I watched the first couple of episodes of old OAV series Mad Bull 34 earlier in the week. I don’t really have much to say about it’s actual content right now – it’s pretty much the kind of thing that I suspect most of the people who actually read his blog would hate anyway, being the incredibly violent and misogynistic adventures of the straight-laced, American-born Japanese cop Daizaburo “Eddie” Ban and his man-mountain pimp of a partner John “Sleepy” Estes (the man so imposing he has two nick-names, the other being the titular “Mad Bull”). I find pretty much everything about it to be pretty damn hilarious, but it’s not exactly high-brow or socially enlightened viewing material.

Of all the random things to jump out at me as being interesting in the show, though, the scene in above screenshot amused me. It’s a scene where Daizaburo is waiting in the car whilst, unbeknownst to him, Sleepy is collecting money from (and doing other things with) the prostitutes under his protection (when I said he was a pimp, I meant it in the literal sense). What I find kind of curious is the debris littering the car – fairly genuine looking Coke, Pepsi and 7-Up cans, and even a McDonalds cup!

This isn’t to say that we never see actual products in anime these days – obviously, there’s a bunch of shows which had Pizza Hut logo’s thrown all over the place (albeit only in Japan for the Sunrise productions), but those were specific cases of paid product sponsorship. In this case, it’s pretty obvious just by the fact that there’s Coke and Pepsi in the same shot that it was just something the animation staff threw in to give the proper setting flavour.

These days, I’d have to imagine that most studios are a bit more up on, or at least vaguely aware, of potential copyright issues when using iconography related to genuine brands in their productions without permission. It’s why you get seeming odd cases like OreImo, where all the characters use computers which look infinitely close to Sony Vaio’s, but sport subtle logo variations, despite the fact that the show is distributed by a Sony-affiliated label.

The other bizarre thing about Mad Bull that was kind of hilariously interesting was this caption in the ending credits…

It’s not like I’ve not been watching anything – contrary to my expectations coming into this anime season, I’ve actually been watching a fair bit. It’s more that none of the shows I’ve been watching have hit that sweet spot between dumb and entertaining that I find amusing to write about – not even Valvrave, which is certainly dumb, and is certainly entertaining, but it wears it so much on it’s sleeve that there’s little to say about it other than, well, “This is duuuuuuuuumb“.

Unfortunately, this has left me in somewhat of a quandary in regards to posting blog content, in so much as there’s really not been much else going on that’s been worthy of lengthy comment. I suppose there’s plenty worthy of shorter commentary, though…

iOS Shiny Festa still isn’t available in the UK. This isn’t a Europe-wide exclusion, coincidentally – I can’t say I’ve checked availability in every country, but it’s certainly available in France at the very least. This matter continues to annoy me, unsurprisingly, but not really to the degree that I’m willing to jump through hoops to play it – setting up a fake foreign iTunes account, sourcing points cards for the relevant region (at a premium) and switching the accounts on one of my iOS devices is certainly series of things I could do, but it’s not something I’m presently willing to. Part of it is just the principle of the matter – not that it stopped me buying the Japanese editions (twice over), but an unavailable English version feels like a more egregious slap-to-the-face – but I also actually, you know, use my iOS devices for other things. Switching accounts around to play Shiny Festa seems like too much of a disruptive pain in the ass.

Speaking of things not available in the UK, Daisuki launched today, and whilst the service is available here in Blighty (putting it one step ahead of Animesols, at least), most the stuff I’d actually watch on there isn’t. Admittedly, “the stuff I’d actually watch” essentially boils down to Lupin III at this point – I’ve got the Gundam offerings on DVD already, and honestly don’t really like Zeta anyway, I’ve somehow acquired three different versions of Madoka, and, frankly, I’ve seen Sword Art Online too many times for my liking (by which I mean, once). The actual error message that pops up on region locked titles is hella-confusing as well, particularly for a site which seemed semi-broken for a while this morning.

Still, I’m going to keep visiting during the launch period, at least, if only to file my daily entry into the giveaway. I’m actually after the low-hanging fruit more than the big-ticket items, to be honest – that Madoka figure is nice, but I’ve seen how much space is required to display that darn thing, and I certainly wouldn’t have it without putting my Magical Girl Rin figure into storage. My day one ticket actually went into the pot for the Weiss Schwartz booster packs, having both the English Fate/Zero and Madoka starter decks already. Not that I’m particularly expecting to ever actually play Weiss Schwartz at any point, mind you, but I suppose it’d be neat to have a proper deck should the need arise!

In any case, I hope all you folks remembered to pop over to the the first round of their title voting in order to request Aikatsu! I gather a few other shows are available to vote for as well but, seriously, who’d vote for anything other than deliciously janky 3D idols?

Speaking of Madoka and iM@S, I picked up the first couple of Cu-poche character figures – Haruka and Madoka. The picture at the top of this post is a size comparison between Bandai’s Chibi-Arts range (Cure Marine) and the well-established Nendoroid range (Sherlock Shellingford), given those are the two figure series that play in the same ballpark.

I like these Cu-poche things. The proportions and the posability are good, and the joints that support that aren’t as unsightly as I’d have thought they’d have been. There’s some really smart design decisions as well – anyone who as ever struggled to properly seat an early Nendo on some of their ill-designed stands, or worse yet owns that Cure Marine Chibi-Arts, will really appreciate the stand. The standard crane-arm-to-back-socket, common to newer Nendo figures as well, is one thing (though I’m vaguely curious what they’ll do with long haired characters like the upcoming Kirino), but the magnetic feet and metal base combo is pretty great. Posed with both their feet on the stand, the figures would pretty much just about stand under their own weight without the crane-arm, if perhaps not surviving many a shock.

The figures could, perhaps, do with more accessories, though. The three faces they ship with is pretty standard across competing figure ranges, and both these girls did ship with at least one other accessory (Haruka has her microphone and stand, Madoka her bow and arrow, and also QB). Madoka’s bow is part of one of her hands, though, and none of Madoka’s hands is structured in such a way that it could hold Haruka’s microphone, which is kind of a shame. It feels pretty light in comparison to a Chibi-Arts in particular – those Heartcatch figures were loaded with bits. The Cu-poche figures do come with a branded bag to keep your spare bits in should you need to unbox it, though, which was a nice touch.

