She also gets the best episode of the show and the best theme song:
My friends managed to find a figure of Quatre-Vingt-Dix for me, which of course does not stand without assistance due to it’s massive shoulder pylons and tiny legs:
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new PV for apotecary diaries
i have an acquaintance whose opinions on this stuff i respect dearly who tweeted once that the protagonist lady is one of his favorite comic book characters ever so i’m curious to see what this is all about
diebuster is so cool. i remember being bummed out when i first watched it because it wasn’t simply gunbuster 2. a couple years later i went through it again with an open mind and understood the error of my ways.
its great as a part of that universe’s history, and its also great as a sequel (the final scene!!!)
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the animation is deliciously physical, i should’ve got around to it much sooner. it’s a fascinating missing link between Gunbuster/Nadia/Eva Gainax and FLCL/TTGL/PSG Gainax
I did two full rewatches of Diebuster this year, as different friend groups were looking for something good to watch during this dire anime season.
This has been my favorite series for a long time just due to the great story, animation, and oodles of charm that universe exudes. The design of every spacesuit, mech, delivery ship, doorway, is extremely fun.
The fanservice did grate on me, as ever, and man that “why not me” scene in the second to last ep is like the low point of the series, but overall it still hits for me in a big way. I love Nono as a main character a lot, they really got the vibe of Gunbuster down perfect with her.
yeah i had second thoughts about my description there after seeing the heavy clash between the “fun” style and some brutally not-fun content. there’s a problem with introducing a major trauma if you’re not prepared to spend like, an entire series picking up the pieces from that trauma.
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been watching Castlevania: Nocturne - up to about episode 5 or 6, i forget.
it’s fine. idk - i think my main issue with this series is that sometime after season 2 of the original they decided the show was just kind of about whatever they wanted it to be about.
it’s not that i think the original story of Castlevania is extraordinary and can’t be tampered with, but like, Dracula X especially has a setting, and a story, and characters. it often feels like the series wants to spend as little time as possible with the source material and as much time as possible with its OCs. and i get it - there’s a lot about Dracula X’s storylines and characterizations that don’t really meet the standards of most modern audience sensibilities, and adding depth is to be expected/necessary.
but i guess in my mind, i’m thinking “i want to see Richter fight monsters with his friends and then go to Dracula’s castle and kill Dracula, and then i’d like to see Alucard for a while.” kind of whatever happens in between those major points feels up for grabs to me, but thus far in the show (two episodes left), it doesn’t seem like this is where they’re heading.
i also think it’s pretty funny they kept the name “Olrox” rather than adapting it to the actual inspiration/name, “Orlok.” that said, he’s one of the better characters, so far.
tying it to the French revolution is also kind of a weird choice, but i guess it helps drive home “the folly of man” or whatever.
something that felt a little weird to me was that apparently in this universe, “a lot of” the colonists in the Caribbean are vampires, which i couldn’t help but read as some kind of reactionary deflection of responsibility of European imperialism.
i know this show has fans here and i’m not trying to be a jerk about this. i really go in watching it, every time, with the intention of wanting to enjoy it, but somewhere around episode 5 yesterday it turned into a thing i had on in the background while i read my phone.
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I watched up to 4 or 5 eps this weekend. I’m a little warmer on it compared to the whole that was the first series only that it feels more confident as a produciton. Unfortenately I can’t stop feeling like I’m watching a fan fiction play out in real time. Real high school flavored “clever writing” attempts at quips and the church is evil.
Full disclosure: I definitely had a in my head game concept of a CV adventure where dracula’s castle pops up during the more turbulent part of the french revolution and you’re just some guy who happens to have some loose connection to Belmonts and a game goes from there in High School.
It might be toxic of me but it feels nice to see more CV heads on twitter starting to call out how much of it feels like CV is being co-opted for someone else’s story. I know its insanely hard to get any kind of audience for an original story/IP these days but I’m of the belief that an adaption from a prior medium should at least be more of a celebration of it’s strengths and highlights that caused it to last this long. At least in the world of video game to animation productions.
