Month: July 2010

Analysis

Liar Game and Game Theory

One of the miracles of shounen manga is the fact that they can be about anything. It’s one thing to make a shounen series for every sport on the planet – the eroge scene can compete in that regard – but it’s no new discovery that shounen extends far beyond its traditional premises, arguably a bit too far. You could probably dig up a shounen about Gunpla building or babysitting and they’d still be as over-the-top as the rest of the genre, and proud of it.

Following this train of thought, it took me a while before I started looking at Liar Game as, quite simply, a shounen about Game Theory.

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Analysis

My Heart, Your Soul, Our Beats

[onodera]

It’s difficult to not talk about Jun Maeda’s Angel Beats. Despite coming from a writer whose most famous works target a relatively niche audience, it’s a fact that Angel Beats is a high-quality production, likely high-budget as well, and it’s earned the attention of most of anime fandom – for better or worse. The show may not have topped Key’s visual novel adaptations in terms of popularity or praise, but it marks an interesting departure from Maeda’s traditional style while staying true to the sentimental storytelling that makes Key what it is. It goes without saying that I’m a fan, but I believe that Angel Beats is particularly noteworthy: not because it trumps the nakige classics, but because it’s a solid drama that helped me identify an aspect of Key’s appeal that I was unable to isolate during the various visual novel adaptations.

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Review

The Girl Who Talked Through Time

I stumbled upon an interesting gem the other day in my quest to actually start reading manga: Kimi ni Shika Kikoenai. Also known as Calling You, the comic is apparently adapted from a short story by the prolific Otsuichi. Since I almost literally stumbled upon the story, I read it blindly, without knowing anything about its origins or the writer. Needless to say, I was surprised that a nameless manga in my backlog turned out to be so good.

Now that I’ve read some of its background info, I can see that my surprise was unfounded – Kimi ni Shika Kikoenai is in fact not nameless or obscure, and for good reason. There’s something compelling about the manga that quickly made me realize that I was in for more of a treat than I expected.

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