What TM stuff are you reading/watching/consuming?

[Comun]

This time i was more patient and actually paid attention to what Pieceman was saying

Enviable skill. I don't think I could.

[pinetree]

Melty-Blood Manga: Cute story, though the Tatari phenomenon was a bit underexplored and Ries wasn't given enough set-up. Sion is cool and makes me wish she was actually relevant in FGO.
Still very clearly a fighting game story though, with the conciseness and excuses for fights you would expect.
Also interesting to see some early setting stuff that's clearly been abandoned, like the old Atlas aesthetic and being able to casually go to the Wandering Sea.

Melty-Blood Act 2: What the fuck

Melty-Blood X:

Melty Blood is a very schizophrenic package.

[TomPen94]

Read Clock Tower 2015.

Nice short read. Good to have a look at what kind of man Lev used to be.
Even better to see an interaction between the Aozaki sisters outside of Mahoyo (and EXTRA I guess), and a positive one at that. Very pleased.

I picked this up to gear up for Ordeal Call, from Doriru's recommendations. Had already read MBBAN, and watched Lostroom.
So I'm expecting Lev's appearance in OC1 to be relevant indeed.

[Final Roar]

I'm currently reading Mahoutsukai no Yoru remake on my PS5.

I don't know if it's just me, but I've made it most of the way through and it feels like something is... missing.
I'm not sure if it's localisation shittery at work or this is how it's meant to be; but I'm genuinely left wanting - even though I'm enjoying the story a lot.

I think it's because it doesn't feel as "dense" as other TM works I've read/been sucked into. At least comparatively.
I assume the PlayStation version is relatively half-assed, as I've noticed some definite naff to the translation. Some of it just doesn't feel that great. (Am I even making sense?)

Assuming I'll have to read/play the original and see if I actually missed anything.

[Nanashi(kari)]

Finished reading Character Material. Fun book with lots of interesting things.
I really want a Notes game. Emperor Slash cutting through the blood sky and showing the real sky is really cool.
Prelude is very nice. The third part would have gotten me really hyped for a Tsukihime 2 had I not know better.
My favorite random trivia was them changing engines to KiriKiri because of ruby text support.
I have no idea why there was a entry about Saegusa. Maybe Meteo begged Takeuchi to draw and include her?


Also started reading Fate/Zero. Just got to Act 2.
Reading about Tokiomi made him feel more similar to Rin than watching him in the anime.
There is something really funny about Kotomine intentionally riling up child Rin.

[Spheromancer]

Just finished Hisui's route in OG Tsukihime today.
That was quite something.
I had some correct feelings in regards to some of the stuff revealed near the end of it, but it still caught me off guard.

This is definitely my fav route so far, and I'm very curious to see where the next and final one takes the characters and story.

[Shift+CTRL+ALT+Delete]

I'm watching the Tsukihime anime.

It's... fine. It's pretty slow, which I wasn't expecting. The music is great, and, this may be a hot-take, I kind of like the character designs in the show.

[Formless Creature]

Finished reading Character Material. Fun book with lots of interesting things.
I really want a Notes game. Emperor Slash cutting through the blood sky and showing the real sky is really cool.

I really want more Notes. content in general. I really like what they were doing with it. And yeah, I realize that it's literally just Evangelion, sh-shut up.
That being said, I am a little more scared to ask for Notes. content, because I'm not entirely sure if I like it because of what it is, or because of the very compelling mysteries that the setting seems to hold, and if it gets an in-depth exploration, it might turn out to be bad, or worse, boring. I'm going to settle for just getting ORT in Nahui Mictlan, because I at least really liked that.

Although I did really like V/V just for... being V/V. I think her story is fun, but I am biased because "extremely powerful, incomprehensible entity learns to love humanity by being like them" is a story idea that I will always like, no matter how tacky, forced or repetitive. It also seems to be something Nasu likes to write in general, but I think V/V is my favorite variation of it. Like, Kukulkan fits technically, but she's not really ORT, just a piece of ORT that gained sentience due to the worship of the deinos. V/V is just Type-Venus, and can operate on knowledge she had as Type-Venus. The whole "we weren't doing it because we wanted to, or gave it any logical thought, because we never had any logical thought. We just did it because it was something we were built to do. In hindsight, we were very stupid" thing is interesting, 'cause it creates this conflict between the more inhuman, Aristoteles side of V/V, and the human side that she developed as a result of absorbing humanity.

