¿Omaqué?

From my Pol Phil class "notes."

Okay, so this is going to be an "omake" post.  "Omake" is a Japanese term meaning "bonus."  You see it very often on the Japanese speaking parts of the internet.  Western bloggers have also adopted the term for their own use.  It now means "I don't have anything to say, so I'll just throw a bunch of random shit up and hope it sticks."  Such as, explaining the definition of omake.

End of Evangeliffect

A long time ago, I promised I'd write something about Mass Effect 3.  That never happened.  Now it's been too long for me to write down my thoughts completely uninfluenced by the intervening time: the intervening time during which the whole internet bitched about little else but The Ending.  Admittedly, it's not a good ending, but the point has been belabored for so long that it no longer really interests me (if you want a very nice rundown of the technical details why it sucks, this guy's got it covered).  Here's what I do have to say about it, and the one thing I haven't said yet: Mass Effect could never have "ended" well.  Mass Effect's emotional weight - and a good amount of its narrative - was delivered through direct interaction with its world.  For there not to have been at the very least a disappointing break in gameplay, the denouement must in and of itself have been interactive.  A truly fitting ending would have involved Shepard - or someone, anyway, not necessarily Shep - traveling throughout the galaxy and seeing for herself what sort of shape the galaxy was in after the Reapers, and what direction it was heading.  It could be heartbreaking, it could be inspiring, it could bring closure like little else.  As it is, the game was bound to have ended disappointingly, and now Bioware's going to add more cutscenes to fix the ending, which is more likely to induce Return of the King syndrome than anything else.  If Return of the King had originally ended on Mount Doom with Frodo and Sam about to die after destroying The One Ring, and then later, the six other endings were added in the DVD, I'd have been glad to have seen the six other endings, but I'd still have more respect for the version that ended exactly and precisely when it was supposed to.  It'd still function better as a film.

Anyway, everything else has pretty much been said and done.  The only thing that really bugs me about the internet's response - besides the ludicrous entitlement issues that always disappoint but never surprise - is how some people seem to see the "synthesis" ending as giving the Reapers what they want.  The Reapers want to eradicate advanced civilizations and turn them into Reapers so that the next generation of intelligent civilizations may rise.  Nowhere is transhumanism mentioned in this.  Individuality remains intact.  Multiculturalism remains intact.  The only thing that changed was everyone...glows green I guess?  To be perfectly honest, that's the one thing I can say for certain I thought Bioware did brilliantly right: the ending isn't "good Shepard vs jerkass Shepard."  Pretty much all the major choices before came down to "do the ends justify the means:" the Rachni, the Council, the Collector station, winning that game of poker with Adams.  To be honest, that's deeper than most other games ever tread, but it was still rather frustrating at times.  The Ending, however, was much more nuanced.  When I was at that point in the ending, late at night, before it had really sunken in just how stupid the whole Reaper thing really was, I was actually half-way impressed.  Or at least, so it seemed, then it turned out that it didn't actually mean anything, and I joined the rest of the internet in a moment of silent "what the fuck just happened?"

Oh Hey, More Touhou

Okay, so here's something a bit odd: people keep saying that Imperishable Night is the easiest of the Windows Touhou games, but I can still barely complete the game on normal without slow-modo.  On the other hand, Perfect Cherry Blossom is pretty easy for me, yet it's one of the harder ones for the rest of the internet.  I beat it on normal on my first playthrough: that's something you're not supposed to be able to do in a Touhou game.  When it comes to games like this, I'm a firm believer in "if it's not kicking your ass, turn up the difficulty or gtfo."  Perfect Cherry Blossom is still my favorite Touhou game on account of its soundtrack, art, and design, but I do usually end up playing Hard more often than Normal.  I think the internet and I can agree on one thing though: Subterranean Animism is fucking insane.  Like, I-still-haven't-beaten-the-third-stage-boss insane, and it takes several continues sometimes to get through the second.  Then again, I've really only been playing it during D&D while the rest of the party is taking their turn in initiative, or arguing about loot, so it's not like I've had lots of time to practice.

Anyway, I've lately downloaded and been listening to the album Musou Materialise (for some reason, it's always romanized British style) by ShibayanRecords.  I've written about this album's direct predecessor, and I came to the conclusion that, because of the similar natures of the songs, and Shibayan's own style, it didn't bear extended periods of listening.  Musou Materialize does not encounter this problem.  In fact, it's an improvement in almost every possible way, sounding like what you might expect the love-child of Justice and Daft Punk to sound like, except Japanese.  I am not going to detail it here, but if you like Justice, Daft Punk, Touhou, or all three, then definitely check it out.  The funkiness is overwhelming (and unlike Justice, not as likely to be confused for broken stereo equipment).

Stripe Pattern in a nutshell.  (image rights
belong to him, 訴えないでください)

I still mean to do that article on Touhou doujin manga, but I still have not had the time I wanted.  I shall likely not have that sort of time until school lets out.  This is a shame, since recently, the man known only as SMS Skull 1 got me turned onto an artist called Stripe Pattern.  He has a very distinctive style of art and storytelling that bears further analysis.  While manga - especially, it seems, Touhou manga - is generally quite expressionistic, Stripe Pattern takes it up to a new level.  Moreover, he always has very interesting insights into previously ill-examined characters.  I'm tempted to make Battle Cry required reading or something, for when I do write that article.  Looking at the touhouwiki archives, it looks like KafkaFuura had a hand in translating some of these.  I'll have to ask him about it: some of these translations definitely feel very loose, as if the original made use of lots of double entendre and meaning that didn't quite translate literally.  Not that the dialog is particularly necessary in some of these works.

Ender's Publicist

So, filming of Gavin Hood's adaptation of Orson Scott Card's seminal SciFi novel Ender's Game began at the end of February, in New Orleans.  I don't know what's in New Orleans that they specifically need to shoot there, but who cares, because this film is definitely getting made.  Will it be good?  Damned if I know, but it'll be interesting to see where this goes.  It'll be at least as interesting to see how it's marketed.  With a cast of kids, will they market it like any other YA novel adaptation?  Will they spin it as a summer blockbuster?  How do you handle the marketing of a novel whose cast would fit right into Harry Potter or The Hunger Games, but who today's kids won't remember (or, most likely, even understand)?  You'll get the literary Sci-Fi crowd easily enough: both those who read it when it came out, and those like me who, the discerning nerds we are, picked it up out of curiosity.  Will they be satisfied with that though?  I doubt it.  Films take lots of time and effort, and if they don't try to sell this to a broader audience than that, then they're not doing their job.  Especially if the movie ends up being good.

Whatever the case may be, they've already made at least one overture to we the Ender's Game fans who live on the internet: someone's started a production blog.  It appears to update every week on Wednesday, though my hypothesis may be proven wrong if no new post occurs within the next five hours of me writing this.  The posts set the right tone, in my opinion.  They aren't informative about the film itself (they shouldn't be), but they portray a sense of enthusiasm and excitement for the project.  Whether or not it actually reflects the atmosphere of the production, it's fun to read, and heartening.  After all, I've said many times that when a movie sucks, the two main reasons are almost without fail either the script or the crew's ennui, and I have good reason to believe that the script is at least solid.  Of course, all that really means is that we probably wont be watching it in Riff Club a few years from now.  Movies are strange things.

Anyway, the film's release date is a long way off (November 2013, according to Wikipedia), so I'm not precisely exited about it, per se, but it's an interesting thing to keep tabs on.

Edit: hypothesis confirmed, it does indeed update Wednesdays.  New picture is of Ender's room.  Looks pretty much perfect.

Dusty Cels

If you're an American anime fan, and were born sometime in the early 90s or very late 80s, you probably watched a programming block called Toonami on a basic cable TV channel called Cartoon Network.  Even if you didn't watch it, you probably still heard about how, on April 1st, this previously cancelled block made a return.  For one night, exactly.  Certain parts of the internet exploded with renewed frustration at its cancellation, and desperate hopes that it might return.  For the first time in, perhaps, all of internet history, those hopes actually have some basis in fact: Cartoon Network has not denied that they are considering brining it back, and in fact, has said that those interested should make themselves audible so that they can better evaluate what sort of audience it would get.  I am sorry to say that, since my TV isn't hooked up, I watched a not-quite-legal livestream of it, but if it were to return, I would definitely watch it.  I can think of few better ways to spend a Saturday night than watching awesome, poorly dubbed anime, hosted by Spike Spiegel Roger Smith Grunt Captain Bartlett Steve Blum.

Of course, in all likelihood, Toonami won't be coming back.  Licensing and dubbing anime is a high-tension bet when your audience is so uncertain.  I have reason to believe that they could sustain a pretty decent audience, but there's no way to make that argument in a way that doesn't rely on the hear-say of any number of given 90s kids and internet nerds.  If they were to restart the Toonami block, they'd be jumping off a cliff without making sure the stranger you just met tied the bungee cord right.  Still, since speculation is what I do, suppose that Toonami did start again.  What would they show?  Certainly, I foresee the occasional Trigun, Cowboy BeBop, and Tenchi Muyo! reruns, but they wouldn't survive on nostalgia for long: people would actually realize how awful the dub of Gundam Wing really was.  They would definitely have to license new releases, but what, pray tell, might they license?  The production committees favor shows that cater two Japanese otaku, who watch it on Japanese television, buy the ridiculously expensive Japanese DVD releases, and the hilariously weird Japanese exclusive merchandise.  While there are many on the internet who watch and appreciate Nichijous and such, that's not the sort of show that drew in people to Toonami.  That's been true since the early 2000s, and if you just look at the Wikipedia page, illustrating Toonami's lineup by year, you can see for yourself how much the quality of shows had thinned out.

Once again, then, what would they air?  It would seem a problem, except that I'm feeling rather confident about the direction the Japanese industry is taking.  The last couple of seasons brought us shows like Tiger & Bunny and Madoka Magica, and this season is in the process of giving us things like Jormungand.  I would like to think that it's a sign of the times that Japan is slowly starting to realize that making the occasional non-pandering title now and then is not only feasible, but profitable.  That's all we really need at this point.

So, off the top of my head, here's some new shows, movies, and OVAs that have come out since 2008 that I think Toonami, should it come back, would be remiss to miss:

- Eden of the East + Movies

- The Rebuild of Evangelion films

- Tiger & Bunny

- Puella Magi Madoka Magica

- Jormungand

I haven't seen a lot, so I'm sure there's perfect stuff that I've missed, but pretty much all of those would fit perfectly with what people seem to have loved about Toonami.  The only thing that gives me pause is that first episode of Madoka Magica, which, though I love the series, is still hard for me to sit through.  Here's how it goes: "OMG THIS IMAGERY FUCKING ROCKS AND oh, it's another middle school slice of life show.  Huh.  I have to give it to them: this is the most inane dialog I've ever heard.  Oh wait, what's this now?  A mysterious transfer student?  How impressive.  I'm going to stop watching this now."  That's pretty much exactly what happened the first time I tried to watch it, and then abandoned it, and I'm worried that might be what happens if it aired on Toonami.  Which would be a shame, since it's an awesome show that everyone who has ever watched an anime and liked it should see.

