Today, a friend of mine asked me “Hey, is Tears to Tiara any good?  I saw one of the figures from that game and was curious.”  It was all I could do to hold back the flow of bile in my throat as I explained, as calmly as I could, that Tears to Tiara was a flaming piece of crap when it came out for the PC, and in its shiny new PS3 version, is a good-looking piece of crap.

I could spend hours talking about the many flaws of Tears to Tiara, but that would be ignoring the larger issue at hand here: using moe to push the merchandise of a crappy product on people.  Tears to Tiara is but the latest example of this. Shining Tears and Shining Wind have also lured friends of mine into playing execrable games with drool-inducing character designs and exquisitely crafted merchandise.  It’s a tale of woe often repeated in fan circles: “I started watching [X series] because [Y image] was really cute, but I might as well have stabbed myself in the eyes with a cattle prod and saved myself some pain.”

The phenomenon extends to music, too.  With the boom in seiyuu fan clubs these days, companies know they can make their money back if they attach a popular voice actor/actress to the project and pump out some halfway decent singles.  Mizuki Nana (a wonderful, wonderful lady whose voice can pierce the heavens) and Hirano Aya (who belches her way through songs and really needs to take a few years off so she can learn how to sing) exemplify the moe music industry, releasing hit single after hit single to the delight of everyone who rakes in the royalties.  Companies will use any excuse possible to try and attach these two ladies to their projects so they can write music and guarantee sales.

Amusingly enough, an upcoming anime called White Album, based on a 10-year-old visual novel from the same company that made Tears to Tiara, casts Mizuki and Hirano as the idol singing heroines.  It’s guaranteed to make oodles of cash from whatever CD singles are released, no matter how good or bad the show is.  The funny part is, it’s from the same company that produced Tears to Tiara.  Draw your own conclusions on remake milking.

So anyway, the point of this little Statement of the Obvious is: Be Careful.  The moe industry is ready and willing to sink its claws into your wallet through any avenue it can, and if you want to avoid wasting your time, you need to start being a smarter consumer.  Read reviews.  Ask your friends.  Use them as cat’s paws (God knows I use the tastefully named Richard Kim to gauge the relative quality of products often enough).

And above all, remember that you can enjoy the merchandise without feeling obligated to waste your time and money!   You can save yourself a lot of grief if you can learn to say “hey, that’s a nice toy” without attaching an “I wonder if the source material is any good” to it all the time.

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Honey, I’m home! The gig at PiQ magazine didn’t end up working out, so it’s time to come back to the gig I love - dissecting the sprouting and burning of the anime/game/manga world.

This week’s topic is one that bridges the burning and sprouting worlds. As Gainax co-founder and master of bounce Yamaga Hiroyuki told a Fanime panel introducing a fresh Guren Lagann, “Boys love drills.”

It’s true, too - going all the way back to Getter 2 with Drill Missile and up to Guren Lagann on the burning side. Some time in the last few decades of anime, drills became a staple of the sprouting side of anime, too - attached not to robots, but to hair. It’s a fascinating crossover phenomenon that appeals to both sides of a growing young Japanese boy.

Drills on robots are relatively easy to explain - they were easy to animate in the old days. Draw a few frames of a drill spinning, and you’re set for the next 26 episodes. It’s also very dramatic to see a drill kicking up a storm of sparks against the armor of an enemy robot. Plus, it’s a surrogate penis, and boys love those things.

Drills on girls, on the other hand, take a bit more explaining. For example, take a look at a couple of girls with different forms of iconic drill hair: Houjou Reika from Goshuushou-sama Ninomiya-kun (whose hair isn’t nearly as drill-heavy as that of others, but is important for the sake of discussion later), Karin from Street Fighter Alpha, and the Archer from Disgaea (who is so identified with her drill hair that in Disgaea 3, she actually says “Doriru!” as one of her combat noises).

Aside from being visually interesting and physically impossible short of wigs wrapped around foam, drill hair has three major features that lends itself to frequent use in character designs. First, it implies that the character spends a hell of a lot of time working on her hair in the morning, implying certain levels of leisure time combined with vanity. Second, the pointed nature of a drill and its resemblance to colonial European wigs adds to a general look of sharpness and nobility to a character design. Third, the standard drill is an upgraded cousin of the Twin Tail hairstyle, which has long been associated with tsundere. Add these three together and you have an easy route to the ojou-sama character archetype, the haughty character who looks and acts like a queen.

Pretty much every drill-haired girl will fall into this character type, from the above-mentioned Reika and Karin to Yurika from Project Justice and Char from Shuraki. Drill hair is character design shorthand at this point, giving you a bunch of character information in just a character’s hair and a little flag for ojou-sama or tsundere fans just like glasses are a giant flag for the tastefully named Richard Kim.

