HappySoda

I Don’t Want to be a Mage!

super rats — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:37:24 +0000

Kero wanted to be a spell caster, a conjurer, a mage. On the other hand, Human Mage wished she wasn’t one, but it was too late to do anything about it. Kero’s constant whining about it annoyed her and made Human Mage sort of hate Kero. Human Mage really wanted to be Human Fighter or maybe even Human Ranger like her mother. If only people could be who they wanted, but then it wouldn’t be life.

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Human Mage’s father wanted her to become a mage. Mages stay in the back line and the least likely to suffer of any party member. He meant well, and it made sense, objectively. However, she found that role cold and empty. Nobody let her play cards when they rested up for the day or trusted her with much really. Everyone else fought side by side or back to back and gained that trust through blood and sweat. Mages don’t even perspire. She was never part of that equation.

She wanted to sweat, to have her body glisten, glowing in the fires of combat, enticing the Orc brutes to come after her, salivate, and drool as she killed them. Nobody noticed her. They noticed her Scorching Bursts, but nobody noticed she did 200 sit-ups every single day to get a stomach you could bounce a gold piece on. She was way hotter than Elf Barbarian, yet every Orc and Hobgoblin the party encountered wanted to defile that Elf with a baloney roll when she sat instead of her.

Maybe if she walked around naked, she thought, someone would care.

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Review of Human Mage from The GoodSmile Company

The cast-off feature on this figure is pointless. You can remove her armor and “robes” to expose her chest, but she’s got the anatomy of a Barbie Doll. So the usual five seconds of teehee you get when taking the clothes off of a figure doesn’t end well and you’re stuck with a figure with clothing that’s chunkier than it should be.

Details aside, Human Mage is a hot sculpt. I like the proportions of everything. Good details and all that stuff. Some unfortunate junk is on a prominent part of her hair, so that’s not good, but overall it’s a very attractive figure.

Human Mage has some angles where she doesn’t look that great. Actually, when I took her out of the box I wondered what the hell happened to her face. At the right angles she’s smoking. Eye alignment seems a little off, which is what I think limits the number of angles where her face looks good. The sculptor also rendered some teeth for her open mouth. It looks totally fine in person, though with the magnification going on here you can see that they aren’t all painted, which can make her look like she’s got messed up teeth.

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Other Stuff

I hope they release more figures from Lineage. The character designs are attractive and have different body proportions than many moe anime and h-game characters. I passed on the Dark Elf though, as the ears were a no go for me.

Danny Choo posted a review for this, as did Foo-bar-baz, for a really nice comprehensive set of photos.

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Kanon Wallpaper

super rats — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:58:13 +0000

Been so busy lately. It’s the 19th already. Luckily, my sister has provided me with an easy way to update. She took one of the pictures from my review of Makoto and made this cute wallpaper.

Click for 1600×1200 version or visit Kit-Kat’s Minitokyo Page

Rei Ayanami

super rats — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:59:24 +0000

Gendo locked Rei in his basement. She was a clone, so he didn’t see anything wrong with it. The original had run her course and that was that. This Rei was his to have and to hold for as long as she would last.

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Review of Alter’s Rei Ayanami Rebuild Version

This is a great laying down pose. Rei’s got hips. The body sculpt conveys both long slenderness and feminine curves. The plug suit design frames her feminine elements for full appreciation. Great design all around.

The outfit detail is pretty good. The differentiation in texture rendering for the white and blue portions of her suit is effective. From the packaging and the low price point relative to other Alter figures leads me to think this is more of a mass market volume play than the typical Alter figure, but that’s just me wild guessing. As with most things, I have no clue.

Rei comes with a black slab base that looks really good in person and provides a cool reflection effect. As attractive as the base is, for space reasons I’ll probably not use it.

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Other Stuff

On the Rei or Asuka question, I’ll say neither, but if forced to choose I’d say Rei since I like short haired character designs, plus the red eyes. Nobody in that show is likeable from an outsider’s point of view, though I kind of feel bad for all of them, even if they all kind of annoy me at the same time.

The base compliments the figure well, seen here at Foobarbaz.

