Format: Playstation 3

Difficulty Played: Hard

Some spoilers ahead folks!

Spiderman has just finished battling Curt Conners and stopping him from destroying New York City, and turning its citizens into mutant lizard people. Now he learns that the disease hasn’t left the city yet. Oscorp has been experimenting with the left overs and accidentally releases it on the public. Meanwhile, Alistair Smythe insisted the Oscorp invest in his new nanobot technology and built a whole slew of giant robots to deal with the outbreak. In order to treat the disease Spiderman breaks Conners out of a mental institution to get his help in finding a cure. This goes horribly awry and it accidentally releases dozens of other inmates.

The Amazing Spiderman is freaking fun! The web swinging throughout the city is near accurate with the size of the buildings. The acrobatic moves that Spiderman comes with, and you can obtain later, are fantastic and are as fun to watch as they are to unlock. The extra comics and unlockables are neat to see and it helps you appreciate how much detail the people put into this game. The story beautifully adds to the previous The Amazing Spiderman movie. This, so far, is one of the best movie tie-in games I’ve ever played.

The story does a great job of picking up right where the movie left off and sends Manhattan, New York, straight to hell. There are multiple crimes and plagues that are threatening the city, and yep, Spiderman is the only one that save them from certain doom. The jumbled and fast paced flow of the main story reminds me of the original Spiderman series and really keeps true to the main concepts of Spiderman. It kinda gave the feeling of “the good guys always wins” and “just keep truckin’.” It even does a great job of building tension with the giant bosses and continued decay of the city, along side reading the cities local tweets that are displayed during the loading screen. Some of the added detail is citizens puken green liquid in the streets to the smog in the city turning colors. This really adds to the atmosphere and is freaking wonderful. There are multiple points of pure dread that over flows the city, and Spiderman’s personal life.

Some of the characters gradually change while some almost take a complete 180. Like Gwen Stacy comes off as a complete bitch, where as in the movie she was more stable and nice. But hey she even mentions losing her Dad recently (see The Amazing Spiderman movie) so that might be some reason to her character change. It also adds considerable depth to Conners and makes him more human then just your average comic book villain, like most comics or shows do. It still plays off the misunderstood scientist, but it showed his gradual grief and dismay to his own selfishness. So he eventually comes to and straightens up to help Spiderman, and Manhattan.

It eventually delves into the scientific debate of human evolution and medicine and which way it should go. Even during one of the final Oscorp missions Connners and Smythe are bickering back and forth whether or not people will be more accepting of nanobots or gene therapy in their lives. This is neat because it’s a real world plausibility. This is also the main divide, and rivalry, between the two scientists. The only thing that was notably odd about the story was some of the voice acting. Near the end it seemed more like they were just saying lines or whenever there was a word highlighted in the scripted to be emphasized it was over acted.

There are multiple side missions that kinda add to the depth of the city, but are distracting and repetitive. There are only so many times you can break up a mugging or stop a car chase in the SAME ways before it gets completely boring. Also lots of the time the bad guys are the exact same or have only small variations that it isn’t even noticeable when you’re fighting them. There are some fun side missions, but when they give you 10+ between each mission, and many of them are the same kinds of missions, it only adds to the repetition.

If you wait long enough in the game one of the unlockables is a icon addition to the map you have that tells you where all the local escaped mental ward patients are and loose comic book pages. This is both a nice feature and a little dumb. Secret collectibles are suppose to be in unknown locations, however since they’re 700 comic book pages and more then 20 patients to collect it does help some. So all in all they are just so so. Now don’t get me wrong the collectibles add some extra game play time to the game. They also really help build Spiderman and it gives extra XP to unlock more moves or even better armor. But they, like all collectibles, are tedious. Also with games like this they aren’t skippable due to how much extra XP they give you. So if you’re playing it on hard you’ll have to collect them in order to prepare for the next stage, or even the next boss. On another note you might get your butt handed to you multiple times due to minor flaws and graphical issues while fighting.

