Yes, I’ve heard the news that iDOLM@STER is coming to PSP by the end of the year – or more accurately, coming to PSP three times by the end of the year. I can’t say I’m particularly surprised that they are doing three separate releases due to the amount of audio data in the game – aside from all the spoken dialogue, there’s obviously all the song data, stored multiple times for each character. Hopefully we’ll get the 360 and Live For You songs as a trade off for the missing characters, but there’s not been anything said about the song selection yet.

Anyway, in a move that probably isn’t a surprise to anyone reading, I’m presently planning to buy all three versions. For those who haven’t been following the news, or hasn’t heard everything yet, I’ll sum up what I presently know about these releases…

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I’ve not actually seen the show myself, but Totali bugged me about this one on IRC (“come on man…its not an apple this time!” he cried), so I figured I’d post it. This means, however, that I don’t actually have anything to say on the subject of the show, so go read the post the grab was stolen from if you are really interested in the matter.

You know, it almost feels like cheating for me to do a Mikan Watch post for Genshiken, not least because I’ve mentioned it before. That wasn’t in a Mikan Watch post, though, so I’m doing it anyway.
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From Episode 11 of the Kyoani version of Kanon, this one is rather hard not to see given it covers pretty much the entire screen. Still, you have to be impressed with the versatility the Mikan Box displays here. It may have been mutilated, but it’s proven it’s worth as a quick and easy solution for basic school repairs. Mikan box, we salute you!

It’s little hard to make out in that image, but it’s the box on the left.

I’ve been procrastinating over watch 5cm for a little while now, but it ended up working out for the best – I had the opportunity to watch it on a 50″ screen instead of my usual 32″. It’s definitely the way to watch it – on as big and high quality a screen as possible. The animation is pretty outstanding, particularly the use of light and shadow which has pretty much become Shinkais trademark. It’s hard not to be impressed when they throw around so many of the kind of light effects that you don’t see much of in anime due to difficulty in achieving it.

That said, I wasn’t really all that enamoured with the content. Sure, I was impressed by the candid realism of the ending, but otherwise it was only really the second of the three segments which I found particularly endearing – the first segment, essentially an extended monologue, started to grate on me after a while, whilst the musical montage the third built up to did nothing for me (it probably didn’t help that I didn’t really like the song).

Ultimately, The Place Promised is the only Shinkai work that I’ve really loved thus far. I really need to get around to re-watching that…