As the title says, I'm interested in this and that and the other thing. History, games (including wargames), comics, fantasy, scifi and who knows what else.
Kind of a slow, tired night here, and saw some youtube vids of people naming their 100 favorite openings and the like, and I found myself thinking in different directions. Hardly surprising. What's one person's kibble is another person's kitty litter after all.
Anyway, this is just 10 of my favorite (I'm way too lazy to dig up 100) openings. I'm sure if I took the time to think of things, I'd change up the mix, but hey, no one is reading this anyway, so who cares! It goes without saying, this kind of thing is exceedingly subjective, and as like as not, everyone will think I'm insane.
Note, this list is 10 favorite openings. I generally like these anime, but my top 10 anime list is going to be a bit different still. I'll leave it to you to see if you can figure out any patterns or trends. It'll be a mix of mostly older stuff and some more recent.
Well, back when I first started watching anime back around 1993 or so, my tastes were fairly "conventional." Action, mecha and the like. Bubblegum Crisis, Gunbuster, Gaiarth, Gall Force, those were some of my favorite titles at the time.
Yet, there was one title that I fell in love with that should have made me realize that my tastes were not simply for your standard fare. Kimagure Orange Road, especially the movie "I Want to Return to That Day." That show is really a topic for another post, and I'm not sure I can do it at this point. (My KOR collection is on all VHS sadly. I keep hoping that Animeigo's next kickstarter will at least be for the OAV and Movie, if not the TV series as well. Not a fan of Summer's Beginning though.) Anyway, that one surprised me because it was nothing like my usual fare. Not an explosion in sight. Simply the story of a few teens coming of age, and filled with the kind of powerful emotion that never quite leaves you.
I mention this because it's a reminder to me that I've always had a bit of taste that goes off my usual. Please Save My Earth and Spirit of Wonder are other titles that came out of that, though neither of them hit me the way KOR did.
All of that said, my recent foray into more "slice of life" anime is really picking up on those threads.
That brings me to my most recent find/obsession. I'm not sure I'd ever heard of it before a few weeks ago, and I'm not even sure I know where I heard it. No matter how it happened, I decided to poke at it, and have found a new favorite. Certainly my favorite find of 2016, and very possibly one of my top 10 of all time. (The anime is a few years old, but I found it in 2016.)
Sometimes, when you try to describe an anime to a friend, they just look at you with a glazed over look "what was that guy thinking when he wrote it?"
A teenaged boy turns into a girl when splashed with cold water, and his father turns into a panda... A lingerie shop owner is the secret leader of a team of battlesuited women who take on rogue androids.
You get the idea.
So, what is it this time?
There is a Japanese game called "Karuta." The very short form is that you start with a deck of 200 cards. On 100 of the cards is the first verse of a classic Japanese poem. Then the other 100 cards have the second verse of the poems. When you play, each player sets a certain mumber of the 2nd card in front of them, and they play face to face kneeling on a tatami. Then a reader reads one of the 1st verse cards, and the first person who touches the 2nd verse card gets to take it out of play. If they get a card from the other player's side, they pass a card of their choice to the other side. First player to clear their side wins.
It is a game that requires strategy, high end memorization skills and the kind of reflexes I never had.
Quite honestly, the game looks like it would be very difficult.
Of course, a rather odd, if interesting game doesn't make much of an anime. In the end, slice of life stories excel because of the people, and this is no exception.
It starts with a young girl named Chihaya meeting a new transfer into her school. He's kind of shy and gets picked on, but it turns out that he's a fanatic about Karuta, and he manages to infect Chihaya and Taichi with the bug for the game.
Yet Arata leaves town again after a short time, but Chihaya's determined to meet Arata again, this time in a formal Karuta match. At the same time, she's determined to win the Queen tournament, which marks the best female player in Japan for the year.
The series is two seasons, and it's taken them through a bit less than two years of High School to this point, and it's just so good. They do a good enough job in explaining the game that you get a sense of real tension as you watch the matches, but it's the characters who shine. I'm still not sure where the triangle between Chihaya, Taichi and Arata is going. (Sadly, no one is doing an english release of the manga, so I doubt I'll ever find out.) If I had to guess, I think it's going to end up Chihaya-Taichi, and then Arata-Shinobu (the current queen) but who knows.
Beautiful animation, great music, great characters, an oddly compelling game to watch. I'm going to give this one 9.5/10. It's only available at Crunchyroll, but well worth it.