The controls were completely smooth and easy to grasp. This sometimes makes combat a breeze, but it’s frustrating considering you have to have a eye on Spiderman’s head to see his spidy-sense go off. This be the notification that you need to hit the counter button, but often the graphics bloom (brightness from natural light) would completely blotch out the indicator. A white indicator on white background isn’t really visible. Other times it’s a snap second indication. So it feels like some of the pacing was set to Viewtiful Joe, which is super fast timing. The only problem that I saw with the controls is that during some of the open world areas the graphical glitches would interfere with the direction you were sending Spiderman and you couldn’t compensate quick enough to correct the problem.

The graphics are something strange and sometimes something to be desired. This is strange since the other half the time the graphics are as beautiful as this generation of games can deliver. Like most of the real world is being wowed by movie like quality cut-scenes, like in Tomb Raider. However, this game takes the character models and uses them for the cut-scenes. Its kinda bad considering most character models are only meant to bend a certain way. The cut-scenes try to add to the model that it makes them look awkward, just weird, or even stiff. However sometimes a nice feature comes up where you can control Spiderman’s viewpoint with the L3 stick. So if you get board with what they are saying you can look off in the distance or admire the elaborate detail of the room you’re in. Other times the graphics don’t seem to render correctly and look like they are Playstation 2 graphics. This isn’t that bad, but given that the other character models, including some cars, seem stiff, then it’s still noticeably bad.

Other various glitches seem to only occur in the open world environment. There were multiple times where Spiderman would clip through the edges of buildings. Other times he would go to swing, or climb back onto the wall, and he would be stuck in a falling pose and you could spin him in circles and nothing would happen. One time he literally got stuck in that pose. However the great thing about all of these is that none of them were game crashing bugs. Most, if not all, worked themselves out and I didn’t have to restart the system.

I usually don’t do DLC reviews, or add them to the main game review, but I thought I should mention these. The DLC won’t be worth the money for most people. There is a mega pack DLC, for about $10 now, where you can play as Rhino, Conners, and, as funny as it may seem, Stan Lee. Now it is fun to swing through Manhattan as Stan Lee, but the other mini-games are either terrible or just rehashes of older games like Space Invaders. They really are kinda bland. I wish they made them into story playable add-on’s instead of cheap rehashes. So fair warning.

For anyone looking to have fun pick up this game. If you decide to go for a 100% game completion then there is well over 20 hours of game play. Also there is enough decent achievements to balance out the annoying ones, like collect all of x-item. The story, as said before, is one of the BEST I’ve seen in a long time. It is really memorable in my book, but the controls, in open world, repetitive unchallenging side quests, and the ending ruins part of the experience. Wait till it’s about $20 or $30 before you pick it up.

++++++++

+Positive+

++++++++

+Graphics
+Story
+Most controls
+Atmosphere of the Game (it’s a fun loving adventure feel)

————-

-Negative-

————-

-Repiticious game play

-Minor Graphical Glitches

-Controls in open world are horrible

-Strange bouts of horrible voice acting

7.0/10

7.6/10 – IMDB

71/100 – Metacritic – Critic Score

7.2/10 – Metacritic – User Score

Date: 2012, August 31 ~ September 2
Location: Woodlake Hotel – Sacramento, CA
Previous attendances: S’11 onwards

Let’s be honest: My first impression of Sac-Anime, in S’11, was a bad one. I didn’t like the crowds, and I didn’t like the weather (as much as I like clear weather, not a huge fan of heat waves). However, I’ve slowly warmed up to this con, and I’ve actually grown to develop an appreciation of it.

Like with the past many Sac-Animes, SA S’12 takes place at the Woodlake Hotel (formerly the Radisson). Convenient hotel rooms that put you right at the con, beautiful lake, and conveniently located next to a strip mall with a number of fast food places. Service, on the other hand, can be questionable; food inside the lobby is not allowed, and I’m rather reluctant to entrust my credit card credentials to this hotel after the random $150 charge Robbie was hit with last year.

Cosplay-wise, it seems like a new dominant fandom is on the horizon. I saw a lot of Adventure Time cosplayers, Robbie included, especially on Friday when the gathering took place. Homestuck is there, to almost nobody’s surprise, although I’ve come to warm up to HS and its fans since last year. Persona was somewhat well-represented here; I encountered three Akihikos and, strangely, three Mitsurus, which puzzles me a bit as neither of their respective VAs were there although I’m not complaining. Touhou was out and about, in fairly respectable numbers.