The next few Cu-poche figures I’m skipping – I’m not that big a fan of Kirino (though I am watching OreImo – I’m missing some of the more satirical bite of the first season, and the Saori back-story episode did nothing for me, but I’ve enjoyed the Ayase-centric stuff. Needs more Sena and Kuroneko), I’ve got too many Saber figures as it stands, and I’m not into Yu-Gi-Oh enough to want Dark Magician Girl, cute as it is. I do have Miki on pre-order already, though!

Not really much else to say, I guess. Whilst it’s rarely the most exciting of events, I will be floating around the event formally known as MCM Expo next weekend. Feel free to say “hi” if you spot me, though given they’ve actually pulled together a semi-impressive guest list this time around, I’m guessing it’s going to be overpacked enough to render that at least somewhat tricky. I should be at Otakon and Ayacon in August as well, whilst I’m talking about event attendance. Man, those flights where expensive…

Anyway, the Internet exploded with a whole load of annoyed shouting and a whole boatload of misinformation when the games surfaced in the US AppStore yesterday. This, mostly, comes down to the fact that it’s three games priced at $55 a piece, which even I admit is a little on the steep side.

Don’t conflate this with me thinking that it’s ludicrously overpriced, though – I think the “race to the bottom” pricing on iOS apps has created a highly toxic market and massively unrealistic expectations in terms of game pricing. You really shouldn’t be expecting to get a game of the degree of polish of a Shiny Festa for the sub-$10 pricing that people seem to expect on the platform (well, sub-$1 in a lot of cases) without the introduction of some really skeezy business practices.

Speaking of skeezy business practices, the DLC bogieman has been rearing it’s head here as well, in so much as the games apparently, as they download, have less material in that the equivalent PSP title. I’ll just say that, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain from trawling forums and the inter webs (again, I can’t even buy the bloody game here!), all the presently released DLC, which will take you up to the same level of content as the PSP game, is available for free. This isn’t to say that there won’t be paid DLC in the future, obviously, but if there is, it’ll not be previously released content.

As for why they’ve chosen to split the game up like that, well, these are big games – aside from the 24 minute OAV (at four times the resolution of the PSP version!), every song in the game features two different videos which the game switches between dependant on your performance. It’s a pretty bloaty game in terms of file space – with everything installed, it’s over the region of three GB in size, which is a pretty big ask for a lot of iOS users. This at least permits the release of a smaller footprint base download, with the other content available on an adhoc basis for those with the space. One could argue that a cheaper base download, with charges for DLC, would have caused fewer arguments, but I don’t think they’d be willing to cut the price so low that they’d avert them.

So, basically, what BaNam have released is an iOS game based on a six-month old (not five year old, as some news sources reported!) PSP game, at the same price as the PSP game, with the same content (in higher fidelity) as the PSP game in, Japan – that $55 price point is a direct conversion of how much they’re flogging this for on it’s home turf. The games availability is opened up for specific regions, but the price is set once and applies to all regions in which it’s available, hence they’ve set the pricing for the local market.

Here’s the thing – Japanese games look really, really expensive to foreigners these days. This is what happens when a platforms price points are set a levels which were more or less globally equal ten years ago, only for several of the foreign currencies to crash in comparative value. This is why Persona Punchmans (still not out in Europe, by the way) was region-locked on PS3, because changes in exchange rate means the prices what US and Japanese PS3 and 360 games are expected to release at now are wildly disproportionate. You can’t expect a Japanese game, made mainly for the Japanese market, by Japanese staff being paid Japanese wages to be released at prices which reflect a modern foreign, rather than Japanese, market. Shiny Festa is an even more extreme example of this than Persona, being even more niche in both Japan and the US.

As for why they’ve set the price at the level they have, which, again, even I agree is probably $15 too steep, and most of Japan would likely agree with too? Well, it’s become increasingly obvious to me in recent times that Japanese soft-houses are really concerned with maintaining the perceived value of a products worth. Launching something at $20 would probably bag them extra sales in the short term, but it’s not a very long-tailed view to take for the iM@S franchise, particularly for their first legitimate foray (excluding the US stream of the anime, and Xenoglossia, obviously) into the West. Releasing what is essentially still a new iM@S title at a lower price sets an expectation as to what the price of an iM@S game is actually worth – it’ll start to make people expect that the next game they release in the series will also be at that price, even if it wasn’t a port of an existing title (and how long after the initial launch you can get away with charging full price for a port of is another discussion entirely).

It might have been a different case if this was clearly an iOS-only mini-game or something less feature rich (which didn’t, say, include an OAV), but it’s literally a feature-equivalent version of a relatively recent PSP game. They’ve got no choice but to release it at the same price as the PSP version without damaging the perceived value of the brand. Now, they can half the price in six months time without any issue, and they probably will, but the important thing here is that the game is available at this release price for a reasonable window of time, because it sets the expectation as to what the franchise is worth.

It’s pretty much the same tact that Aniplex have started taking with many of their anime titles in the US – it’s a balancing game between reducing the price to a level more acceptable to more people against how much additional profit that’ll immediately bring in, also against how that’ll damage the perceived value in the future.

Funny thing is that, if the game is literally a direct port of the PSP version, there’s soooo much they could be nickel-and-dime-ing the player on if they had chosen to release the game at a lower price. There’s all sorts of aesthetic and performance-enhancing things they could be charging for, and many iOS games do, should they have chosen to. You want to change all your audio cues to Azusa saying “Ara”? That’s five bucks… or not, since they’re all still unlocks with in-game currency.

As for why the first English version is on iOS rather than PSP, well, it’s probably mostly down to the fact that they were doing the iOS port anyway and figured it wouldn’t be too much work to include multiple language support in the executable whilst they were at it. By the looks of things the effort was something that was undertaken entirely by the Japanese staff (hence HOOBIES and a few other translation SNAFU’s), but by coming to iOS, it’s something that’s allowed them to almost completely bypass the US part of the company, where there was likely to be more resistance to a PSP release were it to take any actual effort. I mean, they needed none of their localisation staff, and didn’t have to go through Sony concept approval or certification on the product, and didn’t have to re-engineer existing code – even the website is hanging off the Japanese one.

