neko’s thinkbox

Want a spoiler?

“Courage” is lost.

Actually, this series wasn’t really high on my Catching up to clearing list. But due to unforeseen circumstances - read: hints and spoilers on twitter - my utmost curiosity was awakened, thinking to myself, “that is impossible“. And now I’m here. But before joining the new conjecture bandwagon fad, I’ll first drop a few comments about the series so far.

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…to either ragequit, experience an endless loop of oversaturation, or see and clear everything, such that there is no need to spend any further thought on it. And I think, the latter finally happened.

My new AT2 favorite. By Hijiri.

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The whole shebang.

Wow. It took me way longer than I had imagined it would, and… I am blown away. It’s been almost one hour since I finished the game, and I still have goosebumps all over my body, still teary-eyed. And listening to EXEC_with.METHOD_METAFALICA/. definitely won’t help it either.

Now that I’ve cleared both Ar Tonelico and Ar Tonelico 2 in roughly 2 weeks, I know I will have a hard time letting go. A very hard time.

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Remember this image? (By the way, I misread the name the first time (Katsura), but already had saved the image... self-explanatory.)

Remember this image?

It is a screencap from Basquash! episode 15, a newspaper reporting the death of Sela’s father. I already noticed yesterday this interesting notice on the lower left part of the newspaper about a certain Catsuka reaching 10 years of existence already. Google told me about a page called Catsuka which is a French anime site. Since the language and the time frame (Catsuka being 9 and a half year old) seemed to match, I was intrigued, and mailed the webmaster of Catsuka, Tsuka, to confirm this relation. And indeed, there is a link between Basquash! and Catsuka that explains this brief cameo. This link is called Thomas Romain, who is none other than the co-creator of Basquash himself.

Thomas Romain, who was the director for the French version of the TV anime Oban Star Racers (2000), is an old regular of Catsuka’s forums. He placed Tsuka in charge of managing the official website of Oban, and had him organize panels on this series for anime cons and expos. With this strong a bond, it is almost self-evident that Catsuka would eventually be referenced in such a great anime that is Basquash!

Read the original announcement of the Basquash Project on Catsuka, which includes an exclusive interview with Thomas Romain himself. (Only in French, though.) There was also a discussion thread in the Catsuka forums, but some lowlife dipshits decided to hack their forums so they are currently inaccessible. I will update this post once more info is available.
– Jul 20: The Catsuka forums are back up. Here is their Basquash thread. (My post is mentioned on page 40! :D)

Well, this makes for a nice trivia! Teaches me to pay more attention to the creators and the staff behind a certain anime series; I tend to omit those a lot these days…

Voices of a Distant Star is a touching story of two lovers separated by space and time.

Well here is my first post in a long time, sorry for the delay!
School is finally out, work has started, and some time has freed up.
I would say it is nice to not have school work, but working 40 hour weeks is just plain boring.

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As I thought, this episode brought absolutely no change to the story and THUS! It’s a boring epilogue - I’ve mainly said it all in my last post, read it you scurvy dogs.

I kinda hated how this episode tried to be all serious and tear-jerking, because, well, it tried to build some kind of suspense within one episode (which incidentally is the last but it probably never occurred to them - which is fine to an extent if you do it right though), but how can you do that if it already feels like an e-pi-logue!! How much must I emphasize it! Seriously, this felt a little rushed.
Especially the über hazukashii serifus that were uttered throughout this entire episode, made me want to scream KINSHI! all along. (Ami almost got it, but she’s waaaay too soft on the KINSHI part.) It felt as if they wanted to pack a ton and a half of morals before kicking the bucket, even though Yuri-chan-sensei rarely approves of it. And it was so incredibly filled with clichés once again, geez. Graduation? Come on, that’s older than animeblogs.

Well, one moral still sticks out: Too much is seldom good. Reflect upon it.

But (and it’s of course the big but that changes everything) it did make me smile (in a genuine kind of way) and laugh a little too, and I usually don’t do that when I’m that negative, so I suppose it was not all that bad either. Well, apart from the meek ending of the story itself. …blah. Minorin FTW and all that, you know. As I said, read here.

Anyway, props to Toradora, great series with “a sour aftertaste”, as a commenter said. I can only agree. This under 200 words? Crud, I’m such a tweetliar.

Oh, and I am sure you can easily recognize which series > this screen < will remind you of. Hint: mouth. Shit, I gave it away. Haha.

Anyway, I will be off to Barcelona in an hour. Got some AC/DC Concert to attend. Rejoice! One week without my stupid comments, how’s that feel? No, wait, sometimes I’m here and I don’t post for three weeks. Argh, dunno. Know what? If I don’t drown in Top Gear/Disagea/Booze pastimes, I’ll come back with a Toaru review. Though I’m not sure I’ll be able to abridge boredom with more boredom. Meh. Cya!