THEATER REVIEW: Animaniacs Live

written by David Steffen

Animaniacs was a comedy cartoon show produced by Steven Spielberg that ran from 1993 to 1998, first on Fox, and then on the WB. It was set up as a variety show with several short skits per episode starring different casts of characters–the most often recurring being the Warners: Yakko, Wakko, and Dot who live in the water tower on the Warner Brothers studio lot. The show was most known for clever and funny songwriting as well as humor that was meant to appeal to adults as well as children, often making jokes about Hollywood.

Animaniacs is back in the form of the live show Animaniacs Live. Voice actor Rob Paulsen and songwriter Randy Rogel headline the show, with special guest. You might not immediately recognize those names, but if you watched Animaniacs you’re already familiar with their work. Rob Paulsen played the roles of Yakko, Pinky (of Pinky and the Brain), and Doctor Scratchandsniff–he has also done voice acting work for other cartoons, see his website for more information. Rob Rogel wrote many of the songs for Animaniacs, including Emmy-winning “A Quake! A Quake!”.

We saw the show in Saint Paul, in a pilot showing on April 9th–the first official show was in La Mirada CA April 15th.

Looking at the product page for the La Mirada show I think that the production of the pilot may have been very limited compared to the full show that will be on tour. What we saw had 2-3 people on stage and a piano, and a projector screen above the stage. Rob Paulsen sang, Randy Rogel played the piano and sang, and with the special guest most often providing harmony. The projection screen was used about twice during the show–once leading up to to the show, and once to show a song later on. The La Mirada ticket page shows a symphony onstage, so it sounds like there might be quite a bit more going on in the official tour.

So, I don’t know how the full production affects the format of the show–maybe it’s the same general format, just with more musical performers. The show that we saw alternated between talking for a few minutes about the show and then leading into musical numbers. They sang some of the more well-known songs from the show, so you should be able to sing along with those. They also included some alternate endings to songs that Rob Rogel submitted and was asked to change, as well as at least an entire song that didn’t make it on the show. They also talked about the creative process, how a song goes from his composing studio to the screen, about what it was like to work on the show, about other projects they’ve worked on, and so on.

I love seeing voice actors whose work I know in person because it is so strange and exciting to hear the voice you know and love coming from a completely unfamiliar face. For that alone the show is worth seeing, and the extra material like changed endings and cut songs and commentary make it sort of like a live show of DVD extras about the TV show. If you liked Animaniacs, odds are good you’ll like the show. If you’re not familiar with Animaniacs, but you like funny songs and live performances, odds are still good you’ll like the show.

One thing that wasn’t really clear to me from the marketing leading up to the show was: is the show intended for kids? We brought a child to the show, thinking that they would be performing the songs live while they projected the cartoons on a screen. The show wasn’t really set up for kids that age–sometimes-long segments of talking between songs, and almost no showing of the cartoons. Again, we didn’t see the full show, so maybe they use the projector more during the official run which would probably get kids more into it, but at least the version we saw it was difficult for a kid to sit through.

They also had a Q&A session after the show where they would take questions from the audience. Which sounded wonderful, but we decided we needed to leave, rather than subject the kid to any more waiting. I’m not sure if the Q&A will be a feature of all their shows or if they were using the pilot as a way to gather some more questions they might ask during the show itself.

I’ll be interested in seeing how the show does as a whole, and hearing what the full show is like that apparently has the live orchestra and etc.

BOOK REVIEW: United States of Japan by Peter Tieryas

written by David Steffen

World War II is over, decisively ended when the Empire of Japan unleashes their new superweapon on the United States of America. Soon they USA is declared the United States of Japan, under the rule of the Emperor.

The story begins from the point of view of people held in an internment camp for Japanese-American citizens, who are immediately released upon the Japanese seizing control. 40 years later, the child of one of those, Beniko Ishimura, is working as a video game censor as the subversive video game United States of America starts gaining popularity. United States of America is an alternate history war game where the United States won World War II. Meanwhile, Akiko Tsukino of one of the secret police forces, is out to investigate the game herself. They cross paths and begin to uncover deeper secrets about the game and about the United States of Japan.

I like the alt-history aspect of the story, looking at different ways that Japanese government and culture might have grown from 1940s USA insted of the USA we have today. There were some technological elements both fun and dark, as well as exploring the colonial culture aspect where a colony’s culture becomes a mix of its own roots and of the occupying force. The plot as a whole is action-packed, and has lots of exciting events to keep the reader interested, as well as interesting philosophical themes.

