Anime Review: Hakata Tonkatsu Ramens

written by Laurie Tom

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Hakata Tonkatsu Ramens has a ridiculous premise, but once you buy into it, it’s a lot of fun. Hakata City, within the Fukuoka Prefecture, is city so populated with hitmen and other criminal elements that they’ve essentially organized into businesses. Not public facing, mind, but this is the kind of show where in the first episode a hitman finds out someone else has already killed his target, because, well, hitmen are just that easy to hire. (I imagine people with enemies don’t last long in Hakata City.)

Private detective Banba and genderbending hitman Lin are the two most prominent members of the cast, and following their story is the first arc of the series, but the first arc also introduces their fellow miscreants and the show becomes an ensemble after that point.

The cast is very good at what they do, but they sell themselves as people first, rather than what their jobs could have made them. Jiro might be in an unsavory line of work, but he’s an attentive father (even if his daughter sometimes accompanies him on jobs) and a generally cheerful man. Maru’s enthusiastic about trying to find work appropriate for his skill set (torture is his preference, but he also avenges people for pay) and there’s something about him posting a job listing at shadyjobs.com telling people to ask about his rates that makes me laugh.

This is the sort of show where one character is visiting the doctor (who does body disposal), runs into a second character who is the middle of getting rid of a corpse, and then asks if he can use that corpse for a different job.

A series about criminals, whether they’re hitmen, information brokers, cleaners, or other unsavory things could have gotten really dark, and make no mistake they do their jobs pretty efficiently, but instead we end up with a group of friends who go out eating and drinking together after a long day and play baseball on the same club sports team. The series title comes from the name of their baseball team, Hakata Tonkatsu Ramens. It helps that anyone killed by the primary cast are other criminals with a lesser sense of camaraderie.

The one thing that really sticks out though is that there is a dearth of female characters, even among the less prominent members of the baseball team. Jiro’s elementary school-aged daughter is the most frequently recurring female character and there are only two others with speaking lines who appear in a handful of episodes. In a way it feels like Lin’s penchant for wearing women’s clothes only exists because otherwise they wouldn’t have someone in a skirt for the promotional images.

I do want to talk about Lin though. He identifies as male and he’s straight (he doesn’t like getting hit on by other men), but he likes to wear women’s clothes. The rest of the main cast doesn’t give him any crap about it. Rather, they just treat it as his particular fashion sense. I’m not entirely sure anyone in the core cast even brings it up, which is refreshing. The team does use him as bait on occasion because he can pass as a woman as long as he’s not talking in his regular voice (which is deep and unmistakably male), but that’s about the extent of acknowledging it.

Hakata Tonkatsu Ramens is based on a light novel series, and I suspect there were three or four books used to make this anime since there are four storylines, the two in the middle being the shortest. Because of that, the show doesn’t have an overarching plot, but rather distinct mini-arcs covering different problems.

Though the novels are still ongoing, the anime is entirely self-contained. It’s not the type of series that beggars a resolution (there is no master organization to take down, no big bad who must be defeated) so even though it ends on an arc rather than a dramatic episode that ties together everything that came before, it still feels more than satisfying.

I recommend Hakata Tonkatsu Ramens. It’s not Baccano levels of madness, but if you like humor with your hitmen it’s pretty good.

Number of Episodes: 12

Pluses: Great sense of humor, memorable cast of characters, genderqueer Lin is treated as just another part of the team rather than constantly having attention drawn to his choice in clothing

Minuses: Female characters are almost non-existent, first named female character is fridged to provide motivation for male character, ends on arc rather than a series ending

Hakata Tonkatsu Ramens is currently streaming at Crunchyroll (subtitled) and Funimation (dubbed).

laurietom
Laurie Tom is a fantasy and science fiction writer based in southern California. Since she was a kid she has considered books, video games, and anime in roughly equal portions to be her primary source of entertainment. Laurie’s short fiction has been published in Galaxy’s Edge, Strange Horizons, and Intergalactic Medicine Show.

BOOK REVIEW: Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris

written by David Steffen

Dead in the Family is a romance/mystery/horror novel from 2010, the tenth in the Sookie Stackhouse series of novels by Charlaine Harris (which is the basis of the HBO show True Blood). The previous books are all reviewed here earlier on the Diabolical Plots feed.

At the end of the last book, Dead and Gone, Sookie was tortured at the hands of two fairies that were part of the opposing faction of the short-lived but brutal fairy war. As this book starts, she is still recovering from both the physical and psychological aftermath of this horrific treatment, with the help of her friends and her boyfriend the vampire Eric Northman. Things begin to get very complicated when Eric’s maker, the ancient Roman vampire Appius Livius Ocella, shows up with another vampire he has made–Alexei Romanov, the last son of the last Czar of Russia who witnessed his entire family slaughtered and is still suffering from emotional imbalances even these decades later. Sookie is asked to babysit the child of her (dead) cousin Hadley, who is also telepathic, and she helps him deal with social situations. Meanwhile, Bill is still ill from the silver poisoning he got during the fairy war. If his maker were still alive, she might be able to heal him, but the only chance is another vampire made by his maker–and Bill doesn’t want to contact her.

The beginning of this book was a major shift in tone from any of the rest of the series as Sookie deals with both physical injuries and the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. The series has always had the risk of dark consequences, but I found it very surprising that it got that dark at the end of the last book, it feels like a departure from the rest. This recovery period is just the natural consequence of that–you can’t come out the other side of being tortured almost to death and expect to have your outlook on life unaltered, but I found it much harder to read, lacking the upbeat tone that is usually present in most of the rest of the book even when dire happenings are afoot usually Sookie is still joking and referencing her word-of-the-day calendar. Conversely, though I found the change in tone a rough departure from the rest of the series, it also felt like she was pretty much fully recovered awfully quickly afterward. So, I guess I’m just not easy to please or something. But I found this book much harder to read because of that abrupt change in tone from the rest of them, while the rest of them have been smooth (if sometimes fluffy) reads.

