It’s All in the Execution

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Marvel vs Capcom 3 successfully captures the look a fighting game about Ryu fighting Captain America targeted towards American audiences wants to have. It’s a grittier style when compared to the one used in Tatsunoko vs Capcom, which makes perfect sense. MvC3‘s aesthetic step in the right direction however reminded me of a similar attempt not so long ago, Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe.

Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe was an aesthetic failure. Just like MvC3, the game looked to bring together two sets of characters by uniting them under a more realistic visual style, but the end product was just a series of awkwardly stiff 3-d models and jerky animations.

What is going on with that torso?

Worse yet were the Fatalities, that classic trademark of the Mortal Kombat franchise, the violent killing blows which defined the series in the eyes of so many gamers. In MKvsDC, the Fatalities were not only toned down in brutality but also terribly uncreative regardless of the level of violence, especially when compared to the stylish Instant Kills of games like Blazblue.

My goal isn’t to just trash MKvsDC though, and of course I can’t really compare the gameplay to a game that isn’t actually out yet. I just wanted to point out that it’s amazing just how much two different projects came aim for the same basic goal and produce such different results. Marvel vs Capcom 3 is exactly what Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe wanted to be.

For comparison:

Ogiue Maniax Panels at Otakon 2010

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Two of the panels I applied for have been accepted for Otakon 2010. This is pretty exciting for me, as this will be my first-ever time at Otakon as a panelist! It’ll also probably be my last hurrah in the US before I go. If you’re gonna be in Baltimore for the con, I suggest you stop by. The schedule isn’t set yet, but I do have convenient panel descritions!

Note: Panel descriptions are subject to change, as I don’t quite remember which versions we ended up submitting.

Portrait of a Fujoshi: The Psychology of Ogiue Chika with Viga

“Throughout the series “Genshiken,” the character of Ogiue Chika goes on a journey of development, tackling topics such as self-image, childhood trauma, and the many perils of being an otaku-in-denial. Come if you want to really delve into the mind of Genshiken’s most psychologically complex character with a panel brought to you by the experts on angry fujoshi characters, Ogiue Maniax and Viga the Otagal!”

Riichi: Japanese Mahjong, Anime, and You with Sub

“If you’ve watched such popular anime as Akagi and Saki, you’ve been witness to the ancient game of mahjong– and you had no clue what the players were doing. Maybe you’ve even tried the game and found the complicated rules too intimidating. We did too! But we managed, and today we’re here to show you that it can be done. Let us enlighten you on the basics of Japanese style (riichi) mahjong, its appearances in anime and the entire genre of manga devoted to it, and how to play this fascinating game!”

Well that’s all there is for now. I’ll update with a new post when we have schedule information, as well as if the third panel is accepted.

See you in Baltimore!

Have Fun With Japanese: Create Your Own Kanji Compounds

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When you learn Japanese, inevitably you have to hit the wall that is “kanji.” For an English speaker, having entire words comprised of one or two semi-complex symbols can be an unfamiliar and daunting prospect. On top of that, unlike Chinese, Japanese kanji have multiple pronunciations, depending on which words they’re being paired with or how they’re being used. English simply doesn’t do this.

But in time, as you familiarize yourself with kanji more and more, your mind starts to connect the words to the characters, and when you hear a new vocabulary word, your brain may start to try and figure out the kanji behind it. Kanji can hint at the meaning of a word, even if you’re not sure what it is. And even the vocabulary you’ve learned previously starts to look fresh and new, as you realize that they too have kanji behind them.

At this point, it’s time to play a fun new game: creating your own kanji compounds.

A kanji compound is any word consisting of multiple kanji. One that most people might know is 日本, or Japan, pronounced as “Nihon.” 読む, or “yomu,” to read, 書く, or “kaku,” to write, each have kanji in them. When you take the two kanji together, they become 読書, or “dokusho,” reading as a noun.

