2560×1440 | Illustrator .AI

This is actually a semi request fill. Semi, in that a different image was actually asked for, but I liked this one more. Never really been an enormous fan of Iori, but I really like the changes they made to her design for the game’s sequel and the anime. One of the cards included with the Game / BD vol 1 LE pack (yes, I bought it ) was this, and the instant I saw it I decided I wanted to go back to the anime (the episode 2 ED specifically) and vector it. I could probably have just scanned the card, but I like doing it this way, though I’m way out of practice since this took me ages.

2560×1440 | Illustrator .AI

Been a long time since I’ve done anything. I was a bit idle the last couple of days so I decided I might as well do one of the many ideas I’ve had kicking around for a while. I’ve gotten very rusty, this took a lot longer than it used to take me. Though part of it is due to a wierd Illustrator bug I’ve picked up, where scrolling around using the mouse wheel & ctrl / alt / shift causes the menu bar to steal focus, so when I press a key combination it selects random stuff from the menu instead and then beeps at me. Interrupts workflow quite a bit.

I doubt I’ll have time to do another of these any time soon, though I’d like to.

2560×1440 | Illustrator .AI

This has been sitting half-done on my desktop for the last week and a half. Decided to finally get around to finishing it up. When I heard that Asako Nishida was doing the character designs for this show I knew that I’d be seeing one or two good shots for vectoring. I really loved her artwork in Simoun and Touka Gettan especially, and it’s interesting to see it in a more overtly moe-targeted style. It’s also interesting to see lips, which tend to be a facial feature that is under-emphasised in most modern anime designs.

Used colored lines again for this one. I think I may be leaving my old black-line style behind for good. It’s a fair bit of extra effort (got to rearrange the linework so that the right colors overlap each other) but I think the effect is worth the added work. I’m honestly not sure what I’ll be looking into next. I may go back through my pile of half-finished work again and bring one up. I’m also very tempted to go back through the final two episodes of Madoka, since I feel slightly empty after that ending.

2560×1440 | Illustrator .AI

Resurrecting an old vector I started back in September 09 or so. This took way longer than I expected it to, mainly because I decided to spend some extra effort doing colored lines. Not particularly difficult to do, but it requires picking through all the lines carefully and making sure they’re layered correctly such that the right colors overlap. I think I’ve gotten them all, but I know the instant I upload this I’ll notice a stray one I think the effect is worth it. While I like my usual black line style, the addition of colored lines softens out the vectors a bit, and makes the linework less jarring. I attempted to get the background to look like the original eyecatch, but couldn’t quite get it to look right, so settled for some simplicity.

Not sure what I’ll do next. I may go back through my old abandoned stuff again. I know I have a half-done Simoun trace from years ago, so that might be on the agenda. Alternatively one of the shows this season might grab my attention. I am open to suggestions or requests, though as always, I only work on stuff that I like personally and I reserve the right to do something else.

2560×1440 | Illustrator .AI

I quit WoW again. This is the proof. Apparently it’s been over six months since I last dusted off the vectoring tools. This was just a quickie, from episode 10. Grabbed a frame that appealed to me from toward the end and ran with it. It involved re-drawing most of the details in her hair, because the image was so dark and the compression high enough that a single motion frame like this ended up having the finer detail completely destroyed, if it was even there at all. I’m fairly happy with how it came out from a fairly low-quality source given how much redrawing of details was necessary.

Hopefully we’ll get to see the end of this show eventually too.

About the size: I’ve ordered a new monitor to replace my current one, which has seen over five years of constant use and is starting to burn out a bit on me. Replacement is a higher-resolution panel (2560×1440) and there’s a dearth of good stuff out there in this sort of size, which was my main motivation for wanting to do some vectoring again. Never hurts to prepare ahead of time. Knowing me, this will probably be the start of another flurry of activity followed by months of idleness. I guess it depends on whether any current or upcoming anime have any shots that I want to work with. A fair few next season look promising at least.