(I kept reading, mind you, because this close to the end of the series I wanted to see how everything wrapped up.)

Anime Review: Kokkoku

written by Laurie Tom

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I really wanted to like Kokkoku. I really did.

The setup in the very first episode has a lot of promise. Juri Yukawa is a young woman, newly graduated from college, and she’s from a middle class family that has fallen on hard times. Her mother is still working, but her father has been laid off. Her grandfather is retired, her older brother is unemployed, and her older sister is a single mother with a child she had with a man who has since exited her life.

All four generations of the Yukawas live in the same house and Juri feels like she needs to get out of town before she ends up going nowhere like almost every other adult in her family. She knows she’s not that special. None of her job interviews locally have resulted in any offers.

Though her family is not entirely functional, they dote on Makoto, the son of Juri’s sister, because out of everyone, he’s the one most likely to have a future, so it’s because of Makoto’s kidnapping that the entire story is kicked off.

Initially the kidnapping looks like it’s just for money, and Takafumi, Juri’s father, thinks they can scrounge up the funds from the family savings, but they’re both stopped by Juri’s grandfather (who oddly never gets a name–he’s just called “Grandfather” or “Father” depending on who is speaking to him). Her grandfather has a secret that he’s never shared, and he undergoes a ritual together with Takafumi and Juri while using an old stone heirloom and a drop of his blood.

This takes the three of them into what he calls the stasis world. Time is frozen everywhere, and because of that, the three of them can now leisurely walk over to the ransom exchange site and free Makoto and Tsubasa, Juri’s brother, who was with Makoto at the time of the kidnapping. With time in stasis, the three of them believe they can rescue their family and get back home again without putting anyone in danger or losing what money they have.

However, as they try carrying the time-frozen Tsubasa and Makoto home, they encounter other people moving in the stasis world, which should not have been possible.

Kokkoku has some really interesting worldbuilding involving the laws of the stasis world and its guardians, how things float without time to make them fall, and the unusual powers the Yukawa family members are able to manifest after spending a period of “time” in stasis. I especially liked that we have a multi-generational family all working together to save other family members. They’re dysfunctional at times (Takafumi is especially bent that his father has hid the stasis world from him his entire life), but they feel real.

The first half of the series is fun while all the worldbuilding is happening and secrets are being uncovered. Where it falls down is in the second half, when their enemy’s agenda becomes apparent, and by then, a couple of the Yukawa family members’ potentials are wasted. Takafumi becomes a joke and it feels like Tsubasa was being built up for something that just didn’t happen.

Kokkoku‘s final episode is built almost entirely towards a downer ending (which would be fine), but Juri is saved by a deus ex machina that literally comes out of nowhere involving a character we’d never been introduced to prior to the final minutes of the episode.

I did not particularly like the show’s attempt to build sympathy for its villain either. Considering how dangerous he is to the Yukawa family I was not in the mood to watch his sob story flashbacks, which are verbally told to our protagonists, and I’m not entirely sure why Juri and her grandfather would give him the time of day.

I don’t think I’ve watched a show that has started so high and fallen so low by its end as Kokkoku. If you don’t mind a bad ending, the first half’s worldbuilding and the premise itself is good; 95% of the series takes place within a single frozen “moment” of time. But don’t expect much in the second half.

Number of Episodes: 12

Pluses: Interesting premise, multiple generations of protagonist’s family involved, alienness of the stasis world

Minuses: Second half falls apart, ending is a deus ex machina, some of the characters never reach their full potential

Kokkoku is currently streaming at Amazon (subtitled).

BOOK REVIEW: Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris

written by David Steffen

Dead and Gone is a romance/mystery/horror novel from 2009, the ninth in the Sookie Stackhouse series of novels by Charlaine Harris (which is the basis of the HBO show True Blood). The previous books are all reviewed here earlier on the Diabolical Plots feed.

Before the series of books, the vampires of the world had publicly revealed their existence, but since then Sookie has learned of many other supernatural beings living among us as humans. Among them are the shapeshifters, including werewolves and wereanimals of other types. Now that they’ve had time to observe how the vampire revelation has gone, the shapeshifters have finally decided to make their big public reveal, outing themselves to the public both in a general sense and with individual members of communities revealing themselves at once. The reveal in Bon Temps seems to go pretty well, until Sookie’s werepanther sister-in-law is found crucified outside Merlotte’s where she works.

The King of Nevada has now conquered all of Louisiana, killing all of the vampire hierarchy there except for Eric who he has kept on as sheriff, so that brings its own set of conflicts.

And Sookie learns that her fairy great-grandfather Niall is engaged in a major power struggle.

Never a dull day in the life of Sookie!

I thought it was really interesting to see this book tackle another great life-changing event with the reveals of the shifters to the world. It makes sense, real worlds are always changing even if we’re used to them being somewhat static in book worlds. There are enough conflicts all going on in parallel that there’s never a chance to get bored, and you have the mystery of who crucified Crystal to keep the reader engaged as well.

(Only minor quibble, as with the last book, is the tendency to call any conflict a “war”, even if there are only a handful of participants and the conflict lasts only a short period of time)

Spring 2018 Anime First Impressions

written by Laurie Tom

A lot has changed since last year. Amazon’s Anime Strike service has been shut down and everything previously streaming on it has been rolled into its baseline Amazon Prime service. While this does not help fans without Amazon Prime, American fans are no longer being charged a few extra dollars for the same content their Canadian counterparts have been getting as part of their baseline service.

Additionally, HIDIVE is coming into its own as an alternate streaming service with its own exclusive licenses. It doesn’t have a free streaming alternative, but the monthly subscription is affordable and their library is deep with several exclusives.

This spring is packed with high profile series, and a lot of smaller ones, that in an ordinary season I would want to watch. As a result, I viewed more first episodes than usual, and I’ll be going through what I checked out in alphabetical order with the goal of identifying two or three to follow for the season.