My favorite imaginary kanji compound is 光線欠, or “kousenketsu.” It means “lack of lasers.” Use it well in your daily Japanese studies. And then try it yourself! See what you come up with.

Different Aims, Different Misses: “Traveler,” Manga, and OEL Manga

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Back when I was buying issues of Monthly Afternoon to get my Genshiken fix, the magazines would occasionally come with packaged mini-manga. Each small book has one or two self-contained stories and it seemed like a pretty good extra. It wasn’t until kransom’s post about the Afternoon Four Seasons Award that I realized that these manga were exactly that: winning entries from the competitions.

Though anyone is allowed to enter, amateurs can still manage to win, as was the case with Winter 2005 when then-rookie manga artist Imai Tetsuya won the Winter 2005 Grand Prize for his entry, entitled Traveler.

Portable Four Seasons Winter 2005. Traveler is the one on top.

Looking at Traveler, it most definitely deserved to win. The basic premise is that a boy wakes up one day to find that he’s four months in the future and that apparently in those four months he’s turned into a complete jerk who left his band and broke up with his girlfriend. The story is less about returning back to the proper time and more about dealing with responsibility even when it shouldn’t have anything to do with you. It’s pretty intriguing, and everyone loves to say, “Fuzakenna!”

Imai makes mistakes. Some of the characters and plot development seemed tacked on and unnecessary. But what I find really interesting about this is that the faults of Traveler feel different from the mistakes that tend to happen in OEL manga.

When we look at criticism of OEL manga and the whole movement behind it, one of the factors is how much it just doesn’t “look” like manga. Artists try their best to live up to the series they love, but something typically feels off. In the past I’ve talked about some of the reasons why I think this happens, and Narutaki over at the Reverse Thieves pointed out the abuse of screentone in a lot of OEL titles. But I think there’s a more inherent cultural difference, one that’s not really a matter of talent or experience.

The art in Traveler hits bouts of inconsistency, particularly with the characters, as they sometimes suddenly look like they have no bones underneath their skin and muscles. I think you can see this in the image from earlier. Faces go out of proportion, too. A lot of western artists probably even have a better grasp of anatomy and motion than Imai, but the way in which the artwork turns out inconsistent is different from the way it happens in most OEL titles.

The story’s faults are also different from the issues that occur in OEL manga. In Traveler, some characters and plot threads sometimes seem unnecessary or perhaps given too much time, a problem when it’s just a 32-page one-shot, which are problems which occur in OEL titles too, but the plot issues with Traveler seem very much like the kind of mistakes that would happen in manga. There’s a sense that Imai and other manga-aspiring artists in Japan, when compared to their counterparts across the ocean, are simply aiming for separate goals; whether they reach them or not is another matter entirely.

I think the lesson here might be that when you judge two things, comparing the very best of one to the very worst of another doesn’t really get you anywhere. It’s far more interesting and fruitful to look at the middle ground; avoid the absolute greats for a little bit so you can see what most people are doing. There, you’ll find a good snapshot of the state of manga, or whatever it is you’re looking at.

I also know that “across the ocean” leaves out countries and products like Korean manhwa. I’ll leave that for another day though.

The Light Pathos Club

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The second season of K-On! begins with the girls of the light music club heading to their clubroom. Already there, Yui plays a quiet tune on her guitar evoking  a feeling of renewal and change tinged with nostalgia. The subdued nature of this first scene then carries over into the rest of the episode and beyond. As K-On!! has progressed, there has been a distinct overarching focus on the the idea that high school is almost over for the founders of Houkago Tea Time and that things will never be the same.

While present to a certain extent in the manga, Kyoto Animation’s adaptation seems to be focused on showing the subtle magic of the senior year of high school, before the girls become adults and get that much closer to the real world. A semi-running gag in the manga about the ex-student council president turning out to be Mio Fan #1 now features that same character as a mature college student looking fondly on her high school memories. An entire episode is devoted to Sawako, the club supervisor and closet former metalhead guitarist, and her recapturing some of the passion of her youth. In general, the lighting in K-On!! is very soft, again hinting at a strong feeling towards the ephemeral. The message from Kyoto Animation is loud and clear.

