the_twig

For adventure/romance, you should check out Twin Star Exorcists, which is about a couple of exorcists who are told at age 14 that they are destined to have a kid who will destroy all of the demons. They don't like each other very much though. Also Rokka no Yuusha, which is about "The strongest man in the world", who is one of six heroes going on a quest to slay the demon lord. However seven heroes turn up, and one of them is a traitor, so they have to work out who. If you remember, don't watch the last 3ish minutes of the last episode, because it wraps up nicely, before setting up for a sequel that was never made. As for sports/romance, we're going to tell you to watch Yuri!!! on Ice. You've probably heard a lot of bad things about the series, but it's genuinely pretty good, and just got targeted to hell and back when it won a bunch of awards that it really didn't deserve. As it is though, it's a really solid series.

The thing that we really love about anime is the difference in storytelling style compared to western TV. We haven't watched much western TV in the last few years, but from what we have, it's all very heavy handed, and treats the viewer like an idiot. It sounds weird, but it's like they're trying to make an easy to consume series rather than a good story. There are definitely some anime that do the same thing, but they generally aren't the good anime. Next up is anime's ability to convey emotions. We both have some acting experience, and one of us has an A in GCSE drama. Acting is hard. It's really hard trying to replicate facial expressions, and some of them are so similar that it's hard to distinguish between them without actually analysing them. That's easy to do face to face when you're talking to someone, but in the middle of a TV show where the camera tells you where to look, it's much harder to convey. Most of the time the viewer has to extrapolate based on what else is going on (e.g. 'they're scared because there's a big monster', or 'they're distraught because someone just posed them a moral dilemma'. Actually, what the hell does a distraught facial expression even look like?). The other way to aid in the understanding process is just to do a close up of the character's face as a tear rolls down their cheek or whatever. That just looks bad though. Due to anime being drawn though, they can accentuate the emotions. It just heightens the whole experience for us. We can't imagine how so many anime could be done in live action precisely for this reason. The best show this season by far is High Score Girl. In it, the main girl, Oono, is completely mute. She just grunts every so often. Even so, she's a ridiculously complex and emotional character. Everything she does has meaning, and that meaning is something you can work out. How the hell do you do a mute character in anything other than anime and make them as good as Oono? Thirdly, something we really like is a good soundtrack. When was the last time you saw a western show or movie that had a really memorable, lyricless, ORIGINAL soundtrack? The only ones we can think of are Harry Potter, How to Train Your Dragon, and maybe a couple of songs from Pirates of the Caribbean. There are a shed load of great anime soundtracks though, too many to name.

*Slaps* *Slaps again* Watch both of those. They're great. Tutu in particular is our favourite anime. Outside of those, check out Isekai Shokudou, which is about a guy who owns a restaurant that links to a typical fantasy world with elves, fairies, and dwarves once a week, so he cooks for them. Each episode features two dishes, and it's just a lot of peaceful fun. If you like it, we'd also recommend checking out Bartender and Kuuchuu Buranko, which are roughly the same concept, but with cocktails and psychological disorders respectively. Also have a look at Hakumei to Mikochi, a horribly underwatched show from this winter about two tiny acorn-sized people living in a tree. It's a really warm and homely series, and unlike a lot of slice of lifes, they actually have jobs and do stuff with side characters, rather than just being the same fourish characters sitting around drinking tea.

CGI has this stigma against it, that it honestly no longer deserves. The combination of Kado: The Right Answer, Houseki no Kuni, High Score Girl, and Ufotable shows is enough to tell us that in this last year or so, they’ve really worked out how to do it properly. Especially in Houseki, it doesn’t even try to look 2D. All of the staging and camera angles are different, and it just looks amazing. There’s a pretty good quote that we can’t remember the source of which said “The first thing you have to learn when moving to 3D animation, is to forget everything you knew about 2D animation.” That makes a lot of sense to us due to the styles being so different, so it’s possible that someone (other than Polygon) may try to make a studio focused on CGI, and then do a bunch of collaborations. We’d like to see that. The only real black marks against CGI recently have been Berserk, which we all know why it looks bad, and CGI crowds, who are only in the background. Are the crowds as good as 2D backgrounds? No. But it’s better than having no one in the background, or having motionless people, and since it’s so much cheaper than 2D animated backgrounds, that means that they can spend more time on the important stuff.

