Life Update -ATK collaboration: Visual Novel

Normally I would be increasing my posts every week but I've been busier with a major project that I'm now working on.

I won't tell you specifics, but ATK and I will be working on a self published (doujin) visual novel written in Flash I believe (I can't find the engine that the japanese circles use). I'm his writer and we'll be aiming for releasing it by NYAF. It'll come in two languages, English and Korean, which means I need to work my ass off in writing the chapters up as fast as possible. I never expected this to happen....

Hatsune Miku Speed Paint (Commission)

A commission received from someone who bought the super large Rin poster that Al drew in crayon. His plans for NYAF this year is to try and sell disks containing the image files. To compensate, he'll be drawing on larger scale. As of now this one is 4000x3000 but I think he said he'd be going for even larger.

His coloring process changed from the last time I checked. I like this foundation better.

Drawing Request from Mabinogi - Speedpaint

Funny enough, I received an email in March about a request for a drawing in ATK's name. I was pretty sure we put both our emails in there..... Regardless, I forwarded this to him asking what he though about it. It wasn't a commission, more like just an earnest request. Finals were coming up so I wasn't sure how to deal with this one to be honest. In the end, he finally decided to do it.



This one was fairly simple. We received two reference screencaps to base the drawings from, so I won't bother him about shading first before getting color scheme down. The palette is already set and he probably already has a light source in mind.

Nothing major to note besides the horrendously deformed necklace thing. Perspective doesn't change THAT much with a leaning person.....

Somewhat new Layout

I've extended the layout so that the site is best viewed 1080x768 resolutions. I'll probably increase it later on. I've also put the stream on the top of the page and posts bottom. Bear with me, this design is still a test. I may keep it or change it later.

I'M NOT DEAD YET

Just give me a little more time. Once finals/major projects are over and I'm through with this year's school work. I'll be able to post up some news. In the meantime, I gotta figure out how to get my old reader base back.... again....

In other news, for some odd reason, my PC seems to pick up something on the hacker radar for Neople so I have to play DNF on my laptop which means my stream is dead for a while. I've bought a video capture card to hopefully record my PS3.

DnF - Valentine's day Event Speed paint

Currently, in Dungeon and Fighter Korea, there's an event where you have to color in one of three outlines and submit it as an event for a prize.
Al, has decided to do his own take on it.



This is definitely different for him. He has to apply his own style to something to a base line art, and the start is very awkward (detailing the face first and then moving on).

This speed paint is based on the most recent avatar sets released in Korean DnF.
What's restricted him the most seems to be the base art style. The Mage's head is HUGE and it looks iffy.

Because this is based almost directly on something else, the detailing on these two characters is very nice. The hairs are distinctly ATK and the soft shading works well.

NIS America licenses anime

If you haven't heard about this yet, here it is.

We announced yesterday that we will release Anime titles in the US in 2010!
We are very excited to announce our first 4 titles!

Here you go!

- Toradora!
- PERSONA - trinity soul-
- PandraHearts
- Our Home's Fox Deity

We will let you know more about the release dates and all other info soon!
Please looking forward to them!

Please see the press release for more details.
Press Release (JPG / PDF)

Toradora!

PERSONA -trinity soul-

PandraHearts

Our Home's Fox Deity

To be honest, I'm not sure how I feel about this. NIS america's more recent works with Ar Tonelico II and Cross Edge have left me caring less and less about the company. I like Ar Tonelico II as a game and really want to play Ar Tonelico III, but when you have a company that purposefully removes voices because their own voice actors couldn't fill roles, have spelling mistakes, and forget to even convert and translate some of the japanese text, it leaves me wondering.

Having read through some visual novels (not by NIS) I generally ignored spelling errors and the occasional grammatical WTF, but thinking back on it now, I can't do the same with NIS. They should have a large enough staff of beta testers and quality control that major bugs, and aesthetics shouldn't be there. They're making rookie mistakes and it's making me question their other work. Just look at the email they sent. Notice how it says "Pandra Hearts"? I didn't do that, that was a copy and paste. You can look for yourself assuming they didn't change it by the time this is posted.

Stuff like this shouldn't happen, and it worries me when they start licensing anime.
I'm not sure if you've seen the Disgaea 3 opening as subbed by NIS America. It's pretty bad. The translation is....different from what I'm hearing and the subtitles themselves are extremely loud and the type set is a bit large. I'm glad that they're licensing anime and getting more content into our market, but I'm a bit skeptical at the quality it will distributed.

