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I hope you all have at least heard of her, but for those that haven’t, Yoko Kanno is one of the most famous music composers in the anime and video game industry. Her list of works is not the longest, but she far exceeds in quality. Some works include the soundtracks for Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell, Card Captor Sakura, and the Honey and Clover live action movie.

Before we can fully appreciate a soundtrack, we must understand the setting the songs will be used in. Ragnarok Online 2 is a medieval fantasy world based on Norse mythology, and the main focus of the game is adventure and socializing. The game world is very pristine, with large fields, swamps, and forests alike. In the towns, there is a very rustic historical feel, and the attire the characters wear share similar qualities.

If you like symphonic compositions with a very serene cultural feel, you will most definitely love this soundtrack. The primary palette includes the viola, piano, harp, and hand drums. There are some select tracks with goodies like the mythical vocalist Gabriela Robin, and some great supporting instrumentals like the didgeridoo, marimba, and pan flute.

The first song you hear is the intro theme to the game. My first time opening the game to the login screen, I couldn’t help but listen to half the song before entering my login credentials. We hear a vocal feature in a fantasy language, which to me sounds like a mix between Latin, French and Elven. The harp and string chorus pull my consciousness into the vast outdoors; I feel as if I am flying in the air over a vast plain with forests and mountains looming in the horizon.

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Welcome, young adventurer, to the town of Hodemimes. This is a quiet coastal town with no more than a few dozen yurts and pavilions. It is here where adventurers start their journeys; a friendly, social, but quiet community. At the outskirts there is a vast coastal field for novices to train, develop their skills, and learn the adventurers’ ways of life. It isn’t an easy life, but here in county overseen by the village chief there are barely any substantial dangers.

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All adventurers will eventually become well-acquainted with Prontera, the capital of the Rune-Midgarts kingdom. The King’s castle seated on the top of a hill overlooks the town bustling with adventurers and merchants alike. It is a crowded town; there are many guilds, stores, bars, and even a church. The music no longer has the pastoral feel of Hodemimes, we now are immersed the crowdedness of a small medieval Celtic city. From the King Tristan’s Castle we hear the echoes of a bagpipe salutation, and all around we hear the busy crowds of the city move in, out and about.

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In the previous decade Rune-Midgarts was industrializing, but due to intervention by greater forces, the industrialization was halted. Cognito was once a large industrial town, full of factories and labourers, but now it is abandoned. Mechanized fiends wander around the outskirts of the town, showing hostility towards those of other races. The once busy city is now an industrial junkyard; factory scraps are littered everywhere and the stench of rust lingers in the alleys. We hear a lonely saxophone lament, but its echoes fall upon deaf ears: Few travellers visit Cognito, and those that do leave only shortly after they finish their business.

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Far north in the Alfheim Forest, far from Norman (Human) development, live the spiritual Ellr elves. The Ellr obtain their magical powers by links with nature, and have built their town around the Mother Tree. A large library full of religious works is built into a large cranny in the surrounding mountains, Many Ellr come here to worship or to enrich their magical abilities. The Ellr are much sanctified; the music emphasizes the importance of their spiritualism and religion. The Ellr village lacks the casualness of the Hodemimes village, they are a devout civilization and unlike Normans spend much of their time meditating.

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Scattered around the lands are the homes of various tribes. These are monsters that have evolved to sentience, but still lack the intelligence and craftsmanship of the Norman and Ellr races. Their music is very primitive in feel, with heavy ethnic beats and tribal chants. Due to oppression and uncompromising behaviour these tribes are becoming more and more hostile towards the Normans, and fewer and fewer adventurers are able to learn about the depth of these tribes’ cultures.

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Aside from composing music for the geographic locations, many of the NPCs have their own themes as well. Misha is a perky and cheerful shoplady, while Holgrar the blacksmith is much more straightforward and always hard at work in his shop.

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There are some songs that I have not heard in-game, but according to the title they are part of the game’s plot scenario. Various styles exist here, from symphonic suites to upbeat military briefings.

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And remaining are the “uncategorized” songs; songs I do not know the exact background behind. But they all have the same great traditional ambience presented by Ragnarok Online 2, and amongst them are my personal favourites of the soundtrack. Closing my eyes while listening to these songs instantly teleports me to another world where man lives in harmony with nature and the greater forces of the world.