Taking a Jormungander at the New Season

A young boy living with a pimp arms
dealer learns to accept guns in his life.

Anyway, speaking of Jormungand, that's one of this season's shows, and it's awesome.  The writer is Yousuke Kuroda, who also happened to be behind one or two other anime, like Trigun, Tenchi Muyo!, and the Hellsing OVAs.  It's about a former child soldier named Jonah, who hates everyone associated with weapons, and yet travels as a mercenary with an arms dealer named Koko.  Despite his hatred of war and murder, he's come to depend on guns, and has become as dead inside as you'd expect a former child soldier working as a mercenary to be.  Also, lots of gunfights.  The writing is spectacular, of course, but there's something about the character designs that make it work that much better.  Koko is one of the most insidiously menacing looking characters I've ever seen, and Jonah compliments her excellently.  The use of white symbolizing death is not uncommon, but somehow, it works.  I'm not quite sure precisely why it works this time more than others (perhaps it's the way it ties into the characters' mannerisms), but it does.  Of course, this show could easily end up forgettable after all, but if it keeps up at this pace, I'll be very happy.

Bodacious Space Pirates is continuing into 26 episodes, and is still a very well put together thing, but I feel it's lost its way a bit.  The early episodes had a very specific vision of what it wanted to do with Marika's character and the world of the story.  With the introduction of the two princesses, and their storyline, that got muddled a bit.  She's stopped growing, or rather, we've stopped finding out new things about her.  The two new characters have little in the way of depth to take its place.  Cowboy BeBop could get away with that, because Spike, Jet, Faye, and Ed are inherently fun to watch, but Marika and her crew, while fun in context, doesn't really have that quality.  That's not what the show was ever about.  It's still a good show, of course, but not as good.

On the other hand, we have Yoko Kanno and Shinichirou Watanabe of Cowboy BeBop fame making an anime about Jazz, which, for those playing at home, is shorthand for "holy crap this is going to rock."  I need to look up when that's going to air, and if it'll be simulcasted.  Expect to be hearing about this one.

To Make the End of Puns

And now, I must attend to other, far less important matters like homework.  Until then,

Don't you love how villains in old Japanese video games speak?  かっこいいぜ！

Disinterested Lecturer - Touhou Music 101

I talk a lot about music from the series of bullet hell shooters known as Touhou, specifically about works based off of them.  Naturally, anyone coming across this on the internet likely doesn't know what a Touhou is or what music sounds like.  This is problematic.  For one, people won't understand half of what I say.  While it's obvious I don't write this with the idea that people actually read it, it'd be nice if any hypothetical readers were able to understand it.  Also, Touhou music is amazing and people don't know about it: this is a huge problem.

So, to help with this, I've put together a guide to 15 of the most prominent compositions from the Touhou series, along with a short explanation.

The ZUN Scale - Menu Music

F A# C D# C A# F A# C D# C A# F A# C D# C A# F A# C D# C A#...you will hear this on opening almost any of the windows era Touhou games.  It may not be in the same key, or in the same place compositionally, but it will be there.  It gets you in the mood to dodge rain high above the scenery of Gensokyo - a serene yet surreal place where gods have nothing better to do than shoot lots of magic at each other and drink tea and sake.  It's not as often you hear it arranged, but when you do, it's usually the first track on the album.  For instance, R.E.D. from Sound Holic's album Metallic Vampire.  ZUN says the theme sounds "Japanese" to him.  ZUN says that about a lot of his work, and still nobody really knows what he means.  It's definitely a very calm and airy sort of progression, and as ZUN pointed out himself, doesn't sound much like a shooting game.

Bad Apple!! - Elly's Stage Theme (Lotus Land Story)

While arrangers frequently use music from the PC-98 era Touhou games - you still see lots of Casket of Stars and Romantic Children - few of the originals are within the fandom's consciousness.  They're known almost solely by their remixes.  This is mostly because the PC-98 soundtracks were not encoded into mp3 files, and must be played through an emulator.  Bad Apple!! is Elly's stage theme from Lotus Land Story, but is more commonly known because of Alstroemeria Records' seminal work based on it, and the PV that helped make it famous.  The Alstroemeria verison's riff is actually slightly different: it ends up at the bottom of the octave rather than the top of the next.  Its actually kinda odd, being used to the one that ends in A#6 instead of A#5.  It's also a good place to track the progression of ZUN's style, since according to him, this is like his earlier works from before he began making the Touhou games.  Most obviously, all the PC-98 compositions had to be simpler in structure because FM-synth only allowed for so many tones at once, without as much variety in tone type.

Beloved Tomboyish Daughter - Cirno's Theme (Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil)

Cirno is a simple character, and she has a very simple and melodic theme.  ZUN set out to write a stupid sounding song, and in a way, I suppose he succeeded.  It has a certain air of innocence and simplicity about it, certainly.  There's not much complexity to the composition itself: a beat, a bass guitar, and a keyboard part (followed by a piano part).  A few measures into the main body of the piece after the introduction, the keyboard joins the piano, and there is some minor polyphony between them.  This is a popular song to play on the piano due to the simplicity of its arrangement, and yet, one does not too often hear doujin arrangements of it.  In a way, having such an easily recognizable and simple melody makes it hard to make an arrangement of it that doesn't simply take the song verbatim and transpose it onto different instrumentation.  No matter what you do with it, it'll always be Beloved Tomboyish Daughter, and nothing else.

Locked Girl - Patchouli Knowledge's Theme (Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil)

ZUN wrote Locked Girl to be very heavy despite its fast tempo.  He rather succeeded.  The composition is fast, with a constant percussion part and base, but the melody itself has a sort of air of melancholy to it, as well as the grandeur given to it by its form.  The introduction of the piece with a strongly stated melody rather reminds me of some of some of the more bombastic stuff to come out of the late classical and romantic period.  Certainly, Dvorak loved this trope.  We also get introduced to ZUN's love of trumpets here.  Those trumpets appear in freaking everything.  Locked Girl is known in the fandom both on its own, and also for Cool&Create's arrangement of the same name.  Understandably so: both the song and PV are ridiculously cute.  The melody and feel of the song lend itself very well, being already very expressive and voice-like.  At least, that's what I seem to take from it.

Septette for the Dead Princess - Remilia Scarlet's Theme (Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil)

Remilia claims to be a descendent of Dracula himself.  This is a rather obvious lie, but nobody calls her out on it: she has nothing to prove, and would rather sit inside and drink tea all day anyway.  Because of this, her theme doesn't sound much like a final boss theme at all.  It's got ZUN's signature percussion, and despite the complexities of its many layers, has a strong central theme to it.  It's one of the most "charismatic" songs from the Touhou games, befitting Scarlet.  It's not actually a septette: there's percussion and trumpet, piano, and some other synthesized instruments that don't quite have any equivalents.  Unlike most of his other pieces, it doesn't have a real prominent continuo or bass part, not like, say, Locked Girl anyway.  ZUN says it's a Jazz-Fusion sort of piece...ZUN's descriptions can be pretty weird sometimes.  Given how he writes most of this stuff while drunk, this is unsurprising.

U.N. Owen Was Her? - Flandre Scarlet's Theme (Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil)

Flandre is gonna kill you all.

But at least the last thing you hear will be here theme song.  It's probably the second most well known composition from Touhou besides for Bad Apple!! and Doll Judgement.  It's been spread around the internet as McRoll'd and as John Stump's Death Waltz (the latter was how I found Touhou to begin with), some people never even realizing what it actually was.  It's a pretty strange piece structurally.  You have the intro segment with the rapid fire riff, string continuo, and weirdly non-metric percussion, which goes into the much simpler coda that transitions to the main melody.  It's a simple melody, as always, and a powerful one.  There's a tempo shift as it goes into the next segment, which is several octaves lower and serves as a coda back into the melody.  ZUN said he had a lot of fun writing this one.  It definitely comes through.  It's interesting to note that the weirdness with the tempo and meter creates some pretty big problems for people who have tried to make arrangements of it.  Incidentally, here is the arrangement through which I discovered Touhou in the first place.  It's like Scott Joplin decided to write a piano rag that could only be played on player piano.

Doll Judgement - Alice Margatroid's Theme (Perfect Cherry Blossom)

Kirai...kirai LAABIN~
Dare ga, dare ga KAN BI ALI FAU TSU
Doushite?  Naze kashira...
WAI WAI WAI WAI MISSHU A LOT FOEBAA~

For doubtlessly a good 90% of Touhou fans, they will feel the urge to sing these lyrics on hearing this song.  This is called IOSYSitis, and it kills untold multitudes each year.  In all seriousness, the IOSYS arrangement called Marisa Stole the Precious Thing (listen at your own peril) is probably why it's so well known, but it'd be one of my favorites regardless.  It's got ZUN's ever common busy piano work, which works with some synth sounds to create some rather eerie feeling polyphonies, that lead without coda into the main melody.  ZUN says that he composed this one with renewed vigor, and that he wanted to emphasize how laid back these girls are as they blast each other with arcane power for fun and profit.  I don't think he quite nailed the laid back part, not with the erie feeling and melancholic melody.  A lot of ZUN's better work feels kinda melancholic, come to think of it.  That, and nostalgic, but this is definitely not a nostalgic piece.

Ancient Temple - Youmu Konpaku's Stage Theme (Perfect Cherry Blossom)

If you were to ask me which composition most embodied ZUN's style, it'd definitely be Ancient Temple.  It's got the eeriness and nostalgia, the laid back feeling, the pentatonic scales, the key shifts, and the semiquavers, all conversing the same ideas and melodies.  It doesn't feel much like any other soundtrack I've heard, and doesn't fall neatly into any compositional category besides romanticism.  ZUN said (I feel like I'm quoting Confucius or something) that it expresses a "nostalgia that is deep within every Japanese and the frantic feeling that arises when someone is approaching."  For once, ZUN's commentary actually makes a whole lot of sense: the pentatonic scale and shinto-like flutes and percussion seem very nostalgic, and yet, I also get a strong feeling of ZUN despite it.  I wonder if ZUN would want to live in Gensokyo...he always comes through so strongly here.  The music helps define the world, so it's very much his world, reflecting his beliefs.

