Being an animator in Japan is hard. It’s very hard. But with the myriad of problems in the industry, is there a solution? Here’s what some people in the industry had to say. JAniCA, the Japan Animation Creators Association, is an organization made up of animators, producers, and supporters of the Japanese animation industry. The…
What if Vegeta had came to Earth as a child instead of Goku… Twitter user @dragongarowLEE is a massivefan of Dragon Ball. And like most artistic fans of the series, he’s drawn fan art. Lots and lots of fan art. Not only is he damn good, but his stuff is also pretty funny as well.…
Check out the trailer for Imperial SaGa, the newest game in Square Enix’s SaGa series, now with English. Yes, English! The game will apparently include characters and enemies from across the SaGa series which includes the Romancing SaGa series and SaGa Frontier series. The game will also have regular features from the series like the…
Vampire yakuza, minigun-toting trucks, a guy in a flying fuzzy frog suit… Sounds like Miike Takashi all right. Miike, of course, is the filmmaker behind such movies as Ichi the Killer and Audition. Gokudo Daisenso (極道大戦争 ) or roughly translated, “The Great Yakuza War” is an upcoming movie from director Miike Takashi that’s about… it’s…
Se Jun Park won the Pokémon Video Game World Champion Master’s Division last year. You’d think preparing for a tournament that has the words “world” and “champion” in it would require months of dedicated prep beforehand. You’d think. “Actually, I spent less time playing Pokémon in 2014 than I ever have ever since I really…
Cute anime girls on stage singing and dancing… S’okay, but I feel I should be more entertained than I actually am. The iDOLM@ASTER: Cinderella Girls is the spiritual successor to The iDOLM@STER anime. Where The iDOLM@STER was based on the Xbox 360/PS3 game, Cinderella Girls is based on the smartphone spin-off. While both shows supposedly…
One of the new anime this season, My Love Story, is a romance story featuring an atypical protagonist. A protagonist with certain similarities to one of Japan’s most famous bullies. The main character of My Love Story is Takeo Goda, a high school boy with an intimidatingly large physique, and a heart of gold. The…
With the release of the latest Dissidia Final Fantasy trailer, Kingdom Hearts director and zipper enthusiast*, Tetsuya Nomura sat down to talk about the newest addition to the character roster. *Not officially “With the two PSP games, I felt I’d ‘done all there is to do’ and took the stance that it was ‘completed,’ so…
The third season of the anime Gintama started off with a bang. Or rather, a bawling parody of a disgraced politician. The first episode of the new season of Gintama began with a press conference in which the protagonist, Gintoki Sakata makes a public apology that the series did not end properly, and is having…
Hayao Miyazaki is one of Japan’s most celebrated anime creators. He also has the reputation of being a bit outspoken of his opinions. Like how using an iPad is like masturbation, or that time he said he hated cars because they were American. Wait, what? An image has recently surfaced on Japan’s popular online billboard,…
It’s been over two years since Smash Bros. creator, Masahiro Sakurai, first revealed that he was suffering from calcific tendinitis in his right shoulder and while from his tone, it appears his condition has improved, he obviously has not yet fully recovered. In his semi-weekly column in Weekly Famitsu, Sakurai lamented on the recent release…
Solid Snake is one of gaming’s iconic characters. And in Japan, his voice is as iconic as his look – if not more so. While the West has David Hayter, and now Kiefer Sutherland as the voice behind the character, Japan has Akio Otsuka, a veteran voice actor whose name has become almost as synonymous…
Take a good gander at the above image, because it’s one of the few legitimate images of Yakuza 0’s campaign that can be shared on the PS4. The SHARE button is a useful little oddity for the PS4. It allows you to take screenshots or videos of your gameplay that you can upload, or start…
Final Fantasy XV: Episode Duscae came out last month and most people who got it have probably had enough time to process their feelings about it. Japanese gaming mag Weekly Famitsu released the results of their user survey on the Final Fantasy XV demo. What were you looking forward to going into the game? Going…
Resident Evil was released in 1996, and changed the gaming world. It also apparently taught a lot of people some interesting lessons. Japan’s biggest online billboard, 2ch, was abuzz recently under the thread titled, “What we learned from Biohazard (Resident Evil)” (俺達がバイオハザードから学んだこと). Here is a sample from the life lessons of Resident Evil For close-quarters…
Hmm… Mobile Suit Gundam The Origin: Blue-Eyed Casval. A prequel to a highly successful, generation-defining SF franchise? That’s never gone wrong before… I would say Gundam is more akin to Star Trek than Star Wars. Both series are more science fiction as opposed to science fantasy. Both deal with topical issues like war, discrimination, evolution,…
Because seeing a geriatric cyborg badass is kinda cathartic in a way. Inuyashiki is the latest manga from Hiroya Oku, the guy who created Gantz, a manga about people who are transported to a room with a giant black ball in it when they die so they can fight aliens with crazy future-tech weaponry. So,…
Yakuza 0 rewards you for beating the crap out of street thugs and gangsters in the form of gobs of cash. Gobs and gobs of cash. The story of Yakuza 0 takes place in Japan in the 1980’s. History lesson time, kids! Back in the 80’s, Japan was enjoying an economic bubble the likes of…
They already had a live-action movie and a TV show, so I guess a stage adaptation was only a matter of time. Next month, Sega’s popular video game, Ryu ga Gotoku (龍が如く) – or as it’s better known in the west, Yakuza – will be getting a stage adaptation. The stage adaptation, which will be…
Recently, Japan saw the release of the latest Warriors-style collaborative game, Dragon Quest Heroes. The game sold well, but it also had the added effect of pushing PS4 sales to the top of the charts. Sometimes all it takes in an old classic. The Dragon Quest games have famously been a bit of a phenomenon…
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