It’s possibly not the thing to say when I’m trying to partially justify the cost, but this likely wasn’t an expensive product to throw together – it’s not a complicated game engine, given that it’s mostly just a relatively simply game running over a (pair of) videostreams, and probably didn’t cost them that much to port over. It’s an exercise I doubt they’d have done if it was going to cost them any significant monies, given that the PSP is prevalent enough of a platform in Japan that there is likely a 100% intersection for iM@S fanboys and PSP owners. Most people particularly interested in this game likely have their preferred PSP editions already. Things like having to pay for certification through Sony or Microsoft would likely have made it prohibitively expensive an effort for what’s likely a small market even in Japan – the fact that not that many people will pick it up on iOS likely isn’t that much of an issue because it probably wasn’t that much of a development outlay. The uber-fans – the 10% who make the franchise popular buy picking up all the DLC on the main titles – will likely continue to be milked through new songs in the future, and the exercise will ultimately make it’s development costs back.

If anything, I have to wonder if it’s the Japanese iM@S staff trying to prove that, even at a crazy price, that there is actually some degree of interest in the property outside of Japan, and it might actually be worth porting one of the actual main console games over at some point. I wouldn’t confuse this, however, with a serious effort to push the title outside Japan, or much other than a curious afterthought. Japan is the main audience, so they’ll price the game for Japan.

TL;DR – Sorry, but if you’re complaining about the cost, than you probably aren’t the market for this..

As for the game, there’s a limited amount I can actually say about it given I’ve not been able to play the iOS port, but it’s pretty much the same as the PSP game as far as I can see. The game only used two inputs anyway – left presses and right presses. These were mapped to the d-pad and left shoulder buttons for left presses, and the other buttons for right presses. For the iOS version, these have been intuitively mapped to, well, tapping on the left or right sides of the screens. I’d imagine it works well enough. From what I’ve seen, it looks like the rest of the games content is all there – the one video I’ve seen of the menu had the anime and Star of Festa modes in there, at least. The games, basically, look to have PSP content parity.

As for which game to get, well… a lot of that depends on your preferred characters, I guess, though purely on the list of songs available, I’d give Melodic Disc the nod for having the highest average song quality, though Harmonic Score’s Vault that Borderline is my favourite new game-specific song, and Rhythmic Record has LOBM. Just bear in mind that six of the twenty songs available in each version are in all three of them.

So apparently the thing I do when having been away over the first couple of days of the new anime season, faced with an every increasing number of first episodes that I should really probably check out, is to pull something that’s languished on my shelf for months now to watch instead. I suppose it’s at least the prior season of something that’s restarting this season, but that’s not exactly helping the situation.

In any case, when watching OreImo, I couldn’t help but be amused by the establishing shot they used for Kirino’s first visit to Akihabara in the shows second episode.

Which makes the context of it’s usage in Love Live perhaps a little peculiar, given that their schools supposed proximity to the area suggests that they might not even take public transport in most of the time, but that’s probably not the point. It kind of just makes me wonder what people watching British TV shows make of the fact that our television tends to use shots of The Gherkin as locale establishing shots as opposed to other, more globally well-known structures, these days.

In other ways, it could perhaps be seen as indicating that the movie is in more direct response to the franchise as a whole – as Kamiyama himself put it after the movie, there’s been a big shadow cast over the property in terms of a final story, incomplete due to the original author Ishinomoris’ death, which has left the property in a place from which it has been difficult to continue or reinvent.

Or it could just start for Religious Education. Or exposition. That’d work.

It’s a little difficult to get into too many specifics about the movie without giving too much of the game away. It’s another one of those properties which people in Japan are expected to already know at least the bare minimum about, and as a result it doesn’t really spend much of it’s time attempting to set things up. The core concept of the franchise is that there are nine cyborgs, created by Dr Gilmore, and pulled from a variety of international backgrounds. Each of them has their own unique power, and together they fight shadowy evil conspiracies and organisations.

As the movie starts, however, the team has disbanded, returning to their countries of origin and endeavouring to find new purpose. Some of them have gone to work for their own governments, others have established their own restaurant chains, but the ostensive leader, the titular 009 Joe, has been put in something of a holding pattern, suffering a memory-wipe every three years, forced to repeat high school, unable to continue with his life incase he is required to be summoned once more to lead the cyborg team of justice.

Which, unsurprisingly, is exactly what happens. Tall buildings the world over are being levelled in a series of terrorist attacks. Seemingly unconnected, Dr Gilmore, in a leap of logic worthy of Hideo Kojima, is quick to blame The War Economy and the very organisation that Cyborg 002, Jet, now works for. Something even more sinister seems to be going on, however, as those involved claim to be working purely on the orders of something only referred to as “His Voice”, and Jet is carrying out his own investigation in parallel to Dr Gilmore.

009 RE:Cyborg is a really interesting looking movie. It’s a co-production between Production IG and Japanese CG house Sanzigen, most famous these days for their work with Hiroyuki Imaishi on Black Rock Shooter for TV, but also have past involvement in Panty and Stocking (not to mention perennial blog favourite Xenoglossia). Along with Orange, they pretty much form the current bleeding edge in terms of 3D CG usage in anime productions, or at least those which don’t involve idol dance sequences.

The movie is also filmed in stereoscopic 3D, and as such you’d be forgiven for thinking that they’d be 3D rendering the entire movie, but as far as I could tell (and I could be completely wrong on this), that wasn’t actually the case. Much like IG’s previous CG movie, Oblivion Island (out on BD in the UK this week, coincidently, and pretty good fun), much of the movie is a hybrid of 3D character models and 2D background elements. The difference here is that, because of the stereoscopic nature, it’s rather less immediately obvious about it because of how they’ve layered their assets. Scenes in the movie are constructed as a series of layered planes of objects, and as a result it creates a series of incredibly distinct points of depth, probably more-so than if those objects genuinely did have their own depth. The 3D pops a lot more than pretty much any other movie I can think to name, and I genuinely found it to be additive to the experience for once. Once 2D prints of the movie start floating around following it’s Japanese BD release in the next couple of months, I think a lot of people will end up coming out of the movie with a very different perception of how it looks, as much about what’s interesting about how the movie looks will end up represented by little more in the way of parallax scrolling than in most productions.

