Under the belief that I may have a 20GB student cap… I think I’ll still be able to watch anime at university. Overall, this season does look pretty good and better than winter season (which I’ve sort of lost interest in).

Definitely Watching:

• Angel Beats – Even after death, you can’t escape going to school! <- The fact that they’re dead and going to school does seem a little lame, but then it may add a slice-of-life genre to the anime. The art looks quite a lot like the first season of Haruhi from the previews I’ve seen so far and the supernatural “angels and gods” war does seem intriguing. The original VN was done by KEY as well, so it should be good . But what kind of name is “Otonashi” (kind, gentle, well-behaved)?
• Black★Rock Shooter – This is a definite without being said. Based around the song of the same name composed by Ryo; and huke’s character design, B★RS will be a must watch for a lot of the Vocaloid/Hatsune Miku fans. I’m slightly disappointed that it’s an OVA, but the number of episodes is still unconfirmed. The background for the story will also be interesting to watch, seeing as the PV suggests B★RS started off as a normal school girl. Definitely can’t wait for this!
• K-ON!! – Okay, so they added another exclamation mark to differentiate between season one and two. A little weird, but sure this is KyoAni. I’m hoping there will be more music in this one than the continual moe/slice-of-life randomness that was the second half of season one. KyoAni better have more songs up their sleeves, because Fuwa Fuwa Time pissed me off last season. It was good once, but not a million repeats like a broken record player.
• Shakugan no Shana S (2) – I will probably end up watching this, just because it’s Shana. I need SnS III, not these OVAs… This one airs this Friday.

Considering Watching:

• Iron Man – Seeing this made me laugh. I never expected Marvel to start entering the anime scene so this will be something interesting to watch if I get around to it. The Ironman movie was alright, but I haven’t seen anything of the anime yet.
• Mayoi Neko Overun! – Cats, catgirls, nekomimis and what else? Might appeal to some, I’m considering watching it if I have nothing else to do.

Probably Not Watching:

• Working! – Slice-of-life family restaurant story? Doesn’t seem particularly interesting, but could possibly be good.
• Giant Killing – I generally don’t watch sports anime, but this looks like it could have more than the sports aspect to the story.
• Ikkitousen Xtreme Xecutor – The title already throws me off, but I might want an action based anime to watch.

Not Watching:

• Arakawa Under the Bridge – Seemed a little too weird for me.
• Senkou no Night Raid – War story, not all that appealing.
• Yojou-han Shinwa Taikei – College student life, seems boring and not a fan of the art.
• B Gata H Kei – Wtf. The whole “100 casual partners” thing is just so not on. The title reminds me of a podcast I heard about blood types (B-gata = Blood type B people).
• Hetalia Axis Powers S3 – Haven’t watched the first two seasons.
• Ichiban Ushiro no Dai Maou – Magicians! I hate magic related anime right now… well, the magician style ones.
• Ookiku Furikabutte S2 – Haven’t watched the first season and not a fan of sports anime.
• Koihime Musou S3 – Again, haven’t watched the previous seasons.
• Hakuoki: Shinsengumi Kitan – I’m not actually sure what a “shinsengumi” is but I don’t think I can be bothered watching this.
• Ring ni Kakero – Boxing stuff.. can’t imagine myself watching this.
• Kiss x Sis – The storyline just makes me turn away. I saw a little of the OVA earlier and didn’t like it much at all.
• Kaichou wa Maid-sama – Meido-cafe. Will pass.
• Major S6 – Sports again.
• Da Capo Extension – Another anime which I haven’t watched the prequels.
• Uragiri wa Boku no Namae o Shitteru – Looks kind of boring imo.
• RAINBOW Nisha Rokubo no Shinchinin – The plot doesn’t actually sound too bad, but too depressing?
• House of Five Leaves – Looks kind of like horror. :\
• Heroman – Mecha, aliens. Sounds a little bit like Strike Witches.. except it’s just a robot.

And the others look like little kids shows. Movie-wise I’ll definitely be watching the

Disappearance when it comes out on Blu-ray/DVD and I’ll be watching the new Detective Conan movie as well – seeing as Kaitou Kid is making an appearance in this one.

