Topic: Manga and Anime discussion

@RR529 the franchise is as old as i am, the first Manga chapter released back in December 1984

Has anyone else seen the anime "School Days"? I just watched it, and oh boy it was something. It was good, but it was something.

@FullbringIchigo I had the entire Gundam Wing series on VHS back in the day, took a long time to track it all down and I got the last few tapes off of Ebay when Ebay was still really new. I watched them so much several of them had started to wear out.

@Heavyarms55 yeah i have some tapes like that, it's why i'm currently backing them up to DVD while they are still a good enough quality

Before MangaUK got the UK rights to distribute the FUNimation dubbed DBZ the ONLY home releases we got were 3 films done by the ABGroupe, the now infamous "Big Green" dub (they didn't release the others because of poor sales but they were dubbed and shown on TV)

does anyone else still own these?

Got in the Nami figure I won on Toreba. I'm not even the biggest One Piece fan, but it's pretty exciting nonetheless as my first anime figure.

I'll post pics later.

@RR529 i recently got a new statue too but it's a Dragon Ball one not One Piece

it's really good though

you will have to excuse the mess but you try keeping a place tidy with an 8 year old running around

EDIT: Close up of the face

A little fuzzy because of my phone's camera quality, or maybe I'm just not that good at this, but here she is!

Not bad for free (it's much larger & higher quality than I was expecting, TBH).

@FullbringIchigo, I'm not the biggest GT fan, but that looks awesome.

If you want to know what Toreba is, it's an app that let's you remotely play real crane games in Japan (you can win plushes, figures, and other goodies), and if you win anything they'll mail it to you for free.

They operate it like a FTP game, so you get 5 free plays upon sign up, and if you spend at least ¥1,000 (just under $10) on it just once, you indefinitely get 1 free play a day (sometimes during special events they'll give out more. The most I've gotten since the initial sign in was 4 in a day). I earn Google Play credit by using the Google Rewards survey app, so I didn't have to spend any of my own cash to hit that ¥1,000 limit either.

@RR529 i like GT but i know it's also extremely flawed but then again so is the entire franchise, it full of flaws but i still love it

as for SS4 Goku well i always liked the design and as i also have a Base, Goku and Super Saiyan Goku, a Super Saiyan 2 Goku, a Super Saiyan 3 Goku, a Kid Goku, a GT Goku, Base, SS and SS3 a God Goku, a SSBlue, Goku and an Ultra Instinct Goku i thought i might as well finish the set

i can work on my Vegeta's or Gohan's now

So i have been replaying a load of BandaiNamco's old Dragon Ball games and so i played this

and to my surprise there were still people playing it online, i played for about 2 hours and had a blast

i always thought this game was fun, well worth a play if you haven't before

@FullbringIchigo, It's hard to believe anything with Beerus in it could be considered "old", but if you think about it Battle of Gods is already 6 years old. Time really seems to fly when you're an adult...

Anyhow, before FighterZ & Xenoverse 2, I think the last DBZ console game I played was Raging Blast 2 (I know it wasn't as well recieved as the Budokai Tenkaichi games, but I liked it well enough).

@RR529 Raging Blast 2 was awesome, people were just peeved that it didn't have a story mode

these are the same people that moan about a story mode doing "the same old DBZ story again"

you just can't win can you

OK so DBZ Kakarot, BEST DBZ game EVER!

i mean you get to play as Vegeta in his Badman shirt, that has NEVER happened before

and he can even go FISHING!

if i wasn't already getting it that would sell it for me

OH MY GOD HE ACTUALLY WON!!!!

it only took 22 years but Ash has FINALLY won a Regional League

i never thought i would see the day

Glad you're enjoying it @KratosMD !

Netflix certainly is useful for an old fogey like me to see some anime as someone whom never had anything more then the basic five tv channels for a lot of her life and only ever saw Pokémon, Digimon and Yu-Gi-Oh with her kids lol

I didn't enjoy Sword Art Online as much as I was hoping. I quite liked the friend he makes in the first episode... Klein? (It's been a while) and there's an event later on I admittedly got rather emotional over.

The second season or part is also a bit... Ehhhh. You'll get what I'm talking about eventually if I say "wings" 😅

I quite enjoyed Psycho-Pass (A police/thrillery anime) with Blade Runner/Minority Report vibes that involves the cops going after various psychopaths.

It's never come back on the UK Netflix from when I managed to catch it. Might have to look into actually purchasing it as it was very well done (Some of the violence made me wince though)

Though... I watched the first episode of Elfen Leid last night after hearing it was good and Stranger Things was apparently inspired by a few things from it.