Even now, she can't do anything but stay in place, because everything about Type Venus exists to destroy. If she moves even just a little, everyone dies. So all she can do is sit there and wait for her own end.

Still, Notes is a fun story about a guy with the special ability to kill anything, and this cute overpowered blonde girl who's actually the incarnation of a planet's will. It's a shame Nasu never wrote anything else like this.

[UnlimitedBladeWorks]

So after seeing some talk here about Case Files I became morbidly curious. Not curious enough to read 10 volumes, and I knew if I read the first I would find myself compelled to read all 10 so I did the next best thing and decided to watch the anime.

To start with things I liked I do like Waver and Grey both as individual characters and as a unit. Waver's moments of introspection rare as they may be do provide a solid look into what the character would be like post Zero. Framing the series around his desire to return to Fuyuki for the 5th Holy Grail War and him having to let go of that is good, other aspects of his character are touched upon and while not fully explored do give him a sense of roundedness. Grey is occasionally written to be clueless to the point of stupidity and while her arc I don't think is as neatly defined as Waver's you can see the starting point to go a lot of interesting places. Reines is supposedly the third lead but left very little impression, I assume this is partially because Rail Zepplin as a novel just keeps her in the background but if we're going to spend time on 6 filler episodes surely there would've been chances to do more.

The core problem with Case Files is how Sanda utilizes the genre space. Waver states early on that the how and who dunnits don't matter in the world of magic and as a mission statement for the show I can respect that. Focus less on technicalities and "puzzles" and more use the mysteries as a framework through which to examine characters. Unfortunately I don't think the show follows through on this well in the slightest for the core reason that I don't think Sanda actually knows that much about writing characters. I said earlier that Waver Velvet was a good character and I stand by this but unfortunately Waver Velvet doesn't exist in much of the show instead being a shell through which the archetype of Mystery Detective is summoned. Mystery Detective has no character, he exists to be cool, solve the mysteries and give the audience an easy clap when he wins against people who are very obviously wrong. I'm tempted to use this to tangent into how boring the show's depiction of Modern Magecraft Theory is but to keep things short and simple the fact that it's represented simply as "they use computers" is a rather clear depiction of the show's lack of imagination. Supporting characters feel one dimensional and have no real arcs to speak of but most importantly the culprits, in a show that purports to be whydunnit centered are all somehow worse. The early episodic characters with maybe the exception of episode 2's Mary Fargo mainly exist as "clap bait" and don't have anything resembling interesting characterization with this extending even to Rail Zepplin's core antagonist Faker.

Another missing ingredient in Case Files is well any sense of "themes" in that it has no real sense of saying anything about the world, history, the human condition etc. Rail Zepplin at the start posits to be a story about vision, a natural starting point for a story about a mystic eyes auction. "Vision is the first form of magecraft" how can people control what they see and to what extent are they held prisoner by it. These are ideas that have been explored in past Type-Moon works, most notably Tsukihime and Plus Disk but I was open minded to a new take on them or at least an interesting rehash of what had come before. Unfortunately these ideas are mostly dropped after the first episode of the arc and are replaced with the deeply uninteresting Faker stuff.

I'm more than happy for different Type-Moon stories to take different approaches to storytelling but I think Case Files mostly foregoes having interesting characterization or things to say in favor of doing mostly rote mystery stuff. Even if Sanda wanted to do that stuff you can absolutely have it both ways, see Nisio Isin's Zaregoto series which is a mystery series up to its sixth volume but never uses that as an excuse for weak characterization or lack of anything broader to say. Compare the Case Files anime to the Zaregoto OVA and the former looks amateurish. There's a lot more I could say but I think it would ultimately all come down to the same core points. Case Files as a story is just not interested in any of the things I'm interested in and does an astonishingly poor job trying to get me to care about the things it cares about. Even Fate/Apocrypha has multi dimensional characters and (weak) thematic throughlines.

