It appears I've finally stepped out of my selfish, unscheduled, 6 day-long hiatus to grace you once more with the presence of my mediocre webcomic! I won't try to justify myself with excuses like working late at the office or illness. The fact of the matter is that I was playing a lot of videogames. All within a week I got my 360 back from Microsoft (and could therefore resume Lost Odyssey), finally got on live long enough to download some Live Arcade games (namely Ikaruga, Castlevania Symphony of the Night, and Rez HD), the GF and I finally bought a Wii (and subsequently had to also buy Smash Brothers Brawl and Mario Galaxy, two games I've been itching to play for some time), and a friend of mine (props, Tom) lent me his PSP so I could give Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core a try (a "try" being something like 10 hours of gameplay and counting). This is all on top of being smack dab in the middle of a case in Apollo Justice. So that's what I've been up to. As a matter of fact, the reason I finally pulled myself away from the games and dragged my sorry self back to drawing had less to do with a sense of guilt and more to do with the fact that I sat down to watch the first episode of Code Geass R2 and was struck by inspiration.

This inspiration, however, came along with a sense of frustration with my own story, as watching a well-executed, but highly different story from your own is wont to do. Mainly, this was because of how Lelouch Lamperouge can be such an interesting and dynamic protagonist. Compared to our own Kanzaki Kei whose chief conflict (at the moment) is with his own wishy-washiness, Lelouch is driven. He's got his eyes on the proverbial prize. He's also highly intelligent and self-confident, where Kei is a bit of a goof and an amateur. Yes, I'm sure you're thinking, we get it, they're different characters. But what does that matter? And besides that, you invented this character that you're complaining about, so it's your own fault and if you don't like it, then tough cookies. Fair enough. It's not that I'm particularly disappointed in Kei as a character, but sometimes being tied down to a particular character and story can feel restrictive. And an introverted character like Kei who tends to prefer thinking over acting can make it feel like nothing ever happens fast enough. The reason I bring this up isn't because I'm planning on doing anything drastic like killing CRB and starting over with something else. But rather that I wanted to mention that I have other ideas bouncing around in my head and that they'll at some point (hopefully) become sister-projects to CRB. Why do you need to know? Well, you don't really. I just felt like if I mentioned it here, it might get me to think about it some more and maybe even start working on it.

I may write something about Crisis Core when I've finished it.

Hey! It's evening comic week! Comics in the evenings! Hurray! Seriously, though, apologies for the update mishaps as of late. This whole "full-time job" thing is really putting a damper on my creative efforts. I'm quite determined to keep pushing forward, though.

This would usually be where I blather on and on about something maybe one or two of you find the slightest bit interesting (if I'm lucky!) but I'm drawing a bit of a blank. Finding myself with little time to watch anime or play videogames, I really don't have much of anything to say.

But yeah! Check back later for real updates!

Hey, guys, sorry about the lack of updates in the past few days. I did intend to post new pages on Friday, Monday and today, but the long weekend (and a renewed love for Odin Sphere) sort of messed up my groove and I didn't manage to. But there'll definitely be a new page tomorrow (or rather tonight, as they tend to go up the evening before, lately).

Just thought I'd mention something, though, because it struck me as interesting and it's one of the main reasons I've become re-enamoured with Odin Sphere. Item systems in videogames are tricky terrain. Too simple and people will complain about a lack of depth. Too complicated and you'll have people exasperated and wondering why they're bothering even playing. A tip in either direction can easily spoil an otherwise splendid title. But if a developer manages to find that perfect balance it can really make a game shine.

A speal like that makes it seem like I'm going to complain about specific issues I find in item systems, but actually, I'm just going to talk about a few of the things Odin Sphere does right. Now I'm not that far in yet, but it's really made me enjoy fiddling with my inventory, which is particularly impressive because I'm usually not too fond of that kind of stuff. There are two main reasons for this that I can think of at the moment.

For one, many of the items (almost all if I'm not mistaken) have multiple purposes and uses (and I'm not saying that other games don't do this, they just usually don't do it enough). Obviously, there's the usual main use and the possibility to sell for some quick cash if you're in need, but I'm talking beyond that. Seeds, for instance, are something I thought were pretty useful when I first started the game. You can plant them in a stage and phozons (read: shiny glowy things dropped by enemies) will automatically ripen the seed, cause it to germinate and in turn drop useful healing items. I thought this was great until I started feeling like I had way more seeds than I'd ever be able to use, especially since certain seeds produce seed-bearing fruit in what can only be described as an unholy doom cycle of seed production, continuously taking up valuable inventory space with perpetuates of the problem. Some people may also know this phenomenon as "agriculture". Anyway, just as I was feeling as though the seeds were getting on top of me, I found a new item: the egg. So when you use an egg, it hatches into a chick, which you can feed your extra seeds! Brilliant! So now that we've got a new use for that abundance of seeds, what about the chick? Well, the chick will become a full-grown chicken after 3 seeds and can lay more eggs if you give it even more seeds. "That's great!" I said, "No more extra seeds in my inventory! But now what do I do with these chickens?" That should have been pretty obvious. You can turn a full grown chicken into food, which counts as yet another healing item. So at this point I've only really mentioned seeds and chickens here, but already we've discovered two possible uses for each of them. And this isn't taking into account the other possibilities, which include selling the items, refining them into various potions and even taking them to a restaurant to have them made into a meal for you. So there's a real sense that each and every item is valuable and you're never just collecting miscellaneous garbage you find on the ground.