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Thank You

super rats — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 06:06:10 +0000

Sale of HappySoda v1 has ended. Twenty-five people bought a copy through Lulu.com. Thank you! I seriously appreciate it, particularly since with shipping it came out to be, well, a decent amount of money to part with.

Ghost Hunt Part One

super rats — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:42:42 +0000

In Ghost Hunt, normal girl Mai Taniyama winds up working for Kazuya Shibuya and the team at Shibuya Psychic Research investigating paranormal activity. With the help of a cast of mediums, monks, and exorcists, they seek to end the phenomena affecting those among the living. It’s a horror show of the bump in the night variety.

I liked Ghost Hunt. The episodes focus almost entirely on the paranormal investigations, and in that way, Ghost Hunt plays a lot like a traditional mystery program, except the ghosts in the show really are spirits instead of dogs covered with phosphorous. Ghost Hunt is all about the investigations and not really that much about the characters, at least so far. Given that the male lead (Naru) and female lead (Mai) are both teenagers and are opposite creatures, there could be a relationship angle, but it’s not really been explored all that much save when it’s convenient for a gag.

There’s really not much going on with the characters beyond their function in the plot, even with Mai, the person we’re basically following in this show, which itself isn’t bad out of principle, but the dribs of character that do come out during the down time and transition scenes are pretty clumsy and one dimensional. And that’s kind of a criticism I have of the show. Some of the scary moments could have more tension if I had a better connection with the characters. On the other hand it keeps it pretty light.

Still, it still does get creepy at times, particularly if you’ve got one of the built in phobias that Ghost Hunt tries to exploit. Dolls freak me out, so one of the arcs did have me on edge a little, but the rest no. I do hear that one of the later arcs is very creepy, so I look forward to that, which should be coming out pretty soon. The release schedule is quite nice, this came out 10/7 and part two should be 11/18.

Funimation’s first release includes episodes 1-13 on two dvds, which contains five complete investigations, which is nice. The package is pretty bare bones, thin cardboard cover housing two thinpak cases. As far as the English dub, it isn’t going down as one of my favorites, but it gets the job done and doesn’t seem to push it out of scope. Mai (Cherami Leigh) is good in the annoying spunky hey I’m the new girl kind of way, but I find that “Naru” (Todd Haberkorn) sounds slightly more tool than cool, plus the dialog script just doesn’t feel that natural.

HappySoda Figure Doujin 1

super rats — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 20:26:41 +0000

Putting together a doujin/book of some of the figure review pictures I’ve done was a lot of fun. Figures are awesome, you know. It did grow to be a bit larger than what I thought I would do, 68 pages.

Anyway, to keep this in the spirit of fan works, doujin, etc., HappySoda volume 1 will only be available from October 21 to 28. It’s a longer window than the one day for a fest, but people might only visit this place once a week, so in a sense it’s got a somewhat similar limited window of opportunity. Here is a low res (96dpi) pdf download of all the interior pages or alternately here if that’s being throttled.

Book size, price, etc., available when you click the Lulu button. I’m using Lulu.com for print on demand service. My preview copies looked good and they have printers in ~~several~~ parts of the globe outside the US, so for ~~many~~ some shipping will be domestic, ~~wherever domestic for you would be~~ but not as many as I thought.

Halfway Through Lucky Star

super rats — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 15:18:56 +0000

Finished off Lucky Star volume three the other day, so that’s about half of the series. I did not expect to find myself enjoying the opening song, but I do, or it could also be that I think the opening animation is kind of fun as well.

For me Kagami is the most interesting of the four characters, since Konata is enough like me (especially with regard to cell phone use, and my cell phone is in fact at home right now, while I’m not), Tsukasa is a space cadet, and Miyuki doesn’t get enough lines to really shine.

When I’m watching Lucky Star, I’m watching the whole disc in one sitting and it goes by pretty quickly in spite of missing a plot or even much character development so far. I guess being a fly on the wall listening to idle chatter can be amusing enough, which itself is amusing to think about, especially if you’ve ever taken or read any creative writing class or how-to write fiction books. This type of nothing happening is usually frowned upon, though I wouldn’t exactly say that Lucky Star is a show about nothing as some like to say.

