Author Archive for Jamie Spong

Price Per Episode — The Great Devaluing of Anime

Posted on June 24, 2010 by Jamie Spong in the field of Anime.

I am angry again.

The second series of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is being released in the United States. This is a good thing. The licensees, Bandai Entertainment USA, are giving it the same care and attention that the first series received, including a proper, full-cast English translation. This is a great thing.

And the whole 14-episode series can be had for under £40.1

This is a brilliant thing.

There are some people, however, who have chosen to throw a wobbly over this last point.

If you’ve seen the series, you’ll be familiar with the Endless Eight storyline. The characters are trapped in a time loop for eight episodes. Instead of running the same episode eight times, the producers handed the same source material to eight different teams, who each produced a similar yet slightly different episode. These were broadcast over a period of two months. Viewers complained that it was a waste of schedule. Now, people are complaining that it’s a waste of money.

I used to measure the value of anime videos in terms of “price-per-episode”: the price of the video divided by the number of standard 25-minute episodes included. Overall, this isn’t a fair measurement system — it doesn’t take into account bonus features, quality of translation or distribution medium — but for the purpose of this blog post, it’s as good an indicator as any.

So. £40 for 14 episodes. That’s about £2.85 per episode. “But Endless Eight was just the same episode over and over again,” you cry. No it wasn’t, I reply, but let’s go with it anyway. The Endless Eight are now one. £40 divided by seven episodes. £5.70 an episode. That’s not too bad, I reckon.

But it is here that we discover the problem. Apparently, £5.70 per episode is too bad.

All of a sudden, anime is just too expensive. People are up in arms about the recommended retail price of Haruhi series 2 — how DARE they charge this amount of money for this amount of content! — despite the price of anime in the UK and the USA now being cheaper than ever. It was just a few years ago, in fact, that I bought my first four-episode volume of My-HiME for £20. If people are complaining about spending more than a quid or two on a single episode, English-speaking anime fandom has surely lost its way; for years, £5 per episode was considered a fair asking price for a professionally-produced anime translation. (I’m sure that older fans will tell me how it was “even worse” in their day.)

But even that’s not enough.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I bought copies of the Magipoka boxsets. As it doesn’t have a proper English release, I had to import them from Japan.

4 episodes to a set, plus one DVD-exclusive bonus short episode each.

All together, I got about 13-or-14 episodes’ worth of content. All together, it cost me £242.70.

£242.70. That’s £18 per episode.

Let’s look at a more contemporary example. The first volume of the popular new anime series Angel Beats! just went on sale in Japan. It’s done incredibly well; even in its first day on sale, over fifteen thousand copies were sold.

The first volume contains 2 episodes and costs ¥5250. Assuming that you don’t want to splash out on limited-edition bundles or Blu-ray discs, you’re looking at £20 per episode. No translations. No bonus features beyond an equally untranslated commentary track. No frills.

Angel Beats! isn’t even that expensive. K-ON! is dearer. Haruhi Series 2 is dearer still. Don’t believe me? See for yourself.

You see, in Japan, when you buy an anime DVD for the domestic market, you’re not just paying for the right to watch a couple of episodes on your television. You’re funding the series. Next to sponsorship deals, domestic DVD sales are the main source of income for anime producers.

Some English anime consumers complain that the prices of anime DVDs should be brought in line with the average costs of locally-produced television series sets before they’d consider buying them. This point of view doesn’t take into account the fact that British and American television shows tend to be commissioned by a broadcasting corporation or suchlike, while anime producers have to pay the Japanese TV stations to get their shows on the air. It’s only through merchandise and DVD sales that the average anime series can break even, let alone make a profit.

Needless to say, with English-language anime DVD prices as cheap as they are, the anime producers themselves don’t see overseas earnings as being particularly significant. Don’t get me wrong — every officially-licenced English-langage DVD purchase results in royalties going back to the original producers — but your purchase also subsidises license costs, translation costs, marketing costs and so forth on the English-speaking side. Imagine how the revenue shares for each purchase are split. Imagine how little each party must receive.

Sadly, this undervaluing of anime is happening among the licensees themselves. Companies like FUNimation release slim boxsets for peanuts and dump anime series on their website for viewing at no charge to the consumer. While you may think that a copy of Kanon for £13.03 (54p per episode!) is a good thing, consumer demand for cheap-as-free anime will soon cause the major companies to stop making profits, declare bankruptcy and cause the Great Cheap Anime Bubble to implode spectacularly. That’s my theory, anyway.

Let’s step back and take this all into account. A 14-episode series can set you back up to £300 if you live in Japan. In North America, however, you get the same content for only £40; maybe even less. Even in the glory days of £5 an episode, you were paying 25% of the original asking price. Now the English price-per-episode is less than 15% — or, in the case of the 54p-per-episode Kanon, less than 4%2 — of what a Japanese fan would pay. And that’s not even taking into account all of the lovely extra features, like, for example, a full English translation, that you don’t get in the Japanese release.

So, Haruhi fans, what’s it going to be? £320 for the regular edition of series two? £382 for the limited edition of series two? Or £40 for a special, English-language 14-episode collection with bonus features, lovingly put together by people who love the series just as much as you do?

If you’re still not convinced, I can’t force you. If you don’t think that it’s worth the asking price, don’t watch it. If you’ve got better things to spend your money on, spend your money on them instead. You don’t have to watch anime, you know. ㋼

Prices for Japanese DVDs were taken from CDJapan. XE and Wolfram|Alpha were used for currency conversion and calculation.