As a random note, Goshuushou-sama Ninomiya-kun also included a highly amusing bit about how anime drill hair is made - Reika wakes up late one morning, and has to manually drill up her hair by sticking her finger in her tails and spinning it at about the speed of an egg whisk. It’s more than a little silly, and wholly hilarious.

Are you a fan of the drills? Do you wish I’d talked about something else? Didja miss me (or not miss me?) Let me know in the comments!

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All things that burn must turn to ash some day, and it is with a measure of regret that I tell you loyal Spwug readers that I will no longer be able to keep up a weekly schedule writing for this blog.

While I was able to juggle a weekly column, review responsibilities for the now-defunct NewType USA and my full-time day job relatively well, PiQ magazine has asked me to write an extensive monthly column that will eat up a much larger chunk of my time than the old reviews for NTUSA. So, while I’ll still work on the occasional Burning and Sprouting column, I won’t be able to do it with the same regularity I did before.

I just wanted to let you know that this is my last regular column, and to thank you - it’s been a lot of fun, and I’ll still be around, but it’s time to move on.

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As of now, most of my electronics are in a box waiting for transit on Saturday - that’s the day a U-Haul truck comes by and I toss my essentials into the back, and then it’s off to the new digs! As you can probably tell, this makes writing a bit sticky.

Sorry that things are a bit busy - I’ll be back next week for sure.

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Just like the Round Table of Camelot, the Three Kingdoms era of Chinese history evokes images of a time when the world was simple and magical: Men were Men, Heroes were Heroes, and Great Beauties were Great Beauties.

The Three Kingdoms period has been kept fresh in the minds of the Japanese by a great many re-imaginings and retellings, from manga adaptations to the mega-popular Dynasty Warriors game series, in which Men are Great Beauties, Heroes are Men, and Great Beauties are Heroes.

So, of course, with Japan being Japan and money being money, there have been a great many Sproutifications of the Three Kingdoms characters, the most prominent being Ikki Tousen (Battle Vixens here in the states). Ikki Tousen and its constant mix of action and fan service picked up the bakunyuu (爆乳, lit. “bursting boobs”) title from Tenjo Tenge, which lost fans with its endless stream of rambling crap (no, I’m not bitter about TenTen, why do you ask?) and used characters from the Three Kingdoms era to provide an excuse for big-titted teens to rip each other’s clothes off.

But the liberties Ikki Tousen and the Dynasty Warriors series take with the seminal epic of Chinese culture pale compared to a couple of recent travesties, which have made my Chinese friends weep at how horribly their history has been raped in the name of making money. First up, you have Tsukisase! Ryofuko-chan, which turns the mighty warrior Lu Bu into a little magical girl (hey, at least Red Hare is still badass) designed to tickle the fancy of fanboys with Lolita complexes.

That one’s pretty bad, and has melted the minds of several friends of mine, but what really takes the cake is Koihime Musou, which started out as an H game (link for those who aren’t at work) and, because the Japanese have no taste, became popular enough to be converted to a PS2 game. In Koihime Musou, the main character is thrust into an alternate version of the Three Kingdoms period, where the Men are Great Beauties, the Heroes are Great Beauties, and the Great Beauties are gay men (voiced by Wakamoto Norio, which is awesome on at least six levels).

You don’t even need to know Japanese to see how wrong these are - just poke around the sites and marvel at just how far moe peddlers will go in their quest to make money. It’s pretty impressive.

By the way, don’t click on this link unless you’re secure in your sexuality and libido: here’s the Koihime Musou version of Diao Chan.

You’re welcome!

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I’ve gone into my Anime Wayback Machine and pulled the wondrous Giant Robo off of my shelf, and I can’t tell you how great this show was back in the ’90s. Not only did this show have old-school giant robot action, but it was full of wire fu and went so far over the top that it shot straight past Fun right to Glorious. Magic, martial arts, boxing, drinking contests, Giant Robo was full of Manly Men and Awesome Women. Come on, it has the Experts of Justice fighting against Big Fire, how can you hate that?
Of course, it was incredibly frustrating to follow, too - 3 years passed between the release of episodes 6 and 7. I wasn’t one of the people who had to wait for it (I got into Giant Robo late, long after the suffering), but people who followed The Pretender for a while can probably sympathize with those who had to wait years before seeing any kind of ending to their favorite series.

Anyway, try watching Giant Robo some time - you can find it on NetFlix pretty easily, and it’s a fast watch. Hell, if you’re willing to listen to the recommendation of a grumbly old-timer like me, you should be able to find the whole thing (including the wonderfully hilarious GinRei specials) for $40 or less.

It’s worth it. Trust me. Action, passion, comedy, and Robots! All the things that are best in life.

