Mega Megane Moé
Hell and Heaven Moéltdown
Posts tagged Kaiji
The 13th Day of Christmas 2008 – and the rest…
Dec 26th
“Well, I’m no demon.
I’ll play with you until morning.”
Yeah, those of you who know me from last year know I’m not much for stopping at just 12 Days of nonstop posting. I’m not sure why. Maybe I’m cocky and want to see how far I can push myself. Maybe I’m an attention whore and want more posts than everyone else. Or maybe I am just really bored during winter break.
In any case, it’s more content for you, continuing with Day 13:
and the rest… – The Moments That Didn’t Make the Cut
Part 13 in the 12 Moments in Anime Countdown
Pretty much from here on out it’s a bunch of miscellaneous lists, much like omo’s absolutely massive list-in-list marvel, in which I shine the spotlight on a few different topics.
Today it’s simple … just some of the things I wanted to devote more tl;dr to, but didn’t. Spoiler-tagged for your non-spoilery convienence:
Akagi 25
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Clannad 22 / Clannad 24 / Clannad AS 5
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Haibane Renmei 13
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Higurashi no Naku Koro ni – Any divisible-by-four episode
Higurashi no Naku Koro ni 16-18
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Itazura na Kiss 14
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Kaiji 14-15 / 20 / 26
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KimiKiss 20
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Kure-nai 6
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Lamune 9-10
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Distinct lack of Nodame Cantabile
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Shana II 15
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Shugo Chara 25
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Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei Zoku 2
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Tokyo Marble Chocolate
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True Tears 10 + 13
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-CCY
Fanime’s Finest (2008) – A rave on Touhou, English visual novels, and zawa zawa
May 28th
It’s been two days since quite possibly the most hectic weekend of my life, and I think I’ve finally shaken off all the sleep deprivation and worn off that tasty mix of adrenaline and insanity, that anime conventions tend to impart upon an otherwise normal person.
As such it’s time to immortalize my first Fanime (do note that the phrase “my first time” has been beaten to death at the convention already) in literary form by going over some of the more entertaining events that made my weekend and my $55 worth it.
Additionally, in the next few days I plan to make a broader coverage of the convention as a whole with more general info and more griping, but until then I’ll stick with the starry-eyed wonder that makes all the seasoned, hardened anibloggers jealous.
It might be perhaps a bit self-indulging in a sense to brag about all the cool stuff that happened, but on the other hand, I hope I can inspire and encourage future entertaining events like this in the future.
OK, yeah, it’s just wankery. But it’s entertaining and hilarious wankery. Trust me. It’s apparently not just a coincidence I was wearing a Cirno shirt around. I make a lot of idiotically awesome stories.
A Month Late, A Couple Million Yen Short: Kaiji, reviewed
May 14th
So what happened?
I posted numerous times on the show, shoved it to the top of the viewing list over and over, gave it a nine – the highest ranking possible – on the ever-important Scale of Condensing A Complex Anime Into A Single Digit Number (aka MyAnimeList). And yet, it takes until a month later for it to finally push its way out of the review queue, where shows I don’t have much to talk about go to die.
It’s not like I was collecting my thoughts on the show.
It’s not like I was rewatching it.
It just simply passed out of mind for a very long time, and that’s something that worries me, because I really did think I enjoyed this show much more than the average show.
This is because, for the uninitiated, this is nowhere near your average show.
This is a show that goes beyond the forces of moe that some claim poison (or at least, run rampant in) today’s anime. There is no moe to speak of, hell, I could probably count on one hand – probably one finger – how many girls even appeared in the show total.
Rather, what Kaiji is, is a ruthless adrenaline rush, both physical and mental. A show all about a sometimes naive, sometimes genius, sometimes emotional delinquent (named Kaiji) who gets himself in all sorts of shady financial debt, and is forced into a series of increasingly implausible, incredible, and intriguing gambles in order to pay it off.