[Kirishima]

Funny how you can point out core problems with the whole series while just watching the anime, I guess it extends everywhere.

[Formless Creature]

The core problem with Case Files is how Sanda utilizes the genre space. Waver states early on that the how and who dunnits don't matter in the world of magic

Can I just talk about how much I hate this? It's not like you can just do literally whatever you want with magic. It's not like it's physically impossible to write a compelling mystery that the reader can solve (or at least follow along) that has magic as the main feature. You are writing for a setting where the rules for magic are probably a lot more defined than a vast amount of other fantasy settings, and yet you're treating it like magi can just wave a wand and turn a dude into sand while shooting laser beams out of their dick. Literally just introduce everyone, introduce everyone's magic and their specific rules, then have the death happen. Like, writing mysteries is hard, but that's no excuse to give up. If you feel like you can't handle it, then don't write one.
And having a compelling mystery with a compelling how/whodunnit doesn't mean you can't also have a good whydunnit.

I hate to reiterate on a point that has been made before, but why is this a mystery series? Clearly it should've just been about Waver and the boys doing anything else. I haven't read Case Files but just hearing about all this pisses me off because the idea of a magic detective that allows for mysteries impossible through strictly natural means sounded interesting to me.

[pinetree]

The statement is even worse because Waver is a super genius who can understand everything about someone's magecraft at a glance lmao

[UnlimitedBladeWorks]

Rewatched the Overlooking View film for the first time since reading the novel. I still prefer the novel version but I think I 100% see why UFOtable made every change they did, the novel is more of an essay than a narrative. All the changes the film makes are well to make it workable as a film. Having Mikiya be gone for the entire thing adds a sense of emotional and narrative urgency to get him back. There are a few things gone that I personally would've kept, Touko talking about the link between childhood and flight, as well as Ryougi talking about the way her brain works. I do think they do a good job keeping most of the motifs and ideas from the novel intact even if I still prefer the novel in the end.

[Petrikow]

The takeaway for me when I rewatched some of these movies is that they shouldn't have committed to this format of one movie per story.

All of the changes they have to make are essentially tailored toward making sure that it all works as a singular movie.

Granted, most of them (i.e all of them except Oblivion Recorder) do very well to execute of the cinematic structure, but there is something rather... inauthentic feeling about some of the changes that you can notice once you read the books.

[UnlimitedBladeWorks]

Though I also can't imagine what other format would work for KNK. If you're adapting straight there's no way they could've got it done in 26 and I can't imagine UFOtable at the time had the capacity for longer shows.

[Formless Creature]

I think they did well all things considered. Regardless of whatever format they chose it was going to lose something.

[Maedhros]

I never got much out of Overlooking View's movie version. It's damned pretty, sure, and it has proper vibes, which in the end is the ultimate test of an adaptation and the one that most fail, but I never really had much of a clue what was going on literally or thematically until I read the novel. I've shown it to non-Type Moon fan audiences and had rather similar reactions, too. Though I'll admit I didn't really love the novel, either-maybe it's the translation, maybe it's that it's one of Nasu's earliest public works, maybe it's on me, I don't know.

[UnlimitedBladeWorks]

I think the movie pretty coherently explains most of Overlooking View's ideas you just have to pay attention.

[OnesFleetingGlory]

Overlooking View to Paradox Spiral were peak TM movies imo. Each self-contained theme, with hints of the bigger narrative sprinkled over, and finally the reveal and climax in Paradox Spiral were really engaging. But the movies after that, while good, didn't feel as exciting since the main conflict was mostly resolved after the fifth one.

[[TRG]Vash]

I only got to watch the third and final HF movie last week. It's bizarre since I saw the first two flicks as soon as they were available. HF is something that 2009 me would never ever believe would've been made, so when it was announced one could only imagine the hype and that's what fueled me to watch them asap.

btw, I felt like the fist fight was okayish, my memories might be betraying me but I felt more impacted when I read it on the VN. Guess I might give the VN a re-read sometime.