a nook app or comixology to read. you can read whatever you want without going to the store and buying your issues or worrying about the product selling out. Personally I cannot stand reading on a nook or iPad. I enjoy the feel of pages between my fingers, the sound of the spine cracking when its is first opened and the smell of the newly printed pages as I digest the words and picture in front of me. the memories from when i pick up my comics from the store and read them and the feeling of having the whole physical collection is one digital media cannot replace.
looking back at my comparison of print news papers going to digital format, we can also see the exceptions to the case. Newspapers like the Washington Post and The New York Times still have a physical platform while also have a digital one to appease both fans. In a manga related version, we still have Shonen Jump, as well as Shonen Jump Alpha for your digital comic addiction. So while i close this article up, I will go back to reading my first issue of Shonen jump i bought in elementary school, remembering the memories of my first reading of Naruto (boy was that a trip) and laughing at Luffy from One Piece. As long as the fans continue to purchase physical media, i do not see the manga magazine making a full transition to digital any time soon.
Hello again! In the video, I explain what my new upload schedule is going to be such that I can have more regular uploads for yinz guys. However, the thing at hand is reviewing Sword Art Online, one of my favorites from this past season. So buckle up and log in as we review the VRMMORPG classic, SAO! Twitter: https://twitter.com/lamperouge98 Tumblr: http://philperior.tumblr.com/
Hey everybody! I hope everyone is having a good Christmas season out there in the AAA community. What I’m going to talk about today is the first year of the PS Vita with all the ups and downs (mostly downs), and what the future might hold for the pretty little handheld.
So the Vita launched a year and a day ago as in Japan as I’m writing this, and it had a pretty auspicious start in the lands of the rising sun selling 325,000 units in the first few days, a good launch compared to other systems like the 3DS. However, in the next weeks the sells cratered dropping to as low 12,309 units in the week of February 13th, and being outsold by the PSP. Now the sells have recovered somewhat in the following weeks averaging about 40,000 a week worldwide. This pattern followed with the North American and European launches, initial sales was great and then sinking down to low levels. The black Friday and holiday sales good, but this is likely a temporary bump as with all holiday’s seasons sales always rise dramatically over normal sales figures.
So now let’s look the games released for the system so far. There are currently 158 games as of writing for the Vita. Of these 25 were the launch titles, including Little Deviants, Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Wipeout 2048, Rayman Origins, BlazBlue: Continuum Shift Extend etc. The best selling game is Uncharted with 850,000 units sold and will likely also be the first 1 million seller on the system. Not of the other games come close to Uncharted; however three games have about half the sales. Some of the games have been released to critical acclaim such as Persona 4: The Golden which is the highest rated handheld game in 2012 on Metacrtic. Gravity Rush has won handheld game of the year from some publications. So the Vita does have some games to answer that question people like to ask all the time about Sony systems haha. There are a couple games that came out this year that were suppose to turn the fortunes of the Vita around, the so-called “Killer App” that people are always talking about that sells systems, but neither Call of Duty: Declassified or Resistance: Burning Skies became the killer app as both suffered from bad controls and were a little short on content. One of the key selling points people were touting was the ability of Vita to play FPS on the go with the dual analog sticks. Now that two high profile FPS have come out and both have been utter disappointments and in my mind this has damaged the Vita brand.
There is isn’t much to say about what Sony has done to turn around the lackluster sales of the PS Vita because there hasn’t been a permanent price cut, the marketing has largely remain the same, and the Playstation Plus is now on Vita and that should help with sales, how much it will help remained to be seen.
Now I’m going to discuss some things that I think Sony can do to turn Vita around and get it selling good. Here’s the strategy I have conceived that Sony can follow to make sell well and make a profit. They cannot drop the price until the handheld can be redesigned into a form that makes a profit off each unit, otherwise Sony will be losing even more money then they already are on each unit sold. This could take a year or so, but in the end be worth it if they include the features I’m about to list. Include a drive to play all the PSP games; all of the people on the fence about buying a Vita that have a big PSP game library would have a huge reason to buy the system. Add an SD card slot; having only Sony memory cards as the only storage media on Vita has hurt the system even if its not the main reason people often point too. The Vita memory cards are expensive and are an unnecessary extra expense for buyers when they probably have a few SD cards they could be using to store games and data. Extend the battery life of the system; this is probably the easiest one to implement as it has been done many times for other handhelds. The most recent example being the 3DS XL, which added an extra 1.5 hours to the 3DS’s battery life, so it is not that hard. This could also be done through third party batteries such as the ones by Nyko, and that’s what I did with my 3DS and its battery life is actually better than the XL’s. Make games that are an unique experience to the Vita; I think the major problem with Sony’s ideology towards Vita is that they are trying to create scaled down versions of PS3 games for Vita instead of developing games from ground up specifically for Vita. In order to attract people to spent the money on a new hardware you need to have exclusive software that is found no where else. Marketing the Sega Genesis style; it would be extremely funny to watch Sony do some commercials along the lines of the ones done by Sega against Nintendo in the early 1990’s, and seeing how those worked well for Sega it could work for Sony as well.
