Graduation Celebration in Japan: Days 13 and 14

Day Thirteen

Although this was technically the day that we would be spending travelling back to Tokyo, our flight was booked so late (9pm) that we basically had another full day in Sapporo. Unfortunately, this day wasn't quite as well planned out as the previous one, so we mostly spend it just wandering. Really though, we could tell that we were getting to that part of the trip where we were burning out a bit, so that fit in pretty well with what we wanted to do. We spent a fair amount of time sitting in parks or in buildings, just because we were tired and couldn't think of anything better to do. One early morning highlight though was breakfast: we ate dango that we had picked up from the store the previous night. If you don't know why I'm so excited to eat dango, you've clearly never watched Clannad, but if you've seen it, then you know exactly what I'm talking about. Dango are great, by the way. Very tasty.

Graduation Celebration in Japan: Days 11 and 12

Day Eleven

We didn't do very much today, so let's spend some time talking about Japanese restaurants and why they're better than the ones in North America. The first thing that stands out is the hand towel they give you. Pretty much everywhere gives you something to clean your hands with, either an actual towel or just a wet wipe. Pretty nice when your hands are dirty from walking all day. The next cool thing is how a bunch of them put a button on your table that will call a waiter over whenever you want. This is particularly nice when ordering, because you don't feel preasured to decide what to get quickly before the staff come back. Plus, if you need something during the meal, you can just buzz them over and get it. So much easier than trying to catch their attention. But the best part of Japanese restaurants is probably the fact that they don't tip. This actually allows for several cool things, such as the fact that they often bring you the bill when they bring your food, which really expidites the process. It'd really be nice if more Western restaurants implemented these things.

Graduation Celebration in Japan: Days 9 and 10

Day Nine

I don't think that I've yet mentioned how difficult it is to find a restaurant that's open for breakfast in Japan. I mean, they definitely exist, but they're shockingly rare. There are even coffee shops with "breakfast menus" that don't open until 11am. At this point, we've started to realise that it's sometimes better to just buy stuff from a convenience store instead of going to a sit-down place, which is actually a much better option then it sounds. In Japan, not only are there convenience stores on every other street corner, but they sell so much stuff; it's a bit ridiculous. Not only do they sell pre-packaged real meals and other stuff you may expect, but they even let you pay your bills and for your flights there and stuff. Crazy. Also crazy (and wonderful) is the number of vending machines you find everywhere. This has been a bit of an aside, but I really will miss having convenience stores and vending machines in large quantities like this when I go back to the US.

Graduation Celebration in Japan: Days 5, 6, 7, and 8

Day Five

And thus begins the first new-city-every-day section of the trip. This was also the first day that we decided to activate our Japan Rail Passes. So, here's the thing. Foreigners can buy these passes that allow them unlimited travel on (basically) any rail line operated by JR, the nation-wide rail service that used to be owned by the government. The pass doesn't work on local subways owned by other companies, but for travel between cities there's no doubt that this is the best option. It was ~$260 for 7 days of unlimited travel, compared to ~$400 for the Shinkansen (bullet train) tickets alone. That's pretty solid.

Graduation Celebration in Japan: Days 3 and 4

Day Three

The reason we keep waking up so early is the sunrise is so early here. Like, 4:30am early. What is that madness? Who designed this system? I do not approve. Anyhow, this resulted in me waking up by 6:30am again, which I think will be a pretty common theme during this trip.

Our plan for the day was to go and do the touristy things in the city of Tokyo, so we naturally started out by going to the heart of the city: Tokyo station. Apparently it's a popular tourist spot, as far as getting pictures of the building, and the architecture was pretty nice I suppose. It's also where we got breakfast, at one of the only shops that was open. Apparently not many places are open around 9am there. I had curry and rice, because I could, and it was pretty great; Japanese curry seems to be sweeter and far less spicy than Indian curry (at least for breakfast).

After breakfast we headed off to Nihonbashi, the ancient mercantile center of the city. The bridge there is famous for being where the major roads met, and it has some nice statues on it now. It was also featured prominently in the movie The Wings of the Kirin, a 2011 adaption of a Keigo Higashino novel (like the J-Drama Galileo). Good movie. It's also right next to the Ningyocho district of town, where the 2010 J-Drama series Shinzanmono was set (the movie is a sequel). We wandered around the area, looking at some of the local shrines, and slowly made our way to the Imperial Palace. On the way, we stumbled across the Currency Museum and its free admission, so popped in there. Japan apparently went on and off the gold standard multiple times, with the Yen being worth less gold each time they returned. Originally 1 Yen was worth 1.5 grams of gold!

A mythological Kirin, though with wings (which is apparently unusual).

