So, here I am sat at home on a bank holiday weekend without anything to do.

Well, OK, that isn’t strictly true. I mean, it’s not exactly the high-impact antics of an anime convention double-bill, but I do have some three weeks worth of cartoons to catch up on at this point. Most evenings this last week, however, have followed a pattern of me staring, horrified, at the mountain of content that I’ve got sitting around to be watched, mentally acknowledging that the situation is only going to get worse the more I put it off (particularly given I’ve been watching more this season than any other in recent history), and still electing to go the low-impact, low-effort route of playing more Neptunia Victory instead.

Which is probably why my game clock has jumped up by some twenty five hours, and my anime backlog as gone down by precisely three episodes of Gatchaman Crowds – on the subject of which, episode 6 has some of the most unintentionally hilarious animation that I’ve seen in a while.

This does mean, however, that I’m left somewhat bereft of things to write about. I was going to go through the whole Otakon experience from the point of view of a British guy throwing a whole bunch money at it (others have, frankly, already done a better job of writing things up from a general experience point of view than I would, though I will say that anyone who thinks that Skybridge is congested should try visiting London MCM on the height of a Saturday evening), but now that the accommodation feeding frenzy has already taken place, it’s probably a bit too late to jump on that. Maybe next year, if the stars align correctly once again, and I make it back to Otakon again in 2014.

Which pretty much means that this post is simply to acknowledge that I didn’t die at some point over the last three weeks. Yay!

PS – Yeah, the Yoko Kanno concert was great.
PPS – I now know more about anime Penguins than I ever thought I would!

Well, not exactly AFK, obviously, because I’m typing this, but presently I find myself in the land where over-the-counter painkillers are sold FREEly almost entirely in quantities that’d be illegal to sell in the UK, and where adverts are FREE to blatantly slander their competitors by name.

Yes, I’m in jolly Baltimore this weekend for Otakon, and then I’m back home in Blighty for Ayacon the weekend afterwards. And by “Jolly”, I mean “ludicrously humid”. Oh, boy, it’s not like it’s any warmer than it’s been back home recently, thanks to the recent British heatwave, but that humidity is pretty overwhelming for someone from my part of the world.

Anyway, what this would normally mean is that, well, you shouldn’t be expecting the usual frequency of updates for the next couple of weeks. Of course, it’s not like I’ve actually updated much in the last couple of months, so it’s not like there’s going to be much difference.

I would also say that this means that you should say “Hi” if you see me around, but I guess you wouldn’t know what I look like unless you’ve met me previously, particularly given I’ll be endeavouring to protect my baldy head from the sun by doing my best impression of a Yorkshire farmer. You might get me on the 3DS Streetpass if you’re looking to fill out the UK on your world map, anyway!

(PS – Yup, I know there’s been some new iM@S trademark registrations, but I have not comment on something so vague right now)

Those who follow me on Twitter may or may not be aware of my tendency, once a month, to complain about the fact that the new songs for iDOLM@STER Shiny Festa, the PSP and iOS iM@S rhythm-action game, had yet to be solicited for release on CD – mostly the main theme, Music♪, though I guess I’m slightly unusual in preferring Vault that Borderline to the other game-specific songs (and, honestly, I’m really not particularly fussed about Visionary).

Now, almost a full year after the the initial release of the game, they’ve finally actually thrown out release dates for the CDs containing the full versions of the songs. But whilst Columbia may give with one hand, they take with another – rather than release the songs as singles, they are releasing them across a series of 2CD collections, monikered THE IDOLM@STER 765PRO ALLSTARS+ GRE@TEST BEST!. Or at least that’s what I assume is going on – the CDJapan description currently states that all four of those are on the first CD, but I’m pretty certain that’s a misinterpretation of the announcement description.

But, hey, the actual track listings haven’t been published yet, so the actual contents (and what the ‘+’ in ‘ALLSTARS+’ signifies) is anybodies guess right now. That the CD sets go by the titles of THE IDOLM@STER HISTORY, SWEET＆SMILE!, COOL＆BITTER! and LOVE&PEACE! somewhat tie into the tone and content of Music♪, Visionary, edeN and Vault that Borderline respectively probably spells at least part of their plan here.