The other thing is that you've got a limited inventory space (divided into "pouches" that your character theoretically carries around), which is a concept that's usually an exercise in frustration if you ask me, but here it actually improves the game. For one, it prevents hoarding of items and makes you use what you've got continuously in order to make room. This has allowed to developer to essentially force you to take advantage of the stuff they've put into their game, without it really seeming that way. Again this plays into the idea that every item is valuable, because as you play, you know you're going to have to use them all, just to make space for the ones you get next. The other brilliant thing they've done is allowed you to upgrade your inventory space. Again, I'm not saying no other game has ever done this, but it's really well-executed here. For instance, when you upgrade your inventory capacity, you don't just get a bigger pouch and throw away the old one. You get a bigger pouch on top of your old one. So you really feel like it's an improvement. As I did this, I realised that it's the same feeling I get when I level up my characters in RPGs (especially those in which one level is substantially different from the last). This is undoubtedly a good and rewarding feeling and I believe that it is one of the biggest reasons people play RPGs. There's a real sense of improvement in that feeling (even if it is kind of artificial).

And on top of all this, the "ring" interface is friendly, simple and wrought with oodles of precious nostalgia. So yeah, I just thought I'd mention that.

Work has kept me busy enough that I haven't really had time to write anything other than Revenant Braves. Oh well, can't ask for much more than that, right? I'm glad I've managed to continue updating.

The other reason I haven't updated is that I haven't really had much to write about. I started playing Lost Odyssey, but first I found out that the second disk was defective, then my 360 red ringed. So there ya go. Other than that, I've been playing some Touhou which is keeping me entertained, but I haven't played enough of it to really write much about it. I'll leave that to our resident forum-moderator, Ryuu, who is more than enthusiastic about the subject.

In any case, here's something I drew in some spare time I had at work. It's bit of a tease of things to come:

That's why there's weird updates this week! It's cool, though! While they may be wildly unpredictable in their timing, I will try to keep it at 5 new pages per week, one way or another.

The good news is that income means that I can buy things! Like videogames! Which means I'll have something to talkwrite about besides the anime that I'm watching. And when it comes down to it, I'm far more confident in my ability to be pretentious about videogames than I am in my ability to be pretentious about anime. Is it really even possible to be pretentious about anime? Oh wait, I forgot about Gainax.

I'm watching this anime series at the moment that goes by the name of Bamboo Blade. Yes, especially to someone who isn't hopelessly jaded by the sheer volume of misconceived anime and manga titles, that's a bit of a corny japanimation-y title, but Shakespeare rightly said something about a Rose being just as okay a flower if it were called some other arbitrary selection of letters. Anyway, yes, I'm watching this show. When I started it off I would have immediately described it as a generic shounen love anime. It had all the usual trappings of the genre, after all. The male to female ratio is embarassingly unlikely, the female characters all have generous proportions and are all very likeable, and the art style is by all rights leaning more towards classic shounen conventions than shoujo (read: the characters don't look like they fell out of a fashion magazine and stuck wispy mops on their heads). To be entirely honest, I was really only watching the show because the voice actor for Kamina from Gurren Lagann (a.k.a. the baddest dude to ever not exist) voices one of the few male leads. Now that I've seen 15 episodes, though, I am glad that I hung in there (baby).

You see, episode 15 was a bit of an eye opener. I was sitting here, happily watching away when the characters (who've quite grown on me, if not for their refreshing originality, then for their genuine sympathetic qualities) decided to go to a public bath. For those of you who don't know (and if you don't, I'm honestly suprised you've read this far into a rant about anime) Japan has public bath houses for people who may not necessarily have these utilities available to them at home. It was at this point in the episode when I rolled my eyes and thought Well, here we go. Fanservice time. Time to degrade my beloved characters by having them prance around naked, making played-out jokes about bust size to appease the lonely 13-year-old demographic and waste the time of people who *gasp* are looking for story progression . . . But a funny thing happened. Upon arriving at the bath house, there were one or two transitional shots, indicating to us that the bath has been had and the characters have now left, and then we move on to other things. I was genuinely surprised by this. My mind was thoroughly blown, which begs the question of how much integrity my beloved medium has. And for that matter, what does fanservice have to do with integrity?