Caligula

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Why I Watched It: I wanted to play Caligula when it came out as an RPG because of its premise. Students live in a virtual reality school where they’re expected to live their day to day idyllic lives indefinitely. Most of them don’t even realize the world isn’t real, but the protagonist discovers the truth and he and his friends band together to escape. The name come from the psychological term the “Caligula Effect.”

What I Thought: I enjoyed this first episode, as Ritsu gradually realizes that there is something wrong with reality (though his friend Mifue gets the worst of it with her rewritten mom). It begins with a distorted cry for help during a virtual idol’s music track that only he hears, and escalates with bizarre, out-of-character behavior from his friends, until he realizes that the representatives of both of the graduating class and incoming class of students are the exact same person. At that point all hell breaks loose, complete with what I assume are artificial students transforming into monsters. It’s an intriguing start and and I really want to know why this illusionary world has started crumbling.

Verdict: I’ll probably be watching. I think this is an excellent contender for my viewing time. The only thing I’m concerned about is that this is a video game adaptation and I’m not sure how well the rest of the story will weather the transition.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll (subtitled)

Dances with the Dragons

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Why I Watched It: Dances with the Dragons has appealing character designs and looks to have nicely animated action scenes. There’s potentially decent worldbuilding with the idea of fighting dragons with “spell equations.”

What I Thought: I like the magi-tech style of combat, in that this is a modern world where magic is just another technology. There is a boundary between human and dragon lands, and juushiki users (awkwardly rendered as “juushikiists” in the subtitles) are sort of bounty hunters who take out the dragons in exchange for pay. However the worldbuilding is uneven, spending a good minute rambling about the discovery of juushiki when there are more pressing issues, like where did the dragons come from (we see ruins of skyscrapers so they can’t be native) and what is an Altar since everyone seems to be impressed by the killing of a semi-Altar dragon?

Verdict: I might come back to this one, but in a crowded season it’s a pass. While it has potential, the first episode is too uneven and there’s too much dead space that doesn’t feel like plot or character development.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll (subtitled) and Funimation (dubbed, subscription required)

Devil’s Line

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Why I Watched It: I try to stay away from vampire stuff, but this one looks interesting, pairing a college student (rather than a high school girl) with a half-vampire who is part of a police task force. The original manga is seinen, meaning the story is aimed to appeal to the adult male demographic, so it will likely avoid the usual paranormal romance tropes.

What I Thought: This is definitely a gritty, more mature offering. Vampires are much like humans except that they find blood irresistible, and get a high off of drinking it, which tends to result in the victim’s demise. Offending vampires are hunted down and arrested, though not without some level of sympathy, with the understanding that a vampire that has killed can never go back to a peaceful life without blood. I like this level of real world integration with the fantastic, however, the combat animation is extremely off-putting. It appears to be CG, but not rendered in the standard frame rate for anime so it looks too fluid. Aside from that, a lot of the night time scenes feature thin white outlines around characters and I don’t know if that’s a stylistic choice or a rendering error. Finally, I don’t think the two leads have much chemistry with each other and I found it off-putting how Anzai forces a kiss on Tsukasa at the end of the episode, even if he is half-vampire and happens to see blood near her mouth.

Verdict: I’m going to pass. It has some interesting ideas, but I don’t like Anzai or that sort of behavior from my male leads.

Where to find stream: HIDIVE (subtitled and dubbed, subscription required)

Doreiku the Animation

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Why I Watched It: A number of questionable people are trapped in a survival game-ish power struggle to achieve dominance over each other, which is potentially right up my alley, so long as the requisite head games are there. Based on a novel series.

What I Thought: It was more trashy than I expected. It’ll probably appeal to people who like fiction with exploitative scenarios. I thought there would be more of a game structure to what’s going on, but basically two people engage in a “duel” while wearing these high tech retainers in their mouths and the loser is then compelled by the device to be a slave to the winner. So far as I can tell, there is no tournament arc and I suspect most of the cast is going to consist of a bunch of unlikable sadists. We meet our protagonists, who’ve yet to engage in dueling anybody, but we do see the result of one duel. Though the winner is taking some understandable revenge, she becomes cruel in ways that she didn’t appear to be before.

Verdict: I’m going to pass. If it was more game-y I could possibly hold my nose through it, but it looks like the show is going to put our protagonists through the wringer, and they won’t be the better for it by the end.

Where to find stream: HIDIVE (subtitled and dubbed, subscription required)

The Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These

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Why I Watched It: This is a remake of an epic space opera series that in older days would never have been licensed due to the size and scope of the project, covering a whopping ten novels about the interstellar war between the Galactic Empire and the Free Planet Alliance. It was one of those series that I knew about when I first got into anime as a legend in itself, but never expected to watch because no one was translating 100+ episode series at the time. The remake will be shorter.

What I Thought: The first episode focuses almost exclusively on the Galactic Empire, introducing one of our dual protagonists, Reinhard von Lohengramm. We don’t get much history about the current war so much as the Galactic Empire and the Free Planet Alliance have been at it for a while and Reinhard is rather young and arguably inexperienced for the role of High Admiral. The space battle segments are good for those craving ship-to-ship combat sans mecha, and his tactics are sound. Reinhard is willing to forgo “common sense” behavior, realizing that by doing so he can obtain an advantage. It’s not until the final minutes of the episode that we hear the voice of his rival, Yang Wen-li, on the side of the Free Planet Alliance, who promises his soldiers they will still win despite their losses. With Reinhard’s skill established and Yang Wen-li’s sheer gumption with his fleet-wide broadcast, it’s a solid tease for their eventual confrontation in the next episode.

Verdict: I’ll be watching. I love this kind of space opera and it’s unfortunately not as common as it used to be in anime. I’m not sure how it’s going to manage condensing everything from the original, but it looks really good so far.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll (subtitled) and Funimation (dubbed, subscription required)

Magical Girl Ore

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Why I Watched It: When I first saw the promo images of a couple beefcake guys in magical girl outfits, I assumed this was another show about boys transforming into magical girls, but it’s not! It’s about a couple girls who get magical girl abilities that turn them into a couple really buff guys. Naturally it’s a comedy and there are romance complications when the protagonist’s crush seems more interested in her male persona than herself.

