Just kidding, it’s more tits.

Impressions:

So if you’ve been waiting with bated breath to know what the protagonists do this week, then wait no further. They take a bath. And then Lotte wanders off, climbs onto a hay cart, and falls asleep. That’s right. She just traipses into the middle of a forest, somehow manages to find a hay cart by the side of the road, climbs six feet up into it, and then proceeds to sleep through being carted through the entire forest, and is shocked when she falls out of it the next morning. And then the party sets out to find her. This is the entire contribution of the entire protagonist group for the entire episode.

Elsewhere, we have Aldra, a half-demon with a design where they just started adding pointy things to her and then had no idea when to stop… aside from her ginormous ass bumping into everything. She… uh… does the laundry. And cleans. And then animates her frog and mouse dolls by squeezing them between her breasts and thighs. And goes around to all the antagonists to have a chitchat, but I’d be lying if I said I was actually paying attention to any of the magical or political babble. I have a better recollection of her squealing over the fish on her shopping trip than I do what she was talking about with Drillhead.

The big revelation for me this week was that the text they’re using is not in fact just fantasy gibberish as I originally assumed, but a nigh-illegible English font instead. Also, they use the same font for typesetting on wanted posters as they do for handwriting. This could mean something, but I’m not sure what yet. Perhaps next week will have the answer. 

Preview:

SOUND THE CONCH.

That’s just adorable, Kouga.

Impressions:

On the upside, Kouga successfully managed to cross the line from annoying to hilariously terrible this week when he presented Jin with fanart that he drew. The only thing that could’ve made that scene any more hilariously terrible is if Jin went and hung it up on his fridge. On the downside, the terrible preview last week of a smokey room was about right on the money for the excitement level of the episode. The entire first half was basically Kouga and his sister going "We had the plot explained to us offscreen." That in itself could’ve been fine. Exposition exists for a reason. To succinctly convey important information in a brief fashion. Of course, since it took basically the entire first half of the episode thanks to them stammering, waking up, shots of walking past windows, flashbacks, and declarations that the status quo wasn’t going to change, ‘succinct’ has long since been mugged and left for dead in an alley somewhere. They just made matters worse with Kouga’s sister doing the whole eavesdrop/misunderstand thing at the end of it too.

Otherwise, boring and pretty tedious. You know what they say, "A Zetman without someone being stabbed in the chest isn’t really Zetman." Okay, so I may be the only one who says it, but it holds. At least when YJI faffs about with its exposition, it’s things I wis they’d actually shown, not nonsense technobabble from a bunch of emotionless drones rehashing the same few things ad nauseum. Yada yada, Jin gets reunited with his grandfather’s severed-head-on-robot-spider-body yada yada yada. I’m not entirely certain what exactly he was expecting or why he’d be so shocked by it. I really doubt anybody’s in this for the emotional depth of the characters anyway.

Preview:

Oh boy. Misunderstandings. The bread and butter of all truly compelling character interactions.

Those are terrible child names.

Impressions:

Very generic and very boring episode, particularly the second half which was as plain as I’ve seen in a long while. It was practically indistinguishable from a thousand other date bits. I miss the time when Mahiro controlled her with threats of violence and forks, brief as it may have been. When she used to tear open demons too for that matter instead of being nothing but a transparent cloying wish fulfillment device. The biggest laugh I got from the episode is when Mahiro’s friend suddenly teleported about 6 feet away, conveniently just off camera. One moment he’s right next to Mahiro… talking to him even. And the next, he’s suddenly gone for the next minute or two.

This episode, Mahiro completely reverted to a complete spineless doormat, and it wasn’t even played off for laughs. He said that he hated her, which made her depressed, so then he said it was a lie and took her on a date montage, the third of the episode, I believe. That’s seriously it. Most of the second half wasn’t even trying to be funny. I’m not sure what they were trying to do with it since all it led up to was her just saying that she loved him for the fourtieth time, but this time with a sunset and emotional music swelling. Nothing actually leading up to it. No reason to actually give a crap this time compared to any other. Just more annoying cloying nonsense. Stab it with a goddamned fork.

