If there is one thing you need to know prior to going into the new Wake Up Girls, it’s that Moka is kind of a tiny idol jerk.

If there’s another thing you need know, it’s that Moka ended up replacing Mayushi’s old friend/rival Shiho as the center of I-1 Club when they went head-to-head over the single sales of the Unmei no Megami single and her Team M version outsold Shiho’s Team S (Yes, they really called them Team S and M), causing Shiho to form I-1 affiliate unit Next Storm with a bunch of newbies. Their single was pretty good, a Love Live sub-unit single kind of way, if you’ve not heard it, but in the context of the show, getting away from the somewhat gross and hostile environment of the main I-1 Club ended up doing Shiho the world of good.
(more…)

I suppose I should at least acknowledge this exists, even though I can’t say I have a huge amount to say about the actual content, and even though I have absolutely no intention of writing about it on a the regular. Whether or not it’s a bad thing is something that’s up to the individual, but this was very much another episode of Love Live, same sense of humour, snappy pacing and clever use of transition and all.
(more…)

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.
(more…)

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.
(more…)

From this weeks episode of Teekyu (episode 106!). The dialogue is actually referring to the shrine, rather than the box, coincidentally.

This isn’t the first time Teekyu has popped up for this, and I’m pretty sure I skipped over one I could probably have gotten away with appearing in one of the OP sequences because I try to avoid too many series duplicates, but I had just recently been thinking that it’d been a while since I’ve posted one of these.

Teekyu has been off-air for a while. Presumably this is because director Shin Itagaki has been busy with other things – I mean, he was involved in that Berserk anime that was broadcast the last couple of years, and he’s the director on the new Wake Up Girls show that is starting next month, which has no doubt been keeping him pre-occupied for some time now. I dare-sent say, as much as I love Teekyu, maybe the break was needed – the current season of Teekyu has been way more consistently on-point than the last couple of seasons were. That said, maybe it’s just the whole absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder thing.

Which is about all I have to say about Teekyu this evening.