Strike Witches S2 actually starts airing in June, so that’s really Summer 2010, rather than Spring. So I’ll most likely just follow three shows this time unless something comes along that just blows me away with awesomeness or something. xD

Compilation credit to chartfag –>
Not sure who did the first one, sorry. I got sent it at a forum.

So the summer holidays are finally over for me and I’ve moved down to Dunedin to continue climbing the next rung in the educational ladder. Although I arrived on Friday last week, there’s been absolutely no internet until now due to the fact I only went through course approval today. So that was a little disappointing, but it is slightly countered by the fact that the wireless internet here is way faster than my home connection and I’ve heard it’s a 20GB bandwidth cap per student, per month – better than the NZD$49.99 I was paying at home for a slow 10GB connection.

I'm loving this. My home one is like a quarter of this. And I'm on wireless as well right now.

The weather in the past few days has been magnificent. It has been hot and sunny every single day that I’ve been here so far and I’m pretty sure I’m sunburnt somewhere. Dunedin isn’t exactly known for its weather; asides from a reputation for being cold as it’s “in the deep south” (of New Zealand) and so the awesome weather was a pleasant surprise. It’s better than Auckland (which is like cloudy/overcast most of the time), Wellington (worst summer ever) and Christchurch (but I can’t think of a reason right now).

I was actually a little worried moving out to Dunedin as this will be the first time I’ve lived away from home by myself for an extended period of time (~38 weeks). Which is why I’m glad I’m staying in a residential college this year. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th year returners are all very nice and the other 1st year students are great too. This really helps, seeing as I only know around 4-5 people who are also coming down to study at Otago, so making all of the new friends after a few days is fantastic.

Lectures don’t start till next month, so it’s pretty relaxed here, which is definitely good. Orientation this week (which Otago is infamous for), so should be great!

If there are any Dunedin anime fans, leave a message. Or email ayanokatagiri@gmail.com
I think I saw an university anime club earlier on some website, but I can’t remember where anymore. Someone direct me there for Club day!!

I think this was meant to try and mimic the previous Index-tan specials that J.C. Staff did, but this 8 minute long special that came with the first DVD/Blu-ray volume of To Aru Kagaku no Railgun was just plain weird. Titled: To Aru Kagaku no Railgun MMR, with MMR standing for “もっとまるっと超電磁砲” (Much More Railgun). If you’ve watched the previous specials that J.C. Staff do, then you’d know that this is generally humorous and includes a lot of random references between the other shows that they do.

Replacing the Gekota giveaway with Alastor; the dorm room manager being a former soldier; Schrödinger’s cat becoming the palm-top tiger; random references to various words involving “jan” and then Misaka’s “Please conserve electricity, biribiri” line done in weird voices wasn’t that good. The only decent thing in the episode was most probably the references to the turbines which is a stab at the Sister’s Arc.

Frankly, this was pretty crap and it looks like they just tried to string random ideas together. Perhaps I had been expecting more seeing as I enjoyed the last Index-tan, but this was just bad.

The 4th ranked Level 5 in Academy City – Meltdowner – against Mikoto will be one kickass fight.

Again, spoiler for those who have yet to read the manga/only watch the anime. This chapter brings yet again another showdown which I definitely want to see animated! Following from Frenda’s defeat last chapter, Mikoto tries to question her about who hired them before Mugino and Takitsubo enter and save Frenda from getting fried.

After telling off Frenda for getting caught up about the elimination bonus, Mugino, Academy City’s fourth most powerful esper starts to take on Mikoto. Mugino’s able to blow away any of the iron objects that Mikoto throws at her and appears to have a move that looks awfully similar to Mikoto’s railgun. She throws a case of what appears to be some sort of powder (espers doing drugs? omg) to Takitsubo. This powder appears to act as a catalyst to activating her ability “AIM-Stalker”, allowing her to memorise Mikoto’s AIM dispersion field – kind of working as a human esper GPS system. Running out of power, Mikoto then escapes with the three giving chase.