The Imperial Palace gardens were closed (as we knew beforehand), so we went off to the district that was the number one place I wanted to visit: Akihabara. If you've heard of it, you know why. If you haven't, it's basically the geek mecca of Japan. Video games, anime, electronics; they have it all, and they love to show that off. Signs and posters for that stuff are everywhere. Our first stop was, believe it or not, an owl cafe. As in, a place where you can drink drinks while letting an owl perch on you, and you pet it. I had heard of cat cafes before, but the owl cafe thing was new to me. Definitely a unique experience. Afterwards, we went for lunch to the other type of cafe Akihabara is known for: the maid cafe. Thankfully(?) it was probably the most chill maid cafe ever created; the staff were in maid outfits, but they didn't call customers "master" or wear cat ears or anything incredibly awkward like that. It was basically just a normal cafe, but with an odd staff uniform. There were no pictures allowed inside either (which is probably a good thing). I got a rice omelet, and no, they didn't write anything on it. Like I said, super chill for a maid cafe.

Look at that little guy! His name is Cookie.

After the cafes came the shopping, which was the main reason I was hyped to go, of course. And yes, I did find the one thing I was looking for (and a few things I wasn't expecting, but couldn't turn down). I could spend the whole trip just browsing the stores there though, so we left as soon as I got what I wanted lest we waste too much time. There was apparently a cathedral of the Japanese Orthodox Church nearby, so we stopped in there just to see it and get a brief sit in. There was lots of standing and walking, let me tell you.

My haul: Miki is best idol, She and Her Cat, and of course the great Yang Wen-Li.

Using the opportunity to have a little meeting, we planned out the rest of our day and headed to Odaiba, the artificial island in Tokyo Bay, to see the Rainbow Bridge and other attractions. Like the 1:1 scale Gundum they have. And the replica Statue of Liberty. While waiting for sunset for the lights on the Rainbow Bridge to turn on, we chilled in the nearby mall, where we also ate dinner, and I got to eat a Japanese style crepe, where they fold it into an ice cream cone shape and fill it with whip cream. So good.

It's a Gundam!

The rainbow bridge failed to light up after dark, so we just gave up and headed to Tokyo Tower instead. It's sort of like the Eiffel Tower, but it's red and white. And in Tokyo. The observatories offered a pretty nice view of the city, and they even had a glass floor section of the 150m level. Not super large, but big enough to make me extremely nervous. It probably wouldn't have been so bad if the lights hadn't been shining right into my eyes from below, making it hard to focus. There's an extra fee to go to the 250m observatory, which we paid. It wasn't particularly impressive, though I don't really regret going up. The view was nearly identical to the lower one though. Maybe when the sun is out on a clear day it's better, but at night there was no real reason to bother.

Tokyo Tower, from the very base. A nice effect.

By the time we got back to our lodgings, 16 hours had passed from when we had headed out that morning. Also, some 30,000 steps had been walked, covering some 20.5km. I'm not sure I've ever walked that much in my entire life in a single day, and certainly not in the past several years. By the time this trip is done, I'll have met my quota for the next decade, because the next day was a massive count too.

Day Four

We decided the night before that we would head out of the city and go hiking on Mt. Mitake this day. We woke up (early, of course), got ready, and headed out, grabbing breakfast at a cafe on the way to the station. The train ride out there was about an hour and a half, and there was another half hour of travel by bus and funicular up to the start of the trails on the mountain, so it was already lunch time by the time we arrived. We grabbed packed lunches from the 7-Eleven (a much more reasonable thing to do in Japan, trust me; I had chicken cutlet and curry). The hiking was... intense, to say the least. Not all the time, but we pretty quickly went off the easier path and down the steep path that's terrifying to walk on because the slope is steep and there is no safety support, and it's all dirt and rock (some of which is loose)... Really it's standard for mountain hiking, but it still scares me to be on. We went down and up and down and up and down and up... several hundred stories by the end of it all. But the views pretty much made it worth it all. The waterfall nestled in the rocks was particularly nice, though we found out later on (as we climbed back up again) that farther up the stream a (presumably) Shinto ceremony was going on, with nearly naked people standing underneath another waterfall that fed into the one we first were at. It looked... unpleasant. That water was cold.

Not the biggest waterfall, but very pretty (and calming) in person.

The top of the mountain also has a large shrine that we visited. It was partly under construction, but there were sections that were still regular looking. The whole thing was pretty large and impressive. When we were finished with our hiking at the end of the day, we headed back down; rather than take the funicular again, we decided to walk down the mountain to the bus, which ended up being almost as tiring as the hiking. The road was long and steep and had an impressive number of switchbacks, but we made it down eventually. We caught the train back just on time (the next one would have been in an hour), and finally got to sit again for another hour and a half. The step total for today: over 20,000 across 16km (not counting vertical distance travelled).

