Content: description of my little adventure during 4 days at Japan Expo (France, Paris, Parc des Expositions), goodsmile company booth, tsubameyado, loot and many more. Also, I’ve got my camera this time!

If you need an introduction regarding Japan Expo, I suggest you to check out the blog post I did a year ago.
Once again this year, Japan Expo was definitely crowded here and there during the 4 days, totalizing 200.000 attending visitors. I can’t help but wonder how come we can have so many visitors compared to Anime Expo, especially considering the stark difference regarding the guests… oh well.

Anyway, let’s start the usual!

Report and Impressions

Wednesday 29th june 2011
(before the JE)

Little introduction before the event: this year JE was definitely not what I fully wanted to attend, although unlike last year, it was planned thoroughly a month in advance… I guess I had too much spare cash this time and wanted to meet again my friends and acquaintances from France for a blast.

As you can imagine, I wasn’t looking forwards to Yuuki (Escaflowne) or Igarashi (Candy). I didn’t play any silent hill games or anything that would make me want to check out  Yamaoka. Let’s not talk about the random japanese catchers etc. Then… who was I looking for, aside of having fun with people?
Only Nightow and May’n presences are probably the noteworthy big shots (but considered as regular guests for JE staff) and Baba (tales of series producer).

Thus, the plan was set in motion, and it was definitely thanks to Spear that I didn’t cough ridiculous amount of cash just for lodging (Paris is really not your best vacation place if you look for something cheap…). Thus, I only had to spend 82€ ($118) for the thalys and 17.2€ ($25) for travel within Paris (RER expenses are quite expensive on the long run, even for 4 days).

Anyway, I arrived at Spear’s place on wednesday evening and we were soon joined by Mic2070, then Mereck (kawasoft), kohaque (french SOS brigade) and kef (touhou.net). That being said, good ol’ mereck was once again doing stuff at the very last minute (and being cursed with  fucked up delivery of the Narcissu 2nd discs), so he basically showed up around midnight, which is obviously not really healthy for him considering how painful the first day will be for setting up the kawasoft booth etc.

Thursday 30th june 2011
(first day of the JE)

A very slow start for all of us, waking up around 7am (although mic had it worse, waking up at 5am as he has to help touhou.net booth for thursday only). Thus, I and spear had some leeway to dispel our lethargic state a little bit.
Even so, we didn’t have many choice but to press on, considering things were a bit serious from the get go: the objective of thursday was to secure a signature coupon for May’n, as even though there are 3 chances (Thursday, Saturday and Sunday), probabilities are a tad annoying considering Thursday and Sunday were a drawing lot, and Saturday being the only “first come first served” system. On our way, we met TsUb4sa and mygoddess (whom I had the pleasure to meet both of them last year during yukarin’s con..FAILrence).
We all remembered how chaotic it was for some popular guests with the drawing lot system last year, so we had to take all chances at our disposal.
That being said, due to the queue being extremely cluttered, I and Spear decided to pass. We decided to check out few booths, notably Animate (since Cospa is absent this year), while Mic was trying to get his coupon for May’n signature.

This was the first disappointment of the convention to me, especially if we have to compare it with cospa last year: animate was simply split into 2 kind of merchandise: moe and yaoi. The problem aside of the very polarized content is the fact that they offered goods from only 4 series: K-on!, Hakuouki and a very minimalistic content of Heartcatch Pretty Cure and Evangelion (rather obsolete due to the presence of the evastore).
You can imagine how limited the choices were, especially if the only things being sold were miniaturized instrument models, “music box” and figures for K-on, wall scroll and cosplay set for Hakuouki etc.
The only noteworthy thing you can buy from them was the figure of Asuka Langley, gothic lolita by Kotobukiya for 40€ ($58) (which Spear bought on saturday).

Anyway, we were roaming around, trying to figure a bit the time schedule of the goodies at Tokyo Big Sight booth. Mic called spear, taunting us big time that he just got his coupon. We went back there to try our luck, and things weren’t looking good when the 3 persons in front of us were clearly happy with their drawing lot.
I got mine with a nice “gagnant! (winner)” on it, and spear and tsub4sa followed suit (can’t remember if we lost mygoddess already at this point): truth to be told we were wondering if so few winning drawing lot were drawn, or if the staff went a bit overboard with the number of winning lots.

Anyway back to our usual HQ (Kawasoft and Touhou.net booths), we joined Mic who was waiting for us with a “special attire”.

Isn't this Aya cute? D:

Since our objective was surprisingly accomplished already, we didn’t have much things to do, especially considering how light thursday schedule is. I tried to check out if there were any noteworthy cosplays around, but most are the usual Naturo, Bleach, One piece galore with the only exception of a Shannon running around, but couldn’t catch her.
We paid a visit to the niconico booth, and we could meet Momoi Haruko (Seto San from Seto no Hanayome, Feyris Nyannyan from Steins;Gate). Lots of fun with her acting as a MC, full of energy as usual. She had the nice surprise to see Mereck’s girlfriend, Niwakins, cosplaying Makise Kurisu from Steins;gate. Momoi beckoned her and immediately used Feyris voice to match the mood.

A little while later she tried some exotic nekomimi: they are actually mechanical and one of the niconico douga staff was screwing around with the remote here and there.
Equipped with this weird contraption, she was going to perform a mini live, although the vast majority of the audience was as passive as dry dead fish…

After her performance of the opening song of Witch Nurse Komugi, we tried getting a signature from her, which didn’t work for everyone, unfortunately (Nyo and Spear being the lucky bastards of course). Oh well, since she was going to stay for the 4 days of the JE, I thought I will have another shot.

It is slightly past 1pm and I wanted to check out the little conference hosted by Bandai Namco, hoping they would give some information regarding Tales of Graces f and Tales of Xillia. Curious, spear tagged along with me, while mic was a bit busy. On my way, I could see that shannon cosplayer from afar, but I didn’t have time to call her out once again.
Unfortunately, that conference was quite a chore: the start was plagued by lengthy introductions and trailers of upcoming mainstream games of Saint Seiya, both One Piece games, Dragon Ball, Tekken (along with a trailer of its CG movie) before we finally reach their trailers for Tales of the Abyss 3D and Tales of Graces f. Things were a tad annoying with a french MC a bit too hyper and extremely excited about the shonen mainstream games, whereas most of the audience was arguably not impressed by these. Spear had to drop halfway as it was a tad boring and the fact he wanted to have a peek at may’n 15 min showcase. I decided to give up on that, considering the duration and the fact I really don’t want to go through the same content the next day just to have few information about tales of games.
Anyway, as usual, Tales of the Abyss 3D trailer was nothing to write home about, since a 3DS game is hardly possible to gauge properly, especially if it is a port. As soon as its trailer is done, we got the bad surprise that the video for Tales of Graces f was not working… but Baba Hideo (tales of games producer) confirmed that the game should be released in US and Europe in 2012.
As a compensation for this technical issue, Namco staff played the first trailer of Tales of Xillia, without much information aside of being the game celebrating the 15th anniversary of the franchise. There was absolutely no hint if they plan to bring it outside of Japan, but Baba encouraged the french audience to raise their enthusiasm if they want it (which obviously generated a huge response).
Considering I couldn’t get his signature coupon for this day session, I tried to approach Baba considering I wasn’t exactly sure if the JE signing session schedule was correct (since Namco board at their booth indicated that Baba was only signing on thursday).
He was quite surprised I had a japanese copy of Tales of Graces f and gladly signed it and a Shikishi I brought with me.  I could have a little chat with him in japanese (not so easely, but he had no trouble to understand what I meant fortunately), and he seems quite aware of the popularity of the tales of franchise in the US and in Europe. He couldn’t really tell me that much (tried to ask how long it took them for Xillia for instance), and it was impossible for him to confirm if they will keep a dual audio options for Graces (and potentially Xillia), but he certainly saw that  fans had a huge liking for japanese Seiyuu.
By the way, some french fans were also quick to spot him and ask him also an autograph, although I sort of served as a translator (oh well…). Without much surprise, they only knew the Tales of Symphonia series and praised it, although they asked what was the name of the Mana Tree that Lloyd was about to name. Of course, it was Yggdrassil (it is of course not a mere norse mythology reference. Check out Tales of Phantasia if you still don’t know what I’m talking about). Well, it was a pleasure to discuss with him, quite friendly and open despite I was basically your random fan who happened to play an imported version.  Could also take a picture of him.

As expected it was way past May’n showcase, so I just went back to touhou.net in order to catch up with Spear and mic. That said, kardhafi told me he found an interesting doujinshi involving Touhou, Umineko no Naku Koro ni and Madoka Magica. Without much afterthough, I paid a visit to the circle, Moe Luv Circle. Over there, a few bunch of doujin stuff based on Touhou, Umineko and Madoka (post cards, key chains, etc), and more importantly, various doujinshi.
Surprisingly enough, that booth was run by a group of spanish fans: color me startled that they came all the way from spain to sell their doujinshi. Due to my position and hobbies, I certainly didn’t have any trouble to oblidge, and bought their general doujinshi, along with a umineko and madoka centred, all of them in English (and a proper spoiler warning for the umineko doujinshi).
Oh yeah, remember the Shannon cosplayer I mentioned twice? She is part of that circle. So it was 2 birds with 1 stone.
Of course, in order to respect their work, I will only post few shots of their fanbook (don’t expect any scans). The 8 spanish artists had their respective deviantart and/or Pixiv, as follow:
Aiwa (pixiv), Ninamo (pixiv / DA),KawaiiDream (pixiv / DA), Ayame Shiroi (DA), Nevee (pixiv / DA), Kenneos (pixiv / DA), Lisco (DA), CyberSaku (DA).

After this unexpected loot session, I more or less checked around with spear and mic if there was anything interesting or whatnot (just in case we don’t find anything out of ordinary, like last year). And well, spear did find something: a 1/7 griffin Uesagi Kenshin figure for 25€ ($36). No matter how odd the price was, it was definitely e genuine figure so heh.
We pretty much went all over the main hall and went to the second hall (hall 6, hosting the comic con, video games and signing/conference booths), and we found the Good Smile Company booth, pretty well organized this year once again.
Aside of the usual flyers (which were the same than last year), the figures shown there were quite recent, along with interesting teasers such like both Madoka nendoroids (Magical girl and school uniform versions). Aside of the usual free fans, you could also buy the Hatsune Miku Nendoroid, Ouen version (support version) for 30€ ($43). Yes, as surprising as it might be, it is roughly the same price than buying it from their website, shipping included (or even cheaper if you consider the fixed shipping even for 1 nendo, and the customs taxes). They had 300 of them, and they still had 70 on Saturday noon, to ultimately sell all of them (either by the end of Saturday, or Sunday morning). Color me extremely curious how they could lighten the obviously expensive shipping fees due to the weight and numbers, but also the customs.
Anyway, it was quite eye candy here and there and indulged myself with a Miku Ouen nendo (Spear, tsub4sa and mygoddess followed my lead).

one of the cutest nendo to date

As the end of the day was ultimately closing by, I tried to check out other booths, avoiding that huge forest of bootlegs and whatnot. Found myself at Book Off, dealing with second hand stuff that are quite in good condition for a very reasonable price. I found there the visual fanbook and ultimate artbook of Kanon, but even if the price wasn’t that high (28€ / $40) for each, I’m not really that much of a Kanon fan, especially how Hinoue was pretty much very clumsy at that period (if it was some clannad/LB or white clover book, it would be a complete different story).
At least, I could find Ito Noizi’s Gurren artbook for 28€, in an excellent shape. On our way back, Spear got himself a Furyu Tenshi Hand Sonic figure for 22€ ($31.17).

The first day is finally over, and I honestly didn’t expect having that kind of loot right from the get go.

day 1 loot

Spear and I returned home, while Mic, Kef, Mereck and Kohaque made a stop to buy some food, in order to avoid buying prohibitive priced food at the convention (yep, the 1€ per takoyaki ball stuff are back…).

Friday 1st july 2011
(second day of the JE)

The objective of the day was much less difficult this time I guess: grabbing Nightow’s signature, and hopefully getting the  Vash ex libris as Nyo could only get the wolfwood one on thursday (they certainly underestimated the demand for this illustration.
This time however, I got a tad unlucky, but mic could drew a winning lot and passed to me his coupon. Spear and Tsub4sa continued their winning streak meanwhile.

Once the coupons in the pocket, the whole morning was more or less a stroll around the various booths, although as I mentioned previously, the incredible ratio of bootlegs and other HK stuff is really a huge deterrent for any patronage, unless you are either not caring about that, or not really aware of this plaguing issue.
It certainly help to have a rough idea how the bootlegs usually look like, and having official nendoroid beforehand make the whole ordeal a breeze to deal with (well, some captain obvious cases were ridiculously easy, such like a shop selling 3-4 (lol?) snow miku #150 with the usual poor bootleg issues such like the lack of snowflakes printing on the box etc).
It is always  wonder if JE staff are truly serious about their claim of not condoning bootleg and counterfeits, considering more than 50% of the frigging convention merchandises ARE bootleg to begin with (not even subtle when people actually use popular fanarts, such like DMYO’s black rock shooter or even pixiv arts).

day 2 loot

Afterwards it became a much less busy day may I say: we paid a visit to Momoi who was still in high spirits, despite the audience was still again a bit hesitant or shy to cheer her on. This tome however, when she was free, I could ask her for a signature on a shikishi (considering it was a tad rude already, as there was album and single for sale). In the end, I also bought her single and she signed it as well.

Anyway, as it is almost noon, we started making the sandwiches with what we bought yesterday. One would think we should have done in the morning, but Mereck and Kohaque forgot to remove the ham etc from the cooler and of course took it, forcing us to camp a table and make the sandwiches right in the open… I guess we can call that the true doujin spirit: anyhow, anytime, anywhere, do it yourself! *cough*

The rest of the day was pretty much a slow leisure time: more “window shopping” or rather “let’s dodge bootleg minefields and feeling pity for the poor souls being fooled” session. I’ve lead the merry group to the “clayz” booth, showing Miyagawa’s assistant working on a new figure (which will be a Akemi Homura, “normal” pose that should be shown for the next Wonder Festival). They were selling Gretel, Blue Pastel limited edition figure for 20€ ($29) and  Morikubo Yuna for 69€ ($99), with 2 other unidentified figures. Spear and tsub4sa bought a gretel, while mygoddess take a yuna. I was a bit tempted by the gretel considering the price, although I rarely fancies figures aside of nendoroids for some reason, so  more or less restrained a bit my impulses.
Our merry group (as usual, spear, mic, tsub4sa and me, with mygoddess being a bit on his own) attended the little concert done by yumeduo.  We got nice classics here and there such like Super Mario World themes, One Winged Angel, etc.

Afterwards, we just had enough time to go to the signing area to grab our nightow signatures (with far more ex libris this time).

The day was pretty much over after that: went to say hi to some people I knew, then go back to touhou.net before the closure of the second day.
A big core of Touhou.net, Kawasoft and Kohaque lead everyone for a dinner at a japanese restaurant close to Spear’s house. Much to my horror, the price tags were definitely nothing to sneeze at, so I went on my stingy mode and helped myself with a mere yakitori menu (still 7.2€ / $10 in the face… at least, tap water is free and available in france, unlike in belgium…).
Mereck had the “good idea” to appoint me close to one of his japanese contacts, Takebayashi who has been in France for 8 months already. Well, I could get a thorough revision of stroke order of hiragana and katakana, and it seems I could entertain him, otherwise he was pretty much on his own (I surely didn’t expect I would have to talk in Japanese after my encounter with Baba). Color me surprised that he could hang around with his Homura’s cosplay today… well it was a little bit creepy, nothing more.