I especially didn’t like the Dealer’s Hall this time around. Horridly crowded even by con standards, and nothing caught my interest.

Artist’s Alley was business as usual. A lot of Western fandoms were there, and DoujinPress was back with their mostly-Madoka and -Touhou booth.

Finally, the gaming rooms. TBAGR was there to provide their robust selection of games–from the usual fighting game suspects to “classic” games of generations before , with a side of motion dance games. I even participated in a tournament myself; more on that furtherdown.

Prologue:

Picked up my carpool crew and headed out towards Sacramento around 12:30 PM

To avoid toll booths, I took 580, 205, and 5; it’s boring compared to 680 and 80 but at least they’re much faster routes. I was going to stop by an In-N-Out in Tracy on 205 so my carpool could use the bathroom, but I missed my exit. Ended up at a KFC/A&W on 5 instead, where I got to try A&W’s infamous root beer mugs. Mugs were cool, but the root beer itself tasted just like any other root beer. Meh.

Arrival time: About 2:45-2:55 PM.

Day 1:

I tried to check in, but the room wasn’t ready yet, so I had 30 minutes to kill.

My first order of business was to get my press badge ASAP so I would not forget it later, but due to some mishaps I couldn’t get one by myself since the staff thought CCB was only a 1-member groupo for this con so I had to have Robbie tag along so he could clear things up. Since he was also rooming with me, we then went over to the front desk to check in and pay up, but due to my debit card not having enough funds to pay the whole thing, I had to call up all of my 2-night roommates so I could pay partially in cash and the rest by card. Other than these problems, registration and checking in went by fairly smoothly; our room, also shared by Nate and An, was over by the lake, with both front and back doors.

Unfortunately, I hit a snag soon enough when I tried to take photos of some cosplayers: I realized that I had left my camera’s SD card at home! Thankfully, my phone takes good photos by modern smartphone standards, so I ended up using that to take con photos instead.

So Friday was basically the “nothing happens” day, just like at last Sac. I did meet up with fellow Touhou fans.

Around 6 I went to Costco to get pizza and frozen yogurt for cheap; I soon regretted the yogurt because not only was it a lot, but I ended up with what was either “stomach freeze” or a stomachache for the next several hours.

Since I was very exhausted, I found myself crashing around 10 PM, and took a nap so I could check out the nightlife.

Gaming room, notably, had a DJMAX Technika 3 and Pop’n Music 20 fantasia setup. The table the Pop’n was on was a bit low, but managable.

Unfortunately I missed the swap meet, and I didn’t really care much for the rave. The crowd was notably less amicable at night with the rave going on, so I left for my hotel room and went to bed shortly thereafter.

Day 2

Day 2 is the “big day” of Sac-Anime–this is when many of the major gatherings, panels, and other events take place.

For me, it was also my big day, as it gave me a chance to use my other “signature” cosplay: Reimu.

Still pretty terrible at eyeliner and mascara, though I’ve picked up a few new tricks since last time.

Before I could do anything else, however, Matt needed in on our hotel room, so I got him a key card from the front desk and he lent his cooler to our room for the night.

I had a pass for complimentary breakfast, so I thought why not, living on fast food at a con is fairly expensive, guess I’ll score myself some free grub. Met with a few old friends there, who were quite amazed by my Reimu cosplay.

Afterwards, I made for the autograph line for Travis Willingham and Laura Bailey. However, by the time I got to the line it was so hideously long that their autograph session kicked into “express mode”, with them going down the line to sign only one item each so that JYB, Michelle Ruff, and Jennifer Hale could do their autograph session, which put a snag in my plans as I had intended to get at least the box for my copy of Catherine and a World of Warcraft book (which my friend, who chose not to attend Sac, asked me to have signed) signed. Fortunately, someone next to me wasn’t going to get anything signed, so he offered to hold the WoW book. After getting autographs from Travis and Laura, I stayed in the line to get Michelle Ruff’s autograph. The entire deal took me about 2-3 hours.

Went out to lunch at Extreme Pizza, where my friend, cosplaying Meiling, happened to be present. I got myself a hearty mini-pizza, and I was gonna go get Starbucks but didn’t have time.

