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.

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.

3000 Episodes Reflection: From the New World

Wow. 3000 episodes of anime. That's quite a bit of time that I've spent on my hobby in the 3.5 years since I started; if I were to watch that continuously, it would take more than 1 month, 2 weeks, and 6 days (or so says my tracker website). Now, those numbers are kind of misleading, I'll admit. Most likely I didn't really just hit the 3000 episode mark. There are some series on there that I kind of guessed how many episodes I had seen (i.e. Pokemon), but the point is it's really close, and I've spent a lot of time getting there.

Actually, interestingly enough, the 3000th episode (and 200th watched or dropped show) that I watched was the Mushi-shi special episode that just came out. You have no idea how excited I am for the second season that's starting in April. As a result, I felt like having a bit of a celebration and taking a look back at a series that I just recently finished: From the New World.

Now, this won't be a review of the series necessarily. The point of this is not to go into detail about what the show did right and what it did wrong, but rather to look at some of the points that it tried to raise and some of the messages that I think it tried to give to the viewers. This was a show that made me think about the actions of individuals and the nature of humanity itself, so that's where I'll be focusing. As a result, this post will contain some amount of SPOILERS for the show, though I'll try to keep them as minor as possible.

Space Debris: A Look at Gravity and Planetes

Alright, let me just get this out of the way, first off: Gravity is really, really good, and you should all go watch it. Right now, if possible. I don't usually recommend this, but if you can watch it in IMAX 3D, do it. The 3D is totally worth it, and I really wish that I could have seen it in IMAX. The screen at the theater where I watched it wasn't nearly large enough. Trust me, it will help with immersion, not distract you from the movie. As a side note, the final shot in the movie is one of my favourite shots of all time. Just the cinematography behind it, it's so packed with meaning and purpose... the way the camera is placed, the direction that it's facing; it was clearly well thought out, and I truly appreciated it.

Moving on, let's talk about the plot of Gravity (without any spoilers or anything). The entire time that I was watching the movie, I couldn't help but be reminded of an anime that I watched freshman year: Planetes. Also 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I haven't actually watched that movie so I feel like I shouldn't make that comparison. Nevertheless, it's a movie that uses its space setting to explore the human condition, so I feel like that counts for something.

World of Girls und Panzer

So this isn't exactly breaking news any more, but it's still recent. Wargaming.net, the company behind the free-to-play pc game World of Tanks just announced that it will be launching in Japan this fall on September 5th. In order to help make the launch successful, they will be doing a collaboration with the recent anime Girls und Panzer. The details of the collaboration have not yet been announced.

Let me start off by saying... You have no idea how excited I am! I watched the Girls und Panzer anime back in the spring, and it was amazing! Actually, that show is the reason that I started to play World of Tanks. I was watching one of my friends play the game, and it looked like a lot of fun. Then he said "It's basically Girls und Panzer the game," and I knew I had to try it. I just have my four year old laptop, so I tend not to play pc games because it usually starts crying when I try to run them (i.e. over half of the time I played Batman: Arkham Asylum it was running at about 5 frames per second). But this game looked worth the risk, and it was free, so I figured, why not?

Simulcast vs. Bingeing: One Year Later

I just realized that it was one year ago that I started experimenting with watching anime simulcasts, so I figured that this was a pretty good time to look back and reflect on the different ways of watching. At this point, I've watched a fair amount of anime, so I think I should be able to get a fair handle on the issue.

Fundamentally, there are two ways that you can watch new shows: you can either watch new episodes week-to-week as they come out, called watching a simulcast; or you can wait for the show to end and watch it all in a couple of days (or even in one sitting), called bingeing. Well, I suppose that you could wait for a show to finish and then watch it very slowly, but where's the fun in that?

My First Con: RWBY at RTX

Well, now that RWBY has been premiered, I think that it's about time for me to write up my time at RTX. By which I mean that I should have done this sooner, but I'm only getting around to it now so that I don't fall too far behind current. For those of you who don't know, RTX stands for "Rooster Teeth Expo." Not that it's any clearer what that means if you haven't heard of Rooster Teeth...

Rooster Teeth is an production company that makes TV series for the internet. Their most famous series (and the one that started them off) is Red vs. Blue, a machinima (which means that it is filmed in a video game, specifically Halo). Red vs. Blue has actually just started its 11th season, which is pretty impressive for something made on the internet. Other series of theirs include P.A.N.I.C.S., Immersion, and now RWBY. Rooster Teeth is also the parent company of Achievement Hunter, one of the most popular video game community websites on the internet.

For the past three years, Rooster Teeth has held the RTX convention in their hometown of Austin, TX. Three years isn't very long for a convention to have been around, but this past year, there were over 10,000 people that attended. It's pretty nuts. They had major game publishers there, as well as famous voice actors and lots of panels from industry professionals. This year they also premiered the first two episodes of RWBY.

Spring Break Anime: Science Fiction

This is Day 5 in a series. You might want to checkout the previous day, or start at the introduction.

Alright, so after finishing this show, I decided that it really required a full essay to be written about it. It was so complex and deep, and such layered story that can only be described as an epic, that it needed to be given special treatment. It is absolutely steeped in themes and meaning, so I figured that I'd try and write a thematic analysis essay, something that I haven't done since Grade 11 English class, for the book Who Has Seen the Wind?, so we'll see how this went. I've been writing it on and off for several months, with the finishing touches written in the van on the way up here, so it may seem a little disjointed at times. Please bear with me on this. Without further ado, I give you my MLA formatted essay!

