So... somehow... the producers of Arslan Senki actually hired a MALE seiyuu, Yuusuke Kobayashi, to play 14-year-old Middle Eastern Prince Arslan and not a female seiyuu.
I'll admit I was totally surprised when I looked up who played Arslan. I was thinking whoever voiced Arslan would naturally be female - the voice was husky and slightly hoarse just like Romi Paku and Junko Takeuchi.
Instead, it's... a guy.
Why is this remarkable? Here's why.
This is Al from Fullmetal Alchemist.
This is the seiyuu who played him, Aaron Dismuke.
He was twelve years old then. And then this happened.
In other words, he grew up and his voice changed.
This is generally why shonen heroes are played by female seiyuu. Their voices are set - they won't change. They can keep voicing pre-teen boy characters forever.
I'm not sure if I'm impressed or alarmed by Yuusuke Kobayashi's voice as Arslan, because he sounds like a female playing a young boy, and I'm not sure this is supposed to happen given that Kobayashi is, in fact, actually male. Watch Arslan Senki and see if you don't agree. XD
I bought something a few months ago that was pretty atypical for me.
I should explain first that I’m not a gamer – truly. The only games I was ever decent at were Galaga and Tetris. If my character has a machine gun and has to kill zombies, the zombies will eat her first. I’m not adept at action games where you have to move a character around and make her/him do things.
But I have two young friends who are gamers. One works in the game industry. We’ll call him Ryan, because that’s his name. ;-) The other is Yumeka, who writes a popular anime blog you've probably read. =D
Both Ryan and Yumeka own Nintendo 3DS XL portable game consoles. After watching them play, I decided to buy one of my own.
And here it is.
The machine is plain black, but I bought this nice golden Asian-themed metal case for it.
Even though I’d watched Yumeka and Ryan play on their 3DS XLs, I was clueless when I bought mine. Still am in many ways. More on that below. =D
So, here is the home screen:
How did I support the anime industry with this purchase? Because there are anime-themed video games available for the 3DS (actually, there are more available for the Sony Vita, but I digress). And in April, I bought one – the Hakuouki - Memories of the Shinsengumi game.
I saved money by buying the download of the game instead of the cartridge, which I found out I could do while browsing the Nintendo eShop. ;-)
Hakuouki – Memories of the Shinsengumi is a visual novel game. The game opens with a very nice song and a montage of the various characters. Here’s Saito:
Previously, my only familiarity with visual novels were the clips I’d seen on You Tube. Here’s one for the Hakuouki - Demon of the Fleeting Blossom game. It’s not too clear, but I just wanted a short clip to show the general idea of visual novels:
Basically, a visual novel is a kind of walk-through of a story utilizing pictures and captions. Visual novels are very popular in Japan, but I don’t think games like this are produced in the U.S. I could be wrong about that, though.
I’m a huge fan of Hakuouki the anime. But I need to say something about this game.
So far, I’ve only played through part of the prologue. If you’ve seen the anime, this is the first episode where Chizuru arrives in Kyoto and gets chased by vampire samurai.
She arrives, it’s nighttime, she thinks about her missing father who she came to Kyoto to find… she thinks some more about her father… why she hasn’t heard from him for a month, how worried she is about him… and then…
… A vampire samurai appears! Chizuru hides and watches while other samurai kill him!
And then she thinks about how frightening this is… and how scared she is… and how she doesn’t know what she’ll do next… and… and…
Are you getting the sense of what my experience has been so far? I honestly was excited to get this game and start playing it. I’ve played it for about 40 minutes now, and those 40 minutes turned out to cover – wait for it – the first seven minutes of episode 1 of the anime.
I'm not going to judge based on this first experience with it. I haven’t gotten to any of the “paths” yet, each path being Chizuru choosing a different Shinsengumi love interest, that is the heart of the game. Plus, the game offers other things like Media, Encyclopedia and Extras that I haven’t even looked at yet.
I had heard that each path of a visual novel takes hours, but I didn’t believe it. I believe it now - trust me. The question is: does a visual novel do what it’s supposed to do? Is it, in fact, entertaining?
Again, I’m still at the beginning of this game, so I can’t answer that yet. I can say that the story captions, while written in (thankfully) good English and easy to follow, became tedious to read after a while. The illustrations were lovely, the sound effects added realism to the story, all was as it was supposed to be. The only confused element was the player, me. Was clicking through the narrative “playing” this game? Or was I meant to do something more?
The beautiful elegiac Hakuouki anime series I love so much was based on this game. The game came first. Which is food for thought, especially since I’m a writer. It piques my curiosity. What is the appeal of this form of storytelling?
When I’ve been through all the paths in the game, I’ll write a review. It might be a few years from now though, at this rate. ;-)
I guess I’ve been on a gaming roll, because I then downloaded two games for my Amazon Fire.
Sonic Dash is my first experience with Sonic the Hedgehog. I’ve heard of Sonic for years, but never watched the anime or played the games.
(I have read a fan essay that slashed Sonic the Hedgehog and Shadow the Hedgehog together. I’m saying this just so I can mark “yaoi” as a label for this post. LOL)
As I said, I’m not good at action games. All Sonic does in this game is run madly along a road where he has to jump over obstacles. I keep sending Sonic headlong into brick walls and into bodies of water where he drowns. I’m slowly getting better, but I’m guessing that games like this were not destined to be my forte.
