Although I don’t have anything of significance to say about the video in question, I do feel, however, that in these times of low activity I am required break radio silence on occasion.

Actually, there’s just not all that much to say about it. It does contain a snippet of the anime OP theme, Ready!! (not Reday!!, as the original announcement and some parts of the official site still have it listed), which is catchy if a little typical of the songs they’ve been choosing to promote the games ever since the first 360 release. By that I mean it sounds somewhere between (or perhaps around) Go My Way!! and The World Is All One in style. This isn’t to say it’s particularly bad or boring or anything, infact it did me something of a favour by blasting that darn Carnival Phantasm OP out of my head for a while.

Not that this was an entirely suitable replacement – being out of my homestead when they released the promo, I ended up watching it on the bus. Being acutely aware of being in public made it hard to focus on anything other than not singing the English-part of the songs chorus to myself (which you’ll comprehend the degree of embarrassment potential of when you hear it). Understand that I don’t usually walk (or sit) around singing to myself either, but this intense focus on the subject did nothing but make me want to sing to myself all the more.

Mercifully, I resisted, and managed to escape without garnering the incredibly peculiar looks which would likely have ensued. Phew.

The other thing of note, or at least a curious peculiarity, regarding the show that came in the news recently were the staff listings for the first four episodes, which were listed along with the last of the character art releases on Dengeki. The curious thing there is the listing for the fourth episode, more specifically the listing for the storyboard artist for the fourth episode, that being one Kazuya Tsurumaki, best known as the director on FLCL, and as assistant director on all things Evangelion.

It shouldn’t really be a surprise that someone like that would be pulled into working on a show directed by someone with as close ties to Gainax as Atsushi Nishigori, but it is a curious calibre of staff that the show is managing to attract. Secret best show of the season? Quite possibly.

Presently speaking (well, as I type this, probably not when I actually get around to posting this), I’m sat on a Train heading toward Scotland. There’s many a reason for this (well, at least more than one reason, I suppose your quantification of “many” may differ from mine), but but one of these reasons is that there’s a screening of the Sunrise movie King of Thorn in Glasgow tomorrow (or, likely, yesterday by the time I post this).

Not that a movie where the most strongly worded comment regarding it I’ve heard beyond it’s terrible CG, positive or negative, is that it’s a movie that exists, was reason enough for to submit myself to a three hour train ride, but added to another opportunity to see The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya theatrically, it played a significant part.
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Of course, “TV anime” is assumed at the moment, because outside of movies that’s what “anime project” tends to mean these days. Also, the comic only makes sense if I come up with an excuse to ignore the Live4You OAV, since Miki was actually in that. But, yeah, I actually already had my comic lined up for today, then someone went and did something crazy like announcing they’re making an iM@S anime that isn’t transmogrified into a giant robot show. Cool beans and all that, but queue rush-job on my part.

Although speaking of iM@S and giant robot shows, can I just reiterate that Xenoglossia is actually a pretty good show. Sure, it was offered up to Sunrise as a sacrifice for them to be a little subversive with, and as a result doesn’t really bare any similarity with the original work, but compared to most recent Sunrise works it’s not only unusually consistent, but downright coherent. Not that many tend to agree with me, but whatever. I’m content to know that at least I’m right.

(Although on a purely objective level, Zegapain is totally the best Sunrise TV show of the last decade. Probably).

For those who failed to notice, Bamco posted the second iM@S2 promo video on Youtube yesterday. I have to stress that there’s nothing particularly new to this – it’s not only still the same song as the first promo (and given how often Go My Way was used in the lead-up to the 360 games release, you’d better get used to it), but I’m actually pretty sure that this is just the video that they played on the second day of last months iDOLM@STER event. Certainly, I’d seen off-screen camera shots of what appears to be the content of this video on a couple of Japanese gaming news sites a month ago.

Still, it does show off the games five-member units. I notice that, should you discount the extra couple of people, there’s still a few differences in the dance that the three remaining girls would be performing when compared to the first promo. Based upon that, it looks like the dances may scale to the member count better than they did in the first game, and given there looks to be contact and more dancing around each-other this time around, that can only be a good thing.

Hey, it’s certainly been a big news weekend this week, and no news has been bigger than the announcements from the big show.

By which, of course, I mean iDOLM@STER 2. This is, of course, not surprising to anyone, given that they essentially announced last year that they’d be announcing details of it this year, but it’s still kind of cool to see. Less cool is that my NTSC-J 360 is still somewhat on the broken side. Guess I’ll have to get that replaced at some point.
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