  1. At time of writing, the complete series set can be pre-ordered from RightStuf for $58.74 (postage inclusive), which comes to about £39.24. [↩]
  2. Eight Japanese DVD volumes at ¥6300 each ≈ £375. Incidentally, the Blu-ray disc edition is ¥62580, or £466.83. [↩]
  • Share/Bookmark
This post has 3 Comments at this time. Care to add something?

MangaGamer Revisited — Oral Stage

Posted on April 21, 2010 by Jamie Spong in the field of Visual Novels.

I’ve had it. I can’t take anymore.

MangaGamer, as you may know, sprung onto the scene about a year and a half ago, offering a variety of poorly-translated hentai-style novel games. You may remember that I was less than impressed at the time, but I had hope that, with time and the support of fans like me, they would improve.

They got worse.

I should point out that I have continued to support MangaGamer with my money. After Da Capo (which I played the grand total of one-and-a-half playthroughs of), I purchased Kira☆Kira (which held my interest for several sessions of several hours before I started playing something else) and Shuffle! (I only got as far as this screen before closing it in disgust). If you’ve had a conversation with me in the past few months, you can probably tell where I’m going with this post.

One of MangaGamer’s translators updated their staff blog a month or two ago, responding to concerns about their translation quality. In their words:

…we are taking much more time in editing and proofreading than we did before. Because our resources are limited right now, we are putting more emphasis where it’s needed, but changes are steadily being made.

This is all well and good, you may think. They’re clearly making an effort. Why get so upset over the odd spelling mistake here or there? While the presence of spelling mistakes in media in this day and age of digital spell checkers warrants a blog post of its own, this isn’t why I hate MangaGamer’s translations.

In order to better explain this, let’s look at a counter-example; another visual novel lucky enough to be translated into English. Ever17: [The] Out of Infinity, now sadly out of print, is a seminal title that any fan of the medium should try.

Sora is the one on the right.

Unfortunately, the English release suffers immensely from lack of quality control. Words are misspelled, dashes and other characters are replaced with question marks, some of the sentences have awkward phrasing, the English interface is inconsistent. There are parts of the script that one can tell were the victims of an overzealous find-and-replace job — it’s annoyingly obvious that the Kid was going to be called the Youth at some point in the translation process.

And yet the translation of Ever17 is far superior to any MangaGamer title.

Take another look at that screenshot. The player character, Takeshi Kuranari, is referred to by Sora as Takeshi. Not Kuranari-san. Not even just Kuranari. Takeshi. Because this is how we greet people in English. We use first names. The people translating this understood this fact. They understood that calling someone Lastname-san in this context is equivalent to calling someone by their first name in English. It’s familiarity. It’s simple. When he is called Mr. Kuranari in the script, it’s in the context that an English-speaker would refer to someone in that way. It’s natural. It never feels awkward.

MangaGamer doesn’t follow this school of thought. Instead, it leaves all of the Japanese honourifics intact. Characters are called by their last names with the suffix of -san, -kun, -chan or -whatever. Playful nicknames are left alone without explanation of why they’re playful. Characters with meaningful names are robbed of their meaning. But it’s not all doom and gloom; if ever you see a term that you don’t recognise, all that you need to do is shatter the verisimilitude and alt+tab over to the handy dandy translation notes, free with selected purchases!

It’s not just names. Occasionally, you’ll see words like, ooh, say, ‘mangaka’ (comics artist) inexplicably left to float without a life jacket in a sea of mostly English words. It’s bad enough that there are few translators out there who have the integrity to translate character names. In the context of MangaGamer, the Shuffle! translation notes have some really silly examples. ‘Sempai’. ‘Sensei’. ‘Nekomimi’. Sure, one could argue that the average Shuffle! player would already be familiar with these terms, but what’s really ridiculous about this is that some of these ‘translation notes’ just list the English word next to them. Example: “Otoh-sama: Father; Otoh-san: Dad”. See, what you’ve done there is explain that there are perfectly good English equivalents for the Japanese terms! Why didn’t you just use them? Your current method is pointless!

The defenders of this practice (yes, there are people out there who deem this to be acceptable) say that removing the honourifics also removes the mood/feel/emotion of the work, and that their inclusion helps the end user better understand the character’s relationships/motives/social standings. But it doesn’t. It really doesn’t. Here’s why.

To properly understand the significance of honourifics in the Japanese language, you have to be a Japanese person. You have to have been immersed in the language from a young age. You need experience. You need fluency. A sheet of translation notes isn’t going to help you truly understand the meaning behind these terms; you need to speak the language, meet the people, know the culture. Even if you’re a student of the Japanese language (or have watched enough subtitled anime episodes to convince yourself that you are), Japanese honourifics in an English work or an English translation are out of place. They have no context. Japanese is a highly context-sensitive language. By removing the context, you’re removing the point — the significance — of the honourifics. A visual novel isn’t a lesson in Japanese, nor (in the case of MangaGamer’s titles) should it be. Translations exist so that one doesn’t have to learn a foreign language to appreciate a work of art. Yes, there is no one correct way to translate. This, however, is an incorrect way.

Using Japanese honourifics in English translations doesn’t “make the experience more authentic” or “maintain the proper atmosphere of gameplay”. All that it shows is a lack of care, understanding and respect on the part of the translator.

In short: The problem is not the quality control (or lack thereof). It’s the translation policies that MangaGamer have put in place. No amount of proofreading can fix a broken script if you ignore the very reason that it’s broken.

But that’s not the worst part.

The worst part is that it’s not MangaGamer’s fault.

Back in 2008, a representative posted a forum poll on behalf of MangaGamer asking fans whether or not their releases should ignore Japanese honourifics.

