Looks like Gonzo is in the red already, with numerous back-to-back titles failing make a breakthrough sales in their local market, it is really a no-wonder. All of their animes since Vandread have been very geared towards the western market. Gonzo, of course being their stupid self never paid much attention to the demands of their home ground. They went on doing what they do best; anime for western market.

Of course, after all the poor sales it’s a wonder to how did Gonzo actually survived all these years? One can only assume GDH injecting funds from sister companies like Rosso to keep Gonzo staying afloat. Perhaps overall sales and licensing profits managed to keep them just enough to break even? One way or another, GDH couldn’t stand the loss anymore and have decided to retrench Gonzo’s original manpower of 130 to just 30 in the course of next 5 years. This, of course coupled by their previous claims of reducing anime production annually from 8 to 4 means they are really in a deep shit. Not to mention them making deals with Youtube and Crunchyroll to broadcast new productions with ready subtitles. Probably a way to hamper fansubs and increase overseas sales.

Perhaps Strike Witches is Gonzo’s last saving grace, and they know that very well. The TV version alone are blatantly littered with every possible fetish for the local masses to feed upon. Stuffs like pantyshots to striped panties and school swimsuits are a common sight throughout the anime. Of course who wouldn’t like an anime where innocent girls shamelessly display their glorious bottoms in the open? Not me lol, I totally and wholly approve of this production.

It seems that the second season of Strike Witches have been announced. This means that the first was a pretty decent success; enough to warrant itself a continuation. Of course Gonzo is putting everything on the line for the success of this anime. I hope so too, it’s a shame to see a great studio falling flat on it’s face.

After a bit of scouring, I’ve managed to find the translation to Super Butter Dog’s Communication Break Dance, do watch it. It’ll worth your time. Enjoy.

It seems that there is a slight alteration to my cosplay plans this year. Aside from the first two, Riesbyfe, Mariya, and a SECRET character, now I have another addition to my possible list of characters to cosplay.

It’s Shizuru Viola from Mai Otome. The only problem is getting my damn sunken face to puff up a little then it’ll be fine already. Sigh

If I do Shizuru then it’ll be donning her Garderobe outfit. Zounds!

Summer 09′ will bare witness to the release of Touhou’s latest addition to its series. Behold Touhou Seirensen. As usual ZUN distributed the alpha copy to its fans during the 6th Reitaisai. Now it’s available to everyone through bittorrent.

Anyhow I won’t go deep into it. It seems like the bombing system came back, that is to say using bombs does not drain your shot. However, getting lives and bombs aren’t as easy as it was either. You’ll need to collect (4-5 i forgot lol) fragments of them to make up a whole life and bomb. Touhou Seirensen also sees Sanae Kochiya as a playable character for the first time, along with the usual heroines Reimu and Marisa. Now let’s look at the bosses.

As usual, the alpha version introduces 3 new characters with neither of them having any relation to the game’s storyline. First up, a mouse youkai called Nazrin.

Like any first bosses, fighting with her will be quick and easy. Players in normal mode would be able to dispatch her without much trouble at all. Hard and above sees a bigger gap of difficulty and requires players to execute accurate movements and good timing.

Next up, we meet a karakasa named Kogasa Tatara.

Fighting with her is still pretty much a walk in the park for normal mode, while again the usual big difficulty gap for harder modes. Her bullets mostly travel in spiral movements.

The third and final boss which we’ll face in the alpha build is Ichirin Kumoi with nyudo as her subordinate called Unzan. Somehow, I felt that Ichirin’s custome looks alot like a nun’s lol.

Referring to the screenshot above, Ichirin is on the left while that big scary cloud thing is Unzan. Ichirin maintains a barrage of bullets while throwing big cloudy fists of Unzan’s at you most of the time (hitbox of the cloud is as big as its in-game sprite), with it either leaving trails of bullets or the fists exploding with it. In normal mode, players face a few occasional fists while the number of it is almost doubled in Hard mode and beyond. Again you can pretty much see the difficulty gap. Overall she doesn’t really require much technical movements, just purely evasion from dense bullets and huge xbox sized fists.

With that being said, th12’s alpha maintains a high level difficulty of gameplay again with the questionable huge difficulty jump from normal mode to hard. It’s safe to say that easy and normal is for casual players while hard and insane is for hard core touhou players, but then it’s still in alpha stage. Anything can be altered in the final product, so let’s look forward to it this summer.

SEO is an abbreviation of Search Engine Optimization. It is the current craze on the internet, be it private or business based. People would actually pay a lot of money by enlisting professional help just to see their search rankings improve. Search algorithms do not affect SEO. Some say meta tags do. I’m not a rocket scientist in web development so I’m not too sure either.

Anyways, I didn’t spend too much time improving SEO on my site. Somehow, I just don’t really like the idea of having too many spotlights directed at me.