Official Anime/Manga Thread

[Emperor Robrainiac]

Man, all this One Piece talk is making me want to get back to reading the manga or watching the anime. I remember loving the series when it was on Toonami when Funimation took over the dub. The 4kids dub was as bland as hell when it wasn't making me laugh my ass off with their stupid edits. I recall one episode they felt the need to make a character point out that the wine coming out of the barrels was actually grape juice.

 

But yes, I'm itching to get back into it.

[Urban Flow]

I forgot how strange the concept of Speed Grapher was but I actually like it alot. Kinda fucked up but really cool. Has anybody else seen it here or heard about it at least? I honestly only know like 2 people who have watched it.

Edited January 29, 2013 by Urban Flow

[Silencer226]

Seen it? I own it, $11 well spent lol, and it was a collectors set xD.

[The Kid]

Why are Sentai Filmworks taking so long with "Another?" It was last year during the Summer that they announced the license, and yet still nothing...

 

Yen Press needs to hurry as well. There is still no news on the Manga or Book copies being for sale.

[Salamander]

I'd really like to read the original Another novel.  The anime was right up my street, perhaps because it was based on a novel rather than a property conceived as a showcase for stereotype-based female character designs like most anime sources.

[Silencer226]

Why are Sentai Filmworks taking so long with "Another?" It was last year during the Summer that they announced the license, and yet still nothing...

 

Yen Press needs to hurry as well. There is still no news on the Manga or Book copies being for sale.

 

 

The book is going to be digital only I'm afraid, unless they change their mind... Mainly because nobody buys novels.

 

And as for another, well Sentai probably wants to release it on good old blu-ray but there is one cockblocking problem. KADOKAWA. Kadokawa refuses to let anything release close to the Japanese release on bluray due to fears of reverse importation.  They'll let shows get licensed, but they have wait at least a year before they can use Bluray. Funimation is in this same predicament, Panty and Stocking for example which was released last year got a bluray release a few weeks ago, and Is This A Zombie also suffered from the same situation, a dvd only release and will more than likely get a bluray release later down the road once the Japanese licensor feels comfortable. 

Edited January 29, 2013 by Noel Vermillion

[Yoko/葉子]

Appears I shall chow down to some Toriko DVDs, a Spice & Wolf light novel and a Slayers light novel very soon, thank you Rightstuf!

[Silencer226]

I watched Medaka Box Abnormal all the way through to episode 11... At the beginning of episode 11 I was glad Medaka was kicking ass... at the end of episode 11... WHAT THE FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!???????

[Yoko/葉子]

Debating whether to get Rose of Versailles or more Revolutionary Girl Utena.

[Silencer226]

I haven't been watching much new anime but I ran across Kotoura San, it's like the only show I'm following. 

[Sami]

I think Summer Wars' shitty shittiness physically hurt me.

 

I'll explain when I get home. But fuck. Awful. Hated it. This movie made me angry.

[Soniman]

I think Summer Wars' shitty shittiness physically hurt me.

 

I'll explain when I get home. But fuck. Awful. Hated it. This movie made me angry.

 

Did...did I watch the same movie as you?

 

This is a legitimate question, because I fucking loved that movie.

 

Oh well, I look forward to arguing your points.

Edited February 1, 2013 by Soniman

[Sami]

Okay, going to jot down all of my thoughts, haha - 

 

• Pacing was awful. Multiple times I noticed I was literally just watching the same shit over and over, like when the AI was taking over Oz, and stuff in the real world was going crazy. "SORRY I COULDN'T MAKE IT TO THE PARTY, THE TRAFFIC'S AWFUL." Next scene - "SORRY I COULDN'T MAKE IT TO THE PARTY. THE GPS BROKE." "SORRY I COULDN'T MAKE IT TO THE PARTY. THE TRAINS AREN'T WORKING." "SORRY I COULDN'T MAKE IT TO THE PARTY. THE AMBULANCES ARE EVERYWHERE." "SORRY I COULDN'T MAKE IT TO THE PARTY. THE WATER'S OVERFLOWING." "SORRY I COULDN'T MAKE IT TO THE PARTY. THE..." and it goes on. I get it. I fucking get it. Stuff is breaking. Shit. Three scenes would be enough; I don't need a whole scene telling me the toasters are overcooking things. Have three cases of "the ___ is ___" with the severity increasing each time. Done; the point has been made and you didn't waste my time. Thank you.
  
  Other cases include -
  "I BROUGHT THE COMPUTER!" "I BROUGHT THE POWER SOURCE!" "I BROUGHT THE ICE!" "I BROUGHT THE MONITORS!"
  