Love Colored Master Spark - Marisa Kirisame's Theme (Imperishable Night)
This one isn't nostalgic at all though.  Marisa climbs through windows and borrows peoples books with no intention of returning them.  She spends all her time coming up with inventive and impractical spells and teaching youkai lessons in respect with her love-colored magic.  When it comes down to it though, make no mistake: she's chaotic, but chaotic good, and her theme reflects it perfectly.  It's got the ZUN trumpets, and an electric guitar part, a heavy beat, and lots of energy.  It's got a grandiose sort of feeling, but it's also very directed.  I don't really have much to say about it compositionally, except that it seems to have a very FM-synth like continuo part during some segments.  Perhaps it is a callback to Casket of Stars, one of her themes from the PC-98 era.  Come to think of it, Marisa has a lot of themes, but this is really the only one you ever hear about.  Anyway, it's rather direct for ZUN - it's very game-like.  He doesn't do game-like often.

Maiden's Capriccio - Reimu Hakurei's Theme (Imperishable Night)

This is the theme of Touhou's other rather dubious protagonist.  It is not actually a capriccio.  Like Love Colored Master Spark, it's a very game-like and direct.  It fast in tempo, and it moves along quite rapidly structurally too.  Unlike Marisa's theme, it has a strange feeling of valor and power that really doesn't feel like Reimu.  She's the protagonist of these games only when people yell at her enough to actually do her job and keep Gensokyo from falling apart while she pretends to clean up the shrine and drinks tea on the veranda. I think it's the fact that it feels like a victory march played in double time, with the constant trumpet melody and simple structure.

Maiden's Capriccio is also a victim of IOSYSitis, with their seminal earworm Neko Miko Reimu.  Sing it with me:

Neko Miko Reimu, ai shiteru! (Cat-eared Miko Reimu, I love you.)
Neko Miko Reimu, nani shiteru? (Cat-eared Miko Reimu, the hell are you doing?)
Neko Miko Reimu, shuran yurari... (Cat-eared Miko Reimu, hopelessly drunk...)
Neko Miko Reimu, muron furari! (Cat-eared Miko Reimu, and aimless, of course.)

Lunatic Eyes - Reisen Udongein Inaba's Theme (Imperishable Night)
Actually, come to think of it, most of Imperishable Night's soundtrack was pretty heavy.  However, there's nothing so "heroic" in Lunatic Eyes as Maiden's Capriccio or Love Colored Master Spark.  It's actually a rather spooky theme, which is fitting for an encounter with an uncanny lunarian rabbit in the middle of a bamboo forest during an unnaturally long night.  The frantic lead-in piano and synth to the kinda hard-rock-ish melody feels like an idea I've heard before somewhere, and not just in other soundtracks either.  I think the defining feature of this piece is how its A melody is a restatement of the same riffs in different keys.  I think there must be something inherent to that construction that resonates with us as being "frantic" or "insane."  Anyway, Lunatic Eyes also has a well known IOSYS arrangement called Stops At the Affected Area and Immediately Dissolves.  It will not leave you singing any lyrics, only saying to yourself "wh...what just happened to me?"  I think this song is the closest I'll ever come to an acid trip.  There's rabbits...and everyone is speaking nonsense...and some girl who looks like Robin Hood if he were a girl and dressed like a nurse talking about suppositories...and now they're playing DDR...WHAT'S HAPPENING?

Flowering Night - Sakuya Izayoi's Theme (Phantasmagoria of Flower View)

Sakuya had a theme in Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil, but this one is probably her better one, even though I hear arrangements of both with equal regularity.  It's a softer feel to it than her other theme, though it also feels a lot more generic in form and structure.  It's got a simple melody without too many moving parts.  It's A segment goes C G F# G F# G A G F# G D E B A B A B D B A B in various keys over and over, unless it's doing the B segment, which does something else over and over again.  This, of course, is not necessarily a bad thing, it's just a trait it has.  ZUN said that he wanted this one to sound more human, and at the very least, he made it sound not nearly as noisy and cluttered as Lunar Dial (her theme from Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil).  It's another one of those pieces one doesn't see too many arranges for, except on piano.  It lends itself quite well to piano (I even taught it to myself for the computer keyboard - it's not difficult either).

The Gensokyo the Gods Loved - Nitori's Stage Theme (Mountain of Faith)

In a way, you can call this "Gensokyo's theme."  ZUN wrote this to be a liberal and melodious piece to reflect the scenery of Gensokyo that appears to Marisa or Reimu as they enter the Youkai mountain: a place of majesty and beauty where mythic beings live apart from humans, unused to them.  For this reason, it's a simple piece, with a strong but complex melody stated in different keys by ZUN trumpets and piano, with his usual percussion and subtle FM-synth continuo.  Unlike, say, Ancient Temple, this composition isn't generally associated with the boss it precedes - Nitori Kawashiro.  For this reason, it made a good choice for Yuuhei Satellite to arrange for the OP to Manpuku Jinja's Memories of Phantasm: The Spring Snow Incident.  Given how well The Spring Snow Incident embodies the soul of the Touhou games, it was a good choice.

Naitive Faith - Suwako Moriya's Theme (Mountain of Faith)

Gensokyo has many gods, and yet, none.  To ordinary humans living there, even the lowly fairies are gods, not to mention the human magicians and mikos that can strive even with the real gods.  This is the theme of a god: a rather childish looking god with a hat that looks like it has googly eyes stuck on it.  Such is Touhou.  Befitting such a character is a rapid, childish sounding theme.  ZUN used lots of piano in Mountain of Faith, and it shows up here, doubled up with some sort of synth string.  In structure, it's not unlike The Gensokyo the Gods Loved, except far more rapid and game-like.

It suffers from IOSYSitis, at least, to people who understand some Japanese.  The song in question is Kero⑨Destiny, which turns it into the worlds weirdest childrens' song.  Odd how the life of a several thousand year old god who once led an army has been simplified to that of a child.  There's a lot to be said about Suwako's character in general, really.

Nuclear Fusion - Utsuho Reiuji's Theme (Subterranean Animism)
Utsuho Reiuji - better known as Okuu or Chernobyl-tan to fans - is the most outright "villainous" boss character of the Touhou games, but not because she means to be.  She was a hell-raven who obtained the power to control nuclear reactions and misheard some voice that she thought told her to destroy the surface world.  A misunderstanding or not, in terms of sheer power and dangerous intent, she's one of the most formidable characters in Touhou, and her theme - Solar Sect of Mystic Wisdom ~ Nuclear Fusion - reflects this.  ZUN tried to make it as "boss-like" as possible, and gave us a very heavy and complex piece with trumpets and pianoforte and heavy percussion.  It starts with a descending scale reiterated in different keys, starting strong, and going into an A melody, and flowing naturally into the main B melody: a strongly stated, dangerous piece, aided by the persistent percussion, and yet always remaining clear.  Though they are both final boss themes, it's interesting to note how diametrically opposed Septette for the Dead Princess and Nuclear Fusion are.

Personally, I consider Demetori's version almost canon.  The original may as well be metal anyway.

Homework Assignment:
Now that you've been introduced to the barest essentials of the Touhou musical canon, if you've got another 20 minutes, here is an excellent piano medley, which includes all of the songs mentioned here.  It highlights some of the problems encountered when trying to arrange these compositions, as well as ways in which these problems can be turned into features.

Here are some of the better known doujin composers:
TAMusic: Makes good chamber music, crappy electronic-chamber hybrid.
WAVE: Arranges for a real orchestra, forgets what they were arranging.
Virus Key: Arranges for a midi orchestra, adds faux choir to ALL the things.
Buta-Otome: Makes cool fusion arrangements of Magical Astronomy.  Also, sometimes actual Touhou.
Alstroemeria Records: Makes house, sometimes quotes Touhou and calls it an arrangement.
Syrufit: Makes electronica and engrish.
Demetori: Makes a lot of incredibly awesome noise.
Xi~On: Makes slightly less noise, slightly less awesome.
ShibayanRecords: Makes bad easy listening, kick-ass electronic music.
Unlucky Morpheus: Makes kick-ass Jazz, kinda neat speed metal.
EastNewSound: Makes you forget you're listening to pop.
Sound Online: Doesn't make much nowadays, but used to make really clean sounding electronica.
Sound Holic: Makes lots of different stuff with varying degrees of awesome.
Cool&Create: Makes alternative rock, funny sounds into the microphone.
Tomoya: Makes awesome piano music, awful recordings.
REDALiCE: Doesn't make much anymore either, but used to make lots of really fast techno.
Yuuhei Satellite: Makes awesome PVs and electronic music.
IOSYS: Makes absolutely no fucking sense.

Compound Backlog Increase - Issue 3

Yay, this isn't anywhere near on time.  I started writing it a week or so ago, but that never happened.  I had too much stuff to do.  I still do have a lot of crap to do, actually, and it feels a bit like the whole damn academic sky is deciding to fall on my humble head all at once, but that's unimportant.

To the blog, I mean.

Anyway, this one is about crap I've been watching.  I can't decide how structured I want this to be.  I don't feel much like writing long tracts right now, so probably pretty broken.

Bodacious Space Pirates

It's kinda like this, except not at all.

Well, in Japanese it was called Mouretsu Pirates, but that's boring, so I'll call it by its English name.  Can you believe there are actually people who don't like that title?  It sounds like the most fun thing ever...well, assuming you like fun, and all.  Also, assuming you didn't live through the 80s when people actually said "bodacious;" then I can imagine it being annoying.  Fortunately, I'm a 90s kid, so yay.

Anyway, the show - so far - is about an ordinary-high-school-girl who is heir to a pirate spaceship, and the whole thing is a bildungsroman where...

...okay, if I spell out the premise like that, it sounds intensely awful, and then I'd be doing a disservice to the show.  I won't lie and say it's not trope heavy: it's trope heavy.  It's not a deconstruction either: the tropes are being played with, certainly, even occasionally subverted, but there is nothing edgy or groundbreaking here.  The thing with Bodacious Space Pirates is, even though it's only seven episodes in (eight, if you're watching fansubs or a paying member of crunchyroll - I am not), while it has these tropes, there's always a level deeper than what meets the eye that turns what would be surface level cliches into rather interesting characters, and an otherwise standard setup into surprisingly intricate science fiction of the sort not normally seen outside of literature.  While this alone does not a show make, it's well made, and rather fun in a way that few shows nowadays are.

As I was saying, it's about a girl who becomes the captain of the pirate ship Bentenmaru, a vessel handed down to her by her mother, operated under a letter of marque.  Technically, this makes them Bodacious Space Privateers, but since it takes five or so episodes for her to even come to the decision to take up the offer, I suppose the emphasis isn't really on the "pirate" part of the title.  The show sets up the protagonist, Marika, and her life before being a space pirate before anything else.  As it's a 26 episode series, it has more than enough time to do this, and I think this sort of leisurely pace helps ground the show quite well.  We get a good sense of Marika's motivations and character, and a good sense of the general mood of the show (unless the unlikely happens and things take an Evangelion-like turn, but this show is too tightly produced for that).