Saturday 2nd july 2011
(third day of the JE)

Here we gooooo… Saturday, the dreaded day, which makes look like friday was the calm before the storm.
Nothing really noteworthy to do, but the problem was obviously the number of attending visitors reaching almost the double of Thursday.

Tried to grab another May’n signature for a friend, and more or less got it without much problem (no real guilt since despite being first come first served mode for saturday, there wasn’t a rush at all, proved afterwards by the queue).
Since May’n was first come first served, I also took the opportunity to try getting a Yamaoka coupon just in case if spear or mic missed the opportunity, and it was certainly a wise decision: got it, while spear got a dud.

After this third coupon hunt, Spear, Mic, Tsub4sa and I decided to check out Tokyo Big Sight booth for a free paper bag but also camping for the demonstration of Kanan Asuka, doujin artist who did some cute originals but also Nanoha doujinshi.
While Spear and I were in the queue for the paper bag, I noticed the wall full of messages and pictures, and it seems you could get a complete set (bag, fan and tokyo guide) if you simply take a pose with one of their mascot. Well, why not then? A little shortcut, but it was definitely much more time efficient, and we of course let our places for other people. Since the queue was for noon but the demonstration is at 12:30, we decided to stay anyway, so I could have yet another chat with Japanese staff (Spear though I literally broke when I kept replying in japanese to anyone, www).
Without much wait though, Kanan Asuka started her demonstration, while one of the staff was describing what she was doing and a translator was trying to keep it up (some awkward words, but she certainly had a decent French). The demonstration lasted for 30 minutes, leading to an interesting and cute art but wasn’t obtainable for some reason. The process was admitted to be actually 8hours, with a comment that some people are faster than that, and Kanan was aspiring to be faster, but to encourage her, I yelled a random “十分です” which seems to have worked.
After that, they started their sign session, with 4 special Shikishi (similar to the Nanoha ones we got last year with Yukarin), only destined for the first 50 attendants for each of the two demonstrations on  saturday and sunday. After some struggle, I got mine.
Since spear and I knew she was doing doujinshi, we asked to the staff when we can buy her doujinshi, and it seems it is only after the second demonstration around 15:30.

Taking our leave, we first checked if there wasn’t anything new at kawasoft and touhou.net boothes, and I had the nice surprise surprise to meet some german guy, and one of them was cosplaying TK, so a mandatory photo was of course taken.

dance in the shadow!

Next, we decided to check out shiitake’s works at nobi nobi’s booth. Unfortunately, as expected, there wasn’t really any artbook or so over there, just the faity tale book, which is a bit a “waste” for us. That said, there was a lottery, with a handmade drawn shikishi as a prize (it seems it was done every day), the result being communicated on 6pm. After taking part of it, we returned to the tokyo big sight for the grand sale, and I took basically one of each, except the touhou doujinshi (the total was just for 22€ / $31.7 ). Tsubasa took every doujinshi, just like Spear, although I can’t remember what Mic bought.
Midway, we checked if Animate didn’t change offer anything but nope. However, on the back of the booth, there were other figures, and among them, the gothloli Asuka mentioned previously, which spear bought on the spot.

Day 3 loot

Once the loot was over, we went back to touhou.net in order to drop our stuff and lighten the load. Next, we decided to check Shiitake’s own booth, Gensodo. And… no wonder why she was put in the “young creators” side instead of amateurs: it was quite the brutal pro level, with a lot of gorgeous art that would blow anyone’s retina. However, this is also a wallet buster: A3 artworks were sold for 55€ minimum, while minimalistic artbook (something like 10 pages? can’t remember) were for 15€ at least. Well, they were quite the premium stuff indeed, as you can see on her site (quite the business one to boot, despite she barely started quite recently, since you could see 1 digit serial label on the artworks), but that’s a bit too much of a luxury for my taste (not that expensive, but the style and all make it a bit over the top compared to what I usually take so heh). Considering her website is in japanese, french and english, I wonder if we will see her again soon? Most likely…

The timing is about right to claim Miyagawa’s signature, but I wanted to check clayz’s booth first, but as I thought, everything was sold aside of 2 Yuna, which were now discounted to 40€ each. Well, I should have taken a gretel in the end, especially considering its original price, vintage and style but oh well.
Spear and Tsub4sa joined me at the signing area and while I was having mine, I asked if Miyagawa had any stocks left, but unfortunately, they only had that much of a stock so no dice. On our way back, Spear decided to take a Yuna figure, which is ultimately the last one (yes, that makes the 6th figure for him).

Back to our HQ, we sort of split on our own. Tsub4sa followed me to keep me company while I was looking for some noteworthy cosplay. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to say, as like I mentioned before, there were too much mainstream shonen stuff  (these and also things like Vampire Knight…). The cosplay situation in France/Belgium is really not what I can call “rich”, considering the very little non mainstream/recent stuff (Vocaloid cosplays started barely last year and you could count them this year with 2 hands without any trouble). The only exceptions were 1 Episode 2 Beato, as well as 2 battlers I could spot from afar on Friday and Saturday, but without any occasion to approach them (a bit like how it went for that shannon). That said, after a while, I found a dress Beatrice, who certainly worked hard on the dress pattern. A shame I couldn’t ask her if she played the VN, as she seemed quite in a hurry after being asked for photos by so many people besides me.

I then went to my way to nobinobi in order to check out how the lottery was doing, but I got the nice surprise that even if you are absent, if your name is picked, you will be contacted for the prize… that would have been nice to declare it beforehand, in order not to waste people time. Oh well.

Back to the usual HQ, I can’t find Spear nor Mic, so I was basically loitering around until something unexpected occured. Kunihisa and Takebayashi were back after taking few pictures, but still in their Madoka and Homura cosplay. As they were done, Kunihisa is taking off his madoka cosplay and hand over it to Mereck, jokingly asking him to wear it. However, it was a fatal mistake, a true horror! Mereck accepted the contract and became Puella Magi Mereck Magica!

[Warning. The following content may affect people in the wrong way, be it disgust, offense, and other negative emotions, you name it. But some of you might like it for the lulz and the hilaririty following this event. Therefore, I will post ONE single picture and the rest in links. Remember: it was just for fun and a complete deranged period that lead to sheer laugh (and optionally, abdominal pain due to the extreme laughter as an aftermath). If you are weak to this, GET THE HELL OUT. You have been warned. Take care of your eyes, because it BURNS!]

Okay, you read the memo I take it? No?
Then I will repeat again: you do NOT want to look at it, unless you are ready for a magnificient lulz trap cosplay that is hardly fitting either the character or the poor soul wearing it. Again, don’t expect some kipi or anything.

You are still ready? Okay, then here we go! Mereck Magica, with Kunihisa borrowing Takebayashi’s homura’s cosplay!

Why doesn't QB try to have contract with boys? Because of results like THIS

You are alive? Surely enough you didn’t open the pandora box yet! Anyway, I will leave the rest in links. Please be aware that this one is the most “safe” picture among many. Of course, everything else is decent (relatively) and legal, the problem is that it may be unhealthy for your eyes… leading to a very predictable and understandable reaction just like our comrade orphi, who had an intense DO NOT WANT reaction when I’ve shown one of the pictures with my camera (priceless may I say).

a true DO NOT WANT!

See his face? Well there you have it. If you still want to check the adventures of MANdoka Mereck Magica, you can always check the following links. Rest assured, Niwakins, despite the initial terror, tagged along and borrowed Takebayashi’s cosplay… with some even more lulz moments as result.

-I’m Puella Magi Mereck Magica!
-”Je pense, donc je suis”
-KIRA
-oppai~
-~oh noes a pervert! (you mean two, don’t you?!)
-You sure it is a girl? Oh wait…
-Homu homu lost it
-Madoka in a rebellious age
-Pedobear in action! Wait… something is wrong
-Final pose

Anyway, after this completely lunatic moment, the end of the third day finally has come. Just like last year, Kawasoft and Touhou.net (minus Mereck who tagged along with the sos brigade) organized a pizza party at spear’s place, with Nina joining us with 2 of her friends.
Many lulz, along with some serious discussions regarding the JE but also some stupid troll blog post, and the spring season series.

While many of them left around 10PM, nina trained the rest of us for some glow stick pattern for May’n live tomorrow. Of course, we weren’t synch at all, and it became a bit hard to follow a veteran like her. Suffice to say, when Kohaque and Mereck arrived, they were pretty much trolling us about our poor performances, but heh.
Saturday fever night anyone?

Sunday 3rd july 2011
(fourth and last day of the JE)

This is it, ladies and gentlemen! We’ve finally reached the very last day of our pilgrimage. Jest and exaggeration aside, the tiring event is finally about to end, and without much to check around, there was a single thing I really wanted to snatch here: a custom drawing on a Shikishi by Tsubameyado. Thanks to spear, I’ve seen her incredible talents, and it is no wonder she was busy and courted hours and hours during the 3 previous days (I was checking her booth here and there during the 3 days, but to no avail). Since I could grab nearly anything important I felt I had to get, I decided to camp her booth until I manage to have my shikishi.

As I arrived around 9h15-9h20 at her booth, I was horrified to see quite a big queue already: something like 10 people… knowing she needs at least 20-30 minutes per shikishi, that was a long waiting time to expect, but I didn’t mind that much in the end.
Anyway, she arrived around 10am, and we got some… surprise: it seems the first 3 people actually ordered some shikishi on saturday…. one would expect them to scramble afterwards but no: basically, as soon they received their shikishi, they asked for another one on the spot… oh bother…

Thankfully, I wasn’t alone and I could have a little chat with Oyatama and Orphi, soon followed by Yukimusha. Oya was a bit curious how rewrite was and I gave him some of my thoughts, along with the ones I’ve posted on Animesuki (thanks to mic’s 3G tablet). Kcazer also joined us a little while after.

Considering the obvious waiting time not going to be cut short any time soon, Orphi, oya and Kcazer decide to look for few things before coming back. I had Orphi doing a little errand at the same time and indicating Kanan Asuka’s booth at Tokyo Big Sight.
Meanwhile, I and Yuki were following a bit the blind test, and it was quite “difficult” for those who don’t know classics such like Orange Road and whatnot. Suffice to say, the winner managed to get 84 songs among 100, which was quite impressive.

Anyway, it is already 2PM (so basically waiting for already what… 5 hours?) and I noticed that a certain golden witch was still displayed on tsubameyado booth. In fact, it is some sort of a gold colored Shikishi with a intricate and beautiful black pattern for Beato. Since I didn’t have much thing to lose, I asked to Tsubameyado’s assistant how much it is, despite I expect a plain “it isn’t for sale”… however, she answered “dooze” (well mangled douze, french “twelve”), so I was like “?! 十二ユーロ?!” ($17.3) which she confirmed. Of course, my reaction was basically like this. What’s even better is that I’ve realized only afterwards that the black portions that forms the drawing is -not- anything like ink or whatsoever, but actually black drawing paper… in a single piece: a Kirie actually. That means Tsubameyado had to cut precisely around a single sheet of paper, including the eyelashes which are barely connected to the hair portions. Excellent craftmanship, and the art itself is us hardly something I’ve seen before among the countless fanarts of Umineko.

Golden Witch Beatrice

Soon after, I realize that there in a umineko doujinshi buried under a pile of Touhou’s, and unfortunately it doesn’t seem it was for sale. That said, after asking twice, I could pretty much grab it for 6€ ($8.6).
I could discuss a little bit with her assistant: she had some french notions and had a bit some difficulty to deal with it, but thankfully, it seems my Japanese was fairly enough (it seems every Japanese persons I was talking to were impressed by my japanese despite my grammar was abysmal to speak of).

Continuing the spending madness, I finally realized (yes yes, it seems my fatigue really hindered my ability to discern things on sunday) that a transparent sheet wasn’t about Kaguya / Flandre, but actually Bernkastel with Lambdadelta, leading me to check the pile completely, revealing one for Erika, Virgila and Zepar/Furfur. Couldn’t care less for the latter, but the rest was quite excellent.

Anyway, it was finally my turn after a while (6hours… I couldn’t really feel my legs after a while), and I had the good idea to record it.. if only it wasn’t for the memory card being full midway… good thing I had another one on me, but heh.

Witch of Miracles Bernkastel and Ushiromiya Ange

Yes, as you can see, Tsubameyado is drawing while -standing up-. As I was discussing with her assistant in japanese, it seems she is always doing this way, and… she doesn’t take any lunch break whatsoever which I can also testify that: while I was waiting for my turn, she never had a break, except twice, just because someone was asking her few things and that she took 1 glass of tea.

In the end, I was spending like a complete frenzy guy, but it was well worth it considering her talents. All of my spending on the last day was simply only for her booth.

day 4 loot

Please by any means, check out her web site, deviant art and pixiv pages!
http://tsubameyado.iaigiri.com/
http://enzan99283.deviantart.com/
http://www.pixiv.net/member.php?id=99283

After this frenzy, it was time to join everyone else who were lurking in the livehouse during Lightning live, in order to seize the best places for May’n live. It is most likely because I rarely go to any live, but Lightning concert really made my ears ring for a long time, to the point I really had to cover my ears here and there. Even though I wasn’t really interested by them, they certainly knew how to lead a show, and the guitarists were epic win on various instances.

Anyway, May’n live was of course restricted by your usual crap: you cannot record it nor take pictures of it. But I’m sure you will be able to find some recording. As for me, I didn’t bother considering I wanted to keep at least one hand on my loot, while the other was holding my only one glow stick (cheapstake here as usual).
I can’t exactly name all of the songs May’n sung, but it was at least 6 of them, with  Tomoshibi, Lion, Nothern Cross, Universal Bunny, Scarlet Bullet, Phonic Nation.
It was certainly much more exciting with a live environnement, although it felt less pumping and more empty with a complete lack of instrumentists (especially after Lightning performance), but at least May’n could keep the show running with her dancers.

Among the crowd, I didn’t expect that many glow sticks being used (probably thanks to Spear plan), but paradoxally, I felt the audience was far smaller than it should be. Heh.
Anyway, after leaving the live house, I was trying to recover from the fever, noise and fatigue, although I was astonished to see Tsubameyado still working on few more shikishi despite it is already 6PM… Talk about workalcoholic. In the end, orphi still got his meruru, but wrong hair color.

Anyway, few people organized some sort of a tribute to her, but gathering around with our respective shikishi (If I had the chance of having another shot for a second shikishi, it would have been a Homu homu, like this one ~~). Even though it was arguably not the majority of the happy owners of those, we were quite numerous and we made a picture altogether.

So many Shikishi!

Voila, Japan Expo 2011 is now over. Well not completely for me, since I have to go back to spear, spend the night there and go home only around 10pm. Even with so such margin, I almost got late for my thalys (I ran so much in Paris Nord station that I thought I was going to throw up…). But in the end, everything ended fine.

Afterthought

The bad:
Pretty much last year, the  crowd management and general organization of the JE had a lot left to be desired: the general issue is that the convention is horribly shorthanded in term of manpower, leading to a lot of complications, especially on saturday.
I’m not sure if you heard of it, but Dybex (french editor for FMA) had a lot of troubles to deal with fans for Milos no Seinaru Hoshi (FMA movie), and the JE direction forced them not to allow any queue to be formed before the tickets were given out (scheduled for 11AM, while people are in the convention venue at 9am…). Of course, it lead to so many issues to the point dybex staff was forced to throw a drawing lot system, leading to a LOT of apeshit drama.

