Strike Witches should have been a military drama

Okay technically it was, but I feel that the second season (up until the last 4 episodes) focused more on fanservice than the previous one.  I would like to see what would happen if they added more jet strikers and Cold War era plots.  It could potentially be quite political, especially without a common enemy for all the countries to fight.  Also, more F-15 vs Cy-27 dogfights.  Maybe they could do a short about the Advanced Tactical Striker project.  Or maybe some kind of crossover with Ace Combat.

Yeah, that would be pretty cool.

My review of Kira*Kira

Recently, my attention was drawn to a visual novel that had been translated quite some time ago, but that I hadn’t heard about.  I watched the OP for Kira*Kira on YouTube and was interested in the concept of a VN about a punk band going on a road trip.  The setup seemed fairly standard; if I were writing a romantic story about a group of people who started a band, I would probably write something similar.

What surprised me was that Kira*Kira went into a lot of depth exploring the issues that were plaguing the heroines in their respective routes.

Changed my view on divorce

Along with a few other articles I read, Chie’s route convinced me to re-examine how I feel about divorce, a subject that I had not really thought about in the past and always assumed that if it ever happened to me, it would be a last resort that would result in all ties being sundered, and lots of awkward meetings in the future.  Chie herself has little sympathy for her father and his decision to marry another woman and merely assumes that she has destroyed their family.

But the truth is, we can never really know what goes through our parents’ minds when they decide to get a divorce or have an affair.  It isn’t that simple.  Not only would we have to be present for every single moment of our parents’ adult lives, we would have to be our parents in order to truly understand why they chose to separate the way they did.  No child that I have ever met, myself included, would argue with me if I said that we are different people from our parents.  We are our own men and women.  Love is a funny thing like that, it’s not simple, straightforward, or pure.  Feelings can change over time and no matter how much we might want to rage against it, some things just can’t be undone.

Incomplete information an overarching theme

If there is a theme in Kira*Kira, it actually has nothing to do with rock music or going on a road trip.  It’s that, no matter how old we are, we never have all the information about how others feel and it is this lack of understanding that causes drama.  I like this theme.  It was thought-provoking to me.  I described Chie’s route above.  In Sarina’s route, it is only at the end that we understand her grandfather’s motivations for not approving the relationship between her and Shikanosuke.  They are somewhat complex, but ultimately reasonable.  Not only did he not want Sarina to suffer in a difficult hypothetical marriage, but he was also thinking of any children that they might have, who had a chance of inheriting Sarina’s incurable disease.

Kirari’s route, especially the true ending, also has shades of this theme that allowed me to feel more sympathy for her father.

Strange handling of Kirari’s ending

I found it a bit odd that all of the debt incurred by her family was cancelled at the end.  Why would it not be inherited by the rest of the family?  Why would the loan sharks leave with their debt unpaid?

Highly depressing

As is typical of a nakige I was moved to tears by Kirari’s normal ending.  I do not know why I keep reading these damn visual novels, but I am sure this will continue until judgement day when the trumpets sound.

Super Robot…PnP?

I have had a bit of a weird idea over the past couple of days.  There are a few roleplay systems out there that simulate battlemech combat quite well.  The problem is that none of the ones I have come across are strictly anime-related and mostly focus on the Real Robot style of doing things, Battletech being the primary example.  Everything grounded in logic and reality, with that grim and gritty feel that comes with a lot of western sci-fi and fantasy stuff.  This got me thinking – what would a viable ruleset for those silly combining super robots look like?  This section will cover the basics of combat and what I believe has the potential to be turned into a workable system while capturing the Super Robot aesthetic.

The main priority of any RPG system is to make sure that somehow, everyone has fun without impeding the ability of others to likewise have fun.  A Super Robot presents challenges because when all the pilots combine, the robot fights as one unit and if only one person was stuck controlling the robot the whole time that would not make for a particularly fun combat system.  To address this point, I propose that when each person is in their own separate vehicle they fight as a normal RPG party would but when combined, everyone gets a chance to control the robot on their turn.  Each person is given one or two actions they can perform and that will be their turn controlling the robot.  You could theoretically do whatever you want but in practice, such a system would encourage players to work together to accomplish a focused goal and prevent themselves from being overwhelmed by numerically superior enemies (a common feature in Super Robot shows).

