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Posts tagged KimiKiss Pure Rouge
Emperor and Slave: The Mindgames of KimiKiss 22
Mar 12th
Perhaps I’ve compared KimiKiss and Kaiji one too many times for two shows which couldn’t be more opposite in genre and tone, but once again the former surprises me with how much, speaking both outside and inside of the show’s context, it handles itself in a manner that’s almost, if not completely, not unlike that of Kaiji, in how it messes with the outcome and the characters.
Quite simply, in KimiKiss around the halfway mark or so the outcome of the show becomes fairly obvious, although to this episode it’s not set in stone, an issue that has popped up in Kaiji every now and then, when the drama is muffled a bit by the issue of not being able to kill off the main character. It’s not a deal-breaker, given that a lot of the fun in both shows is to figure out how the characters get from point A to point B.
Additionally, KimiKiss offers up a little more unpredictability, but it still would take a bit of insanity to go and argue against the relationships that seem to be developing.
But still, to quote Kaiji himself, “You have to be deviant, or else you can’t kill the devil!”
Whether it be as a viewer or as a character in a show KimiKiss really does almost play out like one long, protracted game of E-Card, perhaps a testament to that game’s representation of society. As the rounds begin to run out on KimiKiss the tension continues to increase almost unbearably, and now with just two episodes left, it’s easy to see who has the advantage, but just as easy to see how the tide could turn in an instant… Read the rest of this entry »
KimiKiss 21: Holding ‘em and Folding ‘em
Mar 7th
Ignoring the fact that I seem to be mixing up two entirely different card games (and neither of the ‘children’s card game’ variety) the action at the final tables in KimiKiss seems to be heating up (or at least, not cooling down) as the final cards begin to play out.
It’s easy to see who are the leaders here but in the world of gambling and of romance it’s easy to turn the tables with just a few shock twists, so don’t get too comfortable yet.
At the Kouichi table it’s been a tough fight between Mao and Yuumi all evening, with Yuumi taking the early lead but losing it late on some unlucky deals, as Mao has come on strong with some excellent strategy. It’s easy to see how her short stack has affected her attack plan, as she’s been letting Mao walk over her all night, and once again she got led into an easy check-raise by Mao, hiding pocket queens to Yuumi’s eight-nine suited with a five-queen-ace rainbow on the table. It’s a huge pot and one that might just determine the fate of this game, and while Mao’s got the clear advantage here it’s easy to see that Yuumi could pull this one in a pinch with an inside straight. Not to mention, we’ll see if one can get the other to fold first…
Over at the Kazuki table Eriko’s been wiping the floor with Asuka all night and going into the next hand it’s going to be near-impossible for Asuka to make a comeback being so far down on chips, but with any luck maybe she can pull out a few wins in order to make it competitive.
We’ll find out when we come back to the World Series of KimiKiss, brought to you by the Udon Association – “At Least It’s Not Those Damned Frogs!(tm)”
(The analogies for KimiKiss, they just keep coming…at least I can speak poker better than politics.)
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: KimiKiss
Feb 27th
You know an episode – or perhaps, a show – is good when your soul is so sufficiently rocked that you can’t come up with a sufficiently interesting one-liner for it, outside of a self-referential, fourth-wall-obliterating, H2O-referencing sentence that seems to drag on and on because no one had the heart to stand up and put an end to the piece of work that’s quickly becoming a paragraph.
But, perhaps more coherently, there’s one thing that’s definitely clear, and that is that the twentieth episode of KimiKiss and Kaiji utterly floored me. I’m not sure if it’s the actual merit of the show or just a logical short-circuiting caused by sheer fanboyism but either way the events that went down in each respective show contributed in massive part to moving the story forward, answering old questions and posing new ones, and that, combined with the sheer emotional rush of each show – one might say, equal and constrasting amounts of moe and gar – made them quite the stand-out pieces.
As such I really couldn’t find a way to combine a summary / analysis of both of them into one coherent post, especially in regards to a unifying topic, so I did the next best thing – create a little mini-series for the two ‘episode editorials’, “20/20 – Perfect Visions”. The 20/20 part is pretty straightforward, being the aforementioned episode number of each series. Perfect Visions sums up my thoughts on each episode, in that they were quite the wonder to see, as well as a pun; if you recall, 20/20 is what is considered ‘perfect vision’.
In all honesty 20/20 is actually just ‘perfectly normal vision’, but from that angle, perhaps you can consider that these episodes aren’t the be-all, end-all, if-you-saw-25-minutes-of-anime-this-year award winners, but rather just relatively fantastic pieces, with a few flaws characteristic to something with less than eagle-eye vision. Then again, being a glasses guy myself, and enjoying KimiKiss and Kaiji a lot, 20/20 isn’t anything to scoff at.
First up of two is KimiKiss, where the metaphoric friction between the main relationships is just beginning to heat up. The two male leads, Kazuki and Kouichi, are coming down to a choice…but will it be them making the decision? Or will the female fighters, or the male spoiler, Kai, have the final say? Paths continue to cross over as time waits for no one…it’s time to take action!
(Psst, 3000 words. I don’t know how I did it either.) Read the rest of this entry »
Super Tuesday, brought to you by KimiKiss (18-19)
Feb 20th
Sometimes it seems that everyone’s favorite high school romance has more in common with American politics than the date of the week where important stuff happens (this being the usual time for the fansub release).
The fight is intensifying on both sides, in this case over the hearts of Kouichi and Kazuki, the male leads, with two vastly different situations shaping up as we come into the closing quarter of the show.
Kazuki represents the Republican party, a battlefield that looked to be intensely fought over in the beginning, but now is just one that’s quickly becoming sparsely populated. Technically there are still multiple candidates left in the field but it would have to take some serious deluding at this point to believe in any other than the one that’s in the lead – with one of the main contenders seemingly dropping out and endorsing a rival, it seems almost a done deal.
Kouichi and the Democratic party has the tougher choice, a straight-up dogfight between two evenly-matched characters that may be similar in viewpoints but worlds apart in appeal. The innocent schoolgirl romantic seems to be the more charismatic of the two as the childhood friend has made a few missteps on the campaign trail but arguably up until recently it was a relative dead heat. Now, however, the pendulum of momentum is really beginning to swing and there’s one that ends up squarely in the lead, barring an unexpected surge.
So, who’s going to take the win? Eriko or Asuka? Mao or Yuumi? Will Kai, the underground favorite, play a role in stealing away hearts? Can the third-party nominations of Hiiragi and Mitsuki do anything other than get laughed at again? All this and more spoilerific commentary after the jump.
(Note: I’m really bad at politics.)