Wow. That question never strikes on my head before. Me, a normal human being do enjoy “these” perverted things like others who enjoys anime. Admit it. You can’t lie. Why do you have a box of tissue paper on convenient place on your desktop? >:3

So yeah. Back to the question “Which one I prefer? Hentai anime or manga“.

Edo

Takamichi is one of my favourite artist

I swing to manga. Obviously. Hard to pinpoint why. Personal taste maybe? I like it when everything is in black and white sketches with those comic speech bubbles. They’re not animated, but I have strong imagination to cover that up.

I treat no audio as a big bonus. It allows me to enjoy it without others in close proximity feels awkward. It allows to me listen to any song that I want while reading it. Again, it’s a big bonus there.

I rarely watch hentai, simply because i just turns me off. I rather watch porn than hentai. Really. and I rarely watch porn. Srsly. Call me a loser, but yeah, I fap to 2D black and white sketches. T_T

Plus, it’s fun to see my favourite characters “hit it on” in high quality doujins. You know what i meant. >:3

No wait. Nah, I think it’s just personal preference. >_>

HolyCow

Stringendo, one of the H anime out there with noticeably better art

They say exams do weird stuff to your brain… Such as making you debate over which is superior: H anime or H manga.

I’m a strong supporter of H anime, mainly because there’s Audio. I daresay I enjoy the Audio more than the Video itself at most times, so TERRIBAD art doesn’t bother me much. That said, I still do enjoy certain H manga out there, like doujinshi by Kirintei.

While discussing this with Tokoyami, we came to a win-win scenario: Read H-manga with H-Anime audio playing in the background. Best of both worlds.

Silencers

Wait till you get to the juicy bits of Yamatogawa's artworks :D~

I swing the manga way, and by that, I mean original H-manga series. I’m not a fan of H-doujins because it ruins the character image. Especially if its a character I like.

I like original series, preferably ones with recurring characters or with a really good story. There are a few artists whose series I’ve really come to appreciate and enjoy, namely O.RI (who is absolutely hilarious), Cuvie (who is a lady 8D), Kiasaragi Gunma (all the girls look the same), and my number 1 favourite, Yamatogawa.

H-manga is pretty much similar to normal manga – they tend to start out good in print, but they suffer adaptation failure. A lot of good manga series have had that, and the same can be said about H-manga, too. H-manga tends to have more room for the artists’ creativity and for the readers’ imagination.

Maybe something along the lines of dragging your PC to the living room at 3 am, plugging it into your TV system and enjoying your 1080p rips at the highest possible quality?

So moe I died

The highlight of my Shiori mini-marathon

That merely strikes me as something a crazed fan might do. IMO, you don’t turn into a “creepy, maniacal obsessive otaku” till you do this…

Kanojo X Kanojo X Kanojo

KanojoXKanojoXKanojo Blu-Ray rips, on the big screen. Definitely disturbing.

What’s the craziest anime-related stunt you’ve ever pulled? Do share you experiences with us below! =D

Oh wazzup people? Let’s get this blog on the roll again. Starting with a question: “What show would you recommend to those who never watched an anime?”.

Newbies as in: Never heard of anim. Heard of anime but never bother to watch one. Anything. Just as long they’re never watched any anime. What would you recommend them?

Before this, I had always recommend *gasp* Naruto and Bleach. Instantly, they were hooked on to it and kept on bugging me for new episodes (yes, I used to watch those shows). Believe me, these people originally labeled me as “kids” because I watch ” Japanese cartoons”. Well, who’s the “kid” now?

Why they’re instantly hooked on to Naruto and Bleach? I dunno. Maybe it’s because of it’s cheesy action and adventure (no offense to Naruto and Bleach fan, but yeah, I don’t like these two anime).

Hence nowadays, I recommended this:

Edo

Never fuck around with Bonta-kun. He'll beat the shit out of you.

Fullmetal Panic: Fumoffu. This is considered to be the nuclear bomb of anime, very destructive and never fails on anyone… so far. I’ve been recommending this to those who never watched a single anime before and it works. Feed them one episode and they’ll demand for more.

