December 24, 2010
The World God Only Knows Season Finale: God Mode On!
This isn’t as much a finale as it is a transition from season 1 to season 2, so aside from some much appreciated characterization for Keima and the God-like gaming skills, there really isn’t much to say apart from the game nerd awesomeness of Keima and Elsee’s fruitless attempts to get him out of his sanctuary.
December 17, 2010
The World God Only Knows Flag 11: Let It All Out
If you never speak your mind, then how are you supposed to try and make people understand? Being all quiet and shy about things clearly doesn’t help, and when you have something you really think is worth fighting for, then you really need to let the world know just what it is you want to say.
Standing in the library, Shiori’s inability to speak has led her to do all sorts of crazy things. If only she had the courage to try and speak, then people would have understood.
December 11, 2010
The World God Only Knows Flag 10: The Voice Inside
When I have kids, I’ll make it a point that they learn how to read books before they learn to read anything else. Call it a personal bias, but few other modes of communication has shaped the world as much as the printed word has, and the ability to replicate and transport ideas beyond mere sound and into reading has shaped the world in ways few appreciate. Everything began when humanity first spoke and wrote things down.
I thus concur with at least 80% of what Shiori says. Heck I HATE it when people write on books. I don’t even highlight my textbooks.
November 26, 2010
The World God Only Knows Flag 8: Dragon-Eating Cake
Apparently I was mistaken last week thinking Shiori would start this week. This week’s episode instead is the Cake episode, with alterations here and there, so it sort of counts as filler at least more so than the broken game episode that was episode 4. Nothing really happened here for me much, it was actually my least favorite part of the manga so… well there’s really nothing to say about it since it really is just filler.
At least Keima’s mom is the MILF of 2010.
November 19, 2010
The World God Only Knows Flag 7: The Shining Star
I think it’s too easy to just say that Kanon’s starved for attention. She could be called selfish and histrionic, going bananas when people don’t look at her or don’t notice her, feeling like she’s sinking into the background. There are many stars and idols who live for the spotlight, always wanting all eyes on them. Kanon isn’t that much different, but for all different reasons. Having lived in the shadow of her former group mates, she’s been struggling to find her time in the limelight amidst the pressures of life and her career. She has to carry on by herself.
It’s actually pretty easy to get depressed.
November 11, 2010
The World God Only Knows Flag 6: A Matter of Identity
As I said in the previous blog post on episode 5, I can only presume that the Japanese idol industry is a cutthroat business even for girls so young and still sort of innocent. Kanon may seem a bit naive but she does try her best to perform in stride. This is further fleshed out by this episode focusing more on her back story and relationship with Keima than even the manga, going so far as to add anime-only original content (I think) to further explain the mind behind the pink-haired idol.
Whether this will pay off in the end,and if they’ll do it for other girls too, remains to be seen.
November 4, 2010
The World God Only Knows Flag 5: Crazy Idols
The idol scene is ginormous in Japan. It’s been around for years, searching out talent that goes beyond mere good looks and singing and extends to even acting (real and voice), product promotions and the like. It’s something similar to perhaps American Idol and other talent searches in Western countries, though to an even bigger extent. An entire damn industry is built around idols and they dominate TV. We get Japanese entertainment channels over here on cable and man let me tell you, they worship them like goddesses.
Except Keima. He worships no one. YOU worship HIM.
October 28, 2010
The World God Only Knows Flag 4: Dedication or Obsession?
We rarely get to see galge outside Japan for the English speaking world, with the exception being eroge, so it’s a bit expected for most people not to really see how big the galge world is in Japan and the culture that follows it. Galge is one of the biggest gaming markets in Japan in it’s regular and adult forms, and if you know Japan, you know there’s always a rabid following.
Normally you’d think that given it’s magnitude, quality assurance would be of paramount importance, but as Keima reveals to us, even galge can be as buggy as any Fallout game ever released.
Yet he trudges on. God does not simply give up on damsels in distress!
That burning desire for success.
Asuka Sora is considered the uncapturable heroine not because the game is hard, but because of shitty quality testing. Bugs abound such as but not limited to corrupting sound files, sprite flipping, sprite substitution, save file corruption and bricking. It’s a technical nightmare to the casual gamer, but a mere challenge for a God such as Keima. By now we all know that there is no such thing as a heroine that cannot be captured as far as he is concerned, and for him all it really requires is more than the usual effort to free. Every heroine deserves freedom.