The second game I downloaded is the exceedingly sparkly and pretty…
Yumeka showed me Frozen Free Fall on her phone. I saw it while browsing Amazon’s app store and downloaded it. Amazingly, both it and Sonic Dash were free. I guess these free games exist to advertise the companies’ paid games.
I do okay at puzzle games, though I won’t win any competitions. And Frozen Free Fall is really beautiful to look at, which adds to the enjoyment of playing it.
I also received two free games for my 3DS, both Pokemon games - Pokemon Shuffle and Pokemon Rumble World.
Pokemon Shuffle is a simple puzzle/aim-and-capture-the-Pokemon game, but Pokemon Rumble World sends Pikachu and other Pokemon characters out to fight enemies.
I had difficulty maneuvering Pikachu in Rumble World until Ryan showed me that the round rubber button on the console’s upper left slides. I had been pressing down on it, really hard, expecting this to move Pikachu around.
Yeah. Real gamers have no reason to fear me anytime soon. =D
Here finally, and only a month late… my Spring 2015 Watchlist!
I have quite a few carryover series from winter, so I wound up adding just two new series… well, three if you count the return of an old standby.
First, the two completely new ones.
Kekkai Sensen, with the clunky English name of Blood Blockade Battlefront, is set in a fantastical future New York City.
A rift in time-space – I think – it’s hard to tell, because the series’ premise isn’t explained too clearly, but – a rift of some kind has occurred and the Big Apple is now co-inhabited by humans and creatures from another dimension.
Our hero Leonardo Watch has a mysterious superpower lodged in his eyes.
Young Leonardo joins a group of other humans with superpowers who fight… something, I think it’s criminal creatures, but there appears to be a larger and more sinister movement working behind the scenes.
Despite the vagueness of the set-up, Kekkai Sensen is a lot of fun to watch. One of the humans in Leonardo’s group is Zapp Renfro.
Zapp is played by Kazuya Nakai, who chews the scenery and is obviously having great fun playing the character.
Leonardo is played by Daisuke Sakaguchi, which seems appropriate. Sakaguchi plays Shinpachi in Gintama, another anime where humans and aliens live in the same city with the culture and species clashes you’d expect from that.
I’ve watched the first three episodes, and so far my only complaint is that there’s not much consistency from episode to episode. Episode 1 was a wild ride, episode 2 was pretty much more of the same, but episode 3 was a closed room type of episode featuring Leonardo’s boss, an understated and not terribly interesting character.
Whereas episode 1 featured a crazed character I fell in love with instantly, Femt. But we haven’t seen Femt since episode 1.
Femt is fey and screams a lot and I found him totally hysterical. He’s played by Akira Ishida, of all seiyuu. I looked forward to seeing Femt in episodes 2 and 3 but he seems to have disappeared from the show.
Regardless of the unevenness of the series, I’m probably going to stick with Kekkai Sensen.
Arslan Senki, or The Heroic Legend of Arslan, is set in a fantasy medieval-era Middle East and tells the story of a young prince who loses his kingdom.
I gave the series a try for one reason: Hiromu Arakawa did the art.
According to MyAnimeList, Arakawa did the manga adaptation of Yoshiki Tanaka’s novel series, which I think means she also wrote the manga story (text and dialogue).
Arakawa is a fantastic storyteller. I loved Fullmetal Alchemist mainly for the story. Her art is good, but her character design has never grabbed me – well, except for Roy Mustang. ;-)
But here, wow.
And these two aren’t the only beautiful characters – there are others coming up.
The story has held my interest so far, even though it’s not Arakawa’s. I haven’t read the background on the Arslan Senki manga to find out why Arakawa chose to adapt someone else’s story. I can only assume Tanaka’s story impressed her that much.
If the great Hiromu Arakawa decided to spend time she could’ve used to do an original manga to adapt this one instead, I have to believe Arslan Senki’s story is going to prove worthy of her faith in it.
The old standby that has returned is, of course, Gintama.
The first five episodes of the new season had a lot of toilet humor, and I found myself rolling my eyes more than laughing.
But OMG, today’s episode. XD
Episode 6 (or 271, if you’re counting from the first season =D) featured a reunion of Gintoki with his old Joi rebel buddies, the dense-headed but lovable Katsura, and Sakamoto, Gintoki’s businessman friend with the loud deranged laugh.
About halfway through, the episode morphed into a Kuroko’s Basketball crossover (yes, insane things like this happen all the time in Gintama). The man who secretly set up their reunion turns out to be “Kurokono Tasuke,” a shadowy figure who helps from behind the scenes.
The name is a double play on words, for Kuroko no Basuke (Kuroko’s Basketball), and for Kuroko’s special ability in the series. He’s a player who assists by his sneaky passes and maneuvering behind the big players on the team. “Tasuke” means “to assist” in Japanese.
I couldn’t stop laughing. The best thing is that it’s a two-parter and next week’s episode has Gintoki and the others as the Generation of Miracles, Kuroko’s Basketball style.
The continuing series I’m watching are Naruto Shippuuden, Sailor Moon Crystal, I Can’t Understand What My Husband Is Saying, and of course Kuroko’s Basketball. The push to publish my novel The Hunt consumed most of my waking moments this past month, so I’m behind on all of them except Kuroko. I’m looking forward to getting caught up.
