Or, rather, it isn't due to budget cuts, it's due to budgets being super low in the first place. They just can't afford to properly animate. Some people say it's a matter of style, but this is a slightly loaded statement: the style emerged from necessity (necessity is the mother of invention), and, as is clear from any big budget movie, once the money is available, characters actually start moving again.
As for the lack of plot progression (power up discussions), it's generally because anime based on comics follow the same plot as the comics, and the comics only have 16 pages a week. 16 pages does not a 30 minute episode make, and yet they have to stretch it out to a 30 minute spot. They can't skip ahead, because the "ahead" hasn't been written yet. Hence the eternal powerups in Dragonball.
Another response, this time on a less level-headed level...
"I have such a hard time reconciling all that beauty and nobility"
I've been living in Japan for a third of my life. I love the country. But all this crap, both within Japan and without, about "beauty and nobility", seems to me a complete crock. It's a consciously self-cultivated image, part of the culture, but completely divorced from the mindset of the people. Just as time has made Shakespearean plays a subject for quiet introspection, while at the time it was a rowdy show with catcalls and peanut shell tossings, time has taken the pretentious artistes of the past and rebranded them as profound philosophers.
In 200 years, people will be talking in similarly sincere tones about the American traditions of performance art and vomiting on stage.
Everything you say is true, but, surprisingly, the answer to your question is "Yes, there is acknowledgement of the Bad Things that were done".
As you mentioned, the government has not acknowledged the bad stuff that went down. And it is barely mentioned in the textbooks. However, this comes back to the government: all textbooks in Japan are authorized by the government, and whenever an attempt to put details about atrocities in the textbooks is made, the financial backing right wingers make a huge ruckus.
However, outside of the government context, there is no rule that you can't talk about this stuff, and pretty much everybody knows about at least some of the bad stuff (Nanking, the comfort women, the killing of Koreans after the Great Tokyo Earthquake), while some of the smaller scale things (Unit 731, etc.) may only be known by history buffs. You would have to be pretty dense to be raised in Japan and not know about most of these issues. Keep in mind that, like most countries, the attitudes of the government can be very, very different than the attitudes of the people.
The obvious one is that it's a MMORPG for the XBox, which would make it unique. Since some people prefer to play games on their consoles, for better or worse, this would be a big deal for them.
As for playing TFLO on a PC, I agree with you completely.
How do the really successful studios do? I'm thinking of places like Production IG, Studio Ghibli, Bones, etc. Are my hard-earned dollars reaching these guys
I don't know the specifics about these companies, but from what the parent article says, the issue is not the money reaching the studios, the problem is the money from the studios reaching the actual cel painters. Besides which, as far as I can remember, Ghibli doesn't use actual cels any more anyway, it's all done on computer. I may be wrong on that, though.
The buyer uses a hacked ebay account with a fake escrow site to buy a Powerbook. The escrow site is fake. It cannot be used to make payments to anyone. He is trying to get a person to send him a Powerbook, saying that he is paying through an escrow site which is fake.
How can this NOT be a scam? Telling someone that you will pay for a product, and not paying, is generally one of the key elements of a scam.
Put another way: how could this be a legitimate purchase if the buyer is not paying the seller?
Carlos answered well, but a bit of an addendum. Not only was the PS never known formally as the PSX, in Japan, it was never even nicknamed the "PSX". The confusion exists in the foreign market, but in Japan, the only place where the PSX is on sale, there is no confusion.
The only problem is that, while everyone assumes that is a Japanese game, it isn't. It's a Korean game, and neither I or my coworkers have ever seen it in an arcade in Japan.
It's bad enough they consider year-old phones to be so worthless they price them nearly 1 en or so.(that's what I hear, but I'm not sure if it's that literal.)
It's literal. But I don't see why you have a problem with being able to buy a 1 year old phone for less than a penny.
the majority of mobile providers' internet costs are huge (as you would expect since most of them charge by the kilobyte) so it can't really be used for that.