  "HI MR. ____ I'M GRANDMA YOU NEED TO FIX ____!" "HI MR. ____ I'M GRANDMA YOU NEED TO FIX ____!" "HI MR. ____ I'M GRANDMA YOU NEED TO FIX ____!" "HI MR. ____ I'M GRANDMA YOU NEED TO FIX ____!" 
   
• So many characters. None of them are likable. I liked the martial artist kid, and the girl (even though she doesn't fucking do anything until the climax of the movie, and even that was one of the biggest asspulls ever; but don't worry, I'll get to that). The rest are either boring, or just annoying. Grandma was stereotypical tough grandma. Main character reminded me of Shinji Ikari because he's a wimp and annoys the piss out of me just like Shinji. Everyone else was either uninteresting or annoying.
   
• The climax was fucking stupid. Asinine. Idiotic. I'm insulted it was even thought to be a good idea.
  
  A fucking card game? Seriously? Why? The pro kid's fight scenes were awesome! Amazingly animated, he was really cool, etc. I loved it! But no, that'd be too cool. Alright then. We should play Yu-Gi-Oh for a bit. Fine.
  
  Let's stop and analyze this for a moment, hm? The AI has already absorbed multiple hundreds of millions of accounts. The satellite is on its crash-course to Earth. It has already won. There is literally nothing left the main characters can do other than try and play this game with him; if he doesn't accept, they will die. There is absolutely nothing they can do to force his hand.
  
  He. Already. Won.
  
  So let's assume this is some asshole hacker sitting at his computer, and not an AI that's wrecking everything. You could say he's a cocky douchebag and that he was dumb. That's fine. But it's not. It's an AI. A computer. A SMART, LOGICAL, ANALYTICAL THINKING MACHINE. Why the FUCK would it accept those terms? What does it have to lose? Everything. What does it have to gain? FUCKING NOTHING. There is NO reason for it to accept those terms.
  
  Also God (?) shows up and gives her powers for no reason okay whatever.
  
  So when everyone shows up to help her and wager their accounts, why doesn't he eat everyone then? Honor? Respect? It's already been established that he doesn't care. He cheated when he fought the pro kid and just started eating people. So if he didn't want to cheat, why didn't he lose fairly? Because he's a cheater; got it. So when all those people show up - that is the biggest meal he could possibly get. If he ate them all then and there (which was very much possible at the time), he, again, would have won. But why didn't he? Because this movie is fucking stupid, that's why.
   
• The movie was predictable as fuck. Pretty much every "WOHWOHAOHWOHW PLOT TWIST" was predicted a few minutes prior. Lame.
   
• The subplot between Asshole and Grandma was really contrived and dull. "Oh look he's an asshole" *then backstory happened* "oh I guess he's not really an asshole". *End subplot*.

 

And yet for some reason the movie's been more well-received than The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, which was actually really fucking great? Stopping to compare them for a bit - TGWLTT had three main characters that all got a bunch of screentime and were really likable. Summer Wars had five million characters I hardly cared about. The plot twists in TGWLTT had a really clever plot twist at the end. Summer Wars was predictable as fuck. The climax to TGWLTT involved a really clever loophole that may have been overlooked by most viewers. Summer Wars' climax was the stupidest fucking thing and legitimately pissed me off. 

 

It's cool that you guys enjoyed it and all, but this is honestly one of the few things I just don't understand. I'm trying. Really. But I can not see what there is to like about this movie. There is nothing redeemable that I can find in this movie. The only things I liked were those two characters, the animation, and... yeah that's about it. 

 

That's it. I think that's everything. The movie was a waste of my time and it sucked. Sorry.

[Sean]

I thought TGWLTT was the better movie but its climax felt even weaker than Summer Wars's. I'm sure the card game has some relevance in Japanese culture that's lost on Western viewers.

I adore both movies though. Whaat. People enjoy the movie a lot because of the characters themselves, to be honest. It's really nice to see the whole family come together and cooperate to save the world. It's not Miyazaki level of storytelling but there's an element of silliness that ends up pretty endearing by the end. I'm pretty excited to see Hosoda's next movie.

[Soniman]

Well Sean gave the broad strokes on why I loved Summer Wars, but I still want to touch upon Discoid's points.

 

 

Pacing complaints

 

I dunno, I didn't think it was nearly as much of an issue as you say it is. Sure it drags out a bit but it's not nearly movie-killing to me.

 

 

So many characters. None of them are likable. I liked the martial artist kid, and the girl (even though she doesn't fucking do anything until the climax of the movie, and even that was one of the biggest asspulls ever; but don't worry, I'll get to that). The rest are either boring, or just annoying. Grandma was stereotypical tough grandma. Main character reminded me of Shinji Ikari because he's a wimp and annoys the piss out of me just like Shinji. Everyone else was either uninteresting or annoying.