Preview:

At least it has a giant sword.

His fashion sense is about as good as a fusion of two people as it normally is.

Impressions:

Fairly boring first half. Flashbacks to one of the previous series, exposition explaining the penis-growing thing from last episode, yada yada yada. The highlight was easily Amata’s exceedingly messed up dream about being literally half Kagura and hunting down Mikono. Mykage continued to sexually harass Zess in her bedroom at night. You’d think she’d at least want to report to someone that the head of the enemy military has been breaking into her room and ruining all her mirrors. You’d also think they’d have actual nurses looking in on Shrade as he lays supposedly dying, but the healing power of manlove surpasses all. Mikono, meanwhile, keeps futzing around in a cave. Thrilling.

Amata goes running off based on his spider sense for the second half (with other random cast members in chase) and finds Kagura’s crazy little obsessive shrine to Alicia where it’s also revealed that he and Amata are two halves of the same person or something, a revelation first revealed by Mikono’s throbbing ovaries back in like… episode 2. Since they’re finally addressing it, I guess that means they’re finally gearing up to end the show. Zessica also kissed him to force him to fly away due to his uncontrollable wing boner and was then robot punched, but I put about as much stock in her having died in a distant cloud of smoke while Mykage giggled about it as I do in Shrade being straight.

Also, just FYI, the broadcast next week will be delayed by about an hour and a half.

Preview:

Well, at least they didn’t reveal Zessica lived yet.

If only this took place in a strip club. Or maybe a bath house.

Impressions:

Well, they finally reveal what the deal with the other ghost is. Unfortunately, they do it by one gigantic stream of exposition from Kirie. She’s the forgotten part of Yuuko’s past and memories along with all her hatred and whatnot. They could’ve at least eased into that as Yuuko was getting increasingly more possessive, clingy, and jealous through the start of the episode, but they jumped straight right from slapping away clumsy idiots trying to feed him to infodumping about the whole bloody thing. Yeah, yeah. The evil side. I get it. You did not need to spend a quarter of the episode explaining that shadows are eeeeeeeeevil.

The ending was a little better handled, particularly with the blurring between the two right before she attacked Teiichi, but I think that would’ve been a much better cliffhanger for the episode than skipping ahead to him all fixed up but her having forgotten him. It could’ve also had a bit more impact if they had some kind of connecting moment in the episode instead of her just going through her usual superficial teasing while he squirms uncomfortably. Also, it’s a little strange for him to just casually wander back to someone who just nearly killed him, but I guess that’s par for the course with the brain-challenge male anime protagonist.

With CG cars and mechs too!

Impressions:

Nice to see the plot’s finally moving again. For a moment, I was wondering what the hell they were doing with Asami at all. First they have her smirking as she cheap shots her opponent during a race, that she’s been a martial artist since she was little in a series where the only martial arts are chi blocking and bending,then she’s ‘betraying’ her father to side with the others and easily beating the guy that fought and defeated just about the entire rest of the cast in preceeding episodes. But then we get to "Oh yeah, she can live with the Avatar in her sanctum completely free of suspicion while the chief of police goes on a vendetta-quest" and there we were. Order was restored once again. Well, I guess it beats setting up her father and then taking over his business as it seemed like things were going for a while. Especially on the heels of the big enemy plan being to lure them into their inner sanctum and then hit them with things. You know, a rented warehouse on the outskirts of the city works equally well as your inner sanctum. As does not revealing yourself to be a rebelling fanatic to the police force. A hired gun works just as well. Speaking of stupidity, you’d also think that they’d have figured out at this point not to use people with metal connected to themselves against a group that mainly uses electricity, but apparently not. 