A very small part of the shrine. Not even the ornate part.

If this trip has shown me anything thus far, it's reminded me of what I realised when in London: I love public transit that works. Everywhere I've lived so far hasn't had any really useful public transit system, due to being too small or just not caring enough because they're in North America and everyone expects to drive themselves everywhere all the time. But the transit in Tokyo and London is so comprehensive and so easy that it's not difficult to live without a car there. There are trains that will take you an hour and a half out to a little podunk station in a tiny town, and the one way trip cost under $10! Someday, I'd love to live in a city like those two, if only for the transit.

Graduation Celebration in Japan: Days 1 and 2

Day Zero / One

I wasn't sure whether to call this days 1 and 2 or just day 1, because in some ways it felt like 2 short days, and in others it was like 1 really long day. Eventually I just settled on calling it 2 days of time, but only 1 day of trip.

A 2:30am start to any day is the height of stupidity, especially if you're accustomed to staying awake beyond then on a fairly regular basis. I would not recommend it under any circumstances if it can be avoided. Nevertheless, that's exactly what I ended up doing. Stupid 6:15am flight. Even worse is the fact that it was delayed until 7:30am, so it turned out that I didn't need to wake up that early after all! Not that they knew ahead of time, or even at the time of the flight. They delayed it once, then undelayed it, and then redelayed it! Apparently they thought they'd have to wait on a plane to get in, but then decided to use one that had been waiting there overnight, but didn't tell the crew, so saved no time in the long run. Kind of frustrating. Thankfully my layover was long enough that I was in no danger of missing fly connection, but it was still a pain.

I was flying United, so naturally that meant problems all the way. Not only was that first flight delayed, but the entertainment system for the LAX->NRT leg was broken, so half the time I couldn't watch any movies without them being rendered unwatchable by the constant freezing and skipping ahead. I did get about 2 hours of smooth video across the whole 11 hour flight, but most of that was spent rewatching parts that I had missed due to the skipping before. I realise it's kind of unreasonable to blame United for a computer error like that, and they are giving some compensation (in the form of a voucher for money off another flight), but that's just the sort of thing that I expect to happen when flying United.

Graduation Celebration in Japan: Intro

Man, it's been a long time since I've posted anything here. October, huh? And that was about something that I did the previous December. Wow. But as long as that's been, it's been even longer since I got to travel anywhere exciting. It'll be three years this June since I went to Russia, and I really haven't been anywhere since then. I mean, I've gone and graduated twice since then (most recently this past Thursday)! I'd say it's about time for another trip.

And so, we end up here: a Japan trip. Now, I've technically been to Japan before, but a) that was a long time ago (Christmas 2000), b) we really didn't go anywhere outside the airport except for our hotel, and c) goodness knows I'm a lot more interested in Japan now than I was then. So, when I heard that a group of my friends was going at around the same time as my graduation, I leapt at the chance.

The schedule is kind of frenetic in terms of traveling, since we wanted to visit a whole bunch of locations across the entire country. We're going to start out in Tokyo for a few days, before moving west and south, hitting up the big/important cities (i.e. Kyoto, Okasa, Hiroshima...). We'll go hiking on the island of Yakushima (part of the inspiration for Princess Mononoke, apparently), before booking it north all the way up to Sapporo to see the lilacs, and then return to Tokyo to head home. The whole thing will take 14 days (not as long as Kenya, but longer than England).

All that travel has kind of forced me to pack lighter than I ever have for a trip this long. I'm going to try to live out of just one carry-on sized backpack, which will definitely be an experience. Being an international flight, I've got 2 free checked bags, but I'm not going to get to use them! Kind of frustrating after paying for a bag so many times on domestic flights. Obviously, this also means that this isn't going to be a big shopping trip, but if I can at least get a copy of She and Her Cat -Everything Flows- (releasing at the same time that we arrive), I'll be content.

I leave tomorrow. Morning. Stupid early. It's gonna be great. I'm going to try to update this blog along the way whenever I can, as with previous trips, so that interested people can follow along. I honestly have no idea what the internet situation will be like though, or how much time I'll have to prepare a post, so we'll just do what we can I suppose.

And on that note: let's get this adventure started!

Christmas in Canada: Winnipeg

Oh gosh, I've put this off for way too long... I was originally going to publish this back in January, and then in March, and then I thought it would work well to publish it for Christmas in July, and then... you get the picture. But hey, I've finally buckled down and finished it off. That's right, the story of what I did at Christmas is coming some 10 months later. Enjoy!

Actually, once again for Christmas I didn't travel to any exotic locations. In fact, it's probably going to continue that way for the foreseeable future, because I don't have any trips planned at all right now, including this upcoming Christmas. I haven't had any trips since then, either. It's kind of sad, but maybe in a year or two I'll get to go somewhere. Goodness knows I love to travel!

