Elfen Lied

I just finished watching an anime which gave me a really powerful viewing experience. Elfen Lied was the anime I just finished and would like to share my thoughts on the experience.

An Interesting Story


This anime had a really cool premise. There’s this girl, Nyuu (also named Lucy), who escapes from a government facility after being experimented on. In the process of escaping, she uses her natural powers (called vectors, which look like a ton of hands) to rip apart anyone who came along her way. Almost free, she gets taken out by a sniper and finds herself on a beach where our main hero, Kouta, and heroine, Yuka, find Nyuu naked and take her back to their home. Kouta and Yuka then spend their time caring for Nyuu, all the while slowly becoming entangled in the search to find Nyuu, as she is a special type of “mutant” (called a Diclonius) destined to destroy the current human race through genetic superiority. Kouta and Yuka also find a little homeless girl and take her in, after learning about the horrible abuse she has endured through her whole life. The story also features many flashbacks to when Nyuu, Yuka, and Kouta were little and the festival that ended up having a large impact on their current relationship. The search to find Nyuu also embroils another Diclonius, Nana, who tries to bring Nyuu back to those who originally experimented on her, but ends up nearly dying – her arms and legs get ripped off. Nana also ends up finding her way to Kouta’s home as well and even more interesting situations tend to happen there as well. There are many, many battles that end up ensuing to bring Nyuu back, and I’ll leave it there for you to watch if you’re intrigued and want to see for yourself.

Fun and Some Not-So-Fun Aspects of the Anime


This anime is definitely geared towards those who like destruction, blood, and fanservice (I really, liked the story, destruction, and blood). For me, the fanservice kept getting in the way of the main story and its progression. There were times where Nyuu would do sketchy things, like make Kouta grab her, or there would be times where important information for the story would happen while she and other characters would be taking a bath. If that’s what you’re looking for, then you’re in luck. I liked the sound design and the pure and utter destruction that happened. The sounds of the violence and the results of it reminded me of the many video games I like to play that have funny sound effects linked to death (e.g. squishing sounds or screaming). This was one aspect that kept me watching – to see what other acts of destruction and insanity Nyuu would be doing next. And there was no sparing of blood. Lots and lots of it. I also did enjoy the relationship that evolved between Kouta and Nyuu, as it was born out of respect and friendship. But on the flip side, the relationship between Yuka (who ended becoming the most insecure person I have ever seen – every 5 minutes she was contemplating her status in life as a function of her unrequited love of Kouta) and Kouta. I also appreciated how Nana and the homeless girl ended up bonding and becoming close friends throughout all of the rough experiences they’ve had.

I also really enjoyed the music in this anime. It featured many different Roman and Germanic influences. The opening theme was sung in Latin, which was great (since I took Latin in high school), and was also used as a vital element of the story that tightened the relationship between Yuka and Kouta and Nyuu and Kouta. Something that I have grown to learn in watching anime is that when there is Latin and German involved, crazy and occult things will surely be going down. I haven’t watched enough to prove this yet, but I’ll certainly be keeping this theory developing.

If the Anime Were to Continue…


I was pretty let down by the conclusion of the anime. Without spoiling the ending for those who haven’t seen it, there was a screeching halt in the last episode, where some of the main questions were answered (e.g. which characters were saved and which were dead), but there was still an opening for more of the story to be written. For example, they showed the motivation for the bad guy (the typical destroying the world to save it excuse used in many games and anime), but the writers didn’t really do anything with it. They just left that out there and chose to end it on the battle of the different Diclonii.

I would want to know more about Nyuu/Lucy and Nana and how they would rebuild their lives after the battles they have endured, and also would like to see them stop the ultimate bad guy (sorry, forgot the name), because I don’t want to see madmen running companies that try to learn how to harness the powers of biology for evil. I would also just like to see Lucy fight some more, as bodies start to fly whenever she’s around, and the anime did a very good job at showcasing her ability to leave carnage wherever she went. I would also want to see Nana develop more as a character who could stand up for herself, and also take care of the friends she ended up having at the end of the anime.

Here’s hoping for a continuation of the story. Ultimately, though, I would recommend this to you if you don’t mind blood and fanservice.

Scryed

I just finished watching another cool anime. This was one of the better ones I have seen in a while and I hope my thoughts will suggest that its worth watching for you as well. This time, I finished a series I randomly picked from my anime hard drive, Scryed.

