If Asura Can Do One Thing Well It's Definitely Punching

There are a lot of games I've never played but like their stories/artwork/other aspects, and Asura's Wrath is a big one in that department.

Mostly, it's because it's more or less the same tone-wise as Gurren Lagann's more serious moments (and I'm pretty sure I'm on the record as a big fan of Gurren Lagann in spite of its over-the-top fanservice) and like Gurren Lagann is a very loose adaptation of the angry, awesome prologue chapters of Journey to the West with a rather different ending. (I'm not going to go on a rant, because I'm well aware I've got... let's call them "loud opinions that nobody needs to hear," but some important precepts of Buddhist philosophy make me angry, angry the way that lapsed Catholics and hard-edged atheists get about Christianity.)

That "basically serious Gurren Lagann" tone just keeps me coming back to watching playthrough videos, over and over, even if I can't understand the dialogue.

Case in point: The below video, which gets simply amazing around 6:21. (I'm sorry I've never figured out YouTube's embed code trick for queuing up a specific part of a video, but honestly I'm not sure the modern embed code even has that option and figuring out the old code is probably kinda hopeless at this point.)



Who really needs to know what they're saying after that?

Also: Is it strange that I find it completely adorable that Asura's basic motivation for going on his epic pantheon-breaking rampage is to punch the guys who made his daughter cry? He makes that guy from that other pantheon-busting game look like a jerk and a pansy.

-Signing off.

This Shouldn't Work...

...but it does.

A while ago, I discovered the Gurren Lagann Parallel Works, a series of what are essentially music videos, which were created to promote the Gurren Lagann movies.

The best of these, and the only one with canonical content to the series or movies, is Parallel Works 8, which is proof that anime is art, as far as I'm concerned.



(I seriously could watch this thirty or forty times a day and be happy.)

What the title of this post is referring to is that there's another song, "Just Like You Imagined" by Nine Inch Nails (which is known for being the song from one of the 300 trailers) which fits the video so well with no editing whatsoever that it's uncanny.



I seriously get chills watching that.

What's even better: Look for any big pounding soundtrack type music, and it'll probably fit too. (I've been checking. I'm very creative at wasting time.)

-Signing off.

Same Song, Same Reaction, Different Series

I've heard a fairly significant amount of negativity about the band My Chemical Romance.

I don't particularly know or care if they deserve it-I've listened to exactly one of their albums, "The Black Parade." And what I do know is that basically everybody loves music videos done to the same-titled song.

Case in point: This video is referred to as "indisputably the best anime AMV of all time" by the poster (who didn't make it). (Warning: Significant Gurren Lagann spoilers, although you've probably gotten significant Gurren Lagann spoilers just by having an internet connection.)



Pretty much the same sort of thing has been said about this one. (Warning: While I don't particularly know, seeing as how I haven't seen more than a fraction of the series, probably pretty significant Teen Titans spoilers.)



So is this song just made especially for intensely emotional music videos, or what?

(It totally is.)

-Signing off.

Getter Robo Armageddon Equals...

In the form of Getter Robo G's "Starvengers" dub (which I am sure was distributed on home video under a different name), Getter Robo was my first super robot series (and also my sister's-it probably influences the way she draws robots). It's also one of the all-time most famous and popular super robots in the world. (It owes at least some of its popularity to the difficult-for-English-speakers-to-obtain Getter Robo manga by Ken Ishikawa, which I have heard is mind-blowing.)

So it's rather fitting that in the late 1990s, they would make a Getter Robo series, Getter Robo Armageddon (more properly translated as "Shin [new/changed] Getter Robo: The Last Day," although Armageddon is its official English localization's name and works poetically), which would embody the themes of that decade's mecha and robot series entirely.



Specifically, Armageddon takes elements and themes from two of the most influential of '90s robot anime, Evangelion and GaoGaiGar, and blends them into a single story that also uses elements of the Getter Robo manga to create an incredibly brilliant series which is both dark (like Evangelion) and uplifting (like GaoGaiGar at its best).

Well played, Getter Robo. Well played.

(It should also be noted that one of the most popular mecha/robot series of the last decade, Gurren Lagann, owes a lot creatively to Getter Robo generally, although calling it a "ripoff" is at best disrespectful to the craft that went into the series and at worst closed-minded poopyheadedness. Yes, I'll go there.)

-Signing off.

Gundam: The Whole Story

The trailer for an upcoming Gundam series, GundamAGE, is ticking off long-time Gundam fans (it seriously has almost three times as many dislikes on this posting of it than likes, which is crazy disproportionate). Actual negative comment I've seen on this trailer: "AGE Gundam [no, silly, GundamAGE!]? More like UNDERAGE Gundam!"