That is and always will be an amazing OST. - 9/10 Dennou Coil - Hyouryuu

In games, there is generally random number generation to simulate luck. They're basically formulas that output a random number to dictate the outcome of an event. While they cannot perfectly imitate real life chance due to the nature of formulas and stored numbers, they're a damn good approximation, and are pretty much unpredictable within their finite set of results. Some of the much older and simpler ones have been figured out, and people have worked out how to abuse them. For example in Gen I Pokemon, you can manipulate the RNG by resetting and pressing specific buttons in the correct orders to guarantee an extra strong starter Pokemon (each individual Pokemon has hidden statistics that make it stronger or weaker, so it's possible to get a Squirtle that can 2-shot Brock's Onyx at level 9, Or a Squirtle that has to 3-shot it). Speedruns of Final Fantasy VI all start with the player resetting their system 13(?) times to guarantee a low number of random encounters. In video games with RNG, luck does not exist, but a close approximation of it does. Outside of games, we consider luck to be a part of it, but you can optimise your luck with skill. Consider a basketball game with a person who's never played before. If they have no idea how basketball is played, and just joined in for the fun of it, then they might try to shoot a basket from their chest, or by lobbing it underarm. If they've watched a few games on TV though, they'll know to shoot with a push-throw, and balance the ball with their other hand. Just knowing that is a skill, and they are far more likely to score. Coincidence is definitely a thing though. That's stuff like finding a dropped coin, or winning a scratch card. That's not luck, because it was a predetermined outcome, someone was guaranteed to find the coin or win the scratch card. The person in question was just coincidentally the one who did. So yeah, skill is more important than coincidence (due to the number of applicable situations), and coincidence is more important than luck (due to luck being impossible to isolate).

That's a really nice backing track. - 8/10 Diebuster - Inazuma Double Kick

We've played a decent amount of D&D. RPGs are fun. We have played a play by post type RPG as well before, but we found that it was incredibly hard to dictate events. Especially in something like a combat, you could basically just say "I hide behind the rock and shoot my bow.", and then wait for the GM to respond, before doing the exact same thing again. If you did anything else, you ended up stepping on the toes of the GM and ended up running encounters for yourself.

So something that really bugs us is when they don’t translate the common words that otakus will probably know. Things like Onii-chan or senpai. Why would any normal person just break into Japanese for one word of a sentence? If the character was an otaku themself, then there’s some excuse, but you see the popular girl characters doing it too. On the other hand, they shouldn’t really try to translate words that don’t have an English equivalent. Things like Tsundere or Kami (in the context of Shinto only. The Shinto Kami are not gods, they’re more like spirits).

Kaiji is a great series about a guy who gets caught up in a yakuza gambling scheme, and is forced to play various games for other's amusement or become a slave, or even die. There are two seasons, and a currently airing spin-off with one of the yakuza men as the protagonist. Selector Infected WIXOSS and it's sequel, Selector Spread WIXOSS are card game anime, but you don't watch it for the card game. You watch it because everyone is a god damn psychopath. Really good mysteries and psychological warfare. We actually consider it better than Madoka Magica. There is more to the WIXOSS franchise, but don't watch anything other than those two seasons. The rest of them are really bad. Noein: To Your Other Self is about time travellers coming from the future to try and find an artefact that will prevent a trans-dimensional war, and the destruction of the world. That artefact ends up being inside a girl, who must be sacrificed for it to be used.

