Unsurprisingly, F/Z Part II episode 1 is not perfect, but it's as direct a follow-up as one could have hoped for. As if the Winter season never happened, viewers are dropped right back where Part I teasingly ended on. This episode's glorious aerial combat sequence alone features more spectacle than any scene in Part I. ufotable continue to raise the standards of TV anime with stunning lighting and great camerawork in each scene, making most shows this season look impoverished.

If the first episode is anything to go by, Part II aims to please a restless crowd disappointed by the non-existent body count of Part I. Time is running short, both in the F/Z universe and in the show’s episode count, leaving little excuse for characters to sit around and talk for episodes at a time. At the cost of all the characterization and philosophy from Gen Urobuchi’s original F/Z light novel, the story will at least begin to move now, if only out of simple necessity. I’m not convinced that F/Z will be my most anticipated weekly release, especially as it's the sole Crunchyroll delaycast among the six other shows I’m watching, but there are still 12 more opportunities to make the wait worth it.

 — David

Dusk Maiden of Amnesia

Studio: Silver Link
Director: Shin Ounuma
Now Streaming on Crunchyroll

Tasogare Otome x Amnesia (Dusk Maiden of Amnesia) centers on activities of the paranormal investigations club at Seikyoy Private Academy. Rumors about paranormal activity haunt this school, and the club members — Kanoe, Niiya, Kanoe, and Okonogi — task themselves with investigating the more substantial reports they receive. The twist is that not all of the club’s members are, shall we say, on the class attendance list.

I was wary of this show based on its premise, which sounded like something akin to a mash-up of Sket Dance, Ghost Hunt, and Another. To my surprise, however, the humorous first moments of the show defused my standoffishness. The first half introduces Okonogi, who is so obsessed with trying to sort out which mysteries to investigate that she remains completely oblivious to the attention-seeking antics of a local poltergeist. This ghost turns out to be the club’s omnipresent president, who can be seen by all the members except Okonogi and is responsible for at least some of the recent paranormal events reported by students.

Playful humor is the key here. But as much as the first 10 minutes are strikingly tongue-in-cheek, the rest of the show is 98% mired in the usual adolescent anxiety yuks. The remaining 2% is comprised of scenes where the club president does things just to make Okonogi freak out (which alone are charming and make the first episode worth the view). Not what I was expecting, and pleasantly so, this show has at least hooked me in for a few more episodes to see where it wants to go and how it’s going to take its audience there.

— Ink

Concert

Ito's concert was scheduled on Friday just before Haruko Momoi's concert. I was under the impression that Ito would headline, considering the broader appeal of her music, but it's no use questioning the convention's decision now. I placed all of my hopes of being able to attend in my press badge after seeing the city block-length line for the show, and luckily I ended up being led in first to one of the best front row seats in the auditorium. This hour alone was enough reason to make the trip to Boston, and I did not come out disappointed in the slightest. Even without her full backing band, Ito came out and commanded the stage on her own the moment "Hacking to the Gate" dropped. The Steins;Gate anime opening earned her the biggest reaction from the crowd.  No one builds a career on the success of a single song, however, so the momentum from this one would have to pull Ito through the rest of her set list. I half-expected her to simply run through all of her S;G songs, but that was actually the only one she sang that night.

Half the concert was a learning experience, since I'm mostly unfamiliar with Nitro+'s collection of untranslated games. The accompanying video on the screen behind her set the tone for each song of the performance and demonstrated the wide selection of Nitro+ games. Ito claimed (in charmingly prepared English) that she sings lots of sad songs, yet the concert was anything but a complete downer. She kept up the pace after her energetic opener with "Kinkakuji" from Axanael. Ito did get around to playing a truly sad song during her acoustic section for "Shoes of Glass" from Saya no Uta, one of the few Nitro+ games with a fan translation available. Saya no Uta was my introduction to both Ito Kanako and Nitro+, so arriving in Boston years later and hearing her solo guitar performance of "Shoes of Glass" was the highlight of the entire con for me.