That kind of decision and the general organization of the event are testimony of how messed up it became over time, especially with 200.000 entries for 4 days.

This issue was worsened by a layout that wasn’t as good as last year: few choices for booth placement were really not the smartest (separating booths like Touhou.net, Kawasoft, SOS brigade, or many “make a sketch” booths being scattered around, while cluttering huge booths together for no reason, like square enix with kurokawa and dybex, leading to stupid result with the queues).
Thank goodness the venues size were sort of fines, but heck…

Another issue that was worse this year that should be mentioned: there were way too few garbage bins. Not only the venues became dirty in a flash, but you could see piled cans nearly everywhere (the obvious issues of having Coca Cola distributing free coke zero 15cl cans every day). There should be at least twice the number in order not to have a mountain of trash by the end of every day.

The ugly:
Communication was once again the biggest issue this year:
I dunno about you, but if you are supposed to open the convention door an hour earlier, wouldn’t it be better to let it know on their frigging website, which still display “10am” while everyone already rushed in at 9am?
Honestly, it was certainly a very annoying issue here and there: you might think that it was easier to enter since the core of the queue has already entered an hour earlier, but it is a very huge issue in term of schedule, as those who had no idea about this change were screwed big time for signing sessions and so forth: I was lucky enough to get every signatures I was aiming for, but some other people who were looking for Yuuki or Igarashi signatures were totally toasted for the “first arrived first served” since it is basically game over past 30 minutes after the opening.

Suffice to say, the communication was terrible as the updates for their website were really lackluster (and I can’t imagine how horrible it would have been in English). A lot of issues regarding guests list and so forth lead to some confusions, so heh…

Another ugly problem that was by far more rampant this year was the abnormal overwhelming presence of bootlegs: you couldn’t even walk more than 10 meters without spotting counterfeits and other chinese stuff, arguably extremely bad for the market.
To add the insult to the injury, the JE staff pinned on various places of the convention a notice mentioning they do not condone bootleg; a practice they were doing for years, yet their inability to even reduce this annoying practice is a testimony of their incompetence…: I didn’t know if I had to cry or laugh at it, considering more than 50% of the shops (not including manga / anime editors) were selling bootlegs right in the open, without any shame whatsoever.
Trying to tell people about this issue was like coping the sea with a mere bowl at this point, but honestly it was really terrible this year, to the point it was even “hard” to find official stuff to begin with.

A third major issue I had with this year JE was the complete non application of common measures regarding security and censorship. Regarding security, I can’t help but facepalm at the emergency exists being -chained-. Yes that’s right, they literally barricaded the emergency exits with chains, in order to prevent people sneaking around. Guess what happen if a fire or an accident of that kind would ever occur? Big problem. If they want to prevent people to sneak around, how about hiring more security guards anyway? Geez…
For the second sub point, I wonder how come the staff would allow shops and amateurs to let their erotic (straight, yuri, BL) content being available to anyone? I mean, considering the huge audience composed of kids and teenagers, I really doubt it is healthy to have guro and all being available on the table not even 1m above the ground. I’m arguably not a puritan dude (otherwise I wouldn’t even touch an eroge to begin with), but there are things to be vigilant about.

Finally, the most annoying problem I wanted to deal with a flamethrower were Free Huggers and certain cosplayers.
For crying out loud, free hugging isn’t about pestering people for hugs or creating a traffic jam for their own activities. I’m aware of the initial intent and purpose of a “free hug”, but 90% of the free huggers at JE were just nitpicking teenagers trying to hug a hot chick/guy and/or following a very annoying trend. If branding huge ass board with “FREE HUGS” ardoned of them or writing all over their body (with guys being half naked, the creeps!), a good chunk were running around, yelling FREE HUGS…So annoying it made me want to yell on various instances “GET THE F*** OUT”.
Meanwhile, some cosplayers really do not consider their attire being an issue on the venues: of course, I’m not talking about skin being exposed, but cumbersome accessories/mock weapons being excessively in the way more than once. Things are even more problematic when a narrow queue force everyone to literally hug each other. I had to dodge many bleach / FF7 Cloud replica swords more than I can count on my hands, and I’m glad I could avoid this kind of guy during May’n live (which was unfortunately not the case for spear).
Really, I wish cosplayers could be treated like in japan: invited to stay on a specific area, and being able to revert to NORMAL clothes should they go to the convention regular venues.

The Good:
I can’t exactly write down any “clearly positive” points since the things I didn’t rant about were either common sense or “a given”.
I mean, it is becoming extremely clear to everyone that they should seperate the JE with the comic con / video games area, in order to have less issues in term of traffic in general.

I guess I will give them credits for spreading the “exposition” booths (Kon, Igarashi’s, etc) around without doing silly stuff. In a way, the different areas were made clearer in their content (with a color pattern etc), so heh.
Naturally, I should say that the activities areas were this time much better placed, avoiding some weird space confinement at times (I would however question the exact usefulness of a catch area at that kind of convention…)

The good point that should be mentioned was the noticably higher amount of doujinshi booths being hosted this year, along with few more cultural booths being placed here and there (among Tokyo Bigh Sight booth). Hopefully this trend will become popular over the time.

And now, the painful bill:
-BE-FR travel: 82€
-Travel in Paris: 17.2€
-Entrance Fee: 35€
-Accomodation and food: 30€
-Loot: 1st day 83€ (Noizi Artbook, Miku Support Nendo, Moe Luv Doujinshi), 2nd day 17€ (Momoi single and Little Hands doujinshi), 3rd day 22€ (Kanan Asuka’s doujinshi), 4th day 66€.
Loot total: 188€

Grand total: 352€ (~ $500)
Thank goodness I didn’t have to pay any hotel or something…

TL,DR mode:

Loot Overview:

Negative portions:
-Ridiculous lack of communication in various aspects of the convention (opening schedule, events, staff, information booth number (still at 1), etc)
-Questional security and placement measures
-Crowd management inside was very bad
-Free huggers and certain cosplayers (huge accessories/weapons).
-Overwhelming mass of bootleg
-Food and Drinks price (yep, again)
-Lack of “real” and various official goods related to the guests (nothing new)
-Got a bit too hesitant for the Gretel figure, oh well…

Positive portions:
+umineko stuff (quite unexpected)
+raid at Tsubameyado’s booth
+ Could discuss with japanese guests on all of the 4 days
+Managed to get every signatures I was aiming for
+good time spent with french fans (too many to list, but notably spear, mic, mereck)
+Mayn’ live
+goodsmile company booth

+/- Mereck Magica (it burns so much it is hilarious)

That is all folks!

What that means I’m not sure and I can say the same for just about any part of the show.  One would think the C might stand for “Control”, but I would argue it rightfully should stand for one thing and one thing only.  Chaos.  Chaos best describes the entirety of [C] and I can honestly be damned to name anything that I could point to and say the show did right.  This one has it all folks.   It has horrendous production values in the animation including regularly off model characters, bargain bin animation quality, lazy fight scenes and even honest to goodness jump cuts in the animation at seemingly random spots.  The show has no concept of how to tell a story either it would seem.  It begins rather abruptly with a young boy named Yoga Kimimaro being whisked away to a “Financial District” district where he is told by an insane clown man (that I swear looks like a concept for Johnny Depp in his next Tim Burton movie) that he can duel other people for money which the show refers to as Midas Money and we’re told can be used just like regular money in the real world.  Some rules are very quickly explained (though in the duels it seems almost anything goes) and so begins a series of duels between Yoga and various other people told very compactly and with not a lot of time to get emotionally attached to any of the characters.  This will become a problem later.

In any case we are treated to some rather mediocre fair told with very choppy editing (perhaps the shows biggest flaw among many) I might add wherein we are introduced to various people Yoga knows that are caught up in the Financial district as well.  One of them is a man said to be the king of the Financial District named Mikuni that forms a mentor relationship with Yoga and tries to pass on what he knows of things.  While choppily edited and a incredibly hard to follow at times (no idea why this needs to be the case other than some really sloppy storyboarding and direction) these episode are orderly compared to what comes in the second half.

It was here that I started to think that [C] has the potential to be a cult classic somewhere down the line.  After being treated to an incredibly cliche sick girl story to explain Mikuni’s motivations and to give him a background suddenly the show changes the rules.  The show must have been running out of time because now out of the blue the Financial District decides it’s collapsing (If the show ever explained why this happens other than it does I must have missed it) and the visuals get intense (still incredibly cheap looking though) and the show just goes berserk and launches into full on B movie territory.  We’re talking tentacle monsters printing money, implications of furry romances, lolita demons monsters growing huge mouths and devouring other lolita demon monsters (these things are called “assets” and they fight for the human characters in duels), rainbow bubbles, buildings disappearing and to top it all off an incredibly poorly animated excuse for a final battle with the camera spinning around everywhere and the rule of cool apparently being applied as to how to depict it all.

The rule of cool seems to apply to the dialogue as well.  Economic jargon is sprinkled throughout the shows terminology for Financial District objects and grows in intensity of use exponentially as the show hits it’s final stretch to the point where the entire script ceases to make any sense at all.  I might be exaggerating a little here, but I promise you if I am it’s not by much folks.   As the shows rumbles on through this financial crisis character motivations and even the resolutions of them cease to resemble anything that resembles common sense, brutal Engrish starts to become an episodic mainstay,  episodes pick up in media res with no real connection to anything that happened previously and god help me what is happening half the time.  Arghhh….it’s hard to even describe!  The final episode manages to reach new heights amazingly enough and while it brings up a few plot points that were previously established regarding the relationships between the assets and their human masters (don’t ask) and in the process makes me leap for joy at the prospect of a cohesive plot thread somehow surviving the chaos of the final act, the feeling is short lived.  For no sooner is this brought up then I am lost as to the argument that the two demon lolitas are having with each other and why I should care and the show decides to have an ambiguous, largely incomprehensible resolution to everything that honestly needs to be seen to be believed.

And honestly I fully recommend people check the whole out.  It may seem like I am ragging on it mercilessly (not that hard for me to do for a change), but honestly it was immensely entertaining on a level of marveling at an anime production gone horribly wrong and the laughs I had in doing so were genuine.  And hey it inspired me to blog about something again (something I never thought I’d do) so obviously it must be something monumental.  So if you’re like me and have a taste for B-Movies I suggest checking out what I would call the best B anime since possibly Musashi Gandou.  It’s only 11 episodes so you can’t really go too wrong can you folks.

It certainly has been a very long while I didn’t make any blog post, hasn’t it?
I feel a bit guilty about that considering all the crap I had to take care of, for like a full year, but I guess this event should be at least covered.

Content: description of my little adventure during 3 days at Japan Expo (France, Paris, Parc des Expositions), conference with Tamura Yukari and Mishima Akio about Magical Girl Nanoha The Movie 1st, loot and many more.

Anyway, as the title and picture  suggest, this article will be about Japan Expo, the most attended convention regarding Anime, Manga etc you can get outside of Japan, set in France (I may be wrong, but AX is still barely around 100000 visitors while JE is most likely breaking the 120000 mark this year… but that being said, AX definitely has more space and guests).

Checking the site of the convention (English Link here), it sure doesn’t look too shabby: lots of guests (notably Hojo and Kojima), many activities shown on the schedule, etc.
You would think there are lots of things to do and… indeed, there were.

I don’t think I shall be able to describe everything, but if you have even a slight idea of what a convention looks like, it certainly was on the mark during the JE.
However, while there are good things, you should also expect a lot of “not-so-pleasant” things as well… but I will cover that progressively later.

Okay, let’s first start with what I’ve done and my impressions on this chaotic rush:

Summary and Impressions

Friday 2nd July 2010
(my 1st day, second day of the JE)

I will first start that, originally, I wasn’t supposed to be at this year JE. Whilst I already attended it once last year (only the last day though), I wasn’t exactly interested in this convention that much (I don’t have any nostalgia surge with City Hunter, nor I am an avid fanboy of Kojima’s games, so).
However, because of a certain incident I shall explain later, I decided to attend it, like 1 week before the event, earning me a guaranteed lot of troubles…

However, thanks to my senpai, MLA-kun, I managed to travel on the second day (Friday 2nd July) for quite a low fee (10€ for the fuel, despite we are on the road for 3 hours is quite nice). Arriving there around 2:00PM, I was however struck immediately by the terrible heat wave… blessing the fact I at least brought with me some bottle with frozen water (which had plenty time to melt, but still remain fresh).

From there, I finally met with some people whom I’ve encountered last year at the JE 2009: notably Mereck and Mic2070; as well as other people such like Suna and Spear (both will be my life savers)  Soon enough, I’m checking all the stuff around, notably the Kawasoft and Touhou.net booths. For one, I certainly didn’t expect so many fans of touhou lurking around, and it seems members of touhou.net didn’t expect that either as they told me that Thursday was beyond busy, with a lot of stuff sold (same for Kawasoft, as they sold more than half of their stock of Katawa Shoujo and True Rememberance in french).

My first regret when I got myself there was that I was terrible at being thorough with my preparations and I failed to bring a camera… but fortunately, it seems it wouldn’t have been of much use, for my main objective. That said, I unfortnately won’t be able to post pictures of the event. Please check the facebook page though, it should give you an idea.

Considering my late coming, the fact I had to settle things etc, I didn’t have the chance to roam around a lot, though I did scout a bit, preparing potential booth raiding for Saturday and Sunday.
Still, with Mereck and Mic help, I’ve found some interesting booths, such like Cospa, but also a booth specializing in importing various books from Japan. And I may have finally found an interesting loot item…
CLANNAD Another Story Art Book, which has gorgeous arts by GotoP. However, as much as my luck was going good there, it was a bit more complicated afterwards. The shop actually uses the original price on the books/magazines and convert the price from yen to euro and… the measly 1800 yens became a whooping 35,30€ (~$44), due to their scary rate, leading to 100 yens = 2€. I wasn’t exactly pleased by this drastic price tag, but I felt that kind of opportunity wasn’t really common, factoring how it may be a headache to consider shipping fee (generally, the few copies of this one are sold for 20-25€ on the net, and due to its weight, you often have to add 10€ for the shipping).
Considering it is the first time I’ve found it, that there was only a single copy and it was basically in mint condition, I didn’t think twice and bought it.

Later on, I tasted once again the atrocious advent of leaving the convention place… the transports were crowded, plain and simple.
But well, at least I was having fun talking with Suna and other people regarding the current state of the anime fandom/industry and some touhou discussions (I’m a complete newb regarding this, having played like few times Mountain of Faith in Easy/Normal, and barely knowing few characters, so I got some points explained etc).

It took us 2 hours, but Suna’s place wasn’t exactly close to the Parc des Expositions. That said, it was a very calm area, and we could buy some tasty pizzas, before going to his house.
There, I could see his brother’s giant collection of figures (which would make desy jealous about the fact he seems to have all major Fate’s figures), and quite a lot of Touhou goods in each sibling room.
After a life rejuvenating shower, I was shown the so called interview with ZUN and his legendary beer.
Finally, we went to sleep around midnight, except few frigging delinquents were howling like morons around 1:00 AM.