I get the odd sense that this is a project that the director and writer got more exited about than it deserved from its conception.  It's undeniable that the tropes here pander very much to the merchandise-buying Japanese otaku.  The opening credits seem like someone looked at a list of theme songs from successful otaku-bait anime, chose some elements at random, and hashed something together from that.  They feel like the opening credits to the show this by all rights should be, but somewhere along the lines, someone with talent got exited and started writing actual characters behind the tropes, and thinking up how the mechanics of future space actually work.  I seem to remember in particular something that happened early on with the mysterious-transfer-student, where with one line she manages to not so much subvert her character type but build underneath it into something still recognizable as a mysterious-transfer-student, yet divergent in some fundamental way.  It's a shame that what and when this effective piece of writing actually was, of course...but it happened, I swear.  I remember that, at least.  Derp.

I shouldn't have to mention that it has a bunch of really heavy handed self-realization metaphors - it comes with the territory, but maybe I have a weakness to that sort of thing in the framework of a space opera.  Somehow, it doesn't evoke much narm bathos in me.  So far, anyway.

It also gets points for not being over the top with fanservice, which, given how in the future, people seem okay with wearing skirts on spaceships in null gravity, is rather surprising.  I can't remember which of the first classic Sci-Fi writers it was who first pointed out the logistics of such things.  Asimov, I believe it was.  He seems like that kind of guy.

The Sky Crawlers

It's a bit like this...

Mamoru Oshii is probably Japan's second most visible auteur in the west, second to Miyazaki.  Oshii directed the adaptation of Shirou Masamune's manga Ghost in the Shell, a work which explored themes of transhumanism and the mind/body problem in the context of cyborgs doing cool things in future Japan, with lots of gunfights and (totally symbolic) nudity.  It partially inspired The Matrix, and is one of the few films that people will go to besides the works of Hayao Miyazaki upon being asked what anime is.  Oshii's filmography also includes the Patlabor films, none of which I've seen, but which I hear are quite excellent.  His films are known for having very sparse dialog, and yet, also for ridiculously dense - and sometimes contextless - exposition.  He has stated outright that in his films, visual elements come first, before story, and before characters.  Meaning he emphasizes visual storytelling and atmosphere to create meaning, as opposed to dialog.  In a way, he's Quentin Tarantino's polar opposite.

The Sky Crawlers is about a young fighter pilot who, knowing no other purpose than being a fighter pilot and accepting his eventual death as a given, goes through the motions of life without much care or motivation, only with a sense of malaise.  As all the pilots, he does not remember where he was a year ago, and likely wont remember where he was a year from now.  The pilots are "kildren" - likely clones of various other pilots - perpetually young, though whether this is because of genetics or because none of them live long enough to grow up is never quite made clear.  The young fighter pilot flies for Rostock, a private military corporation waging war against another PMC called Lautern.  They are disconnected from the rest of the world, waging their war visibly, but never intersecting: only there in the back of society's mind.  There is a nominal antagonist in the form of Teacher, an unbeatable ace flying for Lautern, but defeating him is only tangentially related - though important thematically - to what's going on.  The film is focused on Yuuichi (the main character) and his existential problems, which is conversed mostly through scenes where he and another character come to silent realizations, up to and including the final shot, which is held for a good 30 seconds, and involves the dog standing around before deciding to join the others and walking offscreen.

It also involves cool planes tearing the crap out of one another.  That happens.

Oshii has stated the film is meant to be a commentary on the malaise of Japanese youth in general, but also specifically of otaku who are content to consume entertainment of tired tropes reiterated over and over again rather than living actual lives with real motivations.  As Yuuichi himself says while one may travel the same path over again, it's always possible to have new experiences.  However, I don't think I really have much to say about this, so if you want to read a good analysis of the film's main theme, check out Justin Sevakis' review here.  It is a theme well served by almost every aspect of the film, though perhaps not obvious enough that it'd be apparent to many viewers.

However, it also appears to me that the metaphor of the road traveled down repeatedly, and yet new experiences being possible can be applied to any sort of genre film.  A film which takes a certain framework, with the initiative of the writer and director, can say something new or different while still retaining its shape.  As a matter of fact, I am tempted to say that Bodacious Space Pirates provides an excellent example of this (though I am pessimistic about the prospects of it saying anything truly new about self-determination).  Oshii believes the industry as is to be creatively bankrupt, and yet his own Ghost in the Shell certainly has genre elements, so it's not too much of a stretch to believe that this might be intentional.  All this reminds me a bit of Neon Genesis Evangelion, which frames the issue in a similar, though far more hard-line way: Anno believes that true originality in anime is mostly impossible, and that everything must inevitably be conversed through recycled elements.  I rather think that Oshii would disagree (and he might point to Anno's own work to prove it).

What I found rather striking about the film that I'm fairly sure was not intentional on Oshii's part was the way it depicted - or rather, mirrored - the life of a fighter pilot as it might have been during, say, the Battle of Britain.  The film is very quiet for most of its length, punctuated at times with periods of life-or-death struggle.  Part of the film's premise is the fact that these pilots might be called upon at any time, and may at any time die, which I imagine was not a situation unfamiliar to those of the RAF.  What made the pilots of the RAF different, of course, was that they had motivation, purpose, and personality.

Of course, when aerial conflict does happen, it's really freaking sweet.  Oshii is not a dry art film director, and I am doing a disservice to him with this dry article.  The animation of the planes is videogame-like 3d, in contrast with the flat and ghostly characters.  The use of CG is very conspicuous, but perhaps because it does not try to hide, it is not a problem.  The aerial sequences are "breathtaking" and "stunning" and all those adjectives that people seem to love throwing at beautiful aerial sequences.

Also, Engrish, Engrish everywhere, Engrish so you start wondering if you're really the one who's saying it wrong.

Other Stuff

Seeing it in thumbnail form is kinda depressing, actually.

I was originally planning on talking about Tree of Life as well, but I don't think I really have enough to say about it for a full length spiel.  In short, it's a really freaking well directed film: it captures something deep about the human experience in its imagery and atmosphere.  These characters feel incredibly real and compelling, and the cinematography is easily the best I've seen all year.  Yet, like 2001, I can't help but feel that the themes that it actually tries to converse are rather simplistic and ill-fitting the feat of filmmaking serving them.  While I enjoyed the film, something inside me rejects it at a level that I can't really recommend the film other than as an interesting piece of art, much less call it anything like a favorite.  At least this film has more of an actual structure than 2001, though I don't really see the point in the "creation of the world" scene in the beginning, other than as a rather sarcastic response to the question "why are things this way?"  It's beautiful, but if your film's plot synopsis includes the line "the universe was created," then your film better be about gods, and certainly not a Texas family in the 1950s.

I don't think Tree of Life really deserves the oscar for best picture, but Terrance Malik definitely deserves the award for achievement in directing, and Emmanuel Luzbeki way deserves the award for cinematography, even though it does a disservice to Robert Richardson, Hugo's cinematographer.

Incidentally, I hear Terrence Malik convinced the special effects artist who did 2001's stargate sequence to come out of retirement just to do this film.  I'm not surprised.

Don't you see that releases like these are necessary for
the industry to survive this new market?

Puella Magi Madoka Magica is coming out on DVD and BluRay!  Four episodes at a time.  For 30 dollars each installment.  Over four months.

...yeah...

The first installment (containing the first four of PMMM's twelve episodes) came out earlier this February, released by Aniplex.  Aniplex follows the Japanese model, which is to release shows slowly and at a high price, but with a bunch of collectors items packaged with it.  This model serves to make a profit only off of the ones who are guaranteed to buy it: the otaku.  It's a model that has worked in Japan, and I suppose it's a model that makes very good sense for a market that generally sees anime as a disposable form of entertainment.  However, that does not make it any less ridiculous that a 12 episode series - one that is best suited to be marathoned over a short period of time - costs 90 dollars over four months.  I fully intend to buy this show.  But I have not yet.  I am hoping that eventually it'll come out in a box set for, ideally, not 90 dollars.  However, there is absolutely no guarantee that Aniplex will ever do that.  They already have it streaming on CrunchyRoll, so perhaps it doesn't even make any business sense to do so.  I'm worried that a year from now, there will still be no word on a box set, and it'll be already out of print.

I'd imagine the scenes inside the witches' barriers would look quite excellent on BluRay.  Except my laptop doesn't do BluRay.  Damn proprietary media formats...

Madoka Magica is one of those shows that I often worry about forgetting why it was I liked it in the first place.  Being able to watch it all the way through again - legally - would be very nice indeed.

Speaking of things I want to re-watch, I also still want to see Rebuild of Evangelion 2.22 again.  I saw it in the theatre, once, and my impressions of it were strong, and yet, only of the film as a whole.  I want to watch it again and get a more detailed impression, especially since it was so (seemingly) awesome.  I wonder whether I should get it from Netflix and waste my parents' money by taking up a slot, or just get it on DVD and waste my parents' money that way...

Man, I really need to find a part time writing job on the internet somewhere just so I can have some money I can actually spend on stuff that's not food or school supplies.  Then again, it's not like I could show anyone this blog as an example of my writing, not with the severe lack of effort I put into it.

And Another Thing,
Since I'm pretty sure I won't be crippled with work, I'll probably finally be getting around to writing that thing on Touhou Tonari tomorrow.  Probably.  If I don't decide to do something else instead.

It's a good thing I'm doing a variety now, because this spring is going to be a spring of epic gaming.  Here are some games that are coming out (or have come out) that I'm likely going to be picking up:

- Mass Effect 3 //Well duh.
- IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Steel //So I can get my ass kicked online by people with xbox flightsticks.
- SSX //One of the few parts of my childhood I don't mind returning.
- Asura's Wrath //Once it goes down in price...a lot.
- The Witcher 2 //Well, if I have time for another really long story-focused game.

That, and I'm still slowly making my way through the Touhou games.  I wish I could run them full screen, that'd make it quite a bit easier not make some of the sillier mistakes.

But that'll all be tomorrow.

Compound Backlog Increase - Issue 2

Well.

Okay, here's what happened: instead of writing about the Mass Effect 3 demo last night, I stayed up finishing Lilly's story in Katawa Shoujo.  I had the time to stick to my schedule and do a double post about Touhou Tonari and ME3, but I can write about those pretty much any time I please.  On the other hand, I'd rather write about Katawa Shoujo now than later, since I might forget important things about what struck me as I finished the game.