New Poll

I'm changing polls. The new poll will be about your monitor size. I need to figure out a good size that would accommodate all and make the stream better. Currently it's at 600 X 375 (16:10 HD ratio) and I'd like to increase it but i'm not sure as to how what the max resolution is for everyone. I can't accommodate everyone, but worse comes to worst i may need to do Lowest common denominator.

By the way, I only posted 16:10 resolutions so pick the closest one to your monitor.

A Warning to ALL DFO Players in NEXON USA

DO NOT MAX YOUR CHARACTERS TO LVL 50.


This will be my one and ONLY warning. From the update, it looks as if Nexon has NOT implemented the Awakening dungeon which means you will NOT be able to awaken to your advanced class at 48.

Why is this important?

1. Your stat growth is dependent on your class. i.e. Desparados (awakened rangers) grow differently than rangers do. If you level up as a ranger past lvl 48, your abilities late game will be significantly nerfed compared to those who awakened properly. Unless you enjoy playing a handicap, I suggest you leave your character alone at 48. This isn't pokemon, you will NOT recover lost stats that you may have received in another class.

2. You do NOT skill reset at awakening, you simply get additional skills which means that by 48, you will have needed to save up at least 150 skill points. About 80 for awakening and the 70 as a safety precaution just in case your current skill build didn't fulfill the prerequisites for the awakened skills.

3. There are two dungeons players need to run for awakening. Both require thorough knowledge of the dungeon layout itself and the monsters. Inexperienced players will screw up and they will die. I'm not joking. All rooms have monsters will special properties and if you go in there thinking it's a normal run, you will screw up. This entails more unnecessary exp you may receive that may get you closer to leveling up.


To be honest, I'm unsure if the drops have even been added. Be wary, just because there's a cap increase doesn't mean nexon has fixed everything. It doesn't even make sense to increase it by 10 levels.

Additional Features

I'm contemplating whether to add a streaming broadcast onto the blog. Mildly insignificant but it could show you guys what I'm up to and what anime I'm watching. It would also probably violate multiple copyright laws now that I think about it.
Regardless, just a random thought out there, just to show you guys i'm not simply lying around doing nothing. (Though most of the time I would be in school. A laptop will fix that.)

Just some random thoughts after looking at atk's blog.

This week's post should be amusing. It's something that will most likely end up being a work in progress due to the nature of the post though.

Black Lagoon - English Dub - Mini Review

I've recently watched the entirety of Black Lagoon in English. Although I'll attempt to refrain from any serious spoilers, in general, this review will be mainly for those who have already seen the anime.


As I have mentioned before in my earlier review of Black Lagoon as a whole. The entire anime was meant to be spoken in English. The main giveaways being that the characters speak with English figures of speech (particularly American) and that most of the main characters have backgrounds from America. That said the transition from Japanese to English isn't much of a stretch here. I would say that it would actually be quite comfortable.


In general, you have to get used to the characters again. Pretend you haven't seen it before. Otherwise, you'll get an odd feeling when you hear the voices. Rock particularly sounds vastly different (and honestly, he should be. Not that I'm saying that Rock's voice should be different but that the tone used by the voice actors is different). Brad Swaile puts a different spin to Rock and it will take some time to get used to. He's good at his job but there will be some bias if you've heard his voice already.

Maryke Hendrikse as Revy will be a big change for everyone. Her style is vastly different than Megumi Toyoguchi's. She's more raspy and the range of Revy's emotions are somewhat wider. Toyoguchi has a more flat, jaded tone that gives Revy that almost constant feeling of a cold distant character whereas Hendrikse gives us a character that's also cold but has openings that pierce harder than the Japanese counterparts. Regardless, they both show off their skill and both pull through as one of the (if not, THE) strongest actors throughout the entire series.

Get a black guy to voice a black guy. This would be Dean Redman's only anime role so far and he does a pretty good job. Good range of emotions and solid work overall. His inexperience does often show up as he sounds too flat during tense moments. At one point, I remember him "yelling" "Get down!" only to be quite disappointed that the line was delivered with such mediocre emotion. There's a moment in the Second Barrage where Dutch swears profusely and angrily. Redman comes up with a line that sounds fairly tame. He's skilled at witty lines and dry humor and so I'm interested to see what other roles he will cover. He needs to work a bit more, but he's definitely potential and he's got a great starting point.

I've always felt that Benny was the weakest character of the series. He has history and his character shows, but with only about one to two episodes where he's a major role, it's hard to judge the actors. Regardless, Brian Drummond seems to suffer from the same problem that Redman has in that his voice lacks a sense of urgency. When he called over to Dutch to drive because the boat was being targeted by TOWs, it seemed very flat. I really don't know how else to put it. There weren't any accents on any particular word (maybe "TOW?" I mean, it's not something you expect.... right?).