Tahno earned a few points for the beaten and bedraggled dog look he pulled off quite well along with still having some actual attitude. I’d rather see more of him than the two stooges who don’t have any point in the show anymore besides inflicting ‘comedy’ and continually fawning over Asami to piss off everybody else. Oh yeah, and their blood quest against Nameless Firebender From The Past I guess, who struck again and apparently killed Asami’s mother. Nameless Firebender From the Past is the true antagonist, having now killed the parents of over half the characters in the show. And that’s just the ones we know of. Maybe we should mix it up a little, eh?

Preview:

If you’re reading this, it means that I forgot to change the template.

Sure thing, Speedy.

Impressions:

The whole timeskip thing has officially worn out its welcome. The obsession with the writers going "Look at all this stuff that happened during it which we’re now going to pseudo recap" instead of… you know… being a superhero show is becoming unnerving. At least they’ve moved away from gremlins, which is a step in the right direction after three damn weeks of the things, but the show needs to get moving in present again and stop futzing around trying to be clever. This week’s recap/exposition du jour was Clone-Roy who is now totally not hopped up on heroin because this is a Saturday morning cartoon. The whole nonsense about the original Speedy was a bit painful too. Not what, four episodes ago, they showed him alive with Cadmus going "Yeah, definitely keeping Stubby around." If you really wanted to sell Clone-Roy as paranoid and delusional, maybe you shouldn’t have revealed that he was right a month ago. Wally and Artemis have also apparently quit and are living without pants together. Heroin bad, no-pants good. Got it. I’ll make a note.

The other half of the episode was about Intergang activating some old golems with technobabble and for some ill-defined purpose before Sportsmaster mindraped them somehow. The focus was mostly on Blue Beetle giving his backstory though. The scarab was kind of amusing at least with its suggestions to stab things, but Generic Large Monster of the week was still well below notice or interest. I’m also assuming that Sportsmaster’s new buddy is Deathstroke just because the show is half Teen Titans already. *shrug* I can’t imagine they’ll show him any time within the next month if they keep recapping things anyway.

Well, more like "steal my time."

Crystals began appearing in the world of Esteras 3,000 years ago along with a mysterious race of elementals which looked the same as humans except for their brightly colored hair. It was soon discovered that anybody with elemental blood could use magic by channeling it through a Crystal. As time passed, elemental blood spread into humanity until almost everybody was able to use magic and a prosperous civilization grew out of it. However, there was one Crystal that nobody could ever use; Black Crystal. Even approaching it caused people to lose complete control of their magic. 3,000 years after magic appeared in Esteras, Black Crystal is beginning to grow everywhere and is threatening to destroy the world.

This is real payoff for working on TWilight INSanity a little while back. TWilight refrAIN is a step up in every single way. Better art, better music, better game design, a far deeper engine with even some hidden spellcard stuff, a less obtuse route system, the works. I don’t know what happened between TWINS and TWAIN, but they stepped up their game here immensely. Hell, even the story’s more cohesive and less repetetive between routes, although make no mistake about it, it’s still just a SHMUP story. If you squint though, it’s almost identical to the digest version of a Tales game’s story, requisite racism subplot and magical technobabble and all. It even has an integrated replay/score uploading system. It was also only through working on this that I realized you could start games from partway through replay data too. Neat. TWAIN’s also the game that AQLoop’s oft-delayed upcoming RPG is based on, although as I’ve mentioned, that needs a lot of work yet before it’s ready for release/being good.

The only real thing of note that was different here in terms of working on it from TWINS is that the images were a surprising nightmare, not made any better by a whole lot of Engrish that had to be redone or more often, just outright erased. "Brothers" is not the gender neutral word for "siblings", AQLoop. They were also super efficient about reusing as much as possible which made it a nightmare for me since they did things like have BGM and Vol as two separate parts of the sprite sheet and things that were left aligned in one menu ended up being center aligned when reused elsewhere and… yeah. There was also the ever-fun issue of one character’s name. Trying to fit "Shizukuishi" into the same space as "雫石" is a special brand of fun that I thought I was finished with after dealing with Galaxy Angel’s 烏丸/Karasuma.

