Hythia

I can apparently sleepwalk.

Riding the bus to a meeting, been out and about for an hour, and I finally notice the snow all over.

Snow. All over.

Ever asked yourself, “So… What would the Simpsons look like in live action?”

So was shopping the other day for the fourth Haibane Renmei dvd. Just had a serious yen for the end of the series since I had spent a chunk of time lately looking at some other sketch stuff that Yoshitobe Abe (the artists name, I think) had done (believe he also did Serial Experiments Lain, but too lazy to go dig through my dvds to check).

Couldn’t find a copy of it, or any of the other half-dozen anime dvds I’ve been on the look out for lately. Most of them are late dvds in series that came out a while ago, some of them are the first dvds in series I’d like to watch, some I keep looking for but don’t think have actually been released in the US yet.

So instead I went video game shopping. Wasn’t intentional, store I went into I actually went into looking for dvds, but they had video games and their entire selection was on clearance. So I picked up Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King and Suikoden Tactics, both for the PS2.

DQ8 is… Wow. Other then the fact that the main character looks disturbingly like college age Gohan from Dragonball Z and Angelo keeps reminding me of grown up Trunks from the same series, neither of which is surprising because the character design was done by Akira Toriyama who did the Dragon Ball (should that be one word or two, too lazy to check) shows. I mean… The game is just soo cool. Hard to describe why in ways that make sense. Just the feel of the game really. It is ‘old skool’. It reminds me of old console games, RPGs that were all about story and character and not about flashy FMV sequences or the poly count on the models. The only RPG that has made me really be this interested in it for a while is ‘Tales of Symphonia’ for my Gamecube (which I have played all the way through at least 5 times and am on my way through yet again to get some of the last few titles/costumes for people).

It also comes with the Final Fantasy 12 demo, which I really haven’t been interested in enough yet to look at. Another FF game… Meh.

Suikoden Tactics on the other hand… Very cool game in my opinion, but unless you like both the Suikoden series (specificaly Suikoden 4 which it is loosely based around) and tactical style games you may want to give it a pass. It is still a cool game, I am very much in the liking of it. But it won’t have the wide appeal that DQ8 will for people. If you are interested in the Suikoden series, I’d instead recommend trying to find a copy of the two PSX games (Suikoden 1 and Suikoden 2) or Suikoden 3 instead. Or wait for Suikoden 5 to come out in a couple months.

My other console game recommendation, and probably the next one I’ll pick up, is Grandia 3. The original Grandia game was one of those old school sort of games. Happy, sad, drama, romance, adventure, mystery, very cool game. I have it for my PSX and it is a wonderful game. Grandia 2 I actualy prefer over the original, I just like the character designs better even if the story was a little better in the first one. I have it for my Dreamcast. Grandia Extreme was a dungeon crawl that came out a bit ago and really wasn’t that great, it was mostly just you fighting through a dungeon for reasons I never actually heard explained by anyone I knew who owned it. Grandia 3 should be a beautiful, fun game. I like the parts of the combat system it is carrying on, but don’t know much about the story of it.

Anyways, this is a great year for PS2 rpg lovers. Lots of RPGs coming out right now, most good, some merely mediocre. It is kind of like the last year of the PSX with all the rpgs that came out then. So many games that have been in development for a while are coming out now since the PS3 is on the horizon for release apparently later this year.

The sucky bit of shopping at times is knowing exactly what you want and who should stock it and being completely unable to find it…

One word, sixty seconds. Write your bit, then post it here as a comment.

OneWord

From what I’ve heard, the ‘Victorian Romance Emma’ manga may be coming to the US sometime sooner rather then later. It has at least been licensed for release in America but no idea who is actually doing it as neither of the big two, TokyoPop and Viz, have info up about it yet. Which will be nice, as the scans of the manga I have seen are very pretty, very nice style on them, but were untranslated.

The anime I still have no word on, but the manga will be cool enough on its own. Especially since the anime wrapped up with episode 12 while the manga didn’t have an end yet at the time, so the anime didn’t have a real sense of ending to it.