So the big faults with other paid streaming sites are: Bad players Not simulcasting Overpricing Small libraries Difficulty navigating We don't really know what goes in to making a player, but make sure it uses HTML5, has intuitive scrubbing (some faults we've seen before are being unable to return to 00:00, having to drag the time bar rather than just click where you want to go, and not being able to skip to an unloaded portion of the video. Some also don't show you the timestamp of the point you're skipping to, so you have to guess.), supports at least 720p, if not 1080p, and has decent servers to prevent buffering. Simulcasting is really important if you're trying to break into the airing anime market. Most of the anime community want to watch episodes weekly, when they come out, rather than binge watch them when they're over. Even if they are the latter group, they can just binge watch after the last episode has been released. Most other paid streaming sites cost between $7-$9 USD per month. We wouldn't recommend straying too far from that price range. Also, don't lock your site to any who haven't paid, just give them incentives like no ads, an extended library, or early access to simulcasts. Make sure that a decent chunk of the money goes directly to the industry. That's basically the only reason that people pay money to watch anime instead of pirating it. If you want to really encourage this, you could try being completely transparent about how much of the money goes to the industry. That, in itself, is a really strong incentive to use your site. Make sure that your library covers a lot of bases. You don't just need the big popular shounen action series, you need romances, dramas, comedies, and slice of lifes too. If you can nab some of the less popular, but highly rated shows too, that would be fantastic. We probably wouldn't pay for anything with less than 100 shows spread across a mixture of genres, and even that we'd be sceptical about. Also, if you don't offer any dubs, that's a serious chunk in your market. Lots of people like dubs. Please, please, please use an anime search engine that allows you to filter by genres. It's such a little thing, but god damn does it help. A few other nice filters are year/season aired, and dub/sub available. Outside of that, make sure that it's easy to find things like the full list of available anime, currently airing shows, and popular/highly rated shows. Here are a few other things that would just be nice to have: The option to change between a light and a dark mode The option to choose between English names and romanised names A forum An intuitive comments section (if you don't want to program your own, Disqus works pretty well, and is fairly easy to moderate too) Some kind of 'Pick of the week' to give some less popular anime the spotlight An anime news feed linking to a site like ANN

We are fairly godlike.

So it's pretty much nothing like what you originally described, but we get the feeling that you're talking about Sakamoto desu ga? Video in the spoiler.

Sorry, but that's way too vague. there are so many OPs like that. Any more information you can give? Something like the number of characters, any identifiable themes or features, any logos, what their uniform looks like etc.

So we recently found our old cartridge for Bravely Default, which we remember being quite good, but for some reason we never got round to finishing it. So we could play it together properly, we grabbed a ROM and fired it up in an emulator. The gameplay is really cool with this mechanic that allows you to store up turns or use them in advance to do really big hits. The Jobs (class) system was pretty well made too, allowing you to switch whenever you want, and mix up your abilities between different jobs, allowing a ton of customisation. We have once again dropped it without even getting halfway through. The writing was absolutely awful, and the voice acting was diabolical too. We actually got fed up of the English voices at one point, so switched to Japanese, AND THEY WERE WORSE! The four protagonists do not seem like good people trying to save the world, they seem like ignorant people foisting their ideals on others. The villains basically seem to be evil for the sake of being evil. Most of them don't gain anything by doing what they're doing, as far as we can see yet at least. Every single line is delivered in such an overplayed, fake way, and the accents are ridiculously stereotypical. There's this monk that you fight early on who's kind of dumb, and he has "the dumb voice". You know the one, kind of deep and slurred, but really forced out of his mouth. So yeah, if you ever want to play Bravely Default, ask yourself: Do you care about the gameplay, the plot, or a mixture of both? If it's either of the latter two, don't bother, play something else.

Just listened to a bit of Humanity has Declined, and you're right, it's really nice. Good find. Now to try and find a place to download it... We love Girls Last Tour and its soundtrack. Our favourites are probably Song of the End, The Rain Song, and an unused insert song called Endless Journey.

Whenever you ask about the best anime soundtracks, there are a few names that always come up. Samurai Champloo, Zankyou no Terror, Beck, etc. While they are definitely good, there are some anime that really go unnoticed despite having amazing OSTs. What are some that you can think of? By the way, we're talking proper background music here, not OPs and EDs. So the reason that we decided to make this thread is because we were having a discussion about a certain anime with our friends the other day, and decided to check out the OST, since we remember it being pretty decent. It then absolutely blew us away and became one of our favourite OSTs of all time. That anime was Queen's Blade. For any of you unfamiliar with the series, it's a really high ecchi show about girls with swords ripping each other's clothes off, but just listen to the stuff in this spoiler. For any of you who are interested in this sort of thing, that OST is by Yokoyama Masaru, who also did the music for series like Your Lie in April and Kuzu no Honkai.