So, instead of traveling far away, I went back home to Canada to get my yearly snow and cold fix, and while I was there I spent a couple of days in Winnipeg. I've always loved going to Winnipeg. It's probably the place I've visited the most, so the city has quite a bit of nostalgia value for me. Yes, there are plenty of reasons to complain about it (like the roads; no planning whatsoever!), but I still look at it through rose-coloured glasses. For the past several years a new museum had been under construction in Winnipeg: the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Last September (the one in 2014) the museum finally opened, and I decided that while I was in town, I was going to check it out.

Sports: Why Bother?

New post! Yay! And it's not even directly anime related! See, I can think about other things. Sometimes. This is actually the first post in quite a while that I'm writing kind of on the spur of the moment, without some sort of outline prepared in advance. The goal is to write, edit, and publish the whole thing all today, so we'll see how that goes. I'll try not to ramble too much, but as per usual, I make no promises.

As the NBC announcers have been reminding me for several weeks now, it's championship season in many sports. In tennis, the French Open is wrapping up this weekend. In horse racing, today is the Belmont Stakes, and we had our first Triple Crown in 37 years! Both the NHL and NBA playoff finals are swinging into gear. A little over a month ago, Mayweather and Pacquiao had their big fight. In soccer (football), the English Premier League just ended, the Champions League final was today (congratulations Barcelona), and the FIFA Women's World Cup started today as well (in Canada, and we won our first game!). Looking beyond championships, MLB, MLS, MLL, and NASCAR are all running too. There's a lot of others too, but way too many for me to keep track of. Heck, it almost seems like American football is the only sport out of season right now. With all these sports competing for viewers, it begs the question: who cares? Actually, let me rephrase that. Obviously there are a lot of people who care. Odds are that everyone who will read this cares. The real question is: why do we care?

Baccano! Quality/Content Review

Baccano! isn't the easiest thing to assign a genre to, so I'm going to go ahead and call it a "period action mystery." I mean, it's set in Prohibition-era New York, there are crazy fight scenes in every episode, and you have no idea what the heck is going on for the first half of the show, so it seems fitting. This is one of the shows that I've heard about for many years, but just hadn't made the time to actually get around to watching it until now. It's a critical darling, for sure, and now that I've seen it, I think I can understand why.

The show aired in 2007, and was animated by Brains Base. This was really their first major work, though nowadays they're known for Natsume's Book of Friends and Durarara!! as well (the latter of which is often compared to Baccano! since both of them are adapted from light novel series by the same author, Ryougo Narita). The Baccano! novel series has 21 books, and the first 4 are covered by the anime. Sort of. There were 13 episodes that aired on TV, and those cover the first 4 books. An additional 3 episodes were released on DVD later, which cover the events of book 14, which was released after the anime. So maybe that book adapts the anime... These three episodes are basically a coda to the rest of the series; the main plot wraps up in episode 13.

5000 Episodes Reflection: Managing Massive Character Counts

My goodness, I'm already to 5,000? It's barely been 6 months since the last one of these! In fact, I've barely published anything here since then, and almost everything that I have published was from Spring Break! I don't even know what I watched so much of to hit a thousand episodes so quickly. I guess finishing Inuyasha and Puchim@s! probably had something to do with it, but those only account for about a quarter. Ah well. I guess this just means that there has been a lot of good simulcasts lately.

So, what's changed since the last one of these? Well, I finally subscribed to both Crunchyroll and Funimation. I was originally going to go with just Crunchyroll, but then Funimation decided that The Heroic Legend of Arslan would be a 3 week delay for free users and The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan would be a 2 week delay, and I buckled. It was worth it though, since those shows are great. And now I get to watch more dubs if I so choose, which is fine by me. Side note: D-Frag! has a solid dub.

This is no longer up to date, but the current one is always available at Anime-Planet.

Are there any significant changes to my stats compared to the 4,000 episode mark? There's really only three things that I'll bother mentioning: my "watching" count has jumped from 7 to 17, my "dropped" count has... dropped, actually, from 8 to 4 (they live in the "stalled" category now), and my ratings histogram has crept even closer towards the normal distribution. In fact, the 4 star rating is now so popular that the 1.5 and 1 star ratings don't even show up on this scale. Thankfully, this also means that I haven't watched any horrible shows in the past 1,000 episodes either. I do like to think that I'm pretty good at avoiding trash. Oh, and I started reading manga, but that doesn't really factor into this discussion.

