I can’t particularly say that this was a post I was ever expecting to be making…

Anyway, Adult Swim put out another one of their sporadic Rick and Morty shorts overnight (well, by UK time), and this one was animated at Telecom and directed by Takeshi Sano (Tower of God). Probably not actually that much of a shock given those circumstances, I guess.

I suppose I actually like Rick and Morty well enough, though not in the “talk publicly about it” fashion – which is to say, I do watch the show, but I can’t particularly say I want to be associated with some of the more vocal parts of the fanbase. I’m sure you can probably understand.
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So, they announced a new fork of the iDOLM@STER franchise today.

Shiny Colors is a new mobile production game with new mechanics and a new cast, in which the player is a new Producer for the 283Pro (“Tsubasa Productions”) Production company. Well, simply categorising these things as being just one thing is a little disingenuous at this point, given that it’ll ultimately end up spawning CDs, manga, radio shows and, inevitably, Lives, amongst other things, but the new game was the primary point of announcement today.

It’s a slightly weird thing. Discounting Dearly Stars as something they never really followed up on, it’s the fifth active stream of the larger franchise at this point after OG 765Pro, Cinderella Girls, Million Live and SideM. It’s also going to effectively be the sixth continuing gatcha-style game going, joining Cinderella Girls, Starlight Stage, Theatre Days and the two SideM games, and the third mobile game launched within less than a year.
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Is this, perhaps, the most 2017 of statements?

This years Gundam Unicorn update is… I’ve still not watched more Gundam Unicorn. Although I somehow thought buying the second half of ZZ, which just turned up today, was a good idea? Whoops.

Let’s just put this lack of Unicorn-related momentum down to it being a good harvest this year. It feels like there’s been a constant stream of at least one thing a week I was particularly excited about watching every week for the last year, and at some points I was watching something new pretty much every evening. It’s been a good year for TV anime.

From a theatrical anime point of view, it feels a bit odd to call a year with not one, but two, new Yuasa efforts comparatively weak, but that probably more to do with how ludicrously stacked parts of last year ended up being, with things like A Silent Voice, From This Corner of the World, Kizumonogatari I&II and, I suppose, Your Name. Then again, it’s been a nice year to be in the UK in that regard, because we ended up getting at least something in cinemas here almost even month, and it’s entirely possible that any perceived weakness was more a result of not binging the years best content over a weekend, given the way this years SLA line-up panned out.

Also, that I’ve not been able to see the new Nanoha movie yet. Or No Game No Life. Or Heavens Feel. Guess there’s still some good stuff left to see after all.

Anyway, usual format from here on out. Spoilers ahoy, and don’t necessarily take anything I write about below this point as being that glowing an endorsement. I tend not to write about my actual favourite stuff of the year, since that’s hard, so, this is just the first few things I could actually formula any words on.

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The prologue episode to the new iDOLM@STER TV anime, Side-M, aired what was overnight by UK time. I’m not really a big enough Side-M fan to have anything particularly insightful to say about it, but Episode of Jupiter was good enough to be pretty reassuring about the series going forward.
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It came of at least something of a surprise when they suddenly dropped a short PV for a previously entirely unannounced and unteased PS4 iDOLM@STER game, Stella Stage, during the Sony TGS Press Conference event earlier today.

It’s pretty safe to say that the franchises first outing on PS4, last years iDOLM@STER Platinum Stars, was ultimately something of a disappointment. A lot about the games presentation was fantastic – a nice new visual make-over and a pleasant atmosphere inspired by the movies training camp made a pretty good first impression, and the 765Pro All Stars shows were fabulous – but in the end it was a game that felt like a whole lot of stick without any carrot. That is to say, there was almost zero sense of progression to it – aside from there being little in the way of a narrative thrust to it, and your idols progression simply boiled down to repeating things until their numbers increased. Costumes, infuriatingly, were locked behind random drops, with anything good being incredibly rare – unless you dropped actual money on a P-Drop, a consumable which temporarily improved your chances. Ultimately, it felt a lot like it had taken a few too many cues from mobile games, without providing the steady stream of the kind of content those games have that make it feel almost (almost) worthwhile to play. This was particularly bad given you could enjoy a better implementation of these things for free by pulling out your phone and playing Starlight Stage instead.
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