I’ve been playing a lot of FlyFF lately. Its just a cute game with cartoony characters and everything is really easy to do. Yes, that’s my character. If you ever spot her on the Clockworks server make sure you say hi. I’m very generous with giving away weapons and armor that I pick up.

The thing I love about this game is that you can fly. This means you can go to those islands in the air up there in the background. The game is 3D, so you get to see cities from up high and noobs levelling on cute little mushrooms. There’s also aerial combat.

And there are a lot of paper airships hanging on top of cities that don’t do anything but look pretty.

Special effects?! ARE YOU SURE!?

o.O I’m sure theres a string SOMEWHERE…

These commercials are so funny they just made my day. I still can’t stop laughing.

LOLWUT

@find Alto

In other news…

I can see why now parents are reluctant to buy DS’es for kids. They are so friggin addictive. I spent like, 3 pure days just playing Harvest Moon DS from day to night, and I learned the economics of scale and human resources. You can’t do everything yourself, but if you’re making enough, you can pay people to make your money for you.

Mad industrial farming for the win.

I actually bagged about 100k every season from this, plus wages for the harvest sprites. Very promising farmland. Maybe I should start a farming company.

This season, Kyoto Animation is showing its latest series, Sora wo Miageru Shoujo no Hitomi ni Utsuru Sekai (The World Reflected in the Eyes of the Sky-gazing Girl), also popularly known as Munto TV. This series tells the story of a girl who kept looking at the sky because she saw what other people could not: another world, made of magical floating islands. The floating islands were constantly in a state of war with each other, but King Munto, the ruler of one of the islands, discovers the girl, and finally ends the conflict using her power. Interestingly, 7 years ago, KyoAni released 2 movies named Munto as well, which told the same story the TV series will tell.

Yumemi is the Shoujo in the title, and thus the heroine. To my surprise (at first) the artwork in this show is quite retro, but that didn’t stop Yumemi from being cute and pretty. After I finally watched the 2 Munto movies that KyoAni made back in 2003 and 2005, I realized that back then, KyoAni had already achieved high levels of good artwork, but bringing that into 2009 tended to show the the drawings’ age. Essentially, what I’m trying to get across is that the TV series is actually made up of scenes and animation cut out of the movie, with some additions made recently to fill in the blanks and lengthen the story.

King Munto (the hero)’s level of GARness is the typical DragonballZ-age heavy eye-brow-inward-slanting-eye type. Although not really the title character of the TV series, Munto is still the same arrogant but powerful force he was in the Movies, typically doing things that most normal people in the show wouldn’t do, such as going down to places where he could easily perish in order to save his kingdom.

However, because of the retroness of the artwork KyoAni used to save costs, there inevitably are striking inconsistencies between artwork here and there. Compare Ichiko in the OP and in the actual show, the technicolor fade compared with the rich computer-assisted cel shading and modern KyoAni-style moe drawings differs hugely. Very unlike KyoAni. But since the OP should look a bit better than the rest of the show in general, I guess this is something we could overlook. Below is Yumemi being drawn differently too:

Apart from the huge difference from the OP(picture 3), perhaps they really did not have access to the drawing techniques of the day, so they decided to make do with the drawing techniques of today(picture 1), and attempt to fade it a little to fit the colours in with the parts taken from the movie(picture 2). They have succeeded to some extent, but the differences are big enough for people to notice, and I must say it has somewhat reduced the quality of the experience watching the show.

Anyway, enough talk about the animation quality. Here are the other main characters that have all appeared in the show already since the first episode.

Gass, the Guardian of Space and Time, was meant to prevent people from meddling with the wall that separated Earth from Heaven.

Ryuely, the diviner of Munto’s kingdom. She sacrificed her eyes in order to show the future of the kingdom to Munto.

Leica, the frontline commander of the Alliance. The Alliance was formed to destroy the countries that were sucking the Heavenly World dry of Akuto. Munto’s kingdom being one of them.

Toche, the apprentice diviner and shota requirement of the show.

Gunther the (obviously) villain, who seeks to crush Munto and his immense power, using any excuse available.

Little Shanas. XD

Its 2009 today, so you could say I’m reporting from the future at the moment. Its pretty damn hot here, so we’re feeling the effects of global warming. My horoscope says I’m in for a big year in 2009, and sure enough, when the clock struck 12, I felt all the motivation of my young days return to me at once. This is a new year, and the world has changed. Can’t wait to live it up. 2009 HERE I COME

I’ve been playing way too much red alert lately.

IF LENIN COULD SEE US NOW.