What I found less engaging was the way the narrative interacted with Beniko, who is probably what you would call the main protagonist, though we get POV sections from Akiko as well. Big important details about him and what drives him are withheld until later in the story, to add some mystery for the reader I suppose. This is a writing technique that I tend to find distancing rather than engaging because when I’m reading I want to immerse in the POV as deeply as possible, I want to flow along the narrative like riding a river, and when there are all these blank areas where there clearly should be information, it interrupts that flow for me and I have trouble ever immersing. I’m not talking about revealing details about a person’s origin story, exactly, but more things that the person must be thinking about, and yet aren’t in the narrative. I read the whole book, but until the very very end I felt like Ben was a distant stranger, instead of feeling immersed in him, and since he is the main POV character, that was a major obstacle for me. I found myself constantly wondering “Now, why is he doing THAT? What are the actual stakes for him?” and feeling like I never had a satisfactory answer.

I found the character of Akiko much more engaging, despite her having some hair-trigger homicidal tendencies that are only encouraged by her work. Unlike Ben, I felt like I was fully engaged with her character because there was no withholding that served as an obstacle, and she had some real character growth from beginning to end of the book to follow along with.

Overall, I found the book a pretty easy ready, though I would have liked to be able to immerse more deeply in the Beniko character’s point of view.

BOOK REVIEW: Gravity Falls Journal 3 by Alex Hirsch and Rob Renzetti

written by David Steffen

20161231_163401 Have you seen the Disney XD show Gravity Falls, created by Alex Hirsch? If you haven’t, you should! And you should probably do it before you read this book, because it’s a tie-in that will have major spoilers for the show–I think it will generally work better watching the show first, and then reading the book. Here’s a review of the show.

OK, so now you’ve caught up on the show, right? So this is that journal, the one that Dipper discovers and uses a guide to the town of Gravity Falls through the duration of the series, and the author of which is a major mystery of the show.

20161231_163308 I don’t usually talk much about book design in the reviews, but this book is really really nice. Usually I’m kindof ambivalent about book jackets, because I’m honestly not sure what purpose they serve. But in this case, the book jacket includes all the stuff that you would expect to see on a book cover–the title on the cover, the title on the spine, the blurbs on the backet, the bar code. But if you remove the book jacket, the book cover matches quite closely to the appearance of the journal on the show–no title on the spine, no blurbs or barcode, and the cover is just a six-fingered golden hand with a number “3” drawn on it. It’s very eye-catching and consistent with the show which is cool. AND, the inside of the book jacket has extra illustrations–blueprints of science fictional contraptions from the series, images which don’t appear anywhere else. The book also comes with one of those nice attached-to-the-binding silky bookmarks that I’m used to only seeing in hymnals at church–very nice touch.

20161231_163450 Inside the book there are three distinct sections. The first is the contents of the journal before Dipper finds it in episode 1 of the series. You see these pages in the show, but usually only briefly and you can only make out the titles and major illustrations. The book contains all of those, as well as some that I don’t think ever appear in the show, so this part is my favorite part of the journal, because you are reading what Dipper read on his own. The second part happens DURING the show, and is Dipper writing new pages into the journal. I love the show, but I found this the weakest section because I had already seen the episodes, so it felt redundant, and each episode covered in the book only covered a couple pages, so it also felt rushed and without the characteristic humor of the show. The third section happens near the end of the series, after a major event that I won’t spoil for you, but which changes the nature of the content of the journal again. The design all makes sense, but I found that middle section pretty weak.

The author of the book is often secretive, and so has chosen to write some notes in code. Not enough that you’ll be missing major portions of the book, but small bits here and there. If you feel like trying out your hand at cracking codes, this is a little added feature. And if you don’t, you can easily find the solutions with a little Googling if you want to read that extra content.

I was very happy to get my hands on the book, both for the look, to find out some backstories that aren’t in the show, and read some more of the original journal entries. If you love Gravity Falls, odds are that you’ll love this book. (And if you haven’t seen Gravity Falls, you should!

Anime Review: Ajin: Demi-Human

written by Laurie Tom

ajin Ajin initially bears a superficial resemblence to Tokyo Ghoul, in that the protagonist goes from normal human being to a monster in the first episode. From there Kei Nagai undergoes a similar journey from lamenting his fate to accepting what he is, but Kei’s journey progresses faster and he takes a decidedly different tack when it comes to dealing with what he’s become.

The past couple decades have seen the emergence of a few people called Ajin. They cannot be conventionally killed. Any lethal damage from starvation to disintegration will result in the body dropping for a few seconds to a minute before regenerating to full health. But the interesting thing is that partial damage stays until the body dies, so it’s possible to incapacitate an Ajin for capture. Ajin themselves can put their regeneration to creative combat uses and may intentionally try to kill themselves if they’re too hurt.

Ajin are still incredibly rare though, with only 46 known to the world at the start of the series, and they’re considered to be no longer human. Any found are quickly rounded up by the government which is rumored to experiment on them. Since they can’t die, they’re excellent guinea pigs.

The catch though is someone has to die first in order to be identified as an Ajin. There are likely lots of humans around who just don’t know what they really are, as well as Ajin in hiding who died outside of anyone else knowing.