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To sum up, Ragnarok Online 2’s soundtrack is a serene symphonic compilation using the music of various fictional civilizations. Due to continuously delayed production and release of the game, I believe this soundtrack to be underrated because it is unheard of by most people. Kanno did a great job at composing music that attaches us to the natural world, making players breathe the crisp morning mist through their ears in our expeditionary quest through the Rune-Midgarts Kingdom.

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I have made the entire soundtrack available to download. The files from the Korean Open Beta are in Ogg Vorbis format, aside from meta tags these are the original files extracted from the official client. Songs that didn’t make it from the third Closed Beta to the Open Beta are included, these are in MP3 format. I have archived the collection into two files to facilitate downloading.

• RO² OST Part 1 of 2 (148.97 MB OGG/MP3 in RAR archive)
• RO² OST Part 2 of 2 (199.03 MB OGG/MP3 in RAR archive)

I’m going to use this popular image for the characters an this picture I took myself for a backdrop.

Open up the photo in Photoshop and apply some artistic effects to make it look illustrated, since we want to loose the photograph feel. I used the Cutout filter in addition to some Poster Edges and Sumi-E.

Paste on the characters and erase away all of it’s surroundings. The magic wand and polygonal lasso tool can helpful here. Be sure the edge lines are clean so that it looks very smooth and clean.

After pasting the character’s, create a lens flare over the background, because it look’s so cool

Duplicate the Character layer, zoom in on it with the Transform tool and set the opacity down to 50%. This gives it a nice affect of depth and puts a big emphasis on the character.

Lets add some text now. We should make sure to write the names of the characters because the person that download your wallpaper may not know who she is. Comic Sans MS seems like a nice popular font, so lets use that. Add some layer affects if you want, I had to and white glow around it becuase otherwise the font would be unreadable with my favourite colour.

It was created in the image, please do not forget to write your name people know it. Also, make sure to put your name over a important part of the image so that every time they look there they know who created the awesome wallpaper. Also it’s very importance to don’t forget the name of the company that made the characters because for copyright issue’s.

Save the file, and dont forget to make for different monitors resonations. Now all we had to do is to upload them somewhere so that people can download them and easily too.

Download for standard screen resonation: 1024×768 | 1280×1024 | 1600×1200
for wide screen resonation: 1680×1050 | 1920×1200

…I decided to write this article because my previous wallpaper was getting out-dated, it featured Kagami Hiiragi and the Yuukos from Dennou Coil. I have three monitors, so that’s why it’s in that extremely widescreen resolution with the edges chopped off.

As I was looking for suitable replacement, I came across some more “Very Bad Wallpapers”. After a certain point I decided to start saving the bad ones and write an article about them. To the artists: if you ever read this, I don’t mean to insult you. Everyone has to start off somewhere and everyone takes wrong steps sometime or later, and I’m sure you nowadays you can create much better results, even before reading this un-tutorial.

In the end, I decided to make my own wallpaper, to keep a similar style to my previous one, and at the same time, I wrote this tutorial on some elements one should never do in making wallpapers, or at least be very vigilant towards. My drawing and digital illustration skills are far from impressive so I can only work from scans pre-existing and user creations. You may recognize some of the sources immediately, for others it might be a bit tricky because I did quite a bit of leg mix-and-matching, in addition to some minor redraws. Anyhow, as I promised, here is the wallpaper I made. It’s eerily simple compared to TsundereStorm, since it’s only some outlines with light layer effects. The characters are all major characters of the year 2008, and I have a slightly modified version for myself where I replaced Kyou with Nagisa, since, well, Kyou > Nagisa. Nothing fancy and no completely original illustration, but hey, it works for me. I do watermark my own creations but I do it in such a way that it’s not intrusive and really easy to remove.

1024×768 | 1280×1024 | 1600×1200 | 1680×1050 | 1920×1200

Can you distinguish the characters? I can’t give a good measure of how well one can recognize these silhouettes since I created the image myself. Good character design should have immediately recognizable outlines, I’ll hope that that’s the case.

Yeah, working in retail is busy, especially before the Christmas season. I finally got back into the animanga business after the New Year. Good timing for the arrival of my Clannad book!

The first page of the book is a delicious Kyou Fujibayashi conveniently locked in the gym equipment storage room.