When someone so cute appears and is devoted wholeheartedly to the church and God, one cannot fail to ask how they got to become who they are. Also, I didn’t know that sisters were allowed to show their hair from under their veil. But that’s besides the point. This human index must be pretty special to have been given a nice big cloth made out of the minimum material to build a church. Come to think of it, if it were the absolute minimum of a church, it should contain 2 human souls in it. This post is nothing but a mere tribute to the absolute cuteness of Index, her faces, and her epic canine tooth.

ph34r the tooth.

Gununu

this one looked pretty dodgy.

My kind of girl. Bunny Sister.

Isn’t she cute!??! With the ears and all

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa……

She must be high

I almost broke a tear. This girl DOES NOT belong in hell.

The uniform is patched better than a 654MB Windows update.

side note: Didn’t she feel like, cold or something?

HAH I KNEW YOU DIDN’T HAVE THE GUTS

Make sure thou dost not touch me in the wrongeth place. Lest I bite thee.

Thy sins be committed! They shalt be cut by this knife!

Come! Let thee be purified!

*krunch*

*chomp*

Putting her out to dry

So I was bored over the weekend and decided to try a game that has been released by Hinano and the blogging community not too long ago. I must say it was pretty well made for an indie game, and certainly not a bad effort on the part of the designers and artists. The game was written in Python, so I could guess they did that to save on the work needed to get the basic boilerplate up and running. But, enough of the geeky stuff. Let’s see what these guys have got.

Whoa that was quick.

Alright, so most of the beginning of the game is simple go around, see stuff, meet friends. You are Chase, the new guy who’s going to study at NYU. The games starts with you arriving at the airport and then going through a bit of getting lost, and finally arriving at your friend’s place where you will be living. The next day is then a bit of walking around and getting to know the girls in your class and around the city. This lucky bastard gets to meet 3 girls in his second week in New York. How jealous can you get? So we meet some girls, some girls are pretty normal. Some are like Natsuko. Actually, I was wondering how she has a Japan-poi name but is studying Japanese in an American university. Oh well, I guess this game is just about the moeness and the story, so who cares. She’s hot.

Yoku itta.

Well, I kinda like bumped into this girl CJ who’s just really normal and there really isn’t anything exciting about her at all, but the story just flowed her way, so I went along. It seemed that the more passive I was, the more she stuffed Gyuniku into my mouth and all the boys around started going “atsui ne” and stuff like that. So she went all dere dere and tomatoes. The story seems pretty well thought out and is nice and pleasant to read. I suppose some of the game designers have taken this opportunity to reveal their inner, dark secrets.

OMFG NO. IT CANNOT BE. NO…… Noooooooooooooooooo

The story also has little jabs here and there that are pretty internal to the anime blogging community. Some of them are pretty disturbing, but others are pretty pleasant and its a nice feeling actually get the jokes in the game. Some of the visual novels I have played had all these Japanese puns and cultural references and humour that is only funny to Japanese people sometimes it just gets slightly frustrating googling stuff just trying to “get it”.

Yes… you don’t have to tell me. We skyped before.

Calawain is the nice guy that lets me sleep with him. In a good way. CJ would probably like the idea considering she’s a yaoi fangirl and stuff. I’m not sure how people can be attracted to gayness of the opposite sex, but I guess if boys like yuri then the same should apply to girls as well, by induction. Universal suffrage ftw.

I bet she wanted that ItsuxKyon book.

CJ showed her coolness (yes I think cosplaying is cool and should be taught in every primary school) when I decided to select the choice to invite her to go to the anime convention with me. It’s awesome. She really looks like Nanoha, even with the glasses. I’m not sure why people get freaked out by cosplayers. I think it’s a great way to indulge in fantasy once in a while to escape this cruel world. I need to learn how to sew.

WHOA DAMN NO WAI. This dance party is awesome sugiru.

Remember how I said there were parts where the game had references that were very internal to the anime community? There were quite a few. I have only played CJ’s path so far and I’ve noticed two. So I’m sure they’ll be a lot more. Though I’m still worried that I may tread on to the Impz route, which I would never ever forgive myself for if I ever did.

The trip to the anime convention ended with one of the scenes which all good eroge endings should have. A nice big wonderful kiss. I’m sure being able to kiss a Nanoha would be an extremely gratifying experience to many of you Nanoha fans. The game designers sure let the cat out of the bag. Overall, even though this game had a sense of indieness to it, and a lack of polish, the storyline was pretty good albeit short, but very well made for an infomal effort. Kudos to the guys/girls whose names appear in the credits.

I never cooked a lot before. The only time I learned cooking was when I was flatting, because I was starving to death when I had nothing cooked to eat. So I burned my first dish. It was such a mess I couldn’t bring myself to photograph it. Does anyone of you cook?