 

Come on man I don't see than in Kenji at all, in fact I see a lot of myself in him (awkward around strangers and girls, self esteem issues, a total computer geek, though I am terrible in math) and to compare him to a sad sack like Shinji is a bit much. Kenji may have moments where he has a low opinion opinion of himself every now and then, but when the chips were down he was one of the main people who got the family motivated to come together and take the virus guy down.

 

As for the family, I found them quirky and fun enough. Yeah some of them were annoying, but that's to be expected with a big family, and helps to make them more genuine characters overall.

 

A fucking card game? Seriously? Why? The pro kid's fight scenes were awesome! Amazingly animated, he was really cool, etc. I loved it! But no, that'd be too cool. Alright then. We should play Yu-Gi-Oh for a bit. Fine.

 

It was established pretty clearly that playing the card games and betting on the accounts was the quickest way in which they could get them all back in the amount of time they had left, I don't think a completely ineffectual King Kazma going against a hulking Virus God Beast would've helped much in that regard.

 

Also as Sean said, I'm sure there's a deeper meaning to the card game that's probably lost on Westerners.

 

 

Let's stop and analyze this for a moment, hm? The AI has already absorbed multiple hundreds of millions of accounts. The satellite is on its crash-course to Earth. It has already won. There is literally nothing left the main characters can do other than try and play this game with him; if he doesn't accept, they will die. There is absolutely nothing they can do to force his hand.

 

 

So let's assume this is some asshole hacker sitting at his computer, and not an AI that's wrecking everything. You could say he's a cocky douchebag and that he was dumb. That's fine. But it's not. It's an AI. A computer. A SMART, LOGICAL, ANALYTICAL THINKING MACHINE. Why the FUCK would it accept those terms? What does it have to lose? Everything. What does it have to gain? FUCKING NOTHING. There is NO reason for it to accept those terms.

 

We were told quite a bit that despite it being an AI it does have somewhat of a personality to it, being that it thinks of everything as a game, meaning that it has not concept or scope of the atrocities he's committing, he sees everything he does as good fun, meaning that when he presented with a chance to play some card game, he just saw it as another chance to have fun and screw around with people, I don't think the AI really cared all that much about winning or losing.

 

>Also

God (?) shows up and gives her powers for no reason okay whatever.

 

It was kind of assume that the reasoning was that they were all screwed if Natsuki didn't get help and fast, I'm pretty sure the designers, admins or whoever that was behind the God creature used their high ranks to give Natsuki a power hax, this was basically life or death they were dealing with.

 

 

So when everyone shows up to help her and wager their accounts, why doesn't he eat everyone then? Honor? Respect? It's already been established that he doesn't care. He cheated when he fought the pro kid and just started eating people. So if he didn't want to cheat, why didn't he lose fairly? Because he's a cheater; got it. So when all those people show up - that is the biggest meal he could possibly get. If he ate them all then and there (which was very much possible at the time), he, again, would have won. But why didn't he? Because this movie is fucking stupid, that's why.

 

I assumed that the users that came and wager their accounts became tied Natsuki's when they wagered in the game, meaning that basically Natsuki kind of owns them in that point in time, meaning that if the AI really wanted all of those accounts, he'd have to beat Natsuki to get to them.

 

 

It's cool that you guys enjoyed it and all, but this is honestly one of the few things I just don't understand. I'm trying. Really. But I can not see what there is to like about this movie. There is nothing redeemable that I can find in this movie. The only things I liked were those two characters, the animation, and... yeah that's about it.

 

I thought the animation, good humor, an all around enjoyable cast, fantastic fight scenes, pretty good tension moments (never seen countdowns so tenuous since "Our War Game"), and the great since of unity between family is what really made this movie special to me, though to each their own.

 

As for opinions on TGWLTT, eh I thought it was good in all, but Summer Wars just appealed to me more I guess.

Edited February 3, 2013 by Soniman

[The Kid]

 

You ever just want to leap into an anime and hug one of the characters so badly?

[SuperLink]

I liked Summer Wars a lot, maybe that's cause I also loved Digimon and Our War Game. Creepy world threatening viruses are awesome to me.

 

Also, I thought that the moment the director (who I have studied and written an essay on /shameless plug!) said he wanted to focus less on individual characters like most stories and films do and more on the ideas of a family, from the beginning the main point of the film for him was a big traditional Japanese family all coming together with clashing views but eventually pulling through as a family and showing that they all have separate lives and families and relationships with others that spread out like a huge network across the country or the world. The film is filled with coincidences like who knows who and who has no idea what's going on, and family's just like that.

 

I think giving a large amount of characters, a whole family, some level of development and the feel that each is an individual while also working on a plot involving all of them was going to be very challenging from the beginning. In a comic or novel or TV series sure, but a self-contained movie? I think he did very well considering what he set out to do.

