Author Archives: Nyanman

Anime Review: Grave of the Fireflies

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 This is going to be a really interesting movie to review, in part because of the high regards almost every person places on it.

Plot: I can spoil as much as I want, because the movie starts with the ending, and the rest is a flashback to explain how the ending came about. In short, the main character and his sister are sent to live with their aunt, due to the fact that their mother died in a firebombing. They cannot stand living with their aunt, so they run away. Unlike every other series and movie where the power of love and friendship would save them, reality intervenes and the rest of the movie is spent watching two children starve to death.

This isn’t just a dose or a shot of reality, it’s drinking the whole bottle and drowning yourself in the brewery of reality. This movie is emotionally like a dominatrix who ‘forgot’ the safeword. It’s several other amusing metaphors and similes that I forgot to write down and thus cannot tell you.

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Manga Review: Imouto Wa Shishunki

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Imouto Wa Shishunki is a basic slice of school life comedy 4 panel manga. The series centers around a boy with a younger sister. he has a perverted friend, she has a couple friends, later three primary friends. One of them is the classic straight man from comedy, and cuts down the jokes of the other girls.

The plot is so basic as to be non-existent. Actually, I would like to say that is true, but the plot simply is not there. There isn’t even a Lucky Star or K-on! type of plot where there are jokes and such, bu they at least age as the story progresses. K-on was mostly 4 panel format (better known as 4-koma) and the characters went through the years of high school. Imouto Wa Shishunki has none of that. I could settle for no changes and progressions in the characters so that they remain 2 dimensional, but they don’t even age. Nothing at all changes about them.

Given that the plot isn’t there, along with the parents of all these high school kids, One would expect then that the adults in the story would be reasonable, responsible people. Luckily for me, that doesn’t happen. the adults are more perverted than the students, to the extent of making jokes at the students that I am sure would be harassment at the very least. They do lampshade this with a single strip where the straight man girl asks if she should sue, and the teacher says they’d prefer not.

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Review: Nana to kaoru

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Due to some very unfortunate circumstances for me, I will be delaying my reviews of Aselia The Eternal, Demonbane, and Sonicomi by an unspecified amount of time, as I just had to re-install the OS on my computer, and I have lost the save files, along with a lot of other things. The hard drive is now making a grinding and scraping sound, so This computer is not long for this world. As such, I will be covering manga and anime until I can get something done about this.

Right, that is out of the way, time to review as best I can Nana to Kaoru. First, this will be really hard to review. I originally intended to try to find someone experienced with this who i could e-mail for information about the situations and character relationships in this manga, but that Id ea got tossed out as rather impractical. As such, all my knowledge will come from wikipedia.

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Anime Review: Moretsu Uchuu Kaizoku (Bodacious Space Pirates)

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Bodacious Space Pirates, also known as Moretsu Uchuu Kaizoku is an amazingly good blend of sci-fi space opera and moe. Admittedly, if someone had pitched such a show to me, I would have been quite skeptical about it. Moe and space opera? What could be further apart?

But Moretsu Uchuu Kaizoku (Being a show originating in Japan, I will be using the Japanese name to refer to the show) isn’t just good because of the fact that it has some of the great veterans of sci-fi series, but because it also shows a great amount of promise. At this point, the show seems as if it could ascend into greatness.

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Video Game Review: Soul Calibur IV

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Right, Soul Calibur IV, or How I Am Putting Off Reviewing Soul Calibur V Until It Arrives.

I’ll come clean with you: I don’t really get the appeal of purely fighting games. I fully get the appeal of the fighting aspect, which is why I play and enjoy games where you beat up on things. But a game where there is nothing beyond whacking things over the head with extremely blunt swords? I don’t really get the mass appeal.

Enough about me, let’s get on to that reviewing stuff.

Plot: The game doesn’t really have a main plot besides there being two swords, one good and one evil, and some characters want to do various things with one or both of the swords. When you choose a character, you get a scrolling text thing that explains the back story and was taken right from the How Not To Tell A Story book. What you do is hit either the speed up key, as the text scrolls so slow even a corpse would say it needs to move faster, or just hit the skip key. Then you fight through 5 stages with varying numbers of opponents, then you defeat the big bad or good or whatever in the fifth stage, then the character does whatever retarded thing they wanted with the swords.

The combat is supposed to revolve around hitting people with swords that are quite blunt, and frequently are obscenely large. Apparently, the characters want the two swords that they tower guy has because they are the biggest and bluntest in the land. Apparently, these sword fighters all went to Nerf for their swords, instead of, oh say, a sword maker. This easily explains why you ramming a sword through a guy’s body will only take away a little of his health bar, until he is knocked out.

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