The results were horrifying.

There aren’t that many things in this world that I care about. When it comes to politics, there’s not a lot that gets on my nerves. The results of this poll, however, make me truly angry. This poll implies that there are more people out there who would rather spend good money on an inferior product than those who favour quality, accuracy and appreciation for the work in question.

These misguided ‘fans’, desperate to protect their prized franchises from redaction, are instead pushing them towards an equally catastrophic opposite extreme.

Forget the parliamentary election. This is where we need radical change. ㋼

  • Share/Bookmark
This post has 6 Comments at this time. Care to add something?

Planeview Bench

Posted on April 17, 2010 by Jamie Spong in the field of Random Thoughts.

Ever been to Kew Gardens? Lovely place. Go during the spring; it’s far too hot (or far too wet) in the summer.

Now, Kew Gardens is located just a few miles away from London Heathrow Airport. As such, aeroplanes fly over it. A lot of aeroplanes. An awful lot of aeroplanes.

One thing that sits in my mind in particular is a bench that I usually end up taking a break on whenever I visit. You get a nice view across the green with a few trees at the end. But this bench is underneath a flight path. From behind one of the trees, a plane appears. It flies towards the gardens. Before it disappears overhead, another plane ascends from the tree. Again, it flies overhead, only for another aeroplane to grow into existence. On average, I’d say that there’s a turnaround of a minute or two.

It doesn’t really annoy me; by the time that they get to Kew, the planes are high enough to make only a small amount of noise. It’s just something that I noticed.

If you’ve been following the news lately, you’ll be aware of the giant cloud of ash that’s been holding up (or, should I say, holding down) European flights. Across the United Kingdom, aeroplanes are grounded and incoming flights are forbidden. To some, this is a bad thing; many, many tourists are trapped in foreign nations, with limited means to get home. Ferries and trains have been overwhelmed. Personally, I’m just glad that we chose to visit Venice a week earlier.

But there is one party surely overjoyed by the airspace closure: people who live near airports. For the first time, people living in places like Hatton and Yeadon can leave their houses without fear of engines roaring overhead. Just this morning, the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 ran a lovely story on how beautifully quiet London is now. If I lived in Hounslow, I know that I’d be making the most of it.

So if you’re in Richmond, Twickenham or somewhere else on the Tube map with money enough to get you there and back again, get yourself down to Kew. This may be the only time in this lifetime that it’ll be aeroplane-free.

Or you could just come up here and visit Harlow Carr. Your choice. ㋼

  • Share/Bookmark
This post has 0 Comments at this time. Care to add something?

Venish

Posted on April 12, 2010 by Jamie Spong in the field of Anime and Slice of Life.

“It wasn’t as wet as I was anticipating.”

This time a few days ago, I was in Venice. (The one in Italy.)

I was told about a month earlier that I’d be taking an Easter holiday in Venice. Unlike previous Easter holidays, this excited me. Last year’s trip to Pisa was well-received, but a severely late flight on the way back was an experience that I would not want to repeat. The holiday a year prior to that took place in Amsterdam. It’s probably a lovely place if the weather’s not torrentially snowy. And if you’re a pothead.

So when I heard that we would be visiting Venice, I thought that this time we’d got it right. I only knew Pisa for its leaning tower and Amsterdam because it was a lyric in that song about a little mouse with clogs on. Venice, on the other hand, is a place that I had been made all too aware of through my exposure to anime.

I was warned before I went that it would be packed with tourists, possibly Japanese. It’s possible that Japan has some fascination with the city, but it’s likely that it’s a worldwide thing. Whether or not the Japanese in particular have a fascination with the Venetian city of Venice (it could well be universal – Brother told me that authors who have been to Venice generally write about Venice), there are several notable Japanese things with Venice in them. And while I could dedicate a blog post to the heart-wrenching, life-changing experience that is Pokémon Heroes (set in the sunny city of “Altomare” – like Venice but with Pokémon and CGI excessives), I will instead focus on Aria.

It goes like this: In a post-apocalyptic world, mankind is forced to abandon mother Earth and colonise new planets through the magic science of terraforming. One such planet to’ve undergone this operation is Mars (probably because it was the closest one that they could find), now renamed Aqua (presumably because it’s got water on it now). It’s important to note that this backstory is only alluded to in the show itself; Aria is actually a slice-of-life story about a group of young, modestly-attractive female gondolier operators living in the city of New Venice1, Aqua. They live their lives. They wander the city. Sometimes they discover things. Everyone’s happy all of the time.

It’s very relaxing.

Aria has the odd distinction of being both underexposed and overrated, but it’s by no means a bad show. Providing, of course, that you are not driven insane from the constant annoyances of the repetitive, repetitive, repetitive catchphrases (“No sappy lines allowed!” “Ehh?” “My, my! Ehehe!” AT LEAST TWICE PER EPISODE) and the awkward antics of series mascot ‘President Aria’, a disturbingly personic cat-thing that looks more like a dog-thing who spends most of his time being as “cute” as possible. It’s a jolly good thing that the rest of the show makes up for these potential blood-pressure-raising shortcomings with its gentle pacing, charming soundtrack and general lack of plot. If nothing else, Aria proves that filler is not always a bad thing.

But there is a problem. Aria is set in New Venice. Not Regular Venice. Neither is Pokémon Heroes. In fact, very few of these Venice-based fictions are actually set in Venice itself. They’re always some idyllic utopian place based on Venice, liberties taken as the story requires. In short, these stories take place in what Venice should be like.

And even though I knew all of this, I had set my expectations unreasonably high. I had managed to convince myself that Venice was a place where miracles actually happen. A soul-cleansing place of purity, untainted by the progress of humanity.

