Sora no Kikou ~The sky of the longing for memories~

Early this autumn, my friend from Japan brought me back several items, the one presented in this entry is Sora no Kikou ~The sky of the longing for memories~, featuring digital backgrounds by the studio CoMix Wave. The book is a 175 page softcover, the majority of which are images, which I find uncommon for most fanbooks. The pages are smaller than your standard letter/A4 meaning the images are a small, and knowing the level of detail in Makoto Shinkai’s work I think these images could be spectacularly crisp even if enlarged 4× the size. Inside you will find hundreds of backgrounds from Byousoku 5 Centimeter (5 Centimetres per Second), Kumo no Mukou, Yakusoku no Basho (The Place Promised in Our Early Days), Hoshi no Koe (Voices of a Distant Star), and a TV advertisement for the newspaper “Shinano Mainichi Shumbun”.

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We seem to have some character design recycling going on here in K-ON!. Strangely, it doesn’t bother me as much as I think it should, probably because their personalities are likeable and not identical copies of other characters, and the episode is presented well. Is anyone else in love with the ending theme? It’s been stuck in my head since I heard the first 5 seconds. The only thing that worries me is the guitarist in the ending theme – I hear chord changes, but I don’t see hands moving… Hopefully it’s not like this in the episode body, especially concert scenes. With the mention of NEETs, it’s probably directed toward the otaku crowd, but if you like bands and light comedic drama then this might be a show for you. I’m definitely going to be picking this series up; I probably won’t be blogging about every episode though.

You have most likely heard of the popular Korean MMORPG Ragnarok Online, and many of you have probably played it at some point or another. I would like to bring attention to the sequel of that game, Ragnarok Online 2. Also produced by Gravity, Ragnarok Online 2 was to be another of their flagship games. It features the world of Ragnarok in full 3d, with new monsters, multiple playable races, but most importantly for this review, an OST composed by Yoko Kanno. She composed about 90 tracks for this game, which was first released to the public in 2006 in the Korean closed beta.

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This entry covers the closing episodes of Clannad After Story. I will probably do one last shorter entry for my overall thoughts and opinions, but first I need to set the story straight. I’ll give you a forewarning that this entry is extremely long. A PDF version is being prepared.
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I just recently got a solid connection to the net, so at last I can start catching up on all the anime I’ve missed the past two months. Obviously, the first thing I started catching up on was Clannad.

Clannad has taken quite a big turn from the standard visual novel genre, as I watch on it seems to be shifting towards those Korean dramas where peoples’ lives grow and fade intermittently. The characters and we, the audience, are caught between emotions. The coinciding uncertainty as to whether one should smile or cry is a very hazy emotion, yet Clannad is able to capture it spot on.

However, as accurately as Clannad captures these emotions, I find it harder and harder to sympathize with the characters—the transition from love story to life story is leaving me behind in my youth. Unrequited love is something I am familiar with (and surely most others, too) and in the situations they presented to me my mind jumped through my past experiences and absorbed itself into the Clannad world. But as the story progresses from unrequited love to mutual love, from mutual love to marriage, and from marriage to family, the situation drifts farther away and I no longer have a vantage point from which I can get a clear, close view of the situation. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but Clannad’s cohesion with my own life that was so eminent in the former parts slides ahead of me. It seems like these closing episodes will be something I will learn to understand over time, as I progress forward in my own life and gain the experiences necessary to make the connection. As it stands now, Okazaki & Co. have grown up ahead of me and show me how much more I have to go through.
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