What I Thought: For a series built on the premise that the girl turns into a guy and then fights demons while wearing a skirt, it takes an awfully long time to get to that point, with the transformation happening right at the end of the episode, so we don’t even get a fight scene. The show clearly knows how to parody its genre, and the “cute” mascot that looks and talks like a yakuza as part of its speech tic is an inspired touch, but the pacing leaves me concerned and I’m not sure whether it’s intentional that her crush is expressionless as a piece of cardboard.

Verdict: I’m going to pass. I might revisit if word of mouth builds up, but it’s not funny enough to make up for the slow pacing.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll (subtitled)

Persona 5: The Animation

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Why I Watched It: Persona 5 was one of the best JRPGs to come out last year, featuring teenage phantom thieves who steal people’s hearts in one world so they can regain their consciences in the real one. This should be a quick and easy way to relive the game (or follow the story in the first place for non-gamers). The game’s voice cast is reprising their roles and the series is expected to run 24 episodes so there should be the room needed to cover the entire plot without compressing and cutting too much.

What I Thought: The first episode was engaging and impressive for compressing what was probably the first 2-3 hours of gameplay into a half hour time slot. We’re told all we need to know about Ren Amamiya’s past, how he came to his new school, and what’s happening in “present day” (the story starts in media res and is mostly told in flashback during Ren’s interrogation). The first episode even manages to make explicit how Ren and Ryuji were able to visit Kamoshida’s palace in the first place, which I don’t think was spelled out in the game. I suspect series newbies will be a little, though not horribly, lost but fans should feel right at home.

Verdict: I’ll be watching at some point, though I’m not sure if it will be during the spring since there’s so much else going on and I already know the story. This is definitely going on my list though.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll (subtitled)

Real Girl

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Why I Watched It: The premise, about a boy who prefers the 2D stuff finally meeting a real girl who might be interested in him, isn’t something I’d usually watch. It feels like male nerd wish fulfillment, but Real Girl is based on a manga for girls, so I assume there is a twist to it that makes it more appealing to the female demographic. The character designs are appealing so I figured I’d give this a shot.

What I Thought: The two protagonists are not people I would normally like, but they’re human. Hikaru Tsutsui doesn’t like real girls because they tend to pick on him for being a nerd and he only has one friend, who is also a nerd, so they both get ostracized together. When he meets Iroha Igarashi he immediately dislikes her because she’s fashionable for her age and has a “loose” reputation. Of course she’s the type of girl who would show up late to class without a care (whereas he’s a model student with perfect attendance). What they go through feels very real, especially with how real people hurt each other without wanting to be cruel.

Verdict: I might watch this one. It’s a crowded season, but Iroha is a really unusual female lead. It’s rare to have a more experienced girl in a romantic pair, especially in shoujo anime. That might be why the episode is entirely from Hikaru’s POV, but I hope that switches later.

Where to find stream: HIDIVE (subtitled and dubbed, subscription required)

Tada Never Falls in Love

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Why I Watched It: Sweet high school romantic comedy between a high school boy, Tada, and the girl, Teresa, who has come to his school as an exchange student. Though the trailer video plays up both the romance and the comedy in a high school setting, the early promotional art shows Teresa in a tiara and ballgown, suggesting she is probably a princess. The show is by the creative team behind the Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun anime, which I had greatly enjoyed.

What I Thought: Tada is not manic funny in the way that Nozaki was and while the first episode isn’t bad, it’s definitely a slower burn. Teresa is heavily implied to be royalty and has come to Japan as an exchange student. It turns out that she’s a total Japanophile, specifically of a period drama called Rainbow Samurai, which weirds out Tada because she acts like it’s the greatest thing ever, while to him it’s an old TV show. Tada himself doesn’t seem that remarkable other than he really likes photography, and that’s how he meets Teresa, when she keeps getting in the way of his lens. So far they have such little chemistry together that even sharing an umbrella in the rain doesn’t feel romantic, though I guess that’s the point, given the series title.

Verdict: I might come back to this one, but it’s crowded season and with Wotakoi being the clear romantic comedy winner and Real Girl also being a contender, I don’t think I’m going to be seeing this one in real time.

Where to find stream: HIDIVE (subtitled and dubbed, subscription required)

Tokyo Ghoul:re

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Why I Watched It: The first Tokyo Ghoul anime veered away from the manga and went with a wildly different and original ending, so it’s very odd that the sequel manga is being animated, because it means that people who only follow the anime will have no idea how we got to this point. I’m not sure if concessions are being made to onboard those viewers, or the assumption will be that the audience knows the original manga.

What I Thought: The opening episode is different enough that I doubt I have much more context than someone brand new to the franchise. The government has recently created the Quinx Squad, which are humans with the abilities of ghouls in order to better combat them. Since ghouls require human flesh in order to survive, humans naturally don’t get along with them. We get a bunch of new characters and meet most of the Quinx Squad. The ending confirms where Kaneki is, for fans of the first series wondering why he wasn’t in most of the episode, but I feel like I really needed more answers, not just to Kaneki but to the Quinx Squad’s existence in general, to hold my interest.

Verdict: I’ll come back to this later. Despite the bumpy adaptation the last time around, :re has a new writer and new director, and if the first episode is anything to judge, this series will be tonally different. It’s bloody, but doesn’t seem to be striving for a horror feel, making it more of a dark action show, which feels like a better fit than the action horror hybrid the first one was trying to be.

Where to find stream: Funimation (subtitled and dubbed, subscription required for dub, but not for sub)

Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku

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Why I Watched It: After enjoying Recovery of an MMO Junkie I was really looking forward to another romantic comedy about a couple of geeks, this time in an office setting rather than an MMO. “Otaku” is a Japanese word for “enthusiasts” and particularly gets attached to those with nerdier pursuits.