Well, now that the recap is out of the way, I should probably start into what I promised in the title: how to deal with a large cast. Now, this isn't an "I have all the answers" type of article, since I most certainly do not. Instead, I'll be giving some examples of shows with large casts that I think get it right, and some examples that get it wrong too. I'll explain why I think they're worth mentioning and what they did that's notable. If you're looking for tips on how to manage a large cast for your own project, at the very least this article should give you some examples of shows with large casts that you can learn from on your own.

Spring Break J-Dramas: Antiquarian Bookshop Biblia's Case Files

This is Day 5 in a series. You might want to start at the introduction.

Alright, let's end this week on a strong note. The first J-drama that I watched knowing that I would like it was Antiquarian Bookshop Biblia's Case Files (gosh that's a long name...). By the time that it was added to Crunchyroll's catalog, I had become pretty familiar with how J-dramas worked, and what type of show I wanted to watch. I saw the description for Antiquarian Bookshop Biblia, and I was immediately hooked. I knew that this was the one. It would probably be my favourite of all the J-dramas covered this week if it wasn't for how open the ending is, as well as the incredible strength of the Galileo movies. It still could be my favourite, if a second season is ever made.

The show has one of the oddest premises that I've ever seen. Not odd as in crazy, but odd as in unexpected. Goura Daisuki is a man who is unable to read books. He's not illiterate; he just can't read books because they make him sick when he tries. One day, when trying to sell some of his grandma's old books, he goes to an antiquarian bookshop to get them appraised. The owner, Shinokawa Shioriko, notices something strange about one of the books: it was supposedly signed by the author, but the signature is inconsistent with standard practice. As they investigate why this happened, secrets are revealed, and the mystery is eventually solved. Daisuki decides that he enjoys spending time at the shop, even if he can't read, and starts helping out there. As the series progresses, more books arrive with more mysteries to be solved.

Spring Break J-Dramas: Liar Game

This is Day 4 in a series. You might want to start at the introduction.

Well, yesterday was the best of the week, so naturally today it's time for the worst. After finishing Galileo, I really wanted to watch another mystery focused J-drama, so I picked the one from Crunchyroll's catalog that looked the most like it fit that bill: Liar Game. I did a bit of research on it, and saw that some people had made some comparisons to Death Note, so I figured "what could go wrong?" and dove in. I did say that it's the worst of the week (and it is), but it's not really a bad show. Well, it kind of is, but only because it's so very over the top cheesy, in every possible way. Writing, acting, costumes, everything. But that also makes it a lot of fun to watch.

Liar Game is about a "stupidly honest" girl, Kanzaki Nao, who gets sucked into a "game" run by bored wealthy people that ends up destroying the lives of most of the participants, who are forced to play against their will (similar to CH:OS:EN, but without the murder). The game that is played is different each round (officiated by a masked man on a television screen, like in Saw), but they are all based around the idea of making money. Every player starts out with a certain amount of money (usually ~$1 million) which they are required to repay at the end of the game. Any money they win from other players that puts them over their initial amount can be kept at the end, so every game is designed to have some players deep in debt by the end, which is where the danger lies.

Spring Break J-Dramas: Galileo

This is Day 3 in a series. You might want to start at the introduction.

Alright, this is the big one. Objectively, this show is probably the best of the five I'll be covering, but it also happens to be my favourite. GTO was just winding down its second season, so I started looking around for a new J-drama to watch, just in time to see Galileo Season 1 get added to Crunchyroll. I didn't really know much about it aside from Crunchyroll's paragraph description, but it seemed interesting enough. There aren't really any anime that are police procedurals (like CSI or NCIS), so I was intrigued to see Japan's take on the genre.

Galileo is a police procedural that shares similarities with American shows like Monk and Bones. The series is named after Yukawa Manabu; or at least his university nickname. He is now a genius physics professor, who has been roped into helping his old university friend, now a police detective, solve exceptionally difficult cases where the impossible appears to have occurred (such as teleportation). Utsumi Kaoru is a brand new detective assigned to take the place of Yukawa's friend, and they begin working cases together. It's a fairly conventional setup for a show of this genre; the show's strength comes from its consistency.

Spring Break J-Dramas: GTO: Great Teacher Onizuka

This is Day 2 in a series. You might want to start at the introduction.

After watching Mischievous Kiss, I didn't end up watching any more J-dramas for several months. I was busy with school, and just trying to keep up with the various anime series that I was watching simulcasted. But then summertime rolled around, and I came up with the brilliant idea to marathon all of Bleach. It's not very good for very long stretches at a time (*cough* Bount arc *cough*), and I decided one day that I needed a change of pace. Crunchyroll had just started airing the second season of GTO: Great Teacher Onizuka, so it caught my eye, and I started watching from the beginning. And thank goodness I did; it's way better than Bleach (though I did finish that too).

