Hatsune Miku + Corolla = ?

Hatsune Miku is a “vocaloid,” which means, rather than synthetic music, she is a synthetic singer with an unnaturally high pitched voice through the use of a computer program. Being a product from the ground up, she – and the software to “make” her “songs” – has been promoted with great fanfare. Now she is serving as a poster girl for the Toyota Corolla.

I’m not sure who thought this would fly in the American market, but someone decided to give it a whirl. I’m not sure how many people even know who/ what Miku is. (The kanji for “Hatsune” reads as “first sound,” and “Miku” is suspiciously close to the English “mic” but with a cuter pronunciation.)

Anyway, here’s the video from the very much official Toyota web page.

The above is a gameplay video on YouTube showing the first stage of one of the potential main characters in Super Robot Taisen (“Super Robot Wars”) Z the 2nd, on PSP, sequel to SRW Z, on PS2. As usual, new “original” mecha and pilots are used with a wide mix of mecha anime crossover plots, machines, and characters for a lively mix.

The rough version of the above: the main character, whose name reads like “crow” or “claw” in katakana but is probably representing the name Crowe (while giving the aforementioned impressions), is a man with a million G in debt.

(Eat your heart out, Bernacke; Super Robot Wars apparently functions just fine on a gold standard. Ahem. Anyway…)

So, a desperate man down on his luck due to debts left by his father (and the collapse of his father’s company) makes him receptive to an offer that he really can’t refuse: test pilot an experimental combat machine and earn the money to pay off his debts and be a free man. Since Japanese like to express certain figures in units of “man” (万, or 10,000), the “100 man man” means, in our terms, the million dollar man (or at least, the man in debt for that much!).

As one might cynically expect for the first stage of a video game, it’s not quite some little milk run; a bunch of terrorists are attacking the world’s foremost financial group, but Crowe makes it inside and a deal is struck. I don’t want to vouch for what the name of the machine should be yet, but it reads almost like “Blastia” (like in Tales of Vesperia or something).

Anyway, the terrorists go down fast but, in this completely time-space messed up Earth, there’s such a thing as “Dimension Beasts” that show up to cause more death and destruction, but a mysterious “ally” (?) shows up in the form of Wufei from Gundam Wing, complete with the Shenlong Gundam. The rest of what you see in the video is simply the action.

While the tactical map is all traditional portable SRW type 2D, the battle animations are pretty good, and I found the original music to be not bad at all. Gundam Wing’s music has never been hard to listen to for me.

Now, stage 2, below, introduces another element of this strange new world, the Gundam 00 universe’s content. There’s going to be quite a lot of it in this game.

Prior to the stage, you see some “intermission” (in-between “episodes” i.e. game stages) bookkeeping type work to manage the as yet one-bot army at the player’s disposal. This army will greatly expand in the course of the winding plot. However, this next stage isn’t truly about Crowe; it’s mainly a kick-off of the Gundam 00 plot, with Setsuna starring.

The rest doesn’t require any explanation to fans of Gundam 00, so watch and enjoy. I’m finding the music to be represented pretty well here. – J

Oh and, definitely count me among the mecha crowd. I’ve played the predecessor of this PSP game exhaustively. Rather than babble about my experiences, those inclined to see a sampling of the various series and mecha should just watch the video above. Have fun! – J

This is a 60 second video lesson with good looking animals and the Japanese names for them (along with the English, not because viewers are unintelligent, but because it may help provide an audio memory anchor for better remembering). Thanks. – J

This is a little video on Japanese sentence structure, narrated by yours truly, Jeremiah Bourque, as used in my private Japanese tutoring lessons. Thank you very much.