Ironically, some have said that this will finally be the Gundam series that the original sponsors of the first Gundam series wanted-a lone heroic super robot going up against an army of villains. (In effect, yet another of the typical super robot series of its era of origin. The Gundam series itself created what is known as the "real robot" genre [or the "mecha" genre in English-speaking countries], which generally includes larger-scale warfare, mass production mecha, and intrigue and politics usually inspired by real world history. Incidentally, the original Gundam series was very unsuccessful, but was vindicated by history in similar fashion to Star Trek in the states, popular in reruns and with many sequels.)

Gundam as such has gotten... kind of repetitive, though, which means that a summary like this can tell you almost everything you need to know.



Dude failed to mention that almost every Gundam series (and many other mecha-type series made by Sunrise, Gundam's studio) has the protagonist in a white robot and the masked antagonist/rival in a red robot. Even Escaflowne, whose red robot pilot has no visible mask (I won't say more because, well, SPOILERS!!1!).

In fact, the series Gurren Lagann, which I've recently mentioned, seems to parody or at least give a nod to this tendency, because the protagonists wear sunglasses and goggles and pilot a red robot, while their primary rival/antagonist type pilots a white robot. (Of course, Gurren Lagann is both a mecha/real robot series and a super robot series, and more, but... Well, it's hard to pin down in a single blog post what Gurren Lagann is. Other than awesome, I mean.)

Also, while G Gundam ("Shining Finger!") is admittedly silly, at least it isn't a clone of every other Gundam series like... every other Gundam series.

-Signing off.

Coulda Made This A Theme Week

Specifically, a Japanese anime super robot/mecha series week. Except I did something totally unrelated on Wednesday. (shrugs)

In this scene from the anime OVA (straight-to-video series/movie, which has completely different implications in Japan than in English-speaking countries) Gunbuster, the titular mecha supposedly racks up 250,000,000 kills. (Yes, 250 million. In that one scene. Which is less than four minutes of screentime.)



Don't worry, they're all just monsters. Space monsters.

(And if you're wondering why I'm talking about it, Gunbuster was one of the first works of Gainax, which made Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, which I talked about yesterday. I've never watched Gunbuster and have no particular plans to do so, but I can appreciate it as being an ancestor of Gurren Lagann.)

-Signing off.

Super Robot Profiles: Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

I am so frikkin' high on Gurren Lagann right now. Because I just finished watching it maybe ten or fifteen minutes ago.

What am I saying?

Well, Gurren Lagann (complete English dub release available for free on YouTube!) is one of the most popular anime of the last decade (and of all time, really), and for good reason: It is awesome.

(If you haven't seen it, don't Google it or read any other sites for it. Just go watch it.)

I'm not going to spoil it for you, but I'll try to use more than simple "LOL EPIC" to bring across just what this series is.

Gurren Lagann is a series where symbolism is more important than physics; where determination trumps probabilities; where emotion means more than literal events. In other words, first and foremost, it's a story about fictional people.

And it never pretends that it isn't.

On the other hand, it's a series where events have real consequences. Gurren Lagann never steps back or retcons away events; it unabashedly goes into what happens next, always pushing forward.

Because that is the way a drill works.

The series is both funny and deadly serious. This is not a contradiction, although it gets more serious and less funny as it continues.

The characters are enormous hams, and this is not a bad thing. (More questionable is the often distracting fanservice, which I don't especially care for [it's not very attractive a lot of the time, although sometimes I admit I laughed at the audacity of it], but you take the bad with the good with a series like this.)

Really, to say more than that is to say too much, but it's still not enough. I'm not even sure what else to say.

-Signing off.

Sorry (I Blame Kamina)

This is partly my fault, and partly the fault of somebody else turning off the computer when it should have stayed on.

But it's really MANGAentertainment's fault, because they posted Gurren Lagann on their official YouTube channel and I've been watching it.

Gurren Lagann, people. On YouTube. The whole thing.

What amazes me isn't that they did it, but that I didn't figure it out earlier. (It's been there since late 2009.)

-Signing off and wearing impossible sunglasses.

Game Review: Mecha Dress Up Game

Mecha Dress Up Game is almost exactly what it sounds like. It's a "game" where you can put together various diverse and fun robot parts and then (naturally) blow them up. (There's a button that says "NUKE" which allows you to do just that.) It's also got some rocking music that you can turn on.

Enough of that. Let's talk about what you can do with it.

Quite frankly, if I was going to show off everything that I had made with this game, it'd take forever. I managed to keep from going crazy and only took twelve screenshots. But that would have taken me more work to upload than I felt like, so I just did five. (Five is a nice number for Blogger's image uploader.)

