I watched Five Centimeters Per Second (twice, as you may recall), and got about halfway through a dorm screening of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time before the film froze right at one of what I imagine is one of the climatic moments of the film. It’s like an induced cliffhanger … one that’s still going today.

And Honey & Clover, I’m attempting to be a Good Person and wait for Viz to release it, but the more and mroe it looks like it’s not going to happen, the more and more I become less of a good person. Probably, I will give it until I finish or get bored with Bokura ga Ita, since the two seem to fall a bit close in feel.

Uh … I think the response here I need is, SQUEE KANON SQUEE SQUEE SQUEE.

But unfortunately I’ve kind of fallen behind on my Kanonism, and like all religion, it’s quickly becoming something mythical and untouchable. I haven’t watched more than two episodes of Kanon (guess which two) in the last year and yet I still won’t give up on any argument featuring it. It makes specific points hard to argue.

Still, thanks to the wallet-draining magic of RightStuf, I now am the owner of at least four Kanon DVDs (which is the subset in the intersection of the “before ADV asploded” and “ones that were on sale” categories), so a rewatch can definitely be put on the cards, at any time. It may be needed to see if my tastes have changed…although I’ll need some bravery to admit anything there.

Also I need to figure out what to do with a deck of Kanon trading cards and a Shiori light novel. Learning hiragana at the speed of DS homebrew software~

Apparently, it actually is just how it looks, in ‘za-wa za-wa’. So I can’t really figure out what they whisper in every scene when Kaiji is stressed, since it sounds more like “Jiiiii~” (i.e. staaaaare~) than anything else; although you can hear slight zawa-ing going on in the background.

In any case, I ran through Kaiji approximately twice, once alone and once in a crowd, and both times it was large amounts of fun; it works both as a gripping, mentally twisted solo show, and something you can watch almost like a long, overdramatic sports game with friends. I’ll bring the nachos and dip.

I guess I can call this complete, although I’m fairly certain there was word of a second season of Kaiji. It’s coming, I guess. After One Outs, with any luck. I would like to make GARmbling a permanent weekly staple in my anime diet.

After amassing about 500 worksafe images of Nagato in my imagefolder, I realized I was never really going to use more than about 10% of them, and even then only for random header images in posts, so I kind of stopped. And since that was the only reason I went to the Haruhi imageboard at SOS-dan, I kind of stopped with Haruhi fandom too.

But it’s a sentiment I’ve seen around the otakusphere; Haruhi’s next appearance is more likely to be on a milk carton (”Have You Seen This God?”) than in season 2 of the anime. Or, more seriously, there will probably be a couple dozen rather uninteresting games for various consoles.

C’mon, I would rather play Haruhi: The Minigame Collection than Hare Hare Yukai On Wii. And I’m still not dropping ~$180 for a PSP and the Haruhi game for it so I can have a Nagato alarm clock (although I spent around a day searching for a PC version of the clock).

Well, I won’t hold my breath for Haruhi Suzumiya Forever (I think koneko-chan already made that joke), but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to it still. Although, I don’t even remember what it’s about.

I hope they’re still adapting Dissapearance (book 4), as one of the rumors said, since I rather liked that book. After all, I still have the capability to go blind Nagato fanboy on command, even if I don’t have a continually-expanding collection.

Sia. Probably Sia.

My Shuffle! rewatching attempts have gone roughly as abortively as my Kanon ones, although I do actually sport the full six-DVD set; a bit unfortunate, given how RightStuf put them on sale for a ludicrous price (I guess the bonus panties in the box set – no, I’m not kidding – didn’t fly to well).

Then again, I tried watching it with my usual anime-watching group, whose inclination towards fanservice (a trait I certainly didn’t pass to them) was easily demonstrated by their loud pointing out of any breasts or panties Shuffle put on display. And remembering that the first half of the show is straight-up fluff, that’s a lot.

And for the same reason, I can’t really be driven to rewatch it alone, especially when I’m behind on pretty much every single show in the history of mankind.

The same march of time that has fogged my mind’s memories of Kanon has pretty much obliterated any of the minor details of Shuffle; so I can really select Sia as one of two girls I don’t remember as just one phrase (Kaede: “yandere, WAH’s whore”, Nerine: “huge”, Mayumi: “needs route translation nao”, Primula: “not a loli”). Asa’s a fairly good character too, since she reminds me of Otoha, or a lesser Minori (Toradora), but eh, she’s got enough love, right?

Well, Mission-E, the second season of Code-E, is turning out rather fine, if I say so myself.