This is the image that would/should be invoked by my hypothetical system.

On the other hand, what if they can’t think of anything to do on their turn or no relevant contribution?  Perhaps players could have the option to “donate” their actions to a central pool and other players could draw upon this pool for more powerful attacks that cost more actions than they can physically use in their own turn, thus encouraging a bit of central planning (but hopefully not too much!) and allowing for the kind of ridiculously powerful attacks seen in anime.  As anyone who has watched Voltron can attest to, things always began and ended with forming the Blazing Sword and killing the other guy in one strike.  This kinda clashes with RPGs, few of which allow that opportunity in order to artificially ratchet up the challenge factor.  I don’t think that an RPG based on giant combining robots should necessarily have tactics and intellectual exercise as its primary appeals (as I often say to Warhammer players encouraging me to not play 40k anymore, if I wanted tactics I would play chess) but should rather be about capturing the tone and theme of your average giant robot anime.

The basic actions one can take in combat form the meat and potatos of the system, every specialised action that you add in after that is only window dressing and so these ideas need further expansion.  In the development phase this would also overlap with the class system as the robot’s function would probably be tied into the abilities of the individual characters.  I will cover the class system in my next post, but for now I am getting hungry.

Super Robot Wars OG: The Inspector, or How I Finally Realised What Other Anime Fans Must Feel

Preamble

Let me first start by saying that I cannot, will not, approach this series in a vacuum.  As a Super Robot Wars fan who got into the franchise through the Original Generation series I have an emotional investment in writing about The Inspector and, admittedly, my mind will be filling in a lot of gaps in the material.  While I may be viewing the show through rose-tinted glasses I believe that my perspective also affords me an opportunity to see what could have been done better, in keeping with my mission statement for this blog.  Where this knowledge is applicable and has enhanced my appreciation of the show, please forgive me for lapsing into the realms of Super Robot Wars trivia.

Picking Up Where We Left Off

I understand that I am a latecomer to blogging the series.  It has been on for the better part of two months now, with the 7th episode right around the corner.  Thus far we have seen the introduction of the returning characters from the ATX and SRX teams, newcomers Lamia Loveless and the School children Arado and Seolla.  That, along with the whole slew of disparate villains (Neo DC, Shadow Mirrors, Einst) with their interlocking subplots, sounds like a recipie for a headache if I ever saw one and quite frankly, I applaud any non-SRW fan who is still watching this now.  Therein lies one of the biggest problems with adapting Super Robot Wars to the TV screen: the sheer scope of the thing.

Wheels Within Wheels

I am reminded of a discussion with a friend of mine who tried to play SRW Original Generation 2, the game that The Inspector is based on, in a vacuum.  He had no previous experience with SRW, not even the original OG, and came back to me with the following complaints:

1. There were too many plot threads going on at the same time.
2. None of these plot threads were explained.  They literally came out of nowhere.
3. Overuse of tired mecha anime cliches.

I can agree with all three of these points.  Without giving too much away, OG2 attempts to compact the plots of at least 4 different Super Robot Wars games into one coherent story.  Each of these games has at least 60 stages, 100 in the case of Super Robot Wars Impact, the game that Kyosuke and Excellen originate from.  This is over 200 hours of material and they’re trying to compact it into 13.  No matter how you slice it, that sounds like a recipie for disaster.  This also directly relates to the cause of the second complaint, that the plot threads are never really foreshadowed or explained.

