TMA, the makers of wonderful AV films such as Lozen Maiden and Higurashi ga naku koro ni, has announced Kira☆Star, an AV film based on Lucky Star, in their November lineup. They haven’t made a webpage for it yet, so you have to scroll down a little to see it.
Umineko no naku koro ni is the newest game by the makers of Higurashi no naku koro ni. It was shorter than I thought, only lasted for 3 days. It wasn’t scary like Higurashi was years ago, but I am glad it looks more like a real serial murder now as compared to the cases in Higurashi where they weren’t much so.
Natsuhi is wonderful. I already have an idea of who could have done it and have some theories on how some of them were done, but the game has too little details on the crime scene, though that is probably also a hint in itself…
The characters weren’t awesome like in Higurashi, but the characters in Higurashi didn’t become awesome till several games into the series anyway (K1′s reality marble didn’t even activate till Higurashi3). And I like dai’s music. The music sounds cheap but I love it.
And Bernkastel! I thought it was really cool for her to appear. The next few games should be interesting.
Seiyuu + TV talent + radio personality Yamadera Kouichi has written on the Hollywood Express blog commenting on the increase in the use of famous actors to do the voices in anime and movies, and asks that an appropriate cast should be selected for the roles instead of basing it on popularity.
He continues saying that although popular actors will increase attention on the production abd there have been times where he has seen actors being the perfect choice for the role, there were also times when the opposite was true.
He also places emphasis that they should not change the cast to famous people when a movie version is made for TV shows where the seiyuu cast have been doing the same voices for many years. He says that it not only hurts the feelings of the seiyuu that have been working on the show for all these years, but it also betrays the fans who have been supporting the show.
Fans suspect he is referring to The Simpsons movie, which Fox had announced a cast of famous actors to dub over the lead roles in the Japanese version instead of the seiyuu cast that have been doing the dub for the last 15 years. Though Studio Ghibli also has the habit of using famous actors for their lead roles for their newer movies starting from the 90s.
Yamadera has also had a personal experience where he had completed recording for all the voice work for the dub over for Woody in Toy Story in the Japanese version, but was switched out at the last minute for a famous actor.
Using famous actors gives us the famous Final Fantasy OIYOIYO case so it’s not all that bad!
Issue 40 of Shounen Jump magazine has announced that book 24 of Hunter x Hunter will be released on the 4th of October and that Hunter x Hunter will start again in Shounen Jump starting from Issue 45 which would be sold on the 6th of October.
They finally managed to pull Togashi away from Ultima Online and FFXI! Time to start reading Shounen Jump again!
Of course if what the anonymous source said was true, it also means that it’ll stop again in 1-2 months.
Full page scan here.
Asahi.com reports that the art of cel animation in TV anime is about to disappear in Japan as computers take over, leaving Sazae-san as the last TV anime that is still using hand drawn cel animation. Sazae-san has been using cel animation for the 39 years that it has been running.
Other classic anime such as Chibimaruko-chan and Doraemon have switched to production on computers in 1999 and 2002 respectively.
The makers explain that they continue to stick to cel animation in Sazae-san because the small variations in the lines between each hand drawn frame helps to create a warmhearted feeling which puts the minds of viewers at peace. They are even resisting the move to digital broadcast, as showing cel animation in high definition will make the little faults in cel animation such as dust a lot more obvious.
They are also running out of people who can do cel animation in the digital age while the current cel animators are getting older and older. They currently have approximately 120 people working on the anime across 3~4 companies, but they are still lacking in manpower and 20~30% of the anime is drawn in China.
Microsoft must be scratching their heads wondering why their wonderful ad campaign isn’t working in Japan. This was a real ad that was on Dengeki Daioh apparently…?
Moon Phase reports that the infamous eroge School Days is being ported to the PS2 by Interchannel as School Days LxH (love and hate.) for a December 13th release. There will be added scenes and endings, and there will be newly animated scenes to go with the parts of the scenario that were modified.
I wonder if they’ll stay true to the original and release a really buggy product. But more importantly, would Sony allow those endings on the PS2 without any modification? Then again the PS2 has stuff like Resident Evil and God of War, hmmmmm.
Ganbareya has released downloadable demos for ARO -∞- and Ore no yome Online, games that they have been working on (and posting WIP videos online) for the past 12 weeks. The games are still very early in development so they aren’t much yet, but the basic functions are there to play around with.
ARO is being developed as an online action RPG mainly featuring characters from Haruhi and Lucky Star, and Ore no yome Online is being developed as an online 3D action battle game featuring the same characters.
The demos can be downloaded at the front page of the website.
I was planning to play Succubus Quest for an hour to write a post about it, but I ended up playing it for 3 days and I’m on my 3rd playthrough now after having got the true ending. Man I was supposed to finish Umineko over the weekend!
Some guy was apparently posing as a publisher at Comiket and giving fake name cards to get free doujinshi and avoid the queues. Then he brags in mixi about it and says he’ll bring even more name cards next Comiket since he ran out of cards this time.
nota eroge kenkyuushitsu has been doing a comparison of text file sizes between eroge, and notes that a 1mb file is approximately equal to 3 light novels. The data is not very accurate due to how different eroge handles their text though, so don’t think too much about it.
Also I realised that my RPGmaker XP RTP link in the Succubus Quest post was badly messed up. I hate myself.
Bad Behavior has blocked 945 access attempts in the last 7 days.