This softcover artbook has 144 full-colour pages. The first 38 pages is a gallery of images of Nagisa, Kyou, Ryou, Kotomi, Tomoyo and Fuuko, these are the scans you frequently see on high-resolution wallpaper and scan imageboards like konachan.com and moe.imouto.org. As beautiful as these illustrations are, they arn’t the reason I get these artbooks, since these images are readily available for download from the aforementioned sites.

The following 34 pages are character bios and gestures. There’s a lot of Japanese text here, a lot more than I had anticipated. I’ll have to get my friend to translate it for me or teach me Japanese. The only information I can get out of it are facts that have to do with numbers, like bust/hip/waist measurements, birthdays, etc, but the sketches and miscellaneous illustrations are the main reason I get artbooks, since it gives a bit of insight into the design and development process of the series.

There’s a surprising amount of detail put into the character design, it is to be expected for a character-based show to have highly detailed characters but I didn’t know they would go to the point of making separate illustrations for Tomoya’s wristwatch, Nagisa’s shoe, etc.

All the supporting characters are accounted for and there’s also a section that goes step-by-step through each of the main characters’ stories. Again there’s a ton of text here and I wish I could tell you what all this text is explaining. They numbered each episode by character episode and by airing episode. For example, episode 10 is the 3rd part of Nagisa’s and Kotomi’s arc, the 4th part of Kyou/Ryou’s arc, the 2nd part of Tomoyo’s arc. I’m not really sure how this would be of use, but I might find it interesting when I start playing the game (which will be when After Story finishes airing.)

The Story section of the book is 56 pages long and covers the season on a per-episode basis. There are storyboards for the major parts of each episode. I find it amazing how the producers can show so much emotion in the characters from such simple sketches.

A small part of this section details the architecture used in the animation. As architecture student, it was this section that made me decide to purchase the fanbook (I glanced at scans I found online) as there are very detailed hand-drawn perspective illustrations of the school, the houses, and the rooms in the world of Clannad.

The last 16 pages is a staff and cast interview, unfortunately this is almost all text so again I can’t give any details here. But there are nice portrait photos of the main cast.

中原麻衣 Mai Nakahara (left, Nagisa Furukawa) and 野中藍 Ai Nonaka (right, Fuuko Ibuki)

At the very end there’s a small gallery of official collectible goods, like postcards, cell phone dangly-things, calendars, and other small miscellaneous accessories. I think the little card that comes slipped in the middle of my book is an order card, but since I don’t live in Japan it doesn’t really do me much good.

Another artbook review should be coming soon!

I’m being hosted under BWYS, a scanlation group: They take Japanese manga (comics), translate it into English, and release it online. My friend is the leader of the group and since they would be animanga fans like I am, I joined their IRC channel for some social while closeting away on my computer. However, I was (and still am) much more into audio/video than illustration; I didn’t really have that much background in manga, especially compared to the members of BWYS who work with manga on a daily basis. But I knew Photoshop well and soon I started typesetting and editing for them, and with that I started learning the specific procedure we go through to prepare a raw file into a final release. Most members, having practiced this methodology for quite some time, don’t have much criticism on the system, but I being newer to the scene have a lot of thoughts on the system we use, from both general-workplace and scanlation viewpoints.

General Workflow

Traditional System

In the traditional system, tasks follow a purely linear process, like a production line. If there are multiple team members, usually each member is in charge of a single task they are highly proficient in. Tasks are almost exclusively linear, meaning that the first task is a prerequisite for the second; the second task is a prerequisite for the third, etc. In a continuous environment, person A does task A on project 1, passes that onto B, then does task A on project 2, passes that onto B; similarly for person B and on. In this typical classic system there are three key shortfalls:

1. The speed of the group is limited by the slowest step/member
2. If a member quits, goes on hiatus, or otherwise is not able to continue, all production after that member’s step is stalled.
3. In the case of the above, since each member is exclusively assigned their own task, it would be hard for them to fill in for the missing step/member.

In a team, all members should be equally valued; however the team should not require any specific member to function. In the case with a classic system, every member is required and it is difficult to even classify this as teamwork.