These gambles are great to watch because most of the time they are at least thrill rides which will leave you guessing as to the outcome – don’t take winning for granted in this show – with incredible moments of raw emotion along every twist and turn. On a good day, they are great introspectives as well, as Kaiji ponders the viciousness of human life while getting whipped in a human-vs-human battle of mind and body.
It’s very much a complete package, one that I think deserves a watch by anyone, just because you’re unlikely to see a show like this often amidst more common show archetypes. It drags a bit at times and the noses are awfully pointy, but Kaiji is an injection straight to the heart, which feeds blood to the brain and the masculine regions of the body.
(Manly spoilers ensue after the jump.)
My Show Is Better Than Your Show, March Madness Edition
Mar 5th
There seems to be cries every season about how the cropping of shows is worse than the last, and while this may or may not be true depending on your taste in shows, I’ve always found it hard to be lacking in stuff to put up on the screen every night. This is because while there may not be many standout, my-God-I-need-to-watch-this-now shows in every season there are always plentiful bounties of sleeper hits, things worth trying because someone said it was good, or just plain old shows, enough to ensure that I get continually buried deeper and deeper in a pile of anime I need to catch up on.
Perhaps a large part of it is due to the fact that I enjoy being very easily influenced and thanks to that I can pick up random shows if two or three people say it’s actually pretty good – doubly so if they can nail a weak spot of mine – combined with the fact that I really haven’t seen much, having only been in the anime-watching business for just over a year.
To prove that anime Is Out There – cue the X-Files theme – I’m going to spend a little time tonight going over the majority of my watchlist, instead of the huge specialty posts on a single anime which have been written recently. In case you haven’t figured it out, that’s mostly code for “I want to talk about True Tears, Clannad, and Shana II but am too lazy to unify it in an easy way” with some bonus laughing at other shows added in.
Since it’s March and all and I like to pretend to be hip and knowledgable about sports (Protip: Motorsports yes, sportssports no.), it’s a super special sweet sixteen – ow, my manliness – March Madness-type organization with, you guessed it, sixteen shows on the list. There are in reality a few more but the majority of the extra would consist of “I saw this once, and would kind of keep watching it if there were nothing else to watch,” which explains itself well enough.
To be fair it doesn’t have the mass-voting aspect or the actual sports-related references of the other March Madness anime posts, but, hey, 16 anime, that’s a lot. Read the rest of this entry »
20/20, Perfect Visions: Kaiji
Mar 3rd
Actually, looking back on the 20th episode of Kaiji about a week later, I’ve found that said ‘perfect vision’ seems to be blurring. But undoubtedly, explaining – or, rather, finding out – why will be just as interesting an experience, so here we go.
I think the best way to put it is that Kaiji, the show, has done a good job in putting us, the viewer, in the shoes of Kaiji, the character.
I say this simply because my thoughts regarding the show have mirrored Kaiji’s state of mind as well. When I first saw this episode, I was absolutely, out and out left breathless at Kaiji’s adrenaline-packed mix of fearlessness and insanity. Ten-odd straight posts of “HOLY MOTHER OF~” (paraphrased) over at the AnimeSuki forums seemed to conclude the same.
But now, I’m just wondering where they can go from here, and about the implications of such a shocking event, and how, really, it is sort of a change from what made Kaiji great in the beginning. What always endeared itself to me in the beginning was how it was a show that rode the edge of disbelief masterfully – it was patently ridiculous the way Kaiji got shoved to the wall and promptly came back with all the cutting-edge analytical power of a humanoid interface, but it was great because 1) we liked Kaiji, 2) we hated his enemies, and 3) the kind of mind-manipulation that happened in the early gambles was plausible, especially between two less-than-sound minds.
But episode 20… is it jumping that line of no return? That line between creeping realism and, as wildarmsheero bluntly puts it, shock value?
(Spoilers, spoilers, the magical fruit, the more you read them, the more you…)