The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi Season 2 Episode 1 - "Sorry to be late!"

So they aired a new Haruhi episode.

For the longest time, I really thought that Haruhi had some of the most ruthless capitalist minds Japan had to offer at its helm. The massive amounts of Haruhi figmas, crappy video games and merch they released coupled with things like Lucky Star (which is basically a giant commercial for Haruhi merchandise) made me conclude that these people were out to cut the purses of every hapless young man who has ever had a positive thought towards Haruhi.

Recent events have made me reconsider this...

Haruhi appears to be airing in this manner: They're showing reruns of the original series in chronological (ew) order. When they come to a part of the series where there's a story from the original novels to insert, they put in a new episode. Without warning. So last week's episode was the baseball episode. This week's was Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody... and then next week will be that episode where the Computer Society President is possessed by that giant bug. The next new episode will probably be in a month. And then there's another month of reruns between that new episode and the next.

The only reasoning I can think of for this is that kind of schedule is that someone at the studio doesn't actually want anyone to see the new episodes.

Say it with me now: What the fuck.

Anyhow, that aside, let's talk about the episode...



I read Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody over a year ago It's a nice little story that does the rare thing of bringing in all of the characters at the same time smoothly. So often Haruhi storylines will be segregated. There'll be a Nagato story and then a Mikuru story and then a Koizumi story. They don't really overlap in a significant way. What I like about Bamboo is that it manages to do character development for everyone (except maybe Koizumi) with one continuous story.


I've always been of the opinion that Haruhi works a lot better as an anime than it does as a novel. A character like Nagato, whose main feature is pregnant silences, just doesn't work very well when said pause is just the author writing 'and then she was quiet. And without a visual presence, Mikuru doesn't really work either. She's just the annoying useless ditz that Kyon pays WAY too much attention to for some inexplicable reason. Ditzy cutesy chicks are a lot easier to accept with an image than it is through text (which is something the author would do well to learn).



But a lot of other things come across a lot better visually... Nagato mouthing something before closing the door. The novel didn't dwell on her doing that at all, which is a crying shame. That's the kind of scene that you can interpret a couple of different ways and it is left nicely ambiguous.


So all in all, I think I feel comfortable saying that I enjoyed seeing Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody a lot more than I enjoyed reading, which is about the best you can ask for from an adaptation.

Still... Haruhi has some fundamental problems. Mainly: Balance of characters.


The author treats his main characters as equals (sorta... Koizumi certainly doesn't get as much screentime as everyone else). That's a good idea on paper, but it actually turns out to be a really bad one in practice. The reason for this is simple: No matter which way you shake it, an alien cyborg intelligence that has come to Earth to act as an observer does not weigh evenly with a ditzy redhead from the future.

So even though this episode integrated all the characters in a nice and unified way, it only really got good when Haruhi and Nagato had their scenes. Mikuru's scenes were mildly cute but wore thin after a little while. Then Haruhi's bit was great and Nagato's was fantastic. But the problem is they all had more or less equal time.



There's a reason why Lieutenant Barcley was never a regular member of the TNG cast. He's a fun guy and I love his episodes, but if he had as many episodes dedicated to him as, say, Data he would quickly lose his charm. Mikuru hasn't got half of Broccoli's charm and yet she gets put on even footing with Nagato and Haruhi both.

This is why for much as I love Haruhi, I don't have a very high opinion of the author. To be frank: he's a fucking amateur. He has good ideas and bad ideas and doesn't have a damn clue how to tell the two apart and just throws them all at the canvass in a big mess. Occasionally, when he's throwing the right ones, he'll manage to write something completely brilliant. But for a fair chunk of the time, he's just embarrassing himself. There's more ...

Persona 4 - "I reach out for the truth."

Persona 4 was really damn good.

It's a modern fantasy/mystery RPG/Visual Novel hybrid set in a Japanese small town. It's a crossbreed of Majora's Mask, Final Fantasy and Fate/Stay Night, except much more sophisticated. The story is immensely complicated and nuanced while the gameplay is well thought out and challenging, though it's really the scope of the entire affair that defies description. The game is long, but unlike other RPGs that usually have a filler 'go collect some knickknacks for us', Persona is packed full of stories upon stories.