This too is an artifact of the Super Robot Wars franchise.  You see, Super Robot Wars is a crossover franchise.  It takes popular mecha anime and fuses their universes together to try and create a coherent plot and excuse for giant robots to beat the stuffing out of each other.  OG is like a crossover of the original character plots from other SRW games, created for the fans of those games, so a certain amount of background knowledge is assumed when the writing starts.  We need this foreknowledge to truly know or care about what is going on.  If I were to break down the past six episodes of The Inspector down, it would sound something like:

“Okay, so there’s these guys and they’re hunting down the remnants of a massive global rebellion who is secretly receiving backing from these scientists who specialised in creating enhanced child soldiers, and then there’s these other guys backing the rebels as well who have super technology from god-knows-where and a mysterious spy called Rose who seems to be playing both sides off against each other.  Follow me so far?  Good, because that doesn’t even begin to go into the plot about the ancient chinese giant robots in the shape of animal gods…”

I don’t know about you but when I think about it and try to imagine what an ordinary person would think, I reckon they’d tell me I was out of my bleedin’ mind.  Essentially, these are the barriers that a person who does not play SRW on a regular basis faces to enjoying The Inspector.  On top of that is the already high barrier put into place by the presence of so many “cliched” characters.  I don’t like that word, cliche.  It means something is trite, hackneyed, tired and overused and therefore inherently bad.  All the characters in The Inspector are based on popular mecha “cliches”, it’s true, but this is where I’m going to defer to the “there’s nothing new under the sun” argument.  In other words, I don’t have a coherent argument against that point.  I know why people say they’re overdone or tired and yet I enjoy them anyway.

I’m reminded of a quote I read on the Bioware forums, but that’s going into a discussion of cliches, which could fill an article in its own right and is beyond the scope of this one.

A Glorious Mess

Bearing all of these challenges in mind, The Inspector has managed to get a few things right.  I admire the ability of the anime to stay true to its source material.  They dive straight into the story without the logistical nightmare of trying to summarise everything that came before.  If you want to know, just watch Divine Wars.  I was a little skeptical about the character designs when they were first unveiled but now they have somewhat grown on me.  Even if you don’t like the character designs, they certainly got the mech designs spot on.

So far, the anime seems to be covering every plot from the game and I can respect that, but it leaves me with an ominous premonition for the future.  Between all of the different faction fighting each other, I wouldn’t be surprised to see The Inspector falling into the same trap that Divine Wars did regarding battles with major villains.  People like Bian Zoldark and Levi Tolar, who had a major impact on the storyline, were given all of half an episode’s worth of combat action devoted to them.  In fact, I can already see it happening.  The engagements thus far have been 5-10 minute affairs that do not give the impression of having accomplished anything in particular.  Once the fangasm of having seen the Thrudgelmir try to carve the Shirogane in two with The Gate of Magus playing in the background has worn off, what really happened?  In fact, the only two things of note that have been accomplished in combat were the Wildfalken getting stolen and Lamia receiving a replacement transmitter.

The future is clouded and uncertain.  I hope that what I am predicting doesn’t come true.

Perspective

I have never truly understood some people who get upset when the anime diverges wildly from the manga.  For me it has always been an opportunity to experience two different worlds, two different interpretations of the source material and for me, the fact that an adaptation would never be as good as the original is par for the course and nothing to get angry over.  At the same time, I also acknowledge that I have never really been emotionally involved in following a production in the same way that I am with The Inspector.  I wait in hope that it will be good while a small voice in the back of my mind tells me that it will never be anything more than an average show, not worthy of remembrance at all.  I feel that I have a new understanding of how others feel regarding adaptations of their favorite stories.  I don’t agree with them, but on some level I can accept their point of view.  I hope I never have to go through the anger and disappointment.

Reaffirmation

I am not very consistent with my updates, am I?  My only excuse for my long absence is that I have been going through a lot of personal troubles and only now does it seem like my life is actually getting back on track.  I have started watching more anime, playing a lot more video games and, overall, I think the time is right for me to return to writing about the things I really like.

First thing’s first, I am no longer based in the UK.  My university education has come to an end and I am now out in the working world.  As of December I will be moving to Mauritius to take up new employment.  What this means is that the focus of my blog will change too – there will be less wargaming-related entries since I will no longer have the steady stream of opponents and weekly matches that I used to.  Nor will there be many roleplaying entries regarding my current campaign as I have had to abandon that as well in the process of moving.  I may still do features on roleplaying generally but without the benefit of practical experience to test my viewpoints I will probably be writing fewer.

Personal rants will probably be kept to a minimum as well from now on.  I have IRC for if I want to bitch about my life.