 

That's my two cents. I'll admit that a lot of the family members I didn't care about either, but I think he did very well in trying something not many directors would.

 

PS. Where the heck are all the Fairy Tail fans at? Did you all check out that Erza Scarlet in the last episode because holy crap in a crumpet.

Edited February 3, 2013 by SuperLink

[Sami]

While I appreciate the effort...

 

There's a reason why most movies don't try to balance ten million characters in one movie. It's kind of hard to make it work.

[Soniman]

Id understand that sentiment if the director was trying to give all these characters equal screen time and depth, but they're not. The focus primarily stays on Kenji, Katsuki, and King Kazma Kid, the rest are just there for moral and additional support and the movie never really loses sight of that imo.

[Sami]

I'd understand that sentiment if the director was trying to give all these characters equal screen time and depth, but they're not. The focus primarily stays on Kenji, Katsuki, and King Kazma Kid, the rest are just there for moral and additional support and the movie never really loses sight of that imo.

 

Except Kenji hardly did anything important until he actually grew some balls at the end.

 

Except Katsuki didn't do anything important until the card game.

 

Except Kazuma was actually really cool but they had to make him useless at the end to make room for the shitty card game.

 

Honestly, that's one of my biggest miffs with the movie. Kazuma was awesome, and in order to make the other characters do something of use, they had to make him useless for twenty minutes. Even then, he was the one who delivered the killing blow.

Edited February 3, 2013 by Discoid

[Silencer226]

Superlink I saw the latest Fairy Tail episode, and she kicked ass. 

[Sean]

I like to think that the moral of Summer Wars is "you can't do everything by yourself."

There are characters who "didn't do anything important until ____" but that's because everyone in the movie had to work together as a team. Every character had a role to play, and even if it wasn't seemingly as important as another role, or if they had to wait a while, it still all came together because of their cooperation.

The motif of family is a pretty strong one in the movie. The point of Kazama not being the one to save the day in the end was to show that they couldn't win with his fighting prowess alone.

And like Soniman said, the movie wasn't trying to focus on every character. It focused on a few characters, and the family as a unit.

[Vec]

 

 

You ever just want to leap into an anime and hug one of the characters so badly?

I also liked:

 

"-Whoa! She did a backflip.

 

-What!? Are you serious!? O.o

 

-Just Kidding

 

-You Jerk! >8U"

 

Also...looks like we found the same gif and added to the sig

[redhellc]

So I recently watched Sword Art Online, and I must say It wasn't what I was expecting.

 

I'm the only one that didn't like  some plot twists? I mean some it just looked like the creators fell short on ideas. And the endings(mid season one I presume), are very anti-climatic.

Also I think there is a lot of inconsistency related to the characters. 

There is also a lot o romantic drama, I mean I don't mind a love component on the story it gives motivation for the main character. But in here it goes a little over the top.

Finally it really feels a lot rushed to me, could be a problem in the adaptation form the manga to the anime, but still.

 

I'm not saying it's a bad Anime, but am I the only one who was a little turned off by all that stuff?   

Edited February 5, 2013 by redhellc

[Soniman]

So I recently watched Sword Art Online, and I must say It wasn't what I was expecting.

 

I'm the only one that didn't like  some plot twists? I mean some it just looked like the creators fell short on ideas. And the endings(mid season one I presume), are very anti-climatic.

Also I think there is a lot of inconsistency related to the characters. 

There is also a lot o romantic drama, I mean I don't mind a love component on the story it gives motivation for the main character. But in here it goes a little over the top.

Finally it really feels a lot rushed to me, could be a problem in the adaptation form the manga to the anime, but still.

 

I'm not saying it's a bad Anime, but am I the only one who was a little turned off by all that stuff?   

 

Pretty much everyone gave up on the show when the show left SAO and went to ALO.

 

I loved the SAO season, but found ALO in general to be pretty mediocre, I didn't really enjoy the incestual vibes between Kirito and his cousin/sister, not to mention that the fact that characters don't die like they did in SAO remives a lot of the tension and any feelings of desperation. The villian was so goddamn evil that it was practically cartoony, he had absoultley no depth to him. And I don't think I have to mention that rape scene near the end...blergh.

 

In fact, just in general I really didin't like the fact hat literaly EVERY female in the show had the hots for Kirito, it really took away from the admittedly great romance between Kirito and Asuna.

 

I mean, ALO still has some stuff that I like about it, the ending was good, I really felt like Kirito earned it, the animation/fight sequences is fantastic, and Kirito's daughter in the game (forgot her name) is pretty adorable.

 

Overall SAO is a decent anime, SAO on it's own is pretty great,  but it just gets so caught up in unedded drama by the second part that it really loses its shine.