What happens when you take a former thug, and make him the head teacher of a class of troubled high school students? Good things, apparently. That's the basic premise of GTO. Eikichi Onizuka was in a biker gang during his younger days, and is kind of a scary guy. Then one day circumstances conspire such that he ends up hired by the director of a school to teach the worst class of students they have. Wacky shenanigans and heartwarming life lessons follow soon after.

Spring Break J-Dramas: Mischievous Kiss: Love in Tokyo

This is Day 1 in a series. You might want to start at the introduction.

You may not be aware, but it turns out that I watch quite a bit of anime. And if you want to watch legal streaming anime, you're going to end up at Crunchyroll eventually, as I did. I'm not fully sure what the exact circumstances were, but one day in Fall 2013 I was probably really bored, and decided that I'd click on the "Drama" tab on Crunchyroll. That happened to be when Mischievous Kiss: Love in Tokyo was airing, and Crunchyroll had somehow managed to get the simulcast rights for it, so they were promoting it fairly heavily. I thought "Eh, why not?" and checked it out, thus sealing my fate.

I have to say, Mischievous Kiss is a pretty great J-drama to start with. It can be really cheesy at times, in the best possible way, which is something that I've found is often the case with these dramas. There's a lot of overacting and hamming it up, and the costume design is glorious (though not the most insane of the J-dramas I'll be covering). It's fairly typical for a J-drama comedy, so if you watch it and end up enjoying it, you'll definitely like what else is out there. To clarify my previous statement, a J-drama does not mean that a show is necessarily dramatic; it just means that it is live action.

Spring Break 2015: J-Dramas

Well hello there! It's been a while, hasn't it? To be perfectly honest, I've been working on a post for quite a while, but just haven't been able to get my motivation up enough to finish it, so it's just kind of sitting there. But don't worry! It's Spring Break, so you know what that means: 5 posts over the next 5 days! I think that I shouldn't have any problems with posting this year, so I should get the full 5 out, hopefully on time. No promises, but that's the goal.

In previous years, I've covered video games, anime, and movies. So what's the topic this year? Television, in the form of J-Dramas! Yay! As a side note, this isn't actually the topic that I failed to cover last year and said I'd cover this year (or sooner). I still haven't finished the "research" for that one, and the earliest I'll be able to do so now seems to be this Fall, so don't expect it anytime soon. I also keep changing my plans for it, which hasn't helped it get done. Back to this year, for anyone who isn't familiar with what a J-drama is, it stands for "Japanese Drama," and refers to live action television shows produced in Japan. You may have heard of K-dramas, which are the equivalent for shows made in South Korea. I've seen a few of those too, but not as many, and I figured that I would focus on J-dramas this time around. It's actually kind of odd that I've seen more J-dramas, since there are so many more K-dramas available. South Korea has been very good about exporting their dramas to North America, but Japan has only started making it possible in recent years, and mostly through Crunchyroll, which is where I first bumped into them. Anime has had a very large presence for a while now, but dramas are just starting to really come onto the scene.

I guess if I had to explain what I enjoy about J-dramas, one of my major points would be the same as why I like anime: most shows (at least, most available here) don't run forever. Unlike American shows like CSI or Supernatural, all of the J-dramas that I've seen or heard about are tightly plotted shows that run for a season or two (sometimes nearly a decade apart) before ultimately resolving. On American tv, the goal for almost every show is to keep on the air for as long as possible, and just continue to pump out episodes each season until the show is finally canceled. All the J-dramas that I've seen take a different approach, where they try to tell a story (usually adapted from something), and once the story is over, the show is too. If you know me, you know that I love the plot being the focus, so these are right up my alley.

I'll be focusing on one J-drama each day this week. The order that I cover them will be more or less the order that I watched them in, not that it matters. I won't actually be covering the very first J-drama that I watched, which was the live action Death Note movies. I did really like them (I even think they had a better ending than the anime), but I decided not to cover them because they're movies and I wanted to cover tv shows, and also because it's been a while since I watched them, so my memory is kind of hazy anyways. I hope you enjoy this topic and maybe even find a show that you want to watch.

Full Series

Intro: J-Dramas

Day 1: Mischievous Kiss: Love in Tokyo

Day 2: GTO: Great Teacher Onizuka

Day 3: Galileo

Day 4: Liar Game

Day 5: Antiquarian Bookshop Biblia's Case Files

Quality/Content Reviews Explanation

So, I've started actually purchasing anime now, not just streaming it on Crunchyroll or Hulu. It's exciting, I know. Now that I've started amassing a collection of titles (I say that, but I only have like, 5 shows), I thought "why not start writing up actual reviews of shows?" You know, the kind where you actually give a show some kind of number at the end. I've been wanting to do that for a while now, and this seems like a pretty good excuse to start.