Kei Nagai is an isolated high school boy with superficial friendships (his contacts are seriously named Friend 1, Friend 2, Friend 3, etc. on his phone) studying to be a doctor. He knows his mother’s expectations of him, to become a good upstanding member of society, and he’s so dedicated to his schooling that he reads through vocabulary words on a keyring flipbook when walking to school or even during class when his teacher decides to talk about stuff that he explicitly says is not going to be on the test.

This incredibly inward focus causes him to not pay attention when crossing the street when an inequality inattentive truck driver doesn’t see him. This results in Kei being lethally crushed by the oncoming truck, only to pull himself out from under it moments later to the horror of the bystanders around him.

Kei, realizing that he can’t really trust anyone, bolts before a police noose can close around him. His lack of interpersonal relationships means that he really doesn’t have anyone to turn to, which makes him an unusual protagonist.

Once he learns to accept that he can’t go back to his old life, Kei’s personality shifts, though there are suggestions that this is the real him that was buried the entire time. Kei is logical and pragmatic to a fault and barring an emotional connection with Kaito, the estranged childhood friend who ultimately helps him escape when he first discovers he’s an Ajin, he views his relationships through a cost/benefit analysis. This jives with his superficial friends at school, where he is likely friends with them because they’re “good” people to be friends with, people who are going to make it later in life.

It’s extremely rare to have a protagonist who is baffled when someone helps him when there is clearly no benefit to the other party. Kei isn’t intentionally mean when he decides whether or not it’s worth helping someone, and more than once he hesitates to actually carry out his logic, but his sense of self-preservation is strong and prevents him from taking chances. However, he is canny enough to realize the importance of appearances, so if helping someone is in his interests, he will be a helpful and giving person.

However, Kei spends a lot of time in the first half of the series as a novice Ajin who is still trying to have some semblance of a normal life, so the audience is also immersed into the two primary factions that inhabit this world.

The first one introduced is the government Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, which has a task force dedicated to capturing and experimenting on Ajin. Yuu Tosaki is the head of the Ajin Control Commission under them, but he’s one of the most complicated characters in the series as he shelters an unregistered Ajin while also capturing others. He’s ruthless and driven, and willing to take unethical steps to get the job done, but his motivations are entirely human as he’s done the equivalent of selling his soul to the devil for the money to treat his comatose fiancee. This makes it possible to feel for him while he fends off the bosses who are willing to sacrifice him on the one hand and torturing people on the other.

Opposing Tosaki on the other side is Sato, an old man in a cap who is an unregistered Ajin. Sato plans to create an Ajin-ruled nation, carving it out of Japan itself. He’s an interesting character and a master manipulator though we get little backstory on him. Sato likes to do things the hard way (though he’s quite clever about it) so as to keep things entertaining for himself and he recognizes the importance of media.

Sato is the kind of guy who will release a video about Ajin being violently experimented on to the internet knowing that the real Ajin will be able to tell the real videos from the fakes because they know how it really looks when Ajin regenerate. By appending that video to a plea to publicly protest the treatment of Ajin at a specific time and place, he enables himself to secretly meet other Ajin who’ve been living in hiding and put together a force that can actually one-up the government in one of the biggest ways imaginable.

Unlike Tosaki, who is possible to empathize with and even root for (since he’s spends more time chasing Sato than Kei), Sato is a monster. He’s fun to watch because he’s an intelligent villain who gives off the air of being a congenial old man even when blowing people’s heads off, but he’s completely unconcerned about collateral damage and kills as easily as breathing.

One of the things I like the most about Ajin is that after the ground rules are laid (and one accepts the fact that the higher ups in the government are slow-moving idiots), everyone plays intelligently. Tosaki’s measures to stop Sato are solid based on what the audience knows, and Sato’s way around them is also good. Even Kei, while living in hiding, is extremely competent for a high school student his age. It’s nice to have a series with such a high competency level between different players.

If anything, the hardest thing to buy into is the animosity towards Ajin before the major events get underway. Though it’s clear from the opening minutes that a determined Ajin is extremely dangerous, nearly everyone Kei knows is either ready to sell him out or disgusted with him the minute they find out he’s an Ajin and they know that up until that moment he was just a studious high school student.

The animation of Ajin is done by Polygon Pictures, the same studio as Knights of Sidonia and the two series share a similar design and animation aesthetic, using computer generated characters intended to look like cel art. It’s not necessarily possible to tell the difference from screenshots, but it’s quite noticeable when watching characters do complicated movements where the motion seems oddly fluid for an anime series.

As with Sidonia the choice to go CG is a good one for Ajin as the Ajin characters frequently get injured and run around with “battle damage” that would be a pain to traditionally animate frame by frame and each Ajin has an IBM, a sort of black wraith-like creature they can summon that is best served with computer graphics since they have a ropey ethereal look while being hollow inside.

This also works in favor of the more elaborate choreography for the multiple combatant fight sequences, with an absolutely gorgeous one between Sato and a special forces team towards the end of the first season.