What I Thought: This first episode does a wonderful job of conveying what it’s like being an adult geek, from discovering a fellow geek in the office to trying to hide your hobbies while hanging around muggles. In Narumi’s case, her ex-boyfriend actually dumped her when he discovered she’s a yaoi fangirl. Fortunately for Narumi, changing jobs to avoid her ex lands her at a new company where she gets reacquainted with her taciturn childhood friend, Hirotaka, who is similarly interested in geeky things. After being a sounding board for all her venting, he asks her why she doesn’t date someone who doesn’t mind that she’s a fangirl. The episode ends with Hirotaka giving an amazingly nerdy proposal to Narumi for why she should consider dating him (he’ll always be there when she needs another player in a video game!) and I completely loved it.

Verdict: I’ll be watching. Since they agreed to date at the end of the very first episode, I assume the rest of the series will be the ups and downs of two nerds getting used to dating each other. The other two characters in the show look like they’ll end up being a beta couple and at least one of them is confirmed an otaku in the first episode.

Where to find stream: Amazon Prime Video (subtitled, subscription required)

BOOK REVIEW: Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty

written by David Steffen

Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty is a science fiction mystery, one of the finalists for the Hugo Award for the Best Novel category of 2017.

In the future, cloning is commonplace, but its use is strictly limited by law to ensure that it’s only used for longevity of a person rather than multiplication. Every clone makes regular mindmaps of their memories and after they die, a new youthful body is cloned from their DNA and the mindmap copied into it. Many clones have hundreds of years worth of memories they carry with them as though they have lived a single long life. The practice of cloning is not accepted by everyone, especially religious groups, many of which consider clones to be soulless abominations, and there have been violent conflicts about cloning practices.

And what better use for clones than to crew a starship? Equip the ship with a cloning bay and mindmapper, and a crew of six can staff a starship that would require a generation ship with much heavier infrastructure with an uncloned human crew. Not many clones would be interested in such a long dull trip, but criminal clones granted a pardon for their crimes as payment can be convinced, watched over by an AI to make sure things don’t get out of control, and a cargo of humans and clone mindmaps to colonize the planet at the end of the trip.

But, something has gone terribly wrong. Maria Arena and the other six crew members wake up simultaneously in newly cloned bodies, to their own murder scene. They have been in transit for twenty-five years but have lost all of the memories of their journey, the gravity is off, the food replicator is only manufacturing poison, the AI is offline, the cloning bay has been sabotaged, and presumably one or more of them was the murderer but even they don’t remember that they did it. Their previous crimes are strictly off the record as part of the pardon deal, so no one knows if any of the others had a history of murder.

This was an enjoyable SF mystery, an amped-up locked room type of mystery, where this crew of six is set to investigate their own murders, and it could’ve been any of them since they lost the memories of the journey. As they go they have numerous other obstacles they have to deal with just to keep going, as well as searching for clues to who committed the murders. Scenes from the present are interspersed with scenes from each person’s pasts so the interplay between the characters makes more and more sense as we understand their histories. I don’t read a lot in the mystery genre, but I liked how this novel took familiar tropes like the locked room mystery and by changing the setting and technology level gave them interesting new angles to explore. The book flowed easily from beginning to end and I was satisfied with the resolution. I don’t know how well it will stand up to avid mystery readers, but I enjoyed it and would recommend it.

Anime Review: Juni Taisen: Zodiac War

written by Laurie Tom

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I didn’t expect to like Juni Taisen: Zodiac War as much as I did, but that said, it’s not going to be like that for everyone. The show is a throwback to the more violent anime of the 1990s in that there are lots of blood and guts, with possibly one of the most creative and disgusting ways I’ve ever seen to hide a corpse, but at the same time the series is very talky and ultimately depressing.

Juni Taisen is about a tournament fought every twelve years by twelve families. Each family sends a representative to participate in the gruesome death match, with the outcome deciding the fate of various nations between the power mongers of the world. As for the sole tournament survivor, they earn the fulfillment of one wish, no matter how outlandish.

Each combatant is themed to an animal of the Chinese zodiac and in several cases this also comes with a supernatural ability. During the tournament they don’t go by their proper names, but rather the name of their animal in Japanese followed by a description of their killing style. For instance: Eiji, the Ox, will introduce himself as “Ushi, Killing Systematically.” And make no mistake, there is a lot of killing.

At the start of the tournament, each combatant is instructed to swallow a gemlike object that turns out to be poisonous. The poison will dissolve into their bodies in twelve hours, setting a time limit for the battle. In order to win, the winner must have all twelve gems in their possession before time is up. Given these circumstances, true cooperation seems impossible, since winning involves removing an object from an opponent’s stomach, though at least one participant tries.

With a couple exceptions, each episode focuses on a particular combatant and we see parts of their personal backstory; who they are and why they entered the tournament in the first place. Unfortunately, after a few episodes the show is clearly following a pattern.

Viewers familiar with the Chinese zodiac, which will likely be the majority of the original Japanese audience, will be able to figure out who the winner is pretty quickly, so the show doesn’t particularly worry about revealing any secrets as the body count builds up. It might be possible for a western viewer to watch the show from an angle of suspense if they don’t know the zodiac and don’t watch the ending credits too closely, but the show was certainly not written with that possibility in mind.

How effective Juni Taisen is largely depends on the audience’s attachment for how these warriors came into their present circumstances, since (nearly) everyone dies and if a character’s one moment in the spotlight doesn’t catch the eye, then there’s not much point to anything else. Even the eventual winner’s story is not terribly climactic since their identity is not expected to be a surprise, which makes for an unusually tepid ending. I liked the winner, but because of the lack of surprise, their episode didn’t have a heavier punch than any other despite wrapping up the storyline.

While I enjoyed watching Juni Taisen as each new episode came out, it’s a series that’s more about watching a bunch of skilled strangers kill each other in various ways than anything deeper. We do get a feel for most of them as human beings, but the format prevents us from knowing them enough to miss them.

