Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon is a recent, fairly obscure, unusual and very Japanese Wii game, developed by Tri-crescendo, who most famously made Eternal Sonata for Xbox 360 a few years ago, but first caught my attention with their Gamecube card-RPG Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean. Eternal Sonata, despite the interesting premise of being set entirely inside the death-bed dreams of the 19th-Century composer Frederic Chopin, was too JRPG cliché for me, so I gave it a miss. Baten Kaitos had some beautiful pre-rendered scenery, a compelling story and characters and an unusual battle-system involving the real-time chaining of randomly presented cards to multiply attack-damage. It remains the only JRPG I’ve actually enjoyed playing, even after slogging my way through Final Fantasy VII and Chrono Trigger.

(more…)

There was a point about halfway through The Girl Who Leapt Through Time where I thought it could rival the works of Makoto Shinkai, who I obviously respect a lot as a writer, where because of her actions, because of her emotional immaturity and inability to face her close friend when he tries to ask her out, Makoto, the eponymous protagonist inadvertently pushes him away, into the arms of her friend, at which point she realises she did actually want to be with him. Of course, since the film’s premise concerns a girl leaping through time, the ability which allowed her to sidestep his advances in the first place, equally allows her to fix her mistakes, otherwise the story might have expanded on the repercussions that avoiding difficult situations can have on the people around you.

(more…)

I realise it’s been out for quite some time, but I feel the Animatrix is somewhat under-appreciated. Firstly, let me explain what it is. The Animatrix is a collection of nine short films (each around the ten minutes long) based in some way around the Matrix universe. All but two of them are by different directors, most of them established Japanese anime directors. It’s essentially the movie equivalent of a short story compendium.

(more…)

Lately I’ve been turning cold towards Japanese ‘stuff’. I’m not sure whether it’s because it’s suddenly becoming more popular and mainstream, or whether I’m just growing tired of it, but it’s just not as cool as it once was.

Take animé for example. I used to love animé: It was the first section I went to in DVD shops, I bought all the Studio Ghibli films, and I watched countless series and movies. But now I just don’t get so excited by all the visual bombast, by all the surreality or the squiggly little symbols. There’s a lot of cliché in anime films, perhaps no more than in any genre, say film noire, or romance, but the weird-for-weird’s sake, or the cool-for-cool’s sake of anime isn’t doing it for me any more. (more…)