The other manga find that I’ve been enjoying is ‘Monster’ which is part of Viz’s new signature line of mangas. It is, to put it simply ‘medical horror suspense drama’ which is more of a bunch of genre buttons that it pushes rather then a good description of it as a whole. The story focuses around a young neurosurgeon and a fateful decision to treat the first patient that arrived on his shift rather then the more politically important one that showed up a little bit later, how that ruins his career and personal life while it restores his faith in his career path as a surgeon. Though it gets helluva messed up after that as the patient he did save may have grown up to be a serial murderer. Conspiracies, drama, hospital politics, psychological suspense / horror. It is 18 volumes long, and that is all just in the first book. Have to say, they write horror in a much more psychological way then the old ’slasher’ horror comics we had here.

‘Gyo’ and ‘Uzamaki’ are the two other horror titles I have read, both also put out by Viz and I think both were written and drawn by the same person.

‘Gyo’ is the less strange of the two, which is saying a lot when I describe it as being a story about fish crawling out of the sea with robotic crab legs grown onto them and that it is a sci-fi/horror story. Oddly enough, the depictions of the rotting husks of fish, the stench of the sea life out in the sun, all keep it from being surreal. It is so accurate in the depictions that it keeps itself from being laughable and is more ‘fucked up strange creepy’ then anything else.

‘Uzamaki’ is the harder one to explain. A town is haunted by spirals. Yes. Spirals. The shape you draw on paper. Bodies are found twisted into spiral shapes, strange deformed babies are born, odd snail like creatures show up. Again, not with the slasher violence but much with the weird creepiness and unsettling.

The Diatribe track “Land’s End” just came up in the mp3 player. It amuses me for the title and the somewhat fitting nature of the lyrics after the storyball thing back in November.

“The gang of restless souls…
Whose ship was lost at sea…
Only time has passed them by…
Still wandering beneath…
There seems to be no direction…
And I begin to see it all too clear…

Soon we reach lands end…
where the shadows of the rush…
i can not believe my eyes…
no one remembered us…
could it be that my times come..”

I missed about four lines of lyrics in there as they blended too well with the music. And the song keeps going but I am too lazy now to copy down more of the lyrics. Good album. Apparently they put out a second one titled “Nothing” (the one I have is self-titled “Diatribe”) that I’ve never heard, along with a pair of single’s. Will have to see if I can find any of it sometime.

Diatribe - “Diatribe” ( Forgot how much I liked this album, been almost a decade since I listend to it. Wonder if they ever had another album… )

Stan Getz - “The Bossa Nova Years Boxed Set” ( ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ and other stuff. )

Razed in Black - “Overflow” ( A remix of the first RiB album, at around 140 beats per minute. Great to get your heartrate up, shit to try to draw to. )

Interesting word, that. Threshold. Or ‘threskjoldr’ if you like your Old Norse to be rendered into English. Think about all the things that it can mean.

The simplest definition is that of a gateway or doorway, something through which you go to get from one place to another.

It can also mean an ‘ending’. The end of a runway for example.

Or a beginning, the place or point of entering, the start of a new age.

It is also the point at which physiological or psychological effects begin to take place.

Scientifically it can mean the point or level or value above which something is true and below which something is not.

On some level, I am a bit too aware of all of those meanings right now. A lot of stuff I’ve let slide for a while I’ve been taking more seriously lately, and some stuff that I’ve taken far more seriously then I mayhaps should have I am starting to let slide ( because, seriously, do I really need to unlock all the titles in ‘Tales of Symphonia’? ).

Not that this really means anything to anyone outside of myself. Just me saying ‘Hey, I am still alive. Just trying to figure out “what is next” for me and my life.’ Don’t need anyone thinking I fell off of a building again and lost another internal organ, only have a couple left to spare and saving those to be used for dramatic sacrificial gut wounds for the next time I get in a knife fight. Though fuck if I know how to manage to get stabbed in the gall bladder without anything actually important getting hit…