My enjoyment level has remained consistent through each episode.

The Beatdown Goes On, When They Cry v4

super rats — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:55:58 +0000

It’s good to see those Geneon titles in limbo start to come out again, When They Cry - Higurashi, in particular. Order in the world feels restored now that the murderous kids in Hinamizawa are back in the swing of things, going nuts, and killing each other.

The first time I encountered When They Cry (Higurashi), I wrote it off as a form of loli pandering with some of the characters — Satoko, Rika, and to some extent Rena. But, what interested me was the puzzle aspect, where the viewer watches several short arcs that replay the same set of days and with the same characters (for the most part), but from different perspectives and a seemingly different chain of events that leads to one or more of the group of friends brutally murdered.

The villain and victim change up with each arc, which leads to questions of what is and isn’t truth, and why do the stories describe different events rather than the same set of events from a different perspective. The arcs within themselves are fairly straightforward, so the multiple versions aren’t that confusing as the viewer isn’t really taxed with keeping the facts straight and making connections during the show like they would in other sort out the pieces shows like Boogiepop Phantom. In a way, the different arcs of Higurashi is something like playing several games of Clue. At some point, hopefully, we’ll get enough to find the real story.

In any case, each arc can be pretty disturbing considering the flavor of violence in the show. Doubly impressive considering anime and Japanese based video games way over use the creepy, demonic, killer child type characters. These creepy children characters usually inspire a “roll-eyes” from me these days, usually boring me instead of creeping me out like they’re supposed to. However, Higurashi remembers the vulnerability of the kids in the story and uses their status as children effectively as a way to unsettle. The brutality in some of the scenes emphasize powerlessness very well in both the victim and in a way sometimes the kid that becomes psychotic, which might redeem Higurashi beyond the gimmick of killer lolis or not, depending on how one sees things. It is difficult to watch someone unable to fight back get beaten.

As far as the release itself, the episode distribution on the discs is frustrating. It has a habit of orphaning either the first or last episode of an arc on a different disc. This is fine if you’ve got all the discs and can put them in as you like, but going on the singles installment plan, some of the violent impact, the build up of the psychosis gets a pressure release from having to wait two months, or in this particular case, a year to see the conclusion of an arc started on volume 3, so restarting the series cold felt a bit weak. Still, I’m just glad I’m getting to see more of When They Cry at all.

Bang Zoom!’s dub for Higurashi does the job and the voices in English match the characters. The standout voice work throughout the series is Mela Lee as Rena. While she doesn’t have all that much to say in volume 4, when Rena goes into possessed mode, it creeps me out consistently and is really the only character, who on voice alone, in the English version that does that to me. What makes it creepy is how it also retains a sense of normal Rena in evil Rena mode.

Thank goodness When They Cry continues on dvd with this installment, volume 4. The tension, mystery, violence that contrasts with the moe elements, is a fascinating package.

Beat Blades Haruka

super rats — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 20:07:57 +0000

Haruka lay asleep on her side, head on the down pillow, face toward him. She breathed slow. Sweat covered her body, to which the thin white bed sheet draped over her clung to. It was hot for October, so the windows were open to let the wind blow in. This was different, he thought. By now he was usually alone. Haruka would be gone by now, leaving as soon as she was done to fight demons. They’d done it so many times before, but never before without reason. It was nice and he started to think of what he could do to keep this going.

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A gust of wind shot through the room. It changed the course of his thoughts, pushed the soft veneer off the rainbow. What he really wanted was more. He wanted to flip Haruka face down into that pillow and plow her again. All of the other times were about her, even this last time together was really about her.

He wanted it rough. The kind where Haruka would be careful when she sat for the next three days. Nasty where Haruka would look at him and wonder who he was, but then maybe she’d like it that way and they’d become one of those couples with toys, scary custom-made toys, the kind that make most people say holy shit as they imagine the pain while they picture it in their head and think man that’s just a little too far and wish they never knew that about you. And really, how long could that last? He and Haruka would either burn out or be so screwed up that they’d be each others’ only option, stuck, rather than together. They’d become old dispassionate prunes with a fully stocked dungeon, strapped in and whipped bored, too far gone to even care how they wound up that way.