So I think I might as well jump into this one.  Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, in the magical land of 4chan, a land known to the rest of the Internet as a home to anarchy, trolls, and exceedingly strange people who say incredibly strange things and post singularly strange pictures, there was a man named RAITA.  He was not a writer, but an artist, and he drew this picture:

It was a picture of a bunch of cute girls with physical disabilities.

It proposed that a romantic visual novel about disabled girls might be pretty neat.

For reference, a visual novel is a novel that plays out in illustrated scenes with text boxes, and occasionally prompts you to make a choice that will affect how the rest of the novel goes.

Naturally, the people of the magical land of 4chan thought this was the greatest idea ever.

Fortunately, so did a bunch of people who actually knew how to write, and had the initiative to turn this idea into a reality.

So, Katawa Shoujo is an interactive romance novel about disabled high school students in Japan as developed by people who organized on what is widely considered the place where the internet goes to die.

If this sounds like the worst idea ever, you're not the only one.  However, if you want to read about someone talk about the idea of a visual novel about disabled girls at length without having actually played the game, there are god knows how many people that have already done so.

Here's the thing: I loved Katawa Shoujo (or rather, the one path I've played so far), but if I want to talk about why it's good, I feel like I first have the burden of having to show that it's not horribly misogynistic and awful, but I don't want this to become an apology in the greek sense of the term.  There are lots of those too.  Fortunately, part of why it's good is also the reason why it's not misogynistic.

See, if the main character were a blank template for the player to insert him or herself into, and if the novel were structured so that it was a game with the objective being to date one of the girls, that would be horribly misogynistic, since that would be making the characters gameplay elements instead of characters, elements to be manipulated towards an end.  Fortunately, neither of those are true.

The main character of Katawa Shoujo is not the player, it's Hisao Nakai, a senior in high school who was living a perfectly normal life...until his previously dormant arrhythmia caused him to have a heart attack.  His previous life gets unceremoniously cut off as he finds himself in a hospital, taking medication every morning and evening to stay alive, his friends' visits stopping, and ultimately, unable to return to his old school for health reasons.  He's set adrift in the unfamiliar world of Yamaku High School, a boarding school for people with physical disabilities.  He does not know how to handle himself there, and in the distance, the prospect of what to study when he graduates looms.  He's good at science, and he has a natural curiosity about the world, but other than that, he's anchorless.  The people that he meets at Yamaku will change him in the coming months, and he will realize many things about himself and the world around him.

If this doesn't sound like a self-insert character to you, good.  Hisao has his own, distinct worries, personality, and motivations that come through no matter what choices you make.  No matter what you do, it's in character for Hisao, not the player.

This brings me to the second point.  Like all visual novels, you are occasionally presented with choices of what to do.  It would be unfair of me to try and compare how choices work here to how they work in other visual novels, because I haven't played any other visual novels.  However, I can say this: choices in Katawa Shoujo are never petty things like "do I say sorry or slap her in the face," but more realistic and well considered choices where a real person might have genuine indecision as well.  It's not so much about playing a game as it is choosing which of these novels you want to read.  You read Katawa Shoujo, not play it.  It's a novel, and I will approach it as such.

Okay, now the obligatory apology is out of the way,


Pictured to the left is Lilly Satou.  It was her story that I read.  She's an 18 year old girl attending Yamaku high school.  Her family is affluent, but as of the start of the novel, she hasn't seen them in quite some time.  They live in all the way in Scotland, and she spent several years living with her older sister, Akira, before attending Yamaku.  She's a very polite sort, and her poised demeanor and tendency to worry about others more than perhaps she should has made her somewhat of a mother figure to the rest of her class, and to Hanako Ikezawa, her best friend.  Yet, it becomes clear through her story that even though she is liable to worry about others, she is very reticent about sharing her own concerns with others, even with those she most cares about.  Despite her air of maturity, she admits, in the end, to being rather foolish about that.

She's also completely blind, something that she has learned to live with quite well.  She is not uncomfortable with having to rely on others, but she'll poke fun at you if you for a moment try and pity her for it.  She doesn't like it when people worry about her, which creates a nice dichotomy when she inevitably starts worrying about others, and fails to share her own.

She's a well thought out and realistic character, and the fact that she's blind, while a factor in her character, does not define it.  However, it does bring out certain aspects of her character in interesting ways, and creates for some very effective situations.  For instance, walking to town one day, Hisao had a heart murmur.  She cannot see Hisao, only hear him in pain.  The subtext here is never explicitly stated, but how would you feel if something were happening to someone you cared about, and you couldn't see what's happening?

Lilly would seem to fall very loosely into the "yamato nadeshiko" archetype.  She's well mannered, tall, kind, can cook, and would be considered by the standards of another age to be an "exemplary woman."  This, of course, is very much deconstructed over the course of the story as it becomes clear that she's not a perfect woman: she's a normal person with her own needs and motivations who's really almost as lost as Hisao himself sometimes, only she has a hard time showing it.  It's also worth mentioning the dichotomy of the "yamato nadeshiko" character being a tall, blonde, blue-eyed, half-Scottish girl.  Perhaps this is part of the game's message about outward traits not defining one's personality?  Only in animeland, I guess.

She was the subject of the story, but Katawa Shoujo is not a dry, super serious character study.  It is populated with not only the other girls, but also side characters that give Yamaku high life.

First, all of the dateable characters in Katawa Shoujo fall loosely into genre archetypes.  If they're as well realized as Lilly, I have no doubt they're more than they appear to be.  Lilly's best friend is Hanako Ikezawa, a girl with severe social phobia and burns down all of one side of her body.  Hanako is also a dateable character, but since the two are friends, their paths are largely interconnected such that you find out a bit about her as well.  She would at first seem to fall under the "reticent bibliophile" archetype.  As someone with a poster of Yuki Nagato above his bed at this very moment, I'm quite familiar with the archetype, familiar enough to know that Hanako really doesn't fall so neatly into the tropes as it would initially appear.  I haven't played her path yet, but I'm interested to.  Even if this is the sort of game to have characters that fall into tropes, it's not the sort of game that would let that get in the way of having interesting and compelling characters.  Everyone here follows real world logic, and all that entails.

Rin is another one of the dateable characters.  She's an artist with no arms and a very...off...sort of personality.  She has a very dry, ludicrous sense of humor, and seemingly no connection with the outside world.  She wanders out into the town at night once and stands on a corner.  She doesn't know why, she just does.  ...I think I know Rin.  I think quite a few of us have known at least one Rin in our lives.

Akira Satou: brash young lawyer, or half-Scottish mafia boss?

In fact, the side characters of Katawa Shoujo aren't so much genre archetypes as they are "we all knew that guy" archetypes.  I know an Akira, except she's not somebody's sister, he's a teacher I had in high school.  I know a Nurse: I recently had a dentist appointment with him, as a matter of fact.  I know a Mutou: he's my Logic professor.  I know several Kenjis (Commonwealth Academy was funny that way).  What makes this different from genre tropes?  Well, at a basic level, I don't suppose much.  I can't take that away from the, of course, since the result is most often hilarious, and it does take a certain amount of skill to codify one's life experiences in such a way that you can epitomize them in a character.

For all the research that seems to have gone into this game to accurately depict characters with physical disabilities, the writers don't seem to have even bothered trying to accurately depict Japan or Japanese society.  This game takes place very firmly in animeland, and it's unapologetic about this fact.  The writers drop it for the sake of the story, and it's a stronger work because of it.

On the other hand, certain anime-isms like Misha's ridiculous pink hair are called out in universe and explained: Misha's hair is dyed for reasons that I expect I would know better if I were reading Shizune's path (Misha is Shizune's interpreter and best friend).

At any rate, Katawa Shoujo is definitely the product of people who love the genre and its tropes, but instead of being every cliche ever, it feels almost like a sort of Tarentino-esque tribute to visual novels: playing with the genre tropes, sometimes subverting them, doing them right when they are actually played straight, and ultimately creating something more than the thing which it would seem to do homage to.

Oh yeah, and there are sex scenes.  They flow as logical progressions of the narrative and were written by people who had maybe had sex before.  I suppose that comes with the territory.  If it were a normal novel, nobody would give a second thought about it, naturally, but Katawa Shoujo is most certainly not porn.  Mostly.

It made a very nice contrast with Mansfield Park, to say the least.  Mansfield Park is probably the "better" novel (if we are to judge novels by their influence and depth of content), but I know which one I enjoyed reading more.

Well, I wanted to talk more about the story, and maybe about some of its context, but it's too late at night now.  I might have to write some more thoughts on it in the next part.  We'll see, I suppose.

Again, I feel like I've written too much of a review and not enough of my personal feelings about the game, or even any sort of analysis.  What did I really spend all this time writing, in truth?  Everything I said I didn't want to write.  Oh well.

Incidentally, I want to play this game:

Katawa Shoujo is freeware, for PC, Mac, and Linux.  If you're curious, download it here.

Compound Backlog Increase - Issue 1

I've been meaning to do another issue of Compound Disinterest (or whatever the hell I'm calling this blog nowadays) for quite a while.

Sorry, I've been meaning to do another issue for way too goddam long.

Yeah, that's much closer, I think.

Anyway, I've had so many things I've been meaning to write about, and so little time to do it, if I wrote one huge update, it'd be far too long to read, boring, and most of all, I wouldn't have anywhere near enough time to actually write it.  Instead, I'm going to write something once per day for this week.  Here's what I'm going to try to do, ideally:

Monday (this update): Music. //Get that out of the way
Tuesday: Mass Effect 3 demo. //Yeah, me and everyone else.
Wednesday: Two by this Side, Three by the Other Side. //And, by extension, doujin manga.
Thursday: Assorted thoughts on film and anime. //Including Mouretsu Pirates.
Friday/Saturday: (Riff Club/Good Move Night)
Sunday: Katawa Shoujo //If you want a preview, here's what I had to say about part-way though act 1.

I had been planning on talking about all of these for quite a while, each individually, but for one reason or another, I've never actually done them.

These entries will be much more succinct and blog-like instead of rambling masses of stuff nobody cares about.

But speaking of things nobody cares about, let's begin.

Kokoro Vibrations

Reisen's bangs are in the way of
her Lunatic Eyes.

