Reviews - Animefangirl!

Gyakkyou Nine volumes 5 & 6 manga review (ending spoilers)

It’s been a while since I finished a series that was longer than 1 volume long ^.^ And it’s probably been even longer since that ending was an actual good one. Of course given the nature and message of the series, the ending of Gyakkyou Nine was a given from the start, but the whole point was to see them overcoming all kinds of challenges and adverse conditions on their way to victory.

It seems like the author had to overcome some sort of adversity himself around the volume 5 point, because both the art and the story took a sudden nosedive in quality. It’s pretty obvious he’s cutting corners in a lot of places, and a lot of the characters – Fukutsu Toshi in particular – look seriously off-model half the time. Things improved somewhat in volume 6 (or my eyes got used to it). Note that Toshi cuts his trademark hair at the start of the volume!! It’s really weird seeing him without the hair, but like all other things I adjusted.

Story – volume 5 can pretty much be skipped IMO. Naturally Toshi fights back against all odds to take the team through to Koshien. The only thing worth noting is that Sakakibara-sensei leaves, since he was originally a substitute teacher to begin with, and the original useless club adviser comes back. The only reason to note this is so you don’t get confused when you see some blonde bimbo in volume 6.

Most of volume 6 has the Zenryoku 9 blowing away all their opponents thanks to Fukutsu’s unhittable ‘otokodama’ pitch. But it isn’t Gyakkyou Nine without a final challenge, is it? And so disaster strikes! Right before the finals! Fukutsu fends off a final approach from Kuwabara-chan only to run into the opposing pitcher Muteki, who is like him in every way, but better. And he has an ‘otokodama’ too! And they’re being coached by Sakakibara-sensei, who has told them all the weaknesses of the Zenryoku Nine!

But it gets even worse when the taxi Fukutsu is riding in collides with a truck and is totaled right before the game. I was afraid Shimamoto might pull an Adachi and kill off his hero for the tearz, but luckily Fukutsu survives… with amnesia! Can any team possibly pull a win out of these impossible odds?!!!

Haha, if you’re still wondering at this point then you haven’t been reading the same series I have. It’s pretty cool how at the very, very end, the final adversary Fukutsu and the team have to conquer is ‘Adversity’ itself. Fight on, team! Makeru na!

Now it’s done my final thoughts on Gyakkyou Nine are highly positive, the slowdown in volume 5 notwithstanding. The earlier volumes are the best because the team faces the greatest challenge then – their sucky selves. Once they become a team that’s actually good, the problems they face become ever more far-fetched and the hot-blooded speeches ever more long-winded. It’s still fun to root for them and see how they resolve situations, and the series is pretty good from start to finish.

As a baseball series… well, this isn’t really a baseball series. It would work almost as well with just about any other team sport, so there isn’t much focus on the actual play-by-play aspect of the game. But it’s plain to see what the point of the series is from the very first chapter, so no complaints here. Gyakkyou Nine is a good series. If you can’t find the manga, there’s a 2005 movie which is supposed to be very funny. Either way I recommend the series.

Hajimete no Otsukai Bakushou 2014 Special

Hajimete no Otsukai is a long-running Japanese TV show where kids aged between 1-5 years are sent on their first ever errand (indeed the title means “My First Errand”). It can be something as simple as delivering a pencil to someone five minutes away to something as complicated as taking the train or bus somewhere far away to buy some trivial item. Either way the audience gets to watch the children’s progress through hidden cameras and microphones, enjoying their little comments, laughing when something funny happens and cheering them on when the going gets tough.

Hajimete no Otsukai only airs a few times a year, no more than 3, which means that out of all the footage filmed over the year only a few errands are cherry-picked for our viewing pleasure. I used to like the show until I realized a tendency to focus mainly on two types of errands:

1. The type where the child doesn’t want to go and cries and cries and cries but eventually goes anyway. A variant is to have the child soldier bravely on but start crying once s/he returns. Since the errand won’t air unless the child eventually makes a move, you already know the kid is going to go anyway, so milking the tears for drama is just annoying. Plus it makes the parent seem callous for being so desperate to appear on a TV show that they’ll force an unwilling child out into the wild, calling it ‘character development’ and shedding a few crocodile tears of their own to make themselves appear less self-centered and rapacious.

2. The type where the child is either sent very far away or made to carry something ridiculously heavy so they’re struggling every step of the way. This can be amusing when the kid does it to themselves. Boys tend to fall prey to this the most – Mom will tell them to buy one can of milk and they’ll buy 3 just for the kicks. May be combined with type 1 for maximum crying.

There’s a third type, where a cute kid just goes on a normal errand with some minor happens and comes back without much fuss or tears. This was more common in the older episodes I’ve watched, even up to about 3 years ago, but now they make up the minority of stories on a typical episode these days. Even when you think you’ve been spared, there might be a tearful ‘surprise’ at the end.