1920×1200 | Illustrator .AI

I’ve been meaning to do a new vector for a while. The last one I did was back in May. I’ve been fairly busy with my new job, and additionally nothing recently has really caught my eye as far as potential vector work goes. Shukufuku no Campanella is a fairly mediocre series, but one thing it does have is fairly consistent and attractive artwork. Originally I was considering one of the eyecatches from the series, but when this shot came up in the ED, I knew what I had to do.

This ended up taking a lot of time – probably twenty hours all up. I didn’t expect it to take anywhere near as long, but the jewelry took a lot of line work, and their clothing while simple required a lot of fiddly clipping masks to get right. I also had to redraw Salsa’s elbow, as the way the shot panned resulted in that corner of the image being cut off. I think it ended up looking fairly good.

A word of warning for anyone looking at grabbing the illustrator file: it has a lot of lines and a lot of clipping masks, plus the original was quite high resolution, so it’s nearly 13mb, and some of the masks are quite complex so you’ll want to make sure you’ve got a fair amount of memory.

1920×1200 | Illustrator .AI

Today’s raid got cancelled due to a lack of people, leaving me with a lot more time than planned. Unfortunately the sides of this image get cropped out – there’s actually more traced than is visible, but since 16:10 is slightly taller than 16:9, those extra bits are lost. Either way, I think this turned out fairly good, though I still think that the earlier Sanya & Eila one came out the best of them. It’s nice to finally complete a project like this, anyway. With any luck the upcoming second season’s inevitable additions to the cast will also result in some quality frames for some more work to do. In the mean time, I’m not sure whether this sudden burst of creative energy is going to continue or not. Feel free to make requests, but I can’t guarantee anything.

1920×1200 | Illustrator .AI

Looks like I might actually finish a traces project, albeit two years after starting. Decided to knock this one out first since she’s so easy in comparison. Just one more to go, but I doubt I’ll be able to get it done in a single sitting. That said, I intend to be very idle the next two weeks, so who knows. After that I’ll probably ask for suggestions then disappear for months again and never fulfil them. Most likely I’ll dig up and finish the one I started here.

1920×1200 | Illustrator .AI

When I ditched PinkuBentoBox I said I was done with vectors. However a sudden surge of creativity combined with increasing pre-expansion WoW boredom and the fact that I’m between jobs at the moment have together conspired against me. It’s been quite a while since I watched anything that really grabbed me and made me want to do one of these, so instead I ended up digging up some old source images I’d nabbed from Strike Witches back in 2008. I always thought the three I did were some of the better ones I’ve produced, so I thought it might be worth filling out the rest of the cast, not that I’m promising anything. I guess this is kind of semi-relevant again anyway since there’s a new season of they’re-not-panties-so-it-isn’t-embarrassing starting in a couple of months.

I may end up moving over some of the better ones from PBB but the bulk I’ll probably leave behind.

Periodically I like to pull out a visual novel and play it through. I don’t do it very often, so I’m not extensively experienced in them, but recently it has seemed like there have been more and more available, both as fan translations and actual commercial releases. It makes for a nice break from watching terrible anime and procrastinating over updating this blog. Anyway, I recently finished Aoi Shiro. Aoi Shiro, for those interested, is a so-called ‘all-ages’ yuri VN by Success. Originally released in early 2008 for PS2, the PC port (which the translation patch is for) was released November 2009.

Two things attracted me to this enough to give it a spin. The first was that, as an all-ages game, I was fairly confident that I’d be getting a half-decent plot. I don’t have anything against 18+ games, but if there isn’t a half-decent story to keep me interested then there are far more expedient methods for obtaining such material. The other thing which piqued my interest was the fact that this is a yuri story. Apparently there is some connection between it and Success’ previous yuri visual novel, Akai Ito, but this was not expanded upon within the novel itself.

One of the first things that struck me upon loading up the game was the production values. Most likely this simply highlighting the fact that the bulk of similar games I’ve played are either fairly old or doujin games, but I was fairly surprised to find every line of dialogue in the game is voiced, with mouth movements and eye blinking animated for any non-event CG sprites. It’s a minor thing but it contributes quite a bit to the experience. The art in the game is also fairly nice, with an appealing if slightly staid set of character designs.

