Nooooooooo Atom!

Yes, I finished 20th cb, yes I was a little disappointed by the ending, and no, I don’t have my thoughts summed up in a coherent fashion yet.

Started re-reading 20th century boys.

This series is so good.

Well, I may have found a spec that lets me still compete, sort of.  Maybe I won’t be shelving my magus after all!  The problem is that our damage has been so incredibly reduced that I am literally only good for support dps (and this is laughable, I’m not increasing the TTK in any way near significantly enough).  I think that some magi *cough norgoth cough* are overeacting – we’re down but by no means out, and I’m encouraged by the posts at least one of the oracles for our class have made regarding mythic’s changes to our class.  It sounds like good things are in the works, but the question is, will they get here soon enough?  “soon enough” being the three weeks I’m going to give my class before I shelve it and go do something more worthwile with my time, like levelling that sorc I have in T2.  At least he still has damage.

Aaaaagh!  I forgot!  D:

Stupid, stupid, stupid…  that’s what I get for actually doing stuff on a weekend for once.

Are you finally trying to communicate with your player base? Schweet!

It may not have a billion subscribers or whatever, like woW, but the PVP in Warhammer Online is absolutely a blast (even in T4, when things aren’t getting in the way of it), and there is at its core an amazingly fun, well-planned game that unfortunately is marred in its execution.  When I told him I was subscribing to WAR instead of WoW, my friend invited me to “enjoy the year-long paid beta.”  I knew he wasn’t really joking; and yes, Warhammer is buggy at times, can suffer from lag, and performs appallingly on my computer considering my decent-enough hardware.  But when you can get past that, this game is so fun – and the lore it’s building off is by turns brilliant and laughable.  WoW ruined its orcs; WAR made them what they should be.

It needs a little love.  But that’s okay; I’m willing to wait.  Despite increasingly dire noises made by a handful on the official forums, I think EA is happy with where this game is right now, and I know I am.  Honestly; any more people on Gorfang and I’d be down to single digit FPS all the time.  The game currently has about as many subscribers as (I believe) most other moderately sucessful MMOs, about 350 thousand.  That’s enough for me.

And once they get the balance and bugs tweaked, I bet it’ll start to grow.

I have this love hate thing going on with Shrio Sagisu.  On the one hand I think that most of his (her?) work on anime is terrible, derivative, and boring.  S/he usually settles for synth instruments when real ones would add so much more to his/her compositions, and it makes her music sound flat and tinny.  Plus so much of it is real bg music – that is, it’s forgettable as all heck!

So why do I like the new Evangelion movie soundtracks so much?

I just don’t know. 

This is one of those series that never gets old for me, and I can’t quite put my finger on it!  After all, there’s nothing particularly amazing about it.  Animation is typical BONES, which is to say the animation framing is perpetually gorgeous, the colors are vibrant, and the characters are always on-design.  Character designs are cute for the most part, and the mechanical designs (or monster designs, if you prefer to think of them as such, since this is a “fantasy” series) are for the most part good.  The music is not particularly memorable, with a few exceptions – I can still find myself humming the end theme at random moments.  The action sequences are few and far between, but when they come they’re usually well-choreographed.  (Is that even the right term to use, as an aside?  Live action fights are choreographed – what is animation?  Keyframed?  Storyboarded?)

Honestly, I’m kind of surprised I find the character designs so agreeable.  I’m not generally one for the doe-eyed, large breasted, absurdly over-complicated fantasy clothing type of character designs.  However, the translation of illustrator Mougdan Nakayohi’s (a somewhat well-known adult doujin artist in Japan, I gather, and also responsible for the character designs in a Hentai strategy game called Brave Soul) character designs into Anime form seems to have done everything right in making them enchanting to me rather than irritating.  Though I still could have done without the shoulder-pads.  God damn shoulder pads.

If there’s one problem I have with this series, it’s that characters that I really was interested in, such as the entire Obstinate Arrow team, never really was fleshed out.  24 episodes was too short, IMO, and much of the second half of the series was taken up with Pacifica’s amnesia plot.  As far as I know the book series is still running; I’d like to read them at some time, though I probably would regret buying them – light novels are just too short and simple to hold my interest.  Maybe there will be an omnibus release of some sort!  I know the first couple of volumes have been translated to english.

If you haven’t seen Scrapped Princess yet, I’d recommend it.  It’s not BONES’ best work, and in fact it was mostly eclipsed even for me during its original broadcast by GONZO’s production, Last Exile, but I heartily enjoyed it when it was first released and still do.  Hikaru Nanase’s music complements the action excellently, except for a few sojourns into accordion music that I could have done without; honestly, I can’t think of a single reason not to want to watch it, unless you don’t like fantasy at all.

I’ve rated it before, but Scrapped Princess still gets 4 out of 5 obsessive-compulsive cat princesses from me.

Hypothesis: Cloud Cult’s Feel Good Ghosts is one of the best albums of 2008.