The actual CG part of the animation, for the most part, comes into play with the characters – people in the movie are always rendered, with all that normally entails. The models themselves look fine – I don’t think anyone has quite figured out how to shade hair in these things without it looking somewhat odd, but in a lot of stills you’d be hard pressed to tell whether they’re CG or just highly polished modern digital animation. The character movement is a little stiff at times, though. The actual framerate of the animation is also somewhat constrained, but it’s difficult to tell if that was for production reasons – with the way the backgrounds work, the movie could well have been a composition directors nightmare – or if it’s a deliberate move to emulate the feel of more traditional 2D animation. The movie actually retains much of that feel, and despite it’s use of CG, it very much feels like it’s been storyboarded by someone with a background in 2D animation. The scene composition, layout, the sense of depth and space, and constrained camera movements outside of key set-piece moments are certainly more inline with what we expect from anime than the output of a full-CG house like Pixar.

Also, I’m not entirely convinced that the characters weren’t frequently rendered out into 2D and composited into a lot of the scenes in a far more traditional manner, but it’s rather difficult to tell given the limited depth of a single person in comparison to the entire scene. It’d seem odd, or at least an awful lot of work, for them not to have rigged up some way to construct their scenes in full CG space even if a lot of the elements were always forward-facing 2D objects, but given there’s a lot in the movie that actually feels like it breaks reality in favour of feeling like a classic production, I’d have to assume the approach probably differed on a scene by scene basis.

The look of the movie doesn’t always work, though. There’s a few fleeting moments where perspective ends up looking somewhat peculiar, and there’s moments where objects with uneven edges almost look like they’re floating due to being layered against a genuinely stereoscopic floor. Watching this subtitled is an interesting experience as well – the subtitles pop out as the most forward pointed object, but it’s initially really disorientating as the movie opens on a series of long-shots of tall buildings the world over, essentially demanding that the viewer parse objects at the two extremes of visual depth. It stops being an issue once the camera starts focusing more on mid-field objects, though.

The music for the movie is by Kenji Kawai, and he’s in pretty bombastic form here. This is, of course, great, because I love Kawai when he’s working in that mode. If I was to lay one complaint at the soundtrack, it’d be that it’s perhaps a little derivative of his prior works, in so much as there’s a number of pieces that had me expecting to develop into themes from Gundam 00 or the Patlabor movies, but honestly, it’s kind of hard to complain about that when those scores were effective in the first place.

As far as the movies writing goes, it’s challenging, at least to talk about. Whilst the actual movie is going on, it feels extremely challenging to follow, like all the complexity of a Stand Alone Complex arc crammed into the running time of a single movie, but it’s also something which becomes increasingly obvious the more distance you have from it. There’s a lot about it’s narrative that ultimately ends up coming across as being red herrings, at least in terms of working toward a cohesive narrative, but is ultimately there for thematic reasons more than narrative ones. It doesn’t really help that, for must of it, the movie presents itself as something it isn’t, but for all it’s apparent complexity and weirdness, it’s actually got a much more straightforward point than most of Kamiyama’s other productions.

To get into the spoiler talk, well, Duckroll got there before most of us had a chance to see the movie, and honestly, I think he’s spot-on with most of his analysis of what is actually going on, though I’d probably say the whole Voice of God thing he cites as a secondary theme stuck me as less a theme than a purely mechanical McGuffin which allowed them to exaggerate the main running points of the movie. A lot of what is going on is based around the concept of being able to put trust in others – your ability to have faith – and what you are capable of doing if you either have or lack it, and the fact that the modern default is to be cynical and distrusting of everything.

The movie opens with 009 on the verge of actually blowing a building up himself, under the influence of His Voice, but this is at a point where he has been living a life of repeating high school over and over. It gets back into the themes that Kamiyami was exploring at the beginning of Eden of the East, with the disenfranchised nature of Japans modern youth. As soon as Joe regains his memories, however, he stops hearing His Voice, at least in the same fashion. He is the leader of the Cyborg team, and his faith in his comrades, even those who it is suggested may be even working against them, is absolute. It’s very quickly put into sharp contrast against Dr Gilmore, who ofttimes comes across as a raving conspiracy theorist, distrusting of the government (particularly of the US one, but that’s a pretty common theme of Kamiyamas work!), big business, former colleagues, and even of Joe. Of course, the US government and military are presented as the main antagonists throughout most of the movie, because obviously they’re distrusting of pretty much everyone, particularly their own citizens, because that’s how things work in this post-9/11 era. It’s probably pretty telling that the moment when 002 succumbs to His Voice is when it becomes obvious that he’s been sold out by his own government.

In the end, though, the team comes back together, differences put aside as they work to save the world. 009 himself pretty much outright states the point when says that he now hears His Voice differently, and is being told to save rather than destroy humanity – he has faith in people, not outright distrust. He sees other people as valued comrades, not an enemy or a plague to be cast aside. It is not a good thing to be a cynical bugger about everything.

Then the actual conclusion is a bit weird, but the movie pretty much tells us outright not to think too hard about it. One of the challenges of the movie is figuring out how much of it to take on a literal rather than symbolic level, but even though it’s particularly rich in SYMBOLISM (it’s hard not to notice that the exploding Space Nuke forms a crucifix in combination with the sun rising over the Earth, not to mention the cyborgs new found ability to walk on water), it’s a difficult to take at anything other than face value. Things go on, our heroes are all heroes again, and they’re finally free of the shadow of the manga preventing the universe from carrying on.

Or they’re all actually dead. One of the two.

Anyway, the movie is out on BD in Japan toward the end of May, complete with English subtitles. It’s expected to be getting a wider UK theatrical release not long afterwards, and if you can see it that way in 3D, that’s probably the best way to experience it. It’s possibly not for everyone, but it’s worth seeing if you want something a bit different to chew on for a bit.

(PS – I could have done with more Cyborg 007, the gloriously monikered Great Britain. He seemed pretty good, but was woefully under-utilised, even though he does get a better deal of it than 008)

But, yeah, it’s the final episode. It’s somewhat sad, because now I’m going to have to find something else to write about on a weekly basis, or more likely I’ll just leave the blog lying fallow and unupdated again for weeks on end. It’s also sad because, as much as I kind of rag on the show for silly things, I really enjoyed this show a great deal – enough to import the insert songs CDs, at least. Not as much as I enjoy iDOLM@STER, mind you – not that I think they’re in competition or anything, given that they’ve got very different approaches and aims, but I liked the rather more scattershot approach iM@S took with it’s content. It’s really kind of weird how incredibly different all the idol shows which’ve been airing as of late have managed to be.