I have no idea what the hell I watched and I certainly have no desire to watch any more! It was rather... creepy and uncomfortable to say the least

@FullbringIchigo I hope to god the rumors of the next Pokemon anime ditching Satoshi as the lead are real. I don't know why it bothers me that the underdog Pokemon trainer I've been watching since the 90's never seems to get older, but it does.

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy LOL I ducked out of SAO when I heard about what goes on in the fairy dance arc.

Also, yeah, if the first episode of Elfen Lied bothered you, absolutely don't watch more. Especially if you're an animal lover, or if violence against children bothers you. I'll never unsee that scene with the puppy.

It's not really a good show anyway. The main male character is painfully generic, for one thing, and the show only seems to exist to peddle shock content.

The opener is pretty fantastic, though! Great music and art design.

I wanted to like Psycho-Pass, but the pointlessly extreme violence (do people REALLY need to explode when they're shot?) and infuriatingly pretentious villain ("financing serial killers is morally justifiable because something something free will"...ugh) dragged it down for me.

@Ralizah in know right, he had one birthday once but that was retconed out afterwards

they really should age him up, maybe do a huge time skip and have him as an adult then have a show based around his kid going on his or her Pokemon journey

@FullbringIchigo It would have been great to have him 'grow with the audience,' like Harry Potter did.

Failing that, make each new region's Satoshi a different person who just happens to look and sound like previous Satoshis we've followed, like Nintendo's approach to Link throughout the Legend of Zelda series.

But having a continuous storyline with callbacks to previous seasons featuring an eternal ten year old just really doesn't work for me.

From what I've seen @KratosMD SAO is pretty much evrryone's favourite punching bag. Having only watched the first two arcs I will happily be the first person to say it was alright.

Maybe I should watch it again though to see if I think any different...

What happened to Ash in Sun & Moon?! That look for him now is weird!

If by opener you mean the bit with all the "ELLLLLLLLFEEEENNNN LEEEEEEIIIIIIIID" vocals @Ralizah then yeah that did have some nice artwork there 😂

Well thank fudge I ain't watching anymore then! I just about made it through John Wick's opening (I zip past it on a rewatch).

The thing that really bothered me the most though was how Lucy became after escaping. Just made my skin crawl...

As for Pyscho-Pass. Yeah the violence was a bit goofy at times yet quite visceral too. It's been like three years since I saw it so I don't properly recall the core villain or his motivation.

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy The imagery in the opening theme for EL was a homage to the works of Austrian painter Gustav Klimt. This should make the homage VERY clear:

The title itself is lifted from a Goethe poem, "Elfenlied." The theme features biblical verses sung in Latin, so it could easily be mistaken for a church hymn. It's a lovely piece.

You mean Lucy becoming kind of a braindead moe blob? Yeah, it reminds me of Chii from Chobits, except terrible.

I give Psycho-Pass credit for portraying a kind of techno-dystopia that would actually be a livable place (in so much dystopic fiction, it seems to me like the setting is purely there for mood and themes that the writer wishes to explore, without actual thought being paid to the logistics of actually living in such a place) and for morally evaluating it in a way that doesn't devolve into finger-shaking and dull platitudes about the value of human freedom, but I felt like, in many ways, it was constrained by the same limitations as the work it sought to pay homage to (90's, primarily American, science-fiction cinema).

RE: the violence, while I don't mind violence being... heightened to make the effect more visceral, it directly slams up against the central concept of the society. In Psycho-Pass, mental health isn't just desirable, it's a prerequisite for being able to live freely. The show goes so far as to show how an assault victim temporarily becomes dangerously psychologically unstable as a result of the violation visited upon her (the woman you mentioned in your post). Why, then, would you use guns that needlessly destroy people in the most traumatizing way possible? If the goal is mental health, you'd seek to make weapons that cause as little external destruction to the criminal as possible to ensure the mental health of bystanders. Actually, you wouldn't kill people at all, because that, in itself, is traumatizing. You could easily design high-powered weapons that stun the criminal, and then later dispose of them in a facility, away from public eyes (actually, the Dominators in the show already do this if the criminal quotient or whatever the equation Sybil uses to determine your criminality is called is sufficiently low).

I do like the show's primary writer, Gen Urobuchi, though. Madoka Magica and Fate/Zero are two of his other big series, and they're some of the best anime I've watched since the turn of the century.

EDIT: BTW, if you're like me and are inordinately sensitive to emotional torture porn involving animals, I highly recommend this website.

https://www.doesthedogdie.com/

I have actual animals who are old and could die any day. I don't need Hollywood to constantly remind me of their inherent mortality by always killing them off for cheap tears.

This is why I don't watch what I call "dog movies," either. They almost all end with the dog dying. I hate it.