Due to the fact that we're seasonal watchers, we tend to watch whatever is new, so the vast majority of our anime knowledge is based around the last 5ish years. Despite that, we've notice that we have a great love for the first half of the 2000s. Shows like Princess Tutu, Scrapped Princess, Planetes, Diebuster, and Beck are all long time favourite of ours. The second half was good too, but we don't think as good as the first half of the 2000s. Some of the real stand ups were Bartender, Dennou Coil, Gurren Laggn, Baccano, and Sword of the Stranger. So basically, our favourite period is the 2000s, tending towards the former half.

Yeah, it's unlikely. The manga finished in 2013, and it's been completely dormant as a series since. It was decently popular, but got some fairly negative responses, especially to the second half. Reboots normally only go to the really big and well known series like Sailor Moon, Hunter x Hunter, or Gatchaman (which was a really popular 70s superhero anime). Guilty Crown doesn't really fit those shoes. A Certain Magical Index is getting a 3rd season in the autumn, but that's a massive light novel series which is still ongoing, so they can basically guarantee that it will sell. Again, Guilty crown doesn't have that. Basically the only thing still going for Guilty Crown is the band EGOIST, who a bunch of songs for the anime and use Inori as a mascot character. They've pretty much moved on now though.

We feel as though we know the anime that you're talking about, but cannot place it at all. Google isn't being too helpful either since it just keeps on brining up Mayo Chiki!, which we highly doubt is what you're looking for. For the moment we'll just mention Ouran High School Host Club, which fits most of the points, except the motivation for becoming a butler (actually a host, but close enough). If we remember, we'll reply again.

We don’t use alts on here, but we do technically have them elsewhere. Alongside our dual the_twig accounts, we have solo accounts on certain social media sites, but they are all set to private, and are used exclusively for talking to people we know in real life. We did also have an alt on our last forum, which we clearly labled as such so as not to confuse people, because we were mods with decent powers over the running of the site, and needed a way to test things on the user side or a target to test mod powers whenever we changed something to make sure it worked properly.

In what way shape or form were we nasty? We answered you question and then reassured you. Now can you stop with this slander please, especially in threads we haven't even commented in. It literally breaks rule number 1 of these forums. We will not respond to any further provocations.

Whatever collection you looked at, it wasn't ours. We own barely anything, and don't have an account on that site. MyFigueCollection is kind of like MyAnimeList for figures. You can make an account and then list your collection from their database. As for sites to buy figures, MyFigureCollection should link to some. We don't really know though since we've never bought any online.

MyFigureCollection seems decent. It's mainly just for figures, but lists some other things as well. It also has links to sites where you can buy the items. https://myfigurecollection.net/

Planetes is a near-future sci-fi series in which a significant proportion of the human race lives in orbit. That causes a few problems though, because there is a lot of debris up there, and some of it moves incredibly fast and is really dangerous. Because of this, there are a group of people who’s jobs are to collect and dispose of this debris. The anime really goes deep into the physics of moving around in space, with the astronauts using tiny amounts of propellant, and lining it up with their centre of mass so they don’t just spin in circles, and not drawing stars when there is something bright or reflective near to the camera (which is why you can’t see stars in the lunar landing photos). 3-gatsu no Lion is about a guy who plays shogi (Japanese chess, you don’t need to know anything about it to enjoy the show), and has a serious case of depression due to unintentionally emotionally destroying his foster siblings. The anime follows him learning to rely on others, and in the second season, having others rely on him. The second season has the single best arc from anything we’ve ever seen. Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 is based on a real simulation of an 8.0 earthquake with its epicentre in central Tokyo, and follows two children and a woman they meet walking through the destroyed city with hundreds of other survivors trying to get home. It covers everything from the rescue squads and their robots clearing rubble, to dealing with food and water shortages, to the difficulties of disease and sunstroke.