There’s a lot of merit to taking a more strictly narrative and consistent approach to matters, devoid of tonal-whiplash, as in Love Live, though. I do think the single cour running time means that there’s a couple of things they tripped over a little – to the very end, Rin is pretty much just there, more-or-less a non-character – but taken in it’s entirety, it’s a pretty cute origin story, produced with the same high production standards that Sunrise 8 have been managing to consistently churn out shows at in recent times, at least when it was avoiding the CG.

It’ll be interesting to see, should they make a continuation, where they go from this point – they’ve probably got about six months of narrative space (the characters having not switched back to Winter uniforms yet) before the third years graduate, but as Eri points out right at the beginning of the episode, they don’t have any particular goal going forward from here. Love Live is over, and the school has been saved (for a year, at least). They’ve resolved pretty much everything in terms of what could be a narrative drive, and I’ve got no specific idea where they could actually take it going forward. Just being an idol is likely to be a little too thin in regards to what they’ve set-up with this show.

Anyway, let’s get to the episodes actual content…

1) Enter The Scrub Unit

Unfortunately, the reason why this doesn’t contradict her character is because they never actually got around to establishing a character for her in the first place. She kind of likes sports and makes sporadic cat noises when talks and… well, that’s it.

Maybe they’ll make up for it by making the entire second season about her…

2) PTSD – Probably Temporary Slap-induced Dementia

Not that I’d particularly know – I’ve only played DDR twice, and was terrible at it on both occasions.

3) Well, that was sudden…

This is another case where determining the actual timeline of this show becomes tricky. I mean, at the beginning of episode 11, we’re told that the final acts for Love Live were going to be decided based on the chart positions two weeks from then, with the actual event presumably having to take place at least a week after that just because of logistics. Three or four days pass in the duration of episode 11, then episode 12, by all accounts, actually looks to be set after the final positions have been decided – the implication being that Honoka was actually ill enough to be off school for, at minimum, an entire week. It’s then mentioned later in the same episode that Kotori was to leave Japan in two weeks. Basically, it suggests episodes 11 through 12 or 13 actually take place over a period of at least a month.

4) The Worlds Saddest Slime

5) Poor george

I have to say, what a weird bunch of names these units have. I’m pretty sure Madonna is taken as well, unless it’s the Madonna, in Japan taking Japanese classes, and that they’ve relaxed the rules on what counts as a “school idol” so much that adults taking late-night college classes actually count. That’d be interesting.

Actually, the names in the top-ten table here kind of remind me of what the top unit charts look like in the iDOLM@STER games, just in terms of fruity names, although there generally tends to be rather less English there.

(Actually, the annoying thing in iM@S is that, because of the way 360 leaderboards work, you can only have one entry at a time – so as soon as you start playing with a new unit, your ranking ends up dropping to the point where your new unit is. I mean, even I was top-ten (actually, I think it might have even been top-five) at one point, but, alas, I started another game in an attempt to grind-up to my last unlocked achievement. It still remains unclaimed).

(Also, UC_G? Universal Century Gundam?)

6) Take off! Be Ambitious!

7) I don’t know, it probably takes courage to…

Just saying, I can’t help but think that moving to a strange foreign country to study fashion design with a well-known design would have actually been hard mode here, and going back to your school-idolling ways is the easy way out, but, hey, we all know that Honoka is an ESPer with mind-control skills, intentional or otherwise, so it’s not like Kotori had much of a chance of escaping anyway.

8) The Japanese sure are polite!

Also, no car-dancing this time. They shouldn’t be allowed to use this song without car-dancing. It wouldn’t even have been hard to fit it into the scene in terms of establishing context. It’d have been so, so easy to have had Honoka dodging cars (to music) whilst she was running for her waifu life.

(It’s also a bit weird to have this song acknowledged in the show, given it’s appearance in the first episode seemed to take place in some bizarre alternate universe where things devoid of context happen spontaneously)

9) That’s cheating if you ask me!

Actually, this entire scene makes absolutely no sense within the context in which it is seemingly presented. The timeline the show presents to us is that Honoka calls Umi out to the auditorium with seemingly no prior notice, Honoka goes to get Kotori from the Airport, then Honoka and Kotori manage to return just in time for the concert, the implication of the set-up being that, somehow, Umi and friends managed to organise the entire performance – including an audience full of glowstick-wielding students, middle-schoolers and parents – within the amount of time it took Honoka to get to the airport and back. To be fair, it might have taken a couple of hours to get to the airport and back, but it still smacks one as being more than a little improbable. I do wonder if there’s supposed to be a suggested time-skip in there somewhere, or if it really is supposed to be taken as it’s presented.

10) Saving the Worst for Last?

11) ???!?

12) £25 on Nozomi being Mariko…

13) I like the implication that…

It reminds me of the scene in the final 0048, where Mr. Hater is sitting watching the performance in his Mr Hater mask. That particular case was a bit more peculiar, because it suggests that, given it was a barely-advertised guerrilla concert he likely didn’t know about in advance he was watching, he either wears the mask all the time, or hastily had to put it on to watch the thing. The implication that he has to be wearing that mask in order to watch a 0048 concert is, well…

Getting back to point 9, though, it strikes me as being a bit peculiar that they’re watching the Moooo’s performance given that it seems to have been hastily arranged – it suggests that A-RISE just randomly sit around together browsing idol Youtube whilst lounging around in their stage costumes.

Also, I do like how completely unimpressed Erina looks here. Also that their dressing room, or wherever they’re hanging out, seems to be decorated with a poster of themselves.

14) Moooo’s Music Start?

Have I really just blanked entirely on this being a recurring catchphrase, or is Honoka ending the series on what is effectively a bit of an ass-pull?

1. Important Matters First…

Of course, the result of Honoka collapsing last episode is that they’ve chosen to revoke their Love Live application, removing them from the rankings entirely. It’s a weird situation – if this was a show full of nasty conspiracy theorists, they’d probably have been accusing Kotori’s mother of being manipulative by making it easier for Kotori to make a guilt-free exit, but people in this show are far too nice. Instead, it’s either just giving them a convenient plot development for the shows last episode in the form of a last-minute reapplication, or it’s saving them an awful lot of headache-inducing character design issues when it comes to the shows likely follow-up series.

