ittaku

This is to kick off the discussion for the current anime season. http://anichart.net/Summer-2017

It's there. I watched it and really enjoyed it for the same reasons you said (it's in my ultimately satisfying endings thread.)

Hang on hang on. Nowhere there does it guarantee it meets the criteria of "full" in your opening post. The rori component has not been confirmed (yet?)

It's still an incredibly difficult process trying to learn by reading but the one thing it has in its favour is that you have something motivating your learning. I seriously suggest learning some grammar on the side though through some formal process, either through online guides or buying yourself an old fashioned textbook and working your way through it. Vocab is the easiest part of learning Japanese if you can just look it up on a dictionary. Grammar is the cornerstone of learning the language, especially since its grammar is wildly different from English. What's worse is that the casual +/- slang you encounter in visual novels, anime and manga isn't really taught well anywhere in particular but once you get the grammar you can start learning how casual speech and slang deviates. Text hookers will fail a lot on casual grammar and slang.

Finished Ping Pong. It didn't work for me the way it seemed to work for everyone else. It was decent enough though.

Added Tsuki ga Kirei. Despite its flaws, it is so very sweet...

Yes but no. The anime industry in Japan almost never modifies its already-released material based on what happens to it in another country after it has already released it. The fact is that Japan markets their anime for bluray/dvd extremely quickly after the broadcast, and again there are time constraints and production costs required to get it out there. They usually start releasing the first episodes on disk before a season has even finished, often halfway through, making it only 6 episodes behind. The hard format releases are by far the most lucrative part of their anime releases and you'd be gobsmacked at how expensive blurays are in Japan - 5000 Yen ($50 USD) for 2 episode disks are not uncommon. They do this to capitalise on the hype of a show while it's still in progress. The same release in the west is usually out at the very least months but more commonly years later at a glacial pace by comparison. As for why the west doesn't just remix the Japanese audio itself when it does the English audio in 5.1, I'm guessing licensing restrictions on the original audio make it not worth it. The English dub is by far the more popular one in spite of all us otaku in the west.

It's certainly looking that way, and having one of my favourite VAs, Saori Hayami as the heroine has clinched it for me.

Interestingly enough, Japanese anime tends to mostly still be in 2 channel except when made for movie/cinema. The English dubs of the same anime are often in 5.1 or more channels. I'm guessing time and production costs with TV focused anime series is why they're predominantly 2.0. Even the biggest blockbusters are usually 2 channel if they were made for TV, even when remastered for bluray. As for surround sound for orchestra music, that's been a gimick the industry has been trying to sell for ages but the reality is that an orchestra is always in front of you* and 2 speakers do a splendid job of recreating the full sound stage of what's in front of you. Rock bands are no different in that regard. Having chamber music with all the players in all directions sounds very unnatural (I've walked amongst quartets while they were doing it, the balance works correctly only if they're in front of you.) For electronic and ambient music I agree there are no real rules to obey, though no doubt the performing artist had something in mind when they created it. The highest high-end audio is always still only 2 channel since it is aimed at regular performing music instead of audio-visual reproduction** *Some special symphonies have performers off stage to the right/left/rear such as some Mahler symphonies but they're the exception rather than the rule. **I'm a crazy audiophile...

Thanks. I absolutely adore Love Hina myself, however Love Hina Again is not just okay, it's below average and unfortunately a terrible way to end a brilliant original series so that even though Love Hina is one of my all time favourite series, I couldn't bring myself to include it in the list myself.

In and of itself, the term "in and of itself" is overused in and of itself. But otherwise I agree 100% on the rest.

Added Little Witch Academia the TV series.

Started watching bakuman and after only a few episodes I love it! This is great stuff.

Just finished watching Fruits Basket after a long drawn out intermittent watching. I've known this ancient show has rated very high for a long time but at no stage while watching it could I see how it scored a median rating of 9 out of 10... till the last 2 episodes. I was mostly only mildly amused through it though it wasn't an unpleasant way to pass the time. However the last 2-3 episodes were totally unexpected and really the culmination of 23 episodes of apparently harmless build up but with some amazing emotional weight. No it's not a resolving harem happy ending or anything like that but it has a beautiful ending nonetheless. I was going to give it a 6/10 as "decent" but the ending pushed it up to 7. I can't very well rate the rest of the series on the ending only but I'm glad I watched it though I can easily see how anyone would struggle to watch it with today's anime sensibilities. One thing it doesn't suffer from that older anime usually does, though, is being slow. The dialogue and movement is rapid through the whole series except during dramatic scenes. It's an observation I've made that old series are usually so slow that I have to watch them at higher speed because the dialogue and pace are normally glacial and this was not like that at all. In fact quite a few of the more classic shows also did not suffer from that slow pace problem so perhaps that's why they became classics. These days most bad anime suffers from the other extreme - trying so hard to maintain interest through pace that they blast thousands of lines of mindless dialogue or meaningless action to give the impression of being dense thematically when they're just plain dense instead. I never did quite figure out why they called it Fruits Basket by the way...