I’m not sure how I feel about this, as I think it’s an attempt to add a bit of depth to K-On!, but I’m not sure how much K-On! needs or even wants it. I understand that high school is a big deal and all. My memories of high school are among my most cherished, and it’s because I had very close friends with whom I could be myself, which is also the case in K-On!! However, because it was only somewhat there in the source material, some of it works, some of it doesn’t, and the end result is that it kind of feels forced in.

What are your thoughts on the direction K-On!! has taken?

The Giant Killing Blogging Phenomenon

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All across the Aniblogospheriversemension, an amazing thing is happening.

Episodic bloggers are making really good posts full of interesting content, sometimes even better than anything they’ve written in the past. And they’re all posts about the soccer anime Giant Killing.

I’m not sure why this is happening. Perhaps it’s because Giant Killing is a show with a lot of meat to chew on, or maybe it’s being held up by World Cup fever. For whatever reason though, anime bloggers are producing high-quality Giant Killing posts. They’re analyzing character motives, they’re breaking down the pace of the episodes and the strategies used by each of the teams, and they’re sometimes even eschewing summarizing episodes in favor of transmitting their feel and excitement and discussing the way they themselves relate to the show.

Examples:

The payoff for all of this suffering comes in being able to feel the rush of adrenalin when a play comes together. When that happens, you know the makers of the show did something right, because you believe it.

—Abandoned Factory Anime Review

I always thought of Kuro as simply a strong hard player with no particular strengths mentally (other than screaming his guts out and be a total idiot). Hence, it is a huge surprise for me to see that he actually has the ability to read the game more effectively than anything that I expected. A high line will always have a huge danger in the offside trap, and someone who can read the game can reduce the chances of the offside trap being broken.

—THAT Anime Blog

The 8th episode of Giant Killing sees the likely conclusion of Tatsumi’s engineering of the squad and probably finding a settled lineup. It also reveals a real method to his madness in the process. However, football is a results business, and Tatsumi will eventually have to get some results out of his vision.

—Lower Mid-Table

We despair when an athlete retires at the height of his powers; we want to watch greatness as long as possible. But we also lament when an athlete sticks around past his expiration date. It’s a horrible double standard. I respect a guy who knows the right time to walk away, but I know it’s a difficult choice. How many of us could suddenly abandon our jobs at such a young age?

—Unmei Kaihen

And that’s just a handful. The more you explore, the more you’ll find that Giant Killing might be the best thing to happen to episode blogging in a long time.

Oh, and this goes a long way in fighting the image that anime fans are a bunch of sports-hating nerds who look upon the athletically fit with disdain, and it’s done fairly naturally. It’s not like anyone is actively writing these posts to not seem like a geek. We’re anime fans after all.

ETU!

Heel is Showing

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Shounen, particularly Shounen battle manga, is probably the most well-known type of manga today. In it you have your Dragon Ball‘s, your Naruto‘s, your Kenichi‘s. You have good shounen fighting series, you have bad or mediocre shounen fighting series, and you have ones that start off as one but gradually turn into the other.  I won’t say which is which, and the above titles are not respective examples of each category.

The odd thing about the descent in quality in a lot of shounen series (or even titles which are already poor from the start) is that the same mistakes seem to happen over and over again. The most prominent mistake is that long stretch where the series just drags on and the series appears to have lost all direction. Why does this happen? That’s the thought I want to get at today.

There are certain essential characteristics for a modern shounen battle manga. You need a main character to whom the young boy readers can relate but whom they can also idolize. You need a rival or at least a series of antagonists to continually provide challenges to the hero and to act as measuring sticks for the hero’s progress. And of course you need fighting and lots of it, or at least the story’s concept of “fighting,” even if it’s throwing chickens off of rooftops to see which one flies the furthest. And then you need that extra X-factor, the thing which makes a series different (but not too different). With few exceptions, I think that shounen fighting series have to capture a feeling of action, excitement, and change, and it starts from essentials such as these.