This was an album I thought that I was going to like far more as a whole at the beginning than I actually ended up liking at the end.  However, I'm not entirely sure this is because the latter half of the album is worse than the first half in any meaningful way.  Rather, it's possible, perhaps, that ShibayanRecord's style may not be one that's conducive to listening to for long periods of time.  I find this rather unlikely, but I have a hard time really coming up with any other decent reason why a circle as obviously talented as Shibayan can make such good - sometimes stellar - work on this album, and yet I can't give the album a complete recommendation.  Yes, all of the tracks on here are good - really good - and yet...but let's see:

Shibayan is electronic, but not in the same way as Alstroemeria or ENS.  Their music is far more experimental in nature rather than more conventional house or trance.  The first track on the album - WAP-WA - demonstrates this in its most extreme form, with a glitch aesthetic that, while perhaps repetitive, is very interesting and feels very cool.  As a thematic introduction, it serves its purpose well, and more.  Autumnal Fan takes this theme and takes a more conventional approach, keeping a very profound feeling, funky base, and building on it a really cool vocal track with fun harmonies.  I can't quite put its feeling into words, but it's my favorite track on the album.  Apparently, it's supposed to be Fall of Fall from Touhou 10 ~ Mountain of Faith, but I didn't recognize it at first, and it took me a while to figure out exactly what parts of it they used in this track.  The next track is Castle of Thorns, which has the same approach to its feel, with similar musical attributes, save for the vocals, which are an entirely different.  Here, Chie Fukami gives an adept, but regrettably high and whiny performance that, while actually rather impressive, I find disagrees with me.  It's seven minutes, illustrating another trait of Shibayan tracks: they're always really frakking long.  Next is a really funny sort of track with a funny sort of name: MyonMyonMyonMyonMyon!  Myon is the sound cats make in Japan, and is also the name of Youmu's ghost half.  Myon(5)! is the track where 3L does the incredible feat of hitting what I think is something like C8 and not being incredibly annoying.  Nevertheless, to the benefit of the track, her part does not constitute a significant part of the track, which headless proceeds for eight minutes of myon to infinity and beyond.  It's probably the most inventive interpretation of Ancient Temple I've ever heard, and Shibayan's clever use of electronic effects make for lots of fun that somehow doesn't get old for me.  (Internet history lesson: speaking of Youmu and things that go nyan, this video existed at least a year before nyancat: know thine history)  The next track - The Color of Flowers Is... - is, naturally, funky and cool, but less profound feeling than some of the previous tracks for qualities that I can't quite place but may have something to do with how the progression and arrangement work with each other.  Here, through no fault of its own does it not feel as epic as some previous tracks: it has more to do with the original: Riverside View.  I think Shibayan may have tried to do something with it that didn't quite work.  Or rather, doesn't start working until about the four minute mark, where all of a sudden it gets kinda epic with lots of harmony, interference, and coolness all of a sudden coming together and working perfectly.  All of this, and the vocalist - yana - is doing it again, and doing very high octave vocals that actually work really well with the song, which is saying something, because it's a really challenging part, and I can't hear any signs of pitch tampering with her voice.  Dammit Minoshima...  Anyway, Candle-Magic of Lunar Age 11.3 (I have to be reading that wrong: it sounds like an Engrish title, except it's in Japanese) is more of Shibayan doing their thing, this time with the ever-popular Locked Girl, which fits their style very well, and yet Shibayan chose to go with a very vocal-centric aesthetic here.  I don't quite understand the decision, but it doesn't fail, per se, so much as it's unexpected.  The only problem here, I suppose, is that it's been a whole lot of basically the same musical idea so far, even despite the slight change in style of arrangement.  Star's Tears (or rather, simply Hoshi no Namida, since it's spelled in katakana) comes next, is a sans-vocal track based on The Primal Scene of Japan the Girl Saw.  Unfortunately, since I can't quite quantify some of the things that Shibayan does in their instrumentation, I can't describe why this track is good, only that it is, and that the ways it plays with the song's rhythm and progressions are really fun.  The next track has an incredibly awesome name: Huge Bunny Explosions.  Naturally, it's based on Lunatic Eyes - Reisen's theme (the lunarian rabbit featured on the album cover).  The arrangement feels a bit thinner than the other tracks on the album, which I suppose ends it on a different note for an album that is largely the same brilliant idea for about 53 minutes.  Here, an Alstroemeria vet is brought in for the vocals: Nachi Sakue (ha! I remembered: it's Sakue and not Sakagami).  She does well enough here, but compared to 3L and Chie-san, it does feel like a bit of a step down.

Anyway, if you liked Daft Punk's Homework, or some of Kraftwerk's less experimental stuff, then definitely give a listen to the album: just not all at once.  It's got one really great idea that it does over and over again in different flavors, and it makes for some really great singles, just not for contiguous play.  A rather odd conclusion to come to, and one that doesn't do credit to ShibayanRecords, but there you have it.

Other Stuff
I got into a discussion of fusion jazz the other day with my dad, and he gave me a couple of recommendations that I have now forgotten and must ask for again (I know one was Weather Report and the other was Return to Forever, but nothing besides that).  It coincided, oddly enough, with me finding the Touhou jazz fusion album Keyboard Cat 4 by Buta-Otome.  I'm not going to talk about it, because I really don't have the time or will right now, but I do recommend it.  If nothing else, check out their version of Hiroshige no. 36. called Dream Travel Journal.  The original is from one of ZUN's standalone albums, Retrospective 53 Minutes.  I need to listen to the whole of that album, because I still haven't, and I'm curious to see exactly what ZUN does when he's not writing music for games (except I already know the answer: pretty much nothing different).  The album is a bit of a musical poem about Mary and Renko: two humans who find themselves traveling Gensokyo.  There's something very interesting about these characters: humans filled with wonder as they explore the quiet countryside.  I wish I knew of more doujin about them: they could be really interesting, or at least really funny characters.  Fittingly, the image is really quite Hiroshige-esque.

Anyway, enough Touhou crap, have a metal version of Skyrim's theme.  I've seen some of this guy's other stuff too: this guy's technique is freaking incredible.

Anyway, I'm done with my homework, so I'd better read some more Katawa Shoujo.  I just realized: I said I'd read something that's the length of a novel (and has the content of several novels) by the end of the week.  Ah well, there are worse fates.

Incidentally, I've decided to go with "read" instead of "play" in reference to KS.  It sounds far, far better to say "I'm reading a romance novel" than "I'm playing a romance game."

Subterranean Chromaticism

Haha, and to think that I actually thought I was going to be timely in writing about some of these new albums from Comiket 81.  Not too late, of course, but late enough.  I suppose I had an excuse in that I was going to do it earlier, but I couldn't find one or two of the albums I wanted to listen to, and, truth be told, I still haven't listened to everything I intended to.

I'm also going to try to stop being so very formulaic in the way I go about talking about these albums.  Music is probably the most subjective sort of art, and it's not something one can so much review as it is something one writes about, analyzing and voicing opinions, but not necessarily judging as good or bad in an objective sense.  Usually, this sort of idea is a sell-out, and if I didn't voice any opinion whatsoever, it would be, but I aim to be interesting: a few hundred words rattling off which songs are pretty good and which ones have problems is boring, boring, horribly boring.  Touhou is not a boring series of games, and the sort of music that has come out of C81 isn't boring either.

じゃ、はじめましょうね！

Avidya

Yukari is totally Buddhist: she's

too lazy to have desires.

And what's less boring than going in alphabetical order?  Nothing, bro: alphabetical order is totally rad, and you know what, so is Avidya.  This is a joint production between Syrufit and *Poplica.  I've already heard quite a bit of Syrufit, both on Alstroemeria Records albums and on his own, under the name Syrup Comfiture.  His tracks may sometimes seem to lack Minoshima's diversity in style, but he's also more consistently good, and as I mentioned once before, he's a heck of a lot better at picking and arranging for vocalists.  *Poplica, on the other hand, I've heard very little of, but what I have heard has been pretty good.  Syrufit and *Poplica are not new to collaborations: they've actually produced quite a number of albums together before.  After hearing this album, I'll have to look up some more.  They have different styles, but they compliment each other quite well.

Anyway, Avidya sets the atmosphere with ambient Shakuhachi and electro in a very distinct, Syrufit sort of manner.  It's an original track, so the fact that Syrufit's style comes through strongly here...is not a surprise.  Another Vision carries this on the electro side of things, also a Syrufit track, though this one perhaps too repetitive and atmospheric for its own good.  I'm not quite what's going on with the vocal samples, and I don't think it quite worked out how Syrufit might have wanted it to.  *Poplica's first track on the album is We Are (I haven't the faintest).  The style is distinctly more built around distinct synth chordal progressions, or in other words, more like Alstroemeria style progressive house and, well, more pop-ish sounds.  As a matter of fact, it feels a bit like eurodance in structure, but with a certain air of maturity to it that most eurodance doesn't really have.  Rapture continues more along that stylistic line, but reversed, with the vocals forming the melody with atmospheric synth and piano work and house style 4/4 beat providing a mild counter-point.  It's almost more Syrufit style-wise than *poplica.  et Cetera is actually Linjin's work, but it fits with the album's flow well.  I quite like the very rapid, distinctly stress-metered vocals, even if at its core, it's a rather simple track, with continuo synths and fairly standard percussion work.  Perhaps it goes to show that the tropes wouldn't be so tired if people would just put some soul and talent into them.  Links is also a combo-breaker in that it is a co-arrangement by Syrufit and *Poplica.  I'm immediately suspicious when more than one person begins working on a single track, and to be honest, I don't think this is as good as any of the tracks they worked on individually, but it does retain the soul of the album.  *Poplica and Syrufit work very well together, it seems.  I will say this though: I'm not sure what modulator they put the vocals through, but it sounds a little like Miku Hatsune.  Confirming my theory that Syrufit and *Poplica work well as a team, Stellar is a very heavily phrased sort of upbeat house track with a very strong central feeling.  It's pretty stellar.  Anyway, it's Röyskopp's turn for Candle, the next track on...wait, Röyskopp?  No, this is definitely Syrufit.  Huh, coulda sworn it was Röyskopp, what with the very low base+pad aesthetic it opens with...and the quiet, mid-octave range vocals it continues with...and ends with.  It's undeniably Syrufit in its structure, and it fits with the rest of the album, but it's still kinda uncanny.  You know what doesn't fit at all with the rest of the album though?  Innocent - Nhato remix.  2/2 beat, base drops, noisy/growly instrumental interludes, yep, this is Touhou dubstep.  It actually works pretty well, for dubstep.  The clear sounding, airy interpretation of Broken Moon that the base-dropping segments play off of make it, I think.  The last track, Angel's Doubt - a very vague sort of interpretation of Necrofantasia - actually uses dubstep style tropes in concert with the atmospheric style synths we've come to expect from Syrufit/Poplica extraordinarily well, proving that dubstep might have actually given us an interesting musical tool, if people would only stop making the same song over and over again already.