Nope...As far as I know, you can only do that for white ROMS(ROMs without a number built in). For black ROMs, you could only get the same number activated, and when you request reactivation, the fact that it was stolen would come up on the screen at the shop. And since something like 95% of phones are white ROM phones, the criminal would be dealing with a 95% chance of getting caught and a 5% chance of success.
Methinks you're confusing weird Japanese phrasing with weird Chinese phrasing. Random appearances of "Happy" "Joy" "Golden" and "Double" seem to be some sort of staples of poorly translated Chinese, not Japanese. The "Happiness" in this game's title actually makes sense, if you read the article.
Besides which, Bush supports the war, ergo, Japanese don't support Bush.
Way to RTA. The game is called "Koufuku Sousakan". Unless one of those words is some hyperadvanced English that I've never heard of, I have no idea what your comment is in reference to.
As to why the game is called "Happiness Controller" in English: once again, RTA. It's a game about controlling happiness. I don't see a whole lot of randomness in the naming.
What's the deal with that game, anyway? I see it come up from time to time, often erroneously attributed to Japan, but it's definitely not a Japanese game. Korean? Anyone know?
Stealing a phone? What the hell can you do with a stolen phone in Japan? The owner calls in the phone as stolen, it gets shut off, and you now have a stolen paperweight.
I'm going to have to assume phones work a little differently overseas, because from what I can tell, stealing a phone would only be useful for getting about 1 hour of free calls, and there are much easier and less risky ways to do that.
So there would be no reason for the average consumer to buy a psx+ps3 instead of just buying a ps3 and a tivo.
In the American market, true. In the Japanese market, the average price of a PVR is $550. Sony is probably hoping to take the same approach as it did with the PS2 launch, which provided games and DVD playback for less than the cost of the cheapest DVD player in Japan.
Unfortunately, the review has been slashdotted, so I can't tell what it says, but my impressions so far are:
It's a short game. You can definitely finish it the same day you bought it.
However, it's also a damn fun game, in a very simple, straightforward way. Controls are extremely simple (left and right thumbsticks and L3/R3 (clicking the thumbsticks) only). There are only three basic game goal types: Collect as much stuff as you can, collect as much of one type of thing as you can, and get as big as you can before collecting a certain type of object.
The music is great. Like a laid-back JSRF.
The game tries to be cute, and it works.
And the only big problem I can see with exporting it to other countries is the sheer amount of Japanese stuff that you pick up:
Japanese toilets
Pachinko machines
Grand Opening wreath decoration things
Kotatsu tables
Those gold fish used as roof decorations
Yanki kids
Bosozoku motorcycles and cars
Daruma dolls
Festival shrines
Doll's day decorations
New Years cards
Elementary school kid's backpacks (Randoseru)
Geta sandals
The god of thunder
Kintaro, giant bear wrester
And on and on and on and on.
(And boy is it awkwards to write a list of things that don't exist in the target language. Can't really translate, but can't really leave the words as-is).
I have the game, and you're right. The game isn't really difficult, but it is a lot of fun, and things which are so big that running into them knocks pieces of your ball off eventually become pieces you can pick up.
And don't knock the aesthetic appeal. I don't think of it so much as "crushing" as "collecting", but it's damn fun when you get big enough to pick up things like Godzilla. Plus the designers had a great deal of imagination regarding the things that you pick up (though if you're unfamiliar with Japanese culture, a whole lot of it may be lost on you).
Another example is Dark Cloud 2, which is called Dark Chronicle in Japan. It's made by the same folks, on the same platform, but they wanted to avoid the "2" for some reason.
Good point. Actually, I kind of debated for a while (with myself) whether the comment was meant as an argument, or an addendum. I may well have guessed wrong, in which case I apologize.
Slashdot Mirror
You say it as a joke, but...
Yes.
