Maikaze’s Touhou: A Summer Day’s Dream — Okay, I’ve Acknowledged It

December 29th, 2008

 

Can I go back to doing something enjoyable now?

Just watched this on Nico because… you know… I expect little. And boy did I get it.

Impressions:

To be positive, it looks better than Sound Holic’s attempt at making one of these from the last Winter Comiket. On the other hand, that one was almost three times as long. I am not swayed by the use of professional VAs in the slightest. Gleam of Force had a higher quality cast than this one. Better music and art too for that matter. It was… well… clearly made by a bunch of amateurs. Animation was often stilted and inconsistent, anything that moved was far far less textured than everything else, and they pretty clearly hadn’t quite mastered syncing voices up to animation, though it only got embarassingly bad once that I can recall. They also need to never attempt to draw somebody walking towards the camera ever again. Reimu looked like a drunken sailor lurching towards a whore house. Sausage paws and triangle fingers abound. Hell, there’s one point where Aya has a finger growing out of another finger.

Its biggest sin, however, is being boring as hell. If you’re looking for anything at all related to the games, or cutesy videos, or… hell… what do kids like with Touhou these days… giant headed blobs… you’re not going to get it. It’s just 17 minutes of talking heads and then 45 seconds of Reimu and Patchouli throwing things that explode. Touhou Soccer has longer and more detailed action scenes than that… and let’s you play soccer in the interim instead of staring at inconsistently drawn talking heads.

I don’t care what people may think of this as some kind of breakthrough or stepping stone for Touhou or the doujin world in general. I’d rather have a 90 second little flash music video that entertains me than a 20 minute monstrosity that bores me to tears. Seriously, this was half the length and about 40 times more entertaining to watch. Priorities here, people. Entertainment first, shameless fanwankery can be a distant second.

Posted in Touhou | 29 Comments »

29 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • MA says:
    December 29, 2008 at 3:48 pm

    I’d rather have a 90 second little flash music video that entertains me than a 20 minute monstrosity that bores me to tears <- I agree

  • dm says:
    December 29, 2008 at 4:17 pm

    I’d rather have a 90 second little flash music video that entertains me than a 20 minute monstrosity that bores me to tears

    It’s probably familiar to you, but I’ve always thought this rendition of Perfect cherry blossom was a magnificent marriage of (doujinshi) image and (doujinshi) music:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBYSUFDdG-I

    It helps to know the story, in which case it’s a well-done bit of pantomime. Add an introduction, and subtitles for the conversation between Yukari and Reimu, and you might be able to pull along people who don’t know the story as well.

  • Totali says:
    December 29, 2008 at 4:46 pm

    magical girls shooting beams pewpepwpew

  • zzeroparticle says:
    December 29, 2008 at 7:02 pm

    You’d think they’d just be able to rip off a Nanoha plotline and come up with something decent out of that. I mean, Touhou really is all about magical girls beating the crap out of each other, so why they just couldn’t aim for that level of quality is beyond me.

  • Yue says:
    December 29, 2008 at 7:33 pm

    Oh for the love of, just fill the screen the with gazillion projectiles then this would be the next best thing to Nanoha A’s.

  • Loli Salad » Maikaze - A Summer Day’s Dream says:
    December 29, 2008 at 8:26 pm

    […] I thought it was enjoyable unlike somebody else. It wasn’t super excting but it was enough. Atleast it didn’t focus on […]

  • Malek86 says:
    December 29, 2008 at 9:12 pm

    Mh, so it is really as much fail as I feared it might have been. Thankfully I wasn’t expecting much in terms of quality (although I was very excited at the whole thing). Of course, the utter lack of YukariYuyuko didn’t help.

    Ah well, back to the games and comics.

  • AGear2Ax says:
    December 29, 2008 at 11:36 pm

    If there’s a God, please lend me strength to finish to view this.

  • dm says:
    December 30, 2008 at 12:04 am

    Now that I’ve seen it, it’s actually not bad — certainly nowhere near as bad as you make out.

  • kearsie says:
    December 30, 2008 at 1:25 am

    that’s what I said, too, there’s not enough danmaku in this

  • TheBigN says:
    December 30, 2008 at 1:34 am

    Touhou really is all about magical girls beating the crap out of each other, so why they just couldn’t aim for that level of quality is beyond me.

    See, Touhou for me is about girls with WMD-like abilities having tea and slice of life adventures. So if that’s what’s here, I’m cool with that. :P

  • Ipsod says:
    December 30, 2008 at 5:34 am

    I watched it.. but I couldn’t help noticing a book in Patchouli’s library.

    Namely, a single and fairly small book called Wikipedia.

  • Malek86 says:
    December 30, 2008 at 8:02 am

    Yes, after watching a bit of it, it does seem better than the author says, but still, slice-of-life doesn’t sit too well with me. I prefer doujins where girls get into the most random situations and act with an equally random (and usually violent) behavior. Like in Ennui Akadako, Winter Scenery, and similar. Action doujins ain’t bad either, althugh not my favorite ones. But this feels more like SSiB: too slow-paced and not gripping enough… with the difference that it doesn’t take you 20 minutes to read a SSiB chapter.