However, I think these same ingredients for success are also what potentially drag titles down to the depths, acting as the hand which dipped Achilles into the River Styx, simultaneously giving a series its strengths but also establishing its weaknesses. As a series continues, it becomes more difficult to maintain those qualities in the right proportions and to also incorporate all of the elements which exist between those essentials. After a while, because the people behind these manga and anime are well aware that their readers look to them for certain specific things, the series start to run on auto-pilot, and that is where the seams start to really show.

For example, I think this is why the most painful filler tends to be the fight which lasts for seemingly an eternity. The manga’s staff know that they need a hefty amount of combat in their series, but they don’t quite have the vision at that point to guide the battles, to have them work towards a definite direction which inspires the readers. As a result, they stall. Battles which should have lasted two volumes last ten. Here, a quick breather chapter or two might solve the problem, but that small break might be unacceptable for a series which relies so much on continuous battles which mark the characters’ progress.

You sometimes  get people who criticize shounen fighting manga for being shounen fighting manga, hating these series for the very same reason people love them. But to some extent they have a very valid opinion, as even those things that the people who follow shounen series list as positives can eventually lead to the negatives.

Break Through the 2nd Floor Window: Ogiue Maniax

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Ogiue Maniax managed to overcome its opposition in the third round of the Aniblog Tourney, in a match so close that a mere image macro could have swung the vote either way. I thank chaostangent for a fine match, and I really enjoyed seeing people talk about how they preferred one person’s style over the other. Voting for content, that’s what I want to see.

My fourth round match is against Tenka Seiha, a popular episodic-style blog which also has a doujin game translation arm attached to it. Or maybe the blog is attached to the translation. One likely event is that the match will come down to the pseudo-dichotomy of “episodic” vs “editorial.” I hope that doesn’t happen, and again, that you read at least some of the content before you vote. I already have primers for the Ogiue Maniax style here and here. I’ve also included a couple of my favorite posts below.

The Aniblog Tourney has seen many of the criticisms that other popularity-based tournaments have had. First, similar to Saimoe, vote results are considered “irrelevant” by some because the number of people voting is far less than the number of blog readers out there, let alone anime fans. Second, like the GameFAQs Character Battle, accusations of snobbery run against cries of appealing to the lowest common denominator, resulting in overwhelming indictments of the personalities of both the writers and the readers.

The first issue revolves around a simple question: What would it take to get the people who read anime blogs to vote in a tournament about anime blogs?

If it were a contest of favorite anime characters or series, then I think people would be more willing to participate. The act of discussing anime is one step removed from actually experiencing it, and to be reading the thoughts of someone who is watching anime creates even further distance. And the more you go along this path, the less likely people are going to care. In order for more blog readers to vote, the competition has to be somehow relevant to them; they have to want to be involved.

That leads to the second issue, that of elitism vs mob mentality. Here, there seems to be trouble relating to the other side, perhaps even a strong desire to not want to relate to the other side. I want to bridge that gap, and I will do so with an extended metaphor.

Imagine you’re at a restaurant eating a cheeseburger. Every bite makes you want to take another. What are your thoughts at this time? Perhaps you’re thinking that it’s simply “delicious.” How delicious? You might compare it to cheeseburgers you’ve had in the past that stick out in your memory. You might begin to wonder why you find this burger delicious, or why the people who hate cheeseburgers do so. Or maybe you’re wondering if you’d eat it over an expensive filet mignon. Why do we eat the things we do? How has the act of enjoying food affected commercialism and vice versa? What of the cattle that went into the beef? Or maybe you’re not even “thinking” at all, and you’re just savoring the flavor, the wanderings of your brain temporarily shut down so that you can fully engage the beef and the cheese which lies melted on top.