In any case, TWAIN’s one of my favorite SHMUPs in recent years, even over most of the recent Touhou stuff, so I’d definitely say check it out if you have even a passing interest in the genre. Also to not let my work go to waste too, I guess. Thanks to everybody who helped and the like as well.

TWAIN English Patch
Forum for Bug Reports Etc

As for the last in AQLoop’s trilogy, Alternative Sphere (prequel to TWINS), I do plan on doing it, but it may be a little while. I’ve gotten distracted by a new longish project. I do still need some help hacking for it, so drop me a line if you’ve got any expertise there and can lend a hand. I have enough to disassemble and reassemble the scripts and images, but the game relies heavily on inline commands which means that handling linebreaking within the scripts is a nightmare. There’s also some random minor stuff (tooltip popups and the like) that I haven’t quite been able to extract yet plus other things that’d be fun to disassemble and mess around with if possible. Anyway, maybe once I finish the common segments and some of the character-specific stuff there, I’ll start work on AltS, but more likely, I’ll just power on with that to the end and handle AltS afterward.

And yes, poor Narumi is supposedly male.

Wait, what? She has a bow?

Impressions:

Wow. The last third of this episode could have easily been mistaken for a regular RPG adaptation instead of some kind of baking simulator. It wasn’t even a bad little fight between Rick and Black Tail, although little is certainly the correct word for it. Or maybe tiny. Now triple its length and we can call it an actual fight scene. I can’t say I’m much of a fan of Rouna, the royal maid though. She needs to put a few more points into walking and maybe a few less into her chest exploding out of her uniform. At least she’s literally covered in knives, as all dog-maids seem to be, even if she can’t take three steps without collapsing in a heap. One wonders how she hasn’t killed herself yet.

Regardless, the first half was pretty much the usual waste of time. It introduced the royal threesome, but they’re more or less the same harmless boring bread-obsessed lot as everybody else. They hire Rick and Neris… who is apparently an expert archer… to catch Black Tail, a thief who is of course, the same catgirl waitress that had been lurking around earlier. And is also the only character in the show with a black tail. All that bread must be affecting their brains that they can’t solve this mystery. I’m also not sure I understand the logic behind an archer being the correct fighter to bring to an enclosed space. Then again, they were paid in flowers and bishie sparklies. You get what you earn.

Preview:

Shaking down the catgirl.

I enjoyed this episode exactly as much as I expected to.

Impressions:

Because you know how much I love flashback episodes. Especially in shows that are already dragging like nobody’s business. Ranko did not begin this episode well either, going so far as to mentally introduce herself as well as listing out the names of her entire family. Thanks. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to catch that the woman who looks like a much older version of her that you call "mom" was your mother without that. And then it was right into the ginormous flashback that devoured almost all of the episode. Because let’s just retcon in that she used to be totally different and Chihiro changed her. Why not? That’s good storytelling, right? Making up character traits after the fact totally contradictory to everything you’ve shown and then having them grow out of them ten minutes later through sheer protagonist power and childhood love at first sight. Some day, I’ll figure out why the flashback is the first tool Japanese writers always seem to break out. You’ve already intimated that they’re close and spent a lot of time together. What part of this episode couldn’t have been done in the present for an immediate effect instead of divorcing its events from almost the entirety of the cast? Urgh.

And speaking of the present, we also have the screaming overdramatic male friends. You know, characters that are important to the show. Fantastic. It really is doing absolutely everything in its power to stretch itself out, isn’t it? And it’s on to the second half and more flashbacks. And what was all this leading up to? Ranka throwing a temper tantrum about Rea kissing him and screaming that she’s not going to lose. At least Chihiro had the good sense to recoil from the crazy woman who just grabbed him, slammed him against a wall, pinned him down, and then tried to kiss him instead of standing there in stunned confusion. That may be the most survival instinct I’ve seen in a spineless generic male of his ilk in a long while.

Preview:

Uh huh, Ranko. You’re a real deep character.