But on the other hand, the lighting is a little weird again, making a lot of characters look flat or washed out, and noses sometimes disappear if the angle of the shot prevents shadow on the face.

Ajin has two seasons available and there’s no word on a third. The manga is still running so the anime series doesn’t have a definitive ending so much as a story arc one. Unfortunately the series is only available on Netflix so it will require a subscription, but it’s highly bingeable and well suited to the platform.

Number of Episodes: 26

Pluses: engaging battles of wits, complex morally gray protagonists, creative uses of Ajin superpowers

Minuses: second season doesn’t feel as well put together, Ko is an oddly hot-blooded idiot in a cast of otherwise composed characters, some ongoing plot threads left hanging

Ajin: Demi-Human is currently streaming at Netflix (subscription required) and is available both subtitled and dubbed. Sentai Filmworks has licensed this for Blu-ray/DVD in the US.

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 is a previous grand prize winner of Writers of the Future and since then her work has been published in Galaxy’s Edge, Strange Horizons, and the Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction.

Anime Review: Natsume Yūjin-chō Go

written by Laurie Tom

natsume yujin-cho go

After four years, Natsume Yūjin-chō (also known as Natsume’s Book of Friends) returns with Natsume Yūjin-chō Go. This is the fifth season of the long running series and I previously reviewed seasons 1-4 here.

Natsume Yūjin-chō follows the ongoing misadventures of teenage Takashi Natsume, who has the ability to see youkai (spirits out of Japanese folklore) when most people cannot. Though a kind-hearted person with good intentions, being able to see youkai creates no end of headaches as they frequently want, or even demand his help, and when his small circle of friends have youkai trouble, Natsume’s the person most likely to lend a hand.

Each episode of season 5 is stand alone, and slipping into Go is like putting on a comfortable pair of familiar shoes. Due to the day-to-day nature of the series, there aren’t a lot of details to catch up on as long as one remembers the cast of characters, and even then, there’s usually some backstory help to reintroduce them.

Despite its episodic nature, if there’s anything to thematically bind Go together, it’s history. More than other seasons, we delve into the history of the characters we’ve come to know and learn a little more about the various arts used by exorcists and others who are able to see youkai.

While most series would use backstory for drama, Natsume Yūjin-chō uses it for contemplation. Youkai are a part of Natsume’s life in the same way the people in his neighborhood are and the series arguably works best when focused on the relationships between people or between people and youkai.

This best manifests itself in Takashi’s free-spirited grandmother, Reiko, whose presence continues to loom over the present day, long after her own passing. Though we now know that her creation of the Book of Friends was a forbidden practice, it’s clear that most of the youkai gave her their names willingly and cherished their brief time together with her.

The vocal cast and key production staff return from previous seasons of Natsume Yūjin-chō, but the animation this time around is handled by relatively new studio Shuka instead of the previous Brain’s Base. This is only Shuka’s third anime series and it feels like they’re still trying to get their legs under them.

It isn’t particularly noticeable from episode to episode, the character designs are spot on and background palette pure Natsume Yūjin-chō, but Go has had production issues resulting in only 11 episodes being produced, and used the forgettable “Nyanko-sensei and the First Errand” TV special as a mid-season filler.

Usually skips like this happen when the production runs too close to air date and the episode isn’t done yet, and Shuka had done the same thing with their previous outing, 91 Days (though they used a recap episode as filler instead of a pre-existing TV special).

The episodes produced are solid though and worth watching. While it’s likely easy enough to pop in the middle newcomers should start at the beginning since the entire series is streaming free at Crunchyroll.

Number of Episodes: 11

Pluses: more Natsume and friends; more backstory on Reiko, his adoptive parents, Natori, and others; feel is spot on despite the studio switch

Minuses: run is on the short side, story doesn’t really go anywhere new

Natsume Yūjin-chō Go is currently streaming at Crunchyroll (subtitled).

Anime Review: Yuri on Ice

written by Laurie Tom

yuri on ice

Figure skating has always been my favorite event at the Winter Olympics, having grown up watching it with my parents, and then continuing on my own as an adult. No other sport occupied my childhood nearly so much, so when Yuri on Ice was announced, it was a given that I would watch it.

Yuri on Ice is gorgeous just taken as a figure skating anime, but it’s also a lot more than that, being one of the most progressive anime series to feature a gay relationship without overly fetishizing it.

Yuri Katsuki is twenty-three years old when he flames out at the Grand Prix finals, signaling what he suspects will be the ignominious end to his figure skating career. It doesn’t help that he’s confronted in the bathroom after the competition by up-and-coming skater Yuri Plisetsky, who is going to make his debut at the senior level next season. Plisetsky doesn’t feels there’s room for two Yuris, so wouldn’t it be better if Katsuki just retired?

Our Yuri nearly does, but despite his failure, he’s actually a very good skater, and he would have to be to make the Grand Prix finals, which only accepts the top 6 at the end of a series of skating tournaments. What happened to Yuri in the finals is not unheard of or even that uncommon to anyone who’s watched the sport for a while. Sometimes despite having talent and years of hard work behind them, an athlete fails in that one moment and then the medal is gone.