This, as you must be aware, was not the case. Rather than an escape from reality, Venice was just another facet of it. I didn’t mind so much about the thousands of tourists piled into the scaffolding-enrobed St. Mark’s Square everyday, but even the quieter residential areas recommended by the guidebook had people there. Brother said that he doesn’t like being away from humanity for too long; I’m the opposite. I suppose that complaining about the level of tourism during the first major holiday of the year is just being picky.

As it turns out, Aria is more a depiction of what Japanese life, rather than Venezian life, embodies. New Venice celebrates the same holidays as the Japanese; they have the same customs, the same expressions, the same language (although the latter’s justifiable). In the second series, they dedicated a whole episode to New Venice’s postal service (far more efficient than Italy’s postal service) that appeared to be based directly on the Japanese post office, even down to the logo. Must be great if you’re Japanese. Familiarity with Aria does not equal familiarity with Venice.

Aria aside, Venice wasn’t as wet as I was anticipating. The weather forecast predicted a wide range of rains throughout the holiday, but this didn’t happen, making the weather, at least, correlate with the more idyllic depictions of the city (if dangerously high sun levels are your idea of idyllic weather). But I pictured Venice as being almost entirely laced with canals. I imagined paths at sea level. I imagined the impossibility of getting around on foot. I imagined not being able to find a large patch of land without a significant body of water a couple of metres away. Once again, I had set my expectations too high. I found Venice to be a highly walkable city, clocking up over 30,000 steps on one day. (Step counts brought to you by the Pokéwalker device. I’m not a Pokémon fan, by the way.) After a poor night’s sleep upon arrival, I strove to thoroughly tire myself out during the day to ensure peaceful sleep on subsequent nights. I set myself the goal of walking to each “corner” of Venice, but my enthusiasm was significantly diminished after a distressing discovery in the north-west corner of the island: an industrial district complete with train station, sky shuttle and car park. Cars on Venice‽ This is madness!

I won’t say that I was disappointed. Like I said, I knew what to expect. It wasn’t the first time that I’d been to Italy. Even so, it wasn’t the same. One thing that impressed me in Pisa was the ubiquity of anime and comics. One channel (we had satellite television in the hotel) was showing GTO at 11 in the morning. If I was familiar with GTO, I’m sure that I’d've been impressed. In Venice, however, we only had analogue. (We didn’t watch much TV.) At the airport newsagents last year, I was impressed to see a wide variety of graphic novels on sale alongside the newspapers; at Venice Marco Polo’s newsagency, I was disappointed to see a much smaller selection hidden away in a corner. Okay, so maybe I was a little disappointed this year.

But I don’t regret going. Venice isn’t a magical place in either the literal or the figurative sense, but if you’ve the money (like all good tourist traps, prices are significantly higher in Venice than in Tesco) I’m not going to ruin your fun.

Just don’t expect a miracle.

Incidentally, I found out that Aria is Italian for Air. I walked past a sign that said “Air conditioning” in both languages. ㋼

  1. The subtitles use the transliteration Neo-Venezia. The “Neo-” prefix appears to be the Japanese equivalent of the English “New” suffix, and Venezia means Venice, so New Venice is the way that it should be written. Probably. Ignore me. [↩]
  • Share/Bookmark
This post has 0 Comments at this time. Care to add something?

Brevity One

Posted on March 6, 2010 by Jamie Spong in the field of Anime and Random Thoughts.

Discuss. ㋼

  • Share/Bookmark
This post has 0 Comments at this time. Care to add something?

The Innocence of Noby Noby Boy, or Why Video Games Need to be Fun

Posted on February 17, 2010 by Jamie Spong in the field of Video Games.

There are now two reasons to own a PlayStation 3: Noby Noby Boy and Heavy Rain.

Seeing as I’ve already spent half a post talking about the latter, it’s time to examine The Young Man of the Twin Nobs.

But first, a little personal history. It’s been about 10 years since I was given a Christmas gift of a Nintendo 64 console and a handful of games (Banjo-Kazooie, GoldenEye 007 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time). Now, when I was a child, I was, like many children, stupid. Although I had figured out by this point that consoles needed to plug into a television to work and didn’t communicate via power sockets,1 my grasp on reality and its associated concepts was tenuous at best. So, when I fired up what critics had called The Best Game Ever, I was content to roam the Kokiri Forest, talking to the various inhabitants, walking, jumping, collecting rupees, picking up rocks, throwing rocks, more jumping, listening to Navi and so on without continuing to the rest of the game. I was vaguely aware that there was more to explore — I had, after all, read the manual which talked about all kinds of items that I didn’t have, like, for example, a sword — but that didn’t bother me. Besides, there was this one location that had a frightening boulder scaring me off.

I should probably point out that I have a terrible fear of things in video games. Like monsters. And insects. And glitches. And polygons. To this day, I won’t go near games like Half-Life or Bioshock. I’d always disable items in Super Smash Bros. Melee in fear of getting an appearance from a Like Like or Redead. And Banjo-Kazooie is still the scariest video game that I’ve ever played. Scarred me for life, it did; after one particularly shocking scene (played by Brother whilst I watched) I was reduced to rolling on the corridor floor, trembling, whimpering “they’re crawling on me”. True story. But, as usual, I digress.

The point that I’m making is that when one plays a video game for the first time, be it as a child, a curious parent or a technophobic senior, one doesn’t care about advancing to the next level, unlocking any of the achievements or upgrading one’s character. One cares only about having fun. And this, I believe, is the essence of what a video game should be. The moment that one is forced to do something in a video game, it stops being fun. When it stops being fun, it stops being a video game. It becomes a job.