The Touhou gathering was at 3. Attendance was fairly modest, though we did have an awkward location for our shoot–because all the cosplayers at the gathering were facing against the crowds, it made for some fairly poor shots. My friend who was also cosplaying Reimu was nice enough to lend me her ofuda for some shots.

Afterwards, I went to the gaming room to chill out.

I signed up for the Pac-Man Championship Edition DX tournament; it seemed like the one tournament being offered that I could present some degree of competence at. Some people were practicing, and I did see at least one player who was actually pretty good, which worried my chances of victory a little.However, there was also a Super Smash Bros. Brawl tournament, and it was so crowded (80+ entries!) that non-entrants were forced to leave the room to make way for entrants. I left and decided to kill time in the courtyard, as well as go to Starbucks.

Nameventures. Spoiler: The barista asked to spell it out, so it doesn’t count.

Around this time, the Madoka gathering took place, and I stopped to take photos of that.

The tournament was at 6, and had about 8 entries. Naturally, this meant the tournament would end pretty quickly. For the first round, everyone had two shots at Highway 5-minute Score Attack, and I saw some pretty respectable scores.

However, I did note that some players were not taking advantage of tricks that I normally use, which gave me a bit of an advantage. Ended up placing first after all, sadly not with 2nd place watching.

Round 2 was one shot of Dungeon 10-minute Score Attack amongst the top three, and this is where things get interesting. I had a good run going up until the last minute or so, when I somehow managed to botch my run by skipping a “jackpot” wave of ghosts. Fortunately, I set myself on getting to the next jackpot as quickly as possible, and redeemed myself, pushing myself past 1st place and securing victory!

It felt good not only to win a game tournament, but to do so while in cosplay, when most people who do con game tournaments do not cosplay at all. It was great to do two of my “core” hobbies at once: cosplaying and playing “score attack” games.

As a prize for winning, I got $10 credit at Armageddon Games, the store that was pimping their wares in the other gaming room. I used it to buy a copy of Blast Corps.

Matt happened to show up around the tail end of the tournament, and was shouting and cheering like he was watching a boxing match, heh. We went out to get food, and he was cool enough to pay for mine’s as his way of saying congrats.

My phone was running low and I was tired, so I retreated back to the hotel room to recharge and recuperate. Afterwards, I went back out, since the gaming room was open for about another hour.

Mostly I just hung around T3, and I happened to make friends with a rather friendly player there. Playing T3 without PlatCrew access is suffering, but at least it has the KARA Original Version sets available to play.

Gaming room closed at midnight. Someone was quite fond of my cosplay so she took a few photos of me. She told me where to find them, but sadly, said photos have yet to surface.

I left to donk-donk around the area. Met up with the Persona crew, then split to walk around with a couple friends who were roaming the area.

At this point there was nothing left for me to do, so I went to the lobby. Meh, I was exhausted and out of it, though I met a few familiar faces. As much as I didn’t want to, I went back to the room and changed out of my Reimu cosplay.

Honestly, cosplaying Reimu gives me some rather interesting feels; having people find me attractive in it certainly helps. =) I always find it sad when I have to change out of it into normal clothes or bed clothes. I really like crossplaying; it gives me a chance to bust out my feminine side, and I hope to acquire a few more crossplays while I still look good and young enough to do it.

Day 3

Or “pack up and get out while the sun is still up” day.

Thankfully, I had pulled my car up next to my hotel room on Friday, so packing was a lot faster for me. Threw on my Minato cosplay and checked out of my room.

I thought about lining up for the “last chance autographs” line, but decided no, getting more of the Investigation Team VAs to sign my Persona 4 box is not worth flushing away half the convention day, so fuck that shit.

Dealer’s Hall. Meh.

Starbucks. Nameventures. WTH, I EVEN HAD IT SPELLED OUT. THANKS FOLKS.

Artist’s Alley. Sup, DoujinPress. Bought myself a Reimu/Yukari doujin and a set of Touhou buttons. Gotta love being able to legitimately purchase doujins, in a language I’m competent at, no less.

Gaming room, again. I got sleepy at some point, but I did notice Kenchan in a kigurumi cosplay beasting Pop’n, to the point of scaring away onlookers. I took to playing a more low-key round myself, which woke me up.The room closed at 4, which marked the end of the con for me.

