This Sunday, Azure Flame has a brand new feature, which is absolutely not an excuse for me to write fewer real articles for the blog. Since the one thing we tend to lack here is news, Sunday News Bites has arrived to let me redress that balance, and since there’s no point my trying to compete with blogs that actually offer up-to-the-minute and relevant news, I’ll just pick out the most noteworthy pieces every weekend.
Each week, the Sunday News Bites team (aka Karura) is joined in the studio by an anime or game character to give their opinion on the week’s news. To kick off, we have gone to the Netherworld and brought back Generic Prinny.
Tsubasa Chronicle, now in OVA form
We got bored to death with the second season of the anime, and we don’t have a clue what’s going on in the manga, so what could we possibly want more than a Tsubasa Chronicle OVA? Set to be released one episode at a time across three volumes of the manga, Production I.G.’s Tokyo Revelations will keep us occupied across the long autumn and winter nights, but will it actually be any good?
Prinny says: Dood, when Laharl and Etna aren’t bossing us around, we like to tune into some anime, so we’ve all seen a bit of Tsubasa. I have to admit it got dull pretty fast, dood, so I’m not expecting much.
Bokurano anime director hates the manga
Who do you choose to direct the anime adaptation of a popular manga series beloved by almost everyone who reads it? How about a director with a passion for his work, determined to make the best adaptation possible? Don’t be ridiculous- it’s far more sensible to choose a man who doesn’t even like the manga and thus wants to change it as much as possible. It’s rather unfortunate for fans of the manga who were determined to give the anime a fair chance, but even the director himself has told us all not to watch it; he doesn’t want children with dark back stories dying one by one- he wants sunshine, lollipops and rainbows. Even the ending is to see them all come back to life, possibly because it was all a dream/simulation in the first place.
Prinny says: Haha, we laughed about this news a lot in the Netherworld, dood- this director guy wouldn’t make a very good demon.
Xenosaga licensed?
Remember a few weeks ago when ADV said they couldn’t license B & C ranked titles because it was pointless from a business perspective? Whilst we were all sitting on the edge of our seats wondering just what A-grade titles of pure excellence that they were going to bring us, they went ahead and solicited the DVD release of…Xenosaga volume one. Yes, that lacklustre anime adaptation of the first game that was actually worse than the movie made from the in-game cutscenes is, by ADV’s standard, an A grade title. Well, I suppose it will go well on the shelves of people who like Samurai Gun and Coyote Ragtime Show.
Prinny says: No other RPG adaptation can be as good as Disgaea! Hey, why are you hitting me? What do you mean, “The Disgaea anime is a pile of something unmentionable”?
Welcome to the End…of NHK
Once, it seemed like it would go on forever, but happily, the NHK manga is about to get out of its rut and finally end next month. I dropped this manga a while ago after getting bored with the lack of progression for the characters, but with a definitive end planned, then I might make the effort to read the remaining chapters, regardless of how poor and inconclusive the finale may be.
Prinny says: Dood, do you think all the characters will kill themselves and be reincarnated as Prinnies?
It’s not Gundam Pizza Hut
My prediction about the next Gundam series seems to have been incorrect, as rather than being a tale of warring fast food restaurants, we instead have Gundam 00, complete with a team of four destined bishie pilots. Apparently their bishiness is meant to help the show appeal to female fans, in which case I have some better advice- how about including a few female pilots who are not so completely incompetent that they get killed or humiliated the first time they step into a mobile suit?
That issue aside, should we really expect that much from this new Gundam series? Destiny must surely still be etched into all our minds as an example of Flashback Modes and pointless cast members gone wrong, but can Sunrise pull out of their rut and produce a good Gundam series as opposed to an excuse to sell more plastic models? Sadly, I think not, for over the years the studio’s propensity for creating worlds far too vast and complex to be explored within the required number of episodes has only grown, causing the writers to usually lose all will to create a coherent plot when a pointless mishmash will do.
Prinny says: Mobile suits, dood! The Prinny Squad would like to buy some model kits, but our flippers prevent us from assembling them properly.
“how about including a few female pilots who are not so completely incompetent that they get killed or humiliated the first time they step into a mobile suit?” – That wouldn’t appeal to female fans, at least not the kind of female fans who would watch Gundam 00. After all, you can’t make angsty yaoi doujinshi about strong female characters, duh.
Haha, good point…oh well, at least there’ll be more stuff to laugh at on fanfiction.net
From what I can understand, the end of NHK is not all that bad. Maybe you really could give it a try ^