Category Archives: anime

Four Concealed Triples Contain Ten Times As Many Perils

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Almost a year ago, I wrote about how glad I finally was to achieve a San An Kou, or Three Concealed Triples, in mahjong. It is a hand where you manage to draw three sets of 3-of-a-kinds all on your own. When I first got the San An Kou, it felt like an eternity before I was able to achieve one. What I didn’t know was that getting its beefier older sibling would take a lot longer.

This is Suu An Kou, or Four Concealed Triples, and is highlighted in Saki episode 10, where perennial newbie Senoo Kaori mistakenly refers to it as a “Riichi Tsumo Toi Toi (All Pungs as the subs put it),”a hand which would be worth significantly less if you took her words literally. Like the Kokushi Musou and the Sho Suushi, it is a Yakuman and therefore one of the strongest hands in mahjong, possessing enough killing power to end the game in one shot. It is also significantly more powerful than the San An Kou, and to give you a basic idea of the sheer disparity, you could get six San An Kou in a single game and it still might not be worth as much as a single Suu An Kou.


Oh Kaori, this is why Sub and I made you our mascot for our mahjong panel.

Like all Yakuman, it is an exceedingly rare hand, and what I’ve begun to find interesting about Yakuman in general is that they can often be rare for entirely different reasons. While the Kokushi Musou is difficult to obtain because it is a hand that cannot be anything but a Kokushi, and the Sho Suushi similarly rare because the tiles in it are always valuable to someone at the table (and thus there is a very good chance that someone will hold onto them), the prospective Suu An Kou seeker faces yet another issue, one that I would simply call “temptation.”

Imagine that there was a 0.1% chance for you to win $1,000,000, no questions asked. So of course you take the opportunity, but as you move closer and closer to that cold million, another sign pops up:  “Go for $100,000 instead and your chances of gaining a cash prize go up to 50%!” Then another flashes in giant neon letters, “$200,000, 25% chance to win!” Similar deals continue to pop up over and over again and try as you might, you can’t seem to block them out of your mind. What should you do?

In a situation like that, I wouldn’t look down on anyone who settles for less. Hell, I would probably abandon the million myself, but that’s essentially the obstacle that stands in the path of those who seek the Four Concealed Triples. Along the way to getting that Yakuman, you are continuously enticed by hands that, while not nearly as majestic as the Suu An Kou, can still be quite good, and to ignore those hands is almost as insane as ignoring a 50% chance to get 100 grand for a 0.1% chance at a million. Here, the biggest obstacle is that you are constantly being steered away by appeals to your rationality and common sense, and when your aim is to take huge risks, that is perhaps the most dire threat of all.

Of course, the probabilities I’ve given are in no way accurate to actual mahjong, but I think they give you a fair picture of it. Call it embellishment for dramatic effect.

Shounen Opening Pattern

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Recently, after years away from the Naruto anime, I decided to check out a few recent episodes of the second series,  Naruto Shippuuden. Watching the opening, I saw the Konoha ninjas fighting off an invasion of their home village, with each character getting their own time in the sun, as if the intro wanted to tell you that each and every character is Important. Given the immense cast of Naruto and the 90 second limit of the opening, this means that each character gets no more than a few moments. In fact, Uzumaki Naruto himself, our titular protagonist, hardly has more screen time than others. All in all, the opening is quite hectic.

Afterwards, I decided to go back and watch the very first Naruto opening, and right from when the orange ninja beckoned me to “C’mon,” I was getting an entirely different feel from  the Shippuuden intro. Instead of the scores of figures that currently populate the series, the first opening features only four characters. Rookie ninjas Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura, as well as their teacher and leader Kakashi are each focused upon extensively, and it makes the newest opening feel almost claustrophobic by comparison.

Part of this has to do with the open-endedness of the first opening. With no specific plot developments to hint at, it’s as if the characters and the intro itself are given room to breathe. You get a real sense that these characters are important, Naruto in particular. In a way, it’s quite relaxing.

I compared Bleach openings, too. Once again, the simple, yet heavy emphasis the first opening puts on Ichigo and Rukia differs a good deal from the almost overwhelming number of characters featured in the current opening. Taking a step back, the sheer contrast between then and now seems to speak towards the character bloat that the most popular shounen fighting series almost inevitably experience. If you go and watch every opening back to back, be it Bleach or Naruto, you can really experience the cast creep.

