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daftman's Blog
- Page 23
On 04/22/2017 at 12:17 PM,
by daftman
Another is a horror/suspense/mystery anime that has a little bit of trouble deciding what it wants to be but is quite good overall. The story focuses on Koichi Sakakibara, a 15-year-old boy who transfers to a new school in a rural Japanese town partway through the year and meets a mysterious girl whose classmates ignore her very existence. Why? And what does she have to do with the tragic death of a student 26 years prior, a death the class at the time refused to acknowledge? The story of Another is hard to tease because the less you know going in, the better. But it features an intriguing premise and likeable characters, so it’s easy to recommend in that sense. The problem, if you can call it that, is that the tone does not stay consistent throughout. The first five episodes skew strongly towards horror while the remainder is much more of a mystery. The problem with calling that a problem is that the tone changes organically as the story develops. It would have felt forced to maintain the horror vibe throughout, but it is certainly effective while it lasts! I should also mention that this is not shock-value horror but rather a creepy unease that settles under your skin. That feeling never truly goes away but it’s more compartmentalized in the second half. (By the way, if you’re scared of dolls, you might not make it through those first few episodes. They use brief flashes of creepy dolls between scenes almost as a subliminal message of terror that is quite effective.)
On 04/01/2017 at 12:05 AM,
by daftman
My last blog was about the treasure trove of anime on Hulu. My enthusiasm has been curbed a little bit with the realization of how they were able to get/afford so much stuff. Very few of the shows are dubbed, even when I know a good English dub exists. When I started watching Another (still two episodes left to go, btw) I discovered it was in Japanese with English subtitles. It's certainly not the first time I've watched something that's subbed and it doesn't bother me. It's a pretty niche show set in rural Japan. An English dub probably doesn't exist, I figured. Even though a little research revealed that one does, it hasn't affected my enjoyment of the show. But there are some series that I don't want to watch subbed. Two of the things I was excited for on Hulu were Cowboy Bebop and the original Dragon Ball, two fairly mainstream anime that have good English dubs, and that's how I'd like to watch them (especially with DB, which has over 150 episodes). So I'm going to need to cull my list of possibilities after some serious consideration. Kind of a bummer but not the end of the world.
On 03/26/2017 at 12:52 AM,
by daftman
I like anime. Let me say that up front. But I've watched very little of it. When I was a kid, one of the local tv stations would sporadically play episodes of Dragon Ball Z and later we got Cardcaptor Sakura and a season of Escaflowne (that's not counting the unusual cases of Pokémon and Digimon). Buying anime was super expensive and we never had cable, so Toonami didn't help me when they started regularly airing cool stuff. I was able to get Akira from the library once. That was an interesting experience. And I torrented everything about Ghost in the Shell in college, later buying legit copies because Stand Alone Complex was just that good. But those were certainly exceptions.
On 03/13/2017 at 10:46 PM,
by daftman
I have never been interested in playing Nier, no matter how much Angelo gushes about it on Nerds Without Pants (sorry, Angelo). So I didn't particularly care when they announced a sequel except why? and Platinum Games? And since then Platinum has put out some contract work that was pretty subpar (e.g., Kora and TMNT), so how would they fare when working outside of their strictly action wheelhouse? Whatever. I have lots of other games to play.