2. Oh, it’s A-RISE again

By the way, for those who weren’t paying attention to background elements in the previous episodes, the A-RISE members are Tsubasa Kira (the cute one with the short hair, who seems to be the units center), Erina Todo (the one with the dark hair) and Anju Yuki (the red-head).

3. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

The news she is reporting is, of course, that the student applications are way up, and as a result it’s likely that the school won’t be closing. The metric for applications being way up isn’t entirely clear – I mean, one could speculate that the application numbers doubling simply means that Yukiho is considering applying in addition to Arisa. Or maybe it’s Yukiho, Arisa and their other friend.

4. How much advance notice do you need before it becomes “Foreshadowing”?

Well, I’d be pretty sure if it wasn’t eminently likely that Kotori will back out of moving abroad at the last minute, but the show could still surprise us in that regard.

The alternate idea for this post – the one I’d be doing if I was spending considerably more time on it – would be New Ninth Member Try-Out Comics. Except I kind of did that in meme comics before, and I had only thought of one joke (something to do with Nozomi reject Kuroko (Railgun) for character overlap). It’d probably have been hilarious. Or terrible.

5. Errr, how often is the Love Live again?

Unless this is actually just a subtle way of her informing the rest of the group that her grades have gotten so bad that she’ll be repeating the year over again.

6. Out Of Context Screengrab

7. The One-Eyed Man Is King

I have to admit, I don’t even think that Honoka is entirely in the wrong over this one. Sure, she’s over-reacting, but so is everyone else in this situation. It doesn’t really help that they’re kind of throwing a lot on Honoka so suddenly – I mean, they withdrew themselves from Love Live without even discussing the matter with Honoka first, then she lost her sense of purpose due to the delay in school closure, and then Kotori dropped the overseas-study card. It’s probably not the time to be dropping specific obligations on her, even if she is moping around. Given that these people have just been pointing out Honoka’s lack of perception when it comes to others, it all feels somewhat like a glasshouse/stone-throwing situation.

Also, Umi’s slap was total weak-sauce. They didn’t even have it onscreen!

Oh, and we still don’t know a thing about Rin.

It’s not something which is ever particularly laboured in conversation in the show, but it’s quite easy to over-look precisely how close to Akihabara is to the supposed location of our heroines school, and the advantage that likely gives them over a lot of the other idol units who’re active in the country. If we’re to take the idol ratings as a literal popularity position (whatever metric is used to judge such a thing), then there must be at least, what was it, 999 school idol units registered in the ranking system?

Clearly, not all of those are going to be from Tokyo, or even anywhere that there is going to be a significant population base, even forgetting proximity to the hotbeds of crazy idol otaku. The building which A-RISE’s school is based upon is actually in Akihabara (which is why it is mentioned as being their home turf a few episodes back), and that’s obviously a very deliberate decision – regardless of their actual talent, being seated smack in the center of modern idol culture is an advantage, and the fact the show rates A-RISE as being the number one idol group is clearly indicative of something.

Anyway, I don’t really have a specific point about that, so enough pre-amble…

1. Due to WHAT?!?

It’s just a bit odd that a show about idols, girls put forth as pure, untouchable objects of obsession and idolization, is putting this statement forth – more-so given it’s a cartoon on the subject, effectively meaning it’s doubling-down on the concept. It just seems to me that school idols may, infact, be more part of the cause more than necessarily the solution, you know?

Just saying.

2. Tick..tick..tick…

It’s a little confusing because, generally, you wouldn’t expect to see one letter pushed, on it’s lonesome, into a non-empty household mailbox, as seemingly occurs at the end of the ninth episode. Given it’d already had it’s postage stamp validated, however, it’s not going to be the letter getting sent, shoved into an outgoing mailbox, either – not that that’d be a valid proposition anyway, given that airmail doesn’t really take that long.

It’s just a somewhat peculiar given that it was absolutely not mentioned or even hinted at in the prior episode, even though several days – if not a week – had passed in the duration of episode ten alone. Unless the Minami household simply don’t empty their mail very often.

The other weird thing about it is that we, as an audience, are never clued in to what the actual letter contains, only that it is a rare opportunity for Kotori with a rather unfortunately timed deadline. If it wasn’t for the fact that stamp doesn’t look particularly British, I’d have suggested that the legend of Minalinsky has spread even to the hallowed halls of England, and that she’d be offered a place to train as a maid for royalty. Instead, I’m going to have to imagine that it’s something rather more boring.

Although for all we know it could just be tickets for some WWE Spectacular which just happens to be occurring on the same day as Love Live. Or she could be undergoing gender reassignment surgery, which’d really mess up the whole Mooooo’s line-up.

3. Futari no Heart Balance

Aside from the fact that two thirds of the club seem to materialize from out of nowhere in this scene, just in time to watch Nico step-up to the plate, this episode does make me wonder how often drawings like this are used to determine stage availability at Japanese school festivals.

I only really wonder because, whilst no other examples from the past immediately spring to mind, there was also a similar sequence in what I guess is now last weeks Tamako Market. Of course, in Tamako it went in completely the opposite direction to how things turned out here. Also fewer goofy faces in that show.

4. That Foreshadowing!

In this case, nothing quite so bizarre, but I can’t help but be amused by the “not go out because of the rain” line on the left there, given what’s going on in the rest of the episode.

5. Go Fish

It just makes me wonder a little about the backgrounds of the characters. Umi’s homestead here looks traditional, but not particularly in the cheap sense of the term, and obviously Kotori is the daughter of the schools chairwoman. Whilst they got on the back of Maki a little for being the daughter of an extremely wealthy family, I do wonder if, in fact, we’re just talking about shades of gray here – they’re probably all from at least moderately well-to-do families.

Which make me wonder if, in fact, the real problem the school is facing is that their entry fees are too high to be competitive!

Intermission: I still think μ’s is a dumb name

6. By George!

Actually, I was wondering how many other school idol units we’ve actually seen in the show previously, and as far as I can tell it’s only been the three – they pretty much just keep re-using the same art and A-RISE footage which appeared in the first episode, and the posters hanging in the club-room are re-purposed from the same assets seen in Honoka’s magazines from back then.