Meanwhile at the other research centre, Nunotaba infiltrates the control room amidst the transfer to install emotional data to the imoutos in an attempt to stop the experiment. She is however caught by the last member of the bounty hunting quartet, as they had predicted that Mikoto’s attack could have just been a diversion.

There are seven Level 5s in Academy City and with Mikoto being 3rd ranked, I had been curious about who the other 5 members and what their abilities are (excluding Accelerator of course). Since I haven’t had a chance to read any of the novels yet, the anime and manga have been my only source of material and the introduction of Meltdowner will not only show the difference in power between each Level 5, but a pretty awesome fight should also occur. I think this, and the fight with Accelerator in an earlier chapter, would look awesome animated.

Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA was a rhythm game produced by SEGA for Sony’s PSP. This involves pressing the correct combination of buttons as they appear onscreen, whilst Miku dances around in the background singing. Now there’s a fanmade version of Project DIVA that simulates the gameplay which you would experience on the PSP or the Arcade version. Project -Project DXXX- is a simulator that runs on the computer, created by KHCmaster. Now I don’t own a PSP and haven’t had the chance to actually play Project DIVA, but from what I understand, DIVA has a whole lot of extras such as changing Miku’s costume. This only simulates the gameplay and focuses on the PV or video of the song you’re playing.

Main Menu of Songs (running on Windows Vista Business)

I discovered this about a fortnight ago when I was looking at some Project DIVA footage and starting searching for a way for me to play it or something as similar as possible. From what I could tell, PPD’s gameplay is just like the real thing. Asides from the background video footage being different (PPD plays the video that you’ve designated in the songs folder), it looks very similar. If you wanted to, you could just take footage from Project DIVA and use it here as well.

The gameplay is simple like most rhythm games, hit the notes as the coloured icons reach the grayed out ones and you’re judged on how accurate you were. I actually found some of the songs quite hard to start with, not having played many rhythm games before (only Guitar Hero and Taiko no Tatsujin).

Installing the game can be straightforward or an absolute nightmare trying to work out what went wrong. The game can be downloaded here (latest version is 1.3.2 at time of writing). However, in order to make this work, a few other things need to be installed and the right codecs are a must. KHCmaster has written a short tutorial on how to install and play PPD, which can be found here: http://khchp.web.fc2.com/ppd/1eng.htm. Or alternatively, I’ve included the links to the appropriate downloads below.

• Microsoft.NET Framework
• DirectX Runtime
• SlimDX Runtime (March 2009 SP1) or newer
• DirectShow.NET (DirectShowLibV2-0 is the folder needed)

DirectShowLib-2005.dll from the last file is needed to be unzipped and placed into the PPD folder. Video codecs are also needed for this to work. I’d recommend the either the Combined Community Codec Pack or K-Lite Codec Pack. I ran into quite a problem here, as I normally run CCCP but still found it wouldn’t work. It turns out that PPD couldn’t detect the codecs as they were 32-bit ones and I was running 64-bit Vista. Easy solution was to instal K-Lite’s 64-bit pack found on that same page.

The main folder should look like this (but minus the PPDeditor folder).

After all that, you will need the song files to make the game work. The song files can be downloaded from here, all are in zip compressed folders and you can tell the name of the song under the column “ORIGINAL”. For example, 3.zip is Black★Rock Shooter and you would download by following the page by first clicking on “3.zip” and clicking on download. Once you have the contents of that copied into PPD’s song folder, the last thing you will need is the video to make it run (this could be downloaded from Youtube). This can be any format, so long as you have the codecs to allow it to play. Once you have the video, rename it to movie.format (e.g. movie.mp4) and place it in the folder of the appropriate song.

The music folder should end up looking something like this. (This is my BRS one)

Then, run KeyConfiger.exe in PPD’s main folder and set up the buttons in the following order (first for keyboard and then for joystick): Square, Cross, Circle, Triangle, Left, Down, Right, Up, L, R, Start. If you don’t use a joystick, then just keep pressing next (次へ). This also happens to act as a test for the game to see if you have all the requirements necessary for the game to run. After that, the game should work properly. There is also a PPDeditor, which is used to make the songs for PPD, but I’ve yet to experiment with that so don’t have a clue as to how to work it yet. Good Luck.