A Cool Story

This may be one long paragraph – just letting you know in advance. Scryed is a story set in a world where there are people born with special powers that can manipulate matter and bend it/recreate in specific ways. This type of special person is called an alter. Alters are born naturally in a special area of Japan separated from the mainland after an incident 20 years ago. Now, the world is in chaos, as a special group of “policemen” in a group called HOLY are specially trained to control the “native alters” to make sure they don’t cause any trouble to those on the mainland. Our hero, Kazuma, is a native alter who is trying to work to make money to feed himself and the little girl whom he protects, Kanami. One day, after finishing a job, Kazuma gets roped into a battle where HOLY is rounding up some of the native alters. Kazuma wipes out a whole bunch of them until one of the toughest members of HOLY (who are all alter users), Rouhou, showcases his power and completely defeats Kazuma. After this point, Kazuma is taken to HOLY but completely destroys most of the place and escapes. After this point, without too many spoilers, many of the episodes feature the ongoing and escalating rivalry between Kazuma and Rouhou, with every landscape and building being destroyed in their path. The series also gets interesting when they reveal another person interested in the powers of alter users and starts to round them up to perform experiments on them. Rouhou and Kazuma then form a temporary alliance and do some major damage on him and his henchmen, for a wonderful viewing experience. I also thoroughly enjoyed the parallels between this story and the events that happened after 9/11, especially in how HOLY and the big bad guy round up people (for no reason reported to them) and the discrimination that happened in the story against the alters from the people in the mainland. It’s either irony or a pure coincidence, especially since the anime was released in late 2001 and ran through 2002. Or it could be that my mind formed a pure coincidence, but it was a good analogy that kept me interested on top of the action and characters in the story.

This is one I recommend watching for its epic characters, action, and story.

Kazuma and Cosplay

I have added Kazuma on to my list of characters I would love to make a costume and cosplay for. I deeply loved his persistence, strength, and commitment to protect Kanami and those who have been attacked by HOLY. I also liked that he wasn’t the perfect type of hero who has his own weaknesses, making him much more of a human and lovable kind of guy. In choosing Kazuma, I’ll have to stick to my exercise regimen I have picked up from a colleague of mine, which is already starting to show results. Also, when I get my Lilypad Arduino skills up even more, I can think about making the back rotator part of the costume actually work when I pose for the camera. I would also like to see, while at the con, if there any others who have seen this anime and strum up a conversation with them in a ridiculously cool Kazuma cosplay. I’m already looking forward to it.

The Last Remnant

Every time I get an RPG to play, I’m usually excited. There’s always a good story to look forward to, a battle system to learn and get used to, and a wide range of characters to know and find some favorites. That’s at least what I was thinking when my copy of The Last Remnant came to my mailbox last week, but I was quite saddened and annoyed after playing it (title screen on the upper-left and a cutscene on the upper-right).

A Possibly Good Story

I’ll be upfront with this: I sent the game back after playing around 5 hours of this game. It started off with a good premise: Rush, the main character, is quickly swept into an epic war between two large armies as he is trying to find the evildoers who have kidnapped his sister. In this world, remnants are capable of being used to wield a wide variety of magics, with Rush being special to be able to control them all (at least that’s my guess). There are possibly hundreds of other different characters to learn about and level up. One of the coolest was Lord David (Da-veed pronounced in this game), who wore some cool armor and wielded a gun that could send large blasts of magic down from the sky and wipe out anything that moves. The game most likely followed Rush’s tale across the large 2 disc world to find his sister, complete with twists and turns, but I didn’t get to see those.

Loading Screens Galore

The aspect of this game that broke the experience of a possibly-great RPG. Now, RPGs are normally built with having multiple loading screens, as cutscenes, towns, and other aspects of the world need to be rendered when appropriate. But this game took this aspect a little too far (general loading screen on the far left and battle loading screen on the left). There were loading screens for every town. For every time the map was brought up and I wanted to go to a different part of the world (or town I was in). For every time I started a battle (and there were many, many battles – about 6-7 per submission, but no respawning enemies). So, that might not make the case for you, as you may be used to playing RPGs that have this many loading screens. It wasn’t bad at first, but each time there was a loading screen, it took anywhere from 5-10s to load and let me continue playing. In the gaming world, that’s a really long time. The loading screens also weren’t too helpful in determining how long the loading time was going to be either. I would either receive a tip I knew many times over, or receive a pulsing, glowing screen before every battle. With this happening all of the time, as the game is based upon battling to level and finding new towns and locales, I could not see myself staying for the duration of two discs. Sorry, Square Enix, but this was one of your games that I won’t play (even though it was released in 2008).

Other Let-Downs

And to top all of this off, whenever there were more than 5 people on the screen, the game’s frame rate slowed down to a crawl, so you would just see an explosion/a player’s action take about 3x longer than it should have (or explosions that would clutter the screen and just become pixellated or just be smoky).

The battle system was also quite different than I’m used to and didn’t make too much sense to me either. You control up to 25 people on the field, arranged in different units of 5 people. The unit is measured in terms of HP and AP (hit points and action points for health and magic/actions, respectively). Whenever the unit runs out of HP, the whole unit dies, regardless of whether one of the 5 received all of the damage or all 5 took a little bit of damage equal to the unit’s health. This is something I have never, ever seen before and still confounds me even while writing about this. Another aspect of the battle system which annoyed me was that at completely random times, if I can press a button within a time window presented to me on the screen (this events were critical attacks and critical defenses), I can be able to do some really, really cool stuff. But, these events went by usually way to fast, or came at a point where I wasn’t paying attention (which happens a lot when I play mindless battles in RPGs) – even though the game presented a short window of time for me to press the right button: it would show the controller, and highlight the button it wanted pressed, indicating when the critical event would execute. The designers were cool enough to let me know there was an auto-critical feature, but I could never find it in any of the menus.

If you would like to play this game, by all means go ahead, but just beware of the things I’ve mentioned here. You may be sitting there in front of your TV like I did, sleeping while waiting for action to start.