My favorite Spitz song getting a good cover by a girl? I think I’m really in love. Oh and she also made a cover for Robinson and Kaede which are among my favorites songs. Too bad she’s not in 2d… :(

☢-tan

For Touhou fans Chireiden was the highlight of this Comiket edition, I found the demo quite disappointing: first and second stages were boring, only the third was a bit interesting but the musics weren’t that good, they’re not actually bad but lacked something to make them really good like the majority of the Touhou music scores.

Is this complete version any good? Do the following stages make up for the disappointing first ones?

Hell yeah, Subterranean Animism is a very good Touhou game, let’s review it (review on normal modo since I suck at danmaku heh):

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As C74 is drawing near, I decided to write a little post about Touhou.

Actually this post was originally written in French for an important French blog which offered to its reader to publish their own articles so I decided to make one about what I consider as one of the most important and my favorite phenomemenon from Japan of these last years. My objective was to promote Touhou among my fellow French anime lovers because I had the impression that Touhou was still relatively unknow in France (does someone speak Finnish/Russian/Swedish? What does touhou mean in these languages?). This one will be mostly the same but with some additions and cuts here and there.

I don’t consider myself as a Touhou expert, just a Touhou enthusiast but I’ll try to do my best to describe how I’ve seen the expansion of this franchise and its ever growing fanbase over the three last years.

Now, let’s get down to some serious business.

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I’m a bit late but I thought about linking this new with my -not finished yet- Aria retrospective but since I already planned to publish it on a very set date so I’ll post it now (even if I’m a bit late). Sorry if you expected a full post about Aria, just wait I’ll publish it quite soon.

I was very surprised when I checked my feeds yesterday at work, I couldn’t really believe it when I read “R.I.P. Kawai Eri“, sadly it was very true. From what I’ve read on other blogs, I’ll update the blogroll tonight and tomorrow to reflect my current feeds, it seems that almost nobody outside Japan knew about her illness so it was quite shocking and depressing for most of us. It’s worth noting that her official site seems to go through server overloads because of the heavy traffics from all the fans wishing her farewell.

If this name doesn’t ring a bell, you may have already heard some of her singing and songwriting works from some animes like Air with the beautiful If dreams came true:

She also gave us Madoromi no Rinne (Utawarerumono ending):

The moving and gentle songs (only lyrics writing for the OPs iirc) from the Aria anime and some other series (Bamboo Blade, Romeo X Juliet, etc etc…)

Farewell to one of my favorite singers and songwriters.
Yet another one gone with ZARD last year, very depressing for people like me who love their music.

NANOHA THE MOVIE

Fuck yeah, loli Fate is back!

Got the news from Canned Dogs at work while checking my RSS feeds, from what I read it’s the first season ported into a movie with some changes: it’s already considered as non canon and there’s some barrier jacket redesigns (check the screens) so we may expect some twists to the story. Good news for Nanoha fans, I’m so loving this news.

The movie is also entitled as “Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha - the Movie 1st” so we may expect more of them to be produced, which is not a bad thing as we may have a A’s movie and maybe another one with the Strikers cast. Well this last one may not be appreciated from most of the people but it’d still be nice to see the cast back, especially Hayate (well she also was in A’s but not enough screentime for me even in Strikers) and her:

Look! No armpit hair!

A drama CD will be released at the comiket featuring Vivio and some new characters (no Nanoha, Fate nor Hayate from what I read) and taking place some years after Strikers. Oh and there’s also a scan of some of the Strikers redesigns, gotta love the new Tea <3

Oh yeah the pics are from the Alter Nanoha figures I just received this week, full photo set of Fate and Rein. Sorry no pantsu shots, but if you want to knows Rein’s is light blue and for Fate check here. Can’t wait for the Hayate figure to be released.

Better stay at home watching animes heh.

No post last week because I was damn lazy (and quite busy with work) to translate my Touhou retrospective (Sorry guys it’s in French, I should have chosen another internship).

Anyway let’s talk again about the shows I managed to watch these last weeks.

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Well the reasons are different, let’s start the worse one called GONZO, this studio I’ve come to dislike (not as much as Sunrise but that’s another story), and their last series: Strike Witches or the infamous no pants anime -even Touhou has more female characters wearing pants-.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy shamelessly fanservice shows like To Love-RU or Sekirei for the recent ones, I watched Kanokon because it starred the lovely Mamiko Noto as a shota, as long as it’s clearly a fanservice series I don’t mind it but something like this Sunrise mecha show that create flamewars almost everywhere you talk about animes which features A LOT of fanservice, that would make me rant a lot -although that being a Sunrise show is already enough to make me rant-

I remember reading somewhere that Gonzo was going some financial troubles but I didn’t think it was this serious, it must be really bad for them to not be able to afford draw pants anymore. Sometimes it would be wise to ignore some “recommendations” from some people, Strikes Witches is no exception, I only got curious because I haven’t seen any screenshots from it (because I don’t like to spoil myself, even more when it’s the first episode of a new series) I really didn’t know what it was about except for taking place in an alternative pre-WWII like world with girls being anthropomorphizations of WWII planes fighting aliens, well I wasn’t really expecting this:

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No photos yet, but I received my Spitz Cycle Hit Single Collection (1991 - 1997 and 1997 - 2005) from cdjapan (yes them again)

Like Zard, I’m a late fan of Spitz, discovering the band somewhere around mid 2005, a period where most of most of the tracks in my playlist consisted of Jrock: Janne Da Arc, B’z, L’arc~En~Ciel, Porno Graffiti, Glay, The Pillows  , BuriGuri (Brilliant Green), Cool Joke, Mr. Children, Suga Shikao, Bump of Chicken, many other bands I’ve forgotten and of course X-Japan but only a few truly remain in my head now (and my playlist).

There was a time I was playing on a regular basis a game called beatmania, although I suck at it. Because I was curious I tried the Game Boy portage then I played Robinson, well the 8-bit version of it (I really like this kind of old fashioned tune), wondering where it may come from -trivia: I heard the Tori no Uta tune without any knowledge about Key and way before the anime airing, no pun intended-, with my rudimentary Japanese skills and my kanas table I learned the song name, the only thing left was the artist name, my endlessly long search led me to gamefaqs where it was credited to Kusano Masamune.

At the same time, I was also watching Honey & Clover where I could hear Hachimitsu, somehow I liked it there was something different than all the fast-food jpop/jrock I’ve listened to until then (I only discovered about ZARD several years later). Loving what I’ve just heard, I spent countless hours to search every little bit of information, that’s how I was able to link the music I played on Game Boy Beatmania with this brand new anime, this was only the beginning…

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USO DA!!!

warning: mostly French links ahead.

Somebody proposed my blog (actually the French version) to be in one of the French anime blog aggregator without me knowing it until Sunday. I didn’t expect it but I’m happy that there’re people who like my random writings, I’ll try to keep on writing enjoyable(?) articles.

Anyway thanks to my readers and Skav the owner of Blogchan who accepted to put me along with some of the most influent and biggest French anime blogs although it’s only been about a couple of weeks I’ve started.

There seems to be some problems with my French RSS feed (maybe the fact that I forgot to activate the feedburner plug-in… orz) but I’ll try to fix it A.S.A.P. It’s not very useful to be in an aggregator if they can’t get your feeds, heh. Ok it’s good now.

“… In it all, Shiki is smiling. The sleeves of the light blue kimono is red. Kneeling down and touching the blood flowing on the ground, Shiki streaks it across her lips. The blood drips down her lips and her body shakes from rapture. That is the first lipstick Shiki has ever put on.” -source-

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

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