In my mind, a true video game does not force the end user to do anything. It may gently guide the player to the next destination or give the player some ideas on what to do next, but my favourite games are the ones that offer freedom. Burnout Paradise is one of my most favourite games of recent years, and it’s not hard to see why: The player is given a car and placed in a city. And that’s it. Of course, there are objectives; you can unlock different cars, you can compete in races, you can discover hidden locations, you can perform stunts — and, in my personal favourite mode, you can slam into other cars, shutting them down and sending them to the junk yard. But it’s all optional. There aren’t any menu screens between you and the city. You can start the game and just drive. No obligations. No messages telling you off for going the wrong way. No game has better captured the pure joy of driving since the original OutRun.

It’s important to note that a game like this can only work properly if it’s coded properly. For me, a game needs to feel good to play, to experience. Sloppy programming and poor execution have ruined too many exciting game concepts. Staring at the word “Loading…” on an otherwise blank screen is not fun.

So what of Noby Noby Boy, then? A software toy criticised for its lack of focus? A game that many would describe as an “ungame”?

Noby Noby Boy has been misunderstood. So-called “hardcore” gamers have looked at it, maybe tried it for a while, before moaning that there’s no point to the game and going back to playing Call of Duty or something. But they’re missing the point. The fact that there is no point is the point. Wait… No, let me rephrase that.

Designer Keita Takahashi (also the man behind the Katamari franchise) has stated that when he’s done designing video games he would like to design playgrounds. And that’s exactly what he’s done with Noby Noby Boy. Although he’s stated that he’s not entirely happy with the finished product due to lack of budget, the game nonetheless is a well-produced physics-based playground. The player is given control of BOY, briefed on the controls and left to explore the rest of the game for themselves. The graphics are beautiful in their simplicity. The soundtrack is diverse, consisting of a range of pieces played by a single instrument, further pushing the simplicity idea. The control experience is great (Noby Noby Boy being the first time that I’ve ever used a PlayStation controller for more than a few seconds); barring some problems with the L3 and R3 buttons (which may or may not be the fault of the controller) it really adds to the experience, really giving one the sensation of space and free movement. And although there are Trophies2 to earn and an overarching long-term worldwide goal of stretching enough for GIRL to reach other planets, that’s not what makes the game engaging.

Noby Noby Boy takes one back to a very primal stage of their gaming life. Much like the fun I had exploring Kokiri Forest in Ocarina of Time, Noby Noby Boy presents players with an infinite number of randomly generated worlds to play with. This is a game that perfectly embodies the spirit of a child given their first video game. This is a game that shuns obligation; a game that gives the player complete freedom to play and have fun. Let me emphasize that. Play and have fun. How many games today allow one the pure, unadulterated joy of playing and having fun? Sure, you have open-world sandbox-type games like the annoyingly prolific Grand Theft Auto series, but few of them — perhaps none of them — are as much of a joy to experience as Noby Noby Boy. In this sense, Noby Noby Boy’s focus on fun pushes it much closer to my definition of a pure video game than any other.

So, if you, like me, are tired, disgusted or put off by the complex, miserable, unrewarding nature of hardcore gaming, or just looking for something a little different, Noby Noby Boy may just prove to be one of the most happy, fun and joyous experiences of your life.

If you will let it. ㋼

Ooh, one more thing. There’s an iPhone version of Noby Noby Boy coming out really, really soon (assuming that Apple’ll allow it on their App Store). Judging by the incredible preview videos that they’ve placed on YouTube, it’s shaping up to be the best iPhone and iPod touch application ever made. So now you’ve got a reason to get yourself one of those devices.

Most — all, actually — of the images in this post were taken from Eurogamer.

  1. Coincidentally, the potential of home power sockets to transmit data was realised a few years later with the HomePlug standard. My mind was ahead of its time. [↩]
  2. The PlayStation equivalent of Achievements. [↩]
  • Share/Bookmark
This post has 0 Comments at this time. Care to add something?

Kiddy Girl-and [Kiddy Grade 2] — How We Became Friends

Posted on February 14, 2010 by Jamie Spong in the field of Anime.

Recently, some copypasta sauce spread over an Internet or two proposed that there are two types of anime fans. The first type enjoys story, substance and animation quality et cetera, and the other kind enjoys lighter, character-driven series and doesn’t care so much about where the story is headed.

Like most generalizations, this is complete rubbish.1 Different people like or dislike different things for different reasons. There are several qualities that may make a series seem good or bad, each entirely subjective. At least, that’s an idea. By my reckoning, likes and dislikes (in my case, at least) occur more-or-less at random. But I digress.

About a year ago, the sequel to Kiddy Grade, which had previously existed only as a pilot episode and some sketches, was greenlit for a full-fledged series. Now, I believe that Uta∽Kata is the best non-Giant Robo anime ever made, so although I wasn’t the biggest fan of the original Kiddy Grade I was really looking forward to this new series from gímik, the production triforce behind all aforementioned (non-Giant Robo) titles. I even made a blog post anticipating it!

It didn’t live up to my hype. Of course it didn’t. Things tend to not. But I continued watching. I sat through episodes filled with in-jokes and references that remain impenetrable to anyone who doesn’t spend most of their life on Nico Nico Douga. Sure, there was plot, centimetring away under the everyday antics of the maids-who-are-actually-secret-agents, but it lacked the interconnectedness of Kiddy Grade, the subtle foreshadowing of Uta∽Kata.