Saturday 3rd July 2010

We somehow managed to wake up around 6:30 AM, but we weren’t exactly very fresh. Nevertheless, it was necessary in order to attend my main target today…Tamura Yukari‘s autograph!
After a thorough battle plan being executed almost flawlessly, we arrived at the Parc des expositions around 8:30, but much to my horror, there were toncrap of people already gathered there… that’s the saturday for you, they say huh…
Anyway, Suna had to wait for Emilio and other people, while his brother and I were rushing like mad men in the queue in order to seize any chance… and there got my luck.
Half way on the run, the right strap of my backpack literally snapped, with no way whatsoever to repair it. Therefore, I was forced to carry my backpack unnaturally, which quickly drained my strength a lot (since I didn’t stay to the same place for both nights, I had to carry all of my stuff, so clothes, etc)… something like  20 kg (bottles sure add up quickly…).
To make things worse, the weather was awful and it was then raining extremely hard… it was the only moment I was thankful I wasn’t that ahead of everyone, since the portion of the queue where I was stopped in an empty building (moreover, since I had my hard drive in my bag, it wasn’t exactly a safe spot). People who were outside of that building were stuck for a full hour under the rain.

Around 10:10, we finally got inside, and it was a mad dash towards the signing coupon booth. As we made our way there, I was a bit rash and thought the queue for Yukarin was the third one… which was absolutely overcrowded. By chance we were discussing with someone else and accidently, we realized we weren’t on the correct queue (which made sense to me: I was wondering how come there were THAT many people). I then checked the board to be sure and it was indeed a mistake, so we quickly changed the queue, fortunately much faster (like 3 times shorter).
Something like 10 minutes later, I finally grabbed by Coupon for Yukarin’s autograph, as well as Iwadare Noriyuki‘s!
With our prize now in our pocket, Suna’s bro and I were leading a girl who was interested by Suno’s bro plushies (he had momiji and yuyuko plushies on him) to the touhou booth, explaining as well what was Touhou about etc.
I then realize that it was already past 11:00, right when Iwadare’s signing session was already ongoing.
After dropping my bag to Mereck’s care, I dashed to the complete opposite, reaching the signing desk location (with so many people, going back and forth takes at least 10 minutes…).

Much to my surprise, around 11:30, there was barely 3-4 persons in the queue, so I didn’t wait too long for that. I was a tad embarassed that I didn’t have any official support… granted, I never played Grandia, and unfortunately, the official JE booths only sold Grandia OST… absolutely no Phoenix Wright ones (I would have killed for the Gyakuten Saiban Tokubetsu Houtei…).
In any case, contrary to what the staff told me before (all of them told me I needed an official product, as I noticed there was a shiny “goods”‘ sticker on Iwadare’s autograph coupon, unlike Yukarin’s), I didn’t need anything and I was given a shikishi where Iwadare and his group could sign their autograph.
I could exchange few words in Japanese with him and he was really nice. I was glad I could convey how I liked his work on Gyakuten Saiban 3 and the orchestra version, without any need of a translator.

Hence, Iwadare’s merry group Autographes, get-o! (respectively, from Left to Right: Wo-Lya (bass), Fukuda Yasufumi (guitar), Iwadare Noriyuki (keyboard and composer), Roze Horiguchi (Drums) and Shion (Vocal).

After roaming around, I had however noticed Ki-oon booth (a french manga editor), and remembered that the signing session with Mochizuki Jun (Pandora Hearts author) was ongoing between 11 and 12:00. However, the incredible queue length didn’t exactly encourage me, but an attendant told me that she will be present on sunday as well, though he suggested me to wait really early, as the first ones were camping there ever since 9:30.
At least, I could have the opportunity to have a look at their Pandora Hearts space, with some very nice exposition of some fine illustrations but also top nocht costumes of Alice, Oz, Gilbert, Break and Sharon.

Afterwards, I went back to the Kawasoft booth, fetching my sandwich and then going to the screening of Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha The Movie 1st. However, I got the nasty surprise that they changed at the last minute (or perhaps my fault?) that the movie was starting on 12:15 instead of 12:45.

In any case, I watched the said movie, with very little left about the original series in my memories (it has been ages I didn’t watch Nanoha series, let alone the first season).
Here is my opinion on Animesuki. That said, aside of the schedule change, the real issue was the screening itself.
There was a major problem with the DVD that aniplex has brought with them: at specific portions of the movie, not only it stops playing but we have a very high pitched sound with a screen similar to a “no longer airing channel” crap. The JE staff didn’t tell us anything and they plainly tried to run again the DVD, fast forwarding it. Of course, they got problems yet again.
Fortunately, the aniplex staff quickly intervenes and first apologized to us (the person in charge told us in english), and figured out the issue 10 minutes later: it seems the DVD has undesired portions between each chapters, so they had to play each chapter, and once they are over, they have to skip to the next chapter.
Of course, even if they were fast, it definitely was disrupting, as we had like 7 momentum break, but nothing too major.

After the movie screening, all of our group decided to camp the Signing desk.
I wasn’t expecting a lot of people, but in fact it was a tad worse than my expectations: we were only like 20 people waiting, and it didn’t take too long before we could get our autograph.
While waiting, Orphi explained to me what happened to him: in fact the information about the autograph system was poorly handled, and Japanese fans (yes, a sizable group was present and they did the travel mostly for Yukarin as well) were totally screwed up: only 3-4 of them could get an autograph coupon. Because of this, Orphi was asked by a japanese girl if he could sell his coupon. Orphi was a tad embarassed, considering the fact this person went all the way from Japan to get an autograph. At first he wanted to give it for free, but she pushed him 2 bills of 50€. Still not feeling too good with it, he tried to at least give back one of the bills, but to no avail.
That pretty much shows how they were screwed and desperate as result. It certainly didn’t help JE staff called their coupons system as “first arrived, first served”, as if as long as you are present early at the signing desk, you could have it.
This also explains why the coupons for Yukarin’s autograph were out of stock only at 11:00AM. Generally, coupons for most japanese guests are usually out of stock around 10:15 – 10:30 (due to the rush and privileges the premium tickets holders have… such like entering in the convention an hour earlier and queue cut possibilities…. in fact, for Hojo, the first arrived first served tickets were all given even before the gates are open for commoners, leaving the later a terrible 3 hour worth of queue for a drawing lot, so chance to wait for nothing), but lasting that long is really abnormal so to speak.

Anyway, around 4:05, Yukarin finally shows up, with a fancy dress. Of course, and sadly enough, we were forbidden to take any picture or video of her (hence why I said my regrets about the camera were quickly ignored by this point).
Progressively, I got extremely nervous considering what was going to happen (mind you, I don’t think any of us was that calm with Yukarin basically a mere few meters away from us).

As it was my turn, I managed to pull out my request in Japanese (and goodness I decided to do that, you shall understand later…): in a nutshell, I asked her if she couldn’t do Bernkastel’s nipaa.
Unfortunately, it seems she jumped on the nipaa word, and did Rika’s… well it is all good anyway, because a live experience first hand really was something else. That and shaking her hands were a unique experience.
Speaking of which, I didn’t see that coming, when she leaned forwards to shake my hand, and her “merci” along with her previously “bonjour” are killing moe with her normal voice (I would have killed for a recording of that T_T)

That said, thanks to the translator, he spelled the prononciation of my name wrong, and thus Yukarin wrote “トワヌ ” instead of “トアン”. I knew I had to do it myself, but not like I will complain considering the opportunity I got.

Of course, with our little group, we were sharing our respective experience while waiting for the upcoming conference. We were all a bit disappointed we couldn’t have her autograph on a personalised/official support, but the shikishi we were given was nice regardless. It is just a shame some couldn’t have their items being signed (Mereck had Mai’s poster from the Memorial Box, a lot of people were carrying a Nanoha Figure, etc).
Obviously, we were also trying to understand why we couldn’t make any picture or video recording, while almost all of the other guests could have been.
Damnit, I should have brought a VOICE recorder, that could have been something allowed (or hidden *grins*) and keeping that would have been nice.

Anyway, faster than we thought, 5:30PM was approaching and we seized the seats as fast as we could after the FMA conference, though we were outsmarted by the japanese fans group, having established their positions on the first row in the middle, ever since the FMA conference.
Well, at least the second row was fine and I was camping there, still with the autograph in hand. While we were waiting, we were again reminded that we cannot take any picture or video recording, even for people from press, so they asked everyone to put their camera back to their bags.
While we were waiting for the guests to arrive, we were given a nendoroid Nanoha key chain. A nice treat though obviously we were expecting a Fate key chain as well, but too bad. Well, that keychain was cute anyway.

The aniplex staff, the producer (Mishima Akio) and Tamura Yukari finally arrived around 5:37PM, and of course, everyone was just there for Yukarin, hoping we can have some discussions / answers with her.
However, things aren’t that simple and the conference wasn’t exactly led in a very original way so to speak. Anyway, from what I can remember, here are the questions and answers given. Please remember that there wasn’t any footage or anything of that sort, so I’m trying to pull out my memory. Also, since I didn’t take notes, it is obvious they didn’t exactly say what I’ve typed, but the message conveyed was what I believe to be that way. If any french  comrade remembered of anything else, please notify it to me, thanks.

Questions prepared by the Translator

Q: What do you think about Paris and the Japan Expo?
A (Mishima): Oh I was impressed by the buildings, they were quite beautiful. Also I wasn’t expecting so many french fans around. Thank you again for those who have watched the movie!
Q: What about you, Madam Tamu… errr Miss Tamura?
A (Yukarin): Paris is indeed a very pretty city. And the fans were all kind, smiling brightly. It was the first time I’m attending the Japan Expo and it is quite lively.

Q: I see that the theme of the movie was drastically different from your usual Magical Girl shows, with girls using weapons and the like. What can you tell us about the message and theme of this movie?
A (Mishima): There isn’t any real antagonist of this show. Every character has their own point of view and circumstances that go in conflict with each other. In the end, I believe the message conveyed was specifically portraying how trying to loose the differences between people will bring to peace and that friendship is also another theme that is brought on the first plan.

Q: What were the issues you have encountered during the making of the movies?
A (Mishima): there wasn’t really any real problem per se, however the battle scenes were quite difficult. As you probably have seen, there were a lot of these and keeping them fast paced required a lot of efforts from our team.

Q: Miss Tamura, what do you like about your character, Nanoha?
A (Yukarin): She is very cute and kind. But above all else, she is a girl that doesn’t give up no matter what.

Questions asked by Fans:

Q: When will the DVD and Blu-ray be released in Japan?
A (Mishima): I don’t have the answer. As you know, the movie is such a hit that it is still screening in Japan, despite it has been available on 23rd January. We will release the DVD and Blu-ray as soon as we can.

Q: Can we expect any other movies after this one?
A (Mishima): I cannot promise anything. After all this movie took us a long of time and efforts. In fact, it took us a whole year and half to make it. It was quite exhaustive to be honest, our team couldn’t afford having vacation, so no summer or even christmas holiday for us to finish it.
However, please know that we have received the message from you and the fans from Japan, so who knows!

Q: As you may know, the nanoha franchise wasn’t exactly well known in Europe and it seems it doesn’t go that well in US, as Strikers isn’t announced yet. Therefore, I was wondering if you could release your DVD/Blu-ray, but free zone and with english subs. That way, occidental fans may be able to get the movie and enjoy it.
A (Mishima): It depends of how the series is faring in US and Europe. As such, the response of the fan may do the trick, such like emails. By all means, I encourage you to watch the movie if you can!

Q: Miss Tamura, who is your favorite character aside of Nanoha and what was your favorite scene of the movie?
A (Yukarin): From the movie? It was Precia. As for my favorite scene, it was… well when she died *laughs* (some intervention with the producer). To be more accurate, during her last moments, she didn’t have any regrets and carried out her actions to the end.

Q: Some sort of offtopic, but please bear with me. First, thanks for screening the movie in France. As I’m quite happy that we got the presence of Tamura Yukari, I wonder if you can bring Nana Mizuki next time.
A (Mishima): We will discuss it with our staff in Japan.

Q: What is your opinion regarding the evolution of the Magical Girl as of now? What I mean is that the theme used was mostly about dreams of the said young girls, and now it is mostly focused on magical battles and so forth.
A (Mishima): I don’t believe we have such kind of genre. In fact, sometimes in our current animation, we have sometimes elements such like young girls and magic being reunited, but that doesn’t make it a genre.

Q: Miss Tamura, I was wondering how were you able to change your voice that much. For instance, you can have a very soft voice such like Nanoha, but turn very gloomy and deep, such like Mai from Kanon or Rika from Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. So, How do you do that, and can we have a little demonstration?
A (Yukarin): [Missing Part, unsure if it was the translator failure or not, it seems she can't explain herself].
*nanoha voice*: “I’m glad I went to France”
That is the high pitched voice, now…
*Bernkastel voice”: ‘”I’m glad I went to france”.
*Huge cheer from the public*

Sort of unrelated, but a belgian fan asked through the mic if she could have an autograph, as she was kind of late (can’t remember exactly), begging because she went from “far away”… I must say, I don’t care even though I’m from the same country (perhaps because I don’t feel having roots there, being asian, heh), but this was extremely bitter: it isn’t like it was hard to get a coupon, but some people really had to make efforts for them, and thinking about the japanese fans being unable to receive theirs after coming from -JAPAN-, I couldn’t help but feel disgusted about that and feel pity for them. Well, it wasn’t possible in the end, though at least that person could have a handshake.  That being said, this kind of attempt wasn’t exactly the most reasonable, especially if we consider people having much more reason than being “late” *facepalm*

As you can notice, the prepared questions weren’t exactly that interesting, down to tivial points. Well, everything could have been all nice and dandy, but there were some details that didn’t tick well with this.
First, the conference only lasted 45 minutes. While they have shown up at 5:37PM, the translator dude stopped it around 6:22, which certainly didn’t please anyone in the room, as the conference was scheduled for a full hour.
But what was actually an issue was the fact the translator was really -bad- (だめだ この男…).

For starter, that man simply didn’t watch the movie, which obviously DID impair the questions and the translation of the guests’ answers. While he admitted beforehand that he didn’t watch the movie, he “assured” us he had notes… allow me to be quite skeptical regarding the usefulness of his notes considering his ignorance (stuttering, not really able to understand some questions from the public etc). Of course, he doesn’t have to watch the said movie, but if he doesn’t make some research, that’s asking even more problems.
For example, when he asked who was Yukarin’s favorite character, she did reply clearly, then left him some room to translate the first sentence. However, when he said “the character I liked the most was…” he was stuck, and had to seek in his notes and… flately say “Precia Testarossa”. I mean, it was quite silly considering everyone understood that much and he just couldn’t follow Yukarin who has said the name like not even 10 seconds ago.

But the real issue, beyond his ignorance regarding the franchise in general was his very poor translation skills. The problem lies in many portions:
1) he had dangerously shortened the answers of the guests. Certainly, I don’t think you can convey all detail in a translation going live like this, but it is hard to take seriously a translator who just fail to give the points, by skipping each 2 lines or so. For example, at some point, Mishima was talking like 1-2 full minutes, and the translator pulled us… a maximum of 10 lines… what gives?