  • Reimu_girl says:
    December 30, 2008 at 9:21 am

    it doesnt bore me, if u like touhou enough you will like it no matter wat, I think they did an awsome job people should stop putting it down and finding all the bad parts in it.

  • Makuro says:
    December 30, 2008 at 12:53 pm

    really isnt half bad as you think.The Background was of professional quality IMO and music was good also.The character animation do really need abit more refining but was overall ok,they just need to learn how to draw straight line and smooth curves.lipsync was slightly off but reasonable for a fanmade anime.subtitle was accurate but the positioning was bad enough for me to turn it off and watch it.

  • Myssa Rei says:
    December 30, 2008 at 2:22 pm

    For a fan-made attempt, this actually went rather well. I don’t have a problem with the slow pace myself (leaning towards Slice-of-Life in my old age), but it really begs asking… WHEN will the next installment come? If I remember right, this took Maikaze TWO YEARS just to get off the ground, and even then it had to undergo an art change in the interim.

  • zzeroparticle says:
    December 30, 2008 at 2:49 pm

    See, Touhou for me is about girls with WMD-like abilities having tea and slice of life adventures. So if that’s what’s here, I’m cool with that. :P

    Agreed with the tea drinking part. Not so much the slice of life adventures though since their game-related adventures involve beating the crap out of each other. :P

    Honestly though, I haven’t seen Maikaze’s efforts yet, so this may very well be a situation of me being caught with my foot in my mouth.

  • Newprimus says:
    December 30, 2008 at 5:05 pm

    They say KirbyM’s name is on the credits.

  • Anonymous says:
    December 30, 2008 at 7:16 pm

    Yup. KirbyM talked with the one member of Maikaze that understood English and put subtitles on it.

    http://www.walfas.org/?p=624

  • Anonymous says:
    January 1, 2009 at 5:32 am

    I have to say this anime is getting a lot of unfair flak. It’s the first episode, so you have to establish some kinda plot before you have any real epic fights. Besides, Touhou’s as much about the characters as it is the girls unleashing millions of bullets. Don’t get me wrong, I HOPE we get that later, I do. But in all honesty…I’d rather have 15 minutes of this than 30 seconds of Touhou Project Side Story. Oh my god, I just saw like, 30 seconds of that….It burned my retinas. IT. BURNED. MY. RETINAS.

  • Ashot02 says:
    January 1, 2009 at 3:45 pm

    Isn’t this the blog that labeled Gurren Lagann a “failure” at first?

    Figures…

  • Aroduc says:
    January 1, 2009 at 5:43 pm

    Nah. Aside from the pisspoor episode 4 (5? whichever) I rather liked it until around episode 10 or so when I pretty much spontaneously lost all interest since every antagonist was a joke.

  • Myssa Rei says:
    January 1, 2009 at 8:59 pm

    A second watch pretty much reaffirmed my earlier thoughts on Maikaze’s little effort. It was good for a fan project. Not exactly the best art available, but the fact that they’ve managed to turn out 90’s-era quality is impressive on its own. Nevermind the fact that what counts as ‘plot’ could have come out of one of the games. ^^;

    Also, this was FAR better than what Soundholic foisted on the fandom. *shudders*

    Makes me think that Aroduc is being grumpy again for the sake of being grumpy. ;)

  • Aroduc says:
    January 1, 2009 at 11:22 pm

    Nah, you’re just making allowances for it by saying it’s a fan project. I’m remembering that it took them two years to churn out something unpolished and unmistakably amateur.

  • Myssa Rei says:
    January 2, 2009 at 4:54 am

    Aroduc: Actually 4 years, if you count the first instance Maikaze announced the *intent* of wanting to start the project (with a different set of character designs too). I imagine many are surprised that this is going to be a three-parter, given the amount of work that goes into animating a standard 9 FPS 5-minute Flash animation, much more a 17-minute (minus the OP and ED) or so show.

    It’s not like Shinkai’s solo-effort Hoshi no Koe, true, and the flaws are pretty obvious, though personally I find them pretty minor and don’t detract from the experience.

  • Sheba says:
    January 2, 2009 at 10:37 am

    How much of the work Tokine have done? He was pretty much everywhere in the credits, and I doubt it was in the marketing department.

  • bobzor says:
    January 4, 2009 at 3:25 pm

    Shit, this was like a borefest. I didnt enjoy it one bit, not the overwhelming seiyus, the horrible drawings that looked like ms paint. i feel like i’ve lost interest in all anime thanks to this plain, uninteresting anime.
    Thanks a lot.
    I feel like dying.

  • the ghost says:
    May 5, 2009 at 7:45 pm

    Hi, I saw this a little awhile ago and i have to say it was pretty darn good for a first episode, and it is true for what i have seen from the games it follows a similar/random plot structure like trying to regain something like summer. Hopefully they will make the 2nd episode soon, though it is kinda obvious who took the box.

  • Anonymous says:
    December 1, 2009 at 11:48 pm

    There was a point where the art was much less round, but they ended up changing it for whatever reason. It may or may not have had something to do with intervention from ZUN.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8NzFHtdZjA