I was most disappointed after it failed to appear in the first episode of the Persona 4 anime, but the second episode provided the goods! Sure, it doesn’t actually say “Mikan”, but given prior evidence I’m going to claim it.

(As a vaguely related side-note, it’s kind of disappointing that, for a film set in a region where Mandarins are farmed, and featuring an number of Mandarin farmers, A Letter For Momo doesn’t have a single obvious Mikan Box in it. I think I might have spotted one at one point, but it’s going to be a loooooooong wait to check).

Hey, folks, the PS3 iDOLM@STER2 trial version is out for those of you with Japanese PSN accounts. I figure that, since a lot of people (and not necessarily those planning on picking up the full game) will probably be giving it a try, I’d just quickly run through what the demo gives you to play around with.

Actually, from the details they released yesterday, they kind of suggested that they’ve be covering the first six weeks of the game (basically, all the tutorial stuff – if you play the game, it actually makes a lot of sense that they’d leave things there). As it turns out, they’re only presenting you one week of game, and week five rather strangely. This does mean that I’m now sitting on a really rather long tutorial post for the game that I guess I’ll be sitting on for a couple of weeks.
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…Because the Escaflowne movie is so boring that it’ll knock you out cold, amiright?

Actually, that’s being a bit unfair. Having eight years of distance from my last rewatch of the TV show, as opposed to eight minutes like the last time I watched the movie, rather did wonders for my appreciation. After the TV show, where most episodes end on some kind of cliffhanger or high-point, the movie is simply uneventful. Taken on it’s own, it still has it’s share of issues with pacing and underdeveloped character arcs, but it’s still a very pretty looking movie with some really neat action sequences.
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It’s that time of year again… is what I’d be saying if this was more than just the second occasion the event has been held, or if I’d actually been to the Glasgow weekend last year. Instead, hey, it’s the second year of Scotland Loves Anime, the event in which two cinemas in Scotland show anime movies all weekend.

Not that, on paper, this years line-up looked as good as last years. This isn’t the fault of the organisers, though – The advantage of doing one of these for the first time last year is that they could get away with pulling content from the previous couple of years, whereas they didn’t really have that luxury when following things up just a year later. Add to that the fact that last year was really an abnormally good year for anime movies coming out of Japan, with things like Redline finally hitting after years in production.

I’m not saying that this years line-up is bad (particularly given I’ve not yet seen A Letter to Momo, or next weeks enigmatic “MYSTERY FILM”), but at first glance, not quite so spectacular.
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Bandai Namco released another PV for PS3 iDOLM@STER2 a few days ago, but there’s a subtle (in incredibly anal sounding) difference between this and the previously released PS3M@S trails – this one isn’t actually a trailer for the game, rather it’s the first trailer for the games DLC. The game isn’t actually out yet, but this is Bamco settling into business as usual, and you’ll be seeing one of these every month now for a while to come (heck, the eighth 360 DLC promo was released just a couple of weeks ago).

It’s hard to tell if the PS3 version will work the same, given that the platform hosts have different policies regarding bandwidth costs on their service, but it’ll probably worth me spending a little time discussing how DLC in the games, or at least the 360 ones, work.
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