2) he does mention non existent bullcrap. For example, when he asked what Yukarin liked in Nanoha, she mentioned what I’ve typed above: cuteness and that she never gives up. However, Mr “translator” translated it as “Miss Tamura said that she liked Nanoha so much that she did her best so she won’t fail”… basically he totally missed the fact it was about Nanoha, and completely made up a point from this basis.
Another FAIL moment was the question regarding Yukarin’s favorite moment. First, he didn’t even bother translating when she mentions Precia’s death, but also the fact that… he mentioned that “[...]Because she (Precia) had regrets”, despite Yukarin specifically said “[...]後悔しない“, explicitely saying that precia did NOT regret anything (further confirmed as I discussed with a Japanese fan, confirming the ないpart) . Furthermore, if our translator-kun had properly done his homework, he would have realized that Precia never regretted anything at the moment of her death. Perhaps you might think Precia had regrets because she realized the promise she did with Alicia about a little sister, but considering how the context and how she said it, it wasn’t exactly a regret, but more like an afterthought.
I personally think she didn’t express any grief whatsoever, and plainly stated that point as if it was a conclusion she couldn’t help due to the timing (something like “I didn’t change at all, I always notice things when it is too late”). Granted, it might sound like some regrets, but since it is all about Alicia, and not directly a comment about Fate, you can tell that she “may” have regrets about not fulfilling her promise to Alicia, instead of regretting not considering Fate as her daughter, and thus Alicia’s sister. The fact she realized it only due to Alicia’s promise, instead of her own contemplation regarding Fate’s childhood and her treatment is enough to figure that she did not have any regret towards Fate especially.

I understand that the “no regret” part looks a bit weird, but I made sure the presence of the negative form with japanese fans. That and the fact Yukarin never mentioned Fate in her answer.
Perhaps, Yukarin was actually mentioning that Precia didn’t regret anything in her attempt to revive her beloved daughter, that is.

3) He rarely talked loud enough in the mic when he asked a question in Japanese to any guest, so the japanese audience couldn’t really understand the questions all the time, which is worse when we engaged the questions from the public.

4) His prowess wasn’t brilliant when he translated our questions to the guests. Actually because of this, not only the answers may have been simplified / wrong, but there wasn’t any guarantee that the question the guests got in Japanese was the correct one (the most evident proof of that was Mishima’s answer to the Magical Girl Evolution question)

5) Prononciation wasn’t all that good (he was the one who screwed my name for the autograph by the way), leaving a lot left to be desired. This had an impact on how the guests could understand the questions… for example, the “voice change” question took him -three- minutes, with the producer forced to help him in few instances so Yukarin could understand… meanwhile, I told one of the japanese fans with a very crude Japanese (something like “田村 ゆかりさんの声は全然ちがう事ができる…どうやって? たとえば…なのはと梨花”), resulting to an instant understanding of the situation within less than 30 seconds, despite I’m not proficient at all in Japanese, as you can notice.
Another example is that, in both French and Japanase, this guy pronunced “Magical girl” in such way that it would be in english “magi-Call girl”. It was so stupid, especially he could simply say “魔法少女” to them if needed.

As you can see, there were so many fails (no, the “Madam Tamu…” wasn’t a joke, he went ahead in French, and corrected himself), that it was quite a bitter show for us.
If you add the fact that it was mostly Mishima answering to the questions, it basically turned things into a bore fest for details people would hardly want to know (though most interesting questions were asked by the public, thankfully).
Suffice to say, it is better than nothing, and once the conFAILrence was done, Mereck and I started to yell “Yukarin! Yukarin! Yukarin!”, catching everyone offguard, including her japanese fans. This lead to a general call from the audience for her… I hope it pleased her at least, despite she didn’t exactly receive the proper treatment she should have (in comparison to other guests etc).

Anyway, the day was practically over, since we were quite disappointed by that conference, ranting (especially me) about how the organization and content were nothing to write home about.
Afterwards, we all got back to the Kawasoft and Touhou booths, settling everything back to the crates etc. Nothing really fancy and we were joined by the french SOS dan booth “clerk”, Kohaque, for a dinner… except that there wasn’t any proper restaurant open around, for odd reasons.
After that, the simple Pizza plan at Spear’s house was adopted (not healthy for me after eating the same kind of stuff the day before, but well, why not once for a while).  It took however something like 30-45 minutes for us to decide about the pizzas.
After a long while, the feast could finally begin, with a light hearted mood. It seems that things went very smoothly for Kawasoft and Touhou.net, but not quite much for the french SOS dan.

Around midnight, people were going to sleep, however since I’ve brought my hard drive in case, why not showing how things are done on my side for an umineko patch to Mic and Spear.
After the whole explanation, we then engaged into a very lengthy discussion about the current situation of the plot of Umineko, and the possible culprits.
Before we know it, it was already 3:00, and we decided it would be better to sleep now, considering the long and last day showing up.

Sunday 4th July 2010

As I slowly arise from the sofa in a zombie mode, I couldn’t really say that I was at the top… 4 hours of sleep was a bad idea with that exhausting event. Anyway, most of the merry group awakened, and slowly get their turn to the bathroom.
Mereck and most of the crew grabbed the stuff to the booths, while I was staying a little bit at Spear’s place. Afterwards, I follow Kardhafi and Chaton, heading to the Parc des expositions.
There was still a noticeable crowd around, but not as much as I feared.  At least, thanks to the merry french community, they made me enter in the JE 1 hour before its actual opening time (How? 秘密だよ~).

That was just perfect, since it allowed me to scout properly the possible urgent price-cut of some booths… though it was all for naught, since nothing extraordinary caught my eye.

Then, I remembered that I should wait at Ki-oon booth for Mochizuki’s autograph. Except that I didn’t expect so many fangirls 1 hour prior the beginning of the session. Roughly twenty persons were already present, and within merely 20 minutes, we were the double, then triple of that around 10:45. While the queue was moving in a slow but consistent rate once the session started, an attendant was checking everyone’s… identity. Right, that is something I didn’t expect at all: they did take your identity card, checking if you didn’t have any autograph from Mochizuki during the JE… I was surprised that they basically limited the number of autograph for a complete “once” for the whole convention. Leaving the queue even a single moment (even for going to restroom) wasn’t a good idea, since they announced that anyone would lose their autograph anytime they leave the queue after receiving the ex libris… perhaps it was a way to prevent people to swap place with someone else, which would be an abuse regarding the ex libris (which was limited to 500 copies)
Understandable, but this is a sort of strict conditions we got there. Anyway, I wanted to get a second autograph for a friend, but it was no good due to this, but also the fact the number of people trying to get an autograph is really huge. It took me 20 minute to reach Mochizuki, but the queue was obviously more than 30 minute worth of waiting for anyone joining it at 11:00.
Once inside of the booth, I was wamrly greeted by Mochizuki and  two assistants, the later two were speaking with a nearly perfect french, surprisingly.
That said, while she was signing a bit, I tried to cheer her up in japanese, hoping she won’t lose spirit in the future, and she really was surprised and thanked me, adding an arm and a “がんばります!” to the autograph. Too bad I was a bit distracted and forgot to ask her which character she liked the most (although I was under the impression it is either Alice or Break, but heh). That said, she was really friendly and enthusiastic, despite signing autographs and drawing sketch (and for some lucky fans, complete drawing) for 4 days probably took a toll on her. Anyway, another autograph get-o~

Anyway, after this little event, I didn’t exactly do anything special, aside of scouting any potential price cut, but unfortunately, it seems the rush will only occur very late, just before the closure of the JE.

Around 1:00 – 2:00, I was following Nyo and Smankh for some “window shopping”, but we arrived at the Nico Nico Douga booth, where Yumiko was dancing.
I’m not really following that closely the recent trend on niconico, so I had no idea who Yumiko was. That said, her energy, cosplay and dance skills are nothing short of excellent. That was the only other time I regretted that I didn’t bring a camera or something, because that was really a very good show she has put there (she did dance on the same track I’ve linked at the Japan Expo).
EDIT: Found 3 videos on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLHbYGJxZks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS8-mVr0B1w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Lo9A1AjNTc

Shortly after that, the french SOS dan arrived for their own little showndown: the first kumikyoku, then a hare hare yukai dance.

Soon enough, it was already 3:00 PM, and Iwadare’s concert was held at the JE live house area.
Arriving a bit lately, I still didn’t miss anything much: Iwadare first started with Godot’s theme, then with the court them (PW3), and finishing the Phoenix Wright part with Pursuit (of course, the Trial and Tribulations ones).
Afterwards, his group performed Lunar ~ Silver Star Harmony Opening, then the inserted song.
Finally, he did Grandia’s opening, its battle theme, and another track I couldn’t figure (since I’m no grandia player, I had no idea what track this one was). In any case, for the whole concert, it was quite pumping, and Iwadare had a great aura, even dancing while performing.
The public liked their performance (and dear lord, he was right when he said Shion was cute), and they demanded another one though yelling “encore une” isn’t really as effective as “もう一回” I guess… well nevertheless, as Iwadare was almost leaving, he performed a beautiful piano score… I really have no idea what was this one, but I’d love to find this out.

As I got back to the Kawasoft/Touhou booth, there wasn’t really anything to do left, aside of lurking again for possible loot, or discussing with other people around.
Around 5-6PM, I was making a very last shopping sortie with Spear and Mic. At some random booth, I however discovered something troubling… in a 5€ crate full of OST, I found Shana 1st season OST…
I was first tempted to conclude it was a HK bootleg, but after a much closer look, it doesn’t look to be the case, consdering:
-The presence of the geneon symbol
-no washed out or photocopy colors syndrome
-the whole aspect of the jewel case was normal
-Most of the track titles were in french, which was one of the fundamental trait of Shana OST.

Considering the price for a mint OST, I didn’t hesitated. While Spear and Mic were checking for more goods, I noticed something weird at the left side of the booth. For some reason, I managed to see some art books of Naruto and random things. I would generally stop looking at them, but as I saw the surprising price tag of 10€ ($12.6), I noticed a very… “deja vu” effect of the character design of a character shown on the art book below that tag. under closer inspection, I felt “bingo”…: “hey spear… isn’t it Nanao Naru’s design ?!?!?”… which was THIS one.

Spear was wondering why I was reacting like that and confirmed my thought, and immediately figured out the “issue” with the price tag. The booth clerk confirmed it is for 10€ and we quickly asked if we can have a look at it: no matter how we were glaring at each page, it was a genuine copy of it (and there was a tiny old price tag of 40€ on it). The clerk told us that it is the demo and they have more of them: indeed, there were 6 other copies of that art book in their stock that was visible for us, and we rushed on it: Spear and I took 2, while Mic took the last 3. Of course, we were wondering how come they have so many art books that is barely 4 month old for that price… especially with so many stock… Spear remembered that a certain shop went brancrupt and they had to sell all of their stocks.
What I’ve discovered was just the tip of the iceberg, for we found much more than only Nanao’s most recent art book…

Basically, it was a literal gold rush for us:
Noizi Itou’s Harui-ism art book (5),
Girls Girls Girls art book (1),
Pandora Hearts Official Animation Guide (1)
Lament of the Lamb, Kei Tome (1)
Art collection of Gundam A (4)
Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Visual Complete Guide (1)
Vocaloid Hatsune Miku Graphics (5)
Range Murata: fa documenta – 001+ 002 collection catalogue First Limited (6)
And many more (from what I can remember: Requiem for Phantom, Rozen Maiden, Gundam Seed, etc etc).

Aside of Higurashi, Vocaloid (both 15€) and Murata (50€), all of the other art books were for 10€. It was beyond a steal, and it didn’t take much brain power for us to just buy anything we wanted, or even few extra like the Nanao’s artbook to make some profit along the way.

Mic was pretty much stocking up Haruhi and Gundam Artbooks, while Spear jumped on the Kei tome, Girls girls girls and Pandora, along with a single copy of phantom, while I claimed that Higurashi art book (I still can’t believe it is my first one of higu… ). I also grabbed one of the Haruhi book, and all of us took 1 Miku art book.

I basically spent 60€ ($75), and immediately sold one of the Nanao’s book for 20€, effectively spending 40€ ($50) on 4 gorgeous artbook… considering their original prices and the possible shipping fee attributed to them (especially due to their weight), you can say that we all were to originally spent at least 200€ ($250). It was dirt cheap and it was seriously the best find we could have discovered during the last 2 hours of the convention.
What’s scary is that no one would ever find out about these gems if I didn’t pay attention to that Nanao’s artbook…
Of course, the guys at that booth knew about it and when the business was still afloat, most of these artbooks were to be sold for 40€ each, it is just that it seems they couldn’t help and sell at that insane price, considering they were forced to liquidate all of their stocks, even though 20-30€ could do the trick… it is a real wonder how come no one had noticed such gems before my discovery.
In a way, I sort of bought these 4 artbooks for the price of 1, or even less…

Anyway, back to our “base”, people were obviously dumbfounded by our find, calling us frigging lucky jew bastards… I won’t blame them, obviously.
Since it was about time for the booths to close, I was hoping the cospa one to reduce some prices (since they weirdly increased a lot of merchandise by 5€… I mean, blackrock shooter T shirts were at 25, while SOS dan one was still at 20… in fact, the price board on the external wall of the booth had all T shirts at 20€, but they has put some sort of new price over a lot of them >_>).
Unfortunately, they didn’t do any real last rush price cut at all. It was a bit too bad they were keeping Shina Dark Figures, Christina and Galette at respectively 55 and 60€ (their original price tag was 75 and 80).
That said, I indulged myself and bought 2 cospa straps: Shana, and one from Sora no Otoshimono (Ikaros and Nymph).
5€ each.

After talking a bit with everyone for the last time, I take my leave with Nyo and Smankh but although I thought it would have time by leaving at 7:30PM (effectively having less people around), both of them didn’t look that optimist. And true to this, I was dumbfounded to see the bloody transport area overcrowded still. After the frigging long time and going deeper to the airport station, hoping for a direct line, I was doomed to be late for my Thalys.
Thanks to Nyo and Smankh, I didn’t fall to depression thanks for these lazy bums at the Call center for not working at 7:00PM so I could exchange my printed ticket with another one through phone… duh. With this sad note, I was forced to buy for 62€ another thalys ticket for 10:01 PM, which really made me go home late (around midnight, completely hungry and exhausted as I didn’t eat anything and I was carrying my backpack and loot bag with both hands… at least I guess I did some exercice…)

Anyway, as you can see, I got some good stuff but also got my bad luck plaguing me as per usual basis…
Aside of the events, I think it is time to add further points that would make some aspects of this JE not so commendable but heh:

Afterthought

The bad:
To be blunt, the organization of the JE was a frigging mess. It is their 11th festival, they are professionals, yet they still fail at keeping a proper pace in term of queue management etc.
If it was only an issue exclusively to that point, it wouldn’t be that annoying, but it certrainly is when further factors are included… such like the nasty weather on saturday.
I mean, even disabled persons cannot enter before 10:00 AM in the convention if they don’t have a premium ticket… thus even if they were on a different queue area, they most likely were stuck under the rain until the doors open… I mean, are they silly enough to let people be soaked to bone, especially a lot of them were lightly clothed?

The said convention wasn’t that smooth either once inside: without any proper number of information point (only 1 for the whole convention… hahaha wow), no distribution of maps (rather, they just let piles of them at random places) or schedule, people were left on their own in a very wild way… at least there were a certain amount of maps and shcedule pinned on some pillars, but certainly not as handy has having a sufficient number of maps/schedule around.

The ugly:
Communication was probably the biggest failure of this year.
As you read above, I wasn’t supposed to be at the JE, but I’ve learned 1 week prior it that… Yukarin was coming to the JE for the promotion of the Nanoha movie screening.
Except that I’ve learned from external websites, having the official japanese movie site and Yukarin’s website as the sources… and that was announced much earlier than them, like on 23rd June.
Yet, they didn’t announce her on their JE site at all. Worse, they actually made a HIDDEN news about aniplex presence, in the screenings category of contents, without even seeing it shown on the main page, only on the 30th June, so barely 3 days before the said event… that and the absence of the movie screening and Yukarin’s signing session on the schedule table until… friday morning…wth.
That and the fact that Yukarin wasn’t shown as part of the guests, and even shortly described as the voice actress for… Fate Testarossa in the aniplex screening news…
In case the news is taken out in the future:

In french:

Cette année, Japan Expo vous propose également de nombreuses projections du producteur et diffuseur Aniplex.