Having an enormous cast of characters in a shounen title is not anything new. Kinnikuman for example sports so many wrestlers that it can be difficult to keep track of everyone. However, the anime’s openings do not try to partition roughly the same amount of time for every character. They do not try to say that everyone else is almost as important as Kinnikuman himself. And while there are a number of differing factors between Kinnikuman and Naruto, not least of which is the fact that Naruto simply has more openings, I think it also highlights the increased focus on a “pick your favorite” method of presenting characters in anime and manga.

Essentially, I believe the reason that later Naruto and Bleach openings feature so many characters with roughly equal screen time is that they know each character has their own fanbase, and they want those fans to feel that their favorites are getting treated right. While I don’t see anything necessarily wrong with this, it still makes me miss those simpler times, when it was mainly just Ichigo and Rukia.

If you want to check out the openings I’ve referred to in this post, Crunchyroll has the latest episodes of Naruto and Bleach. As for the older ones, I’ve provided links below. Keep in mind that due to copyright policies and such, most of these videos are modified somewhat, usually by making them widescreen when they originally weren’t.

Naruto Opening 1

Bleach Opening 1

Kinnikuman Opening 1

Kinnikuman Opening 4

Shoujo is Good

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Recently, debate about shoujo manga has centered around “girliness.” Although the word can have multiple meanings, in the context of shoujo it generally refers to pink hearts, sparkles, and school romance, all things you may very well see if you are to pick up a random volume of shoujo. Writers have been addressing how the girliness of shoujo is seen by people of all varieties, girls, guys, those intimately familiar with manga and those who hardly know anything, and any issues that arise from that perception.

The definition of shoujo manga comes into question as a result. Is shoujo defined by those aesthetic and thematic tropes, or is it something much broader? Is shoujo manga simply any comic that runs in a shoujo magazine, no matter the content? But while these are all very good questions, I feel like they are obscuring a very important idea that is more fundamental to manga and storytelling in general.

Setting aside whether or not shoujo is limited by tropes, average girls and impossibly handsome men covered in hearts and sparkles do not preclude good storytelling. It may not be someone’s cup of tea to read about the trials and tribulations of a 14 year old’s love triangle, but there is no ironclad rule stating that such a story cannot be not only entertaining but also legitimately good and able to speak to a wider audience.

Brigid Alverson equates shoujo manga with trashy romance novels, stating, “You read your chosen genre for relaxation, not literary quality.” While I do read shoujo for my own comfort, I also actively look for literary quality in it and am frequently rewarded as a result. I do not believe that it is some rare feat to find strong storytelling and strong characters in shoujo, whether it’s from the 70s or from this past decade, and that is also largely because I do not see shoujo as being limited by convention.

I’m not saying that one should just accept everything without a critical eye, but simply that when the reward is less stellar, one should not necessarily condemn the tropes from holding back shoujo, but perhaps view it as an individual story failing to use those elements in an effective manner. The potential for good, strong fiction is still there and the fact that the heroine’s parents died, conveniently leaving her to fend for herself, is not a death sentence for quality.  It is not only possible to appreciate both shoujo which has all the trappings of “girliness” as well as shoujo which eschews that aesthetic, but to appreciate both on equal levels. Just because you enjoy the unorthodox doesn’t mean that the orthodox is inherently worse or vice versa. Shoujo is both and everything in between, and in every case, whether the manga are adhering to convention or not, good stories can be told, and found, on a regular basis.

Mitsuya Yuuji Throughout Combattler V: A “Lesson” in Voice Acting

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At Otakon 2010, voice acting veteran Mitsuya Yuuji (or Yuji Mitsuya) was a goldmine of valuable information about the industry and the art of voice acting, using his own experience as a complete seiyuu rookie on Choudenji Robo Combattler V as an example During the panel, he mentioned that an interesting exercise is to compare a voice actor’s performance in the first episode to their performance in the final episode.

Taking that suggestion to heart and expanding on it a little further, I’ve compiled a clip of Mitsuya’s voice acting progression from the beginning to end of Combattler V‘s 54 episodes. Not every episode is shown here, but it still gives a good indication of how much effort he put into improving.

Early on, you can hear that he’s clearly an amateur and not entirely sure what to do with the role. He also sounds much deeper, having not yet hit upon the right voice for the main hero Hyouma. You can also hear him experimenting with all sorts of ways to say Combattler V’s name, stretching this syllable, shortening that one and so on. Towards the middle around when the story starts to really ramp up, he puts a lot more intensity into his performance. Then, in the second half you’ll notice that he’s starting to find a “standard” of sorts on how to shout, “Combattler….V!” until it pretty much solidifies, for better or worse.

