Shattered Horizon is a very unique online only first person shooter from Futuremark Games Studio which released way back in November 2009 but was recently brought to my attention after seeing it in the Indie Heavy Hitters pack on Steam (Valve does indeed own my soul and the best part of my wallet now). The basic concept of Shattered Horizon is first person combat IN SPACE, now we’re not talking your typical space marine Halo type fare, but rather actual zero gravity combat with astronauts in jet packs darting around between asteroids and space stations. The result of this is an experience unlike anything I or even the majority of people have played before, however not only is the concept interesting but it is executed extremely well as well and after a few games it becomes very intuitive. Though actually getting kills can be tricky as you are constantly zooming all over the place, however it isn’t so difficult that it ends up being frustrating.

One thing to say about the game is that it has fairly high requirements which may prove restrictive for some and it only works with Windows 7 and that other one, you know, “the operating system that shall not be named”. Shattered Horizon is a very pretty looking game as a result of this and it has some superb level design. This creates a very realistic feeling space experience, one of the maps even being a damaged version of our International Space Station which is a nice touch that will appeal to all the space geeks out there! It is a game which does tend more towards the realistic side of sci-fi and before you get on at me about how you can hear the guns firing and how there isn’t any sound in space, the sound is simulated by your suit! Actually, if you go into the “silent running” mode which is an interesting stealth mechanic where you turn the power off on your suit to avoid detection, you can’t hear the gunshots.

Shattered Horizon is a fun and well made game, which is so different to pretty much everything on the market today, but as I write this now there are 15 players currently online, possibly in the world, this number fluctuates up and down at more prime times there can be between 20-30 people. Shattered Horizon has become victim to the fate of pretty much every single smaller online shooter out there as today’s ADD gamers constantly jump from game to game causing online modes too have very limited lifespans, with only the real heavy hitters of the industry holding a steady course, regardless of quality. To tell the truth there isn’t really anything that I believe can be done about it, there’s always just going to be the big dogs dominating the market with the smaller indie titles floundering in the shadows.

Now this wouldn’t be such as bad problem if Shattered Horizon also had an offline component such as a campaign mode, with that you still have a game that you can play even years after it came out. Unfortunately however since it is solely an online game, once the playerbase is gone well you are to be honest screwed, which is something that will make me hesitant to buy an online only game from now on. I feel that I’m in a difficult position here, I want to recommend that people should go and buy the game and if it did have a thriving online community I would do so with no reserve, but I am reluctant to suggest it to someone. I don’t know whether it is too much to ask someone to put down their hard-earned cash on a game which seems to be rapidly disappearing into non-existence, as with the current server populations I can’t quite see Futuremark keeping them up for that much longer.

Unfortunately Shattered Horizon is a game that has probably run its course, which really is a shame, but I know that I’m going to be playing it from time to time if I can get a game, and when I do it’s almost always great fun! So if you do end up picking the game or if you already have, be sure to send me an email, the address you can find here and we’ll be sure to play a game or two!

As I have said Trava Fist Planet is a 2003 1 episode OAV which was originally released with the Grasshoppa! Magazine in Japan, a DVD magazine that only ever lasted 4 volumes, and it tells the story of our titular main character Trava, a weird kinda furry dog/elf looking humanoid who also just happens to be an ace ex-military mech pilot and his mechanic friend Shinkai which, well, the best description I can come up for him is some sort of alien/duck/god knows what creature. Well the pair end up stumbling across Mikuru a bodacious amnesiac who they recover from a rescue pod which is apparently from “the last generation’s war” on their way to complete the “marking” of the mysterious planet Fable. Mikuru sticks around with them and it is revealed that they are doing this marking to get some cash together to enter the Fist Planet Tournament the mech fighting competition from which the show gets it’s name, though it only really plays a small part in the story.