As you can figure, I didn’t enjoy the 2014 Special too much. The tears were just too manufactured, especially on the part of the studio audience. They even went to the extent of finding a kid whose mother had cancer and sending the kid to the hospital alone. I skipped that errand. It was just too tasteless. Then there was a sweet one where a child goes to a pottery festival and meets all kinds of people along the way… but then her mother cranked up some of the fakest tears I’d ever seen and made the poor girl cry as well. Another fun one had two brightly-dressed brothers in a high-class shopping mall… and at the end the little brother started to bawl. It’s not Hajimete no Otsukai unless kids are crying, I guess.

Then there was a long boring bit showing the first errand of one of the boys. One of the Kameda boxing champion brothers… Tomoki? From 18 years ago, it wasn’t aired when it was originally shot because it was just too boring, and it hasn’t improved with age. Then there was the usual mix of Type 1 and Type 2 errands, nothing really worth remembering.

Maybe the show always was this chockful of forced sentimentality – an errand from about 20 years ago had a poor boy carrying a ridiculous heavy bundle of firewood, for one thing. Maybe I’m the one who has changed from when I started watching the show. Having a lot of nephews and nieces born one after the other in the past few years has made me pay more attention to children and their safety.

For example I remember an episode where a mother made her 2 year 10-month old son ride a bus a long distance away. Now that I have a nephew around that age, I’m horrified at the very idea. He’s just a baby! What if something happens to him? Don’t stand on the balcony crying, run down and get him! Right now the errands I enjoy most are the ones that keep children away from main roads, that make them go reasonable distances for their age (almost none of them) and that have happy, willing kids running errands they’re excited about.

Binan Koukou Chikyuu Bouei-bu Love! offers nothing new

The concept of teenagers with special powers fighting to save the earth is at least as old as the X-Men comics, possibly more. I thought Binan Koukou Chikyuu Bouei-bu Love! was supposed to be a parody of not only that kind of series but also of magical girl shows, complete with transformation sequences, but like many parodies it failed to go far enough and instead become exactly what it’s trying to parody.

Bunch of high school boys, weird mascot from outer space, turns them into heroes, they get into the role pretty quickly, they fight against some kind of hotpot monster in episode 1, end of show. I’m not sure what was decided by the end of ep. 1 because I was already skipping through at that point.

Even though ‘Binan’ is a synonym for handsome guys (with different kanji), the guys don’t look special at all. Even your low-budget smartphone otome ‘game’ has better-looking characters, and that’s saying a lot. I’m not interested in fanservice, male or female, so the naked butt shots in the transformations were actually a disservice. Cover up, luvs.

If I’m supposed to stick around for the comedy, it’s not funny in the least. There’s nothing remotely amusing about it. There’s a wombat and it’s pink and it keeps talking about love. ???? Come on, my toddler nephew tells funnier stories than that, and he’s 2. As for action there isn’t much of that, just boys flying around waving wands at people, pew pew pew! My toddler nephew and his friends play more exciting games than that, and they’re all two.

tl;dr there’s nothing lovely about Binan Koukou Chikyuu Bouei-bu Love! and even 3/4ths of an episode was a waste of my time. Moving on!

Gyakkyou Nine volumes 3 & 4 manga review

AwwwRIGHT! Things are getting better and better! Gyakkyou Nine is only 6 volumes long, so that means Shimamoto has to pack a lot into those pages, which means a lot of hot-blooded action in every chapter. I always pick it up intending to read just a few pages and end up reading half the book.

I’m not going to give a blow by blow of each volume. I’m too lazy for that. All you have to know is that after the fiasco where Toshi ditched his baseball team for a girl, they were really, really mad at him but eventually forgave him when Hagiwara (replacement pitcher with the blond hair) goes through almost exactly the same thing but busts his arm and is forced to rely on Toshi’s pitches.

All good right? Nope. It’s clear that Toshi is wavering between his love for the girl and his love of baseball. Meanwhile the Zenryoku team is scheduled to go up against Hinodeshou High for real this time, and Hinode just blew out their opponents by a ridiculous score. The whole Zenryoku team is down and only Toshi can inspire them… but only if he can sort out his own feelings once and for all!

Volume 3 is a good one just because I like romance and drama, plus it’s fun seeing Toshi deal with adversity that isn’t directly related to baseball. That and it’s funny how his family sticks their nose into everything. Anyway, once that whole crisis is over, the Koshien qualifier finals take place, starting from the first chapter of Volume 4. Toshi gets on the mound full of pep and vim… and is knocked out like a light by a liner from the very first batter. It knocks him out so hard that he lies where he fell in the right field until the 9th inning. Then he wakes up and takes a look at the score. 112-3. Could any team possibly bounce back from such a deficit?