One (half-)episode was nothing but a string of Lucky☆Star-esque voice actor-related gags. I’ve said that the presence of Norio Wakamoto is never a bad thing, and, well, it wasn’t. But I maintain that it was a thoroughly pointless episode; it introduced no new running characters, had no effect on the overall storyline and was never mentioned again.

But I persisted.

I’d watched the original Kiddy Grade. I’d watched Uta∽Kata. I knew that we were being lulled into a false sense of security, building to a massive plot turnabout.

And then it happened. Two major characters died, leaving our heroines without idols/mentors. Sad. Moving.

Meh, I thought.

It seemed that after eight or so episodes of nothing really happening, attempts to shake up the formula didn’t faze me. Maybe I thought that it should’ve been this way from the start. Maybe I was just in a bad mood that day. Either way, the series did become generally less painful to watch after this point, even though the overlying plot still didn’t make much of an effort. You could say that I had the mindset of a “Type A” anime fan at this point.

After an episode of mourning, episode 11 gave us a look into the lifestyles of the antagonists. (There are a bunch of characters in this show.) I thought it was a great episode; it may’ve been low on plot, but it was low on unfunny gags, too. Plus, we got to know the bad guys a lot better. They have feelings and stuff! Who’d've thought it?

Episode 12 added some much needed plot, featuring some well-appreciated continuity in the form of acknowledging the original series, revealing what happened to the principal members of the original cast and definitively linking both storylines. This is it, I thought. The halfway point in the series where everything changes. From now on, everything’ll be deadly serious.

The next episode was a beach episode.2

As beach episodes go, it was okay. It turns out that some computer broke down which trapped them there and they had to fix it or blow it up or something in order to save everybody. But the story isn’t why I find it notable. (No, neither was the mandatory dress code.)

As this episode played out, I found myself emotionally connecting with the main characters. I smiled along with them, cheered them on; they looked so cool in the denouement when they defeated the whatever-it-was terrorising the other characters that they were keeping their ES-Member-status a secret from until now.

And it was then that I realised that, for perhaps the first time ever, I wasn’t watching a show for the story. Sure, I enjoyed the plot and I continue to look forward to seeing where it goes, but that’s not why I care.

Over twelve hit-and-miss episodes, I had shared the adventures of these two girls. Together, we dealt with the strange situations that we were placed in, and, with time, it almost felt like we had become friends. It didn’t matter that they just happened to be a pair of young, good looking female-types; it was their personalities, not their bodies, that won me over. Going back over the older episodes looking for screenshots for this post, I found myself appreciating the show a lot more now that I knew.

I cared for these characters more than I cared for the series that brought us together.

And I still managed to write this whole post without mentioning their names. ㋼

  1. “Every generalization is false, including this one.” – Mark Twain [↩]
  2. Technically a holiday resort episode. [↩]
  • Share/Bookmark
This post has 0 Comments at this time. Care to add something?

MangaGamer Revisited

Posted on February 12, 2010 by Jamie Spong in the field of Visual Novels.

In order to maintain the proper atmosphere of gameplay, some Japanese words were remain untranslated.

I feel violated. ㋼

  • Share/Bookmark
This post has 0 Comments at this time. Care to add something?

Weaving a Story — Heavy Rain and Ergon Logos

Posted on December 22, 2009 by Jamie Spong in the field of Video Games and Visual Novels.

Eurogamer Expo 2009 Leeds

This year, the city of Leeds was lucky enough to host the Northern arm of the Eurogamer Expo 2009. As Leeds is conveniently located inside the jurisdiction of the provider of my bus pass, attendance was a no-brainer. I’m not what you would call a hardcore gamer, but my interests in video game theory and technology more than qualify me to leave the house for this.

Now, I’m particularly interested in the idea of the video game as a storytelling medium. (Which explains why I spend so much time and money on visual novels. The attractive female characters are just a bonus.) At the expo, I got the opportunity to play a wide variety of games, two of which caught my fancy in regards to the use of story.

Heavy Rain Demo

One game that I was lucky enough to have a go on was the upcoming Heavy Rain on the PlayStation 3, a cinematic “game noir” (if you don’t mind me coining a phrase). Many attempts have been made in the past to give one the experience of playing through a motion picture, and, by watching the following videos, it would seem like Heavy Rain, with its high-definition film-grain effect and meticulously motion-captured cast fresh from the uncanny valley, is the closest we’ve ever seen.

Unfortunately, Heavy Rain works much better when someone else is playing it than it does when one plays it for onesself. The control scheme, in particular, is a large point of contention. The character is controlled by the right trigger; pulling the trigger makes him walk/run/tiptoe, and steering is accomplished via the left thumbstick. As you can see in the above video, this takes quite a bit of getting used to.

Sometimes, little icons appear on screen, corresponding to the PlayStation controller’s bizarre, unintuitive circle, square, ecks and triangle buttons or gestures to be performed by the right thumbstick. In itself, this isn’t particularly innovative: these little actions have become known as “Quick Time Events” (no relation to Apple’s QuickTime technology), and they formed the basis of early “interactive movies” such as Dragon’s Lair (a game which Heavy Rain director David Cage has downplayed similarities to). Perhaps a more apt comparison would be the Shenmue series; heavily story-driven games with a plot that develops through both interactive cutscenes and event flags scattered throughout the world. Of course, Heavy Rain’s “sets” (read: levels) are on a much smaller scale than Shenmue’s wide, open explorable environments, but that’s entirely the point: the intent is to give the player the full movie experience but still be in control.