So I’m not going to spoil any more of what little plot Trava Fist Planet has because in truth that’s not really the reason you’re coming to it. However that isn’t really to say that the plot is bad but rather that its potential isn’t realised. The show was originally released with a preview of a second episode which was never to be and that really is the most disappointing thing about Trava Fist Planet. However, that isn’t to say that you don’t feel satisfied after watching it, you thankfully aren’t left with a cliffhanger, but rather that you’re just left with a slight bitter taste in your mouth with the knowledge that a second episode or further episodes will probably never happen with the current anime industry.

It is such a stylistic departure from what people would typically recognise as anime that some could be put off from it. However it is so wonderfully fluid and hyperactive it is a pleasure to watch, without a doubt it set the foundations for the future Redline. The main reason some might be put off this show is the character designs, as you probably noticed I struggled to describe Trava and Shinkai, whilst this is in part to do with my lack of descriptive ability it is mostly to do with the fact that the difference between them and the typical Shonen Jump standard is so vast, even Mikuru probably the most “normal” human looking of the group still has MEGAHIPS and a huge scar across her face. To tell the truth though, if you are put off this show based on the character designs alone, well, I’m not sure we can be friends anymore.

This show really succeeds in creating an interesting and full world for our characters to inhabit in the limited time that we visit it. That isn’t to say though that information is dumped on you, rather that things are mentioned in passing such as “the last generation’s war”. However it feels that Koike is setting up for a continuation of the story which never ended up happening so it is a bit of a double-edged sword in that way. But hey, we can hope that if Redline ends up being a success, which the internet hype machine would lead you to believe it will, Koike ends up being given the money and freedom to finish what he started.

The thing is that unfortunately Trava Fist Planet is hard enough to get your hands on, it was never licensed in either the States or the UK and there aren’t that many fansubs about for it. It really is worth hunting down though, and I would say that the best way to support it would be to pick up Redline when it’s released early next year, but really what more motivation do you need to pick it up by this point? So go now and watch Trava Fist Planet, because truth be told you’re most likely going to love it!

Thankfully however this quickly fizzled out as it was revealed that the source that started the rumour was a fake and it seems that Kawajiri is fine. However, though the crisis was averted the sudden “news” that he had passed away only a week or so after losing Satoshi Kon and the fallout that ensued, made me realise that in the upcoming years the news that a prominent anime director has left us will become far more common as the majority of them settle into their old age.

However whilst we start losing these venerable heavy hitters (though Kon was way before his time at 47) there are practically no young fresh-faced directors rising up to fill in the gaps (with some exceptions of course) and this truly is the worrying thing for it puts the future of anime as a medium in question. There are a few reasons for this, for one a lot of talent these days is being lost to the very much better paying videogame industry, in addition studios are far less likely to give an inexperienced director the money to just go and make a movie, the way that many directors made their break back in the 80s, the anime industry simply isn’t geared to help young directors get a foot up. A precursor to this can be seen in the field of mecha animation when Mamoru Oshii had to resort to using computer generated graphics to depict the flight scenes due in main part to the lack of A class mecha animators out there.

It’s hard to say these days that things aren’t looking dire, and it seems that at the moment if the Japanese government doesn’t interfere in the near future it can only get worse. However the government can only do so much, it is probable that the industry will have to completely re-invent itself in order to survive with those studios which can’t adapt falling at the wayside. Hopefully though, what this will result in is a leaner meaner industry, compared to the still over bloated current one, which is far better equipped to deal with the problems of the future.

Well I’m sorry for all this doom and gloom talk but I feel that the anime industry in Japan is at a pivotal point and it’s going to be in the next few years when we’ll see whether it’s going to sink or float. However I for one hope that it’s going to survive these rough times and come back at us stronger and smarter than ever before!

Well from here it episodically follows Chi adapting to her new life with the Yamadas and her various misadventures. And that’s pretty much all I can really say about the plot of Chi’s Sweet Home or really the lack thereof. You find in general pop culture that animals are for the most part personified acting and thinking like humans, however Chi’s Sweet Home is unique in that it bucks that trend due to Chi being plainly a cat which thinks like a young kitten, or how you would guess a kitten would think, and does all the stupid things that young kittens do. It is from here that the majority of the comedy of the book is derived from.