Remember that this was Mitsuya’s debut role, and here you can really see his growth as a voice actor. It’s no wonder he’d go on to form his own voice acting school.

At his panel, Mitsuya placed great emphasis on the fact that a lot of male voice actors these days try too hard to maintain the “coolness” of their characters and don’t put their all into their performances, citing that this probably has to do with the fact that not nearly as many voice actors these days come from a theatre background (if any at all). It’s interesting then to think about how Mitsuya’s own theatrical experience still had to be molded to fit voice acting.

As a bonus, take a look at his performance in 2000’s Super Robot Wars Alpha, where he has to perform the same line as in the above video roughly 25 years later. Skip to 0:46 to hear it (or watch the whole video, it’s cool). Amazingly, his voice appears to have gone up with age.

If Only It Were a Ra Tilt Instead

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A few months ago, after many hours of intense not-actually-gambling gambling action, I managed to graduate to the next level in the online mahjong client Tenhou. Then, two weeks ago, I squandered all of that and lost so much that I got demoted. From this experience I have learned many things.

When I was telling esteemed Anime News Network columnist and mahjong co-panelist Dave about it, he said that I must be “going tilt,” which I learned was poker lingo for someone whose emotions are clouding his or her ability to play well. At first I denied that this could possibly be happening to me, but in hindsight that was exactly the problem.

It all began when I actually became aware of the points system on Tenhou. On Tenhou, in addition to the scoring in the game itself, between matches you gain or lose what are essentially experience points. The better you do, the more points you receive, until you manage to break into the next level. Lose, however, and points are deducted from you. In my situation, I was just one point away from reaching the next rank, where even barely placing 2nd in a game would have been enough. Conversely, I lost the match hard and then proceeded to lose pretty much every other match following. I kept thinking to myself, “You were so close to moving forward! Just keep at it!” This eventually turned into desperation where I was trying to just win something, which pretty much had the opposite effect. And all that while, I was constantly looking back at my points. I became too obsessed with seeing those numbers go up and it completely affected my skill and it cost me.

While my life was not on the line, from this experience I can relate to Nangou in the first episode of Akagi. Nangou is in deep, deep debt to the yakuza, and in his mahjong game against said gangsters he is desperate for any sort of win, but this desperation also prevents him from accomplishing anything. He is too afraid to take risks when he should, and so behind that even a glimmer of hope for a high-scoring hand means he’ll go for it even when he has almost no chance of accomplishing it. It is not until Akagi himself arrives that Nangou is able to break the self-induced spell and play as he should, foregoing his frantic scurryings for a confident charge forward. For me, the realization hit when I ended up dropping down a rank.

From that, I looked at myself and figured out some of the tendencies that arise in me when I’m desperate. The first is to be bothered when someone declares riichi very early in the game. When one goes into riichi, it appears a bold declaration that they are about to win. Under normal circumstances I welcome the challenge, but when I’m going tilt it becomes almost nerve-wracking, and I get so eager to finish a hand that I easily throw away tiles I shouldn’t, as opposed to when I’m right of mind and am able to alter my hand much more readily. That leads me into the second sign, which is that I get too attached to achieving certain hands, and become too unwilling to deviate. This is more than just a matter of going for high-risk hands when I shouldn’t, because even the cheaper, easier to assemble hands can result in the same trap. When you’re aiming for pinfu (a hand that is special because there is absolutely nothing special about it) no matter what, pinfu starts to feel surprisingly distant. Even my favored ikkitsuukan (full straight) does its best when my hand gradually morphs into it, as opposed to when I am consciously aiming for it.

Although this can be attributed to simple probability, I have a rather occult feeling about it, which is that fear is a big problem in mahjong. Without the ability to overcome fear, the hand is often unable to progress and transform. Sometimes I have to be able to abandon a seemingly grand potential because in reality it is a stifling noose that keeps me and my hand from growing within the game.

Why Are They Making Ash Ketchum’s Eyes So Huge? I’ll Tell You!

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In anticipation of the latest Pokemon Black & White games, the anime of Pokemon is undergoing a revamp, and with this newest iteration comes a great amount of aesthetic change for a series which has up to this point remained fairly static in that regard (or at the very least has experienced change so gradual as to be unnoticeable). Many long-time characters are undergoing design changes, but perhaps the most prominent is that of main character Satoshi, possibly better known as Ash Ketchum, whose irises appear to have doubled in size.

Around the internet, people have been wondering what could possibly be the catalyst for this change. The truth lies with the character designer for the Pokemon games, Sugimori Ken.