Then we have the supporting cast of characters who all give flavor to Black Lagoon. Patricia Drake gives more life to Balalaika than Mami Koyama. She speaks no Russian (which is a bit that I was particularly fond of in the Japanese dub) bu makes up for it in tone. She has a few roles overall but gave Balalaika exactly what the show needed. Her voice fit the character and emotions worked well together. This is definitely one of the best matches to date. To be honest, I forgot how Balalaika sounded in Japanese. Her greatest moment has got to be when Revy is running chores with Rock and they head over to Balalaika who is filtering and editing porn. Right before the cut, you see Balalaika clearly bored out of her mind and Ms. Drake delivers the memorable line "Someone shoot me."





The first season was a great watch and I loved it, but the second season is really where the test is for both dubs and I focused more on that because it proved to be quite brutal in for me in both languages.

You see, the main problem lies in the last arc of the show where Rock and Revy head over to Japan for business. Rock is to be Balalaika's interpretor in which he has to speak Japanese for the Yakuza and here is probably the big spoiler that everyone in Roanapur was speaking English the entire time. This would also be where Toyoguchi fails and she tries to speak english. The rest of the series is fine in Japanese as one my favorite lines are in there.

For the english cast however, it seems that the entire season was painfully hard. I think I realize why Ms. Drake didn't speak Russian. Perhaps it was because she didn't feel comfortable or the director didn't. Regardless it's painfully obvious that the voice actors for Hansel and Gretel, the romanian twins, couldn't speak.... whatever they were trying to speak. It's odd. Jocelyne Lowen (Gretel) isn't particularly new. She has a major part in Galaxy Angel and while Ashleigh Ball (Hansel) didn't have much experience, he had far fewer lines which wasn't much of a problem. However, voices here didn't match very well and then there was the entire part where the director wanted the actors to give off the hints of where they were from by saying (I think) Fratellimeiu?

The Japanese dub covered this particular problem by having the twins speak normally but then Watsup ( the police officer) give the specific hint of how the twins addressed each other. In the same way they were speaking Japanese but actually English, the twins were addressing each other accordingly. They sounded perfectly normal to the viewers but to the characters around them, they were speaking a different language. Regardless, the English dub sounded very off, and it was really a pain for me to hear through all of that...


Greenback Jane arc was fine, so let's leave it at that.


Now here's the moment of truth. All wits put together to give us....
I'm not really sure what to say here.
The way this chapter was handled in English was so completely different than the Japanese one I'm not really sure what to criticize or where to start. But.... I guess I'll start off with the main sequences involving the interpretor.

One thing's certain. Brad Swaile has next to no grasp of the Japanese language and neither does the person they hired to translate. Not only is it extremely rough in tone and mellifluence but the grammatical structure itself is very primitive. Why is this a problem? Rock is Japanese. It's not going to be weird if he can't speak english properly, but it IS going to be weird if he can't speak his native language properly (Probably one of the advantages of having japanese dub anime set in Japan). You can make fun of the Japanese for not being able to speak English properly, but then you better be able to speak Japanese, cause you sure as hell have no right judge. Was it a mistake for the Japanese director to try and make Toyoguchi try to speak English? Yes... Very yes. Does Brad Swaile speak japanese. No.... Very no. The english director has made the same exact mistake. Don't try to squirm your way outta this. If someone hired a coach for Brad Swaile, that would be a whole different story.


Another thing is certain. More often than not, Japanese who speak English have an accent and people in Japan are usually uncomfortable speaking English (surprise). I'm not making fun of anyone for it, I'm looking at this from an objective stance. Here's the directional/fundamental problem here. There was a major language barrier between Ginji and Revy in the Japanese dub (well.... Revy and everyone....) because:

A. Revy can't speak Japanese.
B. Japanese can't speak Revy (English).

But miraculously in the English dub everyone can seem to communicate perfectly fine with the exception of Balalaika and the Yakuza, because either:

A. Revy IS speaking Japanese in the English dub, or
B. Everyone is speaking English with the exception of the yakuza, who speak exclusively Japanese.

Either way, something is really wrong (and B is just downright stupid).


It's quite hard to miss a plot hole like that, and it's even harder to tolerate Lalainia Lindbjerg's role as Yukio Washimine. Never (strong word here) have I heard a role so off. This isn't even a problem with direction. Lindbjerg's voice acting was something else. Never mind language barriers or plot holes, what about acting in general? Her role throughout sounded awkward, filled with an unusual tone followed by flat lines and almost a pure lack of emotion throughout. Or maybe there was emotion, but that was misplaced. What I mean is that her role as Yukio was completely amateur. Let me get this straight. I don't know who she is. Seriously. I didn't know who she was until I went over to anime news network and looked up the English cast for Black Lagoon. Apparently she was Bulma? I don't really follow DBZ at all so I can't judge her work there but her work here was atrocious. Her voice itself fits the role to some extent. It has the mature character that Yukio needs but that's really it. No one speaks like that. If anything a foreigner speaks like that (which wouldn't make sense story wise since Yukio and Rock would be speaking Japanese).