Thus, I'm going to start writing reviews, with a couple of caveats. Firstly, I think I'm mostly going to stick to reviewing shows that I've purchased and actually own. That is to say, I'm going to try to avoid reviewing streaming-only shows. I'm sure there will be cases where I want to review a show but don't feel that it's worthy of my money, and in that case I'll review the online version, but only if it's available legally. This is going to have a few effects on my reviews, the most noticeable of which will be that I will try to review both the subtitled version and the English dubbed version (if it exists, it usually isn't available for free online). The vast majority of the anime that I've watched has been subtitled, but recently I've realised that if a dub is good, I actually like it more, so I want to make it a point to try every dub that I buy.

Because I'm so careful with my money, I'll usually only purchase shows that I've watched before and really, really liked. Usually when I buy shows, it's more to show my support than anything else (although the ability to share it with other people is nice too). Of course, this means that the usual score at the end of a review will tend to be unnaturally high. I dislike it when people give five stars to every show that they remotely enjoyed, and when I rate things I'll try to be fair and not ignore their flaws, no matter how much I enjoyed it. So just remember, if you see lots of fantastic scores, I'm mostly reviewing the shows that I already knew were good; everything I buy has been pre-screened.

Another, less exciting thing that mostly reviewing shows that I own will do for me is it will give me an excuse to release reviews at a pretty slow pace. Like I said, I only just started buying anime, so my collection is pretty small right now. You can check out a (probably) up to date list of everything that I own, sorted by purchase date here, if you're interested. It should give you some hints as to what reviews might be coming next. I don't purchase things very often, so don't expect too many reviews to come out, and don't expect anything even remotely close to a weekly or monthly schedule: reviews will come out when I write them, as I feel like it.

As for the actual content of the reviews, there are a lot of anime reviews and reviewers out there; Arkada from Glass Reflection is my personal favourite, as are the rest of the folks from Podtaku. In any case, I don't want to be just another anime reviewer because I don't think that we really need another person on the internet who assigns numbers to certain TV shows. Instead, I want to try and fill in a hole that I see and provide a slightly different type of review: a quality/content review. There are a lot of people who focus on the technical merits of a show (quality), but not really any that factor in what the show actually portrays (content) as well. Whether or not you agree with their belief system and biases, if you want to know what you're getting into when you go see a movie, I highly recommend that you check out Plugged In. That's the kind of review I want to provide: letting the discerning viewer know what they're getting themselves into. I'll try to make note of things that could offend any type of viewer, regardless of whether I am personally offended or not. Obviously, I'm prone to missing things that don't offend me, so if you happen to see that I missed something, just let me know in the comments and I'll try to fix it.

Doing a quality/content review for an entire TV series is significantly more difficult than for just a two hour movie, so we'll see how it goes, but I plan on doing my best to record all of the areas that anyone might be interested in. It's also important to note that content scores will be based off of the MPAA rating of the show. If the show is rated R (or TV-MA), I'll be a lot more lenient about what it can get away with than a PG-13 show (or TV-14), since its target audience is expected to be more mature. Of course, quality/content reviews have a section to look at the technical aspects of the show as well. I may change the format up a bit as I go forward and make more reviews, but for now here's an outline for what one of my reviews should look like:

I. Introduction
    A. Genre
    B. Year and Studio
    C. Source
II. Story - 5pts
    A. World Background
    B. Plot
III. Characters - 5pts
    A. Personality
    B. Story Role
IV. Visuals - 5pts
    A. Static Images
        1. Character Designs
        2. Backgrounds
    B. Animation
V. Sound - 5pts
    A. Music
    B. Sound effects
    C. Script
        1. Sub
        2. Dub
VI. Content - 5pts
    A. Violence
    B. Sexual Content
    C. Drug Usage
    D. Coarse Language
    E. Other
VII. Conclusion - 100pts ([Story+Characters+Visuals+Sound]*Content)
    A. Wrap-up
    B. Recommendation Level
    C. Where to Buy / Watch

Like I said, I'm still playing around with the format, so it may change up a bit in the reviews to come, depending on how they go. If it does, I'll make sure to update this post. I'm hoping that adding a bit of structure to these posts will help them to feel more focused and be stronger overall than my others that I tend to write in a stream of consciousness style (like this post, actually). I don't even have notes beforehand sometimes; I just kind of wing it. In any case, we'll see how adding structure affects things. I may adapt this format for reviewing non-anime properties as well. It shouldn't be too much of a change.

You'll notice that the final score is calculated by adding all the quality components together and then multiplying them by the content score. I really like the effect this has on the final scores, and it basically reflects my opinions of how media should be viewed. If a show is a technical marvel, but is filled to the brim with content that people may take issue with, I can't recommend the show to everyone, so it can't be given a perfect score. On the flip side, if there's nothing in a show that no one can really object to but the show is a mess, it definitely shouldn't get a good score either. The multiplication allows both quality and content to appropriately scale each other.