HolyCow

MURRRDEERRRRRR!!! IT'S FUCKIN' MURRDDEERRRRRR

If you have friends who enjoy some dark humor, you can never go wrong with Detroit Metal City. Next to Fumoffu, I personally think this is then second most funniest anime out there, plus at only ~13 minutes per episode it’s not hard to show it to someone between classes, during lunch etc. The fact that you can just pick up any episode and still understand it is a definite bonus IMO

Silencers

For people new to anime, I always try to look for some good shonen for them to chew on. By good shonen, I mean shows that have a good balance of action, comedy and does not repeat what I call ‘The Dragon Ball Formula‘ i.e. talented boy fights a villain slightly stronger, gets beaten, goes home to train/learn a new skill, then comes back and wins with new skills. Then newer, stronger villain comes around, rinse and repeat.

Shonen is srsbsns, yo.

There are actually quite a few good shonen out there, the most popular one, and perhaps fail-proof title being Fullmetal Alchemist. The first adaptation back in 2003 was an excellent run, and the new series which begun in April last year took it higher. FMA is famous for it fantastic balance of comedy, action and drama, but more importantly, it ranks high for its compelling story and superb character development. If I had to choose between the two, the new Brotherhood series is the way to go since it follows the manga very closely(whereas the first TV airing caught up with the manga and diverts into its own plot).

You have something better in mind? Discuss in the comment section below :)

PS: Sorry that we’ve been away for a very long time. Exam is like a cancer. One author affected by would effect the other authors. T_T

Oh, how pleasantly wrong I was.

The background art of Sora no Woto is simply gorgeous.

If you have skipped the show in an attempt to escape another moeblob plague, I’ll run you through a synopsis. Sorami Kanata is a young recruit in the Helvetian army. She enlisted because she wanted to learn music and play the trumpet. Apparently, at the time, trumpets are still an effective means of communication between military units. The story begins with her transfer to Unit 1121 at The Time-telling Fortress, located in the quiet town of Seize. The plot progresses as Kanata learns music from her senior officers and lives her life as a dutiful soldier.

If the name sounds familiar, Helvetia is the Latin name of Switzerland (where the font Helvetica was born). Oddly enough, for a country with a European namesake, its currency is Yen. The era seems to be similar to the pre-WW2 era, with cobblestone roads, homes lit by oil lamps and motor vehicles at its early stages. That is, until we see a multi-legged tank sporting LCD screens in the cockpit displaying some kind of a Gundam-esque operating system – written in Engrish.

Sailor uniform is extinct by then. Gee.

It seems that the story is set in a somewhat post-apocalyptic time (reminds me of Scrapped Princess) where the land is scarred and the seas are without fish. As the show unfolds, we get to see ‘ruins’ and remnants of what seems to be a ‘lost era’. One of these ruins happen to resemble a Japanese school building. The multi-legged tank I mentioned uses precision instruments (such as a focusing lens) made using ‘lost era technology’, and apparently impossible to duplicate using ‘present day’ techniques.

Sora no Woto casually drops in pieces of its back story in a seemingly innocent slice-of-life fashion, cleverly revealing a small part of its history every time. The first episode begins with a festival to celebrate Fire Maidens who perished fighting a great winged Demon.

Legend has it that this Demon breathed fire and kidnapped all the Maidens of the fortress into its underground lair. With the help of a giant Spider, the Maidens managed to defeat the demon and decapitate it. However, intense fire kept pouring out from its severed head, threatening to burn the entire town.

The Maidens, each in turn held the severed head to contain the fire, burning themselves in the process. Every day, the villagers poured water over the Maidens, and after a year passed, the fire finally ran out. Ever since then, the villagers remember the Maidens and splash each other with water in gratitude.

Near the end of the episode, Kanata falls into a lake and discovers the gigantic skeleton of a winged creature – with its head missing.