I don't really have as much to say about Avidya as I do about, say, Killed Dancehall, not because it's not good, but because it didn't evoke much more of a reaction than pure enjoyment.  I'm certainly not saying it's only mediocre, because it's actually a very good album that I recommend any electronic music fan listen to, but that said, it didn't inspire much passion in me either.  But with a Buddhist name like Avidya, perhaps passion isn't what this album was really about.

Lol, the bs I say sometimes.  Go listen to this album.  No really.

Begierde des Zauberer

Marisa took a trip to Mordor, naturally
intending to steal Sauron's ring.

Apparently, it was really good timing that I only just discovered Demetori, because I didn't have to wait as long for their next album, which came out this Comiket after a rather lengthy period of time when they didn't produce anything.  What they did eventually release was Begierde des Zauberer - The Magician's Longing in German, referring to Marisa Kirisame: the Lord Byron of Gensokyo.  I guess Patchouli would be Anne Isabella, in that case.  Who would Alice be though...  Agh, muisc, yes, topic.

The introductory track is most appropriately named "introduction," and serves as an introduction.  Derp.  The dark synths build into the introduction of the guitars and twisted version of what I think of as the "ZUN scale progression" that always appears in his menu themes, and it's all very badass.  What's surprising is that, even though they share very similar riffs in the start, albeit in different keys, it doesn't transition into the next track like an Alstroemeria album might, which actually makes the similarity sound rather awkward.  In fact, the first few bars of Plastic Mind ~ Alice in Underground are actually rather awkward, with a very straight speed metal beat, but it straightens itself out quite nicely into Demetori's signature guitar and synth double counterpoint.  It never quite feels like the brothers' A game because of some weirdness with the percussion and synth in one part of the bridge, but flawed as it may be, it is also quite awesome.  Rigid Paradise ~ Dawn of the Dead is also awesomeness, great simply in general, but notable for how well it manages to make the "Dawn of the Dead" part of its name work, with some very nice use of atmosphere in what could have easily been a very straight progressive metal track.  Love Colored Master Spark ~ Final Sorcery takes Marisa's already very rock-like theme and puts it through Demetori's metal filter.  The result follows the original quite closely, feeling very much like a Demetori version of a ZUN track rather than a Demetori track that happens to use a riff from ZUN somewhere.  I can't fault Demetori for this, because I certainly don't think they have anything to prove, but also because they do such a great job of maintaining and reinforcing the soul of the tomboyish, cocky, rainbow-colored-destruction wielding mage and kleptomaniac named Marisa.  Perhaps fittingly, U.N. Owen Was Her follows this, matches it, and crushes it in the palm of its hand while grinning madly.  I didn't like this track as much when I first listened to it, but the more I do, the more I realize what a great job of keeping the eerie power of the original whilst at the same time totally twisting it into something eldritch and heady with Flandre's insane spirit.  U.N. Owen is a very hard composition to work with, but Demetori rises to the challenge quite beautifully, which may be one of the reasons for it being one of the most memorable tracks on the album.  Magus Night ~ Frenzy Night seems rather tame and straightforward in comparison, and it actually is rather straight forward for a Demetori track.  Which is not to say it's bad.  The song it's nominally an arrangement of is from Fairy Wars, and yet occasionally, I seem to hear quotes from other ZUN songs, especially Doll Judgement, but I suppose that comes with the territory of being from ZUN.  Really, this album's problem is that too much of it sounds like Demetori playing ZUN, which, while awesome, can get a bit tiring.  Desire Drive ~ Desire Dream is not an exception to this, being exactly that: Demetori's version of Desire Drive.  I can't really substantiate specifically why this is, but on the other hand, I don't particularly care, because as I said before, Demetori playing ZUN is still oh so very awesome.  Endless ~ The Endless Deadly Deadly Sins provides a nice buffer before the final track, Strawberry Crisis !!!!!!  It's very speedy and adroitly played with the flare one expects from Demetori, but I think the guitar work stands out here even in comparison with the other tracks on the album.

As a whole, it's not as interesting as Nada Upasana Pundarika, or as varied or clever, but given how brilliant Nada Upasana Pundarika was, that's a rather unreasonable bar to set.  I definitely recommend anyone who likes hard rock or metal give it a listen, but after Nada Upasana Pundarika.  I also have to say that, though I have not listened to any others in their entirety, it's probably their second best album, so take that for whatever it's worth.

Killed Dancehall

Geez Flandre, this is the fifth
Dancehall you've killed this year!

I think I've said it before, but Alstroemeria Records is really, really unreliable sometimes.  You never know whether you're going to get good Minoshima or evil Minoshima.  When I first listened to this album, I knew it was good Minoshima, but I couldn't make up my mind how good.  While it's not really brilliant in the same way as Haunted Dancehall was, the more I listen to it, the more I like it, and the more I think that it's a very good mirror of its predecessor.  See, Haunted Dancehall was etherial and full of groovy, almost disco-esque soul.  It was "haunted," as if spirits were floating around in the data.  Killed Dancehall is much more hard-edged, taking the structure and spirit of the original and going for a much more electronic feel.  Killed Dancehall is to Haunted Dancehall as Human After All was to Discovery: not as good, but a very interesting mirror, and still, in the end, a pretty neat album.

I shouldn't even need to mention that it starts with a short original track with sampled vocals that leads into a longer track, but I should mention that this one - Undercover - is especially cool.  What it leads into, Romantic Children, lives up to this promising intro, at least partially.  The pulsing synth echoes the soul of Haunted Dancehall, and yet, in it, there is a depth: something hard and unyielding.  Unfortunately, Minoshima being Minoshima, he writes a vocal part for Nachi Sakue (whose name I've been improperly romanizing as Nachi Sakagami for the longest time, ごめんなさい) which falls into the common trap of being high and "moe" in a track where it's really not appropriate, and it doesn't really work.  On a track where everything else works so well, it's quite unfortunate.  Luckily, there's a vaguely Daft Punk-esque bridge into a track with Mei Ayakura vocals: Unknown.  There are still traces of the intro track as it begins, actually.  The arrangement is is very Minoshima in several ways.  The interplay between the instruments and the vocals is minimal, but contributes to an overall whole very well.  It's also supposedly an arrange of U.N. Owen, but in true fashion, the only part of U.N. Owen Minoshima actually seems to have used is the continuo part.  It's probably the best track on the album, actually.  It's followed by Phantoms in da House by Nhato.  He's always a bit of a gamble, but this track is actually very interesting, and very distinctly his style.  It uses the melody of Phantom Ensemble in some rather interesting ways, along with a very wide range of hard-edged electronic instrumentation, used playfully and in very good harmony.  I think I also hear the pentatonic scale progression from Ancient Temple at one point, but I could just be hearing things.  Brazil follows, which is a very strange Minoshima original, with a totally incomprehensible vocal sample (I'm not entirely sure what language it is, even) used in concert (though not really harmony) with the sort of instrumental backing one expects from Minoshima.  It's disappointing for an original track to be as uninteresting as all that, but it's over about four minutes and goes on to Lunar DIAL, another rather odd track with a riff that uses glissando to...some effect anyway.  To be honest, I'm really not certain at all about the reasoning behind some of the stuff in this track, like the rhythmic, compressed vocal segments, but it nonetheless works fairly well, even if it's confusing.  Endless is confusing for different reasons.  Minoshima bases this track partially on an English DJ track, with the refrain "My fellas run this muthafucka."  Oh Minoshima.  One of these days I'll go to Comiket myself and ask you where you keep finding these samples.  Musically, it actually works really well, and ends up being a really fun track, with a tight sense of rhythm and tone.  It marks the transition from the album's rather mediocre middle to its strong end, a trend that continues with Flowering Night, a track that plays with the riff from, guess what, Flowering Night, and continues on into what might have actually sounded more at home on Haunted Dancehall (or, for that matter, Harmony), with its piano and laid back vocal aesthetic.  It flows into Underdog, the other Minoshima original on the album, and by far the better one.  It's his often-used double layered style, with a complicated looped undercurrent and much more broad melody section for some sort of glissando-y FM synth.  It's pretty neat.  The album proper ends with Underdog, but Syrufit contributes an extra track at the end called DIS_K.  It's rather uncharacteristic of Syrufit, and I checked twice to make sure I had read it right and it was in fact Syrufit, because it's much more in a glitch sort of style than really anything else he's done that I can recall.  It's good to have heard him try something new, but I can't say I like glitch-mode Syrufit as much.

Killed Dancehall starts off very strongly, has a mediocre middle, but then picks up again quite nicely for the end.  After Haunted Dancehall, I was expecting a bit more, but all things considered, this is still probably one of Alstroemeria Records' better albums, at least as good as Fragment Reactions, and probably on par with Plastik World.  Yet, I don't feel quite right comparing it with something like Plastik World, because Alstroemeria Records has changed so much from that era.  Bad Apple!! barely even feels like it came from the same artist.  Minoshima is going in a new direction, I think the two Dancehall albums have shown that pretty clearly.  What will be next, I wonder.  Fused Dancehall, maybe?  I think Utsuho has only been on the cover once, and that was Double Counterpoint...so what I really meant to say was "Utsuho has never been on an Alstroemeria Records cover, what are you talking about?"

Uncanny Instinct

Blonde: Woe!  My soliloquies be verily poor:

I must anon resolve to further my emoting!

Purple: Oh man, the salt on your skin is making

me soooo high~

Being arrangements of somebody else's already brilliant work, one can't help but be slightly cynical about the actual talent of some doujin arrangers.  While some may produce decent covers, I don't think all of them would be as good if they played completely original material.  This is only to be expected, but on the other hand, it does take a considerable amount of talent to create truly great arrangements, talent that would easily be applicable to original material.  The best doujin circles would no doubt be notable if they did play their own material, and in fact, many do put completely or almost completely original tracks on their albums.  Alstroemeria Records does this all the time, either with totally original material or only using elements from the original totally out of context for different ends.  Though Minoshima, Syrufit, and Nhato often play sets as club DJs (under the name Badcats Party), surprisingly none of them have released original albums.  EastNewSound, however, has, and their product is Uncanny Instinct.  I wish I were more familiar with EastNewSound beforehand to see how much of the style here is present in their Touhou arrangements, but that said, what I have heard has been very interesting.  For refrence, possibly their most known piece being a really great U.N. Owen arrangement called...(looks up kanji)...crap...Under a Scarlet Moon, Absolute Insanity...I hope.  あなたが甘い．．．甘い．．．赤い．．．赤い．．．フフ殺してあげる!