KHCmaster’s blog: http://projectdxxx.blog9.fc2.com/ and Twitter: http://twitter.com/KHCmaster

Spoiler for those who have yet to read the manga/only watch the anime. It’s a shame that it looks like at this point that this chapter won’t make it in time for the anime. This chapter focused on the main fight between Mikoto and Frenda (one of the four girls who cameoed in episode 12 of the anime, which occurs during the Sisters Arc.

It starts off with the rather creepy looking scientist, Nunotaba Shinobu arriving at one of the Analysis Laboratories where all the scientists are quickly trying to relocate all of their research data about the Sisters project before Mikoto arrives and blows the place up. Meanwhile Frenda is fighting against Mikoto at another one of the research labs and Mikoto demonstrates her power as a Level 5 by lifting the floor with magnetism to prevent the explosive fuseline traps rushing towards her.

I’m not entirely sure what Frenda’s ability is (magnetism perhaps?), seeing as most of her attacks have involved the magnetic trails, dolls or other items (such as a stun grenade) but she was able to trick Mikoto into holding back her electricity due to a fake “explosive” gas. This causes the fight become physical, which Mikoto isn’t as strong at. With Frenda gaining the upper hand, her only failure came at the end of the chapter where she almost gets caught in one of her fuseline traps; leading Mikoto to realise that she had been tricked.

This is one of the action scenes which I would love to see animated. Frenda’s a cute character, plus she’s a foreigner (French judging from her clothing such as the beret) so there would be some story behind why she’s in Academy City as well as the rest of esper hunting group. Judging by J.C. Staff’s decision to continue with side-character storylines, it doesn’t look like the Sisters Arc will be making an appearance in the 1st season. 7 episodes of unknown content left won’t be enough I don’t think unless they’re planning to condense events and/or leave it on a cliffhanger. Angry Biribiri vs Accelerator would have been awesome to watch.

I was first introduced to Vocaloids and their music – specifically Hatsune Miku’s (初音ミク) – about two years ago but didn’t really pay attention back then asides from the fact I quite liked Miku’s character design. It was only last month that I really got into the music through supercell thanks to a fellow New Zealander who’s also a fan of Miku. supercell, who were responsible for Bakemonogatari’s ED – Kimi no Shiranai Monogatari – have a self-titled album supercell, where ryo makes use of the Vocaloid software to create arguably some of Hatsune Miku’s best songs.

So you may have seen them around but what is Vocaloid? Asahi Shinbun’s report in the Youtube video embedded above explains this well. The creators’ aim was to produce singing software that had a cute and likeable character singing. The Vocaloid program allows for anyone to synthesise their own songs, sung by any one of the now numerous Vocaloids. Although this can result in some rather “weird” songs such as The Disappearance of Hatsune Miku (referred to some at Nico Nico Douga as “godly” due to the insane 240BPM); it has also resulted in talented everyday people becoming songwriters and creating beautiful masterpieces with some amazing video animation that doesn’t lose to HQ anime. The 3D videos by Tripshots are notably worth mentioning here for those effects are truly impressive. Whilst this type of music still has its own niche market, it certainly has gained in popularity (not just in Japan) with the increasing number of Vocaloids and the production of an anime this April.

Black★Rock Shooter was originally a song sung by Hatsune Miku, with design by huke, which is now being produced into an anime by Ordet. Whilst not an anime about the actual Vocaloids themselves, but seeing as there is already a game (Project Diva for the PSP) and B★RS coming, I think it’s only a matter of time before it happens. For the meantime, this B★RS anime is looking good from the PV.