I went out to the outdoor stage to chill out, where I encountered noveau-riche cosplaying as Kyouko Sakura. Chatted for some several minutes, then while she went off to do other things, I found myself playing some card games with the Marisa cosplayer who was at the gaming room. I also summoned #CarpoolCrew here, and we all left, roughly around 5-5:30 PM.

Epilogue

Before we could leave Sacramento, some of the carpool crew needed to use the bathroom, so we stopped at Starbucks; I wanted to use my Treat Receipt anyway.

Further down the road, we stopped at In-N-Out in Pinole for food–the same In-N-Out we stopped at last time, no less. I wasn’t going to put my wig back on, but did so anyway since quite frankly, I much prefer to spend time with cosplayers in cosplay; I don’t feel right in regular clothes next to someone in cosplay.

Trying to keep myself awake, I drove the crew home, arriving at my place just before 10 PM.

Conclusion

This is probably the best Sac-Anime I’ve been to yet, in terms of personal experience. There were a few moments where I was feeling down, but it happened mostly in the late hours when there wasn’t much to do. Having a great gaming room helped to pass the time; I’m looking forward to seeing it again next Sac, should I decide to attend.

To me, everything good that happened can be summed up in day 2: free breakfast, Reimu, crossplay, 2hu, winning a tournament, meeting cute people, people who find my cosplay cute, and megucas.

If there’s anything that detracted from my experience, it’s mostly that I didn’t really have a lot of friends that I enjoyed sticking around with for long periods of time, unlike Kin-Yoobi Con. Then again, this IS a con of 6,000-7,000, can’t exactly expect community when a con is this big.

I did manage to make one new friend from this convention; something that happens very rarely these days due to my attitudes on befriending people.

I may go to ALA next year, but the unfamliarity, coupled with at least one good friend wanting me to come to Sac again along with Sac’s new future location, may make me attend Sac Winter instead.

• Venue: 4/6
• Hotel experience: 4/6
• Community/Friends: 3/6
• Food availability: 4/6
• Cosplay quality: 4/6
• Cosplay diversity: 4/6
• Dealer’s Room: 2/6
• Artist’s Alley: 3/6
• Gaming Room: 5/6
• Events: 4/6
• OVERALL: 4/6

See you all at future conventions and cosplay events!

**Hello everyone and welcome to NerdCrush! A new series of Blogs dedicated to those characters out there that we have a serious NerdCrush on. You know which ones we’re talking about. Those characters who, from the moment they’re introduced, steal the show in our eyes and help carry their prospective plots along like no others could. The kind of characters who we aspire to be more like or perhaps someday meet in the real world through some form of eldritch magic. The kind of characters who, with a mere cameo appearance, can entice us to watch or play something we otherwise wouldn’t have given two shats about. These Blogs go out to those guys (and gals), our NerdCrushes.**

With Tales of Graces coming out on the 16th, I figured this was the perfect time to start my first NerdCrush piece as the character it revolves around, Rita Mordio, is not only a Tales character but the character that helped spark my interest in Japanese Role Playing Games (JRPGs) in the first place.

First things first. I should start by saying that my experience with JRPGs as a child was pretty much limited to a certain Pocket Monster game with yellow, electric mice. I grew up on Sonic and Wolfenstein, not Mario or Final Fantasy. So when Tales of Vesperia rolled around a few years back, not only had I not heard of the game before, but I honestly had no interest in playing it. Of course at the time I lived with At The Buzzer’s own Chris Etling, a diehard Tales fan if I ever saw one, who was not only going to get the game, but was interested in having all of us in the house play it. Not being one to shy away from new video games, I figured I’d give the game a chance, even if I’d had no prior experience with games like it before.

As it turns out, Tales of Vesperia was exactly the kind of game that I needed to play in order to get me into JRPGs. Real time combat, voiced cut-scenes, a typical “save the world” story with non-typical JRPG characters… I could write a review of Tales of Vesperia, but I won’t. I’ll leave that up to Chris if he ever feels like it. For now we’re going to focus on my favorite part of Vesperia, Rita Mordio.