Ito played a few more songs, including "STILL" from Boys Love visual novel Togainu no Chi, and debuted "Lost Control", the opening song for the upcoming Guilty Crown visual novel. She closed the concert with an acoustic rendition of an original song titled "Niji ga deru made," from her latest album, spark! After sweetly asking the audience if she could play one of her own songs, Ito revealed that she wrote the song for everyone affected by last year's natural disaster in Japan. Despite making her name singing for eroge, Ito has a true passion for music regardless of the source. Admittedly, Ito brightens up a bit more when playing her own music. In fact, she was very excited when I had her sign a copy of spark! during the autograph session the day after the concert. Ito still had a lot of spirit left over at the end of her set, but unfortunately she was only booked for a single, all-too-short hour.

Guest Panel

Ito's Q&A panel the day after the concert was one of the most loosely presented guest panels I've attended. The audience was simply given the microphone from the start. There weren't many of us in the room beyond perhaps 80 Ito fans, so we kept a steady flow of questions coming in. I would argue close to half the questions were worth asking and the rest were either lost in translation or just not all that intelligent. Questions about her feelings on Nitro+'s eroge titles were met with a stiffness that she must have rehearsed over the last decade. It's understandable, since no one should really expect someone as joyful as Ito to play visual novels or watch late-night anime, but it didn't stop people from asking on the off-chance she would reveal a hidden otaku side. To Ito's credit, she tried to give a good answer, though it couldn't carry through her giggles and embarassment about blanking on the catalog of Nitro+ games. A man rushed in with the actual Nitro+ catalog for Ito and her translator. We soon found out that this was the president of Nitro+, Takaki Digitarou Kosaka, which naturally caused a stir among the crowd of Nitro+ fans.

It says a lot about us that we mostly kept our focus on Ito for the rest of the Q&A after receiving that information. Ito's responses lacked the kind of depth to really satiate me, considering the distance we've both travelled to arrive at the convention, but my expectations might be better suited towards a surly animation industry veteran rather than a female vocalist at the height of her career. Ito gave her backstory: how she sang from a young age, playing in a cover band before being introduced to Nitro+ through a musician friend working there. Most if not all of her Nitro+ repertoire is written by someone else during the game's development, which explains why the lyrics are often rife with spoilers.

I didn't know Ito could play the guitar before the concert, so when I asked her about the unique live arrangement of "Shoes of Glass," she explained that some songs are rearranged for her to play alone. When I followed up with a question about about her animated gestures and dancing during her performances, she grew mildly flustered, telling everyone that she doesn't think about anything when she is on stage. Ito thinks she is a "weird person" and hopes to stop moving around so much when she performs. She also recognized the challenge of having most of her material in games unreleased in America, so she was impressed by the reaction from the concert. She has performed before in arena-sized concerts but prefers smaller venues in order to be closer to the fans. Because of her experience with covers of American songs, she developed a clear accent in English, though singing properly in French was purely an excercise in memorization. Ito also commented on how Japanese artists take inspiration mostly from Western music, but she takes inspiration from late '80s Japanese pop band Rebecca, particularly career of the band's early lead singer Nokko.

The most interesting response came from a question about Robotics;Notes, 5pb/Nitro+'s next visual novel. Ito couldn't confirm directly if she would be involved in the music for the game, but her comically mumbled response is as good a confirmation as any. At the end of the panel, Ito slipped out through the side with her entourage waving goodbye while the crowd was distracted with a full preview of the new opening for the S;G Playstation 3 port. The president of Nitro+, who had been sitting at the opposite side of the exit, was not quite as skillful in evading the swarm of fans requesting autographs and photos. He took the attention in stride and didn't seem bothered at the impromptu interaction with fans.

While not as packed with Japanese industry guests as any of the conventions on the West Coast, Anime Boston came through solely with the inclusion of Ito Kanako. Even without that level of name recognition required of many Japanese musical guests to reach these shores, Ito is the most interesting guest I've seen. Now that a VN theme performer has reached top-billing at an American anime convention, it will be very interesting to see Nitro+'s next move in the West. If Anime Boston's next guest can match the bar set by Ito, I will be sure to return next year.

