I saw a festival screening of the Girls und Panzer movie at the Scotland Loves Anime event in Edinburgh yesterday. This isn’t the first screening on the movie outside of Japan – it played at a convention in the US a couple of weeks back following Sentais licensing announcement for it, at least, but it may well be the second, and certainly is of the official English subtitled version.
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That’s Tokyo Mirage Sessions “Sharp” FE, as in the musical notation – I’m just too lazy to figure out how to type that.

Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE is that game that Nintendo initially announced as Shin Megami Tensei X Fire Emblem (where “X” is “Cross”, in this case), the game theoretically mashing together Atlus’s flagship RPG branding with Intelligence Systems Fire Emblem series of strategy games. This, of course, set alight expectations of some dark, gritty psychologically fraught low-fantasy epic amongst those who claim Japanese RPGs are now “Too Anime” (which is pretty much just a catch-all for lazy criticism).

They should probably have known a little better.
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Brought to you today by the fact that I can barely swivel my head in here without my eyes falling across some kind of Puchimas! related plush(*), although having one perched ontop of both my television and my PC monitors goes some way to rendering that incredibly likely where-ever I look. Seriously, though, those things were out in force in the Otakon dealers hall this year, and it makes a nice change from the dominance of Love Live crane figures that most anime conventions have been straining under for the last few years (though it did mean I was able to pick up the Starpiece Ritsuko figures. There’s still not enough Ritsuko figures). There was something of an upswing in the amount of iM@S merch in general, honestly, though that’s probably as much to do with the increased number of prize figure releases as it does anything else. I shudder to think of the consequences of the same happening at UK events, though.

This post is also, somewhat more obviously, brought to you by the number 11, which is the number of years which this blog has been sat in this corner of the internet. This is the point, one supposes, where the number of years of existence is getting alarmingly close to surpassing the number of posts made in a given year (even if the average still puts me at over 100 per annum). There’s little other than plain laziness to blame on that front, I guess – at the minimum, it’s not like it really takes a whole lot of time to hammer out a couple of hundred words about a tangerine box popping up in a show or anything, and I’m sure there’s other things I could actually be writing about without too much effort being involved. Must try better, I suppose!

(*) I have fullsize Chicchan, PiyoPiyo, Io and Evil Harukasan, and small Koami, Komami, Chicchan, PiyoPiyo, Hakurasan, Chihya, and Takanya right now. I also have a photograph of me wand Chicchan with satirical Japanese office-lady electro-rap duo Charisma.com, but I’m not the sort to share pictures of myself in the internets.

From episode 6 here, mostly because they somewhat bring attention to the fact, though one appears as early as the shows first episode, used there as a soap-box for Chika trying to recruit potential idol candidates.

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From Season 4, Episode 1 (or, episode 10) of Space Patrol Luluco, one of the two latest efforts from Studio TRIGGER, being used as, well… it’s a spoiler.

Also, Wooser.

Luluco is doing a pretty good job of convincing me that comedy anime is really second-best served in nine minute chunks – obviously, such things are best served in the precise format that Teekyu follows, but failing that, Luluco does a pretty good job of not really overstretching it’s often one-gag episodes, taking things to their end-point without stretching them too thin. It’s a pretty entertaining show, really.

Also, any show that delivers more Sucy is pretty good in my book.