The Character:

When the characters of Vesperia are first introduced to Rita Mordio you learn, rather quickly, that she isn’t the kind of person to mess with. An orphan who has spent her life studying the strange “blastia” (devises that allow people to use and wield magical energy called “aer”) that exists in the world of Vesperia. Rita is stubborn, logical, arrogant and kind of a brat. The ‘genius mage’ of Aspio is not an easy one to get along with. In many ways she’s almost a force of nature that can’t be stopped. Even the main character of Vesperia, Yuri Lowell, a strong and independent character if there ever was one, has his demands for answers cast aside by Rita in a manner of seconds as her mind wanders onto the next riddle to be solved.

See, that’s the brilliant thing about Rita: she’s about as true to herself as any character can be. If she doesn’t like something, she’ll say it. If she’s angry or annoyed at something, she’ll attack it. She’s one of those examples of “what you see is what you get.” Rita isn’t out to make friends or keep up appearances. She does what she wants, when she wants, and will challenge you if you try to stop her. That isn’t to say that she’s some sort of feral wild girl or anything, cause she’s not. In fact, she’s perhaps one of the most logical characters in the game. She’s just too stubborn to go through life any way but her own.

As with any truly wonderful character, though, she changes over time. The change is slow and steady, fitting the plot as the game progresses, but the character she is at the beginning of the game (and her relationships with the characters around her) is very different from the person she ends up being at the end of the game. She learns to accept and trust those around her, something a life living alone had never taught her to do. She learns to genuinely care about her fellow party members, seeing them as more of a family than just some people she travels around with. And she even forgives one of them after they did something so terrible in Rita’s eyes that she swore white hot vengeance upon them. And (without any spoilers) I will mention that her relationship with blastia, the devices and research that dominated her life, is changed quite drastically by the end of the game as well, forcing Rita to move on with her life and look to the future in ways she never thought she’d have to before.

Take note future game designers! More often than not the true sign of a well-crafted character is when, at the end of their story, they look nothing like they did when they began it. Some series (*cough*Avatar: The Last Airbender *cough*) do this better then others. You can bet this point will come up more then once in these Blogs.

The Presentation:

Rita is one of those characters that, with a moment’s glance, you can pretty much tell everything you know about her. She reads well, as they’d say in ‘the biz’.

The 'genius mage' of Aspio

One look at her and you know, without a doubt, that this is a girl who puts function over form. Goggles? Check. Magnifying glasses and compass? Check. Journal and writing utensils? Check. Pockets? Triple check. Rita is a walking research lab and it shows. She sports finger-less gloves to keep her hands warm without harming her dexterity, and doesn’t wear her hair any longer then it needs to be to cover her head. Wondering what kind of intellectual she is? Well look no further then her mismatched stalkings and the ribbon that she only sports on her right arm. With asymmetry like that you know she can’t be a perfectionist and is probably more of a disheveled researcher who doesn’t have time to take care of herself. (Spoiler: that’s exactly the case.)

Her default outfit is bright, fiery, and utilitarian. Just like her. And while you can dress her up in all other kinds of outfits (including a certain ‘kitty cat waitress’ outfit that both her and I refuse to speak about) throughout the game, seeing as how some of those outfits are jokes/references to other games we aren’t going to take these into consideration. Although some of them are pretty badass. But that’s not the point…

Of course a major point in Rita’s favor as far as presentation goes is her American voice actress, Michelle Ruff. If you have no idea who Ms. Ruff is, then a) you’re missing out. And b) what are you waiting for?! Go look at her IMDB profile right now! Chances are you’ve heard her before in one of the many, MANY things she’s done. She’s one of the A-listers, folks.

Ms. Ruff does an amazing job of conveying Rita’s arrogance and stubbornness without losing touch of she fact that, deep down, Rita really isn’t such a bad person. She’s lovably obtuse, if you will. Whether it’s her snappy remarks at other characters when they comment on that fact that she isn’t doing anything but running around in combat or is using the same spell over and over again, “Shut up! I like it!” She’s a lovable brat through and through.

One of Rita’s most famous (and most humorous) lines comes from when she use what the game calls an ‘overlimit’ and is able to cast spells instantly instead of slowly charging them up. Rita ditches the often lengthy amount of dialogue to cast a spell and simply yells, “Blah blah blah!” to get things rolling. That, coupled with her ability to overlimit almost endlessly, also makes her one of the most broken characters in the game.