Voicing of dialogue isn’t really that uncommon, but usually the protagonist is not included in any voicing. Generally this is because the protagonist is little more than a generic avatar for the player himself. The generic male protagonist in these games is one of the reasons I think I find so many VN anime adaptions completely vapid. Shouko, as protagonists go, is refreshingly well-rounded and avoids a lot of these pitfalls. I’m not sure if it is simply expedience or a deliberate consideration, given that as a female character there is already a major disconnect between the usual male VN audience. The decision to flesh her out in detail results in Shouko receiving at least as much character development throughout the game as the rest of the cast, if not more.

As far as the plot of the game goes, it’s fairly good. It’s not going to be winning a Pulitzer any time soon, but it is intriguing, well-paced and pitched fairly well. I’m a big fan of the particular storytelling style which crops up in a lot of these games, where there are multiple endings reachable, and each major route through the game reveals a new aspect of the overall situation. The addition of a ‘true’ scenario unlocked upon reaching the end of all the other routes, which draws together all the members of the cast and ties together the various elements of the plot into a lasting resolution is fairly nice. It actually surprises me that this kind of semi-nonlinear, branching plot structure is rarely seen outside of the visual novel genre. The most common complaints about Japanese games in general recently have seemed to be hinged around the uninteresting and linear nature of their plots. I would love to see this particular structure used more.

Unfortunately the endings were probably the weakest element of the story. While the endings themselves were fine, the ‘happy end’ epilogues seemed very weak. Only the true end has a remotely satisfying epilogue, and it comes at the expense of an abrupt and slightly confusing final sequence. I also felt that there were elements of the plot which were not expanded upon enough, and I ended up being left with a few questions. The foremost in my mind is that we never have it fully explained why the protagonist has the ability she does. The idea that there is magical power in blood is a fairly standard trope. The exact same logic is used to justify boob-biting in Tsukihime[link nws] or at least half the sex in Fate/Stay Night[link nws], and the quasi-vampiric Shouko nomming which effectively takes the place of sex in the various routes are perhaps a slightly more tasteful reinterpretation of the same core concept. The reason why her blood is of particular power is explained within the plot as well, relating to her backstory, specifically that she had consumed the same medicine that had been keeping Nami from aging. They never did, as far as I recall, state categorically whether the references to her having eaten ningyo flesh was literal or simply an illustrative reference to the similarities between Yasuhime and Yao Bikuni of the ningyo story from Japanese folklore. Anyway, that aside, it is never actually explained why Shouko was able to take that medicine without any side-effects. It becomes an extremely major plot point, but the actual reason why it was possible in the first place seemed to have been left at the door. Perhaps it was a reference to Akai Ito, which having not played that game I would not have been aware of.

I played through the routes in a fairly conventional manner – Yasumi, Migiwa, Kaya, Nami, Kohaku then the true route. I probably enjoyed Kohaku’s route the most out of all of them. She was the character who interested me the most, and seemed to have the most mystery around her. It seemed like there was a lot more about her which ended up going unrevealed, which is a bit of a shame. I also noticed that there was a bit of inconsistency in Shouko’s character in some of the routes which was not there in others. Specifically, in some of the routes she has a lot more personal strength of will. In Migiwa and Kaya’s routes, she is a much stronger character. Kohaku’s route made her seem much weaker and more reliant on the rest of the cast, especially Kohaku herself. This may simply be a matter of expedience, where she takes the more submissive role in when paired with a stronger character.

I was also a little bit disappointed at the fact that the rest of Shouko’s classmates don’t play a large part in the story other than providing a vehicle for plot advancement, a bit of character development, and comic relief. I will admit I was crushing a bit on Ayashiro. Incidentally, they could probably have done with giving some of the other girls in the kendo team a few moments. The way that everything is presented you could almost be forgiven for thinking that the team is three girls and a manager.

However, niggles aside I enjoyed the game quite a bit and would absolutely recommend giving it a spin.

IT’S.BEEF.TABOO.