Hey... haven't I seen this skeleton from a certain mecha anime somewhere? Hmm...

Another hint of the Lost Era is the recollection of a dead Japanese soldier (he scribbled his last words on a pillar in Japanese), where the multi-legged tanks climbed modern-day buildings fighting against an unknown enemy. The ‘enemy’ fired a huge beam that wiped out an entire city. Just so happens that at the edge of Kanata’s fort, there is a desert with the roof of buildings poking out of the sand, a region called No Man’s Land.

The story goes deeper and deeper into each character’s past, and before I realised it, 10 episodes flew past me. That’s what I really liked about Sora no Woto. The characters don’t just appear out of nowhere. Each one arrived at the fortress with a lot of baggage, and the story-telling was so moving, it simply left me thirsty for more. It doesn’t try to exploit the moe-aspects too much – the character design has already done enough of that.

Dead man drama. Totally got me sitting up straight.

In a way, Sora no Woto manages to get the best of both worlds. With its moeblob character designs, I’m confident that it can generate a good amount of merchandise sales. Well, not as much as K-ON would, but I think it would suffice. Its plot and story-telling makes it an excellent watch and it kept me glued to the seat with each episode.

For a show that features music as a major plot element, the soundtrack is composed by the ever-talented Michiru Oshima, the genius behind the epic music of Fullmetal Alchemist and Bounen no Xamdou. The melodious OP is performed by Kalafina, Yuki Kajiura’s latest talent project that debuted with the theme songs for Kara no Kyoukai.

Man, I totally wish Dragoons/Stalkers/Immortals could climb around buildings and cliffs like that.

The show is about to end at episode 12, but I dearly hope for a second season to see more story progression and learn more about what really happened during the Lost Era. I’m honestly surprised to say this myself, but I think Sora no Woto is really good. If you have doubts that it’s another moeblob fanservice show, you can be rest assured that it’s got more than meets the eye.

My name is A'isha. I am an Indian from Rome and I only speak German. Sieg Zeon!

Her assertive loli voice is quite awesome.

I started to notice her voice after hearing two similar sounding characters, Aruru (Utawarerumono) and Maria Taro (Zetsubou Sensei). Both characters had a strong childish persistence in their speech. It was then I started paying attention to her voice and the characters she voiced.

She continued to voice a lot of major side characters, but rarely ever got the leading role. It came as a shock to me when I discovered that she put on a male voice for Shinkurou, the titular character of Kurenai. There’s a certain inflection and fluster in her voice that I felt made the character felt… real. Like, that’s how a normal person would speak in real life.

The chemistry she had with Maaya Sakamoto was simply fantastic.

After that, whenever I hear Sawashiro’s voice in any new anime, I get extremely excited. I absolutely enjoyed her work as Sasada (Natsume Yuujinchou), Tsugumi (Kannagi), Warden aka God (Maria Holic) and then finally a leading role as Canaan (Canaan). All this while, it seemed to me that not enough people were giving her the attention she deserves, especially when there are seiyu like Aya Hirano and Kugimiya Rie who seem to monopoly the spotlight all the time.

So this award she received, I think, is totally appropriate. So, Miyuki-chan, congratulations and I hope you’ll continue to get more major roles in future series. If you’re not sure how she sounds like, her more recent roles include Kanbaru (Bakemonogatari), Ayane (Kimi ni Todoke) and the very sexy Celty Sturluson (Durarara!!) – her voice made me go moe over a headless character!

I love me some cool-dere. Nekomimi and latex, yeah.

Simple: because it’s fucking AWESOME.

I’ve been craving for more Gundam anime ever since the last series, Gundam 00. When I heard of the existence of Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn, I was so overjoyed that I got overthrilled. While I love the design of the mecha itself, I have no idea what’s the story was going to be.

I’m not really a fan of light novels.

Why is it good?

Finally, I get to see a scene where the mad skillz of the pilot matters. Ever since SEED, they’ve been throwing a shit load of IMBA (imbalanced) Gundam just to prove that “overpowered Gundam” = WIN”. But Universal Century Gundams are all about skill and strategy, and I’m happy to know that they actually kept this in check. Phew.

