You Don’t See This Every Day

Actually, this is a crossover with Nobunaga’s Ambition, a venerable wargame series out of Japan, but that’s niche stuff. The kind of niche I’m into, mind you. The people are similar, though: it’ll be Oda Nobunaga, Akechi Mitsuhide, Oichi, Takeda Shingen… with pokemon. Holy cow. 

Anyway, it’s a crossover I never expected to see. The famous generals, along with Oichi who never took a battlefield in her not-so-charmed life in real life (I think), will be shown in a more anime-like vibe as shown in the picture above. For a much larger one, you’ll need to go to the Japanese website. Apparently Oichi will be the first personage figured in a series of short manga stories that will run six volumes long. That’ll be a webcomic starting on the 16th of this month (March) according to what I read on that site.

I’ve played Pokemon games in the ancient past, but I’d long lost track of the franchise. (I also never came close to finishing the first.) Tossing in famous warlords is a new spin on this and might make it very amusing indeed. I might even want to play such a thing. Time will tell, but this is one of those crazy things you don’t see every day. – J

This One Won’t Bite

You’ll want to click on the video above and see this amazing robot in action. It’s meant to emulate how a snake moves on ground – and in water, the latter being quite remarkable as a visual display.

…Wow.

Straight from “Oh my GOD!” territory comes this story from Popular Science magazine, detailing nekomimi (lit. “cat ears”) that rise and flatten out on command from human brainwaves. A video is posted after the break.

Note: It’s nekomimi. neko = cat

Incidentally, the first thing I thought of was:

Tabane Shinonono, genius inventor and all-around flake of the series Infinite Stratos.

They alter to reflect her mood.

Japan. Bringing anime to real life. – J

Just follow the link and look over all the details. Screenshots detailed here. This sort of thing just tends to defy any sort of intelligent commentary. Just go look, read, and gape in awe and wonder. Seriously, what do you think? Totally awesome? Run-in-terror strange? Combination of the two? It’s hard to know how to react to something like this. – J

Known as スーパーロボット大戦 or Super Robot Taisen in Japanese, this franchise goes back to rather ancient gaming times and continues haltingly into the modern era.

What The Heck Is A Super Robot?

For Americans and other non-Japanese, let me explain this in terms that should be easy to understand.

Voltron. Super Robot.

In other words, not realistic.

So, this creates the issue of what is a so-called real robot? (This is Japanese loan word slang, as will quickly become obvious.)

Veritech. Real Robot.

As in, a realistic robot, not a “real world” robot!

This is Super Robot 101.

Western gamers shorten this to the acronym SRW, and to save time and ease reading, I will do so as well.

For the Japanese anime aware, yes, I am WELL AWARE that the above are “GoLion” and “Valkyrie Fighter” in the Japanese versions. Who do you think I am?… But to explain to the uninitiated, such departures are necessary.

Crossover Mecha Gaming

All but extremely limited and rare offshoots of these games are turn-based strategy games involving statistical formulas and player strategy as one army faces off against one (or more) opposing armies. Rather than purely men (and women), these battles are fought with mecha, which is Japanese jargon for a machine (from: mechanical).

In other words, they include what one would identify as a robot specifically (something with humanoid features) as well as things which are not traditional robots, but which nonetheless fit within the context of “robot wars.”

The single great defining feature of the series, however, is that it is an anime crossover game series. By crossover, I mean that the games draw upon characters (and mecha) from a diverse cross-section of mecha anime, ranging from the realistic (i.e. Gundam) to the apocalyptic and incredible (i.e. Evangelion).

Essentially, I eat these games for breakfast.

SRW games are one most challenging type of games in existence for he (or she) who wishes to read Japanese natively. The dialog ranges from the ridiculous, to the insanely colloquial, to the extremely technical, including specialized military jargon. Through it all, the language is peppered with loan words.

Well, it took me a long time to get up to the speed required for them, but it is nonetheless one way I keep my unconventional reading and listening skills sharp.

Recognize any...?

Super-Deformed Mecha

As you can see from the picture, mecha in the “super deformed” style is basically… big head, squished body, which creates a “deformed” body style.

Originally, the use of SD (Super-Deformed) mecha was because the primitive systems SRW games were on had to be this way to fit within memory constraints. Later, it became an issue of economics: studios like Sunrise (creator of Gundam and many other franchises) license SD likenesses of its properties at half the price of full size versions (or so I have heard).

Thus, by using SD models, the creator (Banpresto, derived from Bandai, the toy company behemoth) can unleash a massive army of mecha, and their associated characters, upon a large niche gaming market.

North America: Original Generations Only

Thanks to licensing hell from so many varied properties, the legal challenges of bringing these games to North America have scared everyone off from even trying, except for one.

Original Generations uses the Banpresto “original” (i.e. not appearing in an outside created anime) characters, which means Banpresto owns all the rights, which means, no licensing hell. However, only the Nintendo Gameboy series versions (mainly for the dual screen version, or NDS) have been brought to America. A PS2 version mashing together Original Generation 1 & 2 was released in Japan.

I own that game, and it’s not bad.

Anyway, we can no longer say that originals haven’t appeared in anime. That’s what the Original Generations anime, seasons 1 and 2, are all about, based on the first and second games, respectively.

The image at the top of this article is a Gespenst, one of the oldest “original” mecha used in the SRW series.

A Massive Source Of Dialog

Besides the encyclopedic data in the games themselves (and I’m not kidding – there’s an in-game mecha and character encyclopedia in every console version dating years back), there’s a huge amount of in-game dialog, particularly during battle animations where the results of the statistical foolery play out before your eyes with background music (BGM, BGM’s) playing and voice actors (seiyuu) speaking these lines as they appear at the bottom of the screen. In ancient console versions, and all portable ones, this written text is all you get, but for console versions – including ports – you get voice, too.