Spring Break Anime: Existential

This is Day 4 in a series. You might want to checkout the previous day, or start at the introduction.

*MAJOR SPOILERS*

What does it mean to be human? I love it when shows ask that question, especially in connection with technology. It probably has something to do with the whole being-a-computer-science-major thing. It's a question asked by many different TV shows and movies. The Matrix looks at what reality is, while Ghost in the Shell examines what separates man from machine. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is one of my top anime because it is so thoughtful. It raises real philosophical questions about life and tries to engage its viewer to consider them. The other day, I was feeling like watching a philosophical show like that, and I stumbled onto Serial Experiments Lain. It's an older show, but it had some pretty good recommendations, so I figured that I'd check it out.

Spring Break Anime: Action

This is Day 3 in a series. You might want to checkout the previous day, or start at the introduction.

*MILD SPOILERS*

Alright, this is one that I didn't really want to review, but I feel so strongly about it that I have no choice. The most popular show of the past year was probably Sword Art Online, with everyone and their uncle talking about it. It was a very polarizing show as well. If you go to the Anime News Network website, you can see that it is #16 in the "Most Diverging Opinions" category, even with more than twice the number of votes for its score than anything else in the top 50, and well over 10 times the votes of almost all of the rest of the top 50. There's a really simple explanation for why opinions are so spread out: the show started out amazing, and ended horribly, on several different levels.

Spring Break Anime: Folklore Anthology

This is Day 2 in a series. You might want to checkout the previous day, or start at the introduction.

*MILD SPOILERS*

If you've ever talked with me about TV shows, you'd know that I really don't watch procedural shows; I tend to spend all of my time watching serial shows. If you don't know the difference, procedural shows are shows like CSI or Seinfeld where nothing really changes from week to week. Something may change over the course of a season or two, but the viewer can usually skip an episode or twelve without missing anything at all. Sitcoms and crime dramas tend to be procedural, so I tend not to watch them. Serial shows, on the other hand, are shows where there is an overarching storyline that persists from week to week with new developments each episode. Examples of these would be Lost or Heroes.

It's probably because I put too much of an emphasis on story in media, but I can't stay interested in a procedural show. If there is nothing that reoccurs each week, I can't be bothered to tune in again. Which is why it's strange that I love Mushi-shi so much. Mushi-shi is an anthology, which is a step even further abstracted from procedural shows. Not only do the episodes not have any connection besides the same main character, but they are so unrelated they could be shown in any order and still make the same amount of sense. There is no over-story, no mystery to solve. It's simply the adventures of a man from week to week. It's not entirely fair to say that the show has no main story, but the story is only brought up twice. It's the mystery of where the main character came from, so nothing earth shaking, but it is fascinating.

Spring Break Anime: Slice of Life

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

*MILD SPOILERS*

Let me start off by explaining what the Slice of Life genre is for those of you who are unfamiliar with it. Basically, it is when a show takes a cross-section of a character's life, and that is its entire purpose. There is no quest to save the world; no ultimate battle between good and evil; no grand mystery to solve. Some of those elements may be present in some form or another, but they are not the focus of the show. The Slice of Life genre exists simply to let us see the ordinary life of its characters.

Most shows in this genre end up being teen romances set in high school (Clannad, Toradora, etc.), but there are almost as many that aren't romances at all (K-On!, Tari Tari, etc.). Because of the audience they are targeting, they do tend to be almost exclusively set in high school though. The two shows covered below aren't your typical Slice of Life shows though. They're very different from each other, but they're both examples of one of the things that I like the most about anime: whoever made them had guts.

Spring Break 2013: Anime

Last Spring Break, I decided to do some writing and give my personal top 10 list of video games from the year before. This year, I can't really do that, because I haven't played all that many new games. If you really want to know, I would probably choose The Walking Dead, Journey, Spec Ops: The Line, and a couple of others as my best games from last year, but I haven't even played Journey or Spec Ops yet, so who knows. (Actually, now I have played some of them, and I've written up an analysis of both The Walking Dead and Spec Ops: The Line.)

No, this year I figured that I'd tackle a different form of geeky media: anime. I watch a fair amount of anime in my spare time, and I've covered several shows in the past year. Actually, that's one of the reasons I love the anime genre so much: the shows are usually short. They're planned to run for only a season (13 episodes) or two, and then they wrap up nicely. An entire story, planned from start to end, can be started and finished within a week! Of course, there are some like Naruto or One Piece that never end, but that's a whole different animal.

So, over the course of this week, I will be posting my thoughts on different anime that I have watched this year. I'm also going to try and talk about the less watched, more interesting shows that I've seen, so not Gintama or Steins;Gate or the like. These won't all be shows that I would recommend or would watch again, but they all are interesting, I can guarantee that.

Right, so, starting tomorrow, one post per day for five days. I did it last year, so I can do it again, right?

p.s. Watch Steins;Gate. Please.

Full Series

Intro: Anime

Day 1: Slice of Life

Day 2: Folklore Anthology

Day 3: Action

Day 4: Existential

Day 5: Science Fiction