Looking at the track information, I think the defining feature of this album is that it has so many different artists contributing to it, yet I think you can still pretty definitively call the album electronica.  We start the album with Summer Breeze.  The translation on touhouwiki says "Summer Wind," and this isn't really inaccurate, but it sounds weird, and in my world, I'd like to think that Kofun P is a Seals & Croft fan.  The song itself is a melodic affair with moe vocals that, fortunately, are arranged and performed well enough not to be grating.  The easy listening synth provides a sugary second layer of melody that provides harmony with the vocals occasionally, but doesn't really do much else.  It's really pretty bland stuff, but it's inoffensive, and afterwards, Steel Cliff comes along and takes it in a more eurodance-y direction.  It would sound a little bit like Harmony-era Minoshima were the vocals not so chromatic and in a tolerable octave.  It's got some nice harmonies with the base part and percussive piano, and works quite admirably.  While the arranger was different, the vocalist was actually the same as the first track.  Whaddaya know, I guess it's just Minoshima who can't pick good vocalists.  The next track, In a Constant World (again, not the touhouwiki translation, but heck, even GoogleTranslate says that  ｢変わらぬ｣ means "constant") is more glitchy in its instrumentation, but despite being from a different composer, is structurally similar to the previous track.  Its vocals are of the "low and breathy" sort, another one of those aesthetics I can never quite get into, but I suppose they are interwoven with the instrumentation fairly well.  Original Remind (this one was named in English originally, can't you tell) comes next and keeps up with the trance-like trend of the last two tracks, with meandering vocals, very lightly phrased vocals, and high-attack synth and pad second layer.  It's really quite traditional, but it does its thing well, and moves on to EasyNaturalStep.  Now, EasyNaturalStep is probably one of the most Jpop-like tracks on the album, but it's also probably my favorite.  It has a very well done vocal section, trading off between heavily phrased and harmonized female vocals and rapid rap sections, playing off of the admittedly pretty simple major-key continuo and base.  It helps that this is one of those lucky tracks where I can sorta-kinda understand the lyrics...well, one half of the lyrics anyway.  It has this pervasive atmosphere of fun that good pop should have, with the adroit execution and soul to make it work.  I'd call it a guilty pleasure, but I can't say I feel all that guilty.  Within the Light follows this up, a more slow paced track with a simpler sort of melody, going for a softer feel, with its soft-spoken (not breathy, mind you) vocals, percussive piano, and pad aesthetic.  As this is the same composer as In a Constant World, this isn't particularly surprising.  Again though, I can't honestly say it doesn't work, but it does go on into The Two of Us, which is another one of the album's more notable tracks, also by Kurotori (Black Swan), the composer of EasyNaturalStep and Under a Scarlet Moon, Absolute Insanity.  It's got a very interesting minor-key vocal section and some very good use of distortion and pads in its instrumental and continuo section.  It at times feels the slightest bit like Yuki Kajiura, actually.  I think it's the sweeping and rather un-pop-like melody and solo section, but it's more likely I'm simply hearing things.  Monochrome, sorry Monokuroumu, is next, and it maintains the quality of the previous track.  Again though, I'm having trouble pinning down exactly why this is.  It's not a melody with traditionally constructed tonalities, anyway, so maybe I like it just because it sounds different.  The next song is Paper Planes (which was hilariously mis-romanized in the download I got ahold of as "kamihiko uki" instead of "kami hikouki," but I suppose I should be glad he didn't translate it as "Spirit Plane" or something) is the third song on the album from Kurotori, but it's also probably my least favorite, despite the fact that his style continues to remind me of Yuki Kajiura for some incomprehensible and probably really stupid reason.  Maybe I just don't like the fact that he opted for very traditional trance-style synth instrumentation this time.  Before the Dawn Breaks finishes the album on a rather Jpop-y note, but an exceptionally good Jpop-y note.  Actually, many Jpop-y notes in a row.  That together form a song.  Sorry, sorry, anyway, the pulsing synth and continuo harmonize with the vocals quite well, and give the song a distinct aesthetic despite it's questionable heritage.

Uncanny Instinct is a good album, and I think I could point to it as proof that doujin circles aren't worthless second-handers and actually do have some genuine talent.  I would not call this one of my favorite albums ever, not by a long shot, but I see myself listening to it quite a bit in the future.  I think EastNewSound could make quite a name for themselves as an indie music group, though if they do want to make their way in the world, I'm not sure if they want to stick with the anime lesbian album covers.  I love anime, and I love lesbians, but really, they're not doing themselves any favors.  I'm also a little confused, because I'm looking through their discography on touhouwiki, and as far as I can tell, despite Touhou being responsible for a good 75% of the world's girl-love manga and fanart, this is their first album cover to do this.

Why am I spending so much time talking about this?

Edit: I looked it up, and apparently "Under a Scarlet Moon, Absolute Insanity" is actually, according to touhouwiki anyway, "Beneath the Scarlet Moon, The Crazed Blossoms' Severance."  Got the first part right, but not so much the second.

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Touhou Pianoforte I - Requiem for Sakura

Yuyuko lookin' boss, Youmu lookin' QUALITY

I'm actually going to cheat a little and talk about an album that is actually from...you know, I'm actually not sure, because it's not on touhouwiki at all.  *looks up*  Apparently, this was C79, so only a year ago or so.  The artist - Tomoya-san - is on youtube here.  He's pretty small-time, and as a result, the quality of the recording is pretty awful.  There's significant cut-off at the high end that causes some really unfortunate distortion.  Fortunately, the music itself is beautiful.  A piano album like this isn't the same thing as a more traditional doujin arrangement, because it's usually much more straightforward in its interpretations of the originals.  For this reason, I think it'd be more accurate to call this "variations on ZUN" instead of "arrangements of ZUN."  "Variations" sounds higher-brow anyway.


Unfortunately, I can find only two tracks from this album on youtube, both uploaded by kkcwkoh.  I'll go ahead and say that it's worth downloading, or, if you live in Japan and are actually able to buy it, buying.


Because of its nature as piano variations on Touhou music, mostly from Perfect Cherry Blossom, I'm afraid I don't have as much to talk about.  It opens with the "ZUN scale progression," naturally, but moves on to, actually, a rather powerful motif on Sakura, Sakura, which is fitting with the whole "Perfect Cherry Blossom" thing, and also thematically, since contrary to popular belief, the song was only popularized in its modern form in the Meiji period (though the melody was from Edo), when Japan was modernizing, and the romanticization of its history began.  This is the era that Gensokyo appears to be in technologically as well.  All this weaves in quite well with a variation on Ancient Temple, one of ZUN's more under-recognized compositions, played with feeling and flare.  Next is a very dizzy, formless, yet still strong variation on Mystic Dream.  After this is a variation on Hiroari Shoots a Strange Bird (another one of Youmu's themes), this time much stronger in its central themes.  It captures the feel of the original better than the original did, in some ways.  The Sakura, Sakura motif returns in the next track, which is a variation on Ultimate Truth.  It doesn't feel as strong as some of the other tracks on the album, but as a relative measure, this is meaningless, since the rest of the album is so awesome.  A variation on The Doll Maker of Bucharesti is next.  Alice's themes are some of my favorites from PCB, and this track is one of the best on the album.  Next is a variation on Paradise, a track I'm actually not as familiar with.  However, the arrangement itself is very nice, and played with the characteristic flare.  I'm even less familiar with the next track, Prayer in Service of the Sky ~ Towards Equal Heights, mainly because it's not actually from Touhou, but Clannad, an anime.  I've never seen Clannad, but it has quite a large fandom.  I imagine that if I saw it, I'd like, but it is, at its core, a soap-opera, so I'm not sure if I could ever take myself seriously again.  Then again, I loved every panel of Touhou Tonari, so I guess I already kinda can't take myself seriously.  Anyway, the track is good, and even though it's quite obviously not ZUN's style, it's still Tomoya-san's, so it's all good.  Next, going apparently in reverse order, is a very nice variation on The Fantastic Tale of Touno. The album concludes with a variation on Phantom Ensemble, a very nice end to the album, embodying quite a few of the themes present throughout.

It's an extraordinary album, carrying the atmosphere of PCB's soundtrack perfectly, except for the recording hiccups.  It's probably my favorite Touhou piano album.  I once played this album for a friend of mine who listens to almost nothing but top 40 stations and has been exposed to very, very little Japanese otaku culture, and he said he very much enjoyed it.  If that's not an endorsement, I don't really know what is.

Symphonic Suite: Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil

If only, if only.  The more I think about it, the more I think how perfectly Touhou soundtracks are structured to be adapted into symphonic suites.  Think Pictures at an Exhibition.  Think about it: every Touhou soundtrack has a very proper first segment - the menu music - to set the theme.  Each is already segmented into very distinct sections that explore their own themes, but progress the suite as a whole.  ZUN's work, if handled correctly, could be played very well by even a small orchestra or septette and piano.  It wouldn't be overly long (about the same length as your average symphony), and would be a unique experience even for people who are already familiar with video game music.

In my ideal world, someone would get ZUN's permission (or heck, maybe even inspire ZUN to do it himself, the lazy drunk) to write a symphonic suite based on Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil.  Since Touhou fandom is rather large in Japan, I think someone could conceivably convince even the Tokyo Philharmonic to do it.  Hey, they've done Final Fantasy, though granted, Nobuo Uematsu is a respected name in higher circles, and Junnya Ota really isn't.  If it's a success, then there are still seven more games to do, not to mention all the spin-off games ZUN has composed music for.

If I were to undertake the task of adapting ZUN for orchestra, a task I'm in no way qualified to do, despite the meaningless jargon I throw around, I'd try to keep a few things in mind.  First, while Touhou compositions work because of melody, the also work because of their unique atmospheres, so having the whole string section playing the same part simply won't do.  Any Touhou orchestration has to emphasize solo performances and interplay, perhaps using instrument combinations not often seen in more traditional video game arrangements.  TAMusic has demonstrated that simple violin and piano can go a long way.  Too many have forgotten that large orchestras originally evolved for variety and flavor, not for redoubling the same handful of sounds.  Speaking of which, I also imagine that, if at all possible, a clavichord would be most useful to the orchestra.  I should also think that choruses should be spared for the most part.  There are few tracks that I think would really benefit from that sort of aesthetic, but on the other hand, using them for the tracks that are already supposed to be bombastic, like U.N. Owen Was Her, might work.  The trope became popular for a very good reason, it's just that people keep on using it without understanding what makes it work.

One Winged Vampire.  Lol.

Anyway, I'm thinking the chances of this happening are very much dependent on what mood ZUN is in, and knowing ZUN, that means it's pretty darn unlikely, but one can hope.  Perhaps we'll continue to see things like the performance in the video above.  This isn't what I had in mind, stylistically or otherwise, but having anything Touhou played by an actual orchestra is pretty darn cool.

On the other hand, maybe all we need is a good ol' tavern bard.