There are around 17 different Vocaloids right now (some English and some Japanese) with Miku being the first of the Vocaloid2 series. I’ve yet to listen to many of the Vocaloids other than Miku, but Megurine Luka appears to have also been very popular, dominating Nico charts at one point if I recall correctly. My favourite songs by Miku would have to be 恋は戦争（Love is War) and ワールドイズマイン (World is Mine) from supercell. Although Miku has been compared to being less realistic than newer Vocaloids, her songs are still nonetheless awesome and supercell is an exceptional example of this.

This type of music is unique and I find it quite refreshing to listen to something different as this. Like I said earlier, this does have a niche and and I can’t imagine every person liking it instantly but I would definitely recommend supercell’s album. Give it a try, you never know?

Whilst the film doesn’t actually get released for another two weeks (February 6th), this PV condenses the 150 minute film into a 5 minute montage. The PV itself is for the Original Soundtrack to the movie posted by Lantis, being released a week (Jan 27th) before the movie. This is very spoiler heavy. So unless you want to be spoiled, or have already read the fourth novel, don’t watch this.

The music sounds good (though I rarely tend to listen to BGM) and the animation’s looking good too judging by this. But I’m sure this would be a lot better watching it on the big screen.

Haruhi really does look better with the long hair ponytail.

• Lantis removed their original version and replaced it with a non-spoiler one after complaints. But not before the spoiler version had already been copied and uploaded by others.

Azu-nyan's super cute tora-mimi welcome in the new year!

This is like an episode 14 to K-ON!’s first season, being released with the last Blu-ray DVD of the first season. The girls are invited to perform a live by Ritsu and Mio’s friend from their middle school. To be honest, I can’t say I was expecting much from this episode after feeling like the ending to first season (episodes 10-12) were pretty disappointing but I was pleasantly surprised after realising how much I enjoyed this episode. The comedy and the blu-ray quality animation (plus no weird looking faces that I could find!) were pleasant and made it worth watching. Okay, so there still was the rather repetitive and filler “tea drinking &amp; cake eating” supplied by Mugi halfway through the episode but a live episode with some music is better than watching the girls eat their cakes.

You can't have K-ON! without.. cake?

The rehearsal and live were good, even though they still stuck with only showing “Fuwa Fuwa Time“. They should have introduced a new song in my opinion, this one’s been way overused as their theme song. For example, one of the other three songs that Ritsu suggested that they’d play or even “Don’t Say Lazy” plus all the costumes from the ED (which could have led out the OVA). At least it wasn’t a repetitive encore like episode 12 was.

Mio tripped again, no shimapan this time though.

Their lack of experience at performing live and the way Yui and Ritsu went about it, plus the screw up at the rehearsal were quite funny and well, expected of K-ON!. Overall it was a good episode/OVA and if season 2 will be anything like this, I’ll be happy to carry on watching it. But one thing they definitely need to do is bring in new songs and not recycle the same one over and over again.

N.B. I noticed that Azu-nyan still doesn’t appear in the ED sequence. :(

Hardly the weather to be going to the beach in.

I cannot believe the weather here. It’s mid-January; we’re having 12 degree days, a lot of rain and I’m pretty sure Winter has just decided to revisit this month. There have only been 8 sunny days out of the last 26 since around Christmas and this is probably the worst summer weather I can recall. Not to mention that it is ridiculously foggy today.

Stupid Telecom. I doubt I didn't upload a single byte last month.

My ISP’s been annoying too, I blew my bandwidth and that led to practically no anime over the past week although I’m not entirely sure it’s my fault considering their track record’s in the spotlight right now for constant failure as a public telecommunications provider. I still haven’t decided what’s interesting enough to watch this season though, So・Ra・No・Wo・To and Ookami Kakushii are the only ones I’ve started so far. I’ve been told that Dance in the Vampire Bund (naked vampire loli?) and Durarara!! are good.

Instead I’ve ended up doing some reading. To my surprise I found the first light novel (translated) of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya at the city library. It’s not the hardback version I’ve seen online, but it was still the same book. I’m not sure how far I’ll get through this, I read the Baka-Tsuki version back in ‘08 and this is very similar to it. It’s been awhile, but I think I got up to Volume 6: The Wavering of Haruhi Suzumiya last I remember.