Fortunately for Yuri, a friend’s kid records and uploads a video to social media of him performing the exact routine of the man who did win the Grand Prix, Victor Nikiforov, who is also the reigning world champion. Victor sees the video, and something in Yuri, which causes him to drop his own skating career and fly to Japan so he can become Yuri’s coach.

From there, the story takes a fairly predictable course. Yuri gets back into shape and Victor finds new ways to motivate him because in some ways it’s a lot harder for Yuri now. He’s not the new kid on the block anymore, and one of his early competitions for the new season has him facing challengers who are several years younger than him.

Due to his flame out, he doesn’t have the opportunity to return immediately to the Grand Prix, but has to prove himself again through a qualifier.

Considering that figure skating is an artistic sport that lends itself to visual presentation, I’m surprised it took so long for it to be turned into an anime, but it may be because it’s such challenging work beyond what the average animation studio is used to choreographing.

For a twelve episode series, there is a lot of figure skating. Yuri attends four competitions and performs largely the same short and long programs at all of them (which is expected), but the animation team manages to keep things fresh by intercutting other scenes and flashbacks, choosing which parts of the program to show, and by altering what happens to Yuri as he sometimes botches a landing, touches a hand to the ice, or even faceplants.

Though I can’t say animation is never reused, it’s shocking considering how much effort must have gone into it. Unlike a lot of anime that can fake action and movement through speedlines and or camera movement, Yuri on Ice needs to look like ice skating, especially the skating viewers are used to seeing on TV.

What comes out is beautiful. I can’t get over Yuri’s step sequences. I don’t think it’s as hard to animate a jump since a triple axle happens fast enough that the casual viewer likely can’t tell the difference between that and a double, but the step sequence has a lot of quick and deliberate movement, and it’s not something most animators would casually be familiar with. Moreover, it’s supposed to be one of Yuri’s strong points, and it looks good.

The animation team really did their homework, as the show follows the real world Grand Prix of Figure Skating competition. Scores are realistic, as are conversations about risk versus reward regarding whether to perform the more difficult jumps. The music director must have had a field day as all of Yuri’s competitors have wildly different songs to go with their choreography. There is no generic song that plays during a skating competition. Everyone has their own, as they would in real life.

The other skaters that Yuri meets are also fabulously diverse. Though there are expectedly European skaters, Yuri’s former rinkmate is from Thailand and the representative from the US is Latino.

While the figuring skating storyline is what drew me in, what broadened awareness of Yuri on Ice and made it one of the most talked about anime of the fall season is the romance that develops between Yuri and Victor.

Japanese media is typically not good about depicting queer relationships, often designing them to be comic relief, pander to hetero members of the opposite sex, or only flirt with the possibility that the characters are gay by leaving the relationship ambiguous enough that it doesn’t matter.

Yuri on Ice removes the ambiguity while also making Yuri and Victor fully realized characters who are much more than eye candy for the audience. We would be invested in Yuri regardless of his sexuality, which makes it more powerful that he is gay and unashamed about it.

I highly recommend Yuri on Ice. Even if figure skating and romance isn’t quite your bag, it’s so well put together that it’s worth checking out.

Number of Episodes: 12

Pluses: gorgeous and frequently realistic figure skating, progressive gay romance, amazing and varied soundtrack

Minuses: most competitors come and go without much fanfare even though Yuri should at least somewhat know them, sometimes faces get a little too cartoony in order to show humor

Yuri on Ice is currently streaming at Crunchyroll (subtitled) and Funimation (dubbed).

Winter 2017 Anime First Impressions

written by Laurie Tom

Winter is a slim season this year, though there are a couple gems. Because of the partnership between Funimation and Crunchyroll, most new anime brought to the US now is streaming on the former (if dubbed) or the latter (if subtitled) and I’m watching entirely on Crunchyroll again. Though there are other players in the licensing market now, like Amazon and Netflix, the former does not regularly simulcast and the latter never does.

Amazon has started it’s own Anime Strike streaming channel for an additional $5/month on top of Amazon Prime membership (US members-only), but with only a handful of exclusives and two winter simulcasts it’s hard to justify at this point. The dollar goes so much farther with their competitors.

ACCA: 13-Territory Inspection Dept.

acca

Why I Watched It: This is one of the season’s more mature offerings, featuring an adult cast containing bureaucracy members of a fictional country divided into thirteen states. The art style is distinctive, following the designs of its manga origin, which gives the cast a unique look compared to other series.

What I Thought: We follow the POV of Jean, a sleepy-lidded deputy chief of the Inspection Department, a sort of auditing bureau that ensures the thirteen districts are compliant with the national government. It’s a political job in a department that is beginning to look unnecessary given the long years of peace since its establishment, but there is something brewing and Jean is canny enough to sense it. It’s clear that he’s intentionally projecting a false image of himself that is a lot wealthier and disinterested than he actually is. This first episode is clearly setup and the storm is still to come.