Number of Episodes: 12

Pluses: Interesting storytelling format, everyone more or less gets a chance to shine

Minuses: Doesn’t feel as deep as it was aiming for, winner is predictable if you know the Chinese zodiac

Juni Taisen is currently streaming at Crunchyroll (subtitled), Funimation (dubbed). Funimation has licensed this for eventual retail distribution in the US.

REVIEW: Hugo Novella Finalists

written by David Steffen

The Hugo Awards Best Novella category covers stories between 17,500 and 40,000 words. See here for a full list of the nominees this year. I enjoyed all of the novellas this year, I’m glad that the Hugos use instant-runoff voting so I can give some kind of vote for them all instead of just having to pick one!

1. “And Then There Were (N-One),” by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny, March/April 2017)

A Sarah Pinsker from an alternate reality has discovered how to travel to alternate realities. One of the first actions this alternate Sarah Pinsker performs is to organize the first SarahCon, attended entirely by Sarah Pinskers of various realities. This Sarah (an insurance adjuster) grudgingly decides to attend, where she meets hundreds of herselves and is just starting to figure out how to navigate the odd social situation of talking to all these other Sarahs, when a dead body is discovered, apparently a murder, and this Sarah Pinsker is the closest Sarah available to one with detective experience while they wait for the authorities to arrive on the island of the convention. The victim is Sarah Pinsker. Pretty much all of the suspects and potential witnesses are Sarah Pinsker. And Sarah Pinsker is on the case.

This story was wonderful and fun and delightful and hilarious. There was plenty of humor inherent in the situation, but the murder mystery is played straight–it has all of the components you expect from a murder mystery, except that the scenario adds a bizarre twist to the situation that both complicates (because it’s hard to even tell the people apart) and simplifies (because Sarah has a better understanding of the suspects than she would if they were entirely separate people) the investigation. This lends itself to the story taking some turns that would only make sense in this very specific situation. Highly recommended, I have been recommending this to anyone who has asked me what I’m reading.

2. River of Teeth, by Sarah Gailey (Tor.com Publishing)

This was previously reviewed at greater length here last year.

Usually alternate history is used to explore the consequences of major political or military events turning out differently. But sometimes, it can just be used as a reason to tell a Western story about hippo-riding cowboys in Louisiana (alt history because there was an early 20th century proposal to import hippos to raise them for meat).

Winslow Houndstooth had been happy as a hippo rancher until his ranch was burned to the ground. Now Houndstooth is a hired hand, and he’s accepted a job from the government to clear all of the feral hippos out of the Mississippi, and he also has revenge on his mind to get back at the one who destroyed his ranch.

This is so much fun, very much a western style story but with the significant added wrinkle that their mounts/cattle can bite them in half. The story is told straight, so the hippos aren’t used for comedy, but that just makes it all the more fun. It has the feel of a heist sort of story, with Winslow as the leader gathering skilled specialists to perform the seemingly impossible mission.

3. Down Among the Sticks and Bones, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com Publishing)

Jacqueline and Jillian are twin sisters, weighed under the heavy burden of parental expectations. Every aspect of what they do and how they present to the world is defined by their parents who wanted the perfect boy and the perfect girl. Jacqueline is the perfect princess of a girl, never dirty, never impolite, while Jillian is a tomboy who excels at athletics and never does things that might be considered girlish. When they’re thirteen the girls discover a portal into another world in their house and they travel through it, to a land protected and contained by a vampire and a mad doctor who can raise corpses from the dead. Portal visitors are a common occurrence here, and due to a prior arrangement, the girls each go into the custody of one of these powerful men and must make their way in this strange world until they can find a doorway home.

This ties into McGuire’s Wayward Children series, but you don’t need any familiarity with the series to read this–it works just fine as a standalone. It is built largely on the audience expectations of portal stories, so if (like me) those are a particular favorite, you’ll be well-primed for this. The characters are both well-portayed as real people as well as larger than life in some ways because they are constantly being pushed into boundaries that generally do not fit them. It’s a story of what makes each of us different from the others, and how our environments and constraints on our behavior end up defining much of who we are. It’s also a tale of sisterhood coming from a family that didn’t exactly nurture their relationship, thrown into adversity of a strange world. Well worth the read.

4. All Systems Red, by Martha Wells (Tor.com Publishing)

The security android (SecBot for short) calls itself Murderbot, but only in the privacy of its own head. It’s part robot part human, property of the Company, on security detail with a group of humans surveying a planet for resources. Unbeknownst to its crew, it has successfully hacked its governor module that is supposed to keep it safe and limit its behavior to only those things necessary for its security duties. But, really, it uses most of that freedom to download and watch entertainment vids in every moment of spare time. Its current crew is disconcertingly friendly, which is bothersome when it really just wants to be left alone to watch its shows. When a series of things go wrong with the surveying mission, it’s not clear if its due to the Company’s cut-rate equipment or if someone is sabotaging them. But Murderbot’s vid-watching has (surprisingly) prepared it for unexpected situations more than its actual functional programming, and if it wants to survive it’s going to have to help its crew get out of this.

Murderbot is a fun and charming character in its own way. While some parts of its personality are far from mine (a casual attitude toward violence, but that’s inherent in its programming) I think its character is particularly appealing for introverts who may find friendliness from others alarming at times. Murderbot is a very competent character and it’s a solid action story, but the biggest charm of it for me was just enjoying the kind of odd personality traits, different from most human characters in stories but also different from most robot characters in stories. Fun, and the first of a series.

5. Binti: Home, by Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com Publishing)

The original Binti was reviewed here as part of the Hugo Novella Review in 2016. Binti: Home is the second story in the series.