At the very end of the review, I'll give each show a recommendation level. This will be based mostly on the final score, but it's also kind of subjective. The highest level is Universal Recommendation, followed by Reserved Recommendation, both of which are quite positive. Lower down is Cautious Recommendation, and the lowest level is No Recommendation. I'll also do a quick pros/cons breakdown, effectively summarizing the review in a few bullet points, and give a 5 star rating for the sub and dub where applicable. If the dub's rating is greater than or equal to the sub's rating, take that as a recommendation to watch the dub instead.

So, I hope you enjoy these reviews, however often I actually post them. This is just something that I'm doing for fun, so don't expect too much. Nevertheless, I'll do what I can to provide quality reviews for you and yours. Thanks for reading.

4000 Episodes Reflection: The Key of Type-Moon

So, a couple of days ago my father sent me a link to a blog post about how modern dictionaries fail to live up to their full potential by one James Somers. It was a great read, so naturally I wanted to know if he was constantly that good, or if it was more of a one-off thing. Turns out, he's pretty consistent. One post in particular that stood out to me was about how people should write more, even if they never plan on showing it to anyone else. The next day, I happened to watch Julie and Julia, which is a movie about someone who decides to start a blog because she wants to be a writer. I think it's high time I updated this blog, don't you?

Actually, as a brief aside before I start explaining what a "Key of Type-Moon" is, let me just say that Jason Somers is, for lack of a better expression, everything I want to be when I grow up. He's a talented programmer (mostly web development, but I'll forgive him; somebody's got to do it), he has an excellent grasp of the English language, he writes articles for The Atlantic and TIME, and he just one day decided that he was going to learn how to fly an airplane... so he did. That's pretty much the coolest thing ever. Learning to fly has been a dream of mine for a long time, although I've never actually pursued it. I hope that one day I'll be as cool as he is. Or, better yet, as cool as I think he is.

Alright, back on topic. You know, I spend so much time watching anime, I could have sworn that more of my posts were about it. Apparently not; I haven't posted any anime related articles since January, when I hit the 3000 episodes watched mark. I just hit the 4000 watched mark, so I guess it's time to revisit the topic. On that note, 1000 episodes in 3/4 of a year? Goodness that's a lot...

I'm actually taking a screenshot this time, so I can look back at my stats later.

In Japan, there's a genre of video games called visual novels. The best way to describe them is kind of like choose-your-own-adventure books, but with pictures and sound. Visual novels aren't very big in North America, although that's starting to change. The two best known visual novel developers are probably Key and Type-Moon. Key tends to write romances with a hint of the supernatural that will end up crushing your soul (Kanon, Air, Clannad), while Type-Moon tends to write verbose action-adventures that wax philosophical (Kara no Kyoukai, Fate/Stay Night, Fate/Zero). Now, these two descriptions may not sound very similar, but that's mostly because they aren't similar; Key and Type-Moon stories are actually very different from each other. But even though their stories are almost nothing alike, there is one striking similarity between Key and Type-Moon properties: the anime adaptions.

First Person Indie Wanderfests

You know, I don't seem to post very often. This particular one I've actually been meaning to do for quite a while; I started back in mid-June. I even finished writing it a week ago, but I just have had trouble making the time to post it. I actually have some 15 posts in various stages of completion right now, but I just cant seem to get around to finishing any of them up. Ah well. If you're reading this, that means that this one actually got posted, so I suppose that's a win for me.

So there was a Steam sale recently, and I decided to take that opportunity to pick up a couple of games that I had been meaning to for a while: Gone Home and The Stanley Parable. Well, I actually picked up Gone Home during a Humble Store sale, but let's not worry about the details...

As you may be aware, I absolutely love story-driven games (see Alan Wake), and one of the places that you can find an abundance of stories is in the indie game sphere (see To the Moon). A while ago, I heard rumblings in the video games community about this game called Dear Esther, and decided that it was the exact sort of game that was right up my alley. I picked it up, gave it a playthrough, and enjoyed it for what it was. A little while later, I heard about a Source mod called The Stanley Parable, which seemed like it fit into the same general category, so I downloaded that and ended up enjoying it immensely.

Now, a year or so after finishing those games, I've been hearing about Gone Home, another similar game (which I've now played). I've decided to label this style of game as a First Person Indie Wanderfest, because this is basically what the whole game is like: it's from a first person perspective, and as you walk around the carefully crafted environments, a narrator talks based on where you are and what you're looking at. That's... really all there is to it. I figured that this would be a good time to give my thoughts of these games, going through them in the order that I played them.