Hmm… I’m not going to cover much about the story because I’m more impressed with the awesome fight scenes.

O Hai. Meet 'Kshatriya'

There was a scene where a protoype Kshatriya mobile suit went against a mass-produced Z Type Variable Fighter. The fight choreography was awesome, as they show both pilots trying their best to beat their opponent. Of course, the mass-produced mobile suit lost, but it wasn’t an easy fight. The pilot died battling with all his might, unlike the anon pilots in Gundam SEED that die cheap meaningless deaths while shouting “KISAMA!” (“Damn you!” – Ed.)

Oh, the Kshatriya pilot is a girl btw.

'I nearly jizzed in my pants' scene

Seriously, all the pilots have SKILLZ. MAD SKILLZ.

Face it: it’s supposed to be that way. Mobile suits aren’t exactly cheap to build, and only people with exceptional skills should be allowed to pilot them. Not everyone in the US military gets to fly the F-22, right?

There are a lot of good moments in the show. One of my favourite was mentioned moments before. Another good scene was one where a random soldier temporarily disabled Kshatriya with only a rocket launcher… which tells us that the Kshatriya is not that all IMBA now, although it has wrecked nearly every single mobile suit it encountered.

Also, I noticed that when Kshatriya met Gundam Unicorn for the first time, the pilot didn’t waste time gawking over the new machine. Instead, she tried to immediately disable it. That would be the realistic thing to do; it’s still the middle of battle. But of course, she was too shocked to do anything when Gundam Unicorn’s NewType Drive kicked in.

Yes. Do that. Don't wait. Yes.

Reminds me of the good ol’ Zeta, and I love Gundam Zeta.

AARGGH… I’m having a hard time trying to describe how much I LOVE this show. This… is a like a mecha porn for me. (Omigod, ew. – Ed.) Hard core mechas fighting in space with GOD-LIKE music in the background.

But of course, it’s not all apeshit-mental action scenes. There were some ‘inevitable and necessary’ boring moments too, but hey, that what gives it a good story line.

Presentation

I was nailed to my chair for the entire show and my jaws on the floor during the fighting scenes. The animation quality throughout the entire show is good, and at certain scenes, it was extremely fluid.

Epic background music really played a strong role to spice up the “atmosphere”. The powerful soundtrack composed by Hiroyuki Sawano made my hair stand. If you’re soft, it’s can induce tears… (honestly, I almost cried tears of joy!)

NewType Drive just kicked in yo!

Gundam Unicorn’s startup sequence was so epic that I actually looped to it over and over and over again. Call me lifeless, but damn, it was really good. Three thumbs up to Sunrise for that scene alone!

The Bad

I need to wait for months for the next episode. Damn you, Sunrise. Damn you.

Conclusion

If you’re a Gundam fanboy, you’re most probably roaming the internets looking for reviews and discussions of Episode 1 after watching it five times. If you haven’t watched it, then I suggest you to stop reading this rant and go get it.

Now.

I’m serious.

It’s fucking good.

Really.

The past few years, though, have been very good times for the Malaysian otaku. Internet speed has improved by leaps and bounds (still crappy, but we can never have enough, right?), hard disks have become cheaper, more channels have been opened that made purchasing and owning imported anime goods so much easier. Events have been growing in quantity, quality and scale as well.

Five years ago, getting 500 visitors to an event is considered an achievement. Recent trends however see major fan-organised ACG events clocking up 3000, 5000, and in the case of Comic Fiesta 2009, it even went past the 7000 visitors mark. If that’s not a sign of growth, I don’t know what is.

For the folks behind the scenes, in order to open the doors of opportunity, and to continue to open new ones, they knew that the first step was first to create awareness. After there’s awareness, there’s building the hype. Once there’s a sizable crowd of well-informed fans, a bulk of whom are financially capable consumers and are excited to spend on the things they love, the anime business here begins its ascent.