Binti is the first human from the Himba culture to travel to the stars where she is attending Oomza University, where she is learning to refine her skill for mentally manipulating magical formulas. The first story told of the tragic happenings of her trip where she was the sole survivor of an attack by the jellyfish-like Meduse and went on to help forge a peace between humans and Meduse, and in the process was physically changed so that her braids became like a Meduse’s tentacles, able to move of their own volition. Now she is returning home to Earth to her family to go on a pilgrimage during her break in her schooling, and she’s bringing her Meduse friend Okwu with her. With the truce with the Meduse still fresh and tentative, and with Binti changed dramatically by her new experiences since leaving home, she doesn’t know how her family and culture will receive her.

Solid story, and I like following Binti as much as the first time. The first book took place mostly off-Earth so you didn’t get to see much of Binti’s home or her culture directly. This story takes place almost entirely here, we get to know her family and her background better. This story is the second in what I think will be a trilogy and it does feel like that–it is clearly building FROM something, and clearly building TO something where it will go next, but as itself I wanted to get the rest of the story–I will be excited to read the third story. I would recommend not starting the series with this book–I don’t think you’ll get everything out of it if you haven’t seen Binti’s path so far, and the previous conflict with the Meduse and the beginning of the truce.

6. The Black Tides of Heaven, by JY Yang (Tor.com Publishing)

Mokoya and Akeha are the twin children of the Protector, sold to the Monastery at birth. Mokoya is plagued by visions of the future that can’t be changed, and Akeha is drawn to political revolution. The Machinist rebellion is growing, the power of technology growing quickly and threatening the iron rule of the Protectorate and their soldiers, and both of the siblings see the terrible things their mother does to maintain her rule. They must make decisions about where their loyalties lie and where their abilities are best used.

This story ties into the author’s Tensorate series, and was dual-released with another novella in the same universe The Red Threads of Fortune, but it works as a standalone–you don’t need any prior knowledge of the characters or universe to be able to follow the story. I haven’t read the related novella or the other books in the series, but I enjoyed getting to know the twins and their relationship with each other. What I found particularly interesting was some of the cultural details, especially how children are not considered a specific gender until they’re old enough to decide their gender for themselves, and how Tensorate magic is used to facilitate this process–although parts of living under Protectorate rule seem oppressive, this particular aspect was positive and interesting.

Anime Review: Code:Realize ~Guardian of Rebirth~

coderealize

Code:Realize ~Guardian of Rebirth~ is the story of a young woman, Cardia Beckford, who is left alone in a mansion by her father. He tells her she cannot leave and that she must never know love because she is a monster. Her touch is a corrosive poison that melts anything she comes into contact with save the specially designed sheets and clothing her father crafted for her. One day, her father is supposed to come back for her, but before that happens, Queen Victoria’s soldiers arrive to take her away.

She’s stolen from them by none other than master thief Arsène Lupin, who brings her into his gang of friends who are hunting for Cardia’s father, legendary scientist Isaac Beckford. Cardia decides to join them rather than go back to the mansion, so she can learn more about herself, the strange gem embedded in her body in place of a heart, and to find her father.

Code:Realize is set in an alternate Victorian England, powered by steam-driven technology, and Lupin’s group is composed of literary figures who supposedly lived in that time period. So Cardia ends up rubbing shoulders with Victor Frankenstein, Count Saint-Germain, and Impey Barbicane. (I had to look up Impey, who apparently is from a Jules Verne novel From the Earth to the Moon.) Abraham van Helsing joins them shortly afterward.

The show also features other literary cameos such as Captain Nemo and Herlock Sholmes (the “getting around copyright” adversary of Arsene Lupin), making it fun to watch for period fans, as long as one doesn’t expect too much historical accuracy. Even Queen Victoria herself has a sizeable role.

Cardia’s father isn’t just the greatest inventor in the history of Britain, he’s also suspected of being behind a terrorist plot, and a mysterious organization known as Twilight is after Cardia, led by none other than a boy claiming to be her brother.

Though her companions get some time in the limelight, the anime keeps the story focused around Cardia, her discovery of Isaac’s true plans, her budding sense of self, and her growing trust and affection towards Lupin. All this happens in a steampunk world full of cars, trains, airship races, government conspiracies, and mad alchemy. But even though the story is imaginative, it doesn’t quite come to life, and I think it’s due to the series’ struggle with its roots.

Code:Realize is based on an otome visual novel, so in the source material the player is Cardia and she pursues a romance with one of the men, so all five are young, single, and good-looking irrespective of how old they should be at this point in history.

It’s a really good otome, where the rest of the story is just as engaging as the romance, making an anime adaptation an excellent chance to pull in a crossover audience. Unfortunately the anime doesn’t go for that and positions itself as a more traditional reverse harem show where one girl is surrounded by a group of guys who all like her, rather than a badass group of friends who are trying to help one of their own (which is closer how it feels in the game, ironically enough).

It might be due to the run time constraints, but a lot of the banter between the different men is missing in the anime, making them seem more like work partners rather than true companions. This flattens their characterization and makes their strongest bond through Cardia rather than each other, which doesn’t feel convincing when most of them don’t get enough time to fall in love with her either.

This weakens the run up to the finale, when Cardia and her five friends are supposed to be working as a cohesive unit. The series actually has a fairly action-oriented second half, with London under siege due to an insurrection. We know the six of them are supposed to be composed of battle-tested friends, because they’ve been together since the start of the show and they’ve done some jobs together, but we don’t feel it, which is too bad because the last two episodes are otherwise pretty good.

Both in the game and the anime, Cardia starts off the story as an emotionless doll due to her isolation, but as time goes on she starts to display more of a will of her own. She never gets as expressive as in the game, which will probably be the biggest disappointment for fans of the original, but even as muted as she is, she’s still better than the average otome heroine, and the animation staff lets Cardia fight for herself in combat so she avoids the standard heroine helplessness for the genre. Her battle choreography isn’t particularly great to look at, but it’s about par for the course for the rest of the cast.

Despite the loss of characterization, the anime otherwise does an extremely good job of adapting the game. This is no mean feat considering that a single playthrough is about 15 hours long and most of that time is spent reading. Though it was a given that the anime would follow Lupin’s storyline, since he’s the series’ poster boy, there are a lot of details from the other romance routes that are necessary to understand the story as a whole, and the show manages to weave them in. This allows things like Saint-Germain’s backstory to work when it wouldn’t have if the script had scrupulously stuck to Lupin’s in-game storyline.

