Allison & Lillia / First Impressions

Allison & Lillia – 09

「元戦場に架かる橋」 (Moto Senjou ni Kakaru Hashi)
“Bridge Spanning the Original Battlefield”

Episode at a Glance:
Allison, Wil, and Fiona take a trip on the new, luxurious, transcontinental express train that connects Roxche and Sou Biel, after receiving an invitation from Benedict. Somewhere along the middle of the bridge, the train stops in front of an island to allow the passengers to pay their respects to the soldiers that died on this former battleground.

First Impressions / kurenai

kurenai – 09

「貴方と私と」 (Anata to Watashi to)
“With You and Me”

Episode at a Glance:
Shinkurou asks Benika for a full explanation about the Kuhouins, so she explains the ways of their conglomerate and how they inbreed to get pure blooded children. While Shinkurou realizes this job’s too much for him, he decides to protect Murasaki as he originally promised.

Macross / PV

Sheryl Nome starring May’n Live R-Zero Appearance

For all you Macross Frontier and Japanese music fans out there, Nakabayashi May (Sheryl’s voice in all the songs) made an appearance last night on TBS’s Live R-Zero program and sang Diamond Crevasse in its entirety. Even after listening to her CD ad nauseum, I still really like the song, so it was cool to hear the live version. She did a fairly good job with it too – much better than I’ve heard some more popular artists do (SMAP and Ayumi come to mind) anyway. My main complaint is that the audience and host Izumiya Shigeru didn’t really seem all that into it, and that kind of took away from the atmosphere. Then again, this is an anime song appearing on a normal music program, so it might be somewhat understandable. Regardless, the video is definitely still worth a watch, if for just the song alone. Hopefully it’ll be able to hold me over until the first Macross Frontier soundtrack is released next Wednesday (June 4th).

Miscellaneous

On Vacation – To the Land of the Rising Sun

While hearing about my vacation plans is probably not the most exciting thing, my blogging will be affected; therefore, this can be considered as a somewhat official notice of that. For the first time ever, I’ll be going overseas and on a real vacation (i.e. paid vacation days). Evidently, this will also be my first time in Japan, but I’ll be there for a month, staying at an apartment I rented in Ikebukuro, so hopefully that’ll be enough time for the Japanese lifestyle to soak in. I’ll have Internet access at the apartment, but I’ll only have my relatively old and underpowered 10.6″ Fujitsu ultra-portable notebook along with me. While this little thing has served me well in university, blogging will be somewhat difficult due to its inability to playback HD videos smoothly (…in addition to the time commitment of course). Regardless, I don’t want to put all seven shows I’m covering on a complete hiatus, as the backlog when I return would be somewhat daunting.

My tentative plan right now is to continue covering the shows that I currently am, but in a fairly trimmed down manner. These “lite” posts will probably be restricted to screenshots and impressions alone, so my apologies to those of you who come here for the summaries. (Writing detailed summaries is always the most time-consuming task for me.) At the very least, I want to have a “placeholder entry” with just screenshots for completeness sake (indicating that I have watched the episode), which would also allow for any discussion amongst you, the readers. The regularity that my posts appear will probably be affected as well, given how I’ll be on Tokyo time and out and about most of the time. Again, this is merely a tentative plan, but I’ll try to adhere to it the best I can.

I’m leaving in the middle of next week, but some of my posts this week may also be affected while I prepare for my trip. As mentioned above, I won’t be back until a month later (~July 6th), but hopefully by then, I’ll have some interesting stories that I can use for Random Musings.

Note: This will affect (Mon) Wagaya no Oinari-sama., Nabari no Ou, Special A, (Thurs) Allison & Lillia, kurenai, To LOVE-Ru, and (Sat) Kanokon, but Omni’s coverage will continue as normal.

 

Tidbit: The image above is taken from the official site of the Hana Yori Dango (Boys Over Flowers) movie, which premieres on June 28th in Japan. Seeing as how I recently finished the drama and thoroughly enjoyed it, I just might check it out while I’m there. I was asked, “Do you really want to be in a theater surrounded by bunch of screaming Japanese fan girls?”, but the person quickly added, “Oh wait, that might not be such a bad thing.” I’ll let you guess who said that. =)

First Impressions / Special A

Special A – 08

「旅・犬」 (Tabi / Inu)
“Trip / Dog”

With the S.A class off to Hawaii, Kei is still visually upset (black aura and all) by what Hikari told him after the contest. When they arrive, they have some free time before dinner, Hikari, Akira, Tadashi, and the Yamamoto twins go off shopping, while Kei stays in his room, claiming that he’s not feeling well.