Upon asking myself this question, I first had the thought that maybe I'm just a tight-assed, prudish kill-joy, but then I realised that while that may be true, there's more to it than that. When we consider that the whole point of an anime series is to tell a story, the answer becomes kind of obvious. Meaningless deviation from the plot like this is quite simply a form of pandering to a certain demographic in order to increase (or maintain) viewers. And as we all know, pandering to a certain demographic is a textbook example of selling out, which is to integrity as kryptonite is to Superman.

So does Bamboo Blade have integrity? You bet your shinai it does! Does it really matter, though? Would I still enjoy the show if it went ahead and had done that played-out bath house scene? Well, yes, but it wouldn't have made as much of an impact on me. You see, this way, I've put the show up on a special pedestal reserved for things that aren't trite and obvious. It's a pedestal I call respect and it goes a long way in making me remember things fondly. And of course, it's in the studio's best interest to have its productions remembered fondly! I guess the only problem is that there are a lot fewer artsy, stuck-up idiots like me in the world than there are lonely, 13-year-old idiots. And in the end, all of us different kinds of idiots are ruled by the almighty dollar.

Second seasons, when it comes to anime, are a bit hit or miss if you ask me. For those of you who don't know, most anime is limited to between 12 and 26 episodes. None of this "drags on for ten seasons and has lost absolutely all popularity by the time it's over" stuff we get in the West. For better or for worse, studios generally have that one season limit on telling their story. Ocasionally, however, a series generates enough popularity to warrant a second season, or at least an OVA. There are some benefits and some drawbacks to this scenario.

For one, if the show was popular enough to get a second season, there's a good chance that the production values will have been increased from the first season. You may notice an increase in animation quality, or heck, even a longer season (24 episodes instead of 12). A good example of this is Genshiken, whose first season looked at best reasonable and at worst like I could have drawn it, but whose second season was quite presentable.

The troublesome territory that can occur with a second season has less to do with art and more to do with writing. Generally, it seems a studio won't know ahead of time that they're getting a second season, so the first season is designed to have some degree of closure at the end. It's the complete opposite than in Western television, because rather than end a season on a cliffhanger in hopes of bringing your audience back next season, the aim is to conclude all open story lines, giving the audience a sense of closure, like any good story has. In these cases, starting a second season can break the sense of closure offered by the first, which in terms of story-flow is a bit halting and uncomfortable. However, trying to avoid this by assuming a second season will occur can turn out even worse. Kare Kano is a perfect example of this kind of scenario going horribly wrong. Granted, the director left the studio about half way through the production, which is guaranteed to fudge everything up, but watching this particular series will leave any viewer with a tremendous sense of unfulfillment, with it ending abruptly smack in the middle of a major plot point. For those of us who generally prefer anime to manga (however few we may be), this meant never really knowing how the story turns out.

And speaking of manga, anyone who enjoys anime can tell you that the biggest problem with a long-running or multi-season series is filler episodes or in worse cases, entire filler arcs. These occur when the original manga author has not finished writing the story, but the anime has caught up with the available content, and thus runs out of material. In these cases, the producers of the anime have to basically wing it and come up with new original material for their series, to keep it on the air in the meantime until the manga author pumps out a few more volumes. This filler material is, in general, decidely of lower quality than the original work, has little relevance to the overall plot, and is basically a transparent stall for time. Occasionally, it's entertaining and can also provide some added character development, but on most occasions, it's a hindrance. Fortunately, this is less of a problem for one-shot second seasons and more of a problem for those unnecessarily long shounen action shows like Bleach, Naruto, and One Piece, which go on for hundreds of episodes to tell a story that could probably have been told in like 70, tops.

I guess I bring this up because of the second seasons of favourite shows of mine that have been airing recently. I mentioned Genshiken II, which recently finished its run and I honestly, thoroughly enjoyed it! It used plenty of untold story from the manga (or so I'm told) and added a few entertaining bits of its own (read: hilarious yaoi episode) while wowing us (well, me, anyway) with much nicer art and animation than the first season. Shakugan no Shana's season two is also airing, currently and is a little less impressive. The animation doesn't seem all that much different from the first series (especially given the recently released feature film, which looked very nice) and the story is dragging it's legs like an anemic, elderly tortoise. It has occurred to me that maybe I just look back on the first season too fondly. My tastes and views on anime may have changed enough since 2005 to alter my perception of a series. Still, though, as much as I may complain that the second season isn't as good as the first, I'll still watch it through to the end, in hopes that I'll recapture that same feeling I felt at the end of the first 24 episodes and that brought me back when that 25th aired.