A big sign of that ascent is the upcoming May’n concert here in KL. Seeing how it’s being organized by the guys at Sozo – the people who brought us AFA – I was genuinely surprised. Putting some thought into it, I realised what was really going on here. Let’s look at this from the perspective of a Japanese record label.

Let’s say I’m the CEO of Flying Dog (lol), and I look at a paltry group of Southeast Asians with their measly market share of roughly around 5 million potential consumers (compared to the market share in Japan). I receive a proposal to send in one of my artists there for a concert, supposedly seeing a chance to pierce the SEA market.

Without having any past concerts to base from, or any idea what the SEA market is like, I can’t afford to send in one of my top artists and waste their time. If I can send them to Fukuoka and generate 3 million yen from a concert there, is there a chance that a concert in SEA can generate a higher figure?

So, let me just send a fresh, upcoming artist and test the waters. If I send in one of my assets and the sales don’t look very impressive, why should I bother wasting my talents’ time when they can generate a much bigger profit elsewhere? It doesn’t sound very nice, but hey, that’s the reality of business for you.

That’s where you, me and all the ACG fans in Southeast Asia come in. I’m sure you’d love to watch your favourite singers perform live, here in Malaysia instead of Singapore or Indonesia, right? I sure as hell want to watch Maaya Sakamoto, Yoko Kanno or even Utada Hikaru perform here, but all that has to start somewhere.

Here’s where the ball starts rolling. It’s a big heavy ball to roll, but if we join hands and make it happen, trust me, we can start seeing things we never dreamed possible just 5 years ago. Things are a-changing, a lot of people are doing all they can, yet ultimately, it can’t happen without you.

So do your part, join the excitement and let’s show the Japs that we’re no small fry to sniff at!

Yeah, I guess he didn’t really thought it through lol.

Erst Kerf

Main Menu

First up would be Erst Kerf, which is a Shmup…now wait a minute, did I say I don’t do Shmups? Well, Erst Kerf is a Shmup, but with Dungeon Crawler elements incorporated into its gameplay. Although what really pulled me in was the rather impressive artwork of the main character. The game is rather small by today’s Doujin Game standards, which can come in gigabytes, but sometimes the smaller the better right? Not exactly in this case. But more info about that after I explain a bit about the gameplay.

Shmup + Dungeon Crawler

This game is played from a top down perspective, ala dungeon crawler style, where you go from point A to point B through a maze, ala dungeon crawler, and you control your character using both the mouse and keyboard, ala dungeon crawler. The mouse is used to change the direction your character is facing and to target the enemy and shoot, while the standard WASD keys control your character’s movement. At the end of each stage, you’ll encounter and face off a boss. You can set both your mouse buttons for alternate types of attacks, where each attack requires a different amout of magic force to use.

Now back to the bad part about the game being small. Based on the options menu of the game, it takes advantage of Pixel Shader 2.0 with Motion Blur and Light Bloom, which sounds impressive. However, the game’s size says otherwise, meaning it uses a texture resolution that is quite small by today’s standards. In other words, if you have a big, high resolution monitor, its not gonna be easy to play this game too long. Because in windowed mode, the game would be too small to play on screen, requiring you to look closer to really dodge all the danmaku while shooting your enemy. Setting it to fullscreen on the other hand, blur’s out the image too much, which can give you a headache and motion sickness especially if you are prone to these things while gaming. In other words, while this game has an interesting gameplay and nice looking graphics, the low resolution makes it hard to play for people with big screens, which is quite the norm these days.

Densou Tenshi Valforce

The second game I’ll be reviewing would be Densou Tenshi Valforce, which I’m just gonna refer to as Valforce throughout this review. Now I’m sure many of you have seen and played an arcade machine than can be played in Versus mode and each person has two joysticks to control. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, head down to your closest game center and look for the arcade machine called Virtual On, and don’t forget to bring a friend to fight against. By the way, I never played the arcade before myself, since I’m really not interested in arcade games at all.