The artwork and character designs are simple, which goes well with the story, and very very cute! The cuteness factor is without a doubt Chi’s main weapon in her arsenal and reason for the book’s success. In manga and anime when a creator aims to make a character cute he/she often overshoots the mark making a sickly sweet, somewhat vomit inducing experience. However Konata hits it square on its jaw combining cute character designs with the natural cuteness that comes with a young kitten in a one-two knockout punch.

The actual book that Vertical put out really is a thing of beauty, the paper quality is above any of the books I’ve ever owned let alone any manga. It just is a pleasure to hold in your hands. In addition the entire book is unusually in full colour something that actually wasn’t done by Vertical themselves surprisingly enough but rather when it was first published in tankoban in Japan.

Throughout this I’ve been reviewing Chi’s Sweet Home as a book for adults as technically it is and was first published in a Seinen magazine, but it also functions perfectly as a children’s book and on first impressions you would say that it was one. It’s child friendliness is increased furthermore due to the fact that in Vertical’s attempts to reach out to a wider audience they have flipped the book so that it reads from left to right, because if as that wise 4Kids exec once said, children don’t read, what chance in hell do we have of getting them to read backwards?!?

This is a book pretty much perfect for cat lovers, but it really stands as just a nice thing to read that’s pretty much guaranteed to bring a smile to your face as you are continuously bombarded by weapons grade fluffy cuteness. If you have any doubts at all about whether to indeed pick up Chi’s Sweet Home I would have to recommend at least giving the Madhouse animated anime a chance which you can watch for free on Crunchyroll.

Throughout its time Studio Ghibli have been the people that have brought us some of the greatest animated movies ever created, however in recent years some of their works have been received comparatively poorly and so as a result there was the question “have they still got it?”.

Based on the Hans Christian Anderson tale The Little Mermaid the movie tells the story of the titular character Ponyo a young goldfish who is the daughter of a mighty sea wizard who used to be a human before he fell in love with Ponyo’s mother a sea goddess. Ponyo sick of her constricting overprotective dad manages to escape to land, encountering Sosuke a young boy who lives with his mother whilst his father, a ship captain, is away at sea. It transpires that Ponyo ends up falling for with Sosuke and Sosuke with Ponyo, calamity then ensues as Ponyo is exposed to her father’s “secret evil sea wizard stash” turning her into a human girl whilst at the same time enhancing her magical abilities a hundredfold causing a huge storm and sea levels to rise to a level that throws all that effort you put into switching the lights off and separating your trash out the window, not only that but for some reason, which isn’t exactly explained, the moon is falling out of the sky. Well push comes to shove and the entirety of life on earth ends up depending on whether the love between Sosuke and Ponyo is true.

Ponyo is technically stunning, as with all Miyazaki and Ghibli works the animation is completely hand drawn, and man does it look good! It seems that Ghibli in their animating of the movie may have taken direct inspiration from recent French animation, with parts leaving me very reminiscent of a movie released around the time called ‘Mia and the Migou” (see the trailer here), however at the same time still keeping a decidedly and recognizably Ghibli look to it. Beautifully flowing with vivid colour it really is like visual ecstasy, especially so on blu ray which was the version I picked up and the version that is a must if you indeed do have the player. If you’re as lucky as me and are able to go and see the movie in the cinema I would have to recommend it as it only looks better on the big screen.

Miyazaki himself stated that he set out in creating Ponyo to make a Totoro (if you haven’t watched Totoro then shame on you) for a younger audience, and this is very much the case. Ponyo is a kids movie through and through, the plot is simple and easy for kids to understand. When I finally managed to see the movie on the big screen at a screening at the Queen’s Film Theatre here in Belfast the seemingly universal reaction of the group of kids that were watching the movie as well was hugely positive and hopefully someday they’re gonna be back for more! However that isn’t to say that it’s impossible for adults to enjoy the movie as well, the story of Ponyo and Sosuke is absolutely charming and it’s even worth watching for the eye candy on it’s own.