But what really impressed me about this game was the potential for plot branches. These two videos show only one direction for the story to take. As I watched others experience the demo, I saw many other possibilities. And these are more than just changes in dialogue; in this one scene, the developers programmed many different possible ways to distract the robber, calm him down and reach the scene’s conclusion. In my playthrough, I accidentally knocked a bottle off of a nearby shelf. According to another report that I read after the event, it’s possible to pick up this bottle and knock the robber out.

In the video you see above, our hero talks to the robber, eventually convincing him to leave (I love how the shakiness of the options represents the character’s inner nervousness), but this was not one of the outcomes I saw at Eurogamer. If you can’t get him to calm down, the player must attempt to wrestle the gun from him. I managed to get shot in the shoulder, but my character seemed fine and the outcome was the same in the above video (only with a slightly broken shoulder). But if the shopkeeper is shot, a similar but significantly different scene plays out as Scott is given the vital clues with the shopkeeper’s final breath. Same outcome, but more dramatic. And though I may complain about the controls, one can’t argue that they don’t feature some interesting idiosyncrasies; in the above scene, the player must continuously hold down both shoulder buttons to keep their hands up. (If you don’t manage to keep them up, you still get the “shot in the shoulder” ending.)

It’s plain to see that an enourmous amount of work has gone into Heavy Rain. I just wonder if it’s all really worth it. Yes, it just may be a true interactive movie, with engaging characters and a plot (based on what little we know of it) that seems decent enough. But the demo that I played had significant problems that may not be fixed by release date. I speak, of course, of the controls. Even if you have full control over your character, there’s not much point if you’re going to be limited by control scheme and set (again, level) design. From a gameplay perspective, it may as well be a string of choices and dexterity tests for all the difference it makes. I’m hoping that I’ll be proved wrong, but it seems like Heavy Rain will soon join the ranks of Fable Ⅱ, Shenmue Ⅱ and every Telltale Game ever made as an experience that sacrifices gameplay in favour of its story.

Which brings me to an example on the other side of the technological scale — and, unlike Heavy Rain (with its tentative February 2010 release date and PS3 exclusivity), one that you can play right now. You see, in the building opposite the show floor, they had set up a nice little indie section, featuring developer talks, 3D gaming demos and a selection of expensive-looking computers running Flash games.

One such Flash game was Ergon Logos.

ergon1

An extreme counterpoint to Heavy Rain’s high-definition three-dimensional graphics, Ergon Logos is entirely text based. (And no, it’s not what you think.) Reading through its first act, Ergon Logos clearly sets out to be a Braid-esque deconstruction of the classic Super Mario story (princess kidnapped, hero saves her) told through the medium of interactive kinetic prose, but, as creator Paolo Pedercini says, ”it fails miserably and becomes a piece of non-linear kinetic visual poetry written by a teenager obsessed with post-structuralist French philosophy. I don’t,” Pedercini adds, “know exactly what I was thinking.”

Regardless of original intent, what has been created here is, accidentally or not, a deconstruction — an interactive critique, if you like — of the visual novel medium. Let’s put aside the story and look at the delivery. The narrative is presented in a line. The line has various twists, turns, right-angles and about-faces and, every so often, the player is given a choice between two or three directions in which the story can take. All the while, the story is moving at a constant, linear pace, unbroken by pauses or mini-games of any kind. Remind you of anything?

This, I argue, is a novel game in its purest form. Along the way, the player (reader?) is given glimpses of other possibilities for the story, whether the option has already passed or has yet to be. I am reminded of Ever17 (which I admit I have yet to reach the true ending of) and its tendency to show the player shadows of the results of other plot choices within its narrative. In some cases, it is possible to get stuck in an infinite loop, and, while none of its eventualities can be considered a “true ending”, one may feel as if one has hit a dead end at times. At one point early on in the second act, you are given the same option twice at once, going in opposite directions. Just what is one to do? Only through replaying the experience can one see all that there is to see, but Ergon Logos is not designed to be “completed”. It is designed to be read, experienced and to challenge your idea of what makes a game. Even if it ends up doing something completely different.

Anyway, I highly recommend that you play it for yourself a few times. Ergon Logos is free, Flash-based and should work in most major web browsers. I recommend, however, that you close everything else and start a new browser session, if for no other reason than [SPOILERS AHEAD] one of the game’s many endings will deliberately make it (and possibly your computer) crash. But it’s art. So that’s okay. ㋼

  • Share/Bookmark
This post has 1 Comment at this time. Care to add something?

Kanon Turns 10: Sad Girls, Fan Translations and Boot Camps

Posted on October 10, 2009 by Jamie Spong in the field of Anime, Stuff I've Bought and Visual Novels.

Kanon Group Shot

That title up there should probably say “Kanon Turned 10”. I started writing this post in May.

But it’s still 2009, and this year marks the 10th anniversary of the release of one of Japan’s most beloved visual novels.

Kanon takes place in Winter. There is a main character and some other characters as well. Some of the other characters are more important story-wise than others, and the main character has to talk to them for the story to happen. (That’s what one does in a visual novel, after all.) Hopefully, I’ve managed to describe it to you without spoiling anything. Please don’t stop reading here.

Kanon is notable for being the first work produced by Key, who would later go on do create Air and Clannad (which you may have heard of), as well as Tomoyo After, Planetarian and Little Busters!.1 (Which you may not’ve heard of. Don’t read too far into any of those Wikipedia articles if you don’t like spoilers.)

Nayuki is my favourite character. This is a picture of her.

Nayuki is my favourite character. This is a picture of her.