Or, rather, it isn't due to budget cuts, it's due to budgets being super low in the first place. They just can't afford to properly animate. Some people say it's a matter of style, but this is a slightly loaded statement: the style emerged from necessity (necessity is the mother of invention), and, as is clear from any big budget movie, once the money is available, characters actually start moving again.
As for the lack of plot progression (power up discussions), it's generally because anime based on comics follow the same plot as the comics, and the comics only have 16 pages a week. 16 pages does not a 30 minute episode make, and yet they have to stretch it out to a 30 minute spot. They can't skip ahead, because the "ahead" hasn't been written yet. Hence the eternal powerups in Dragonball.
Another response, this time on a less level-headed level...
"I have such a hard time reconciling all that beauty and nobility"
I've been living in Japan for a third of my life. I love the country. But all this crap, both within Japan and without, about "beauty and nobility", seems to me a complete crock. It's a consciously self-cultivated image, part of the culture, but completely divorced from the mindset of the people. Just as time has made Shakespearean plays a subject for quiet introspection, while at the time it was a rowdy show with catcalls and peanut shell tossings, time has taken the pretentious artistes of the past and rebranded them as profound philosophers.
In 200 years, people will be talking in similarly sincere tones about the American traditions of performance art and vomiting on stage.
Everything you say is true, but, surprisingly, the answer to your question is "Yes, there is acknowledgement of the Bad Things that were done".
As you mentioned, the government has not acknowledged the bad stuff that went down. And it is barely mentioned in the textbooks. However, this comes back to the government: all textbooks in Japan are authorized by the government, and whenever an attempt to put details about atrocities in the textbooks is made, the financial backing right wingers make a huge ruckus.
However, outside of the government context, there is no rule that you can't talk about this stuff, and pretty much everybody knows about at least some of the bad stuff (Nanking, the comfort women, the killing of Koreans after the Great Tokyo Earthquake), while some of the smaller scale things (Unit 731, etc.) may only be known by history buffs. You would have to be pretty dense to be raised in Japan and not know about most of these issues. Keep in mind that, like most countries, the attitudes of the government can be very, very different than the attitudes of the people.
The cheapest rent was $1,500?!
And here I was thinking that Tokyo was expensive.
As for where they can live, the cheapest rent I could find on chintai.co.jp in Tokyo itself was 13,000 yen (about $120). So it is possible.
The obvious one is that it's a MMORPG for the XBox, which would make it unique. Since some people prefer to play games on their consoles, for better or worse, this would be a big deal for them.
As for playing TFLO on a PC, I agree with you completely.
How do the really successful studios do? I'm thinking of places like Production IG, Studio Ghibli, Bones, etc. Are my hard-earned dollars reaching these guys
I don't know the specifics about these companies, but from what the parent article says, the issue is not the money reaching the studios, the problem is the money from the studios reaching the actual cel painters. Besides which, as far as I can remember, Ghibli doesn't use actual cels any more anyway, it's all done on computer. I may be wrong on that, though.
Ok...I just don't quite get this.
The buyer uses a hacked ebay account with a fake escrow site to buy a Powerbook. The escrow site is fake. It cannot be used to make payments to anyone. He is trying to get a person to send him a Powerbook, saying that he is paying through an escrow site which is fake.
How can this NOT be a scam? Telling someone that you will pay for a product, and not paying, is generally one of the key elements of a scam.
Put another way: how could this be a legitimate purchase if the buyer is not paying the seller?
Carlos answered well, but a bit of an addendum. Not only was the PS never known formally as the PSX, in Japan, it was never even nicknamed the "PSX". The confusion exists in the foreign market, but in Japan, the only place where the PSX is on sale, there is no confusion.
The only problem is that, while everyone assumes that is a Japanese game, it isn't. It's a Korean game, and neither I or my coworkers have ever seen it in an arcade in Japan.