Click here for more coverage of Anime Boston 2012.

The greatest challenge to begin enjoying Nise is to abandon attachment to most of what was enjoyable in Bake. Bake begins interestingly enough as a sort of supernatural reverse harem (in the chronological sense), where the protagonist settles on a girl first and wanders the town collecting members for his harem afterwards. The 15-episode series tightly compresses two novels worth of character arcs, moving as quickly as text-dense adaptations allow. Despite how the story only seems to move through the sheer might of the sexual tension in some scenes, I will say that Bake has surprised me with the level of sincerity imparted to its characters and how they grow and bond with each other within the relatively short running time of the series.

Nisemonogatari matches, if not improves upon, all of Bakemonogari's strengths in a technical sense. Taking a few broadcast seasons off to focus on their craft and roll in all that Madoka money has made all the difference for Studio SHAFT. They scale back on most of the shortcuts taken in Bake — empty black screens, literal walls of text ripped from the novel, still-frame montages — and actually animate what's happening in unusually splendid detail. The luxury of time and funding means minute physical character tics are placed throughout and that all characters are actually drawn on-model by the time of broadcast. Shinbo's visionary apporach to anime is in full effect for Nise, working sight gags for all they're worth and disregarding any notion of spatial continuity to wonderous effect. Nise triumphs over Bake in that characters rarely sit around to talk; they roll around, do handstands, get into earth-shattering fights, hop across works of post-modern public sculpture, and leave the realm of reality to speak in their inner voice. Nise captures that breath of life in its animation that was missing from most of Bake due to budgetary constraints.

Problems arise for Nise as it moves away from the promising set-up of the first novels. The original Nisemonogatari novel is split into two character arcs covering the protagonist's delinquint younger sisters' involvement with dangerous supernatural phenomena. NisiOisin relegates the principal heroine of Bake and her rival-in-love to supporting roles far away from the action of Nise, though trimming the cast does not give the project any tighter of a narrative focus. The first arc trudges along in the background before abruptly resolving in a most ungratifying manner. The second half isn't much more engaging, but at least there seems to be a deliberate attempt to engage the audience before the end.  The titular characters of each arc might only appear for a few minutes of screen time in some episodes, if at all, and the author doesn't utilize the newly introduced characters much either. Nise feels a lot like an extended intermission between Bakemonogatari and the next book.

As incongruous as Nise seems, it really is the logical (within Nise's personal construct of rules) place to end up after Bakemonogatari. The protagonist has already solved the problems of the members of his harem to a workable degree in the previous series. Bake ends satisfyingly enough, so forcing in a new plotline out of nowhere wouldn't work out. Instead, Nise's continued dialogues between characters further flesh out the kind of people they are and highlight their positions on the harem totem pole. What really works out for Nise, though is that it dissolves the protagonist's Nice Guy hero image from the first series. Even with complete power over the narration, he can't hide some decidedly un-Nice acts. The best writing in Nise comes from seeing the protagonist grapple with the disgusting side of himself as he tries to fight back his urges. I can only reference the actual Monogatari text beyond Nise in a very limited way, but I have the impression the seeds sown in Nise only produce fruit after this story is over. Whether anyone still cares about character dynamics might not be easy to ascertain over the noise caused by Nise's actual draw-in.

Now I've finally arrived at the most polarizing element of Nisemonogatari: it's damn sexy. After about four episodes, there isn't a viewer left who can say they watch Nise for the plot without lying through their teeth. Anime conservatives will crawl back under their safety blanket at the sight of dead elementary schoolgirl upskirt shots, extended conversations with fully nude loli vampires, chiseled male and female collarbones, slavishly drawn bare feet, little sister kimono unravelling, and a lavishly animated toothbrushing sequence that establishes itself as a pivotal moment in changing brother-sister relationship conventions. Bake could get pretty hot when it wanted to, but Nise completely overblows the sex appeal. Factor in SHAFT's keen eye for framing, VOfan's attractive character designs, and NisiOisin's bold situational writing, and you have a product that trumps most standard ero-anime.