Outre la présentation de la saison 2 de Black Butler en association avec Kana Home Vidéo, Aniplex sera à Japan Expo pour un événement Fullmetal Alchemist : Brotherhood, en diffusant le dernier épisode de la série en présence des doubleurs français et de l’éditeur Dybex.

Seront également projetés en avant-première mondiale : 2 films live.
[...]

• Enfin, Magical Girl Lyrical NANOHA – The Movie first. La première version longue d’un Anime qui a renouvelé le genre des magical girls en mêlant habilement scènes d’action impressionnantes, quêtes magiques et galerie de personnages attachants.
  La projection sera suivie d’une séance de dédicace de Yukari TAMURA, doubleuse d’une des deux héroïnes, Fate Testarossa, également en conférence de presse le même jour à 17h30 ! À ne manquer sous aucun prétexte !

In English (translated by myself, since they didn’t even bother to do that for the English page):

This year, Japan Expo proposes many screenings from the producer and editor Aniplex.

Aside of the screening of the second season of Black Butler, with the partnership of Kana Home Video, Aniplex will be present at Japan Expo for a Fullmetal Alchemist : Brotherhood event, screening the last episode of the series, with the présence of the french voice actors and the editor, Dybex.

There will be 2 world premiere live movies.
[...]

• Finally, Magical Girl Lyrical NANOHA – The Movie first. The first long version of an Anime which has renewed the Magical Girl genre, skillfully blending impressive action sequences, magical quests and a lot of likable characters.
  The screening will be followed with a signing session with Yukari TAMURA, voice actress of one of the two heroines, Fate Testarossa, present as well for a press conference the very same day at 5:30PM! Do not miss this opportunity!

Frankly, it is really as if Yukarin was a total random and second hand guest. I dunno, it isn’t like she is that famous for the french community, but I think it is at least “decent” to introduce a guest: all other guests were properly announce, even some “newcomers” like Aso Natsuko.

The lack of communication probably became a strong impact on weak presense of fans (as we weren’t exactly a lot to begin with), but even Japanese fans were affected by such amateurish way to handle the events. I mean: I know Hojo, Morning Musume and Kojima are the big super stars, but there are a lot more than just these 3.
By extension, if you have read my article in details, you will notice that they often contradict themselves: well, the whole requirement of having an official item for Iwadare’s autograph was bullcrap… Good thing I’ve checked it up in case… but before that, some staff members had no idea what was the shiny “goods” sticket on my autograph coupon etc.

Not really related to the JE staff, but the food and drinks were really a rip-off… what, 9€ for 6 mere takoyaki balls? 8€ for a mere cheese – ham sandwich?
It isn’t like I was expecting free stuff or anything, but it is such a swindle that even ostentatious extra such like caviar wouldn’t really soften the blow. I wasn’t affected by this, but some visitors were dumb enough to buy food and drinks at those unreasonable prices.

The Good:
At least, the space they prepared and the layout of the convention weren’t so bad. They were enough room for everyone to walk around without feeling like in the french subway.

Other good point regarding the organization of that JE is the fact they weren’t silly in having minimal autograph sessions and at least spread them so people won’t have a dilemna between attending one or another… unless you want more than half of them, which is a bit greedy if you ask me.

Also, they were smart enough to pack various booths together: it was actually a good thing that Kawasoft, Touhou and SOSdan booths were clumped together. Likewise, the various amateur stands were packed together depending of what they offer (you could often see the “doujinshi” together, the “I’m drawing your portrait with a manga style” booths packed together etc).

Anyway, as far as I was lucky to get many great things (3 autographs, mainly Yukarin’s, having a short talk and shaking her hand, so many win artbooks), I wouldn’t have been so blessed without the support of many great people around, all noted above.
That kind of convention is really not a field trip and going there all alone isn’t any good.
And thinking about it, I wonder if I will really attend the Japan Expo of next year… I have no more expectations for a “decent” organization at this point, but unless they bring solid guests, I doubt I will be that good with that, considering the huge expenses without including the loot, and the fact it is better suited for fans that are only good with anime and manga, ignoring all the other stuff such like doujin, VN etc.

And now, the painful bill:
-Initial travel: 10 + 62 (return)… and prolly that extra 62 as refund seems not possible…
-Travel and food expense: 30€
-Entrance Fee: 31€
-Loot: 35€ (clannad book) + 5€ (OST) + 40€ (Artbook Raid) + 10€ (Straps)

Grand total: 223€ (~ $280)… without that train penalty T_T
Thank goodness I didn’t have to pay any hotel or something…

TL,DR mode:

Loot Overview:

Negative portions:
-Ridiculous lack of communication in various aspects of the convention (events, staff, information booth number (1), etc)
-Autograph coupon system being really really confusing due to its name and the lack of *large information* outside of the said signing coupon booth.
-Queue management outside of the convention is really bad
-Yukarin’s treatment… almost as if she was a booth babe, so to speak.
-Conference regarding Nanoha Movie: very bad translator, uninspiring prepared questions, 45 min despite planned for a full hour
-Food and Drinks price
-Lack of “real” and various official goods related to the guests
-My atrocious luck with my Backpack and my return ticket…

Positive portions:
+good layout of the booths, and the venues were large enough
+Art Books raid :3
+ meeting various japanese guests and fans
+YUKARIN <3
+meeting great people again. I can’t thank enough everyone who helped me thorough these 3 days. Guys, I love you!

But seriously though, the fine line of this Japan Expo is that: -do not- attend it alone and more importantly: check every day all information sections (not just the news) because it may change your plans drastically. Always be aware that 9 hours is really too short to check everything, so always be really careful about the time you are spending in a queue or anything else.
And unless you are really a whealthy bastard: bring your own food and drink, ortherwise prepare to either cough a good portion of your budget, or starve and dehydrate to death.

I Kind Of Wish I Could Be Playing This On Multiplayer With Ghost or Myssa Rei as The Philippines But What Are Ya Gonna Do

Yeah well, I know I was supposed to be doing a write up of the great people feature for this installment of my Civilization IV exploits, but as everyone can probably see I struggled with how to make the idea interesting for a while.  I recall ghostlightning talking about how articles ought to be written to be as inclusive to the core readership as possible, and so I though about how to make great people a more interesting topic than just me rambling in detail about features of a game that most people likely haven’t played.  Today it hit me….the answer was to bring the game to the people, and what better way to do so then a “Let’s Play” of Civilization IV’s own controversial Road to War mod.

As one might expect there is a World War II mod for Civ IV and as I’m sure most people know World War II affected the world on a global scale with repercussions that are still affecting the world today.  Everybody no matter where they are from has seen their country influenced by the course of events of the war, and every country has it’s great people who did what they could to try and win it for their cause.   Now I said this mod is controversial, and what I mean by that I mean by that among other things is that it actually would have gotten the game banned in Germany if they had gone ahead and used the version I am planning to play which includes Hitler, Hirohito and the Nazi Germany flag.  That had to be removed from the retail version and if you play that one you will be getting Vice Chancellor Franz Von Papen and Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto for Germany and Japan respectively.  However that’s not the only controversy, because this mod is still very much a work in progress and prone to some A.I bugs, balance issues and the occasional crash as well as some very odd geographical choices.  It’s not uncommon for Road To War players to make changes to the script for the purposes of enhancing the experience for their style of WWII simulation and in fact the author has encouraged it as well.

For the purposes of this LP I have been playing as my own glorious nation, The Dominion of Canada under the difficulty setting of Chieftain with realistic events (meaning key war events take place on the day that they did in real life) on the global assault map (meaning the whole world is the stage) starting in the year 1936.  The following will catch people up to 1943 an where I am now in the conflict with all the hardship, small victories and incidental observations that came along the way.  Hope people enjoy.

Words Cannot Express My Anger At This Blunder

20×6? 1936!

The year is 1936 as I start up my mod to an immediate crash upon loading the world map.  After 30 minutes of tinkering around I finally solve the problem that keeps crashing the game.  Turns out the video file it keeps trying to play is corrupt and causing the game to hang.  This is only the first of many immediate problems I am to be made aware of in the opening stages of this mod because after removing the corrupted asset and getting control of the game I am greeted with it’s representation of Canada and don’t quite like what I see.  It’s not the wacky geography that gets me at first or the lack of a character model for William Lyon Mackenzie King (Canada was only recently added to the game as it’s own playable faction along with countries suchs as Greece and Brazil and all lack character models for their leaders), it’s the fact that:

• Ottawa is infuriatingly misspelled  as Ottowa
• Instead of obvious cities like Toronto and Quebec the game pretends Quebec doesn’t exist at all and supplants the most populous city in the country with frickin’ Thunder Bay

• For whatever reason the Rocky Mountain range COMPLETELY blocks access from Edmonton to Victoria (not actually how the country works) which means the west coast is useless right off the bat
• The flag is the Maple Leaf which wasn’t the flag of Canada during the time of WWII.  That would be the Red Ensign we are looking for.

All right, so the author of the mod knows fuck all about Canada….this is a great opportunity to start making my own customizations.  A quick trip to the map editor allows me to fix the spelling of our capital city and to add Toronto and Quebec City to the map.  This won’t be the last change I make.

In any case this is the pre war period that I obliged myself to start from so that I could get the full Road to War experience and most of it is spent building up the infrastructure of Canada while getting ready for the war to come.  I encourage all of my cities to grow a bit and made some deals with Great Britain to keep my citizens happy and slowly the war finally creeped around in 1939.  First though a brief timeline of events leading up to me actually being able to do some fighting.

• In August 1937 Hiroto declares war on China and pretty soon starts invading one city after another.  Somehow Chairman Mao’s People’s Republic of China gets completely wiped out by February 1938 leaving only Chiang Kai-Shek’s Republic of China to get it’s ass kicked.  Somehow I don’t recall this happening and can only chalk it up to the Chinese A.I being a little dim.  This feeling will continue for my session as I watch the Allied powers kind of dither around.
• Francisco Franco takes control of Spain in February 1938 and Austria is annexed by Germany as well meaning 3 civilizations are wiped out in one month.  Holy shit!
• In September 1938 Czechoslovakia is conquered by Germany meaning there game is over.

September 1939 -The Road To War Ends

I must say, this game does a reasonably good job at starting the war off.  First Japan attacks China and then one turn later Germany invades Poland, forcing the Common Wealth of Nations to declare war on Germany and Japan.  Here’s where we run into our second major problem for my play through however.  Again probably because Canada is a new edition the author seem to have never gotten around to giving it it’s own WWII units.  Most major powers involved in the war have their own unique military units that are representative of the actual ones used in WWII and these units all come with augmented stats which are in most cases much higher than the ones you would find in normal game of Civilization.  However the newest editions still only use the ones from regular Civilization, meaning they have absolutely zero chance of ever beating anything from Road To War in battle.  This simply wouldn’t do so I edited the script to allow Canada access to the Commonwealth line of Road To War units.  I justify this in that on the first turn of the war Winston Churchill and all the allied nations approached me and offered to share their resources.  Great Britain in particular allowed me to take 800 gold per turn from the Commonwealth which essentially allows me to buy units instead of having to wait for all of them to finish.  Just like in the real war it’s hand me downs from Britain to Canada……..whatever, here are you great heroes for this play through of WWII at the moment.

Meet the Allied Nations

Most Helpful

The British Commonwealth Realms as Lead by Prime Minister Winston Churchill

Best Theme Music/Most Short Lived Ally

The French Republic As Led By President Charles De Gaulle (Should Be Albert Lebrun By The Way

Most Comically Oversized Glasses

The Commonwealth Of Australia As Led By Prime Minister John Curtin

Most Intense Stare

The Dominion Of Canada As Led By Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King As Played By Kaioshin Sama

Most Unfortunate Last Name

The Republic Of South Africa As Led By Prime Minister Jan Smuts

Your cheers please!  And now your villains:

Meet The Axis Powers

Most Sassy Pose

The German Reich As Led By Chancellor/Fuhrer Adolf Hitler

History’s Biggest Over Compensator

The Kingdom Of Italy As Led By Il Duce Benito Mussolini

Most Surprisingly Competent AI Opponent

The Empire Of Japan As Led By Emperor Hirohito

Feel free to boo and hiss!  Especially if you are from Finland as they are the first nation to be knocked out of the game after formal war is declared.

1940 – The Atlantic War Begins And Things Start Going Bat Shit Crazy

Remember When China Was Completely Wiped Out As A Nation And Conquered By Japan?  What About When All Of Southeast Asia Was Conquered By Japan As Well?  Neither Did I

The first very peculiar thing happened in February of 1940 when somehow Japan managed to completely wipe out Chang Kai-Shek’s Republic of China and effectively remove China from existence.  Something tells me this wasn’t supposed to happen, but it only got weirder from there.

Good Thing I Got Out Of There Fast

Right on time France fell to the Germans in March of 1940 giving way to Vichy France and a whole new villain for our play through.

History’s Greatest Herocoward

Vichy France As Led By Marshal Henri Philippe Benoni Omer Joseph Pétain

Now I have to pause here for a moment to stick up for the French situation during WWII and give a few observations.  As I understand it from history classes and a little wikipedia as well France didn’t really surrender en masse to the Germans as is often mistakenly believed (leading to many unfair jokes at the expense of the French being “cheese eating surrender monkeys” among other things), the French cabinet couldn’t decide what to do so they put the legendary hero of WWI in charge with emergency powers and Petain believing that further hostilities would only destroy France almost immediately surrendered to Germany paving the way for the existence of Vichy France.  France’s saviour or a coward that made the allies fight tougher….you decide.  Anyway this also caused a domino effect which gave the Allied nations two new allies.

Best Moustache

The Kingdom Of Norway As Led By King Haakon VII

Token Female Leader

The Low Countries As Led By Queen Wilhelmina

1940 I would say was definitely the beginning of the Atlantic War in my game.  It was a good thing I had built up all of those ships in Halifax because even getting troops over to the London was a pain in the ass with all of the German, Italian and French Submarines in the way.  Thank god for escorts is all I can say.  Meanwhile as I was getting my forces mobilized in London as a staging point the British Commonwealth was very nicely beating the crap out of France while Italy started making it’s way into Africa in later November.  Yes that’s right Italy….no Desert Rommel (no not the one from ZZ, the real Desert Rat Erwin Rommel) and Afrika Corps in this scenario I’m sad to say.  Hungary and Romania also joined the Axis Powers, but are such a small contribution in one city and a handful of soldiers a piece that they are barely worth mentioning.  If you ask me they did it for the security…well at least Romania.  Late in 1940 I finally broke through the Atlantic barrier and managed to occupy Casablanca, essentially scoring myself a beachhead into North Africa and a chance to help out the British against the Italians.

1941 – The Battle For Africa Begins

Raise The Standard!  TO VICTORY!  Oh But Little Did I realize Just How Long The Road Ahead Of Me Would Be

It’s now 1941 and about a year and a half into the war and I’m kind of getting a taste for how agonizingly slow and desperate it must have been during the years that the Axis was advancing.  I don’t think I managed to accomplish much of anything until literally December and the end of the year besides managing to get my airbases built along with access to paratroopers and many other questionably useful units.  The airbase was a godsend because it allows me to airlift up to three units to any allied city of my choosing, effectively eliminating the need to run the Atlantic Gauntlet.  Unfortunately I didn’t get that until near the end of the year so that’s why there was so little progress.  The paratrooper might be useful if it weren’t for the fact that bombers are ridiculously powerful in this game and Italy has at least four Fiat CR. 42 Fighters in each city.  Basically a paratrooper can be air dropped up to ten spaces away from the nearest airbase (which is a lot farther than it sounds) but are sitting ducks until the next turn.  From what I’ve found (and what made progress so tough) any unit left outside of a city and within range of bombing by the enemy is as good as dead.  Hooray for balance.