So essentially, my focus here will be all things fiction and I will reaffirm my commitment, here and now, to always looking on the bright side of life.  Trying to find the things that make even bad stories somewhat enjoyable.  Trying to find out what was done right rather than what was done wrong or, if I don’t, then at least say how I would have done things differently.  I reaffirm my commitment to constructive criticism, constructive writing.

Welcome to the new world.  It isn’t so different from the old.

Why can’t we ever have nice things?

I wanted to share with you all, one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.

I know it’s pretty old but I only started watching Legend of the Galactic Heroes recently and I love every minute of it.  It’s truly an inspirational show.  If you haven’t yet watched it you should.

Was that really necessary?

I am all for scientific thought.  Science is increasingly becoming the way forward for the advancement of humanity as a whole if it hasn’t already and my own religion of Christianity is quickly becoming an antiquated relic that is perpetuated only by the way in which it involves itself in world events.  But you know, I also saw a street preacher being harassed by a couple of guys from one of the local universities the other day (area and university will remain nameless in order to protect the reputation of whatever institution I might inadvertedly damage with my non-existent influence.  All I can say is that it wasn’t the University of Surrey).  In the words of so many people who have come before me, “was that really necessary?”

It reminded me a little of my own time at university and the kind of acquaintances I made.  One Christian, like me, and two atheists of varying beliefs.  I realise, of course, that atheism is not a unified belief system and everyone has their own opinions and levels of doubt regarding whether or not a god, let alone the Christian God, exists.  But due to certain missteps which resulted in them finding out perhaps more than they needed to about my religion, I became the subject of much ridicule over the three years of my degree.  Far from swaying me in one direction or the other, I could only ask the same question, “was that really necessary?”  I could have asked them to stop of course and as friends, they probably would have obliged but in my immaturity I was stopped by two things.  First, I was afraid they would argue that I shouldn’t have special treatment and that it was only fair that they make fun of everyone equally for everything, which I suppose is fair enough.  The second was that I didn’t want to lessen their opinion of me, which I somehow thought it would.

In retrospect what I should probably have done is stood my ground and calmly told them to please stop taking the piss at every opportunity.  Then cut ties if they continued to take their jokes both too far and in a direction that was uncomfortable for me.  But I didn’t and so, like some kind of masochist, I kept crawling back for more.  I’ll be honest, it was almost a relief for me when they would move on to talking about relationships and other aspects of guy talk.

It certainly didn’t help that at the time I was also in an IRC channel with people who were as close to militant atheists as I’ve ever encountered.  They would come back occasionally and brag about how they had gone to sermons and general panels on what Christianity is and heckled the speakers, among other disruptive behaviour.  So once again I had to ask myself that same question that has haunted me throughout my natural life, “was that really necessary?”  I mean, you might ask me what kind of supposedly infallible, loving God would drown His own creations in a worldwide flood and I would reply that I don’t know.  Perhaps the Christian God is not infallible or loving.  That part of Christianity might be wrong.  But in return, I would ask you to explain what kind of person would you have to be to derive so much pleasure from tearing down and making a mockery of other peoples’ beliefs when the people you are mocking have done you no harm in the past.

It doesn’t help.  Personally, I will go back to believing that God does exist, that evolution can explain the origin of life, that scientific thought is the way of the future, and that I can live as a Christian in a world with increasing contempt for religion in general (I am reminded specifically of the memo leaked from the Home Office regarding the Pope’s visit to the UK).  I will live by the Ten Commandments, do penance when I have done wrong, and never make fun of another on the basis of their religious beliefs, be they Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Scientologist, or even Atheist.  That’s just not what I do.  It’s not who I am.

Of Super Robot Wars, Galaxy Angel, and Life Experiences

Hey there, everyone.  Long time no see.  The reasons for my absence are manifold and I won’t go into them here.  Suffice to say life has been pretty difficult as of late and I haven’t felt like writing anything down at all.  I did, however, get to do two things.  The first was play a lot of Super Robot Wars games.  The second was play the English translation of Galaxy Angel.  As I’m sure people who have played the game before can probably attest to, I fell in love after my first playthrough.