Evidently, some people (i.e. Toei Animation) thought that Kanon was worth adapting into an animated series. So they did. It wasn’t very good.2 A few years later, after the exceedingly poorly paced Air TV series somehow became liked by folk, anime megahouse Kyoto Animation made another one. And it was good. So good that they eventually brought it over to North America, translated it into English American3 and released it on DVD, which, due to issues, quickly went out of print. Until it was re-released in a horrible boxset that tries to cram the whole series on four discs and typesets the subtitles in a highly annoying font.

At the time, one could've expected to pay this much for one of these. That's four episodes, y'hear? Well, I suppose that it's better to get 24 episodes for £30 than 4 of those episodes for £200. Even if the subtitles are harder to read.

At the time, one could've expected to pay this much for one of these. That's four episodes, y'hear? Well, I suppose that it's better to get 24 episodes for £30 than 4 of those episodes for £200. Even if the subtitles are harder to read.

To further appease the English-speaking fans, an unofficial fan translation of the original visual novel had been in the works for many years; before the story was animated, in fact. After much work by many hands, it was finally released earlier this year for anyone who owns a copy of Kanon Standard Edition, the slightly enhanced re-release.

Haeleth (who I believe started the project) mentioned on his website that HimeyaShop was a good place to get visual novels and the like. So I did. What I didn’t know is that since Haeleth’s now out-of-date page on Kanon was posted, all of the 18+ rated visual novels that they sell have been moved to a separate website, so I ended up with the “all ages” version.4

Now, Japanese programmers do things slightly differently to the way us Englishmen are used to. I’m no hacker (heck, I barely know any HTML), but one can tell from looking at the way that the game installs itself that the Japanese are used to a much different computing experience than us. (Do they not have the Program Files folder in Japan?) Perhaps the biggest cultural difference is that Mac users are generally left in the cold when it comes to visual novels, with most pretty much all of the major releases being Windows-only. This is a problem for me, as I have been a Mac user for nearly three years now.5 With barely any hard drive space remaining on the ol’ MacBook and Brother choosing to use his computer most of the time, there was only one way I’d be able to play Kanon.

I bought a MacBook Pro.

I wanted to take a photo that showed off the anti-glare display because I couldn't find any photos of the anti-glare display when I looked for them when I was thinking of getting a MacBook Pro with an anti-glare display.

I wanted to take a photo that showed off the anti-glare display because I couldn't find any photos of the anti-glare display when I looked for them when I was thinking of getting a MacBook Pro with an anti-glare display.

I suppose that you could tell from my brief description up at the top that I haven’t yet finished Kanon in any of its forms. But just you wait. The moment Windows 7 is released (and my beautifully cheaper-than-half-price pre-order copy shows up), I’ll shove a Boot Camp installation onto that glorious solid-state drive and have Kanon running better than anyone could’ve imagined. (No, I did not write this post just to show off the new computer. I haven’t even turned it on yet.)

But soft. If you’re running Windows 2000 or XP or so (and have a working DVD drive), you too can experience the story of Kanon — regardless of your knowledge of Japanese.6 As mentioned before, Kanon Standard Edition For All Ages (to give it its full title) can be purchased at HimeyaShop.com. They post internationally! (But they don’t bother to fill out the Customs declaration, so be prepared for extra charges once it reaches your nation’s borders.) If you want the full version with the added nature sequences (which you might as well get, seeing as it’s the same price and the fan translation allows one to disable the sex sections if one wishes), you’ll have to go through ErogeShop.com (direct link provided so that you don’t have to look at the more trashy selections). The English update can be found up here (the link is buried at the end of the second sentence from the top of their section on Kanon). Use 7-Zip or something to extract everything in the “Patch files” folder to wherever you installed Kanon, and that should be it.

Finally, I will mention that at the time of starting this post, there was an ongoing online thing called the Key 10th Anniversary Letter Project, which attempted to collect fan submissions of thanks and congratulations to Key on reaching their decennial year. That date has now been and gone, and I’m not sure what the status of the project is, but it looks like they need help more than ever. If you can lend a hand with managing the project (or want to contribute a letter of your own), please give them a moment of your time. Who knows where it’ll end up?

When I first experienced Planetarian, I was moved to the point of giving a care — not something that comes easily for me. When I finished the Clannad anime series, I felt a similar way. Let’s hope that Kanon does the same.

Additionally, Japanator tells me that today is Moé Day. So this post isn’t so irrelevant after all! Hooray! ㋼

  1. No relation. [↩]
  2. Or so I have heard. [↩]
  3. Nayuki sounds like a man. Still, they got the drowsiness down; in the Japanese version, she just sounds like a duck. [↩]
  4. Many Japanese visual novels, particularly the kind where there’s one guy and more than one girl, contain sex scenes. (Hence the nickname “erotic game”, or “erogé”.) Having sex isn’t necessarily the goal of the story; these scenes range from being tightly integrated into the storyline to just thrown in there to tick the box. (“Game’s not selling well? Add the obligatory sex scene and watch the copies fly off the shelves!” --The Thought Process of the Common Erogé Producer) Kanon falls into the latter category, and versions with the naughty bits removed completely were released without any major changes to the storyline. Incidentally, neither of the animated adaptations feature such scenes. [↩]
  5. My excuse: They don’t make Logic for Windows anymore. [↩]
  6. Not that it’s a brilliant translation; the names are written backwards, with the first name last and vice-versa (for what I can only assume are unavoidable technical issues), honourifics are bizarrely ignored & transcribed without any explanation and certain words and phrases are left untranslated and highlighted in purple. If you click on them, it tells you what they mean and why they decided that it was a good idea to not translate them. They might’ve fixed all of this in the latest patch, though. [↩]
  • Share/Bookmark
This post has 0 Comments at this time. Care to add something?