Verdict: I’ll be watching. I like that Jean is a canny and observant protagonist. We don’t get inside his head in this first episode, so we don’t know his reasoning for anything, but his actions are curious enough that I want to know more.

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

Fuuka

fuuka

Why I Watched It: I admittedly didn’t have high hopes for this one, because it looks like the anime version of manic pixie girl upending a normal guy’s life, but the hype going in was good so I figured it was worth looking at.

What I Thought: Fuuka relies on a well worn anime convention to get started, the meet cute that goes wrong due to an unexpected panty flashing, which results in the titular Fuuka spiking protagonist Yuu’s phone into the ground. He wasn’t taking a picture, but her behavior is so outrageous that the memory of her is burned into Yuu’s brain. Fuuka’s a free spirit without a cell phone who still listens to music on CDs and she horns her way into Yuu’s life, leaving him wondering how he ended up with a girlfriend by the end of the first episode. It’s not my fantasy, but I do like how Yuu is a complete Twitter addict as I’ve never seen the medium depicted in anime before.

Verdict: I’ll probably pass, though I might come back to it at some point, because I know of a development later in the manga that takes this beyond the standard romantic comedy and I’m curious how the event will be handled.

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

Interviews with Monster Girls

interviewsmonstergirls

Why I Watched It: I wasn’t originally, since I feel like anime’s fascination with cute monster girls who look mostly human except for ears/tail/horns/etc has been done to death in the wake of Monster Musume, but early word of mouth is good, so I decided to check it out.

What I Thought: This is not my kind of show, but it’s surprisingly light on fan service and the first episode is what it says on the tin. Demi-humans have always existed in low numbers in this reality, and high school teacher Takahashi finally gets a chance to meet one who happens to be a student at his school. From there he inquires about the myth versus reality of being a demi-human by interviewing students, the first of which is a vampire. The interesting thing is that the demi-humans aren’t treated that strangely by the rest of the student body. They’re different, but not something to be feared. The myth vs. reality angle doesn’t tread much new ground though, especially starting with a vampire, which has already been reinvented to death.

Verdict: I’ll pass, but it’s a new angle for people who aren’t tired of the monster girl phenomenon.

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

Ms. Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid

kobayashisdragonmaid

Why I Watched It: This is the one monster girl show I was going to check out, because of the unusual gender flip in that it’s Ms. Kobayashi, a woman, who gets stuck with a unusual houseguest in the form of a western dragon who can turn into a cute young lady.

What I Thought: The gender flip does add something to the monster girl genre, as the things that concern Kobayashi are different from that of a heterosexual male protagonist. She’s more concerned that Tohru doesn’t burn down her apartment than cohabitation with a stranger. Watching Tohru try to disrupt Kobayashi going out for drinks with a coworker (under the mistaken impression it’s a date) was entertaining as Tohru makes it clear that she harbors romantic feelings for her. I think the idea of having a dragon maid would be funnier if Tohru was in her full dragon form more often, but that would take away from the cute monster girl look that appeal to fans of the subgenre.

Verdict: I’ll pass. It’s cute, but I don’t think there’s enough here to sustain my interest.

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

Saga of Tanya the Evil

tanyatheevil

Why I Watched It: Reason one was the wacky premise of a Japanese salaryman reborn as a little girl where he becomes a super-powered child soldier. Reason two was that World War I is seldom visited in anime but it’s my favorite historical conflict and the series takes place in an alternate WWI.

What I Thought: I was expecting to be more put off by Tanya, and to be sure, Tanya is “a monster in the body of a little girl” but she (he?) is interesting in watch in the way that some villainous protagonists are. It’s not that we like her, but we want to see what she does next and what her game is. The world building is more interesting than I expected. Air mages replace the airplanes of the real World War I, and the story takes place from the Empire (German) viewpoint, but there are several noticeable differences between real world history and the alternate one in how the war started, early grand strategy execution, and the progress being made.

Verdict: I’ll be watching. This show is definitely not going to be for everyone, but the other Empire characters are more relatable human beings (no cardboard Nazis transported to the wrong time period) and having a sympathetic cast around Tanya could balance things out.

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

GAME REVIEW: The Last Guardian

written by Melissa Shaw

The Last Guardian is a gorgeously detailed, thoughtful action-adventure fantasy game. You play a young boy who awakens in a cavern with a large mythical creature who is chained to the floor. As the story progresses, you form a bond with the creature, Trico, as the two of you navigate through environmental puzzles set in enormous, elaborate environments, some of ancient ruins, some of dizzying heights. Sometimes you need Trico’s help to survive or progress through a series of puzzles, and sometimes Trico needs yours.

Designed and directed by Fumito Ueda, who brought us the iconic Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, The Last Guardian shows the influences of both of those games, particularly Ico. In this game, however, you leave all the combat to your enormous companion.