The game revolves around a series of murders in the town of Inaba, with bodies showing up on foggy days hanging upside down from powerlines. I won't talk too much about the plot (that would take too long), but as you might guess the police are baffled and it lies with you to form a sort of Scooby Doo mystery-solving gang in order to stop the murderer.

The writers likes to alternate between somber darkness and lighthearted fun as they tease out the mystery. The whole game has a very anime style... catchy J-Pop numbers play as you go around town or get into fights and the game has an all-star voice cast that includes the likes of Rie Kugimiya, Yui Horie and Ami Koshimizu (even if you don't know all those names, believe me, you've heard them before).

All in all: It was a fantastic game and I couldn't put it down till the credits rolled. I highly recommend it (the undub version, obviously). After the jump, I'll talk a bit more about the gameplay and then go into a few things about the characters in my usual way.

So one thing about gameplay: Man, this shit was hard.

The first ninety minutes of the game are just visual novel bits and then beating up some ridiculously weak enemies. Then all of a sudden the game becomes this nightmare land where every point of mana is precious and not sufficiently protecting yourself against certain elemental attacks means doom for you and your entire party.


It's not a situation where you'll lose a battle and have to go and grind levels to win. You could play like that, I suppose, but it's more accurate to say that the game wants you to be tactical. Don't expose your elemental weaknesses, buff yourself up, dispel enemy buffs, use the defend command when it's wise to and keep your health bars high. Often boss fights can last over an hour, with a boss switching tactics/forms every time you knock off 1/4th of its health.

It's brutal and exhausting, but ultimately extremely satisfying when you think your way through.

So that aside, let's talk about some interesting points of the game...


This is Kanji. He's a thuggish delinquent with a bad history of gang violence and involvement with the police. He's a good guy though and has a big old heart of gold, in spite of his tough-guy act.

Not that special at first glance, but the thing is that he also has the unusual distinction of being the very first openly gay video game character.

(Some people might take issue with 'first', so let me say that the Bioware lesbians don't count because they're designed first and foremost to titillate players and the blue alien lady isn't even really a lesbian because she comes from a mono-gendered species that can reproduce with more or less anything with a pulse)

I'm not quite sure what to make of the portrayal of Kanji's sexuality. Like for one... The murders in the game involve an alternate dimension that victims are being thrown into, wherein a combination of their desires, anxieties and fears are made manifest by the 'Shadows', a race that feasts upon negative emotion. Kanji gets thrown in there and when you go in to pull him out his dungeon is filled with gay characitures... like you have to fight muscular men in rainbow underwear in there. Not exactly a tasteful depiction, but the place is supposed to be a manifestation of both his fears and desires, so in a way it kind of makes sense. I mean, clearly the writers were having some fun here, but it also shows that this is how he would be afraid people would see him if they knew he were gay.

But the whole thing is muddled when Kanji later develops a huge crush on this one dude who ends up being a girl (albeit a somewhat transgendered one). So I guess he's at least somewhat bi? I really don't know. I actually personally think him and that girl are a pretty good couple (he's very brash and straight-forward while she's intellectual and reserved), but I believe that that sort of thing really doesn't work out long-term. Although I read online that in Japanese culture it's apparently more common to be bi than gay, so who knows?

What I liked about Kanji though is that at no point did he feel like fodder for the degenerate yaoi fangirls of the world nor did he feel like he was an attempt to shout 'hey being gay is ok' or whatnot. He's not someone that's defined by his sexuality as gay characters in fiction so often are, but it's rather just an aspect of him. That's why it made me a bit sad when I read about him online and saw people saying things like 'oh yuck, Kanji! I never used that guy ewwwww.'

I hold some conservative views myself, but for crying out loud people, can we get passed that?

The other thing I want to talk about is the game's primary flaw, mainly the relationship system.


I say 'flaw' but it's actually mostly a good system. A group of characters in the game have mini-storylines that you develop through the game that are attached to a Persona card in the game... as you spend more time with them, you level up that card and get XP bonuses when you make Personas of that class. So say for instance you become friends with Kanji up there, who is the representative of the Emperor card... when I go to the next dungeon and make Odin, an Emperor Persona, I will get a good 6 levels on creation, which is really essential.