"This is the fruit of my research..."

The Love:

So there you have it folks, that’s more or less Rita Mordio in a nutshell. A stubborn, snotty little spit-fire of a mage who pretty much carried my interest through Tales of Vesperia. That isn’t to say that the game was boring or the other characters sucked, because they don’t. The gameplay, characters and story of Vesperia are all quite solid, actually. It’s just that for me, the guy who got ‘stuck’ playing the mage in the group, Rita was the driving force in my caring for the group and what was going to happen to them. Her snark and deadpan humor are what kept me eagerly awaiting each new skit that popped up. Because I knew that each one would bring more opportunity for hilarity to ensue and Rita to kick some butt. For me, Rita was the most important character in the game, even if she wasn’t anything special or new by JRPG standards.

While I’m certainly not a diehard JRPG fan, I can safely say that I have a newfound appreciation for them. Sure, a good deal of that is thanks to Tales of Vesperia as a whole, as the game is absolutely wonderful. Yet for all the wonderful characters and setting the game had to offer, my absolute favorite part of it, my NerdCrush, was Rita Mordio. The hot-headed genius that’s just as likely to defend those she cares about as she is to smack them upside the head or toss a fireball at them.

This whole time I have been complaining about the BangZoom! dub, so I will say that the brilliant Johnny Yong Bosch as Orihara Izaya didn’t disappoint me at all (well except for the whole Masa-omi thing). I was actually expecting to be let down, even though I am a fan of his. He also reminded me of Chris Patton, specifically Chris in Baccano! which is a good thing in this case. He’s talented enough that he can be great on his own, despite sounding similar to another voice actor. His Russian was really good as well (although I’m not a Russian language expert), so kudos to him! Kari Wahlgren was also really good as Celty Sturluson, the Dullahan from Ireland. It would have been an easy part to over act, but she kept it wonderfully simple. Lastly, Patrick Seitz was awesome as Simon Brezhnev, the Russia Sushi guy!

Ryuugamine Mikado

]]> http://bcklanime.wordpress.com/2011/07/13/catherine-is-only-in-english-not-japanese/ Wed, 13 Jul 2011 10:10:07 +0000 ck http://bcklanime.wordpress.com/2011/07/13/catherine-is-only-in-english-not-japanese/ So Aram Jabarri, the manager of Public Relations & Sales for Atlus has confirmed on the Playstation Blog that the PS3 & XBox 360 game Catherine is English only.  If you wanted to hear Katherine with Kotono Mitsuishi’s voice, you will have to settle of Michelle Ruff’s instead.  But she isn’t too bad.

Having played the Japanese version, it is a shame that the Japanese track will not be in the English version.  The voice work is excellent & portrays the characters very well.  Plus, the sheep in the game are hilarious with their frighten voices.  Although I favour Japanese voices on Japanese works, the English ones so far aren’t too bad.  I hope the English cast will do the game justice as the lineup is pretty strong.

Now you can find links to offsite pages under the home page drop down, all of the proper collection pages under collections, autographs under the autographs page, and extras under the extras page. Most of these will be sorted by alphabetical order, numeric, or by order of release. These will be obvious. There ARE some sections that haven’t been sorted yet, but they’re still available for you to access.

Collection Updates

Items I’ve updated so far on the site:

Mini key chains
These aren’t totally finished yet. There isn’t much because I don’t know much about this set. Please contact me if you know something that I don’t.

Puzzle Clock
This is the clock from my last update. I got it from a friend of mine who is selling off some of her collection. There are detailed shots of how the clock goes together and taken apart, as well as the image on the puzzle.

Pins
This page holds the pins that I own, whether they be bootlegged or official. The two pins listed are also from the last update I posted about, but come from the swap meet I went to.

Bootlegged Plushies
This page is new and contains photos of all my bootlegged Sailor Moon/Usagi plushies.

Michelle Ruff meeting
This page holds the summary and photos of my meeting with voice actress Michelle Ruff.

That’s it for tonight, but I’m sure there’ll be more. Hope you all enjoy your weekend =)