Although the game offers you only a small selection of simple gameplay mechanics to find your way through each map, it combines these mechanics in an ingenious variety of ways to create challenging and thought-provoking puzzles. Rarely is the path through an area clear at first glance. Fortunately, the game lets you take your time in most sections, which also enables you to explore the lush maps, some parts of which serve no purpose other than to enhance the sense of grandeur and detail of this world.

One of the most notable aspects of the game is the creature design. It may seem odd to use a word like “realistic” to describe a 20-foot-tall, feathered beast with a doglike face, a catlike body, and glowing blue horns, but Trico scans as a realistic animal, with idiosyncratic but recognizable behaviors. His animation blending is seamless, so nothing interrupts the realism of Trico on-screen. He is an appealing companion, by turns protective, affectionate, curious, and fearful. He grows attached to you, following you around, howling mournfully when you’ve gone somewhere he can’t reach. Although Trico moves like a cat, he isn’t perfect; he sometimes misjudges leaps and has to scramble to complete them. His imperfections make him all the more endearing.

Like any real animal, Trico is not a perfectly controllable creature. He has his own agenda and his own limitations. The game requires patience. It can be difficult to communicate what you want to Trico at first, and even when you can, it can take him a little time to do as you ask. The game also requires you to let go of precise control sometimes, and let Trico find his own way rather than waiting for you to direct him.

This game is not without its frustrations. Camera control is sometimes restricted, making it difficult to see. At other times, the camera moves abruptly from one place to another, often to avoid clipping through solid objects. These movements are jarring, and since you move the player character relative to the camera, they can interfere with gameplay. In addition, the game has an atypical controller scheme, with no option to reconfigure it or to reassign buttons. And although it’s a virtue that it is difficult to fall off Trico inadvertently, the flip side of that is that it can be difficult to jump or drop from Trico when you want to. In terms of the story, near the end of the game, there’s a brutal and disturbing cut-scene that’s hard to watch, and another cut-scene that leaves you wondering what you’ve been feeding your friend.

On the whole, though, The Last Guardian is a magnificent game: often quiet and moving, sometimes abruptly exciting, always immersive and beautiful.

Melissa Shaw’s short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Analog, and several anthologies. Melissa is a Clarion West graduate and a “Writers of the Future” contest winner. She is currently writing for an as-yet-unreleased video game.

GAME REVIEW: TIS-100

written by David Steffen

TIS-100 is a assembly language parallel-node programming-focused puzzle game, published on Steam in July 2015 by Zachtronics.

For those who aren’t familiar with what “assembly language” is, it is the lowest level of programming language; it is actually what the CPU on your computer is running (mind you, it varies from processor to processor, so when I say “assembly language” it’s not a single language really). Programmers these days rarely write in actual assembly language–they write in some high-level language like C++ and then programs called compilers break those high-level languages down into assembly language.

Anyway, so each “level” of the game involves you being asked to write a program that completes a certain task. This could be copying data from one field to another, adding numbers, sorting numbers, multiplying numbers, and so on. To this end you have one or more inputs feeding into a grid of processing nodes, and one or more outputs, and your job is to process those inputs into appropriate outputs by writing instructions in each of the nodes.

There are quite a few limitations on what you will be capable of doing. Each processing node can only store two values, one in the accumulator (ACC) and one in the backup (BAK). There are also stack nodes that are available in some levels that you can use for more storage, and there are tricks you can figure out to keep track of more information, but generally that’s what you have to work with.

Not only that, but each node can only hold about 16 instructions–these instructions loop so it won’t just sit idle when they’re done, but there’s a limit to how many different tasks can be handled by a single node.

And it’s very easy to deadlock nodes. When a node passes data to another node, it wait indefinitely until the other node retrieves it before doing any other instructions. When a node catches data from another node, it will indefinitely wait until the other node actually sends some data. So, one way you can lock up your system is to have two adjacent nodes simultaneously send each other data–then they both wait forever for the other node to retrieve it, but the other node will never retrieve it because the other node is also waiting.

Once you think you’ve written something that might work, then you can run the system and it will test it against known input/output values and give you a passing or failing grade, as well as keeping stats like runtime and instruction count. You can also step through the code for debugging purposes.

If this all sounds horribly boring to you… it probably will be! It’s a very niche sort of game, certainly.

Visuals
Basically nonexistent. Mostly just text or colored blocks/bars on screen. It makes sense for the kind of game

Audio
Almost none. Which I found kind of nice because it was easy to play the game with sound off, so it’s easier to find a space to play it.

Challenge
Quite high puzzle challenge. the game provides a manual which explains everything you need to know about the language, so you don’t have to have any prior knowledge of programming. And, though it will feel familiar to anyone who has done some assembly language programming, I think that it is a made-up language so no one will know it before the game starts anyway.