You're right. Sorry. I meant that 95% of cell-phones are black ROMs.
It's bad enough they consider year-old phones to be so worthless they price them nearly 1 en or so.(that's what I hear, but I'm not sure if it's that literal.)
It's literal. But I don't see why you have a problem with being able to buy a 1 year old phone for less than a penny.
the majority of mobile providers' internet costs are huge (as you would expect since most of them charge by the kilobyte) so it can't really be used for that.
Not in Japan.
Nope...As far as I know, you can only do that for white ROMS(ROMs without a number built in). For black ROMs, you could only get the same number activated, and when you request reactivation, the fact that it was stolen would come up on the screen at the shop. And since something like 95% of phones are white ROM phones, the criminal would be dealing with a 95% chance of getting caught and a 5% chance of success.
Methinks you're confusing weird Japanese phrasing with weird Chinese phrasing. Random appearances of "Happy" "Joy" "Golden" and "Double" seem to be some sort of staples of poorly translated Chinese, not Japanese. The "Happiness" in this game's title actually makes sense, if you read the article.
Besides which, Bush supports the war, ergo, Japanese don't support Bush.
Way to RTA. The game is called "Koufuku Sousakan". Unless one of those words is some hyperadvanced English that I've never heard of, I have no idea what your comment is in reference to.
As to why the game is called "Happiness Controller" in English: once again, RTA. It's a game about controlling happiness. I don't see a whole lot of randomness in the naming.
What's the deal with that game, anyway? I see it come up from time to time, often erroneously attributed to Japan, but it's definitely not a Japanese game. Korean? Anyone know?
Or move to Japan, where this game is played, and "park at night" is about as dangerous as "movie theater at noon" or "planetaium at 6:00 pm".
Besides which...
Stealing a phone? What the hell can you do with a stolen phone in Japan? The owner calls in the phone as stolen, it gets shut off, and you now have a stolen paperweight.
I'm going to have to assume phones work a little differently overseas, because from what I can tell, stealing a phone would only be useful for getting about 1 hour of free calls, and there are much easier and less risky ways to do that.
So there would be no reason for the average consumer to buy a psx+ps3 instead of just buying a ps3 and a tivo.
In the American market, true. In the Japanese market, the average price of a PVR is $550. Sony is probably hoping to take the same approach as it did with the PS2 launch, which provided games and DVD playback for less than the cost of the cheapest DVD player in Japan.
No, sorry, I live in Japan...
It's a short game. You can definitely finish it the same day you bought it.
However, it's also a damn fun game, in a very simple, straightforward way. Controls are extremely simple (left and right thumbsticks and L3/R3 (clicking the thumbsticks) only). There are only three basic game goal types: Collect as much stuff as you can, collect as much of one type of thing as you can, and get as big as you can before collecting a certain type of object.
The music is great. Like a laid-back JSRF.
The game tries to be cute, and it works.
And the only big problem I can see with exporting it to other countries is the sheer amount of Japanese stuff that you pick up:
And on and on and on and on.
(And boy is it awkwards to write a list of things that don't exist in the target language. Can't really translate, but can't really leave the words as-is).
I have the game, and you're right. The game isn't really difficult, but it is a lot of fun, and things which are so big that running into them knocks pieces of your ball off eventually become pieces you can pick up. And don't knock the aesthetic appeal. I don't think of it so much as "crushing" as "collecting", but it's damn fun when you get big enough to pick up things like Godzilla. Plus the designers had a great deal of imagination regarding the things that you pick up (though if you're unfamiliar with Japanese culture, a whole lot of it may be lost on you).
Exactly.
Another example is Dark Cloud 2, which is called Dark Chronicle in Japan. It's made by the same folks, on the same platform, but they wanted to avoid the "2" for some reason.
Good point. Actually, I kind of debated for a while (with myself) whether the comment was meant as an argument, or an addendum. I may well have guessed wrong, in which case I apologize.