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When Hatsune Miku, the first Japanese Vocaloid2 program, was released on August 31, 2007, she was like God’s gift to Sprouting-type moe fans on YouTube and Nico Video.

With “her” easy-to-use interface and cutesy vocal stylings, users could re-imagine any song they wanted, set it to some video - or even just a still image - and voila! Instant audio/video contribution to dazzle fellow otaku. You don’t have to be able to sing (though the “I tried to sing it” genre is huge on Nico Video these days), you don’t have to have much musical talent, and you don’t have to have your own recording equipment, but you can still give the world some “new” music.

Just a quick search for 初音 (the kanji for Hatsune) on YouTube pulls up around 14,000 results for Miku-mixes of all kinds of songs, from Nanoha openings to the Kefka boss fight music (the best part is at 2:37).

Meanwhile, more machinima-minded otaku have had their toy since January 2007 - the home version of THE iDOLM@STER (yes, that’s the official spelling, and yes, it makes me sad whenever I have to write it out). With its impressively expressive cel-shaded characters, a multitude of camera options, energetic dance moves, and ultra-Sprouting costume choices (I was a big fan of the Iron Mask, but I may have been the only one), it practically begged for anyone with a good video card to make music videos with it.

And they have been at it for over a year now, producing everything from brief, soulful ballads to full-length denpa dances. If you’re of a mind to blow some time at work and want to see what the minds of otaku can do when combined with decent video capture cards, you could do worse than the 6,000-plus iDOLM@STER (god, I had to write it again) videos on the ‘Tube.

Anyone have any favorite performances from the Vocaloids or the iDOLs they want to share? I’m getting pretty bored at work these days…

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Today being today, I suppose I should address the subject of romance, even though it’s a week to be Burning. In that spirit, let’s talk about one of the character archetypes meant to dodge romance: the Hot-Blooded Idiot (熱血バカ).

Like his counterparts in more sprouting anime, the Oblivious Guy (鈍感) and the Wishy-Washy Loser (へたれ), the Hot-Blooded Idiot is a great way for writers to dodge any sort of resolution to romantic subplots. If your main character is a Hot-Blooded Idiot, he’s too obsessed with his chosen thrill (be it piloting giant robots, fighting people, playing baseball, or what have you) to give such petty concerns as romance a second thought, and no number of swooning girls will sway him from his chosen path. His chosen path doesn’t always have to include robots, though many classic Hot-Blooded Idiots have blindly chosen the cockpit of a robot over… you know what, let’s not finish that joke.

A good example of the Hot-Blooded Idiot is Ikki of Air Gear - the manga explicitly states that over 90% of his brain capacity is taken up by skating, how much he loves skating, and how he can get better at skating. The remaining 10% covers Everything Else, which explains why he has managed to weave through a complicated web of three romantic interests: mostly by ignoring them.

There are plenty of other examples I don’t have time or space to cover here, but they all follow pretty much the same pattern - boy meets obsession, boy follows obsession, 2 to 6 frustrated girls get lost in the dust cloud.

So - do you hate the Hot-Blooded Idiot? Do you accept him as a necessary evil in anime and manga so the romantic subplot doesn’t end too quickly? Or do you actually admire his single-minded pursuit of his chosen craft, at least compared to the walking disasters who muddle their way through gaggles of Sprouting storylines?

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There is a long tradition of Hollywood stars going to Japan to make commercials that would be hideously embarrassing for them to make in the West (Lost in Translation dramatizes this process, along with being a very good movie about alienation and isolation). These range from Arnold Schwarzenegger plugging energy drinks to Sean Connery talking to a bunny puppet about yogurt. There are plenty more out there, but few of them have tread into our Sprouting territory, until Suntory coffee decided to raise the ante.

Behold, Tommy Lee Jones as an alien in Akihabara.

Does this mean that Tommy Lee Jones is maid moe? You make the call!

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Here’s a quick thought about the inherent silliness of giant robots, especially the homages to giant robots.

Opinion: Daizengar, or DyGenGuard, is one of the most popular and well-liked super robot among the Banpresto originals in Super Robot Wars. (honestly, it doesn’t have much competition in this category, considering its number of appearances and the fact that it’s one of maybe 4 or 5 supers in the Original Generations games. Plus, it’s badass.)
Fact: According to the Super Robot Wars OAV, Daizengar/DyGenGuard uses a muscle trace system similar to the controls used in G Gundam - as in, the cockpit is basically a motion capture room that has the robot mimic its pilot’s movements.

Conjecture: What does this mean for Tatsumaki Zankantou/Tornado Blade, where Zengar/Sanger’s best friend turns his mech into a horse for the Dynamic General Guardian to ride?

Conclusion: Real men ride each other.

Yes, Super Robot Wars players have been wondering this for years. But, before I go…

Parting thought: Is THAT why Zankantou grows like that?

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