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i haven’t seen any of Nocture yet but i’ve been readily enjoying season 3 of the first series. it’s not as dutiful as seasons 1-2, what with dracula being dead, but so many of the characters and performances have been intriguing thus far. isaac in particular is a pretty interesting character afaic
altho, the Alucard teaches Sumi and Taka b-plot is a bit flat
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Season 3 of the first was the lowest of that series for me imo. I was just shy of throwing in the match on that oiled and salted corpse. Season 4 does a lot to recover from it even with the liberties it takes.
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yeah i also couldn’t finish season 3, and didn’t check out 4
anyway
is like something i wrote in my first draft of that post before trying to be a little kinder, but yes, it feels like it’s on that level to me, too
also this. again, i get it - in the original, Maria is kind of an air-headed moé girl with her cute animal friends. this was later retconned in the PSP remake and makes a little more sense for her characterization and transformation into SotN Maria (although it’s less of a fun contrast, as originally intended). to make her a likable character to anyone but the biggest otaku on the planet, she needs to be more of an actual person.
but their need to make her sound like the wokest person in your freshman comp. lit. class in order to confirm that, actually, Maria is strong, just feels so forced.
i think that’s always been my issue with most of the series’ writing, though - the lack of subtlety and dialogue that breaks the fourth wall for me, constantly.
on a positive note, though, one of my new students likes the series very much, and even though i’m pretty negatively critical of it so far, i had fun talking about it with him. like the show is clearly written for him - a 16 year old who has never played Castlevania.
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I haven’t watched any of this new thing at all but I really enjoyed all 4 of seasons of the first series and I think it comes down to how alien this sentence is to me. Like of course Castlevania was “co-opted for someone else’s story”, Castlevania doesn’t have any story. Guy goes to castle to kill vampire, the rest of it is pure vibes. You could call Vampire Hunter D “Castlevania” and it’d make as much sense to me. It’d be like if they made a Contra anime and people got mad it didn’t focus on the betrayal of Bill Rizer or whatever the fuck
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i don’t necessarily disagree with this general notion, but i also don’t wholly agree. however if i actually type out why i disagree i’m going to reveal too much about how invested i am in the plots of Konami action games
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Please do that’s what Select Button is about
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Also how is Sand Land getting a high budget open world game and Vampire Hunter D isn’t
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The best I can say is that I’m probably perpetually stuck in the 90s where stuff like the Street Fighter and Fatal Fury movies and ovas took they’re fair share of liberties but for the most part stuck to just being about trying to show off as much as what the source characters can do. Even if the alpha movie had the dumb plot line of a long lost brother with the dark hadou I was less bored on the way to its dumb conclusion.
All I can say is that I haven’t really felt the vibes between the fights.
If I’m not doing this most of the time
During something made out of something I have a personal attachment for I’m probably not having that much fun.
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I finished CV Nocturne two nights ago. As a whole its mostly fine. It looks good, sounds good (outside of some writing) and the story that it is flows well enough even if my personal interests wane alot between points. It’s biggest sin for me is still not enough CV flavorings. While CV stories are mostly thin excuses to prop up a game I do believe they still have they’re own identity and developed an iconography all their own that deserve as much attention as when being transferred to another medium. Show me more belmont sub weapons and the monsters I’ve grown to love. CV has a deep bestiary to plunder. I think the biggest failure is there hasn’t been any gags involving anyone complaining about the parabolic flight path of a medusa head. Show me a werewolf doing street fighter moves or some axe armors, throw some skeletons a bone and let them thow bones down.
I’m starting to feel like the studio handling these likes dunking on Belmonts because they don’t do magic and can’t flex their animation chops without mixing in flashy Avatar styled magic pugilism to cover up animating complex contact interactions to keep the wow factor up. I don’t hate the idea of this because it does look rad and I want to run a DND character like that some day but just feels like it lacks a little imagination given the history of animation’s attempts at depicting martial prowess and still be presented in amazing ways. I’d just still prefer if Richter was a tool user but now just had the mojo to use small scale item crashes instead of just doing what everyone else is doing.
Season ends with a last second stunt casting to make everyone happy but I can’t tell if it means even more variations to come to the plot or maybe a steer back to basics and we go to an actual castle.
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Don’t be fooled by the runtime, it just loops
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