He got up and thought to himself, something that nasty is what The Internet is for — you don’t want someone that nasty to be the mother of your children. But, that was thinking too far ahead. He got dressed and decided to go to the store to get something to cook for dinner. He chose to ride out the romantic route for as long as he could. Be the shining knight. He even bought candles. He’d revisit this subject at another time, which he hoped wouldn’t be anytime soon.

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Review of Alter’s Beat Blades Haruka

While the likeness of Haruka’s face really isn’t there the hotness of her body is all there in the sculpt. I love the torso twist, the arms raised, form fitting outfit with scarf fluttering from Haruka planting her foot and changing direction with blades in hand ready to strike. Her costume rocks, made to frame, accentuate, and direct the eye to all of her nice ample features, though with that black feature running through the middle of her torso, the belly button through the fabric Alter figures seem to be fond of is missing.

If anything the sculpt could have been a little more aggressive in describing the force of her motion. Her hair could be used to accent the motion a little more and her face seems a bit relaxed, but maybe that’s Haruka’s character to be calm. I don’t really know since I don’t play H games.

The pose leaves Haruka with a one-point mount. Her right foot connects with the base at an angle. The plastic pegs from the support mount that go into her foot are longer than the standard pegs. It looks like Alter is still experimenting with one-point mount options. Using ABS on the support legs makes warp less of a problem than mount breakage.

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The finish on Haruka is very good, but not flawless. The paint on her lapel area isn’t crisp and there’s some mold debris there on my copy. There’s some artifacts in out of the way areas, but the rest looks very clean and sharp. Eye alignment could be a little better, but the bangs dropping in front of her right eye could be throwing that off.

All in all, I like this Haruka figure quite a bit. There’s a little bias in my view of the figure since I really like her character design. Haruka hits the sweet spot. She’s young, but not loli, filled out but not grotesque with her hips and breasts. Haruka as a physical character is built just right and the figure is well made.

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Other Stuff

Alter put a character logo/graphic on the white diamond shaped base. This is fairly common, but I’m not a fan of it. I’d rather have a base that is easy to ignore than one with a logo or character name graphic. One with a decorative design is nice though, something like the one for Another Blood from Max Factory.

There’s a lot of body type shots in this set of photos. It may be a little much, but the figure holds highlights and shadows so well I just took a few more than normal. There is also this very good review from Kimagureman Studios, who also gives out the exposure data for each of the photos.

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Slideshow

And here’s a link to the Beat Blades Haruka Slideshow, but you need a Flickr account to view it and have your view filter on at least moderate to see anything.

Shinobu

super rats — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 21:56:18 +0000

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Shinobu has a different idea of role playing, or maybe it’s me the D&D nerd that’s got the uncommon definition of role playing. To me it’s some fat or smelly or fat and smelly guys sitting around a table hacking through trolls for magic items. I mean, I guess it’s okay if Shinobu shows up dressed like her character, but I really wish her character would wear pants.

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Review of Shinobu from Funny Knights

Shinobu is an example of a poorly done cast-off. Her top is so freaking clunky it looks like it’s made out of a down comforter instead of being school uniform flimsy, not to mention the sleeves just don’t fit on properly. So, Shinobu looks kind of stupid with her clothes on and just as bad with them off. They’ve made no effort to conceal the pegs where her arms attach to her body. That’s just all around shoddy.

Shinobu has such a cute face…on the box. Not so much on the figure. It’s still cute, but the rough quality of the paint on her eyes has me annoyed. On the plus side, she looks great below the chest. Shinobu’s legs are somewhat realistically proportioned, which gives a different flavor to the more stylized legs a lot of anime figures have. Shinobu has a nice butt.

Due to the mediocre face, the overly bulky top, poor construction revealed when in cast-off mode, Shinobu is really only there for butt and pantsu fans. Shinobu’s character design had a lot of potential to be that cute campy sexy that anime based designs do so well, but wound up disappointing.

I’m wary of ordering another Funny Knights figure based on this.

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