As far as these other units go, aside from A-RISE, the only other one that’s been specifically associated with an image was Number 18 there, Dream, who’re named in a magazine spread from back in the first episode, and are the unit hailing from Fukuoka. The other group, despite being on the cover of one of the magazines, wasn’t identified.

Unless by some kind of miracle they climb back up to the top twenty, I’m going to assume that they’re not George, though, mainly because it’d have been a waste to have drawn such high-quality artwork for characters who aren’t going to reappear in some kind of presumed second installment of the series.

7. Getting Strong Dumb Now

(Man, people catch fevers way too easily in anime).

8. Sometimes I think I’m OCD…

I have to admit, during the concert scene in this episode, I ended up getting really hung up on which earrings which characters were wearing. It breaks down as follows:

Stars – Nico, Eri, Rin
Moons – Nozomi, Umi
Hearts – Kotori, Honoka, Hanayo

You might notice that Maki is missing from that list – it’d follow that she’d be wearing Moon earrings, but I’m pretty sure she’s not wearing any. Her hair more-or-less completely covers her ears anyway, and I’ve got to imagine it’d cause the 3D animation staff all kinds of additional headaches to do with clipping and the like.

Coincidentally, does anyone know how attendance at school festivals actually works? I mean, in some shows you see it ticketed, but that’s in things like MariMite where the schools are so upper-class that they’d want to control and monitor who can actually get in incredibly strictly. In other cases, you see characters suggest it’s a good chance to pick-up girls from other schools, but you’d think that they’d, you know, also have good on the same day the festival was actually occurring.

9. Perhaps not the greatest idea…

Whilst it’s cute that they did Honoka’s little dance-shuffle-jump after-all, I have to say that taking such a huge leap whilst standing in a fairly huge, likely slippy puddle, whilst also dancing on a small roof perched upon a larger roof of a tall building, doesn’t strike me as being a particularly sensible thing to do.

Maybe it’s just the rain blurring things somewhat, maybe it’s some of the fruity angles they utilized in the hand-drawn cuts, or maybe it’s just the number of odd crotch-level shot that’ve been spread throughout the episode reaching a distraction-climax, but the use of CG didn’t actually seem quite as egregious in this episode as it has in a couple of the other dances. There’s a few cuts where I’d honestly not been able to tell at first blush if they were 3D renders or not.

I’m also kind of surprised that the next episode preview wasn’t just a series of cuts of the girls laid-up in bed ill, given that’s what typically seems to happen if girls get even the slightest bit rain-soaked in these cartoons. Well, either that or they horrifyingly multiply like some kind of Gremlin, but I’m pretty sure that’s just Puchimas.

Before I get onto this weeks episode of Love Live, I’m going to revisit last weeks briefly. Firstly, given the content of last weeks episode, it was a little funny to notice, not to mention difficult not to miss, the new series merchandising that was solicited this week. Whilst I’m pretty sure that Nozomi is the only character truly deserving a Big Can Badge (fnar fnar), there are things like character fans and messenger bags up for order as well.

Onto other matters, I’m really struggling reconcile Kotori’s time.

I mean, I mentioned a couple of episodes ago that it was pretty crazy that Kotori had managed to make nine stage costumes in less than two weeks for the Open Campus, and that was before we actually had all the information on the situation. Last weeks episode makes things seem even more bonkers – essentially, we were being asked to believe that Kotori was simultaneously attending school (and being a good student!), practicing as a member of Mooooo’s and was working part-time in a maid cafe – frequently enough that she was famous enough for both Nico and Hanayo to know her by reputation – whilst simultaneously being able to make custom costumes for their performance.

I’m not really sure how to make the ends meet on this one. There’s numerous options one could put forth. It could well be that, following the Nico ESPer Theory, Kotori has the ability to dilate time around herself, and formed a time-space bubble to allow her more time to fabricate the costumes. This would also allow us to posit that, when she froze up when caught in maid-costume outside of the idol store in the previous episode, it was because she was flustered enough to lose control of her power and swung her personal time in the other direction – she hadn’t frozen up, she was just moving really, really slowly.

Alternatively, it may well just be that Kotori is some kind of mutant that requires very little sleep. Clearly she has to sleep on occasion – though a lack of sleep may explain the occasional bout of scatterbrain from which she suffers – but maybe she only has to crash hard once every two or three days. Costume production would have been carried out during the hours in which normal people sleep.

Or maybe she just bought Evangeline’s pocket-universe resort after Negima concluded. If the series ends with her, inexplicably, looking two or three years older than even the (not-Nico) third years, I’m going to take it as being evidence that this is the case.

As a final note regarding episode nine, what was up with that letter to Kotori at the end of the episode anyway? Was it just a cute endcap between the episode and the credit sequence, or are we supposed to take it as some kind of ticking time-bomb that’ll become relevant as the show continues? Given it’s complete non-appearance in this weeks installment, and it being air-mail in nature, I half expected the ending credits this week to start with two puzzled employees of the British mailing service pondering if Tokyo is somewhere in the backwaters of Wales.

Anyway, let’s get on with this weeks episode.

1. I hate to bring this up, but…

2. The Ultimate 2D Waifu Show

I guess that Mascot is a pretty accurate description of Nico at this point. It’s pretty funny to compare everyones current attitude towards her to how they were trying to butter her up at the end of episode five. I presume, at this point, everybody has realised that Hanayo likely knows more about all this idol malarkey, and Nico is just around for comic relief.

(It’s also funny to see Nico increasingly dig herself into a hole in this episode, albeit not in the Yukiho sense. It’s definitely a charm point!)

3. Clearly in her element

Also, that was a pretty gratuitous Eri ass-shot at the beginning of the scene, particularly for a show which has been relatively service-light thus far.

4. Obvious shipping aside…

If it’s just her trying to assume the same posture as Maki, I’d have to be extremely worried about the effectiveness of Eri’s training sessions if she can’t so much as cross her legs. Otherwise, her stretching is really just bringing into sharp contrast the inconsistency in Nico’s portrayed comparative height throughout the episode.

5. This episodes biggest fanservice moment!

It’s a bit of a peculiar scene, really. Honoka’s sleepwear is pretty ludicrously designed, presumably due to them having to go to such extremes to differentiate what all of the girls are wearing in this scene. I do wonder where she suddenly pulled the rice crackers she starts eating from – she makes it sound like a spur-of-the-moment thing to help her try to get to sleep, but surely the fact she has access to them means she already had them in her bed? Does she always sleep with Senbei, or is this just a one-off occasion due to being on a trip? What happens to them once they start the pillow fight?