The effect is noticably ampilified considering the restraint previously shown by Bake that allowed the audience to grow fond of its characters without a reliance on sexuality. Even higher-leveled anime viewers who are normally okay with inappropriately sexualized underage girls find Nise to overstep the boundaries of dignity the general Western anime community have set forth. As lovingly crafted a sexploitation series NisiOisin and SHAFT have given the world, it's still an exploitation bound to discomfort those who haven't completely embraced their true otaku power. Watching Nise is nowhere near as shellshocking of an experience as, say, watching In the Realm of the Senses. As a major commercial late night television anime, however, it easily crosses over into that zone where viewers will want to take a step back and reexamine their motivations for watching.

Nise is as inaccessible as viewers will make it out to be. On many levels, it's a lot more fun to watch than Bake and certainly more polished than a lot of other work SHAFT has done. On the other hand, Nise leaves us in the middle of a messy web of character relationships that begs resolution. While the sexuality rarely pushes the plot forward, the show would be drained of its energy if the sexuality were taken out. And somewhere under the surface, Nise almost has the right idea in its approach concerning the topic of underage sexuality. The execution, however, is a failure from inception, as the work is clearly aimed to sell wishful fantasies to that crowd of esteemed gentlemen who have no qualms about loving young, idealized 2-D girls.

SHAFT's next adaptation, Kizumonogatari, with its promise of gory vampire violence, will likely take back all of the attention lost during Nise. By no means is Nise the gravest mistep in Japanese young adult literature, but from here on out I hope NisiOisin's other Monogatari novels give SHAFT a little more to work with.

iM@S is the very embodiment of the “otaku making anime for other otaku” phenomenon that every reportedly serious anime blogger has been decrying. Series Director Atsushi Nishigori (Gurren Lagann, Evangelion 2.0) makes his directing debut on a project that he was purportedly already a fan of, an oft-heard claim that according to cynics is an omen of an early death knell for a creative work. The first half of iM@S is largely a big anime mess that underutilizes what people actually like about iM@S, but the path to redemption this show takes in the second half is quite unlike anything I expected from a series I wrote off as an easy cash grab.

iM@S follows the story of 765 Productions, a small-time idol agency aspiring to reach the top of a competitive idol world. The show begins with the arrival of a new producer, simply referred to as Producer for the run of the series, after going through a documentary-style introduction to the 765 Production idols. As interestingly directed as the first episode is, the show slips into standard anime mode for the next seven or so episodes. iM@S doesn't really properly set itself up as a typical slice-of-life show, yet in spite of a bold declaration from 765 Productions of attaining stardom around the beginning, no discernible plot really gets going until the second half. Much of the series is episodic, with each idol receiving focus for an episode or two. Aside from the first episode, there is no introductory easing-in period for the audience to begin caring about the characters, so a solid understanding of a good bit of the iM@S esoterica is required to glean an appreciation of the finer details. Not to say that the show doesn't try to have its cast appeal to viewers, but even after I played some of the game to better understand iM@S, the first episodes still slog through a streak of some of the most uninteresting scenarios committed to animation.

It’s not until episode 8 where the show improves and doesn’t get significantly worse. Here Nishigori and staff start feeling comfortable enough to show off their robust animation talents after lulling audiences into a fanservice coma. The writers even manage to skillfully weave in some strong story arcs and an overarching plot as the show progresses, which is probably more than anyone asked for. Truthfully, the show doesn’t actually get legitimately good until around episode 18; considering that there are 25 total episodes, that means roughly two-thirds of the show consists of arguably okay anime before it drops its best content on viewers. This might be a major problem, but the thing is that iM@S doesn’t need to attract an audience outside of its circle of devotees. The franchise is established and popular, so it really doesn't affect the target audience if a good amount of the show simply consists of side stories like finding a pudding thief or returning someone's lost wedding ring, just as long everyone's favorite characters from the game are present. Unlike other “for fans” projects, iM@S plays the fan-driven angle harder than any anime I’ve seen before, but it is as much a labor of love as it is a calculated strike on the iM@S market. This is certainly one of the better joint efforts between suits and fans who happen to be working professionals.