And terrible animation so expressive.

By the way there's a trick to getting Japanese locale within wine apps, but you have to start it on the command line or create a shortcut of sorts somewhere that calls it. LC_ALL=ja_JP.UTF-8 wine app.exe where app.exe is the game's executable filename. As for getting videos to play within visual novels under wine, you need to use winetricks to install ffdshow, quartz and wmp9. When ffdshow installs and the configuration window comes up, you have to enable mpeg1 playback from it which is disabled by default (many VNs use mpeg1 for video).

1. It will work very well with your CPU, your main issue will be getting the GPU working. There is a very good driver for your GPU but it's not installed by default since it's non-free software so you'll usually be prompted to install it after installing the operating system. 2. Visual novels will work very well under any virtualisation software - kvm is the most common one used and is free, vmware is a commercial one but works very well. The reason they work well under virtualisation is you're actually just running windows within a virtual machine. Accessing your linux files from within the virtual machine is trickier but doable. Usually you can only copy from one to the other since they're seen as two separate machines, but you can do some file sharing magic which is now getting into some more advanced functionality and non-trivial. However, in general most visual novels will actually work with 'wine' the windows emulator that doesn't need windows installed, but is a little trickier to set up. I run all of my VNs under wine. Fullscreen works on all more recent ones, but some ancient ones have trouble going full screen. 3. The media players under linux are excellent. mpv is the best player, but if you're familiar with vlc it is equally available though as you said it didn't work for you but most people with vlc on linux have no issues. 4. Photoshop will work under wine again, or if you install a virtual windows you can just run it under that. Mint is still available and a fine choice, especially if you've used it in the past and familiar with it.

Mr Poltroon has covered it, but not specifically I guess. The following is a list of wildly different genre anime where there is a substantial romance component that meets your initial requirement and I rated v. good or better. I've put asterisks next to the ones where the genre is primarily romance, even if it's in a sci-fi or alternate world etc. Chivalry of a Failed Knight Kamisama Kiss Kanon2006 Lovely Complex * My Love Story!! * Planetes Toradora! * Waiting in the Summer * Chobits Familiar of Zero Golden Time * His and Her Circumstances * ItaKiss * Kimikiss pure rouge * Mysterious Girlfriend X * Please Teacher! * Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches There are loads more, but I tried to stick to some of the better ones.

Linux

Seikai suru kado went into a totally unexpected direction this week. It's been very solid and was almost starting to feel repetitive so it's nice to see this change...

Just finished watching the feature length "Suki ni naru sono shunkan wo" aka The Moment You Fall in Love which is the ~sequel to Zutto Mae Kara Suki Deshita aka I've always loved you, the second in the "(love) confession executive committee" movies. It was a very pleasant romance to pass the time without much in the way of real drama and a handful of standard tropes but nicely executed and most enjoyable. There were strong ties to the first movie with it being set in parallel with other the characters, but each movie can easily be watched by itself though the order to watch them should be obeyed and I enjoyed the earlier one a little more than this one. I believe they were planning one more in the series as well. Definitely worth a watch if you want to see some self contained unchallenging romance - just make sure to watch beyond the closing credits. 8/10

It's not just you. Though I guess the writer achieved his aim of making us appropriately disgusted. This episode was the one that made me think this story is taking too long with not enough material, and it doesn't look like there's any resolution in sight anywhere at this rate.

Seen Maid Sama and it was good. The others I know of but haven't watched. I'll investigate them in the future. Thanks!

Thanks. I'm all over .si already but they don't have years worth of old stuff and the um tracking thing associated with the old stuff is dead even if records of it are also available.

I didn't mind that character towards the end either. On the other hand none of the antagonists have grown much on me. Alice being the unintentional antagonist is doing dumb shit on a Darkness aka Lalatina level, only without it being funny. I'm not sure they could have made her much stupider.