TikTok Wipe It Down Challenge #Japan #Korea

Featuring some of the best compilations of TikTok's #WipeItDown challenge from Japan and Korea! Check it out!

Valentine's Day Meets Christmas in this AMV!

A Christmas Snow 

by AstylesMusic

Birdy the Mighty: It's Obviously A Woman's World

Shounen Alert!

So far, Birdy the Mighty is the only action/adventure shounen anime that stars, a female lead. That means a female lead with power in spades and superhero-like strength. Let's recap, this might be the only shounen anime with a STRONG female lead. Strong enough to break your face! hahahaha

Why aren't there more shounen anime out there with female leads, like this one? All of the others are cult interests, like vampires or Halloween towns. Do all girls like vampires and Halloween? That's not the way... Or one day everyone will wake up and the female species... will be gone, presumably to Hogwarts or something. Or they'll be the new villains ..._(O.O)_... Aaaaaah NOooo!

But why not regular heriones???

As anime nerds, we already know that some girls are just regular shounen heroines. But there aren't enough themes and main characters to help a girl out. There should be a long list of shounen, not even "shounen", of action/adventure anime starring girls. Stereotypically, the word shounen refers to boys anime, kind of like the superhero cartoons of Japan. But, then why did you guys in Japan make this one? Just to fly in the face of your own conventions? Make more... Please?

Anime like Birdy the Mighty, show anime fans that it is possible. "Birdy" or her Earth codename, came to Earth from a distant planet to investigate powerful alien criminals that go to Earth to do bad stuff. As events unfold, a human boy gets in the way of a fight. The bad guy uses the boy as a body shield (bravery at its finest or is it typical cowardly bad guy behavior) and Birdy disintegrates him with a full body punch. So... the boy has to be revived on her planet and in the meantime Birdy has to share her body with him... As in, let him use it so he can keep going to school, have a social life, and get good grades. But she still fights aliens when he gets home from school.

Birdy is a typical shounen main character with all the shounen features. She's stubborn, optimistic, brave, impervious to evil, and loves a good challenge. She stands up for what's right in the face of danger and stronger enemies. Plus she can also think with such a hard head...

In fact, if she doesn't wear her superhero suit, she might be a tomboy. If I were a girl, she would be one of my favorite shounen/shoujo heroes and I would lament the anime industry for taking so long to get onto the bandwagon. 

In short, they need to make more strong female leads for anime. For otaku. For you and for me. For the world. For the FREAKING UNIVERSE!

You can catch Birdy the Mighty for free, streaming on Hulu.com

Modeling is her side job!

I always knew there were Otaku like me out there...

Otaku Reivewers play: HuniePop - the OEL Puzzle-Dating Sim!

Full series coming soon to the Otaku Reviewers YouTube channel! -chansu

Otaku Let's Play! - Yoshi's Island Part 1: That's Why Girls Avoid Shy Guys

Yoshi's Island like you've never heard it before...gy.

Yoshi's Island is one of the most well-known games for the SNES or Super Nintendo Entertainment System from the 1990's. In that game Yoshi carries baby Mario through the entire Yoshi world and brings him back home.

The Otaku Reviewers like to play old school video games, while having fun and maybe a few laughs. So laugh at us, we're a couple of shy guys wondering if the "Shy Guy" bad guys ever get girls. It's a thought experiment that takes place only in Yoshi's Island (lol).

No New Sword Art Online III Anime?!

Don't kill me for false advertising just yet. Hey wait, look where Yui is? Yeah. That's right.

Okay, so it's not written in stone that there won't be a Sword Art Online III anime, but there has been no news on the topic. To be more specific, there was a certain Sword Art Online Sing All Overtures concert at the Yokohama National Convention Hall, and along with it there was NO NEWS for a new SAO anime adaptation, or anything of that sort!!

For those of you that don't know much about the anime world, Sword Art Online is a story series about a boy named Kirigaya Kazuto who goes by the username Kirito, and his adventures in various VRMMORPGs. The most famous of which is chronicled in the first SAO anime adaptation, where he and other hardcore gamers are trapped in a virtual reality gaming headset working to clear the game and battle for survival, because death in-game meant death in real life. 

Sinon, the main female protagonist of Phantom Bullet. And the cast of SAO all together!

Sword Art Online became one of the most popular anime of 2012 when it released due to its perfect blend of high-adrenaline action, high fantasy and high tech fusion, survival game aspects, and combination of harem and drama story elements. Go to any Top 10 anime list. You are bound to see Sword Art Online among its ranks.

Asuna, Kirito's love interest, flies the skies of Elfheim with her rival in love, Leafa, who happens to be Kirito's cousin. Got it?

But then, why no SAO III? It may be because the story-lines of future light novels (from which the actual story content originates) does not hold such a high-stakes survival aspect as the original Aincrad story arc. Hey, I might be wrong. The fans really love SAO, and SAO II the adaptation of Phantom Bullet, Calibur, and Mother's Rosario (which are relatively more light hearted, but still high-stakes, exciting stories). Maybe with enough cult fan backlash, we may hear news of SAO III yet?