Of course, the annoyance for me is that, as nice as iM@S collection CDs are, I kind of own a lot of iM@S CDs already, and this probably means I’m facing shelling out three times as much as I would have otherwise for the sake of four songs given that I’ve probably got a lot of the content presented here already. I suppose we’ll see once the full track list is out.

The other thing to bear in mind with this, though, is that this is a wholesale dumping of iM@S music content going on here – it suggests the end of the milking phase for this particular content. What this signifies is the expectation of both something causing a bump in interest in the franchise, and something causing a significant content refresh. Whilst I’m certainly looking forward to the upcoming movie, that’s probably not big enough of an event, and I will point out that the last time they released a collection of Best Of CDs, it was six months ahead of the release of iDOLM@STER 2…

Which rather stokes the bonfire of expectations regarding the likely upcoming announcement of iDOLM@STER 3 for early next year…

Just saying, you know.

Wait, Passionate Idol Activities and Tangerine Boxes in the same cartoon? What kind of crazy paradise have I stumbled into here?!?

I’m not quite sure exactly when it happened, but at some point over the last couple of months, Aikatsu, a goofy pop idol show produced by Sunrise to promote a goofy pop idol collectors card video arcade game, seems to have firmly embedded itself as the unlikely favourite amongst those on my twitter timeline. It’s maybe hard to discern a particular reason for this in terms of determining a ratio between how much of it is steadily increasing quality, Stockholm syndrome and it continuing through a Spring season which was dominated by a small handful of shows which were mostly more impactful than they necessarily were good.

Well, OK, Stockholm Syndrome is actually grossly unfair a statement – it’s not like the show hasn’t proven itself to be constantly at the very least entertaining, but sometimes it’s more satisfying to watch a show which maintains a certain level of consistency over a long period than it is to watch something that hit’s incredible highs but is incredibly short, if you get what I mean? There’s a lot to be said for something that’s reliable in what it delivers.

That’s assuming you don’t fall into the trap of continuing to watch some kind of boys-comic claptrap what goes on long, long after the material has fallen off a cliff in the futile hope it may regain it’s quality at some point. Not naming any names, of course.

Of course, I absolutely wouldn’t suggest that Aikatsu’s popularity has any relation to how easy it makes it to ship the characters, oh no.

For my part, I’ve been satisfying my appetite for double-artificial idol music by picking up the CDs as they come out – well, aside from Siginalize, which I’ve somehow repeatedly forgotten to buy. I’ve not got the two most recent CDs either, but those are bundled in with next weeks release of the all-important Precure All-Stars New Stage 2 BD. Funny thing is, my favourite song is probably still Idol Katsudou from way back at the start of the series, though as far as the insert songs go, I guess Take Me Higher, Tristars image song, is pretty popular at the moment.

Well, as pretty popular as a song from Aikatsu can get, anyway.

With the recent release of the 300th figure, Good Smile Company have done something of a soft relaunch, or at least a minor rebranding, of their Nendoroid figure line. After all, at 300 entries, it’s probably one of the biggest series of specifically branded figures outside of the low-end capsule-machine brandings like Bandai’s HGIF, but at this point they’re facing increased competition from other manufacturers finally launching ranges in the same size and price point regions.

It’s kind of an interesting rebranding as well, in a sense – I don’t actually follow any of GSCs social presence, even though they do things in English, but it definitely feels like they’re playing up to the series popularity outside of Japan with their new packaging style (despite the “For Sale In Japan Only” moniker still displayed on the back). The Romanized version of the character name is now more prominent than the Kanji one, and the sculptor information on the front is now in English, the Japanese demoted to the back of the box. Whilst the traditional Nendoroid “Something Something Action Figure!” line in Japanese is still displayed on the front-left, the box also features slightly-awkward English lines like “Cute to look at, fun to play with and great to collect Nendoroids!” all over it.

Although it is kind of unfortunately that the rather cleaner, less busy graphic design of it all does actually end up making it more like, say, the competing Cupoche packaging than the busier, older ones did.

It’s also kind of unfortunate that the two Hidamari Sketch characters they’ve released as part of the series ended up juuuuuust either side of the rebranding, cursing the boxes not to match, despite being released barely a month apart.
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