Hoo boy. Now I have to read volumes 5 and 6 to find out. If the Gyakkyou Nine were any longer I would be worried about how much longer it would take to get through it all, but one of the nice things about short series is that it’s easy to keep the fire going and your enthusiasm up because everything happens quickly. Win or lose, it won’t take long to find out!

Watched the HEY! HEY! HEY! MUSIC CHAMP 20th Anniversary Daikanshasai

HEY! HEY! HEY! MUSIC CHAMP 20周年大感謝祭 in Japanese. It was too much trouble to translate “Daikanshasai”, which means something like “big thank you party”. Basically a small live concert featuring some big names in the Japanese music industry celebrating 20 years since Hey! Hey! Hey! started… even though it was technically cancelled 2 years ago and had been in decline for a while before that.

Anyway it aired live in Japan on December 29th 2014 but I’m only just getting round to watching it. The performers on the show were:

aiko
AKB48
Ami Suzuki
Arashi
BoA
GACKT
Golden Bomber
Hideaki Tokunaga
Kiroro
MAX
Noriyuki Makihara
ORANGE RANGE
Porno Graffiti
PUFFY
Ryuichi Kawamura
SMAP
Tetsuro Komuro
T. M. Revolution
Tomomi Kahara
TRF
Ulfuls
I’m not going to do an act-by-act breakdown like I did (and will continue to do) with Kohaku Utagassen. It was a lot of fun for me as a fan of Hey! Hey! Hey! Music Champ because they showed lots of skits from the early days of the program. Some of them I had seen before, like the one with X Japan and the one with Amuro Namie. Others like SMAP’s first appearance and Arashi’s first appearance were new to me.

I went through a phase where I watched a lot of Hey Hey Hey clips on Youtube when I was learning Japanese, but I only focused on artistes I was interested in, so no wonder I didn’t see those.

The performers sang a number of hits from the 90’s, but the really interesting part of this for me was… seeing how they had aged between their first appearance and now! Without going into the gory details, I’m quite close in age to most of the acts like BoA and Ami Suzuki and even the ossans of Arashi mwahahaha, you can dress as young as you like but you’re still an ossan, mwahahahaaa… yeah, I enjoyed that.

Even better, when the current SMAP members came on live, they spent the time talking about grey hairs and balding heads. Apart from Goro Inagaki they all denied having any grey hair at all, but they’re not fooling anyone. Being in a “boy” band at the age of 42 must be suffering.

And of course Matsumoto couldn’t resist a little dig at Kusanagi for his drunken incident a few years ago. I was working with some Japanese people at the time and they were all shocked, shocked! to hear of Kusanagi’s little bender. I didn’t know much about SMAP back then and barely knew who was who, but it was still funny. Human beings are all the same, corrupt and wicked inside. Some just put on a better mask than others.

And some play the guitar better than others

Actually I didn’t pay that much attention to the guys’s looks. Now the ladies, on the other hand… ^.^ IMO many of the ladies looked even better with a bit of maturity added on. MAX especially had a very nondescript ‘generic pretty girl band’ look in their youth, but with a little meat on their bones and roundness in their faces they looked great dancing on stage. Pretty sure they used to be 4 members, but only 3 performed. *shrug*

Ami Suzuki still can’t dance, but after what, 20 years as a performer I don’t think she cares any more. She’s doing more acting these days anyway, so it was nice of her to relive her idol days for one night.

Tomomi Kahara also looked good, especially considering all the ups and downs she has been through in her career (according to the gossip mags anyway). Wonderful clear voice.

I did wonder what BoA was up to these days, didn’t I? I suppose I could find out in five seconds by checking Wikipedia, but where would the fun be in that? It’s more exciting when people show up out of the blue and you’re like, Hey, it’s Gackt! (I had almost forgotten he existed). Hey it’s BoA!

The best thing about live shows is that every once in a while something goes wrong and there’s no way to do a second take, heh heh. That’s what happened to T. M. Revolution (who is definitely dyeing his grey hair, but at least no one asked him about it so he didn’t get the chance to lie). He totally lost his place while singing Hot Limit and had to pick up the song a little later, which prompted the hosts to respond like this:

Haha, they’re so mean. According to T.M. it was Matsumoto’s fault for distracting him by talking about his ex-wife right before he was scheduled to perform. Whatever you say, Takanori. Though it’s cute how performers will apologize to the audience when they make a mistake… as if watching them fluff lines wasn’t the whole point of live performances. …What?

Apart from that everyone sang and danced old hits and new, and then the show ended with all the performers singing H Jungle with T’s million-selling single “Wow War Tonight.” Looking forward to the 25th anniversary performance!