All in all I feel I can definitely say after watching Ponyo that Miyazaki hasn’t quite lost his magic yet and I’m desperately looking forward to the next Ghibli film, which is to be based on the book The Borrowers by Mary Norton, though to be honest let’s just say their history of adapting western literature isn’t the best. Really if you have young kids then go for god’s sake and buy this movie! If you don’t, still go out and buy this movie!

The original, based on a manga from the 50s, told the story of Shotaro Kaneda a young boy detective who takes control of the titular Tetsujin, a giant robot created by his deceased father during the Second World War as Japan’s war winning superweapon, it was a light-hearted series following Shotaro using Tetsujin to stop criminals and other giant robots. The series was brought over to the US in the form of Gigantor, one of the first ever anime on US television. It went on to spawn 3 more television series, one in 1980, one in 1992 and the 2004 series that I’m reviewing. In addition it also was turned into a live action movie in 2005, but as with many live action adaptions it’s not really worth talking about. Tetsujin pretty much created the giant robot genre and laid down the cornerstones for what we have today.

The 2004 remake departs radically from the original series, set ten years after the war, it deals more with Shotaro’s struggles to control Tetsujin and figure out his purpose and place in a Japan free of war, but along the way still defeating other giant robots and various criminals. Whilst diverging away from the original plot wise, it remains very faithful in terms of character designs and Tetsujin himself after various redesigns over the years returns to the original 60s form.

The show manages to successfully capture the spirit of a Japan unsure of where they now stood in the world, still burdened by the memories of the war. However at the same time the country is progressing rapidly in industry, with great hope for the future, something which is quite interesting depicted in an anime.

The animation seems to have a fairly high budget, there seems to be very little, if no CG in the show, which is fairly rare for a giant robot show these days. The mech designs though aren’t really anything to call home about though, in keeping with the show’s old school aesthetic they’re pretty unrealistic and retro. The original series was back in the time before people would pilot their massive fighting robots and this remake is no different, Shotaro controls Tetsujin using his iconic lunch box sized controller which can be used by anyone, so whether Tetsujin is good or evil really depends whose hands the controller is in.

The English dub is workable and of fair enough quality, but I would have to recommend the Japanese track above it because at times it can be pretty damn cheesy (I selected the dub because I was working at the time).

All in all I thoroughly enjoyed the show, I found the story very enjoying and it had far more depth than what I was expecting going into it. I would have to definitely recommend that people go and pick this up, I bought the two volumes on Amazon for the combined total of £3.00, I would be out buying the rest of them, but unfortunately they were the only two volumes released in the UK by Manga. However, it has been released in its entirety in the US. This is a show that really deserves some more attention, so please go out and buy it now!

Promo 1

Chris

And so in my endeavour to prove that this isn’t just a manga blog, I have decided to compile a list of picks for the new spring season.

Heroman

Without a doubt Heroman has to be the biggest show of this new season. A collaboration between Studio Bones and Stan Lee, it tells the story of Joey Jones, a teenager who is bullied living in Centre City, West Coast USA and the titular giant, stars and stripes emblazoned, ass-whooping robot Heroman, which was transformed from a toy robot that Joey hoked out of a bin by magical alien lightning. It seems that for the rest of the series that Heroman and Joey will be fighting against the aliens that caused the aforementioned magical lightning. I’m sure that you can guess from the premise, as expected with Stan Lee behind the wheel, the first episode at least is pure American comic book superhero schlock. However as someone has read superhero comics in the past I really rather enjoyed it. However if you aren’t a comic fan it’s still worth checking out for the excellent animation and production values of the show.