The problem is that relationships max out at level 10... not a bad thing in theory, as there are lots of cards to max. But there's an interesting quirk in practice: Once you finish a card, the person is essentially dead to you.

So you have a situation like with Rise here:


Rise of the Lovers card captured my character's heart with her ability to call out an elemental weakness/immunity of the enemy before a battle starts and her capacity to refill my party's health and mana after each battle (always something to look for in a girl). And of course she's also voiced by Rie Kugimiya. But anyway, at level 10, love was confessed and a long-term commitment was made... But from then on, it was now in my interests to refuse to spend time with her and to ask out a blonde bimbo so that I could max out the Moon social link. And, of course, my doing this will have no effect on Rise.

I'm not saying the game should be a bloody dating sim or something, but that just makes no sense and it really broke the immersion. A lot of the side routes (i.e. the blonde bimbo) are pretty pointless too so why not cut one or two and make it so that you max out that card with the girl that I had my character commit to? Surely that would make more sense than 'okay she loves you, time to start seeing other people!'

... Right?

In the end though, this was a fantastic piece of work that I enjoyed from beginning to end. If at all possible, you should grab it. There's more ...

Wolverine - "Every single time."

This rocked.

Seriously, I can't imagine why it got such negative reviews. I mean, prequels are sort of problematic because you know in advance who's going to live through 'em, but that honestly didn't detract much from the movie. The main complaint I could see people having about the movie is that it's not terribly realistic, but for crying out loud it's a movie about a guy with a metal skeleton and claws. It's not supposed to be realistic.

What it is supposed to be was Wolverine chopping things up as various tragic things happen all around him. The plot twists and turns in a rather comic book-like way and there are many fights and explosions. It has everything you would really want from a Wolverine movie. I guess if you don't have any particular Wolverine-related desires, you could conceivably be disappointed, but I think most of the film's detractors must have their heads up their ass.

Was it as good as X2? No, probably not, although it does get bonus points for not having Halle Berry. But it was still a damn good watch.

Spoiler talk after the jump.

(If you ever get the chance, see if you can read the Marvel Wolverine Origins story, it's quite good)
I'm going to keep this short, so let me hit on some key points:

1) The intro sequence was damn good.

The whole point of the Wolverine character is to be this incredibly tortured creature that clings to a minuscule amount of goodness in a world where everything bad has happened to him. The war montage got that across, while also doing a good job of differentiating between him and Sabertooth. I thought it was genius.

2) The plot was wacky.

This is what all the critics on rotten tomatoes seem to agree on, but I'm not sure how it wasn't more twisty or farfetched than X2. Yes the 'Achtung, spy!' bit and 'he was working for me all along' stuff is loopy, but it's not hard to follow and this is what comic book storylines are like. I don't see why this is a bad thing in Wolverine and not in X2. X2 has mind-control drugs leeched out of a wheelchair psychic guy and two attempts at psychic genocide.

I think a lot of these 'oh the plot sucks' people are just hopping aboard a bandwagon. The main problem with the plot is that it's a prequel and you know generally what's going to happen. Content-wise, it was comic-booky but I sort of want comic-booky when it comes to comic book movies.

3) Hugh Jackman is too clean.

He plays a great Wolverine and I wouldn't have any one else. And most of the time he looks fine... grizzled and weary, just like you'd expect Wolverine to be. But there are certain scenes where the guy will look at the camera after a rough fight and just shine with excessive prettiness. Yes, I realize that Mr. Jackman has a female following to be concerned with, but they could've gone a little easy on the make-up.

4) Some of the minor characters are pretty stupid.

I think Marvel writers are partially spoiled by their movie success and think they can insert whatever bollocks characters they please into their movie. I'm not even talking about Blob (his scene was at least funny), but rather the throwaway mutants like Agent Zero or the guy with the swords. The Marvel universe has always been about a solid backing of b-list gimmick characters, but that doesn't mean that those clowns should get into the movies. Though I guess they aren't that much worse than your Toads or what have you, so this isn't a Wolverine-specific problem.

I didn't mind the last guy though, if only because it's sort of been established that that's the kind of thing that Stryker apparently likes.

5) The adamantium bullets thing was also stupid, but it's not the kind of thing I dwell on because (again) it's a bloody comic book movie. There's more ...