Speaking of the pillow fight, I can’t say I’m kosher with will the Nico-abuse which ensued.

6. Khorosho…

This can be taken a couple of different ways – if I wanted to be cynical, I’d say that it’s a sudden attempt at them to give the character an additional moe-moe character trait, but I think that’d be a touch unfair. Really, whilst I think it could have been handled in a slightly less blunt-feeling fashion, it’s a cute, subtle attempt to play into the intended theme of the episode, in as much as it’s supposed to display the character feeling more comfortable and open around her fellow idols. It’s likely a habit of the character which she’s been carefully keeping herself from slipping out around school, and her sister doing the same earlier in the series was supposed to be an early sign-post of such.

(By “slightly less-blunt”, I tend to mean that I’m typically dense enough to such matters that anything I pick up on I classify as being blunt)

7. Errr, yeah, you don’t say…

At the very least, I’m pretty sure that she didn’t need to tell Maki to not tell anyone else about her scheming affection, because it’s likely pretty transparently obvious to everyone involved.

Well, not really. It’s a slightly odd feeling episode of Love Live this week. I mean, the overwhelming character Love Live exudes is one of almost oppressive earnesty – aside from the Nico stuff the show plays almost purely for comedic effect, it doesn’t have a cynical bone in it’s figurative body. It’s a pretty strange contrast to something like AKB0048 which, despite being sponsored by a genuine idol conglomerate, has a tendency to feel like the production staff are fully acknowledging how dumb this whole idol thing is.

What’s kind of odd is how much of this particular episode ends up coming across as being product placement – even when upon further investigation a lot of it actually isn’t. It’s something that you wouldn’t bat an eyelid at were it not something which comes across as being so cynical in an otherwise so, well, uncynical show.

Not that almost all anime shows aren’t trying to sell at least something, obviously, and the frequent PVs already suggest this show had more of such an agenda than most, but those at least feel organically integrated into the proceedings.

Anyway, on with the usual.

1. Change of Shipping Lanes

I was wondering if there was any clear reason for this, from a staff perspective. The whole Maki-Nico thing was played up sporadically in the original Love Live PVs, particularly in Mogyutto `LOVE` de sekkin chuu!, but it’s not really been all that apparent in the TV anime outside of one cut in the OP. Saying that, even whilst he isn’t doing episode directing himself, Love Live series director Takahiko Kyogoku is storyboarding the vast majority of episodes – including this one – as well as having done the same for the PVs.

Which is to say, it looks like this was pretty much just a whim. Will be curious to see if it continues on an upswing in future episodes.

2. Nothing say Russian like…

It’s a slightly peculiar scene in as much as Honoka mentions here that they’ve gotten some female fans since Eri joined. It’s a bit of an odd statement because, for all intents and purposes, men don’t seem to exist in the Love Live universe. They’re figures who exist in theory, but in practice seem to have a ghost-like appearance in the actual show, invisible to all. At the very least, every single fan who has actually appeared in the show thus far has actually been female.

Still, it’s nice to see that we’re actually being shown in the current ranking of Moooo’s, though the fact that they’re being placed 50th makes me wonder how many schools in Japan are supposed to have idol units, particularly given that 50th place seems to be something they take pride in, having taken some considerable effort to reach.

3. [*]Ability to speak to Alpaca’s not guaranteed.

Still, the whole idol shop scene is curious for a few reasons. I mean, how could they have not previously noticed the store when every single time they’ve been to Akihabara in the past they’ve been at the same location (right infront of that giant Gamers sign-nyo, fans of product-placement-nyo). Then there’s Nico being unable to see her own merchandise when it’s pretty much the most prominent on display.

Mostly, though, it’s just the weird mixed-message the scene can be read as promoting. All the merchandise – or at least all the Moooo’s merchandise – on display is bootlegged. Our heroines are, strangely, pretty happy at the flagrant disregard of their image rights on display here, as it show’s that they’re attaining some degree of popularity.

It’s hardly the shows only example of playing loose with copyright, but whilst I realise Akiba and fan-culture in Japan tends to be at least a little looser in these regards in at least some situations, it seems odd that a show that’s created to ship merchandising is essentially glamorising counterfeit product. I can’t imagine that the involved companies would be particularly happy if I started selling glorious Nico pin-badges, anyway.

4. I think Kotori is hiding something else here…

Forgetting that for a moment, though, Kotori’s story doesn’t seem to entirely match-up – if the photograph was taken without her consent, how come it’s signed?

What is also a bit odd is that, whilst she asks her friends to keep quiet about her part-time job at school, she seems content to carry a photograph around with her – occasionally poking half-visible out of her bags side-pocket – whilst there herself. Not exactly being subtle, are we Minalinsky?

5. BUY OUR BOOK!

The work being promoted in the background here is 水平線の向こう側, or Suiheisen no Mukougawa (The Other Side of the Horizon, I guess?). The thing is, unless someone cares to prove me wrong, I’m pretty sure that this specific thing isn’t actually something that exists. If that’s actually the case, it’s an alarmingly detailed poster for something they seem to have made up purely for background art in a relatively brief cut.

Mostly, though, it’s just something that kind-of propagates the feeling of product placement in the episode, even when it’s for something that doesn’t actually exist.

(The Tonkatsu place in the following cut is apparently a real place, by the way).

6. PRECOGNITION POWERS, ACTIVATE!

7. Okaerinasai, Goshujinsama!

You can see some footage from inside the actual store on Youtube, if you’re particularly interested – the shows replication of it looks to be pretty accurate. The actual store has run some Love Live events in recent times, so I guess it’s inclusion in the show is well-planned payback.

8. I can’t help but notice…

Not that a huge part of this episode isn’t about glamorising parts of fan-culture which are often which are often villainised – it’s not like Akiba tends to be painted in a particularly positive light these days. It’s hard to imagine that, in reality, Cure Maid wouldn’t be immediately swarmed by nerds the second it became known that an idol group of even minor popularity were working there.

Coincidentally, the reason why you don’t see A-RISE taking immediate retaliatory action to having their home territory invaded is because they prefer to keep their wars private.

Sorry.

9. And finally, a note for Vividred Operation