Then I combined the two together in a massive display of fan faggotry and decided to speculate on what would happen if the first Galaxy Angel game were to be adapted to Super Robot Wars.  For the sake of this hypothetical situation, I worked on a few assumptions:

• Galaxy Angel would be an acceptable series to include in Super Robot Wars.  The definition of “mecha” covers all sorts of mechanical objects but its common sense usage refers only to humanoid mechanical fighting machines.  Tekkaman Blade falls within the accepted definition of mecha but I highly doubt that Galaxy Angel, a series consisting entirely of planes and spaceships, would.  Aircraft do appear but only in support roles where mecha are the primary feature of the series.
• The Emblem Frames are capable of atmospheric flight.  In the first game there are no atmospheric battles so we have no idea whether they can actually fly on their own power but it seems rather silly to suggest that the crown jewels of Lost Technology would not be able to.
• Um.  Well, that’s pretty much it.

So obviously, the Emblem Frames would be planes.  There’s no way around this.  It would be impossible for them to land of their own free will.  Well, maybe if a squad system was being used then they would land if grouped with land-based units.  Size-wise, they’d probably rank as S or SS; the Emblem Frames are not particularly big, but then they don’t need to be.  Probably C ranking on the ground and D in water, but A for Air and Space (if not an S for Space).  High mobility but low armour, as is customary for planes and Real robots, even those that happen to have Super robot elements.  In-game, the Emblem Frames are shown to be capable of taking a fairly large amount of missiles to the face before going down so it’s not entirely unreasonable to suggest that they be given more HP than regular planes.  About 3000-4000 would put them on par with the Macross Variable Fighters as seen in the Alpha series, which is basically what I’m drawing on as a reference here.

As for unique features on each Frame, there probably wouldn’t be that many.  Energy shield on the Lucky Star and definitely a repair ability on the Harvester.  To be honest, I don’t know if all the Emblem Frames got energy shields but for the sake of practicality it might be easier to just apply that to all of them – it would give the Happy Trigger in particular a bit more survivability since, if we wanted to be accurate, it’s not nearly as quick or agile as the others and would probably just get shot down.

Now here comes the main problem: the attacks that each unit has.  The Emblem Frames, individually, don’t have that many weapons.  The Lucky Star has its missiles, plus the Hyper Cannon.  Trick Master has its Fliers but not much else that I could see.  Happy Trigger has enough armament that we could scrape together at least 3 or 4 attacks, and Kung-Fu Fighter would probably be able to do 2 attacks – Machineguns and Missiles, with the Anchor Claws being its super move.  Let’s not even talk about the Harvester, which has only missiles and pretty weak ones at that.  Sounds like they should really be used as squad filler, right? Each unit’s weapons are described at the very beginning of the game.  Disregard this part, I suck cocks.

What I would do is try to build in internal synergies, in the form of combo attacks like those used by the Aestivalises from Martian Successor Nadesico.  A series of original maneuvers designed in conjunction with BROCCOLI would really help round out their moveset.  Then incorporate two separate levels of Will powerups – one at 120 which allows them to use their special moves (Hyper Cannon, Anchor Claw, Flier Dance, Strike Burst, Repair Wave) and one at 140 which allows them to use their final, winged forms, increasing all of their stats in a similar fashion to the Zero system.  I would also make it so that each Emblem Frame could be reloaded by any unit with the proper skill but could also resupply by moving adjacent to the Elsior and executing the proper command, with the Elsior itself able to repair and resupply.

I haven’t really thought much about the pilots and their skills yet.  I imagine in terms of Squad Leader bonuses, Millefeulle’s would probably be an increase in the money earned per kill, as is customary for very lucky characters.  Ranpha and Mint are a bit harder to deal with, I’d probably give them something like speed or hit/evade rate increases.  Forte would probably have one of the bonuses usually associated with characters who are effective commanders and squad leaders in their respective series’, namely an increase to squad damage or to Platoon Attack damage (if we’re talking about the Tri system used in Z), thus giving players a reason to use Forte when the enemy is at close quarters.  Vanilla’s is pretty easy; +50% to HP and EN recovery.