Main Menu

Valforce is based on Virtual On, where there are 8 girls to pick from, each of them with their own abilities or mecha suits, and battle each other til one side wins. The reason why I mentioned Virtual On is because this game supports the Twin Stick system that you veteran players are all familiar with. Yes, which means I suck horribly at this game in Twin Stick mode. We have the usual Arcade mode and Practice mode here, but in addition to those, you also have a Network Mode, where if you don’t feel like sharing a screen while fighting a human opponent, can network with another computer and versus the other player.

Character Selection

Yes, this is probably the only reason I downloaded this game first out of all the C77 games, coz I spotted a blonde loli (moe?). Don’t be fooled though, although they don’t show it here, her mecha suit packs quite a punch, although the huge size of it makes it hard to maneuver.

In Game

Yeap, that’s the same loli you saw just now, facing another character in arcade mode. As you can see I lost quite a bit of HP really early in the game, and at the same time did not do any damage at all. I’m sure veteran players will feel right at home, assuming you have one of those Dual-Shock imitation controllers, or a USB converter for the PS2 Controller. Graphics are pleasant, while nothing spectacular, its quite good by doujin game standards. And yes this game supports some of the highest resolutions I’ve ever seen for a doujin game. BGM is pretty generic and repetitive, and adds little to the battle atmosphere. All-in-all, a rather fun game, if you know how to control, or practice if you don’t, especially when you go up against a friend through a network.

And that’s all for now, I might post a second one soon if I find any more games, while waiting for’em big ones.

Maids who are actually maids.

However, upon reading Emma, I began to have a change in that perception of that. Maids in Kaoru Mori’s world are portray in a realistic way, but she’s able to make it enjoyable and fun to watch / read. Most of anime maids took the fashion references from French Maids, but for Kaoru she focuses on English maids who actually does her job as a maid. Okay, she doesn’t show everything a maid does because that would be boring, but at least the maid in her story ACTS like a maid.

Generic maids in anime I.

Ever since then, I began to despise characters or story who have characters who are maids but just for fanservice sake. This series is one of the examples. Yoshitaka the main character let’s the girls wear these kind of outfits because he likes it.

Yeah, I know these certainly catches people attention...

...but these are not maids.

I mean, maid outfits have been abuse lately in my opinion. Any girl can just snag a maid outfit, put it on and call it cosplay as a maid. I mean, even in anime / manga sometimes characters will wear maid outfits, for fanservice sake.

But what about this one ?

…Okay I admit, sometimes I make some exceptions whenever I see my favorite character wearing a maid outfit. *shoots self.*

Generic maids in anime II

Generic maids in anime III

*Ahem* Anyway, most people don’t really realize that wearing outfit of a maid actually its a huge responsibility, because a maid is a worker who does work, not just for the sake of acting cute and blushing, stalking it’s owner ( or you anime fans prefer to call it ‘Master’ ) or clumsy falling down and showing off their panties ( real maids wear bloomers ). Of course most important not just for the sake of saying ‘Welcome home goshujinsama’ ! while wearing “cute” cat ears ( honestly, I have no idea whats the appeal of cat ears, really. )

Yeah Maria, you tell'em !

A maid job basically depends on which household she’s admitted too, but the one that everyone knows is the household maintenance, include cooking, doing laundry and ironing, food shopping and other household errands.

While surfing, I happen to stumble upon a comic strip about maids, which apparently was drawn by Kaoru Mori herself !

Yesh, I hate stalkers type and doing no work.

LOL at case 2, hard.

Double LOL at case 5.

Awww, that's a sweet ending heh.

Yeah, I would bury that maid deep in the ocean.

Seriously, who wouldn't freak out if someone suddenly comes to your door and pull this ?

Jokes aside, these are exactly the kind of maids I hate now ! I wish there were many kinds of maids manga which are fun and enjoyable like Emma.

Yup, maids are awesome.

Despite all my rant, I’ll always have a soft spot for characters who are maids, mainly because; like Shirou said; Maids are awesome.