天下制覇

Thank you and good night.

As far as the games from this one went, I’m pretty disappointed. The two new Touhou editions were really just about the only things that I found noteworthy enough to even mention. I still haven’t been able to try Alternative Sphere yet, but nothing else has so much as held my attention for more than three or four minutes. Maybe a couple years ago was just the renaissance for doujin games. I miss the times when stuff like Crescent Pale Mist, Guardian Heroines, Blood Over, Battle Moon Wars, etc etc was coming out ever single Comiket. Oh well, maybe in the winter.

At least there’s always the parking lot to marvel over. The Vita-Mobile is particularly frightening. How can anybody even drive that? The powder blue Rei-van covered in pink hearts is in a class all to itself. Shamelessly stolen from Senakablog (NSFW) like always.

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Just a reminder that it’s out in Moonland on PS2 now. It has to get ported to PC, right? RIGHT!? Hopefully only about 365 more days to go. 365 long Ryougi, school girl Akiha, and Archetype:Earth free days. *sigh*

I am so not in the mood to separate the wheat from the chaff tonight. Something about princesses, sailors, and China fighting a whale. Or something. I’ll deal with it once the kerfuffle (44 points + double word score + 50 for over 7 letters) settles, likely tomorrow midday or so. 
A few more caps of possibly dubious legitimacy after the cut.

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Fettgans at Doujinsuki over in Franceland apparently more patience or drive than I do and has been compiling a preview list of ]the upcoming games at Comiket as well. Of note is his list of the Touhou themed ones that I didn’t find wading through 50 pages of random other Touhou stuff to track down.

List reproduced after the cut.

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It figures that fewer than 24 hours would pass since I did my little preview before Aquastyle posts a long promo for their upcoming animated short… or whatever you want to call them. The Sanae x Master Spark combination attack was hilarious. Nice to see the newbies getting some pre-emptive love too. And yes, I know Iosys released something about a week ago. It was really really lame.

 Oh, the places you’ll go…

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Tasofro just announced Touhou 12.3, including the three mentioned above. Given the name (SWR was Hisouten, soku means ‘near’, or a pun for ‘zoku’ meaning sequel), style, and that there was sort of a quasi-non-announcement about an SWR patch in the works, I’m going to assume it’s an expansion to SWR, moving the story up past UFO (out in a month, remember). It apparently adds, among other things, robots, and the story is something about fog in the middle of summer, not like it matters. Probably Suika getting too drunk to reincorporate. Really though, your guess is as good as mine right now.

Continuing from my previous semi-rant before… even though art and animation has been inarguably getting better across the board for last decade, direction really hasn’t. Many action shows think that they can get by with just grunting and stills, not that I’m looking at you, Needless, Basara, or any bloody Jump series ever. That makes things like Monty Oum’s machinima Dead Fantasy series all the more impressive. Sure, it’s fanwank to the extreme, but awesome choreography never goes out of style. No matter how well animated your grunting or yelling may be, it’ll never live up to real martial arts. Sadly, these days, real action sequences like you used to find in J2 or Tokyo Majin are the exception rather than the norm. I blame that drill show for repopularizing grunting, whatever it may have been called. I’m sure they’ll make a resurgence in popularity eventually. Probably at the point when people realize that extremely detailed background animation or falling cherry petals is actually very very boring.

Also, I’m glad that DoA got some love after the second edition was almost all Final Fantasy love.

Can’t let you do that, Star Fox!

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