That being said, I think that the game will be much easier for experienced programmers to start playing and to master, simply from being familiar with the kind of data manipulation and debugging mindset. This game is challenging for an experienced software engineer, so I imagine it would be significantly more difficult for someone with no programming experience.

Story
There is a hint of a story. The manual has a note attached to it that says that this old computer was found in your deceased uncle’s belongings, and it’s been given to you. There are also note files scattered in the various puzzles written by the uncle, talking about the machine and its oddities. I haven’t completely finished the game yet, so it’s possible that these coalesce into a coherent story at some point that actually affects gameplay, but at this point they just seem like set dressing rather than an integral part of the game. Which is fine! It’s a programming game, and it does what it does very well.

Session Time
As short or as long as you like! It is a very easy game to put down at any time. If you are working on a program and you want to shut it off, you can save and quit at any point without penalty, and shutting it down takes only a few seconds. Perfect for someone whose life is full of random interruptions. The one catch is that, for some of the more complicated puzzles, trying to get your head wrapped around the whole puzzle again might take some time, but there’s not much to be done about that.

Playability
The manual explains the language very concisely, and even gives some examples. It’s easy to experiment with various things to figure out what works and what doesn’t. The debugging features are super nice to help you break at any point and step through the code, watching the values of the memory storage at any given time to track down where something has gone wrong.

The game is difficult because that’s the point, but it has some very nice easy-to-use tools to help you solve the puzzles.

Replayability
There is some replayability inherent in the game. Once you solve a puzzle it is marked as solved, but it does keep statistics about how many nodes you used, how many cycles it took to run, and how many instructions it took to run, and it also tells you what the best possible solution as measured in those metrics is. So you can reply the game to try to tackle those goals to optimize your code. There are some really steep challenges to unlock as achievements, such as solving certain puzzles without ever using certain instructions.

Originality
I have never played another game like it. The only thing it reminds me of is taking an actual assembly language class way back in 2003.

Playtime
Whew, no way to predict this. It really just depends on how good you are at debugging and visualizing the puzzles in your head. I don’t know about anyone else, but I tend to continue cogitating on the problems even after the game is shut off too, and then suddenly when I’m doing something completely unrelated the solution will pop into my head. I think I’ve put in, maybe 2 or 3 hours on the game so far and indicators seem to suggest that I am about halfway done with the puzzles? Assuming the puzzles continue to ramp up in difficulty, this no doubt means that I am much less than halfway done in time. If all the pieces click in place for you, you could finish it as fast as you could type, or you could spin your wheels on the game forever, who knows?

Overall
This game is great! If you’re into this sort of thing. And, well, let me be honest, that’s not everyone. If you think the idea of debugging assembly-level code is great fun, then buy this game now! You won’t regret it! If you don’t have any experience with programming, maybe buy it for a programming-loving friend instead and then see if you can come over to their house and try it out? If you don’t have any experience with programming, and you do well at this game, then YOU SHOULD CONSIDER A CAREER IN PROGRAMMING, SERIOUSLY. Modern programming languages are not at all like this one, this is the kind of stuff that runs on the CPU, but is generally not what programmers actually write. But if you can handle this, you can handle high-level programming languages too.

Fun game, novel setup and interface, with the feel of real assembly language. Very challenging and it will be fun for those who like this very specific sort of problem solving, but it’s likely to be a big miss for a lot of people who probably won’t. Probably a niche interest, but for that niche I haven’t found anything else like it. $7 on Steam.

Book Review: Joyland by Stephen King

written by David Steffen

Joyland is a mystery novel written by Stephen King and published in 2013 by Hard Case Crime.

Devin Jones is a college student living in New Hampshire who takes a summer job in 1973 at Joyland, a local amusement park as a jack of all trades, but especially for “wearing the fur” which is the expression for wearing the park’s dog mascot costume. Besides the usual things one would expect from a college summer job–getting job experience, making friends, making money, Devin hears about an unsolved murder that happened inside the haunted house ride where a young girl’s throat was cut. Tales of the murder catch the attention of Devin and his friends and they speculate about who did it and how they got away from the scant evidence available. Devin also meets a wheelchair-bound young boy who is not long for this world and who might know more than he should.

I’m not a big reader of mystery books, so I’m probably not the best judge of whether any specific mystery book is a good one or not, but I enjoyed this reasonably well. The patchy details of the murder are mentioned early on and were enough to catch my interest. The carnie lingo and customs were interesting and were at least partially based on actual carnie lingo and customs (though not entirely, he freely admits in the author’s notes)). It caught my interest earlier than many Stephen King books have of late so that was a plus.

When I think back about the whole book I feel like quite a bit of it was kind of meandering and longer than it needed to be, but I only really picked that apart in retrospect so it must’ve kept my attention well enough while I was reading it.

There is… probably… a supernatural element but it’s very slight if so, which does make it unusual on my reading list.

All in all, I enjoyed the read well enough. I wouldn’t say there’s anything epic or groundbreaking here, but it succeeded at what it was doing.