Date Released: 2012 Genre(s): Action, Comedy, Seinen, Supernatural Magazine: Young Jump Web Comics Summary: Follows the life of an average hero who manages to win all of his battles with only one punch! This ends up being the cause of much frustration as he no longer feels the thrill and adrenaline of fighting a tough battle. Maybe all of his rigorous training to become strong wasn’t worth it? Recommend: SUBSCRIBE!
QUICK REVIEW
OnePunch-Man is an interesting manga that will keep you laughing at it breaks down the genre of classic Shonen manga with its simplistic main character and its overly-manly and stereotypical battle manga archetypes. When I first saw the manga I thought it would be a little hard to get into, but within a few pages I was hooked and now I can’t stop laughing at this great parody manga. A great read for any lover of old battle mangas or likes to point out those manga’s stupid points.
ART 1/1– Clean and Nostalgic
The art in One Punch-man has such a good feel to it. You can feel the influence of manga’s like dragon ball, especially form a certain alien in the first chapter. You can’t help but be drawn it the detail Yuusuke-Sensei puts into his work and his mastery of lighting effects and overall destruction.
STORY 0.5/1- Great Parody but Somewhat Simple
ONE-Sensei has done a great job at making this manga on the surface feel like an average battle manga while also adding in all his subtle parodies. You can clearly see from his characters that they are there to draw upon a nostalgic effect of the simple, villain of the week battle manga, but in a more hyperbolic manner. ONE-Sensei also does a good job in making the jokes funny even if you have no knowledge of the parody by making the story actually entertaining with how Onepunch-Man breaks the through the routine of these types of stories. However, this word routine is a good summary of each chapter. You will find that the story follows a very similar route every chapter, albeit with some extra details. Bad guy comes with his cliché ideology and backstory, he causes destruction, Onepunch-Man shows up and is underestimated and then promptly beats the enemy in one punch. Even so, I feel this is best for the style of this manga and a do feel the overarching story will evolve soon. I expect great things with this story.
CHARACTERS 1/1- Best Part by Far
Onepunch-Man is a great parody of a hero; he became so strong that he can defeat any villain in one punch! He’s so strong he WISHES there was someone who could challenge his power! He is a great parody on the classic hero who seems so strong that we the reader could never understand how he is ever truly opposed. Each villain is a great parody of a classic battle manga archetype. Each villain is taken to its basic form and makes for a good parody of the genre. You will see various characters that you will feel you’ve seen before and smile as you see them here. Honestly, they are definitely one the driving points of the story. Without them there would really be no story to begin with!! I commend how well they are used in this story to drive plot.
WORLD 0.5/1- Dry, but relevant
The world of Onepunch-Man is… well… non-existent really. The world is literally a sandbox for destruction, similar to the cities in the old power rangers shows. They just break apart in the wreckage of the battles that seem to take place consonantly. The best example I can give you is that the town are named by letters (Onepunch-Man lives in X-ville or something like that.) In saying this I would like to point out that the world is a parody too; in battle manga places get destroyed all the time, but no one really cares. They are generic and made to be destroyed like a Lego village when you are a kid. Even so, I would have like to feel as though I was drawn into the world more. ONE-Sensei is starting to build up the world so I hope there will be more engaging points in the future.
ORIGINALITY 1/1- What We All Thought in Manga Form
This story really is a good parody. It takes all our thoughts on the stupidity of some things and the nostalgia of others to make a story that we all will enjoy. It takes the ideas of others and builds upon it in a funny way. I personally enjoyed each story and how it has progressed.
BOTTOM LINE 4/5 Hilarious, Action-Packed Parody
This story is so good that I really can’t do I justice. Check it out for yourself and see how much fun you’ll have with the story. I really see this manga only going up as of this point and can’t wait for more.
Until next time readers, READ MORE COMICS! ~~Z-ComiX
Hello to everyone out there in the AAA community, and a special hello to Mitsugi and Chiaki in Japan, nice to have you back in the same time zone as myself again, perhaps I can catch the live show now lol. Anyway, what I want to talk about today is the overemphasis some put on the visuals of media products and how it causes people to miss out on some experiences they might have otherwise if they didn’t focus so much on how something looks. The two examples I’m going to use are anime and video games, as those are two types of media where this is most apparent.