As an iM@S poser, I seriously envy the level of enjoyment hardcore iM@S fans would have gotten from watching this. From a technical perspective, the show is a complete success. No expense is spared in animation, especially the dance sequences which I’ve heard are actually not traced from the game animations. I'm not too big on iM@S's catalog of ani-songs, but it is extensive and well-produced (I do listen to the first opening song pretty much every day, multiple times, though). The direction picks up superbly after the first half once the show moves into its most dramatic phase as the timing and framing of each important shot is hit perfectly. It's so astounding that I was visibly moved by the events unfolding in an anime adaptation for an arcade game meant to take otaku cash hand over fist. The range of facial expressions and all of the little quirks in movement that are often cut by low-level animators convey a level of genuine emotion that few anime released within the last ten years have reached.

The writing doesn’t quite hit the peaks set by the direction, but still manages a beautiful usage of fantastic elements blending with the realities of the idols in key moments of introspection. It would actually be reminiscent of Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue, if Perfect Blue had been capable of being heartwarming. The world building is excellently accomplished through a “show, don’t tell” policy that illustrates how the rise of the idols changes the world around them. The idols are not merely told that they've become stars, they walk through the streets disguised, wary of arousing attention, while passing billboards for their latest single and seeing their music videos playing along the face of a building by the pedestrian crossing. As far removed from the proceedings as I am, I can't help but to feel proud of these characters for coming so far and developing into proper idols.

iM@S is definitely a thing that is better than it has any right to be. By the time the cathartic final concert episode arrived, I found myself fully invested in this show and the characters, even after a few false starts. This show is an event anime that will and has completely passed under the Western radar for more valid reasons than poor excuses. There are more hurdles to overcome than it might be worth to enjoy the series without previous exposure to the property, and though I praise iM@S for what it does right, it dooms itself early on by being slow to engage the audience. I do apply a minor asterisk to my rating leading to a clause that you should watch it anyway if you have the patience of a saint and an extremely open opinion of what counts as interesting subject material for anime. The iDOLM@STER challenges in the worst way possible but still rewards those who can stick through it.

Fate/Extra is an RPG much in the vein of the later entries in the Persona series. You assume control of a blank-slate protagonist who finds himself involved in a single-elimination tournament for the Holy Grail for reasons he cannot remember. Gameplay breaks down between information-gathering in the school-themed central hub and commanding a Servant, a supernatural being, to fight for you in the tournament. F/E follows passage of time mechanics similar to Persona, assigning you time-sensitive tasks to do before progressing to the next elimination round. Now, I happen to love the Persona games, so I’m painfully aware of every moment F/E doesn’t meet the standards set by the game it emulates.

To start with, the environments (the school and the arena) aren’t all that interesting, and you’ll stare at them for hours as you run through the game. The arena is simply a collection of sparse corridors that don’t serve much purpose other than to hold an enemy encounter, treasure, or scripted event. The school is equally lifeless, especially once the number of NPC combatants is reduced by the end of the tournament. While the level design is lazy, it has nothing on the Extreme Rock-Paper-Scissors battle system. It’s a major letdown to learn that the Servant fights that awed me in the original visual novel have been reduced to a guessing game wherein you input six commands each turn (attack, break, guard, or a selection from a list of skills) and hope for the best. You can easily throw away an hours worth of playtime by not playing like a coward. After a while, Servants will familiarize themselves with enemies and telepathically figure out the enemy’s command order, at which point you can turn off all thinking processes and grind until the enemies stop dropping worthwhile XP.

