Cover of Black Blade
This week I’m finally getting back to book reviews, with a look at the horrible novel by Eric Van Lustbader – Black Blade.
Filed under: Books, Reviews, videos Tagged: Black Blade, book review, Eric Van Lustbader
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This week I have another book review for you, covering one of David Eddings’ fantasy novels, “The Diamond Throne” – part one of the Elenium.
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A while back I reviewed the Silmarillion – this time I’m reviewing and discussing Tolkein’s first novel: The Hobbit.
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Filed under: Books Tagged: Books, middle-earth, video
This time I’m taking a look at the first book in the “Books of the Raksura” series by Martha Wells – The Cloud Roads.
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Filed under: Books, videos Tagged: Books, Books of the Raksura, video review, vlog
If you’ve been following my reviews on Bureau42, you may know that I enjoy superhero comics, particularly judging by my reviews of DC: The New Frontier and similar works, as well as allusions to superhero comics in other reviews I’ve written. So, I missed Justice League when it first aired on TV. I missed it when it came out on DVD. However, now it’s finally out on Blu-Ray, and I’ve finally seen it. I’m pleased by what I’ve seen. My mind was not blown, but I did enjoy what I saw.
The series doe
This past week had the 2017 DICE Awards. I have a few thoughts on the awards.
On the one hand, the DICE Awards, being a juried award similar to the Academy Awards (but one where alcohol is served like the Golden Globes), didn’t have any particularly cringe-worthy stunts or overly crass attempts of humor like, for example, the VGAs and The Game Awards have had.
On the other hand, we had two MCs, Greg Miller and Vanessa Chobot who had no chemistry, with Vanessa taking the awards with what felt l
Sorry about the rapidly changing themes recently. Essentially, I’ve been going through the themes to find one that I really like. This is the closest I’ve found to one that I do like – one that works with the screen width in a way that I like, and with a header I like. Now, if only I could find a way to change the graphic to a fountain pen instead of a ballpoint pin.
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Thus far, the three shows in the Type-Moon universe that I’ve covered: Fate/Stay Night (F/SN), Fate/Zero, and Unlimited Blade Works (UBW) have been two-cour shows – spending 24 episodes to tell their story. In the case of F/SN and UBW, they have each adapted one route from the first Fate game – with the former title dropping a few elements of UBW in to give Rider a little screen time. However, Fate was not Type-Moon’s first game. Before this came Tsukihime, which set up elements that came up lat
Before Kinoko Nasu created Tsukihime or Fate/Stay Night, he put out a light novel series titled “Garden of Sinners” (or Kara no Kyokai). The books set up some concepts that would be folded into to the collection of series that is generally known as the “Nasuverse” – though the series aren’t exactly in direct continuity with each other. In the mid-to-late 2000s, they were adapted into a series of animated films by Ufotable, prior to them getting the gig for Fate/Zero and Unlimited Blade Works.
T
Shounen fight anime and manga, in the past few decades, has developed a very definite style from Dragonball (and Dragonball Z) on – no matter the tone, the series tend to have a bright color palette for both characters and for the overall visual style of the series. Things might get dark and stormy in bits with narrative and tonal weight, but the colors for the characters themselves will maintain that color. You’re never going to see Naruto, for example, putting on an all black traditional ninja
2015’s revival of Ushio and Tora by Studio MAPPA is not the first revival of an older anime and manga series in the 21st century. In 2008, JC Staff revived the classic fantasy anime series Slayers, with a fourth season after an almost decade gap. The series was was released as a split-cour show, with the first 12-episode cour being subtitled “Revolution”, and the second “Evolution-R”. When the show originally was announced, the big question that fans had was would this show come back with a Drag
The Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha franchise has been interesting when it comes the Magical Girl genre of anime. The original series was something of a conventional Magical Girl vs. Dark Magical Girl show, like the Pretty Cure franchise, with the difference being that the battles between Nanoha and her opposite number, Fate, played out a lot like a superhero fight.
The later series played up this concept, with the second series, Nanoha As setting up a battle of superhero teams (or superhero and su
Mushibugyo is a series that has a real issue with tonal whiplash. There are anime series that have mixed creepy elements and comedy with tremendous effect – Ghost Hunt is an anime series adapted from a light novel with some strong comedy elements, which doesn’t overlook the creepier and more horrific elements of the narrative, with a well done escalation into further horror.
Mushibugyo doesn’t do that. Mushibugyo starts off with super-colorful characters, an over-enthusiastic and incredibly den
Hayate the Combat Butler, as a manga, recently came to an end, and I have two Hayate Series that I haven’t reviewed yet (though I have previously done a video review of Seasons 1 & 2). It’s time to cover those bases and finish off the other Hayate series.