I gotta say, The Second Barrage was a surprise. Not in a good way. The first season was great, this one needs a revision or something.....



As a final side note, something that confused me was the scene between Takenaka and the Japanese tourist at the airport. It was understandable that the tourist had that weird accent when trying to ask for a light, but Takenaka can speak Japanese. His conversation with Rock proved that, so it's awkward that he'd speak English to the tourist when he's (Takenaka) the one that started the conversation. Something that I've known (almost inherently) is that people are comfortable speaking their own native language with others who can also speak it with equal comfort. It SOUNDS stupid, but apparently that doesn't prove to be true in Black Lagoon-land.



Why do I focus so much on the English dub for Black Lagoon? Because it's one of the prime examples of where English dubs can be of equal grade to those who speak english as many Japanese dubs are to Japanese. In all honesty, it's painful listening to English. English itself is a very ugly language being such a frankenstein. This is why singing in English requires many sacrifices (extend vowel sounds, negate hard K sounds, avoid "errrrrrrrrr"). So when something sounds off in English, it's a piercing tone as opposed to Spanish (or japanese, except when you get emphases wrong) or Italian. This is why English dubs need to be polished. Look at Spongebob or Chowder. They get voice actors who work with the characters and it shouldn't be any different for anime.

ATK's DnF Fanwork

What am I supposed to say to this.....
I guess that's one way of combining your hobbies but.... what?

It's not the multitasking that's an issue, nor the work or the tower run. It's the combination that confuses me. What am I supposed to comment on?

Random side note: The sound effects synch up with the music at 3:29 ish.

Some Thoughts on Myself

This is actually me stalling for time but in another sense I need this some where to look back on to improve my own writing.


As a casual writer, I try to make my reviews "good." I admit, this doesn't always happen, and occasionally I miss points that I originally meant to mention but forgot. Perhaps its because I'm starting to rush more often, which is usually a bad thing. I need to start dedicating time in my schedule that's purely dedicated to thinking reviews out and writing them.


I have this notion of attempting to avoid as many spoilers as possible making the review not spoiler-free but good enough that it won't reveal too much. The main problem with that however (and I've been seeing this in my reviews) is that I make these super broad sweeping statements that make my reviews look terrible. Game wise, I feel that I can be more specific on certain things that would allow me to personalize it a bit (such as gameplay). But for anime that don't really have anything unique about it or don't' make it to my absolute top or bottom. I noticed I've often just ended up writing such broad statements that when I try to look back on it, I make this mental note of "oh, that was some time ago, I shouldn't worry about that anymore."

I know I shouldn't distance myself from my writing and I know I have to take this head on but goddamn... Some reviews just suck. It's so stagnant and void of any character that I'm mildly ashamed I wrote such filth. I frequent the Anime News Network and I often read Theron Martin's and Carl Kimlinger's work. They refer to key characters and explain certain points that make a show strong or poor. They get very specific into the details of some characters to explain why they think that concept works.

I think that I may have to change up how I write and take a look at this from a different approach. Maybe I have to work on applying a little more focus and spoiling a bit more than what I usually do. The main thing that holds me back from doing that is my "philosophy." Because of how story driven anime is (supposed to be). I believe that minor spoilers in conjunction with a higher frequency of them are just as bad as major spoilers because it's these small tidbits that give3 you the small bit of insight that makes you go "oooooooooh." Figuring something out? Yeah, that's a good feeling.

So I'm a little bit at a loss here because I'm somewhat unsure how to approach this. Do I spoil more to give more character (no pun intended) to my reviews? or do I potentially screw up my own reviews and make them sound pathetically generic and lifeless with no specific key points?


I have an agenda when I write a review. It's quite easy to see that. But just exactly how far to I have to stick to it to get the kind of review I want?



In other news. I'm going to add CD Japan's links to the board. I've been accepted into their affiliate program. It's a really great site. You can get Japanese soundtracks for retail price in Japan. All you really do is play EMS shipping (which is cheap) and the standard conversion rate.

Happy New Year!

New Year's resolution:
Get back on schedule
Get back on schedule
Get back on schedule
Get back on schedule
Get back on schedule
Get back on schedule
Get back on schedule
Find other material to fill up space for lost schedule