House Of Five Leaves

Running in the well-known noitaminA TV block, House Of Five Leaves looks unlike any anime I had ever seen before with an extremely interesting style and character designs. House Of The Five Leaves is the story of a down and out ronin called Masanosuke who keeps getting dismissed from his jobs due to a soft heart. That is until he meets Yaichi a pretty carefree seeming guy, who is also as it turns out is a member of a gang of kidnappers called the House of Five Leaves, Yaichi ends up hiring him as a bodyguard for making a deal with the family of a boy he had kidnapped. When things turn nasty and the family’s swordsmen attack Yaichi and Masanosuke, it is revealed that he is ridiculously strong, despite being a coward, and he quickly dispatches them. Seeing this, Yaichi ends up convincing him to join his gang as protection. The first episode of House of Five Leaves has a very gentle pace to it, however I still found myself very much intrigued by the story and the characters for example it is shown that Yaichi isn’t just a two-bit crook but rather has just intentions behind his crimes. I can see however that the distinctive art style might put some people off, but this is definitely a show I’m intending to continue. However though Funimation picked up the simulcasting rights to House of Five Leaves, it isn’t available in the UK, which is a shame.

Senkou No Night Raid

Senkou No Night Raid Is one of my two real stand out shows of this season. It deals with a group of Japanese spies with supernatural powers in 1930s China prior to the invasion. This isn’t really a period of time that gets much coverage in Japanese media due to the atrocities committed in China during the invasion and so I was extremely interested when I first heard about it. Senkou No Night Raid has been aptly compared to Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and it really does have a very Ghost in the Shell feel to it, with both series focusing on a very tight group of special agents and both are mired in political intrigue. This has to be probably my top show of the season, but I can see it going wrong fast if the creators make the wrong decisions. Nevertheless I’m still hoping that someone is going to pick it up for western release, because with the way it’s progressing at the moment I feel that it could do well over here.

Angel Beats

At the start of the season I had already decided to avoid Angel Beats, dismissing it on the grounds that at the time I was under the impression that it was based on a visual novel and I had never heard great things about shows based on them in the past. However I was wrong in two ways, firstly in that the source material for Angel Beats was not a visual novel, my confusion arose from the fact that is being made by the creators of Kanon and Clannad, and secondly when I sat down to watch it I was surprised at how good it was. So I can assure you that as I was watching it, I was indeed eating some humble pie. Angel Beats is about a guy who wakes up with no memories in the afterlife which is for some reason a high school, when he wakes up he finds a girl beside him holding a rather large sniper rifle pointed at a white-haired girl. The girl then tries to recruit him into the Shinda Sekai Sensen or the Afterlife Battle Front an organisation rebelling against God and the student council president Tenshi, who is in fact the aforementioned white-haired girl, in order to avoid being deleted. The guy, who we discover is called Otonashi, ends up joining with Yuri (sniper rifle girl) the leader of the After life Battle Front or at least until he gets his memories back. It really is quite an enjoyable show with quite a few entertaining video game references and parodies. I was definately surprised by the quality of Angel Beats due to it’s less than reputable source and would definitely recommend it, I’m still not going to watch Kanon though!

Rainbow

To be honest, prior to watching Rainbow I had been avoiding it, fearing that it was going to be too brutal for my tastes. However after watching it I can’t believe that I was going to miss what is now my second real standout show of the season. Rainbow tells the story of several young men sent to a young offenders prison in 1950s Japan, a Japan still reeling from the Second World War. This is one of first animes that I have ever seen that contained at the start of it, a warning about how violent it is with the creators stating that they felt that they needed to have the level of it in order to accurately portray the grim reality of prisons in that period. And yes it is violent, with one particularly malicious guard beating down relentlessly on one prisoner that the young men meet and previously a brutal fight between the prisoner and the young men. Rainbow really does effectively portray how after committing a crime in that period, people would barely look at you as another human being and they treat you that way as well. It really is quite a hard-hitting show and I am very interested as to where Madhouse is to going to take it, however I’m not sure if I could recommend it to someone who’s squeamish when it comes to violence.