So the gameplay isn’t all that great, but at least the story and writing should be good, right? Nasu’s name is prominently featured on the back of the box underneath a screen shot, which is more credit than what most writers involved in games can hope for. Unfortunately, Nasu takes it easy with this one. The only characters that are remotely interesting are the three playable Servants and characters with existing ties to the Nasuverse. The F/E originals are surprisingly clichéd and difficult to sympathize with in their dying moments after having remorselessly delivered a beating on them.The principle antagonist for most of the game is a snotty kid who happens to be the king of the world and spends most of his appearances giving condescending advice to your character, who takes it like a punk. Really, that’s the extent of the relationship with what you’re led to believe is your greatest foe for over 25 hours of gameplay. Everything is scripted so that you’re never at a loss of where to go, who to talk to, or what item you need to overcome any obstacle that comes up, and everyone is more than glad to help your amnesiac protagonist against his incompetent and stagey opponents. It’s so straightforward that it prevents interesting developments in the story. I never really felt like my choices had any impact on my character’s development, and forging a bond with your Servant essentially comes down to “Did you talk to your Servant today?” This is essentially the opposite of my experiences with the visual novel, so I wonder how much involvement Nasu actually had in writing the scenario for the game.

There are choice moments where the Fate spirit shines in the game, though. Saber Extra’s dialogue and vocal performance is excellent throughout, pretty much single-handedly justifying F/E’s inclusion in the Fate canon. Caster is worth a playthrough for seiyuu fanatics interested in having voice actress Chiwa Saito refer to them as “master,” even if she’s the weakest servant and requires hours of tender, loving grinding to compete in boss fights. I haven’t yet steeled myself for a third run of F/E, but I imagine Archer is just as wonderfully a jerk as he was in F/SN. Though I wish the game would make a proper name for itself, all of the call-backs to other Type-Moon properties are amusing. The Noble Phantasms are as flashy as the PSP can hope to muster, and the remixed F/SN music tracks let you know that its about to go down right now.

Aksys Games did see fit to give this game a proper showing here in America with its own limited edition release in a big cardboard box that seems to be the fashion with PSP RPGs lately. The extras are typical fare for a release like this: a small art book and an incomplete soundtrack CD. It’s a really nice art book, though; the hardcover binding and paper stock are above what’s usually done for bonuses like this. I’m only a little (very) upset that the Saber Extra figma from the Japanese release isn’t included, but I suppose licensing deals and price and all those other bothersome factors came up.

I’ll keep my berating of Aksys Games' F/E localization to a minimum if I ever hope to see them publish the sequel, which sounds infinitely more interesting. I’ll just say that the localization is kind of weird from time to time. There are a few embarrassing typos in the script, and even more embarrassing are the occasional fansub-isms that pop up in dialogue, a thing people complain about in, you know, actual fansubs and not a product released by professionals. I’m sure no one at mirror moon got paid to translate the F/SN visual novel, but I’m also sure they would have had the integrity to never have Caster say “OMG.”

So Fate/Extra didn’t manage to become my favorite game despite being a Persona clone with Servants in it. The game is a "fans only" experience that often feels like a chore. Even so, I will probably buy the sequel from Aksys or whoever publishes it in America, regardless of all the bad things I’ve said about the first game. I feel responsible to let publishers know there is a market for Fate in America, so I am compelled to vote with my dollars (though Aniplex won’t see a dime of that, let alone $700 to own the complete Fate/Zero collection). I optimistically await to have nothing but good things to say about the sequel.

I feel like I’ve let the prose get ahead of me for a manga review about a quintet of schoolgirls, all members of their school’s Light Music Club, doing silly things and being cute. Even so, I can’t deny the unsettling parallels between drug usage and reveling in the moé lifestyle. It can’t be ignored that there are some deeper machinations at work to have propelled this humble 4-koma gag manga into a merchandising empire that will keep a few creators and publishers financially sound for a time. It’s easy to forget there ever was a manga while the anime has commanded such a blinding presence in the last couple of years (primarily in Japan, different story in the West), and I would argue the franchise wouldn’t be half as successful had Kyoto Animation (KyoAni) not been handed the reigns. K-ON! is one of those cases where the adaptation overshadows the source material.

I would like to stop talking about what KyoAni has done for K-ON! and focus on the manga in question, but it must be said that Kakifly provided an excellent framework rather than a fully realized work. If your first taste of K-ON! came from the television show, the manga may come across as a downgrade. Most of the essential elements are there, but there’s something missing. We might as well get it out of the way now and admit that the missing piece is that deft, loving KyoAni touch that elevates erog and light novels to heights unimaginable by their original creators. While Kakifly competently illustrates the experiences of a group of high school friends, KyoAni breaths life into the world and quite literally makes the characters come alive and sing.

