An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

How we got to more card games – Z/X Ignition Spoiler Review

Here I go with the Card Game anime again. Don’t worry, though: unlike last week’s entry, this isn’t one that’s about playing card games, but rather an entry that takes the same route as Luck & Logic and tries to present what I guess is the story behind the card game.

To that… I know basically nothing about Z/X. I know it’s a game, and that its branded merch like sleeves and deck boxes have often been on clearance, but I don’t know the first thing about how it plays or what its cards are like. Instead, I’m going into this anime basically sight unseen.

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Breaking News – Kamierabi God.app; or, What I’ll Be Selecting Come Fall Season (because Yoko Taro in a Leprechaun Mask told me so)

The original concept is from the man who brought us Drakkengard and Nier

The script is by the creator of Kagerou Project, one of my favorite works of all time.

The director worked on Knights of Sidonia and has a proven handle on 3d animation.

How could I not be excited after an Anime Expo panel like that? Well, the promotional images and trailer that dropped certainly helped. Let’s take a look!

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Diagnosis: Terminal Edginess – Redo of Healer Spoiler Review

WARNING – This is an angry review of a naughty show. Some things cannot be said without foul language.

The revenge plot is one of the oldest and most famed stories in fiction. The Count of Monte Cristo, written in 1844, is considered a great work of western literature, and is one of the most pure examples of the revenge fantasy, which has had perhaps countless imitators over the years. Of course, one could cite the Euripides play Medea, first performed in 431BCE, as being the true antecedent of the genre, depicting as it does how the former princess of Colchis took her revenge on the unfaithful husband who abandoned her, with the gods on her side even as she goes through many a terrible movement in ruining Jason.

But despite that legendary pedigree, the revenge story is also one of the easiest sorts of tales to get wrong. It is easy, perilously easy, for revenge stories to degenerate utterly into morasses of edge and skewed priorities that, rather than entertaining, leave a body baffled and often a bit upset.

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And the Meta Award goes to… – Keep Your Hands off Eizouken! Spoiler Review

Keep Your Hands off Eizouken! (the title is excited) is an odd duck of an anime about, oddly enough, the one thing that any anime studio should know pretty well: the process of creating anime! The basic pitch is that a trio of high-school students with a passion for the art of animation form a film club and use it to produce anime and… that’s about it.

Yeah, this is very much a slice of life show. It is held together by three broad story arcs, around the first three productions by the club, but the “story” isn’t so much the point as it is an exploration of the characters and a window into both the fluffy and technical sides of the creative process. Because of that, I’ll be doing this review a little backwards from how I normally do it, starting with commentary on the show and its structure while saving plot summary largely for the end.

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