Well, this episode was extremely fast-paced. Maybe even a little too fast-paced? The battle was pretty much over as soon as it started and it seemed kind of chaotic visually. I mean, I know that the battle itself was chaotic, but I felt that the presentation itself wasn’t very good. At least they replayed that battle theme that they introduced in episode nine, that’s a sick theme.

Satou was surprisingly awesome in this episode during his confrontation with Margery. That was some pretty good script work there in my opinion. It’s a shame that we don’t see Yuji do anything of that sort often. When he does it usually ends up making me crack up a little since it’s hard for me to take him seriously.

The ending’s quick shot at Konoe has made us all ask ourselves once again just what role she will be playing exactly in the show. Since she’s an original character to the animation, not even the people that have read the light novels knows what’s going on over here. There is nothing for anybody to do but to speculate.

With a new season comes another (romance?) drama series that ultimately ends up being under my radar. This season is no different with the arrival of true tears. Let’s be honest with each other here now, you all knew I was going to end up blogging about this one. I mean, what genre could please me more than this one?

The first episode of true tears has been a pretty slow start. Besides giving us some simple introductions to the main characters, it really didn’t do much else. Nothing smelling of a premise is even hinted at so it’s all pretty vague at the moment. No matter, I am extremely patient with these shows anyway.

I will say that this first episode was certainly quite an eye-opener as the art was absolutely beautiful. I don’t know where they got this money from but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried over whether they can keep this up or not in the coming episodes. On the music front, both opening and ending themes were very nice and the opening’s animation was particularly impressive. The first bit of it with all the leaves was executed very nicely and the CG part around the end was pretty cool in my opinion. I haven’t really taken notice of the show’s score too much but the track they played near the beginning and end of the episode was quite good. I’m not familiar with the voice actors of this series at all but I’m pretty content with the casting decision thus far. Let’s just hope that all these great “asides” don’t go to waste with a mediocre story and/or a deteriorating production due to the budget being completely spent on this episode. ;)

I really enjoyed this episode. It balanced everything well and the pacing was simply excellent. The art was pretty good and the music was timed quite nicely. I look forward to more episodes like this one in the future. I hope this great momentum wasn’t lost in the midst of the brief hiatus over winter break. ;)

As I predicted from the last episode, Pheles hit the scene and quickly concluded the episode. I was eager to hear Shana’s confession to Yuji although I was pretty sure that things weren’t going to work out. It’s probably not going to be resolved until the end of the series, and that’s really just a maybe in my opinion.

Tomorrow’s episode should be jam packed with a lot of exciting scenes. It’d be hard pressed for them to make anything as exciting as the movie but I think it should still be enough to impress me. I’m not really sure how long this arc is going to span, but I’m going to take a stab here and guess that it’ll wrap up on episode 15 or 16.

It’s interesting how differently one perceives messages that are in all caps. The caps makes Kitty seem very angry at first (due to her reply to my first question) but then it quickly shifts to making her seem like a very immature person .

Remy Chi Jian Suen: Shouldn’t you be at work?
Kitty Tang: I AM AT WORK
Remy Chi Jian Suen: What a naughty person you are.
Kitty Tang: TAKING MY LUNCH =p
Kitty Tang: SOMEWHAT
Remy Chi Jian Suen: o
Remy Chi Jian Suen: What’s with the caps lock
Kitty Tang: TYPING SOMETHING THAT NEEDS TO BE IN ALL CAPS
Kitty Tang: SO I HAVE THE CAPS LOCK ON
Remy Chi Jian Suen: Good grief. Did you beat the game already?
Kitty Tang: NONO, STILL WORKING ON IT, DIDN’T PLAY MUCH DURING X-MAS
Kitty Tang: HOW’S SCHOOL?
Remy Chi Jian Suen: Awake for my first class, slept through my second class (after she was done talking about the syllabus).
Kitty Tang: HAHA, LIKE ALWAYS
Kitty Tang: SO YOU BEAT THE NEW FF GAME I ASSUME
Remy Chi Jian Suen: Nope, I didn’t play it much.
Remy Chi Jian Suen: I had various games, anime to watch, code to write, so I had to balance it all out.
Kitty Tang: WHAT A BUSY MAN YOU ARE
Kitty Tang: I GET SOOO SLEEPY AT WORK IT’S NOT EVEN FUNNY
Remy Chi Jian Suen: You should sleep at 0000 like me then.
Kitty Tang: ALMOST FELL ASLEEP DURING MY TRAINING
Kitty Tang: I SLEEP AROUND0030
Remy Chi Jian Suen: lol, my my ~.~
Kitty Tang: I MISS SCHOOL ALREADY
Kitty Tang: WHERE I CAN SKIP WHENEVER I CAN’T WAKE UP

I picked up the raws for true tears and 「 シゴフミ」 when they were released and I’ve been filled with anxiety ever since I watched them. The absence of a subtitled version of these episodes is practically driving me insane. I was so hopeful that I’d be able to watch them before classes began but it seems that fate has different plans for me because I need to be in MC 4042 in less than ten minutes for my STAT 221 class.

I did come to terms with myself yesterday and figured that the delay in their releases is probably caused by karaoke timing issues. Ah, I wish they just didn’t bother with that. I mean, seriously, if you’re going to sing along, I would think that you know the song well enough to not need the help of timed subtitles, right?