Anyway, some things you can do:

Design a very spiky and sharp guy. (This is actually only moderately spiky.) Note the little curse-sealing thing hanging on the horn? That's treated as a "hat" by the game.

And yes, he's totally got Gurren Lagann's torso there.

Here's another one. I'm not sure...

...but I think I might have maxed out my MissileCard on this one.

As you might suspect, there are quite a few gaggy things in this game, and I tried to fit as many of them as possible into this next image.

You can also give your robot many different kinds of axes.

You can also build a robot that I've talked about a few times...

Yes, I gave him a TV antenna, Gurren Lagann sunglasses (technically Simon's rather than the robot's), pirate hat, gun sword, and lightsaber. Even I have my weak moments.

Anyway, if you like robots, this is a fun little doohickey to play with.

-Signing off.

Super Robot History: Landmarks of Audacity

Robot with the best name: Xabungle. (There's no series information there, but it'll still tell you more about the series than Wikipedia.)

Robot with the most ambitious design: GaoGaiGar. (What could possible be more ambitious than a robot which takes common elements from preceding series [a train robot, a drill tank robot, and a lion robot] and crams all of them into a single design? GaoGaiGar isn't the handsomest mecha out there, but as my discourse upon him should indicate, the design has grown on me. Except Liner Gao. Replace that with a rocket ship.)

Robot that most radically defies physics: Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. (That robot ought to collapse into a black hole larger than a galactic core merely by thinking about existing, much less actually existing. Considering that its dimensions render it thousands of times larger than the Milky Way galaxy by volume, and it's probably supposed to be mostly solid [as opposed to the vast voids of space] it's probably as heavy as the freaking detectable universe. Not to mention the fact that there's no way a structure that large could exist without bending and warping in on itself, or that the robot's punches would be constrained by the c limit [that is, it'd be impossible for it to conduct a battle in a human lifetime, or even the typical star's lifetime, especially when you consider the time dilation that would be created by the robot's gravitational field], or the fact that it'd be ending all life in the universe by yanking their planets out of their orbits to itself, shredding galaxies, etc., etc., merely by its presence.)

Robot that was the most horrible killer: Ideon. (It destroyed the universe. 'Nuff said-Cosmos doesn't hold a candle.)

Robot that isn't really a Super Robot but deserves an honorable mention for being a greatly loved character and all that: Optimus Prime. (Yes, there's irony in this being said after yesterday's post. Also, to clarify, making that picture wasn't really responsible for the post being so short, I just thought it was funny.)

-Signing off.

Super Robot Size Estimate Revision

A few months ago, I made a remark about the largest mecha known to have been created in anime and the like. Originally from this post, I'll quote it here for simplicity.

...Well, first off, [Daitarn III] was just shy of four hundred feet tall, making him one of the largest super robots of the era and still one of the largest of all time. Granted, the [Daitarn III series enemies] were exactly the same size most of the time, but still-Daitarn is significantly bigger than the king of the monsters Godzilla, the universe-slayer Ideon, and nearly every other kaiju and super robot you can think of-the only exceptions to this I can think of are Danguard Ace (650 feet tall), Gunbuster (~812 feet tall), the titanic SDF-1 Macross (I'm unclear on its actual height, but in battleship mode it's about 3/4 of a mile), and the really ridiculously large things like Dark Nova/Star Giant, Primus, and Unicron (all the size of small planets)...

I should have known better than to overlook Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.

Why? Because the series pretty much happily defied physics and logic with more ease and willfulness than Western comic books or even most of the crazier anime, and they eventually took the progressively increasing size of their mecha to the point of having one the size of a planet... and then took it one more step, to Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, which was a combination of all previous mecha used by the protagonists. Yes, a mecha with the same name as the series. How big was it?

Behold. (WARNING: Lots of scantily clad females. This is part and parcel of any Gurren Lagann sequence. Further, sorry for the slightly hentai-esque bit with the creepy negative-space guy.)

Not symbolic. Not an exaggeration. (I feel like a Silver Age comic book cover.) According to Wikipedia, the official sourcebooks explicitly state that Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is 10 million lightyears tall. That is approximately 100 times the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy, and 10,000 times its thickness. Imagine the collateral damage. (The battle was supposed to take place in some kind of alternate universe, by the way, which is why civilization and life in the universe didn't instantaneously end as a result of the mecha's combination sequence. And why there was a ground.) The little things that the big shadowy enemy are chucking at it are entire galaxies. The enemy was attacking because they were worried that the fictional energy that powered the series mecha, which explicitly defied the laws of physics (particularly conservation of mass and energy), might destroy the universe. Gee, what are the chances?

Ironically, the Ideon (previously mentioned) could still destroy Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.

-Signing off.