First spot of the season, from Gugure! Kokkuri-san, the gag-comedy about a fox spirit who elects to haunt an incredibly dead-pan little girl. It’s where we first meet the more-than-a-little-skeezy dog spirit Inugami.

The show is OK, I guess. I hadn’t intended to watch it until I caught wind of a tangerine-tinged lead, but given I like a spot of dry humour every now and again, the relatively flat delivery the show presents quite often isn’t far from my cup of tea. It could probably do with something of a higher gag concentration, though. Maybe I’ll keep up with it, and maybe I won’t – I’m feeling a little time-strapped as of late.
(more…)

I suppose it’s probably long past the point where me actually saying something about One for All is productive or useful to anyone. It’s not really through a lack of playing it, mind you, more a combination of laziness and bad timing. Whilst I’d well prepared for the games launch back in May, booking time off work to play it, I ultimately decided that it’d be far more productive to spend that time on a last minute trip to Chicago to ogle real-life idols instead of cartoon ones. Missing that launch window really threw off my timing, though.

Still, though, four months, a Platinum trophy and the best part of eighty hours of play time later, I guess I should write at least something about it.
(more…)

Submitted by Author over the twittersphere, from an episode of Barakamon. All potential jokes about Digivolving Presidents are too overplayed to repeat here.

Well, at least I assume it’s from Barakamon – I’m taking his word for it, because at this point in the season, it’s increasingly apparent that I’m absolutely not going to find time to watch even a single episode of the show. I feel kind of bad about it, because it’s apparently pretty good, even if many comments to that effect are often couched in terms of “well, we’re never getting a Yotsubato cartoon”.

In reality, though, it’s pretty much the victim of being not on Crunchyroll and not being an idol show – I’m behind on my anime as it is at the moment (having taken on a little more than I usually endeavour to chew this last season despite taking a two-week trip to the US in the middle), so if it’s something which doesn’t just appear somewhere on the frontpage of Crunchy when I check the site, there’s a pretty good chance that I’ll either just forget about it, or simply won’t bother to jump through the additional hoops to watch it. In the case of Barakamon, it’s also one of the increasingly few shows which isn’t streaming anywhere in the UK, which isn’t to say that I couldn’t, say, watch it on Hulu using one of those handy region spoofing plugins, but who wants to deal with Hulu?

Call me spoilt, I guess, but it does mean I have nothing to say about the actual show.

(Also, I should probably actually watch K before going to see Missing Kings at SLA in a few weeks).

Well, it would seem that in my rush to not update the blog with something in over a month due to a bout of post-Love Live malaise, I managed to completely miss the fact that the ninth anniversary of me staking a claim over this particular corner of the internet passed yesterday. Whoops. Oh, well, at least it’s not an important anniversary like the tenth or something!

I’d like to pretend that I’m really busy – and in fairness, I did take a couple of weeks out in the US in order to make a return visit to Otakon (Altima were great – Motsu is pretty baller – and Saori Hayami was adorable, though I’m still pretty frustrated at having to skip the panel to even stand a chance of getting her autograph) – but since I’ve gotten back… there’s simply not been anything I’ve felt it necessary to write about. Admittedly, the unceasing onslaught of LLSIF events eat up time, and the Midway event in KanColle (yes, I’m still playing) certainly did too, but it’s not like I’m not watching and enjoying cartoons or anything. I suppose I should probably get around to writing something about iM@S OfA, though. It’s not like I’ve not clocked-up the best part of seventy hours in that thing at this point.

Those Vita Love Live games, on the other hand… not so much. They’re kinda bad!

Proving weak against UFOs, from the ending credits to Engaged to the Unidentified (Mikakunin de Shinkoukei), because I can actually watch it in on CR whilst being in the US?

Mashiro best character, Konoha Secret Best character, Benio kind of annoying, Kobeni really just sort of there most the time, yadda yadda yadda. Not much to say about the show, but I do think the upcoming Mashiro Nendoroid looks pretty great – it has fun faces, and comes with Mokele-mbembe. Which is mostly just neat because Mokele-mbembe is a fun name.

Mokele-mbembe.

I dunno, though, the Nendoroid line really feels like it’s on an upsurge at the moment, in terms of fun character choices and faces – I mean, I was just popping onto AmiAmi to pull a link for the Mashiro nendoroid and notice that a cute Zvezda nendo has been listed (although if it was Professor Um or White Robin, I’d probably be twice as all over it). I’m sure I’d be all about that Renge nendo if I’d seen more of Non-Non Biyori as well, and all those Kill la Kill toys look great…

Meh, the worries of a merch-purchaser. I don’t have room for all the nendos I have already, let alone the ones I have on order. Also, Cu-poche’s are still great as well.

(Also Nico-Nico-Ni, obviously, because what’s a post here these days without mentioning Love Live?)