I'm crazy again

The foregone conclusion when one doesn't hear from a blogger is that they're out of the blogosphere. I'm not. If anything I've been more interested than ever in the status of my site. Unfortunately however, I have precious little to report to you, the loyal viewer. I've played about 5 chapters of Sekien no Inganock(which is brilliant), I've watched a few episodes of Real Drive and Mushishi, as well as Cat Soup(Which seemed pretty original and cool). That's about all though. I haven't watched a single episode from the new season yet, I really haven't found anything lately to go crazy about, with one exception:

Mononoke. My god, I know this show is old but I would have added it to my 'must-see' list with no questions asked RIGHT AFTER watching it the first time. It's just that good. Religion plays a heavy part in it, and if I could make any allusions, I'd call it 'Ookami for buddhism'. That wouldn't be accurate, as Mononoke also incorporates many non-buddhist elements, but that's the essense of it. The show is heavily atmospheric, and takes its time telling a narrative over the course of one to four episodes.

Regardless, my plans are to eventually watch Mushishi, Porco Rosso, and then get on to some of the winter anime that interest me the most. You can look forward to it if you want, but my favorite thing is to disappoint people so don't look forward to it too much, and don't let me know that you're looking forward to it.

Apathy Series

So there's this series of Visual Novels that I'd like to introduce. They've never been translated to English, but from what I've seen of them and what I have been able to play of them, I've been lead to believe that they're brilliant.

One day I was innocently trying to ID eroge cg as I often do when I came across a blog containing this picture and the caption "MiColle's Arai-san's 'Nice Smile☆'----Too cute! lololol" in Japanese.

ミッコレでの荒井さんの　ナイス・スマイル☆ ----可愛すぎるｗｗｗｗｗ

This image fascinated me greatly. For one thing, the art style is eerily flat and non-revealing yet detailed and proportional, and the expression on Arai's face is incredible. After much searching, I found that the game in question is called Midnight Collection, and is a collection of horror stories presented in Visual Novel form. It comes from a set of games sharing the same characters and is called the 'Apathy' series. The series started with the 1995 game 'Gakkou de Atta Kowai Hanashi'(lit. A scary story that was/happened at school school) for the super nintendo and has had several releases. The Visual Novel Database shows 4 games, but Japanese Wikipedia shows a couple more. After scouring Youtube for videos of gameplay or fan videos I came across a couple videos which continue to fascinate me. One of my main purposes of this post is to shows those videos to you, but I also hope to introduce you to the series, and perhaps also drive up demand for a translation of the series, by however little. In all honesty, games like this motivate me to study Japanese in my spare time.