Or merely Ar Tonelico 3 as it was known in Japan. I’m not really sure what NISA thought they were achieving by making such a nerdy game even more unfriendly looking for newbies by including a Hymnos word in the title. Hymnos is the games in-universe language – Qoga, as it happens, means something to the effect of “Final” – so it’s kind of like if they named the Star Trek movies in Klingon.

Except kind of not, since Ar Tonelico isn’t exactly an English name in the first place. Oh, well, I suppose the whole stripping mechanic to the battles is off-putting enough for most anyway.

To get back to the point, though, that Mikan Box is in the Bistro in Eternus Shaft.

This one comes in from Author, taken from… well, he doesn’t say which episode, but it’s from Mahoraba. That’s the cute comedy with the multiple-personality landlady, as opposed to Maburaho, the show which many (myself included) manage to get the name confused with, and is a show about… I don’t know, some kind of magic-related rubbish, I guess.

I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of a Mikan Box in Maburaho at this moment in time.
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On top of the shoe-locker there, to the right of the screen, though the box on the left could possibly be one too.

This post has been a long time in coming. Well, possibly a long time in coming, which is why it’s kind of a relief that I’m actually able to post this. The story goes is that I saw this movie back in May last year at a screening at Londons BFI, which was actually before the movie opened in Japan. The movies director, Koji Masanari, and the producer were in attendance, and they did a Q&A session after the screening.

So I asked him about Mikan Boxes. Really.

Of course, the Mikan box above is only a small element on display, and even then it was only up there for a couple of seconds. Whilst I obviously have the powers of my finely-honed Mikan Eye, it was quite possible that I’d not seen what I believed I had. This confirmation is important to me, as it means that I only asked a really dumb question, as opposed to a really dumb and inaccurate one.
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From episode 12 of The World God Only Knows, the most recent and final episode of the present series, in the pre-OP sequence. At least I think it’s a Mikan box – I watched it on Crunchy, and whilst usually a fine way of watching things, the visual fidelity here wasn’t quite up for my very specific requirements in this case.
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From the second episode. It’s not exactly the kind of bright and breezy show from which I’d normally expect to be striking Orange gold, but rest assured, the owner of this particular Mikan Box was brutally beaten and hospitalized shortly before it appeared. Off-screen, of course – it’s not like he was female.

Yeah, Mnemosyne certainly earns the 18 certificate the BBFC gave it like nothing else in recent memory. It’s actually incredibly nostalgic in a certain sense – it harkens back to the days where seeing the Manga Video logo on the cover generally suggested that you’d be getting tits, violence and inordinate amounts of swearing. I don’t know about the later since I watch it subbed, but it certainly provided plenty of the former two.
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