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

Spring Break Movies: The Winners

This is Day 3 in a series. You may want to check out the previous day, or start at the beginning.

Well lookie here! I actually got this one posted when I wanted to, rather than a couple of days late. Imagine that.

There aren't a lot of movies that are on this list, but the ones that are on here are absolutely fantastic. This list is The Winners of 2013.

Spring Break Movies: The Losers

This is Day 2 of a series. You may want to check out the previous day to start at the beginning.

Let me just start out by apologizing  I really wanted to get this post up on schedule, but circumstances foiled my attempt. My computer crashed yesterday, and when it restarted it got stuck in a loop that lasted for 8 iterations and a trip into my Windows 7 partition. I was seriously afraid that I had lost my computer for good, but thankfully it recovered (just not in time to still have internet access, so I lost my chance to post last night). So, here it is now.

There were a couple of movies last year that I was excited for that ended up failing to meet expectations. One of them I had waited for it to be made for years, and the other one I had seen a trailer for that made me think "oh, this looks promising." Unfortunately, they were not what they should have been. These are The Losers of 2013.

Spring Break Movies: The Ambivalent

If you've been following this blog for over a year (or if you've just looked back into the archives), I'm sure that you've noticed that I like to celebrate Spring Break by writing and posting every night of the week, with all of my posts following a common theme. I'm sure that you'll also have noticed that it is Wednesday of Spring Break and there have been no posts so far this year. I know, I'm disappointed in me too.

Basically, circumstances haven't been super conducive for writing posts this year. I currently only have an internet connection when I'm at the office during the day, so I don't usually have the ability to do research and post in the evenings when I'm free, which has been what I've done in previous years. To further complicate matters, I actually had a really cool theme picked out for this year but discovered recently that I wouldn't be finished my research in time (although hopefully I'll have it finished a little later in the year and I'll do a series then to make up). As a result, I've been scrambling to find a new topic that I can write about in the evenings (without an internet connection) and then post the next morning. So, let me present to you my thoughts on the movies I saw in 2013.

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

Best Games of 2011: Number One

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

Batman: Arkham City

So, when I decided to write this, I had no idea that the final day of my review series would line up perfectly with the day of the BAFTA game awards. And, apparently, the fine British folks don't agree with my choices. They seem to think that Portal 2 is deserving of the Game of the Year, whereas I have clearly chosen Batman: Arkham City. Ah well. You win some, you lose some. As much as I'd like to agree with the BAFTA awards, I have my reasons.

Best Games of 2011: Number Two

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

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

Like I said yesterday, this was the hardest choice for me. Did I think that Skyrim or Skyward Sword was the better game? After much deliberation, I realized that although both games were fantastic, I had more fun playing Skyward Sword, so I gave it the higher spot. I haven't finished either of them, but I'm giving Skyward Sword the benefit of the doubt that the ending won't be terrible. (UPDATE: It wasn't.)

Best Games of 2011: Number Three

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

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

So, this was the most difficult choice. I couldn't decide if Skyrim should get third place or second place. Apparently, I decided that it deserves third. Interesting...

Skyrim was a very difficult game for me to get into. I loved its predecessor, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, when it came out in 2006. I bought it on launch day, and played it for hours. Over 110 hours, actually. I couldn't get enough of the massive, vibrant, alive world. There were so many quests, and I had to do them all! And I did. I memorized the towns, and to this day I can still name most of them and put them on a map.

Best Games of 2011: Number Four

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

Portal 2

Portal 2 was a fantastic game. Let me say that right off the bat. However, I'm only giving it fourth place. Ordinarily, that would mean that this was a fantastic year for games. Unfortunately, I only played four games this year that were worth giving a place on this list, so that's not true. It just means that there were more games this year that fit my play style.

Best Games of 2011: Honourable Mention

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

L.A. Noire

You may be wondering why L.A. Noire is only getting an honourable mention, as opposed to being the 5th best game of last year. Goodness knows that I love round numbers, so I really wanted to do a "5 best games" feature, rather than a "4 best games" piece. However, I couldn't say that it was one of the best games of the year in good conscience.