Tag: anime

I went to a friend’s birthday party yesterday. He lives in the Russian district of the city, close to where I used to live in high school, so it was kinda nostalgic to walk around there.

He has a small, super friendly dog. The dog was really interested in my beer and constantly tried to sniff it and lick it. Later, someone actually gave the dog a drop of beer and after that it lost its interest in mine. I guess he didn’t like the taste, just the smell.

We played board games and video games, hours passed. I got way too drunk and lost control over what I was saying, telling some pretty cringe stories. At some point, me and another dude at the party left for another event – a night time gaming convention nearby.

The gaming convention was fun as hell. There was so much stuff to do and see there. I was really drawn to the stand that sold anime merchandise – a highlight for me that they had was a hand painted picture of Marin Kitagawa.

People always tell me when they visit my place that my walls are so empty – that I should put some pictures up. I thought about buying the waifu picture at the stand for decorating my home, but ended up not getting it.

They also had a bunch of figurines for sale – the most interesting ones being those of Rem, who is particularly relevant at the moment since the show she is from is currently airing another season. And she’s also a character in the mobile game I play daily.

The only souvenir I got in the end from that stand was a Bocchi keychain.

The event had many arcade machines, pc-s and consoles around for playing. Me and a friend played a few games of Dr Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, which has been my favorite game ever since I played it for the first time in 2004, on my Nokia N-Gage with an emulator.

While playing that game there, I started at difficulty 5 and my friend at difficulty 1. I was too drunk for the speed and concentration it required and lost. So I kept reducing the difficulty each game, and finally won when we were playing on the same level. Later we came back to that machine, I was more sober, kept increasing the difficulty and managed to win up to difficulty 4. It was quite an experience, playing my favorite game for the first time on an arcade-like machine.

The event also had a cosplay competition. There were various cosplays from Genshin Impact and some other IP-s I don’t care about. And the highlight for me – a cosplay of OMGkawaiiAngel from Needy Streamer Overload. I loved that game – its protag is a girl with severe mental illness and personality disorders and drug addiction and you gotta manage her mental state to get through the game. All of which is relatable to me.

That cosplay was well executed. When the cosplayer stumbled on stage, it actually seemed in character, which was cute. I voted for her in the competition. But I wasn’t there when the competition results were announced so I still don’t know who won it.

Around the time I was in university I used to hang around with people every single day. I had energy to go to multiple social events in one night. Nowadays I meet people like once a month at best. But the amount of stuff experienced yesterday almost made me feel young again.

So. Have any suggestions what picture I should put up on my living room wall instead? Leave a comment if you do.

I’ve binged a few older anime series lately. I really loved ReLIFE, which made this old man cry and laugh and cry more than his last serious relationship. And at the moment, I’m about to finish Kokoro Connect, which is kinda the same genre as ReLIFE, and has also made me feel a lot.

It is about a group of teenagers, who catch the attention of a supernatural entity, who then starts to mess around with their lives, because it thinks that “they are interesting” and because he “wants to see interesting things” from them. Well, I’ve now seen some pretty interesting stuff myself.

I like it how these series can really make you feel a lot, you can get addicted to the feels, especially if your own life is devoid of any emotion but regret. And the other thing I like about these high school romance dramas is the deep analysis of the characters’ subconscious worlds that some of the teens can come up with. One moment they are in a serious discussion about each other’s feelings, which would dwarf the analytical skills of even my therapist, and the next moment they are so emotionally charged that they have no control over what is happening.

I guess so far I’d give this series a solid 9/10.

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Are there any more emotional series you’d recommend me that I haven’t seen yet? Let me know in the comments.

So I started playing another gacha game on my phone recently. If you don’t know, gacha games are Japanese games with a super deep and fascinating loot box system. You pay tons of money to open loot boxes to get waifus, and the best waifus are rare, so you really gotta cough up the dough to get them.

And I already did. Cough up the dough, I mean. This game I’m currently playing is called Girls X Battle 2 and it’s pretty awesome. At first I thought it would be lame to pay real money for virtual waifus, but boy I was wrong and I ended up disappointing myself and my parents.

Basically the actual gameplay in Girls X Battle 2 is similar to any idle game – you just make numbers go bigger for the sake of making some more numbers go even bigger. And as these games work, at first you have solid gameplay for some hours, and then you hit a wall. And your credit card will help you breach the wall and keep playing.

There are three currencies needed to make your 12-year-old anime girls’ numbers go bigger – let’s call them “Cash”, “Booze” and “Drugs”. There’s also a premium currency, let’s call it “Diamonds”. So I just used some “Euros” to buy 30 million “Cash”, 30 million “Booze”, and I’m getting the “Drugs” by buying them in-game for “Cash” and “Diamonds”. So now my waifus have infinite power, and I still have around 15 million cash left.

Nice.

 

Anyway, I’m not sure how long I’m going to play it, but it is pretty solid fun. It has a lot of social features, and I like that the girls are voiced by actual famous voice actresses. For example the character on this picture is voiced by Chiwa Saito, who also voiced Senjougahara from Bakemonogatari.