As unremarkable as I make it sound, Kakifly’s K-ON! is still one of the better slice-of-life manga out there. Like any good slice-of-life 4-koma, it’s easy to pick up and effortlessly flip through a whole volume in an hour. There are no ponderous subjects to tackle, hardly any moments of distress, and most conflicts are resolved through spirited enthusiasm and encouragement. Kakifly plays up the sexuality plenty of times, either for a joke or a splash page, but don’t get the wrong idea that K-ON! is some sort of subversive perversion of schoolgirl idolatry (the author isn’t nearly brilliant enough to make that work). Between the anime and the manga, Kakifly takes the crown for having the sexiest content of the two, but even he manages to show some restraint. There are no two-page full color spreads of bathhouse scenes with the Light Music Club, although I’m sure you’d be able to find a poster like that by browsing through K-ON! merchandise.

I don’t want to make any excuses for K-ON! to explain why I like it so much, which is why I need to admit that several criticisms about it are on the mark. K-ON! is about nothing, aside from an account of a high school music club across three years, and occasionally there are too many bare thighs and maid outfits for the typical manga cynic to stomach. K-ON!’s greatest strength that prevents it from collapsing into a sugary goo are its characters. Granted, this won’t work for everyone, but endearment towards the characters goes a long way in one’s enjoyment of K-ON!. While several characters are pulled from stock anime personalities (Ritsu is the energetic girl! Mugi is the kind-hearted rich girl! Nodoka is class rep among class reps!), the execution is such that everyone mixes together well. The anime might do it better, but the manga does a fine enough job convincing me that these people can be friends for reasons other than "we're in the same club". Each character possesses distinct minor traits and are allowed equal time to shine, avoiding favoritism in what is supposed to be an ensemble cast. The clean and attractive character designs avoid the usual anime embellishment, opting instead for a subdued and unified design across all characters. They are “real” enough while allowing Kakifly space to capture the characters' expressiveness.

For a manga that is wholly character-centric, Kakifly makes it look good by keeping it simple. The situations and jokes are such fluff, readers are likely to either grin like a creepy idiot or frown with measured disappointment. Don’t expect too much in-depth musical territory to be covered in the manga, as the girls spend most of their time lounging around in the club room or hanging out in town and each other’s houses. The leisurely pace of Kakifly’s high school utopia covers the usual circuit of Japanese adolescence, from school festivals to club trips. It’s hard not to get even a little invested in the world and characters when it’s made to be so appealing.

The Yen Press release of K-ON! is put together quite nicely. The pages are larger than the typical manga volume, so you won’t need to keep the book so close to your face to absorb the details. Each volume has an abundance of color pages and a few extras tacked on at the end, which I appreciate. The covers and spine are done up in each featured character’s image color and look appealing when lined up. I have minor grumblings about the localization, a welcome change to how I normally feel about having things I like put in a language I can understand by people paid to do so. I commend Yen Press for not writing out Mugi’s yuri-vision scenes after KyoAni killed that noise early in the anime adaptation. However, they dropped the ball by swapping out the onomatopoeia in Azusa’s nickname for the American equivalent, despite how damn near everyone who would pick up K-ON! knows what “nyaa~” is. Yen Press even goes to the length of including a glossary in each volume to explain details that might be lost on American audiences, yet they couldn’t keep “Azu-nya”. Not to mention how poorly “Azu-meow” tumbles out of my dumb American mouth.

I suppose the purpose of a review is to sell someone on a product, but I can’t put it out of my mind the weight one must carry to enjoy something like K-ON!. To the uninitiated, approaching K-ON! requires a blind leap. You either come out of it feeling gross or you discover a new dimension to that Japanese stuff you enjoy so much. If you’re like me, you won’t find out about the dark side of seinen manga target demographics until after you’re in too deep. You’ll most definitely be judged for being into “That Little Girl Crap”, but they can never hope to understand you or your moé. Like with any drug, remember to never take it too hard and always mind your budget.