Fine Dining in Another World

Two genres have been making waves in the anime industry for the past couple years.  The "summoned to another world" genre, otherwise known as isekai, has gained traction with the accomplishments of breakout hits like Konosuba and Re:Zero. The other genre of note is cooking, or food more generally. While not on the same level of exposure as the isekai genre the success of mega-hit Shokugeki no Soma brought the genre to new heights of popularity.  In its wake were shows such as Sweetness & Lightning was also met with praise while Shokugeki no Soma approaches its third season itself.  Restaurant to Another World, as the name implies, combines the two genres in an unexpected, yet positively delightful matrimony.

Gamers and the Element of Surprise

There are quite a few shows airing this season that I want to write about, Restaurant to Another World and Classroom of the Elite being a couple of examples.  I want to talk about GAMERS! first, though, because I think the show is flying under a lot of peoples' radars, and who can blame them?  Take one look at the promo art and plot description and the series just screams a generic "boy-meets-girl" story and truthfully, it kind of is.  I'm not here to try and convince you that GAMERS! is some sort revolutionary series that will take the anime world by storm.  What GAMERS! demonstrates, however, is how you don't need to have a novel plot idea or killer production values to have little surprises and delights that add up to something warm and comforting.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 Impressions [Video]

It's been a while since my last blog post and part of that was getting the "Top 10 Anime" and "Favorite Games" pages up.  Obviously the major reason why, though, is because I've been hard at work creating this video on Xenoblade Chronicles 2.  This marks the first video that I made from the ground up seeing as my other video I already had the script written in the form of a blog post.  I wrote the script exclusively for this video and you will only find it in the video.  There are a lot of things I want to talk about in my experience making this video but just like last time if you don't care about any of that skip right to the bottom of this post for the main feature.

E3 2017 Roundup: Sony

With Nintendo out of the way it's time to look at Sony and what they brought to the table for E3 2017.  At last year's show, Sony redefined how E3 press conferences should be performed with a classy presentation that had little to no down time.  An opening live orchestral performance that led into the world premier of the new God of War game set the mood and the lack of company execs and developers giving idle pleasantries kept the audience energy at a constant high as game after game after game was shown off.  In addition to God of War other titles such as Resident Evil VII and Insomniac Games' new Spider Man were revealed.  A handful of brand new IP's even premiered in the forms of Days Gone, Detroit: Become Human, and Hideo Kojima's much anticipated project Death Stranding.  This all culminated in one of the most well received press conferences in E3 history and Sony aimed to replicate that success by using the same conference format for 2017.  The difference: not nearly as many new titles announced and not a single new IP beyond small VR games.  However, as we saw with Nintendo a lack of new announcements doesn't necessarily make for a bad conference but what we will see is that it certainly won't reach the same high as last year's did.

E3 2017 Roundup: Nintendo

Now that the biggest gaming trade-show of the year has wrapped up it's time to take a look back at what's been shown off and how much of a splash these announcements made.  To kick it all off I'm going to start with Nintendo's showcase.  This was the first E3 for Nintendo's new console and, as I mentioned in my pre-launch piece for the Switch, would prove to be a pivotal showing for it.  This was Nintendo's chance to really sell the Switch with solid first party support that will court relations with third-party developers in the future.  All in all, Nintendo has a solid performance at E3 but it also felt like they were treading water a bit, not really pushing the boundary of expectations.  Let's break down their showcase game-by-game and and see what each brings to the table.

Sympathy & Empathy [VIDEO!!]

So I follow a handful of game and anime journalist groups on the web and I've always admired the polish and professionalism these outlets put into their video content.  When Memorial Day weekend rolled around I thought, "Screw it.  I've got a three day weekend, let's try turning one of my blog posts into a video."  Now you can skip the rest of this post and go straight to the video if you want but I want to use this space to talk about the process and my experience while making my first video ever.

Truthfully I would have rather turned one of my video game articles into a video but that would have required me capturing game footage and I have no way to do that without going out and buying a peripheral.  So I decided to do one of my anime pieces instead since I could relatively easily acquire video clips for those.  From there it was a matter of deciding which anime article to use.  In the end I settled on my "Sympathy & Empathy" article because it is the one that I feel most proud about and is also one of my most received pieces.  I would later come to realize that I was biting of a little more than I could chew by choosing this piece.

Simple Lessons on Life

"A broken tool is of no use to its owner."

"A weapon doesn't need to think, just destroy."

"Stop pretending to be human and just do what you're told."

Chances are if you've watched your fair share of anime you've heard lines similar to these in one show or another.  They're typically spoken by villains or high ranking military officials to an individual with immense power that comes in a humanoid form of some sort.  Human weapon stories come in many shapes and forms such as the usual android tales or characters literally turning into weapons, to give a couple examples.  Often times these stories are used to explore the facets that make us human and posit concepts that make the viewer question those established concepts.  Along the way you have lines such as the ones above spoken and the protagonist clinging to the human weapon (who is normally in the form of a girl) as he desperately explains the importance of life with tears in his eyes.  If you want a example hot off the press look no further than this season's Alice and Zouroku.  While offering fresh new characters, such as an old man protagonist, Alice and Zouroku has still followed the tried and true formula of human weapon stories thus far.  Human weapon stories have stayed relevant over the years by focusing more on their mysteries of how the human weapons came to be in their respective universes, but the core formula for each has remained the same and it's hard not to say the genre has become stagnant and predictable as a result.  It is upon this stage that WorldEnd: What do you do at the end of the world? Are you busy? Will you save us? (sic) has come into play and it aims, from what it has shown so far, to redefine just how a human weapon story is told.