I haven’t finished it; one of my main weaknesses with ’simple’, fluffy shows is that I have little motivation to continue watching it, compared to more dramatic shows that leave me hanging. On the plus side though, these shows are always there for me; they’re easy to pick up and continue, and offer nice, relaxing watches.

Such a mindset even applies in a show with relatively high amounts of action, like this one; it’s not complex action, after all. Mission-E is really a show you can have fun with, instead of having to break your mind analyzing; which is what I end up doing in every other show.

Just how Mission-E will turn out in the end, I’m not sure; after all, it took Code-E until the end to fall on its face. But I have hopes that it will work out; the character set is strong and it looks like the storyline is finally covering all the characters from the first season.

And, well, Clannad is still continuing. I guess I didn’t quite see the After Story thing coming; although I’m rather glad that it did. Although I didn’t play the visual novel, it seems that the story of Clannad is absolutely enormous, continuing beyond the standard ’school life’ stuff and into what we term the real world of adult life.

And I definitely appreciate it for such; although the adventures of Tomoya, Nagisa, and crew were funny, cute, and emotion-invoking in their basic form, the perspective After Story allows (once you get past the initial, sort of mediocre arcs) is somewhat one-of-a-kind.

Clannad has been a rollercoaster as a result, in both senses of the word; the quality has veered back and forth, especially depending on your opinion of side characters and gym locker rooms, and it’s thrown down a few emotional gauntlets as well. And from the looks of it, there are more to come. Lots more.

Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei is in much the precarious position as Mission-E, being a show which doesn’t leave much impetus to watch; although amusingly and ironically enough, it’s much more intensive than Mission-E.

Although, it’s for a different reason than most mindscrew anime; Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei is a brain-killer to watch, but it’s out of a mixture of sheer crack and reference overload.

Such a property makes it equally great for when I’m feeling out of my head, and just need a minddump of ADHD insanity to spin down the gears. As such, I’ve enjoyed Zetsubou Sensei in the few times I’ve watched it this year; I still haven’t per se finished the second season, but they’re queued for whenever I feel completely mindless.

All I remember is the general consensus that the second season sucked. It was probably fairly close to the truth; I remember watching, way back when, about 4 episodes of Okawari, before stopping. Whether it was out of General Lack of Compulsion to Watch Things Like This, or out of disgust at the quality of the show, I can’t remember.

Still, I have fond memories of the first season, at least, which is why I’m looking forward to the third season, with some simple tips for the production team: more sisters, more traps, more Ninomiya-kun. It should work fine.

Like Haruhi, my fire for DNAngel has understandably cooled in the approximately three years or so it’s been since I first came in contact with the manga and anime. Although I still have a few of the songs from the anime on my playlist, more or less I have become completely disengaged with the franchise, to the point where I can’t be arsed to go find the easily accessible scans of the manga which has suddenly begun running again.

I mean, I was at the library sifting through books at a sale of discards, and I saw the 11th volume of the manga in English, for only a dollar. I put it back in the box.

Maybe if it was one of the earlier volumes – for I always felt more in touch with the stories of Daisuke and Riku than whatever Argentine rubbish they’re throwing around – it would have been different. But recursive nostalgia, how I am fondly remembering only the old parts of an old series I am tryign to fondly remember, isn’t exactly a good sign in itself.

My prescribed medicine, as for all problems I have, is a rewatch (or rather, reread). The issue, as always, is time.

Oh, Marmalade Boy, now that’s old school.

And honestly I don’t have much to say of this, given that I only watched it at the beginning of last year; my library continues to only have the first box set of four – remember, this is a massive series of around 70 episodes – and so I’ve only experienced the first 17 episodes. Only, I know.

There’s not much to remember, at least at this point, I discussed with a friend while at the above book sale, the evolution of shoujo, at least in our eyes. Marmalade Boy to us was one of those manga (and anime, by extension) that is good in memory, but maybe not good in reading. It flares up on the dramatic end of the scale of shoujo, which is rather dramatic-skewed to begin with.

In terms of new and old shoujo, I’m slowly mellowing my tastes away from dramatic love dodecahedrons like this; Bokura ga Ita seems a good, moderate mix (although that may just be the passive, always-moderated voice of Nana speaking). And Kare Kano, probably does fly a bit on the dramatic end when you get into the deeper parts of the manga, but the top layer, of two people looking to find their true selves (hello, Shugo Chara, I should mention), just appeals to me more.

My final judgment for now is that I’m probably not buying Marmalade Boy any time soon, but I would grab it from the library if it ever shows up.

At this point you may note that my 12 Days posts are beginning to fold in on themselves in a sort of painful repetition where I repeat many of the same topics over again.