I imagine the Elsior will be one of the weaker battleships in SRW, given how much damage it takes from regular enemies in the game itself, but it would at the same time be essential to supporting the Moon Angel Wing and making sure they don’t run out of energy mid-way.  The addition of the Chrono Break Cannon would probably help somewhat but I couldn’t really imagine it as anything other than a big fat repair bitch and I mean that in the nicest way possible.  Tact’s Squad Leader Bonus would probably be a buff to the Emblem Frames when they’re within a certain distance, in addition to other skills like Command.

Now, at the risk of being controversial, I would have their theme music be “Emblem Frames soaring through space” rather than Eternal Love.  Save that for when they go into hyper mode and it will seem all the more awesome.

Fan faggotry over.  Sometimes you just gotta get it out of your system, you know?

Oh, and I’ve started playing EVE Online.  It’s pretty fun.  Gotten a little tired of the Touhou fandom so I don’t know how much more I’ll be writing about that.

Bureaucracy, or how the worst day ever turned into the best

Let me tell you about the worst day I have had in recent memory.  I woke up at 8:30 yesterday.  This in and of itself would not have been terrible except for the fact that I was supposed to wake up at 6:00 in order to get ready for an appointment that I had at 9:40 to have my biometrics taken, for which I had to arrive half an hour early and which would take me over an hour to get to by train.  After much agonising over the decision, I decided to go for it anyway and as it turned out, they didn’t mind so much and just had me wait in line with the other applicants.  So, the moral of the story: never give up, stop worrying, and comply with bureaucracy to the best of your abilities here in the UK.

So, worst day ever.  The bright side to it all was that I got to go to the London MCM Expo and see all the lovely, lovely toys.  Playing Bayonetta was pretty awesome, and I managed to meet holy of 2D Emotion, also known as the webmaster of DoujinStyle.  He’s a pretty cool guy.  Some of the cosplay was not nearly as bad as I was expecting either although in the UK military and sci-fi dressup has always been of higher quality than anime stuff.  The thing is, you need to start with your expectations low; cosplay here in the UK will never exceed or even begin to approach the elite-quality stuff they have in Japan and the rest of East Asia, so why agonise over it?  Just appreciate the effort they put in (in most cases) and be content with finding the one or two that are legitimately good.

My only regret is that the photo I took of Al-Azif was so terrible.  I thought the cosplay was quite good too.  If you’re out there, I can only say that I’m sorry.  There was also an impressive Enma Ai; no doubt she took part in the exhibition that I wasn’t able to get a ticket to go see.  Should’ve taken a photo of her when I had the chance.

It’s true what they say.  These conventions exhaust you in all sorts of ways.  Well, after that we had a pretty good session of Star Wars d20.  More mind rape ensued.  I’ll have to tell you the mind rape story one of these days; it’s a classic crit-fail story.

You can find the album here.

100th Post Yay!

Hey guys.  Been awhile, hasn’t it?  Well, real life has a pesky way of getting in the way of things that really matter – like being geeky.

Don’t tell your parents or anyone you care about I said that.  The reality of the situation is that I haven’t really felt the motivation to soldier on and do any posts.  For awhile my life was in shambles and I’ve only just begun to pick myself up again.  So, now that the school year has started again I hope to have some more content for anyone that actually stumbles upon my little corner of the internet so for all those new and returning I invite you once again to take a seat, have a drink.  In addition to being the 100th post, this also marks the 1 year anniversary (belatedly) of this blog so it’s a pretty special occasion all around.  Not that I did much work for most of that year.

Anyhow, here’s to another year of all-around geekiness, from anime to tabletop games and everything else in between.  Who knows, I might go to some actual conventions this year!  What else can I talk about…hmm…well, the Retribution of Scyrah has just been released and I got the book so I’ll be reading over that and get my commentary up in the next day or so.  I’ll need to take a look at the final release of the Mk. II Warmachine rules as well since I haven’t had a chance to do that over the summer.  No particularly interesting anime coming up in the foreseeable future so I guess visual novels will have to replace it, for the time being.  That’s okay; I just finished Kazoku Keikaku so I’ve got something to talk about at least.

A new year, and new possibilities.  I look forward to sharing them all with you, dear reader.