The adapted script is also unafraid of moving plot moments to different places in chronology or different locations from the original. Frankenstein, who was originally not part of Lupin’s gang, is already with the group by the time Cardia meets him, speeding up what was originally a much slower start to the story. Some element of cutting and rearrangement was expected, but Code:Realize does it a lot and remarkably without losing a single plot thread. Events might not occur exactly as in the game, but the story remains intact.

In the end, Code:Realize is perfectly viewable version of the source material, even without being a prior fan, but as an adaptation it has a lot of flaws in what was otherwise a promising premise. My feeling is that the adaptation writer was trying so hard to make the plot fit in the time allowed that characterization fell to the wayside in favor of leaning on common otome anime tropes instead of what made Code:Realize unique among its peers.

Number of Episodes: 12

Pluses: Entertaining steampunk worldbuilding, smart adaptation to condense the source material into 12 episodes without losing much of the plot, Cardia is not as helpless as typical for otome protagonists

Minuses: Characters are fairly flat across the board, series wants to be a simple reverse harem romance but can’t get away from the source material’s action scenes, combat choreography is subpar

Code:Realize ~Guardian of Rebirth~ is currently streaming at Crunchyroll (subtitled), Funimation (dubbed). Funimation has licensed this for eventual retail distribution in the US.

Anime Review: Recovery of an MMO Junkie

recoveryofmmojunkie

Recovery of an MMO Junkie was my must watch show of the fall season. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I first heard about it, because there have been a lot of anime in recent years about people getting stuck in virtual RPG worlds, but this is different. There is no getting trapped. This is simply a romantic comedy featuring a delightful cast of adult gamer nerds, and we need more series like this.

Thirty-year-old Moriko Morioka has been worn down by the grind of her office job, which was incredibly hard on her since she is naturally a people pleaser with low self esteem. So she quits and decides to live off her savings while she gets back into gaming.

She finds a new MMORPG, since the old one she used to play has shut down, and makes a male avatar called Hayashi simply because she wants to play a cute guy. As someone who plays male characters just about as frequently as female ones, I love that MMO Junkie acknowledges that women will play male characters too. Before long, Moriko meets another player who plays a female support character called Lily.

Hayashi and Lily hit it off and rapidly become best buddies in game, all without knowing who the other person is in real life, which isn’t at all uncommon with online gaming and internet friendships. While Moriko suffers from crippling anxiety at meeting people in meatspace, she is open and enthusiastic when she has Hayashi to act as a barrier to other people.

And course, the romantic comedy twist is that the girlish Lily is actually played by a man, Yuta, who has his own hang-ups and insecurities (though he’s still much better put together than Moriko). Arguably the biggest joy of watching MMO Junkie is seeing these two introverted dorks finally come together.

Moriko is a wonderful protagonist. Aside from being in her thirties, she’s relatable in how she is not put together and suffers from a great deal of social anxiety. She doesn’t mind running to the store in sweats to pick up food and prepaid game cards, but if anyone should pay attention beyond ringing up her total at the cash register, it’s completely mortifying. Moriko doesn’t see herself as someone worthwhile, so she has trouble believing anyone else would either.

Though Moriko’s reactions are done for comedy, those who suffer from social anxiety will completely understand how this is how we feel, even while we laugh along. Even an innocuous bit of curiosity from a store clerk can be taken completely the wrong way by the socially anxious. But at the same time, every time she manages to overcome a social hurdle, no matter how small, she’s easy to cheer for, because we know how hard she’s worked to get that far.

Recovery of an MMO Junkie is clearly aware of how games work. Not so much in the mechanics department, but how the players in those games work. There are lots of touches that show the creative staff know games and the behavior of the people who play those games. For instance, in one scene a character spends the entire conversation idly crafting while in game. (Because what else are you going to do when your character is busy making fifty scrolls? You talk to people or go afk.) And there are similar small player to player interactions that will ring true to people who have played MMOs; the guildmaster being the repository of everybody’s secrets and personal hang-ups, players saying something confidently thing in game while uneasily hoping it sounded good in real life, spouses logging on each other’s characters, etc.

They are often small touches, to be seen once and then never repeated, but the fact the creative staff is aware of so many things without reducing them to repeated gags really makes the game world feel like there are real people behind the computer screen, even though we only see the faces of a few of them. There are conversations about work and university, characters aren’t always online at the same time, and it makes it feel like people have a life outside of the game.

Though every episode takes place at least partially in the game world, at least half is spent in the real one, since MMO Junkie is really about the people on the other side of the monitor rather than an epic adventure, especially since Moriko is trying very hard to avoid people discovering her true situation.

Quitting her job was probably the best thing for her mental health, but she’s well aware that it’s not socially acceptable to be an unemployed thirty-year-old woman who spends all day (and night) gaming, and her social situation is one of the biggest hurdles in getting her to acknowledge that Yuta could possibly be interested in her.

If there’s any flaw in the series, I’d say that it’s so short! Everything wraps up quite adorably, and there is a bonus 11th episode for viewers on Crunchyroll (it’s a home video exclusive in Japan!) as well as an animatic for Episode 1. The bonus episode is pretty forgettable fluff, but if you need a little more of Moriko and Yuta it satisfies well enough. The AR animatic is skippable though.

I highly recommend Recovery of an MMO Junkie. This is my light-hearted favorite of 2017.

Number of Episodes: 10 (plus 1 bonus episode)

Pluses: sweet romantic comedy, thirty-year-old female protagonist (!), accurately captures the nuances of being a MMORPG gamer

Minuses: supporting cast doesn’t get much development, coincidences are laid on a little thick

Recovery of an MMO Junkie is currently streaming at Crunchyroll (subtitled) and Funimation (dubbed). Funimation has licensed this for eventual retail distribution in the US.