Hayate the Combat Butler: I Can’t Take My Eyes Off You is something of a break from the norm from the first two seasons, in that the series is considerably more serialized than the first two series – or for that matter the series that came
Well, the time has come to talk about the most recent Hayate the Combat Butler TV series, and potentially the last series to come out, for reasons which I’ll get into, but also a series that is something of a return to form for the franchise’s anime incarnations.
As the title suggests, Hayate the Combat Butler: Cuties puts the focus somewhat on the women in Hayate’s life. For most of the series, with the exception of the last couple episodes, each individual episode focuses on a particular fema
Gen Urobuchi has gotten a tremendous reputation as a writer of animation, particularly through his deconstruction of the magical girl genre with Puella Magi Madoka Magica. In 2011, he did something slightly different, by doing a novel prequel to the hit visual novel Fate/Stay Night, covering the events of the previous Holy Grail War, which set the events of the original game and anime in motion. The show shifted animation studios from Deen, to Ufotable, who had only a handful of shows under thei
Adaptations of visual novels to anime are something of a mixed bag. Sometimes, like with Clannad and Comic Party, the adaptation is a hit. Other times, it doesn’t work quite so much. Fate/Stay Night falls into the former case, though there are times where the work stumbles in its execution, primarily on the animation front, though there are some narrative issues.
The series follows Shirou Emiya, an 18-year old high school student, approaching graduation, and planning to join the JSDF in order t
Fate/Stay Night, as a visual novel, had a several routes the player could take through the game. The original F/SN anime adapted the Fate route, with the inclusion of some elements of the Unlimited Blade Works route, with varying degrees of success. After Ufotable’s successful adaptation of Gen Urobuchi’s novel, Fate/Zero, there was question of what it would look like if they were to adapt one of the routes of the game, and in particular the Unlimited Blade Works route in its entirety. Two years
The Fate universe has, in the works I’ve reviewed thus far, has generally formed a cohesive narrative whole – with the exception of clear comedic side-stories that are deliberately intended to be outside continuity like Carnival Phantasm. Others have adapted alternate routes of the visual novels that are part of Type-Moon’s Nasuverse (like Fate/Stay Night mostly adapting the Fate route and Unlimited Blade Works adapting that route). Fate/Prisma Illya is a true alternate take on the Fate Universe
Dallos is an anime that reminds me a lot of what got me into anime in the first place. I came into anime as a fan of science fiction and fantasy, and I came in through OVAs and films like Akira, Demon City Shinjuku, Ghost in the Shell, and Record of Lodoss War. So, when I found out that Dallos, an anime considered to be the first OVA (or one of the first alongside the Cream Lemon series), and which was directed by Mamoru Oshii (who also directed Ghost in the Shell and Angel’s Egg – which I’ve pr
Having gone through the melodramatic gravitas of Fate/Stay Night (both regular route and Unlimited Blade Works), it’s prequel Fate/Zero, and the adaptation of the visual novel that came out sooner – Tsukihime, if I was to describe the next Type-Moon anime to come out in a short phrase, it would be “And now for something completely different!”
Carnival Phantasm is an adaptation of a comedic manga series that put the characters from Fate/Stay Night and Tsukihime (and with it spinoff works like Me
Bodacious Space Pirates was a show, back from 2012, which was a fantastic anime series, which had all the fun of old-school Juvenile SF, but without the problematic elements that those works often run into (and the problematic elements from some contemporary SF). However, the end of the series left me hoping for more, and in 2014, a film sequel to the series came out, subtitled Abyss of Hyperspace, with US release coming later in 2016. At long last, I’ve finally had a chance to watch it, so it’s
This time I’m taking a look at another out-print anime, in the wake of Lodoss getting license rescued by Funimation, in Armored Trooper VOTOMS.
Oh, and if you want to pre-order Lodoss in the wake of its license rescue, it’s available from Amazon & RightStuf
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Filed under: Anime Tagged: Anime, ani
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In the anime portions of Gainax‘s OVA series Otaku No Video, there’s a sequence where the main character is being shown the various types of Otaku that the members of his friend’s club are part of. There’s the vehicle and mecha otaku, who is a geek about engines and how things work, and so on. One of the members of the club is an animation otaku, and he demonstrates his affinity for animation by pointing out the detail in an animated sequence (taken from the
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It’s been awhile since I’ve done an album review. It’s time to change that, by taking a look at a science fiction concept album adapting one of the first alien invasion novels – H. G. Welles’ War of the World.
The album and stage show, unlike most adaptations of Welles’ book, doesn’t shift the time of the Martian invasion to something contemporaneous to the work’s production. Instead, it sticks with the setting of the original work, having the Martians invade in the late 1890s, as per the origi
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