Let’s start with anime, and how some people cannot bring themselves to watch a show simply based on the animation. This comes in a few different forms, like if a show is old by a certain number of years. There are some people who cannot watch a show if it’s older than the year 2000, meaning hand drawn anime because that’s roughly when the industry transitioned to computer based anime drawing. Conversely, there are probably people who don’t like computer drawn anime and will not watch anything after the year 2000, but I have never met a person like that. Some anime fans will judge a series on just the art style or just for seeing a few magazine scans. Examples of this are Code Geass and Gundam Age, which were both prejudged on their character designs. One turned out great and the other not so much. Sometimes people say they don’t want to watch a show because there is too much fan service, which I could see. For me, I will watch old shows like the original Gundam series, which is from 1979, and other stuff from the early 1980’s, but I haven’t gone further than that. I have seen Astro Boy, but I’m not sure if what they aired in Canada was the 80’s version or the 60’s version. Art style to me is kind of whatever, I prefer story over the visuals of anime I’m watching so I usually give a show a chance no what the animation is like. Finally, I don’t mind fan service as long doesn’t distract from the story and fan service part of the charm of a given anime show.
How this manifests in the video games industry takes the form of game graphics. Graphics are often pointed to by people want to claim that a certain platform is superior to another and it’s been this way for a long time. Examples of this today are; PC elitists who want everyone to drop playing games on any other platform in favor of the PC, PS3 or Xbox 360 fanboys who think their preferred console is visually superior to the other, and pretty much every other given game systems that have competed against each other. This is often the main or opening argument of people I like to call “graphic masturbators”, defined as people who favor graphics over every other aspect of game design. They seem to think that this is the atomic bomb of arguments and it automatically wins the debate. However, it’s my contention that these people miss the point of playing a game which is to have an enjoyable game play experience over eye appealing visuals. This syndrome has lead to game companies (at least the big ones) making trailers for games using just cut scenes form the and not actual game play graphics. This gives a false impression of the game’s graphics and leads to gamer alienation. The way a game plays is the most important part of the experience I get out of playing game, which is why I play games on various platforms.
The main thrust of what I’m trying to convey here with this article is the best summed up in the age old saying “don’t judge a book by its cover”. I think people need to go beyond just the eye candy in whatever media they consume. For us anime fans it means going beyond the new thing and checking out some of greatest entries in the anime genre. Because in the end visuals change over time and a good story transcends time, no matter what decade it is from.
This time around, as promised, I do impressions on three separate anime: Natsuyuki Rendezvous, Kokoro Connect, and Sword Art Online. Not a lot of bad things to say this time around. Enjoy!
Recently, I been reading a lot of articles on game sites I frequent in which the authors lament the fact that studies show that only about 20 percent of gamers actually finish a game they start. When I heard this I was a little shocked and thought no way that can be right but, then I started to see in multiple articles on multiple sites. So in my mind this is a disheartening for a couple reasons; one that developers put so much time into making a game that only a very small minority of people that play games see the end and that people paid like 60 dollars for a console game these days and that’s like getting only a portion of the value of what you paid for. I’m the kind of gamer that must finish a game’s story all way through. I’m what you might call a “game finisher”, however I’m not a completiontist by any measure as I don’t feel the need get every achievement or trophy in every game I play. Its more about seeing that the job gets at the basic level by simply beating the game because that is still is the base objective in any game even games that are multiplayer centric like Call of Duty and Battlefield 3. I finish a lot of games, this year so far I think I have finished maybe 20-25 so far this year, which probably puts me in the 1-5 percent of that 10-20 percent of gamers that finish games.
So that got me wondering what percentage of anime fans actual finish the anime they are watching? Now I don’t any figures for this like with game, but I’ll try to use what I know from anime fans I know have told me. The hosts of the anime podcasts I listen to will often comment that they have only seen a portion of a certain that is in a given discussion. This is probably because they are also reviewers and they have a lot anime to watch and its just not possible to watch the entire series. Also another difficulty is access to the whole show which is sometimes hard because maybe you cannot find in your country or its not very popular and thus not streamed or fansubbed. Then there is simply having not a lot of time to devote to watching anime, which is probably a problem we all have unfortunately.
So the point of me bringing this up is that I just think its a bit tragic that all these talented people put so much time and effort into making great anime and games and the vast majority of people never see them. Some tips I have to have to maximize your game and anime experience is to focus on perhaps a couple at a time and clear them out move on to the next game or series. In anime series skip the opening and ending credits as this can often save about 5-6 minute per episode of a series.So get out and actual finish a game of anime!
Here are some the articles taking about the low number of gamers that finish their games:
