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.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qiQcqCpLB8

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.

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.

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 What I didn’t know is that since Haeleth’s now out-of-date page on Kanon was posted, all of the 18+ rated visual novels that they sell have been moved to a separate website, so I ended up with the “all ages” version.⁴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 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.

Miku had a bit of an accident this morning, as you can see.

Anyone know how to fix her? Anyone know someone who’ll do it for me?

Great to see that she’s still in high spirits.

Musicians are always doing crazy things in the name of publicity. This accident may give her career a boost.

I call this one “Making The Best Of A Bad Situation”.

I’m going to close this post with some inspirational words about how we all have problems in our lives that seem like a major inconvenience but are actually a blessing in disguise. If life gives you cream, make yourself some cream soda. No, wait. More like, if life gives you… Gah. Motivational lecturing is one thing. Putting it into practise, well… Concentrating on short-term stuff takes about as long as the long term stuff and produces fewer gains. Advice for life, right here and exclusive. ㋼

So I’m going to be taking a look at that FLCL DVD set released in the UK a few weeks ago. I pre-ordered this one from Amazon back in January using a gift card. I hate gift certificates, but Amazon’s gift voucher implementation is (grudgingly) one of the best: When the FLCL collection was released and Amazon hadn’t received any copies (and still haven’t to this day), I cancelled my order and placed another with Play.com. Amazon automatically gave me back the credit for the gift certificate which I was able to apply to another pre-order I’d made without having to place the order again. (The contents of said order can wait for another post.)

We watched the series over a period of about a week. We do most of our viewing on a Yamada DVX-6700 (which, to date, is the best DVD Video player that I have used), but we had to watch the last disc on Brother’s iMac due to the general television area being occupied. It was Brother’s first time watching the series, but I’d seen it several times (in both Japanese and English variants). As such, I’m not going to bother talking about the show itself. Maybe I’ll get Brother to do a write-up.

First off, the packaging.

I'm not sure how to get the thumbnails to be precisely 554 pixels wide, so you'll just have to click on it to see the big version.

You probably can’t tell from the photographs, but the cover art has JPEG artifacts. I hate JPEG artifacts on the web, and I loathe them in the Real World. The result is a bootleg-grade cover that you would be ashamed to flaunt (unlike this lovely US boxset). (For the uninitiated: JPEG artifacts are a horrible effect of saving your images as .jpg instead of .png. Become enlightened.)

Each North American DVD release of FLCL was accompanied with a booklet featuring translator’s notes et cetera. This release came with a limited edition registration card.

One can tell that they went with a particularly cheap brand of DVD case. You know, that brittle-but-bendy texture that opens with a snap. Being a three-disc release (two episodes to a disc–they could’ve just use two discs if they wanted to save money), the case was augmented by one of those things that holds a disc on each side that clips to the middle of the case.

Except it wasn’t clipped on correctly. Removing the discs themselves from the centre section was a chore in itself; I always find these particularly awkward as I’m worried that I’m going to snap the disc in half.

Judging by the menu credits, the UK release appears to be a carbon copy of a Madman Entertainment release. I’m assuming that MVM (the UK distributor) thought that it would be more cost-effective to go with Madman (the Australian distributor)’s PAL encode than for MVM to do it themselves. However, half of that sentence will not make sense if you’re not familiar with how video (or my mind) works. Don’t worry about it.

Video-wise, the quality was as I expected. Some minor blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em quality flubs, but overall, no glaring audio or visual errors that I could perceive on our vintage four-to-three aspect cathode ray box.

Naturally, we watched the videos in English. Unlike Manga Entertainment’s horrible stance on sub vs. dub discrimination, MVM’s release comes with a full “signs-only” subtitle track, translating (most of) the bits of on-screen Japanese text that are unfeasable to be picked up by the dub. Honestly, you probably wouldn’t be missing much if they weren’t translated (not in this series, anyway), but it’s still something that I expect to see on all English-language anime videos.

Oddly enough, the subtitles on disc 1 are different from those on discs 2 & 3; they must’ve changed subtitle providers (or something along those lines) between volumes. The typesetting’s noticeably different in the later volumes, and the ending theme is only subtitled on the 2nd and 3rd discs. Also, the episode titles were expanded from their short, four-character Japanese forms for the English adaptation (e.g. FiSta = Fire Starter). Whilst volume one’s sign-only subtitles use the full-length titles, volumes two and three use the nonsensical shortened titles.

Another point of contention is that for some reason, the ending sequence of episode two has been replaced with the ending sequence of episode one. But only the video track has changed. This means that the narration for the episode three preview plays over the preview for episode two (which we’d just seen). This is a glaring error, and although the other episodes appear to have the correct ending and preview sequences, they’re all slightly–but significantly–out-of-sync (the first episode being the exception). I’m not sure whether to blame MVM or Madman on this subpar presentation. Maybe it’s just something that slipped through the cracks.

To sum up, you’re paying £18 for a modern classic with high production values packaged into a set with decidedly low production values.

And people wonder why no-one’s buying UK anime releases.