Thankfully June 194 brought a couple of buffer allies in the inclusion of Greece and Yugoslavia.  Again they are kind of underwhelming in this game in terms of having any offensive power but make up for it by having surprisingly well defended cities that effectively force Italy to have to go through them in order to get any more troops into Africa.  Still Athens gets conquered by Italy anyway leaving only one Greek city on the map and the Greek civilization on the brink of collapse.

December 1941 could potentially be seen as a turning point in my war effort just as it was credited with being in real life.  With the Axis’ advance in WWII effectively stalled Japan (which will soon be scaring the shit out of me) makes it’s attack on Pearl Harbour only to fail and bring some new allies into the conflict.  This time they are actually useful.

Thank You Thank You Thank You!

The United States Of America As Led By President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Best Dressed

The Republic Of The Philippines As Led By President Manuel Quezon

GHOSTY!  Glad the Philippines could make it.  If the Japanese even try to get near there you can bet Canada and the U.S will be there in a dash to fight them off.  Anyway with the United States research power behind the Allies I very quickly get access to Industry Level 3 which grants advanced infantry and armour along with access to desperately needed anti-air.  The year of hell in 1941 finally comes to a close.

1942 – Western Power Alliance For Great Victory In Africa

I Still Don’t Know If I’m Looking Forward To War In The Pacific.  For Ghosty And The Filipino Friends I Might Just Have To Tough It Out Though.

The tide is starting to turn in Europe with the United States contribution to the war effort, but the pacific front is starting to move further into Southeast Asia in what can only be described as utterly bizarre.  Effectively taking control of the alliance with my 1200 gold a turn commitment the Commonwealth goes on a mad rush in Africa.  With anti air power I don’t have to fear crossing the desert quite as much and manage to take and return Dakar to South Africa in April, but keep Addis Ababa as a military base in May.  Italy tries to fight back and cities change hands on an almost monthly basis, but Britain ends up diverting some of it’s forces from the Raj into Africa and together we force them back even further until by the end of the year Africa is almost entirely under allied control except for Tripoli and a couple of strategically insignificant cities controlled by France.  However the diversion of forces from the Raj emboldens the already vicious Japanese A.I and they actually manage to take control of it in late November.  With the fall of the Raj Japan is now currently leading in points and overall territory, but I’m sure that together the allies can get it back.  We’ll have to for the sake of our collectives entertainment interest because if Japan wins the war there won’t be any anime….EVER!

1943 – The Gateway To Italy Is Opened But The Story Is Not Yet Written

We are almost up to date now.  With a staging point for an invasion of Italy I am currently building up my forces for an attempt at a landing by sea.  However with the birth of a great general in Quebec I can now immediately promote my paratroopers twice and grant them the ability to move after an airdrop.  This opens the possibility for an invasion by air and see in just a few months time.  as I said though the story is not yet written.  It is August 1943….ROME MUST FALL BY CHRISTMAS!

Hopefully everyone enjoyed my recap/LP attempt of Civilization IV’s Road To War mod.  Let me know what you think and either way I’ll be back for more with news of the war effort.  This is Kaioshin Sama signing off…good night and remember to support the troops by buying war bonds.

The rest of the article contains spoilers and impressions so this is your chance to look away if you don’t want to watch the preview above.

That was neat.  First obviously the animation was top-notch and with not a single hiccup or out-of-place frame that I could find.  Everything also flows extremely well even by Gundam animation standards in all of the intricate movements that we see the characters and mobile suits making during the brief skirmish between the Jegans and the Kshatriya.  My particular favourites were the funnel attack on the Jegans, the specific movement of the Stark Jegan pilots fingers as he locked them onto the joystick for what he must have known was going to be a fierce encounter, and the depiction of the destruction of the Laplace colony at the beginning of the video which I will get back to soon.

The music was also a standout with all four pieces featured bringing something to the table.  First we have the nice  piece played during the ceremony to mark the turnover to the Universal Century calendar with its upbeat nature that goes well with the promise of a new dawn for mankind being made.  Then after the Laplace Incident and during Siam Vist (the old man) we have the sombre reflective piece during Siam’s discussion with Cardeas.  The main theme makes a brief appearance during the title card as well (looking forward to hearing that one in full especially) and finally the only one I hadn’t heard before in the battle music during the skirmish which sets the appropriate tone of tension and even reminds me a little of the classic Neo Zeon battle theme from Char’s Counterattack.  All very appropriate in their respective contexts.

I also liked the cinematography used in a few key scenes.  First there were the shots of the inside of Laplace with all the earnest celebration during the Federation presidents speech juxtaposed with the outside shots of the impending terrorist attacks and the sense of foreboding that something bad is about to happen.  Second was the introduction of the title card itself which at first seemed surprising and a little sudden, but upon reflection was placed quite nicely after what was meant to serve as an introduction.  Earth never looked so beautiful.  Finally there was one shot just before it with Cardeas standing over Siam and the pair just barely lit by the sun peaking out from behind the Earth.  It seems to hint at a twilight not only for Earth below them, but of the Universal Century and mankind as it prepares to pass into the second Universal Century in just a few years time.

If there are a few things I find disappointing they begin with the point at which they ended off.  I feel that it definitely accomplishes the goal of leaving the viewer wanting more, but the fact that it was sandwiched between commercials and barely gets out of the introductory phase of the episode seems almost like too much of a tease.  Also was it not possible to have a slightly better quality video for the preview?  I understand they want the allure of Blu-Ray video to help push the sales, but I still get the feeling that they were being a little cheap just the same.  It wouldn’t have killed them to have an HD option would it?  Oh well….small nitpicks, none of which I will have to deal with when the actual Blu-Ray comes out so I’ll leave the negatives here.

I just want to talk about one more thing briefly before I head off for a session of Civ IV.  I had a feeling…..and sure enough the whole idea of the Laplace Incident kind of reminds me of the failed promise of our own ringing in of the 21st century….that is if the dawn of the Universal Century is supposed to serve as a Gundam equivalent.  Here we have the promise of a new dawn for mankind and perhaps an age of peace in the first successful colonization of space.  For us it was the fact that there hadn’t been a major war fought by the first world since the fall of the Soviet Union which we though would bring about an age of security and economic growth with trade at last open again to the eastern world and no major enemies to fight.  Both promises ended with a terrorist attack on a significant symbol of human triumph.  For the Universal Century it was the first colony of Laplace, a symbol of a dawning space age of colonization and an end to worries of war over territory and of unsustainable population growth.  For the 21st century it was the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, images of commerce and security respectively.  Both events eventually led to wars that have drug on and have still not yet ended (Federation/Zeon war for U.C and Coalition/Insurgent war for 21st century) and little but misery and economic and security setbacks.  Of course the fictional war took longer to get started than the real war and it has been going for over fifty years by the time of the Oldsmobile Rebellion in Gundam F90 while the real war started almost immediately and at this moment the powers that be are making promises that it is in it’s final phases.  One can only hope that the real world doesn’t make the same mistakes as this fictional one and we can make good on Yang-Wen Li’s ideal of having peace in our time.

Further Reading:

The Wikipedia article on Gundam Unicorn (Today)

Zeonic Scanlations are currently working on many Gundam Unicorn related projects (Deacon Blues 2010/02/11)

Absolute Power You Say.........

About a month ago I found myself coming into some extra money so I decided to treat myself to something and on a whim I bought the Civilization IV pack off of steam and fired it on up.  Previously I had played Civilization II during high school but was too young and inexperienced in strategy and resource management to be very good at it, and I had tried to install Civ IV on my old PC when it first came out only to watch as it chugged like my mother at bar (basically impossibly slow) and become more or less unplayable after about 30 seconds.  Now with a faster PC I felt I might get to enjoy the experience and felt that Civ IV would be able to give me the chance to do something I’ve always wanted to do…..lead an Empire to glorious victory and total dominance of the globe over an epic period of time while micromanaging EVERYTHING along the way.  It’s all here and it’s proven to be pretty much as close to the perfect game for me in just over a month, far surpassing my previous all time favourite of Fire Emblem:  Seisen No Keifu which stood in it’s place in my heart for close to a decade (I still love you Fire Emblem don’t worry).

With ghostlightning’s blessing I’ve decided to start a short series on Civilization IV and why I love the game so much, and tonight with some spare time (which will also be spent playing the game of course) I figured I’d get things started.  Truthfully I coul talk all day about the intracies of Civilization IV and in 1000′s of words still not totally sum up what it’s like to actually play and experience the game’s depth and scope, but I have other things to do tonight as well so I just want to briefly talk a bit about the things that make the game awesome to me and hopefully in the process convince a few people to give it a try.

Part 1 – On Being A Leader:

Where To Begin.......

The basic idea behind Civilization IV (or at least the most basic of the basic ideas) is to put you the player in charge of a Civilization and let them dictate the course of it’s history to either glorious prosperity, a dismal demise, or perhaps a middle power like my own country of Canada.  Nobody ever said being a leader was easy though and if you were to doubt it then I would suggest looking up the story of Damocles (no not that fortress from Code Geass, the actual morality tale).  Anyway nobody ever said being the leader of an entire civilization with it’s hopes and dreams invested in you was going to be easy and from the moment the game gets started and puts you into control of a single settler it almost immediately starts to try to kick your ass and to put an end to your feeble attempts to “build a Civilization to stand the test of time”.  Whoa holy shit watch out for that Barbarian over….oh man you just lost your only unit….so much for that civilization of yours that never was eh?  False starts are forgiven by Civ IV though and your free to try again, but do be more careful next time.

Avoiding hazards is one thing, but where to start that first city of yours and get that civilization under way?  Do you want to pick that open area with lots of farmland to focus on storing food for population growth?  What about that mine in the mountains over there that can be used to expedite building….but it’s so far away from food isn’t it, and it’s not exactly a mine full of gems to get the economy going…..ugh…I guess you’ll just have to worry about that later…..by which point another civilization may have claimed it and you’ll have to go to war with them so that you can expand your borders and claim it for yourself.  Is this a good or bad thing….I’m afraid your on your own on that one fearless leader? :/

Okay Now What....

So now you’ve got your first city up and running, but there’s only one guy in it.  You might think you want to set your city to produce another settler to make another city….or perhaps you want a worker to improve those tiles around it…..what about military protection from the marauding barbarians who want to put an end to that Civilization of yours….better make up your mind.  Done deciding are you….well to bad there’s still only one guy at work and it’s going to be damn slow in making that new unit for you.  Maybe you should set him to gather food so that your population can grow and you’ll have two workers to speed things up a little….but then who is going to do the work and build new units in the mean time?  Boy it’s tough getting a civilization off the ground, and this only a snapshot of the things you’ll have to consider in the first 5-10 turns of a game alone in order to hopefully get a head start on competing civilizations.

Civilization IV challenges you to second guess your own decisions and to consider multiple factors before committing to a course of action and like real history once you’ve chosen your path there’s no turning back so you better hope it was the right one.  Nobody ever said being a leader was easy, and I believe somebody in a comic book I once read said that “with great power comes great responsibility”.  Civilization IV comes closer to simulating this contradiction of the leadership role than any game I’ve ever played and it’s just one of the many reasons I love the game.

In the coming days and weeks I will be writing some more updates on the reasons why I love Civilization IV.  I hope people are looking forward to it as much as I am and please if anybody has any subjects concerning Civilization IV that they want me to discuss don’t hesitate to drop a comment and I’ll be happy to see what I can do.

Next Time On Here’s To Us:  The Great Ones (Paying Tribute To The People That Helped Make Our Civilization What It Is)

Further Reading

An excellent source of information on all things Civilization (Civ Fanatics 2000-2010)

The Sword Of Damocles and why being a leader may not be all it’s cracked up to be (Cicero 106-43 BC)

Modernization of Gundam…..I talked a bit about the idea yesterday in the comment section for ghostlightnings article on Gundam 00′s final battle and how I thought the show might be an attempt to update Gundam for the 21st century paradigm we live in now.  Gundam Tribute I think has much the same idea in mind, only now it is about the Gundam sound rather than the core concept itself.

First off I bet some are asking “what is Gundam Tribute exactly”?  Well simply put it’s a collaboration between Sunrise/Bandai and Lantis and some of todays most popular music artists and idols in Japan to cover some of the classic Gundam songs and make an album out of it.  This is of course part of the 30th anniversary celebration for the franchise, but as I mentioned to the ghost yesterday I think it’s also a further example of Bandai’s current strategy of branching out and trying to bring new fans into the fold.  How exactly does this work with the music?  Well when you have the likes of Jam Project, CooRie and Little Non the latter two of whom are popular in the moe and eroge branches lending their status to Gundam songs (and vice versa) it may just help to bring the fans of their music into a greater awareness of Gundam and may even legitimize it for them as well.  Idol status goes a long way in Japan and while Gundam is an established tradition it’s not popular with all.  Gundam Wing branched out to female viewers and Gundam Seed branched out to a younger generation, but I think Bandai is always looking for new opportunities, and that’s an interesting thing.  I guess we’ll see what’s what, but for now I’m kind of eager to do some cross comparisons of the song covers on this album with their originals and to go over what they did with the pieces and what I as long time Gundam fan liked and disliked about these updates.

This article is going to be a little youtube video heavy so just bear in mind when you load the rest that it might take a little bit longer than normal.

Ai Senshi By Jam Project (Original By Daisuke Inoue)

Alright so the way the way I plan for this to work is pretty simple.  The originals on top and the covers on the bottom.  This is an overall great start to the album with one of the more famous and popular classic Gundam songs in Soldiers of Sorrows insert Ai Senshi, which has already seen many covers from Gackt to American artist Andrew “Party Hard” W.K.  The original was actually sung by Daisuke Inoue (not the same one that invented Karaoke) and plays out like an upbeat cheer with lyrics that are actually kind of depressing whereas the new version fits in nicely with JAM Project perfomance style of music.  Very high energy to go with the upbeat nature of the song as well and it’s also neat to hear each of the voices of the JAM Project have their crack at the song.   Moving on.

Toki Wo Koete By Faylan (Original by Mami Ayukawa)

Zeta Gundam’s first openings cover gives me mixed feelings on this one.  It’s hard to imagine a more technoish sound coming out the modern version than the one from the 80′s and I kind of miss the awesome guitar solo in the beginning of the original version.  Faylan’s version sounds just a bit to artificial to me.  Damn Autotune……

Toki Wo Koete By Miyuki Hashimoto (Original by Hiroko Moriguchi)

Zeta Gundam’s second opening cover is different in better way than the first one I have to say.  This is the opposite of what Faylan’s was like and now we have the cover sounding less like a synthizer driven song than the original.  We’re also able to better here Hashimoto’s voice since she isn’t filtered like Faylan’s and she even seems to be borrowing a bit from Hiroko Moriguchi’s style.  It’s different yet familiar, a good combination for this Gundam fan.

Silent Voice By  Yozuca* (Original by Jun Hiroe)

Also known as the only ZZ Gundam song that I felt was memorable, this is the second opening for that series as covered by Yozuca.  The original marked the shift in tone from goofy to serious with it’s slower beat and the sense of urgency it brought….especially compared to the absurd Anime Ja Nai.  This cover manages to capture a lot of what I felt made Silent Voice so memorable with it’s chorus, but it’s neat to hear a softer singing style from Yozuca as well during the verses.  As if she chose to take the lyric “silent voice” to heart during that part.  Still not the most memorable of the covers though.

