Ending B

Not content with normal methods of showing off its new season of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Kyoto Animation hid the first episode within a re-airing of the first season.

Obey Haruhi!

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Acen 2009 is over, and we are tired! I'm back at Kim's place for the night after a 7 hour drive from Chicagoland. Sunday was slower than the other days, but we still saw quite a few cosplayers. Artist's Alley was looking a little dead though as some artists left early (including us, we left an hour before close). Steve had to leave early in the afternoon to catch a flight back home. As usual, check out more pictures after the jump!

The Dealer's Room was still a busy place today

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Day two is over and my wallet is emptier. I spent a good amount of time scouring the Dealer's Room today for a couple of movies. Kim seemed to have a pretty good day selling her artwork in Artist's Alley. Honestly there isn't much to say about today. It was fun, but pretty much more of the same. Hit up the jump for some pictures though.

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Day one is finished and everyone else in our hotel room is asleep. It's way too late at night/early in the morning, so I'm gonna try to make this quick. We arrived at the hotel yesterday evening, about an hour after Artist Alley registration closed. I already had my con badge, so this wasn't an issue for me, but it meant that Kim would need to wake up a bit earlier tomorrow to get everything taken care of before setting up her tables. This morning we headed over to start the con! Read more after the jump.

This is the line to enter the dealer's room

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It's time for another convention! This time the gang is heading to Chicago for Anime Central 2009. The con runs May 8 through May 10th this year. Steve, Kim, and I will be attending, so expect pictures and updates throughout the weekend. If there are any questions you have about the con, let us know in the comments here and we'll try to answer them as quickly as we can. I don't think I'll have internet access in the convention, but I'll at least check in from our hotel room in the evening.

For those who recall my first article on Clannad, you will recall that I wanted to wait for After Story to make a full judgment on the series as a whole. Well, on the flip side, CAS, does answer my questions. Unfortunately, I didn't like the answers I got.

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SOME MINOR SPOILERS!

It's going to be impossible for me to tell you what I think about CAS without revealing major MAJOR spoilers, but I'll try my best. This series takes place almost immediately after the events of the first series. The series is split up like so: "During School" (ep. 1-9), "After School and All is Well" (ep 11-16), "Things Fall Apart" (ep 17-21), "Nauseatingly Happy Ending" (ep 22), "Extra Prequel Episode That Does Nothing for the Plot (ep 23), and "Clip Show" (ep 24).

THUD!

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I had hopes for this game. High hopes. I spent the majority of the 1st disc hoping the game would get better….but it didn’t. What happened Tri-Ace? You used to be cool.

The plot so far is average at best. The game takes place in the year Space Date 10, or 2075. World War III has made the Earth’s surface uninhabitable, so humanity turns to space looking for planets suitable for colonization. You take control of Edge Maverick, a 19 year old rookie space cadet who is assigned along with his teenage friends to be part of the exploration team. Why Earth is choosing teenagers who’ve barely finished school to explore unknown worlds is beyond me. Maybe the government thinks they’re expendable? In typical RPG fashion, things don’t always go as planned. In mid flight to the first destination, the ships encounter some space anomaly, causing a crash landing on, luckily, the destination planet. As if things weren’t bad enough, monsters which shouldn’t be anywhere near this planet inhabit it, and decide to wreak havoc on the survivors. After combining parts from 3 of the ships to make 1 working ship, Edge is given the task of continuing the mission to explore the galaxy, where more things won’t go as planned. Poor guy can’t seem to catch a break, eh?

The characters themselves aren’t particularly great. Edge himself starts off as a likeable guy, kind and ambitious, but gets painfully more annoying as the game goes on. Edge’s co-pilot, Reimi, takes the role of the weak woman, whose main purpose in the plot seems to be causing trouble for the party by needing to be saved in one way or another. Lymle, who looks like she’s 6 but is apparently 15 according to the manual, is probably the best character so far mainly because she doesn’t take sh*t from anyone and summons a huge Cerberus on anyone who tries to harm her. She does have the annoying habit of saying ‘kay after every sentence. I guess the director wanted her to be more “moe”. I’ve met more characters, but I won’t go into any detail about them, mainly since there’s nothing terribly interesting about them.

I'm 15 'kay

The battle system is good for the most part. Battles take place in real-time on a 3D map with up to 4 characters participating. You take control of one character and have the ability to switch who you control just by pressing the left or right bumper. Once you get more than 5 characters you can switch out one character for another. Only characters that participate in battle get experience so remember to switch out often unless you have no intention of using certain characters. The only complaint I have so far is that there seems to be no way to have one character perform an action while controlling another. Say I was controlling Edge but wanted Lymle to cast a spell. I have to switch control over to Lymle in order to do anything. In previous Star Ocean games, it would have been possible to bring up a menu over another character and have them either cast a spell or use an item.

The unique part of Star Ocean 4’s battle system is rush mode. When the little green bar under a character fills up to 100%, they can activate rush mode. In this mode, characters can attack more often and run a little faster. They also can use new moves but I haven’t been able to do so as of yet. The downside is enemies, including bosses have this too. This makes a few of the bosses particularly nasty.

I don’t know if I’ll end up finishing the game. It starts off interesting enough, but so far has mostly followed the formula of “get stuck on planet, escape from planet, repeat”. The battles are fun enough to keep me entertained but I don’t know for how much longer. My advice: play Star Ocean 2 if you haven’t already or if you’re itching for a 360 RPG, get Tales of Vesperia.

What's a girl, to do when her one and only dream of forming a band with her best friend is falling apart? First the light music club is being disbanded for lack of members. Then her best friend tries to back out of their "dream." More importantly, their newest member has never played anything more difficult than the castanets.

Welcome to K-On! This anime is based off a manga of the same name by Kakifly. The four main characters are all first year students in high school and are looking for a club to join. Ritsu wants to join the light music club but learns that all of the members graduated last year. Unless four students join by the end of the month it will be disbanded. Ritsu recruits Mio, Tsumugi, and Yui and together they become the only members in the club. The next step is forming a band, but none of them can really play that well, or at all in Yui's case.

Mio takes matters into her own hands, Tsumugi is amused.

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Hope everyone had a good April Fools Day. This was the second year that Ending B was able to do some kind of joke. To see what we did this year, click here. I suggest you use either Google Chrome or Safari to get the full benefit from the prank. Once you go to the page, you'll see a joke post I wrote up. The main attraction though comes in once you move your mouse anywhere on the page. The javascript code was borrowed from www.mrdoob.com where it was written as part of a Chrome Experiment. Because the code was designed for Chrome, results in other browsers is a bit different. Firefox and Opera work, but don't support rotation of the individual pieces. In IE8 the pieces just keep falling right off the screen (which is also kind of amusing).

You can click and drag the various pieces of the site around too.

More recently Mr. Doob started a new project called rfrrr.com that sounds interesting. He's dubbed it a referrocracy, but to me, it's a kind of free advertising! Click the link and check out some of the other sites that are currently part of the referrocracy.

Information on a new Legend of Zelda game, The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks was released all across the internet today. I found a trailer for it on YouTube. Enjoy!

So... it's Wind Waker with trains?