Are there any thoughts from your burger experience that you want to share with others? If so, which thoughts? What is your purpose behind making people aware of cheeseburger and cheeseburger-related topics? Do you want to recommend the place to others? If you’re going to compare it, do you compare it with other items on the menu or with other cheeseburgers? Or do you want to talk about the concept of the cheeseburger and how ubiquitous an icon it’s become?

Clearly there are some topics in my cheeseburger metaphor that when translated into anime blogging clearly lean towards the side of the “episodic” blogging, while there are others that would clearly be considered “editorial.” But there’s also this gigantic middle area where the division becomes increasingly tenuous. Some can easily exist in both types of blogs, and it all just comes down to what it is about anime that interests you, what you want to say about it, and what kind of discussion you expect from it, if any at all.

Anime can be emotional. It can be intellectual. It can be sophisticated and it can be visceral. It can be all of those things and none of them, and there’s no clear definition of which is which or how things “should” be enjoyed. Irrespective of any notions of quality in either the anime being watched or the blogs being written, people have real reasons for liking the things they do, even if it’s as simple as “killing time,” that’s still a valid reason. Similarly, someone who has gotten to the point of analyzing the cultural effects of anime and not the anime itself may risk being too far-removed from the anime itself, but it’s still a decided direction. You may not like either reason, but that doesn’t mean that the first person is a mindless sack of waste, nor is the second necessarily incapable of talking “normally.” And just as you can respect someone else’s approach to anime, someone can respect yours, even if you disagree entirely.

It’s easier to understand each other when we’re not being so aggressively defensive.

THE WORLD! IS! MAHJONG!

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Mahjong manga has its fair share of devoted followers, especially in Japan itself, but I feel that the genre has a direction it has yet to explore that could, if done well, be one of the best mahjong titles ever.

The mahjong portrayed in manga is almost invariably Japanese-style mahjong, but of course mahjong is a game of Chinese origins, and has found homes in other parts of Asia and even in the United States. There are some rules we kind of take for granted with  Japanese-style mahjong. For example, declaring riichi, or the act of declaring to your opponents that you’re a hair’s breadth away from winning in order to gain the opportunity to earn additional bonus points, and furiten, or the rule that trying to win off of a tile you’ve already discarded previously is significantly more difficult, are exclusive to Japanese mahjong.

Now, wouldn’t it be great to see a series about a guy (or possibly a girl) who has to master multiple forms of mahjong?

Korean-style mahjong forbids stealing tiles to complete straights unless it is to win a round.

In Hong Kong’s version of mahjong, you can actually win with a 0-point hand, ending the round but achieving nothing in return.

Taiwanese mahjong has 16-tile hands, as opposed to the standard 13-tile hand found in most other forms of mahjong.

American mahjong actually has “jokers” and the ability to exchange tiles at the start of the match.

And Japanese tiles are smaller than the tiles used in other parts of the world, so even the methods of cheating change somewhat as you go from one style to the next.

Some of the rule differences seem small, but they can have a profound impact on how the game is played, and this is exactly the sort of thing that could be exaggerated to great effect in manga format. The hero would have to adapt to every style and figure out the feel and the flow of each type of mahjong. I see it as being similar to Swan, where a young ballerina travels the world to learn different philosophies on ballet.

And if they start running out, then I don’t see why they couldn’t just start making new ones up. There’s Washizu mahjong, why can’t there be Canadian mahjong?

What’s In: Fujoshi, What’s Out: Fujoshi

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So in adapting the manga series Mousou Shoujo Otakukei for English-speaking audiences, the title was changed to Fujoshi Rumi, with Rumi being the main character and fujoshi being what she is.

But now with Fujoshi Kanojo, the title has been changed to My Girlfriend is a Geek.

Two different US distributors are behind each title, but I find it interesting that one would go as far as to insert this very otaku word, fujoshi, into the title when not even the Japanese version used it, while the series that prominently displays the term in its name is presented as being more of a general “geek” type of significant other.