Sugimori was the original Pokemon artist, drawing up all 151 of the originals as well as all of the character artwork. Even now he remains in that position, with his works being the official depictions of all humans and Pokemon in the franchise. Essentially, this means that Sugimori has been drawing for Pokemon for 15 years now, and his artistic sense and style have grown accordingly. Whereas the designs for the anime originally drew inspiration largely from Sugimori’s original designs for the first generation of Pokemon games and have remained fairly constant since, Sugimori’s own artwork has gone through a one and a half decade process of refinement.

Left: 1995-1998, Right: 2010

When you look at the anime’s new character designs, you can see that they are simply re-aligning themselves with Sugimori’s work.

So in a way, the artwork for the Pokemon anime is pretty much ending up where it should be.

Better Go Get Some 3G Coverage

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The Passing: Satoshi Kon

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Satoshi Kon, dead at age 47, will always be remembered for creating great animated films.

In writing this post, I am aware that I am nowhere near the biggest Kon fan. I’ve only seen a handful of his total output, owning none of it on physical media or in digital format, but I know that of the films I have seen, all have had a profound effect on me. To this day, I distinctly remember that scene in Millennium Actress where the titular character is moving gracefully between still paintings, stepping out of one and taking up her pose in the next. It’s visually creative in a way rarely seen in anime, even with someone like Miyazaki, who usually goes a much more orthodox route when it comes to representation of events. It’s the kind of thing that gets burned into your memories, and you’re all the better for it.

When I say that the man will be remembered for creating great animated films, you might be wondering, by whom? And the answer is nearly everyone. Not just film buffs, not just the casual movie-going audience, and especially not just anime fans who themselves come in all varieties, but just about anyone who’s had the opportunity to see one of his films. Satoshi Kon’s recurring themes of psychology, memories, and dreams have the potential to be incredibly heavy and complex to the point of driving people away, but instead Kon managed to create incredibly accessible works which get their audiences to think. Not every film is for every person, but there’s inevitably one you can show to your friends or your family and have a nice discussion afterward. You want to know how to mature your tastes as an anime fan in a short amount of time? Watch a Kon film, and see where your mind takes you.

I’ve seen around the internet that people are worried about the fate of anime and the creativity therein after all of this. To this I say, losing Satoshi Kon, especially at such a young age, is a serious blow to the heart and gut of Japanese animation, but great creators die. It’s kind of what they do, being human and all, and to dwell on what they could have done, while a worthwhile exercise, only takes you so far. A creative form of expression such as animation, Japanese or otherwise, is not so simple that it can be felled by the death of one man, great as he may have been. There is mourning, but there is also the next step.

Rest in peace, Satoshi Kon, with the knowledge that it’s impossible for you to not have inspired someone.

Review Time

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How soon after you watch something should you review it?

Over the course of writing Ogiue Maniax, I’ve taken different approaches to writing reviews. Sometimes Iwrite them almost immediately after watching something, while other times I wait a day or a week. In some instances the delay is a month or more. Writing a review right after finishing something means that the experience is very fresh, that a lot of the emotions you felt in watching it are still welling up inside, but expressing your thoughts so soon after can also mean that you haven’t had time to process everything. On the other hand, the longer you wait, the more distance you give yourself in order to really chew on the work, to really see what it says. Too much time however, and you might start to forget important things. But then if you forgot those things, were they really that important in your mind?

So then you might say, “Why not rewatch it? That way you’ll have your memories of having seen it the first time, and then also it’ll be fresh in your mind.” But while I’m in no way against rewatching a show for review purposes or otherwise, I have to wonder about what the process of rewatching does to your experience with a work. In my review of Xam’d, I talk about how the series pretty much thrusts you into a very complex situation with little or no explanation to the extent that you aren’t even sure who’s on what side until a few episodes later. Going back and rewatching those episodes after having finished at least a good portion of the series means you can actually see what is happening in those early episodes, but at the same time is that a good thing? Is it a positive that you have that greater clarity, or is the loss of that rushed, turbulent feeling detrimental to your experience with it? Lost memories, indeed.

One last question for you all: The concept of “reviewing” aside, do you feel the way you talk about a show or a film or a book changing as time passes, like when you compare your conversation right after you get out of the theater to when you’re talking about it one month later?

Ogiue Maniax on the Otagal Podcast

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In case you weren’t aware, I appeared on a recent episode of the Otagal podcast, talking about your favorite subject and mine, Genshiken, or at the very least Genshiken 2.

Viga was my co-host for the Ogiue panel at Otakon 2010, and we have some good discussion for this podcast.

Hope you all enjoy my distinctly non-radio voice.