The sheer entertainment value of this is incredible, even if the general technology level of these games is at the lower end of the scale in general.

Cultural Value

Essentially, SRW is a gateway drug to more mecha anime, and introduced me, personally, and quite a lot of gamers to anime which they have not seen before, but would like to (largely as a result of seeing the content in these games).

Blogging Value

The reason I write these words is so that, in the future, I can simply link back to this post and people can get an explanation of what the broader subject is when I discuss, oh, “and in SRW Z, this unit is great to use) or something like that.

Put bluntly, I am capable of an embarrassingly large degree of highly detailed babble about things arising in this game series, and relating to anime appearing in these games, that I wanted to give people some kind of heads up about it.

At any rate, there’s an incredible amount of non-traditional language education that can be derived from my gaming, and rapid-fire reading, experience gleaned from these games, and that has value to me as a blogger.

So there.

This requires a little explanation. While the term “Lolita” must necessarily hail from the famous novel, the gist is reversed in this context. Rather than little girls dressing like adults, this far more frequently involves older teens/ young women dressing like young teens.

Specifically, girls wearing Victorian style costumes evoking a mix of nuances.

What It’s Not: Sweet Lolita

So-called Sweet Lolita fashion is deliberately evocative of porcelain dolls, which typically have pastel colored, cute and innocent looking clothing. Any Victorian influences are used only in these sorts of colors, like pink (shown right.)

Makeup is also used to accentuate the effect: that of the child fantasy. That is, a child’s fantasy of a prettier, dolled-up version of herself.

Given that many Japanese girls are rather short, even many adult women can get away with this sort of thing far better than women in the West might manage to do. It’s still not exactly common.

Bring In The Goth

Gothic Lolita fashion is, as one might expect, a deliberately counter-cultural phenomenon protesting against the so-called Gyaru (read: gal) fashion craze that brought Japanese youth fashion in line with American concepts (blue jeans, short skirts, etc.) and which still echoes throughout fashion.

Put another way, this is for girls who wanted to go radically against the grain of “American Casual,” punk, and other mainstream youth styles.

The main distinguishing feature of Gothic Lolita is the use of darker make-up and clothing (shown left). The use of crosses to accentuate the look and feel is probably borrowed straight from existing Western Gothic styles.

While the style can be used by younger teens, it is just as likely to be used by older teens to look like, well, middle teens with wildly ornate, loudly black clothing compared to what is considered normal.

Cosplay (Costume Roleplay)

The term cosplay will be familiar to many who are already in-depth about anime. Read as either costume play or more appropriately, costume roleplay, this is simply the best Japanese term available for what we would call dressing up in English. Innumerable niches exist in Japan for various costume styles, all of which seem to have someone willing to dress up in a given outfit (whether this is wise or not).

For Westerners, dressing up as a “GothLoli” (or Goth-Loli) might be considered cosplay. For girls in Japan who in no way take the fashion seriously, it might be temporary cosplay to them. For instance, someone could easily put on an outfit like this just for Halloween, promptly forgetting its existence the next day.

For others, it is a sustained protest against fashion norms. Well, more power to them.

Anime Influence

Along with other styles of Lolita clothing, GothLoli is used to evoke a sense of breaking outside the norm in more than a few works of Japanese animation (i.e. anime). Victorian clothing, more broadly, evokes an ornate style that exceeds the modern norm in terms of attention to detail, style, and visual effect.

This makes the effect ideal for standing out, as demonstrated by the top picture, showing Sae from the romance video game inspired Amagami SS, currently airing. This is Sae’s last episode as the featured girl; all six girls from the original video game have their own “arcs” as if the other arcs did not exist, to allow for four-episode romantic fantasies.

Certainly, fantasy is the real theme of this.

Origin: Visual Kei Music

Visual Kei, which should be quite literally read as Visual Style, uses elaborate make-up, costumes, etc., to sell various kinds of Japanese rock music (including punk and heavy metal). Many androgynous-looking male leads are also featured.

It’s easy to see the Western influence, but it’s safe to say that Gothic Lolita is yet another form of living art that is a modern segment of Japanese culture.

A Series That Embraces The Crazy

“Asobi ni Iku Yo” is one of a certain style of recent anime that embraces all manner of cliche “anime content” – in this case, we have an a) alien b) catgirl c) with vivid proportions, and she’s just the start of it – and taking things several steps further to create something zany, but entertaining.

Production values for this show, well… extremely high is the best way to put it. The opening theme’s CG water effects look like they belong in a movie, not on television. They’re flaunted in the show itself a bit but, someone’s being paid some really good money for that.

Oh, the characters are quite amusing too, in most cases. Honestly I don’t go for the catgirl thing nearly as much as the “real girls” in the show, aside from maybe the title character because she has a nice personality to go with it, but fortunately, we get to see a lot of the other girls, particularly in this episode.

It’s a bit tough to just start with the first episode to catch people up, so instead, I want to put behind a spoiler space something that is particularly crazy in this episode: totally silly, laughable, and to this viewer and writer, really entertaining. Also a bit ecchi, frankly. It’s amazing how close to the line they can walk things and still air it on TV.

Spoilers Here: show

Anyway, if you want to know whether to watch this show or not, I think that pretty much sums the pros and cons up both ways.

Ja ne! (Later!) (Japanese: じゃね！)

Authentic native Japanese people had no earthly clue what this was either.

Having cleared this up, I wish to elaborate that this was a stunt pulled by an “adult department store.” That’s adult as in, not safe for kids, I do believe.

Sometimes weirdness has to be put into a little context…

Thanks for reading!