Proposed Modern System

In this proposed modern system, projects should avoid sequential processes and execute tasks in parallel steps whenever possible. In addition to this, members should not be assigned a specific task but only be given a title depending on their specialty. Tasks would be posted by the group leader and checked out by the members. Since members have specialties but are otherwise free to pick any task, they can develop a broader set of skills and consult each other if assistance is needed. Overall, each person will have a lower efficiency than if they did their own task like in the classic system; however, we avert the shortfalls of the classic system:

1. Because members are not restricted to a certain task, faster members can work ahead of slower members
2. Unrestricted tasks allows members to be able to broaden their skills, and as a result
3. There is no sudden stall in productivity if one member stops.

In Scanlation

The classic linear chain for scanlation requires every member
and relies heavily on the leader for communications.

Traditional System

In traditional scanlation, we have the following essential roles:

1. The leader, who will mainly be handling completed tasks and passing them on to the appropriate person;
2. A scanner, who scans the paper-media manga into a digital format; (or one who downloads or sources files that have already been scanned, likely the leader in such a case)
3. A translator, who is in charge of translating the Japanese text into coherent English;
   An editor, who cleans and digitally enhances the scans and replaces the Japanese text with the translated English text;
4. A quality checker, who inspects the grammar and image for consistency, and makes the necessary adjustments; and finally
5. A distributor, who hosts the file to allow the public to download it.

While this system works, you can see exactly how such a process is prone to the shortfalls of a classic system.

Proposed Modern System

Modern scanlation will take a new approach on how to convert manga to a locally understood digital format. In essence, there are only two roles:

1. The leader, who will have less of a focus on handling transactions. Instead, s/he will be giving out expertise, providing motivation, and recruiting new members.
2. The members, who may have certain specialties but are not restricted to that field. For example, a translation specialist may help quality-check should there be the demand.

A modern approach takes the leader out of the parenting position and allows them to guide all the teams formed within the group. There is no exclusive dependency for any one member.

The classic tasks Scan, Translate, Edit, QC will be broken down to reduce dependency and redundancy. Members are encouraged to pair up when tackling tasks, preferably a more-experienced member with a less-experienced member.

• Scan/Source – same as above.
• Translate – same as above.
• Translation Check – checking grammar, flow, and coherence.
• Pre-edit – cleaning up the scanned files, including clearing out the Japanese text.
• Typeset – entering the proofread translation into the pre-edited files.
• Quality check – same as in classic system, except grammatical errors should have already been fixed.
• Distribution – same as above.

Because the leader no longer handles the transactions, the members are responsible for communicating and passing files onto each other. In an ideal situation, if any member (including the leader) should vanish the group should still be able to operate at 100% efficiency due to true teamwork.

Prerequisites for Success

While a new methodology is easily written out, there are many steps required for it to succeed.

• All members, both existing and newly-recruited, must be familiar with the new methodology. They should understand that the new system is aimed to develop well-rounded members that can handle a wide variety of tasks. One member of 80% proficiency working with a member of 50% proficiency is just as thorough as a single member with 90% proficiency.
• A developed backbone infrastructure would be optimal for task distribution. An online interface would act like a task library, allowing tasks to be “checked out” and tracked. The system would allow members to know who is working on what project/task and who is free, and could keep an archive of intermediary files in case of data loss or irreversible changes. The leader should always be able to override the system and set priority tasks.
• The group will thrive only in an open social environment. Because of such intimacy in the new teamwork methodology, it is essential that members know each other well and that communications are instant. Members should know each other well enough to be comfortable meeting up in real life. Online, IRC chat would be the ideal method for group communications; e-mail should only be used as a last resort or for any administrative purposes (passwords, extra-group communications (vs. intra-group), etc.)

Summary

Redeveloping a group’s methodology is not an easy task, nor is it something that can be achieved in a short period of time. Leaders should always be open to change, and the change should be evolving slowly but steadily. Right now BWYS is in a transition state, we have started testing a new approach for some of our projects, and we are really starting to emphasize our open social environment especially when considering new recruits. A slow change reduces the change and learning stress on the members, keeping overall proficiency optimal while not losing out like groups which have done things the same way since day one. While it is important to keep up-to-date, it also is important that procedures are habitual and require no second thought. Whilst new methodology may be more efficient, it takes a lot of time for a group to naturally assume the different processes; the key is finding the optimal balance of change and tradition.