Yup, it’s that time again.

true tears (row 1, column 2):
This series will likely sate my thirst for a romance drama this season, replacing the void that I’m left with now that I’ve finished last season’s ef - a tale of memories. and Myself;Youreslf. It doesn’t exactly have the most interesting of premises but Myself;Yourself started out like that too and ended up being quite a surprise so I probably shouldn’t be jumping to conclusions. Since I noted that this will be “replacing” ef, you might be asking if I’m going to blog this one or not. I can’t say for now, obviously, but it is one of the series from this season that are being considered.

俗・さよなら絶望先生 (row 2, column 3):
I laughed so hard when I was watching the first season of this so there really was no question over me making time to watch the second season. I am really more concerned about a group picking this up over it failing to be as awesome as the first season.

PERSONA - trinity soul - (row 2, column 4):
The game’s supposed to be good. And yeah, that’s about all I’ve got to say. I don’t think I’ve watched an anime set in this kind of a setting in a while so it might be a good change of pace. I spotted Mai Nakahara and Takehito Koyasu in the cast, so at least there’s something to look forward to, I suppose.

シゴフミ (row 3, column 1):
The premise is nothing gravely original enough to cry home about and the show kind of reminds me of 「しにがみのバラッド。」, which I didn’t like, so why am I watching this? Suffice to say, I am really watching this purely based on the fact that Kana Ueda is voicing the lead character. Hence, if it ends up sucking, I will not hesitate to set this one aside.

ARIA The ORIGINATION (row 3, column 3):
ARIA is my kind of show. I’ve watched both seasons one and two and its OVA, so why stop now with this season three?

狼と香辛料 (row 3, column 5):
I showed Jacky this series and he said what little of it he read was rather funny so it seems kind of promising. Will Ami Koshimizu and Jun Fukuyama secure another victory at the Seiyuu Awards as they did with their work with Code Geass? Who knows.

Gunslinger Girl Il Teatrino (not featured in the image):
To be honest, I haven’t even finished watching Gunslinger Girl’s first season. But since my brother liked the first season enough to purchase the DVDs, I suppose that it has to be at least somewhat decent. I took his DVDs with me so I’ll probably try to finish the series some time this month and then hop on this bandwagon.

Okay, I didn’t see this one coming. I will however accept this conclusion for Renji and Chihiro’s arc since it’s believable enough given the characters in question. I’m guessing the ending in the game is going to be different because the shock value will be completely lost otherwise.

As a whole, I felt that the ending seemed pretty anticlimactic. Maybe the break-up should have happened in this episode and just have that wrap up the arc instead? The ending “messages” that the characters gave also didn’t seem very meaningful to me. And hey, we never got to found out what the deal was with Himuro and Yuko! All you see is the two meeting up at the church after the ending theme, come on! :(

Looking back at the twelve episodes of ef - a tale of memories., I think it really came through with a very strong script, visually imaginative renditions of scenes (this cannot possibly be emphasized enough), and excellent music. What it seemed to fall short of was the lack of a strong storyline to match its unique characters and its failure to develop all of the characters sufficiently. Himuro and Yuko, anyone? And what about our male leads? We know very little about them compared to what we know about our female leads. Perhaps the real problem here was that ef tried to do too many things at once by telling two stories in twelve episodes?

In essence, if you don’t care too much about the plot and am more interested in character dynamics and their relationships, you should definitely give this one a go. However, if you watch shows because you’d like to see a great story unfold, you might get a feeling of wanting more at the end of the ef.

According to a news post, a team has been formed to bring OpenJDK to the Haiku operating system! You can find the project proposal here.

This is great news and I wish Bryan and his team the best of luck!

Well, the first half of this episode was a little dull, but eh, what can you do? I shouldn’t have been expecting too much since they did say they were going out on a date so it was kind of obvious that nothing was going to happen until the end of the episode (or the one after if it came down to that). Still, the date could’ve been more entertaining. I guess the fact that this couple doesn’t interest me didn’t help. I mean, I like the arc and all, but I just don’t really care for the pairing.

In any case, the ending was certainly quite a twist. I don’t know about you all but I was certainly expecting Chihiro to have died in this episode. At least, if not this one then the next. I was expecting her to kill herself to break off her ties with Renji…but no. I will admit that I think this is more painful for Renji since he has to live on knowing that their relationship cannot be the same as it once was even if they did meet again whereas if she just died…well…she’s dead, there’s not much you’re going to be able to do about that.

So what’s in store for us in the next episode? I really can’t say. Will Renji try and confront Chihiro? Will Chihiro and Himura move elsewhere? Well, probably not, that kind of defeats the purpose of ripping those pages out I suppose? What about Himura and Yuko? Yes, what about those two?

This episode has pretty much wrapped up both Kei and Miyako’s arcs. With two episodes to go, I don’t think they’re going to investigate Kyosuke and Kei’s relationship. It would look way too out of place anyway. I was extremely satisfied by this arc’s conclusion. I don’t know if this was an original ending for the anime or not, but whatever, it was beautifully done. Well played, SHAFT, well played.

The script work in this episode was simply brilliant. I really liked the part where Kei was making a series of statements while Hirono was acknowledging them one by one. The voice acting there was simply brilliant. The violin playing in the background only made that scene even more awesome. I like the Hirono x Miyako pairing and all but this part was simply too good for me to pretend/lie and say that the phone conversation the two of them had at the second half of this episode was better than the one Kei had with Hirono.

So, we are left with two episodes to wrap up Chihiro and Renji’s story here. I think two episodes is more than enough but what about Himura and Yuko’s story? Are they going to be addressed at all? Since they’re skipping out on Kyosuke and Kei’s story, does that mean they’re going to skip out on Himura and Yuko’s too? That would disappoint me greatly if that was the case.