I’m pretty sure I’ve posted something along these lines before.

I’ve been watching Macross Seven lately, because having finally finished Macross Plus I was struck by a desire to watch more shows about transforming robots in space.  Having finished Macross Frontier too recently, I couldn’t bring myself to watch it again – and honestly Frontier was kind of underwhelming.  I would have much rather had a series that didn’t have such godawful CG, and the problem with pretty much all Macross after Do You Remember Love? is that the transforming battleships have lost their cool.  I mean, they’re just big robots now!  Their stupid “carrying their main cannon as an enormous battroid gunpod” thing kind of wears thin too.  And of course the other mecha designs were amazing, but they’re all basically recycled from older Macross anyways.

The point of this article is really that if you have considered watching Macross Seven, and you enjoyed the original series, Plus, and/or Macross Zero, don’t even both watching Seven.  It’s…. just not very good.  Mecha designs are disappointing, spaceship designs are lame (except for the stuff they recycled from Macross, Macross Plus, and DYRL!), animation quality ranges from “recycled a single scene 2-3 times in a single episode” to “bad,” and honestly the music is anywhere from mediocre to awful.  I know, I know, I’m spoiled by Zero and Plus/Frontier, with their soundtracks being done by Kuniaki Haishima and Yoko Kanno, two of my favorite composers.  I got about twenty-seven episodes in, and I’ll probably finish it at some point out of sheer boredom…  But it has dropped way down in my list of priorities, and now sits somewhere between “do the dishes” and “level my sorcerer in Warhammer Online.”

Ultimately, Seven just doesn’t have enough interesting things to make up for the sheer idiocy that is sound energy and Anima Spiritia, and mediocre rock music.  There have been a few stellar moments, but they’ve all been dragged down by the setting.  The worst part is that this Sound Energy and Anima Spiritia bullshit is canon, which means the idiots who dreamed all this nonsense up are probably going to do another series all about it.  By comparison, the fold quartz &c of Frontier was practically brilliant.  (and the old Dude Who is Probably Britai?  fuck yes!  He totally beats out Exedol being part of Battle Seven’s bridge.)

I guess if you want to watch Macross, just watch Frontier again instead of Seven - it’s better in every way, even with the CG factored in (and I know that a lot of people liked the CG, and it was occasionally impressive, but not enough of the time for me.  I was hoping for the sort of high-caliber CGI / cel merging like you see in the (frankly gorgeous) Macross Zero, where sometimes it’s honestly hard to tell if the images are cels or just amazing CGI. Instead we got pretty standard satellight fare, and, well, that just wasn’t good enough.

Even better yet, just watch the original!  The original Super Dimensional Fortress Macross has better characters, plot, worldbuilding, and animation than Macross Seven, and the music is way better!  (I love Mari Iijima [ima anata no koe ga kikoeru...]!)  Or Macross II: Lovers Again, which is very eighties but also pretty good.

My wish list for a new Macross series or OVA is as follows:

• High quality animation, at least equal to that of Macross Frontier’s good episodes.  Let’s try to keep those characters on model, folks!
• CG that is at the very least not offensive, and at best is at least as stellar as the stuff you see in Macross Zero’s best moments.  Please only use it for things where you can honestly tell yourself that regular cel animation wouldn’t be as effective – I’m looking at you, terrible CGI models for Macross Quarter & Battle Frontier in robot mode!  you could have been so much cooler if you had just been cel-animated.
• Space ship designs that don’t suck!  I will also settle for rehashes of original series stuff.  Please no stupid generic CGI monsters a la the Vajra.
• Why don’t you do a series about the Macross II, Megaroad?  I don’t give a shit about this fancy 2058 stuff, let’s see why Hikaru & Misa went missing!
• Music by someone who doesn’t suck. I’m easy on this.  Just please make sure they don’t suck.
• If you’re going to make voice actors / actresses suck, please make sure they are people who can sing!  Macross Frontier did this well, probably because Yoko Kanno helped.  Macross Seven?  Not so much.
• A story that isn’t completely retarded.  Parallel dimensions?  a-ok!  Anima Spiritia?  Stupid, and I’m pretending it’s not part of canon.  Robots with speakers for weapons?  Uh, no thanks.

I would rate Macross Seven, based on what I have watched, 2.5 orgasming soul-stealing alien chicks out of five.

for those of you just joining us, I have a hard-on for Team ICO’s games the size of manhattan.  Ico was brilliant, and Shadow of the Colossus was the single best game for the PS2 I have ever played.

Now comes news that Ico’s creator is scheduled to speak about game design at the upcoming Game Developer’s Conference, which will also have designers of Mass Effect 2, Fallout 3, and the well-known (among nerds) Goichi Suda, lead designer on Killer 7 & No More Heroes.

I’m really hoping we see some footage, or at least some data.  Either way, though, it’s starting to look like I need to think about buying a PS3…