Issenman-Nen Ginga By Aira Yuhki (Original by Jun Hiroe)

This cover manages to take the more gospel/rock ballad like version by Jun Hiroe and give it a more whimsical sound.  In this case I think I actually might prefer the cover version to the original just for how different it sounds compared to most Gundam music I’ve heard.  Always interesting to hear new styles for old standby’s and especially so when they are enjoyable as this.

Eternal Wind By Aki Misato (Original by Hiroko Moriguchi)

It’s kind of hard to top Gundam F91′s ending theme with a cover, but this one gives it a go.  There’s something missing in the atmosphere for much of the beginning song though I have to say and I’m not sure I like Misato’s singing voice as much as Moriguchi’s for this song.  While the instrumental gives us some surprises later on by giving us a different sound (not exactly what I would have hoped for mind you) it’s still missing that tempo change and added intensity at around the halfway point that the original really sold itself for me on and Misato’s voice never quite gains the intensity I would have hoped for.  Again though as I said it’s hard to top the original in this case.

Stand Up To The Victory By Rey (Original by Tomohisa Kawasoe)

I recall hearing that when Victory Gundam first came out that Japanese didn’t know what to make of the rock driven opening that the early 90′s brought to the franchise.  I wonder what they’d think about this version now if they could have seen into the future.  It’s definitely got the same high energy and it’s still rock, but it’s just a little different and Rey has done a nice job of making it their own.  Can’t complain.

Just Communication By Minami Kuribayashi (Original by Two-Mixx)

I think everybody has heard this one at least once.  For me it has a long history because it was the first anime opening that I actually got to see on broadcast television in it’s original form.  You see back when I was just starting out on this whole anime fandom thing the only easy way to watch any was on YTV here in Canada and the dubbing companies used to love to cut up and replace the original theme songs with their own which usually turned out to be utter drivel.  Bandai however made history here when they chose to send Gundam Wing to YTV with only the dub track being inserted for English speaking viewers and YTV ran it as it was.  Needless to say turning on this show Gundam Wing to see what the deal was and seeing this Japanese theme song left a huge impression on me and no it’s being covered.  Love telling that story by the way.  Anyway Just Communication is known for it’s eurobeat/dance flavour, but the cover seems to be going for something more like an akihabara para para club beat flavour.  Can’t say I’m down with it as much, but I bet otaku are having a field day with this one somewhere.

Fly In The Sky By Little Non (Original by Ushima Hitofumi)

I was always more partial to the second G Gundam opening “Trust You Forever” (I mean it had Master Asia and Schwarz Bruder grappling and sounded like a Gaogaigar song to boot) and never quite felt all that big on Fly In The Sky, but this has to be the most radically different sounding cover on the entire album in a bad way.  Fly In The Sky’s original sound gave more of that feel of a martial artist challenging himself to reach the heights of his discipline, but Little Non’s version sounds all “lolied up” and more like something that would go with a magical girl anime about trying your best, making friends and all of that other sugary sweet stuff.  Granted G Gundam was about that stuff to, but in so much more of a manly way (Men communicate with their fists after all).  I’ll say no more…..moving on.

Dreams By Masami Okui (Original by ROmantic Mode)

Over half of the selling point of the original version of Gundam X’s first opening for me has always been that rocking 40 second lead so it’s a good that that Okui’s version has that too, albeit with a much different style that includes actual vocals.  I’m not sure what else to say then other than I think this is a pretty neat cover, especially with the use of back up vocals that sneak in and out of the song, but certainly give it some extra points in terms of style.  Also looks for the tempo change around halfway through and the inclusion of some piano.  The original was a lot more static in terms of sound so again neat stuff for this cover.

Resolution By Masaaki Endoh (Original by ROmantic Mode)

I like to call the original the final countdown of Gundam songs, but here’s what I think is neat about the cover version……first of all it’s not the same singer for this Gundam X opening follow up as it was for the original which adds some variety to this part of the album (I’m actually surprised they chose two Gundam X openings and left out Turn A Turn) and second it’s by the guy who sang the Gaogaigar theme.  That means about 1000% more guts and passion for this version of the song and that is most welcome.  Love this cover.

Kaze Ni Hitori De By Kageyama Hironobu (Original by Daisuke Inoue)

We go back to the original movie trilogy for the final section of this album with Gundam’s own folk song.  Here’s the problem though…..I think this one sucks.  Now don’t get me wrong, I absolutely adore Kageyama Hironobu and the contributions he made to JAM with his Project there, but this man is simply meant to be a loud and energetic performer who is there to rock your socks in concert and his voice simply does not lend itself to the folk nature of this song.  His voice sounds strained as if he just wants to belt out the lyrics as per his norm, but he knows it’s not going to happen and I know this song just isn’t happening.  Shame…..

Beginning By rino from CooRie (Original by Daisuke Inoue)

The song from the psychedelic acid trip scene from the third movie (spoilers shall not be included) is covered here by rino and it’s nice to here something different from Inoue who pretty much does every song from the original movie.  Rather than be all eerie  and unsettling with it’s musical accompaniment this cover appears to seek to be more lamenting with it’s usage of piano and rino’s soft vocals.  I think it works personally and as head to the finale of the album (as this song was used for the penultimate moment of the original TV series) I think this cover fits in quite nicely as part of the tribute album.

Encounters By Granrodeo (Original by….you guessed it, Daisuke Inoue)

And so we arrive at last at Encounters which was the send of song for the original Mobile Suit Gundam movie trilogy and thus would be an appropriate sendoff for this tribute album under any circumstances, however…..holy shit is this amazing.  Now the original was like a cheesy love ballad that fit perfectly with the ending of the series, but Granrodeo (you may have heard them doing the opening for Needless which aired a couple seasons ago with the song “Modern Strange Cowboy”) has turned this into a full blown rock ballad and the most radically different sounding song on this album in good way.  In fact I have to say this is probably my favourite cover song on the entire album.  What a way to end things off with such a bang.

Well….that about does her again.  As always I recommend most of the albums I do runovers of otherwise why would I be bothering to listen to them in the first place, but I’d especially recommend this one for the Gundam fan.  If you can get a hold of it then I say snatch it up, otherwise there’s always youtube.  Hope you all had fun and here’s one more Gundam relevant bonus video (as if this thread didn’t have enough) to lead us off that I just say today and thought was pretty neat.

Defend My Love by Namie Amuro

It’s Namie Amuro singing a song with Amuro Ray in the music video and the song is pretty damn catchy too as far as I’m concerned

Gundam Unicorn 3rd Trailer (But Wait There’s More)

I’m away only a day and suddenly the last pieces start to fall into place for 2010.  At this point I’m not sure what else I can expect from what looks to be an awesome upcoming year that I think will more than make up for the lack of mecha I’ve had to suffer through in the latter half of 2009.  With the recent announcement of a new Code Geass project (Trooooolllllllllllllllllls!  Come out to plaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!)from Sunrise this now brings the number of new mecha series from Sunrise alone up to 5 with Unicorn, Votoms, Geass and the Gundam 00 and Seed (hrmmm) movies.  What a busy year and it hasn’t even started.  All that needs to happen is for ghosty to get his new Macross year and I will be ready to prematurely (gasp!) declare 2010 the best year of the century so far.  Here’s a list of some other things I’m still looking forward too:

-Final Fantasy XIII

-Eden of The East Movies

-The rest of V Season 1

- Bioshock 2

Looks like I’ll probably be returning to this blogging business full force next year.  I’m wondering if I’m even going to have any time to rest at all.  In any case time to brush up on my writing and blogging techniques because I almost forget how WordPress even works now.

In a nutshell:
Beatrice’s teacher appears before the golden witch and her furniture, decided to take back her name and powers she bestowed to her pupil. Unwilling to do so, Beatrice starts a fight with her, which takes bigger proportions than any sister of purgatory could imagine.
In the end, Beatrice is literally skewed by her teacher’s spears, gungnir. As she attempts to return Beatrice to her form she had before being an Endless witch, Beatrice nonchalantly asks her teacher to do that instead. Much to her surprise, Beatrice’s teacher is in fact skewed by spears. In truth, Beatrice summoned 4 towers instead of 2, which killed her teacher way before she could be touched. In the end, Beatrice simply revived her teacher for an instant, in order to continue the game.
Back in the meta world, Meta Battler is utterly confused, arguably stuck with such fancy show presented to him.
On 5th october, at 6AM, the adults are still discussing regarding the whole deal with Beatrice and her letter. As they covered all the possible situations regarding this new guest, the adults decide to leave for breakfast. However as they step out of the dining room, they notice an awful stench in the corridors. Natsuhi quickly notices something weird with the door of the parlor: there is a big magic circle on the door. As Kyrie and Rudolf arrive, they notify the rest that this symbol was present on the boiler room door as well. However both that door and the parlor’s are locked. Rosa, Kyrie and Hideyoshi then check the children while the rest of them scout around the mansion.
Weirdly enough, Kinzo and servants are missing, several rooms have their door locked with a magical circle and their respective keys are missing to boot. On their way back, Hideyoshi’s group notices that Shannon is in the parlor, but no matter how they try to get her attention, she doesn’t move. Everyone gathers outside and breaks the window, but as they get in, they realize that Shannon is dead.
In the meta world, Meta Battler is still affected by this brutal magical show, unable to think about anything but loss. Suddenly, Beatrice’s teacher appears. Although Meta Battler is quite doubtful about her sense of magic, she starts mentioning japanese magic, the rain ceremony. As Meta Battler argues it is just an updraft caused by fire, allowing clouds to gather at one spot, she mentions this was however considered magic before the principle was found and explained by science. Then, she claims some gremlins are actually lurking in TV braun tubes, using magic to create images. Of course, Meta Battler doesn’t believe it one bit, but she mentions that while both claim different theories regarding the tube, they would just need to open it and see in it. So long they do not check the said tube, their respective theories can be considered as truth.
Amused by this ironic situation where he receives help from the entities he is trying to deny, Meta Battler asks the name of his new ally: Virgilia.
Meta Battler makes his come back before Beatrice, and much to her surprise, the young man completely ignores the whole fancy fantasy show, arguing that the garden is pretty much normal, bearing no traces of that battle. Beatrice recognizes it as the shrodinger’s cat box, and can’t help but be frustrated to see her teacher helping Battler.
In the gameboard, the adults decided to shelter themselves with the children in the guesthouse until they can contact the police.
In the meta world, Meta Battler acknowledges that he has to suspect one of the 18 because of Beato’s red. Thus, he asks virgilia a reconstruction of the first twilight.
The whole massmurder is a link of 6 closed rooms, merging into a large scale one.
Meta Battler wonders if they were killed by a trap, but it is denied in red.
As their deaths are confirmed, Meta Battler wonders if the culprit isn’t among the 6, speculating that the murderer killed the other 5 and commited suicide afterwards. Because of this, he asks Beatrice to repeat in red that “all of the 6 were killed by other people”.
At first reluctant, Beato’s claim in red that none of the 6 commited suicide. Puzzled by this hesitation, Meta Battler is however encouraged by Virgilia not to be tricked by Beato. And indeed, he realized that she didn’t repeat his demand in red, but changed it to suit her. Therefore, it is “just” isn’t a murder or a suicide, but perhaps an accident.
Beatrice is about to break this theory with her red, but Ronove cuts her short, asking for a strategic meeting.
On the gameboard, the adults are very tired but still try to keep their awareness. As Eva is slumbering, her young alter ego presses on the riddle. Although Eva doesn’t have any clue, she realizes that the sweetfish river might not be taken properly. Curious about that, she goes to the library of the guesthouse and found a book that she needed and realized she found out the key of the Golden Land.
Very soon, she is in a weird underground passage and as she enters in a very decorated room, a large amount of gold is piled before her. Beatrice’s gold has been found.

_______________________________________________________________

Overal Thoughts:

I was pretty pumped up due to the very good start Episode 3 got, especially with Episode 3-2. However, 3-3 was… rather disappointing to say the least.
For starters, the following rant has no real impact on the franchise whatsoever, since it is only just fancy fantasy, so it doesn’t take off the actual essence of the series. However, I believe the whole witch fight was rather poor, which was made for readers’ entertainment.
The problem isn’t of course the length: it would have been detrimental to the episode if it was anything longer. However, it seems the producers had a very bad budget balance as: while the towers looked nice, the rest (especially the witches animation) were terribly subpar.
To begin with, I think they made change that don’t make sense with what the characters say. I mean: why would virgila hurls several spears, while Gungnir is unique? Likewise, why would Beatrice impale Virgilia with the same spears? They have different magic, but heh.
The other odd point was that the spears were basically destroyed/disappearing upon contact with Aegis… it doesn’t make sense with Ronove “avoided” comment. I think it would have been much less awkward if Virgilia threw 1 single giant spear (gungnir) and both giants shields and the spear bounce off before contact which is actually the true result of a paradoxal issue (the immovable object and the unstoppable force), further explained by the “gods’ taboo”, by Ronove. In fact, it would have been less awkward if they just didn’t include Ronove and Belzeebub comment if they wanted to keep this way.
Also, why “smothered mate” at that point? Considering Virgilia, you wouldn’t call a “mate” if you aren’t sure completely that it is over. So what it is? A fake checkmate? ^^”. Actually they could simply put smothered mate at the point she really did, so when she is floating.
Finally, while I will ignore again the ugly efforts done for Beato’s being skewed, something was a bit more annoying me here: the fact Beato stomped on Virgilia’s head.
I think every anime watchers know already that Beato is hardly a nice woman, pretty much cruel and all. But was it necessary? I doubt so, especially that in the VN, Beato was still a bit humble, arguing that if she didn’t use this trick, she would have been dead. Furthermore, she asked Ronove to take care of Virgilia’s corpse as, she is her teacher after all, she she has to give due respect. That’s the total opposite which just makes me wonder why they put unecessary extra stuff (like I said many times in my articles: I don’t mind if changes are made for a better transition or shortcut, but changes that give nothing but a different element just don’t work here).
At least, I’m glad they kept あかいくつ偽 (red fake shoes), the original BGM of the fight, though they again remixed it, for weird reason.

Anyway, witch battle aside, it was good to see Battler totally in despair due to this ridiculous fancy show, then powered up by Virgilia’s wise words. By this definition, it should also spark a proper “tool” for anime watchers to understand Episode 2 now: since the magic portions are “theories regarding the events of what happened”, there is an official answer that all magical stuff so far were bullshit.

That said, the content was extremely shortened as DEEN simply cut completely the adults’ talk regarding the riddle: this is the central point for the “gameboard” world, and probably the key mystery regarding the culprit. Thus, why removing the discussion altogether? It just makes even less sense for anime watchers who are already stuck with the bare minimum. Now, without the adults output (which is important as they know Kinzo’s backstory), it is much harder to understand the epitaph.

As you can see, I wasn’t impressed by this episode… even though they didn’t screw that much with Meta Battler and his progression, the rest has much left to be desired.
If you count QUALITY shot such like this one (… Rudolf looks like he is a quarterback with a shunk head…) and many silly stuff, I think they really need a much better organization for the budget, period.
6.5/10

Considering the lack of information in 3-1, the dual analysis will be about 3-2 and 3-3… It “shouldn’t” be as belated as the recent articles, hopefully.

I wonder if when the time comes I’m going to be the only one following this