Cross your fingers, loyal otaku!! We know Asuna and Kirito are!

-chansu

Cherry Tree High Comedy Club Review

 

This is a review of a new computer game called: Cherry Tree High Comedy Club!

Let me begin with my impressions of the Comedy Club. To me this game seemed almost like the Persona games, without any monster fighting. It's the most complete life simulation game there probably is out there, without sacrificing that Japanime style that we all love. 

 In the beginning, the main character Miley talks to her friend and rival Octavia. She talks about her determination to bring back a defunct Comedy Club that used to be at her school. This is the opening of the game and like most visual novels, the opening is very long. Don't let this deter you from playing the game lol.

Just like anime virtual life simulators, skills increase after you do enough of certain activities. Basically you can become any kind of person you want to be by practicing your favorite things.

That's not all, you can talk to a wide variety of people and get to know them better. There's even a slight chance that you can talk successfully about love :3

There are different places to go, the world is your oyster! At least the city!

This game is a great game to play if you're feeling bored. The main character is a girl, so it's probably going to appeal more to girls than to boys. But that shouldn't let boys get scared enough not to try it out. But for girls of all ages, I highly recommend this game. 

Get the game at the official website!

http://cherrytreehigh.com/

Bleach Philosophy Corner

You (the internet) loved my case study on Ulquiorra (an avoidant psychopath with a heart of gold and a penchence for brain washing) the most popular bad guy of the Aizen saga. So I'm going to keep blogging about Bleach, this time about philosophy and maybe psychology too. Chansu, this is not selling out it's good blogging...

So Ichigo's friend Ishida got shanked by a mysterious bad guy with enormous power. And Ichigo, he's weaker than a wet tissue. It seems like everyone else in the show downgraded Ichigo, like our economy got downgraded by S&P. However, in this case they downgraded Ichigo to something like C. Orihime now feels it's ok to make a move on him (or fail to make a move on him), because he's pathetic.

What kind of hero is Tite Kubo making Ichigo out to be in this arc?

He's Kubo's experiment in the underdog archetype. Kubo went for this vibe during the Soul Society arc and that's why we like Bleach. But for real, in this arc Ichigo experiences being a well endowed person but with no real power at all. A lot like you and me. Ok Chansu, not like you or Luffy but this is about Ichigo and Bleach.

He might as well said "Let's walk away so my now-crappy-son doesn't hear us talking about bad things"

Ichigo for the first time in the series experiences the human dilemma. That we might not be strong enough, that our friends will downgrade us, that our parents and mentors will walk away mysteriously, that strange men will ambush our friends, that the girls that like us don't talk about that stalker guy (Orihime...), that our weaker friends will come to the foreground to flaunt their strength (CHAD...), and the list continues. Ichigo is facing the best human dilemma that shounen anime can offer. And it's the best because it offered too much for a shounen anime. Ichigo is practically that person everyone pretends to be nice to because you don't want to hurt his feelings.

But Ichigo is a shounen hero after all. He is an example of what we should do. Keep trying and keep trying again. Trust strange men... Well not that last part. We should keep trying even when we don't know if we can make it. He never lashed out at his friends for downgrading him, he just kinda stayed chill. We can assume that Kubo instilled such a "theory of mind" to Bleach, I hope. I like to believe Ichigo knows he's been downgraded worse than the S&P though Kubo didn't make this crystal clear (he's got to at least try to tell a story by showing and not by spoonfeeding everything to you).

Ichigo kept trying... Why can't we? Resilience is key...

Never use a calling card given to you by a stranger... Unless you're a shounen hero...

RPGHero's Anime/Manga pick of the week: Densha Otoko (Train Man)

Densha Otoko is a book, movie, television series, and manga. It's about a nerd who is in the right place at the right time on the subway and somehow saves a beautiful woman from a obnoxious and in most representations a horny old man. The old man decides to fight Densha (the nickname for the main character) instead of molesting the beautiful woman and the conductor steps in to save the day. A few days later Densha gets a set of expensive Hermess cups from the woman and sets out to recruit the members of the 2 channel BBS as his advisors because he's got no experience with dating, let alone someone as beautiful as Hermess. He follows their advice, something any person who's been on an internet forum knows is taking a risk. Can you believe that this was based on a true story?? The real Densha must have been immune to the trolls and the bugs hahaha.

I highly recommend watching the television series. The episodes are around 45 minutes long but you'll get hooked after the first episode.

Watch it online here:

To watch more go here http://shitteru2.net/category/jdrama/densha-otoko/

Or check out the book or manga at Amazon.com:
Train Man: The Novel (Del Rey Books)
Train_Man: Densha Otoko, Vol. 1 (Train-Man)
Train Man: A Shojo Manga

 Comment your thoughts here! If you've got girl problems Chansu will give you his expert advice and RPGHero will hand you some beer and chicken, it'll be alright... If you wanna start a forum with RPGHero and Chansu drop us a line and we'll get to planning...