“Lapis Lazuli Crown” is a two-volume romance series set in a world where magic users have to channel their powers through stones. Our main character Miel is the daughter of a disgraced noble family who used to be the personal magicians for the Royal Family, however she herself isn’t that good at magic instead relying on her brutish strength and she dreams of marrying into nobility. That is until she encounters Radi, a lost young man in town who she first meets after throwing her handbag at him by accident. Telling her that he’s a rich kid from the outskirts of the city he hires her to help find his friend who he was separated from, an arm wrestling competition later they find his friend who we discover is called Seig, and that Radi actually gave him the slip. A few days later Miel is tricked into a plot to destroy a barrier that is protecting the house of a politician, Radi ends up saving her and it is revealed that Radi is in fact Radian (I know quite a stretch) the Prince of Savarin, the country in which the story is set. This leads into Miel, who is now determined to perfect her magic skills in order to be able to work at the palace, training to become a sorceror and eventually join Radi in the palace.

My main problem with Lapis Lazuli Crown is that near the end it really starts to feel a bit rushed, you start to lose large chunks of time, much like a druggie, and the flow of the story feels unnatural. It seems as though the author had the intention of carrying on but had to bring it to an abrupt ending, with the author herself saying at the end of the second volume that she had a folder of things that she wanted to include but wasn’t able to.

Other than that it is a fairly enjoyable read, if not slightly generic. I found the character of Radi in particular to be interesting, he is constantly up front with Miel about how he feels about her which is refreshing when you compare it to the typical shojo “I wonder if he likes me too?”, he also has a degree of depth with his actions often having more than just one motivation behind them. However in the beginning I found Miel a bit grating with her life’s dream of marrying into a rich family which made her seem very shallow. However luckily as the series progresses the situation improve and though she is chasing Radi, who is about as noble as you can get, it is instead for love rather than status.

The art style is pure typical shojo which doesn’t really do much to stand out, but saying this it is well drawn with nice character designs, though they do look suspiciously similar to those of the bonus story “Daisy Romance” which is included at the end of the first volume.

To sum up, “Lapis Lazuli Crown” is a somewhat enjoyable short shojo series but it doesn’t really do anything to make it appeal to the non shojo audience. Though it would definitely be appreciated by any fan of the genre.

As soon as he arrives he finds one of his pupils being bullied, Makoto, a timid young boy who is bullied because like another certain young boy from a certain movie, he can see things. However unlike this other certain young boy, whose name and movie he is from I will refrain from mentioning due to copyright issues, he doesn’t see dead people but the emotions of people embodied in the form of monsters. Toyama manages to stop the kids from bullying Makoto, who then discovers that he’s a detective, which leads into Toyama and Makoto episodically solving the problems of the pupils throughout the rest of the book.

The actual main mystery of the dead teacher falls secondary to the dramas of the students which turn into simple moralising tales, such as telling the reader not to steal or to be happy with who you are and your body. However throughout the first volume there is a shadowy figure in the background who may possibly be related to the death of the dead teacher Shimizu.

My first and prime problem with Deka Kyoshi is that for a story about a detective posing as a teacher in a school, it is seriously lacking in Austrian goodness à la Kindergarten Cop. But in all seriousness Deka Kyoshi fails in holding my attention where Kindergarten Cop succeeds. To put it plainly I found Deka Kyoshi boring, there isn’t much humor, there is very little action and what drama there was I found too simplistic and uninteresting.

However one of the more interesting features of Deka Kyoshi is the artstyle, it’s very reminiscent of classic shonen art of the 70s despite being published only 4 years ago with the characters simply and cleanly drawn, which fits the stories and contrasts nicely with Baba’s demonic envisionings of the students’ neuroses.

The “Teen Plus” classification on the back of the book suggesting that it is for 16+ is confusing, this is very much a kids book and it doesn’t really offer much for older crowds. I would have to guess that it received this rating due to one of the stories dealing with the rather controversial topic of wrist cutting, which I personally was surprised to see due to the fact that wrist cutting is very rarely covered in the media, and the rather creepy images of monsters which may disturb younger ones.

In conclusion Deka Kyoshi just didn’t do anything for me and I don’t know if I could recommend it for children due to the disturbing imagery. I feel that I would have prefered it if the actual mystery had played a more central role, though at the end of the book it does seem to be leading towards that direction. But based on the first volume I don’t believe that I will be going out of my way to pick up the second.

Volume 1 of Deka Kyoshi is out now from CMX Manga