And although I would like to wax more poetic on KimiKiss and Higurashi in some form or another, I shall hold myself back until I watch the respective OVAs for these series. Maybe then I will have new thoughts in addition to the praise already offered in these two posts.

Heck, it’d be a challenge to say “School Days” with a straight face, especially in the way it ruthlessly parodied itself in its two OVAs (if I count correctly – Valentine Days and Magical Girl Kokoro).

Of the two, neither were particularly standout. School Days was probably only really compelling for the ruthlessly horny nature of Makoto Itou and the twenty-odd girls he did the dirty with (one may want to keep count in a future rewatch – was Kotonoha ever even included in that list?), in addition to the infamous-for-all-eternity-like-it-or-not ending. If you just had the characters by themselves in a simple love story (i.e. remove the cheating and the violence), School Days would be rather plain. Although I wonder whether it would be the same story at all.

But Kokoro-chan and Valentine Days sort of flopped, mainly because they leaned on their memes rather hard instead of throwing in any particularly large amount of new or funny content; I had more than a few laughs, and even at the Nice Boat moments (like the sea of blood at the end of Kokoro-chan) … but in the end, School Days needs to stay down. It works well enough – in a shocking, ridiculous, WTF way – as it is.

Uh … it still exists? Shira Oka, as with most things developed by a small team very few people have heard of, is taking its sweet time in being created. Although, such a thing is not always bad – one can hypothesize that Okashi Studios is busy putting quality into this TokiMemo-esque visual novel, after all.

And there have been decided signs of life, no matter how meager, for Shira Oka, so it’s definitely not vaporware – or at least I believe so.

In addition, they had a minor presence at Fanime 2008, holding a panel to discuss and demonstrate the game, and it looked functional, for sure. It’s been a while since I played a visual novel, but it looks professional – at least more so than the doujin efforts, understandably. ‘Twas entertaining to watch, since I remember being in a turbulent emotional state before the conference and in a quite upbeat state after. A healing visual novel in a meta sense. (I can’t actually speak for the tone of the game yet, though.)

Well, news has been sparse, but if a release ever comes on the cards, you bet I’ll let you all know.

Have I? I don’t know. Running probably about half a minute in length, they’re pretty hefty, even by the usual magical girl standards, moreso if the show decides to transform half the guardians at once (insert laughing at Tadase’s fabulous transformation here).

What is certain though is that I’ve still got at least some vested interest in Shugo Chara, in some way, shape, or form. I’m preventing myself from getting spoiled through the internet or the manga, which for me means that I still want to watch the anime.

I’m just at the end of season one (i.e. non-Doki, circa 50), and haven’t seen an episode in about a month. But I found it comes in phases; after slowly trickling my way up to the Utau fight in 43 and then putting the show off for a few months, I spammed Shugo Chara for a weekend to ‘catch up’ (although I’m still behind). I think such a marathon would be beneficial again sometime soon, especially since I found a close friend of mine is beginning to follow Shugo Chara.

After all, despite all the filler, it still is a top-grade magical girl show, one that harkens back to the old school.

I guess I must have been pretty tired when writing the original post, given that I got the timeframe wrong (it’s actually 13 hours), but I can understand the feeling, given the multi-paragraph response to every resolution.

I feel like I’ve waxed poetic (or linked to waxing poetic) for ef more times than I care to know about over the last 18 days or so, and while I’d much like to do more, I’m sure your eyeballs will forgive me if I do not at this moment.

I also want to put off any more ranting until I rewatch, probably the entire 24 episodes of both seasons, which is rather ambitious but very worthwhile given the raw emotional power and the many artsy secrets and deeper meanings of the show. It’s, ironically enough, probably a higher priority than some of the anime I haven’t even seen yet.

I guess, ef is my new Kanon, in that sense. The god of this world.

OK, so I still haven’t touched my Cardcaptor Sakura DVDs – partially because I’ve got things like school to contend with, partially because they’re low-quality foreign-subbed probably-pirate DVDs, and partially because there are a million different awesome forms of Cardcaptor Sakura to consume now, including the old R1s, the remastered Japanese version, and very soon, blu-ray.

Yeah, Blu-Ray Cardcaptor Sakura. I don’t understand why, but it’s still awesome.

Still, the fact that I walked into the kids’ section in library and checked out half the Cardcaptor Sakura manga (the Sakura Card half) is probably a sign that I still want to Remember Love. The manga will be a good catalyst, being marginally quicker than the 70-episode anime; maybe then, I will be inspired, to do and watch great things.