Dodgeball DS – 8 player wifi

I don’t know how many beats my heart skipped when I saw this.

Tokyo Majin Gakuen Kenpuchou 5

Alright, I originally started this blog to practice writing, mostly through anime blogging. It’s been about 3 months since I started this thing, and not one dedicated anime post yet. So, I figured I’d start.

I haven’t decided on a format for these things yet, I’m just feeling it out. Keep in mind that since these are going to be single episode (and maybe sometimes movie) blogs, there may be unmarked spoilers. As things go on I might do some fancy stuff to hide the spoilers or whatever, so bear with me.

The first anime I will be blogging is: Tokyo Majin Gakuen Kenpuchou. Don’t ask me what it means. I’m 5 episodes in and I’m going to assume you have the same level of knowledge about the show as I do for the time being, so beware if you’re expecting some kind of explanation on background story up to this point.

There are several pictures following this, so be forewarned in that regard as well.

FF12 Revenant Wings Gameplay

Click here to have a look.

The gameplay looks similar to the underappreciated DS game “LostMagic” with the spawning monsters and RTS style navigation. It appears that the gambit system may be intact–I noticed Penelo casting cure spells without being provoked by a menu and the others attacking the nearest enemy before focusing on Vaan’s target.

Doesn’t look half bad.

Another anime horizon broadened

So I have these two games for the Nintendo DS: Jump! Super Stars and Jump! Ultimate Stars. The game being entirely Japanese, I went straight to Gamefaqs.com to look up some guides for them.

I was quite surprised to see how many different manga were represented in the game. At this point, I knew Shonen Jump was responsible for the likes of Dragon Ball Z and Naruto, but I discovered that some other properties like Ruroni Kenshin and Yu Gi Oh were part of it as well. Not only that, but there were *tons* of different things I had never even heard about.

I was never much into comics or manga, but these games piqued my interest. After all, with so many characters in a fighting game that I knew nothing about, it would do good to do some research on them. So I browsed the ‘net, managed to find a few scanslations of some manga and was pretty impressed. Not impressed enough to keep reading, but I knew the most basic elements each manga and its characters.

What this also did was expose me to some new anime that had just started in Japan. The anime Black Cat–which was also a Shonen Jump manga and is coming out on US DVD soon–was just starting at that time, so I followed that through to the end and it was very enjoyable. Right now, I’m downloading Busou Renkin, Gintama and Death Note (highly reccomended), all which are quite entertaining in their own right.

I also learned of the ‘purpose’ of Shonen Jump, and I have a greater tolerance of their sometimes simple themes. Most, if not all of the manga properties are based on the values of Friendship, Effort, and Victory. Basically if you try hard, keep good friends, you will win. This is fairly obvious in DBZ and most other properties, as the heroes always get into the predictable flow that I’m sure you’re familiar with. It all serves to reinforce these values, and after all the “Shonen” in Shonen Jump means “young boy”. It’s like inspirational stuff to install these values into the young boys.

So, these two games have expanded my anime knowledge and viewing range. and if I see any more new anime that I recognise from these games I’ll be sure to give them a shot. If you have a DS and are looking to import a title, Jump! Ultimate Stars (the newer one) is one of the best you can go for.