In his own words, there are no bad heroines, only bad games.
Godraging.
Elsee said it best: He may be a goofball, he may be eccentric, but this is the reason why he’s good at what he does and why he will succeed in capturing escaped demons when others could not. Again you can call it dedication or much easier simple obsession, but in reality it’s more likely both. He may be obsessed with galge to the point of completely ignoring everything else, but you have to respect the dedication he puts into them. He plays not only because he needs to, but also because he wants to. He wants to save those heroines and see the ending.
It adds a greater degree of depth towards his character that others only see is a gamer freak who does nothing but press on his PFP all day. I’m not denying of course that it’s unhealthy and he really shouldn’t be ignoring the rest of the real world, but by now we already understand that he must have some reason why he chooses the galge world over the real world, and we cannot help but have some degree of respect for something that goes beyond simple obsession or dedication, but it’s practically his passion. Galge a part of him as him as much as his hand or foot is.
Respect his authority.
Presentation wise, I think the best part of this episode are the loops, specifically how it simulates the visual novel style of repeating the same scenes with different choices to see different outcomes, dialogues and CGs. Naturally that’s the way to play such games anyway, so I guess I should give props to the studio for trying to adapt that concept to animation, though the looping thing has of course been done before. It was funny and enjoyable to watch Keima’s struggle for perfection, his unwillingness to give up even when faced with a seemingly eternal cycle of repetition with no end in sight. It takes god-like skill and dedication to defeat bugs that are practically so hard coded into the game that the entire game’s development team even gave up on fixing it.
I think it speaks a lot about his character.
Admit it. You'd do anything to save her too.
Even if it was a great adaptation, I still have to ask myself if it really needed a whole episode to do. This is one chapter in the manga and they stretched it to fit half an hour. From a characterization viewpoint I think it did it effectively to dispel the assumptions that Keima’s just a crazy megalomaniac on the run from reality and show the dedication and passion he has for what he does, and not because he’s a candidate for the asylum.
But even if they could make it into a great 30 minutes adaptation, they didn’t need to make it one.
If this season is really running only for 12 or 13 episodes, they have a lot of ground to cover if they really want to try and finish the entire story by the end of season 2. They could cut out stuff to make it fit, but from that view making something this long doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Because I’m too brain dead to figure out what Manglobe plans for the series, I’ll assume they have a plan for it since they’ve been doing great so far. In the end this episode boils down to two: either you want a extended but great adaptation, or a shorter one to have more content in the long run.
And as much as I liked this episode, I think I’d preferred a more compressed piece from them.
He can already see the ending.
Next weak we’re getting I guess Kanon since the preview is about an Idol, and because she showed up, I guess we’re getting Haqua too. I’m curious to know actually who’ll be voicing Haqua, since so far the girls of the series have been spot on in casting, so I hope they pick a good one for her.
October 21, 2010
The World God Only Knows Flag 3: A Daughter’s Pride
This is the type of megalomania you usually see in extreme fictional characters and usually applied on their fellow people. You don’t always see such grandiosity in a strange meta scale. We’re watching a show about character extending his megalomanic (sp?) muscles over a fictional character inside a fictional world. The metaphysics of this plot device will hurt heads so I won’t go into it in detail.
Megalomaniacs are probably hard to properly play. There’s usually more than the overinflated ego and the loud voice and laughter, so it takes a lot of skill to properly play one. I haven’t been very positive about Shimono’s work as the Kami-sama of galge, but with this episode suffice to say that he’s really warming into the role.
He might just pull off something awesome in the end.
October 7, 2010
The World God Only Knows Flag 1: The Capturing God
As a gamer, enough can probably be said about my… addiction. Though of course it’s not so much a pure addiction per se, that I end up screwing up my studies and my social life in the name of defeating the next boss of finding the next save point, but I still take my gaming very seriously. It’s a hobby sure, but it’s a hobby I actually take the time to research, prepare and and even practice for. When I want to enjoy it, I enjoy it the way I want to and the only ways I know how. In all honesty, I think anyone would treat the hobbies they really enjoy with a degree of seriousness.
There is, of course, the more extreme ones, who do nothing all day but game and… well game duh. I almost went down that road once but realized there are far more things in the real world I need to put my focus on, and the real world has no save points. When it’s game over, it’ s game over.
Aaaand above all of us is Katsuragi Keima, the Capturing God.
Medical Student vs. Anime 