adorable rockets

My friend and fellow Visual Novelist Samu-Kun has recently posted a dense and multilayered essay on the topic of moé. He has been thinking about the topic a lot, both as a consumer and a creator, and since he and I share an interest in art history I am quite interested in his insights.

He also used graphs. I am admittedly a sucker for graphs.

In his essay Samu-Kun proposes three distinct themes and theses and expands upon them sequentially. In summary they are:

1. Moé is made by artistic idealization, similar to the art of portraiture – what is desirable and good is amplified, and what is not is omitted.
2. The application of moé in the service of a story can be done many ways: stories containing consecutive layers of ‘absolute moé’ and stories which build and remove ‘relative moé’.
3. Moétic character stereotypes serve an important function, allowing implausibly idealized characters to be introduced into a story.

I shall expand and reflect upon each three in turn.
Read the rest of this entry »

Long before I was ensnared by making my very own Visual Novel, I was a game designer by trade.

Doki-Doki Classmates!! One of my non-digital game projects

Recenty I’ve found myself only really playing four kinds of games:

1. Rock Band – Beatles, et al. Social cooperative games of skill and music played as part of regular parties.
2. PSP RPGS – Disgea mostly, but a handful of others. Games of strategy and grinding, perfect for travel.
3. Wargames – Simulation of tactical choices and historical outcomes are my turn ons. Oh and tanks. Lots of tanks.
4. Board and Card games – Battlestar Galactica, Race for the Galaxy, Dominion – typical Board Game Geek fare.

It was boardgames that once again lured me into the art and science of game design.

“Luck hads no place in games!” is a zealously defended opinion among some board game players. It’s easy to understand why. Candyland is a crappy game. It’s really all luck and the game plays itself. On the other hand Chess is awesome, and look… no dice!

The only problem with this point of view is that I can’t stand all the most popular brain burning games of no luck! Even many popular collectible card games turn me off. Why? And why did I continue to enjoy wargames of all stripes where buckets of dice capture the uncertainty and chaos of the battlefield?

Well it would be mostly an academic question were it not for the fact that I was trying to make a few games of my own. Like Doki-Doki Classmates!! The harem-building er.. friend-collecting moé anime card game. I need to understand games if I’m going to have a chance at making a good one myself. Unlike writing a visual novel there is no screenwriting authority to show me the way!

Thankfully I’ve gotten a second opinion about luck and games from Fortress Ameritrash. This fantastic article lays it all out. The more I thought about it the more it rang true. All of a sudden so many other aspects of what I enjoy in many games, from Rockband to Disgea to Conflict of Heroes, all made sense!

So of course I drew some diagrams… Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, yes Bakamonogatari was the knock-out hit of last season and quite possibly the last five years. So why am I wasting my time on what I should be bemoaning as typical J.C. Staff dreck, instead of waxing rhapsodic?

Two simple reasons:

1. Bakamonogatari deserves more than a quickie post dashed off from the hip.
2. A contrast between Railgun and A Certain Magical Index provides a unique opportunity, unparalleled in the annals of anime, to contrast two shows with near identical moétic goals but very different moétic results.

I dare say that even after only one episode Railgun is an almost unqualified moétic success, while Index failed to retain my interest for even ten episodes. Of course what’s most fascinating about this comparison is that we have not only similar goals, with contrasting results – we also have the same source material, the same studio producing the show, even many of the same characters. It is a near ideal laboratory to study the success and failure of moétic technique, and even to gain some insight into the evolution of this genre/school of art. Yes my dear readers, this is once again an entry in the service of moé.
Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re not already familiar with Cave Story, it’s a Japanese freeware platformer, a 5 year labor of love by one man, and possibly the finest example of that 8-bit genre.

Read the rest of this entry »

A bit of background first, I’m an old time Star Wars fan. My childhood was pretty much defined by the original trilogy and I remember fondly the old Action figures, comic books, even that trashy novel by Alan Dean Foster! :p

In highschool I was an X-Wing (and Tie Fighter) addict, and while I remember little of the details, I was strongly impressed by the depth and complexity of tactics thoose games created. I suppose they were partially responsible for my adult fascination with military wargaming from WWII to more modern stuff.

Today I like fast paced games that simulate the meta aspects of combat more than stuff that attempts to simulate every bullet on the battlefield, mostly because computer games (largely the Combat Mission series) made me realize that it was much better to let machines to that kind of work. If I’m going to play in real life, I find that playing with minis beats the stuffing out of the old cardboard counters I gre up with. However I get no enjoyment at all out of the painting, so I’m a big advocate of the style of collectible miniatures games like WotC has been producing. I guess that as a visual designer in real life, painting is too much like work!
Read the rest of this entry »

Behold, the Beast!
Read the rest of this entry »

So the way I heard it was that Yoshida, Reiko, one of the script writers at Kyoto Animation got Rock Band(tm) last Christmas because she was such a big fan of Karaoke and Western music. This inevitably led to the entire animation department spending time in the break room endlessly trying to master Maps on expert mode instead of working on their next heartful anime. When the producer caught them at it, all they could do was mutter some half-hearted excuses about doing ‘research’ for a new show… and so K-ON! was born. Well, maybe it didn’t exactly happen like that, but you have to admit the timing does fit!

In any case there’s a few shows I was eagerly awaiting this season. K-ON had huge potential because, well rock bands are awesome (and they are more so now that we play entirely too much Rock Band(tm)), Japanese highschool girls are awesome (and they are more so when uber moé), so it could be two great tastes and all that… Of course it also had the potential to be utter dreck since an all-too clever concept can easily be a crutch that replaces the more important things like plot, and characterization.

So how did it turn out? Read on…
Read the rest of this entry »

Watarase Jun vs Ayasaki Hayate

Wow, an epic match-up by most accounts. Jun’s would normally be a shoo in. His femininity is clearly established and he has huge fanbase with plenty of screen time and lots of doujin and fanart to bolster his popularity. Hayate on the other hand seems a tough sell. Since he spends most of his time as a normal boy (well clueless servant to insanely rich and spoiled loli-tsun-otaku) you’d think its hard to see him as very moé at all. Nontheless I’m going to give my vote to Hayate. The fact that he’s a normal hetero boy makes his cross-dressing discomfort that much more adorable, not to mention that his outfits tend to be cuter and frillier too!

Too funny, but the votes are serious now…
Read the rest of this entry »

After doing copious researching for my Lego mico projects I was shocked to the discover that the Internets were sorely lacking in this.

This is much harder than you would think due to the total lack of official information on the ships. There is huge difference of opinion about the actual scales of these ships and the battlestar wiki unfortunately is home to some of the most outlandish theories (and is not even internally consistent across it’s articles).

For this posting I started with this awesome Star Trek comparison chart as the basis, then matched the scale based on two observable features: the main gun batteries and the Viper launch tube opening/hatches. Both of these match in scale, giving a reasonable confirmation to the idea that Pegasus is ~1600 meters long.

What’s smaller than Lego minis? Lego micros of course!

Another shot after the break…
Read the rest of this entry »