Lucky Star (anime)

Lucky Star started out as a comic strip manga my Kagomi Yoshimizu in 2003, and was adapted to an anime in 2007, which was released in the West by Bandai Entertainment, then again by Funimation.  More mangas and light novels are still being written in this series to this day, but I'm reviewing the 24 episode anime that was released in 2007.

Lucky Star was groundbreaking in showing how incredibly entertaining the mundane could be.  There is no epic saga, just anime schoolgirls doing schoolgirl things.  They go to school, do homework, watch anime, get sick, get better, argue, go on vacation, all the little things we took for granted before the Pandemic.

This anime set the stage for dozens of moe, slice of life anime for years to come.  It it thanks to Lucky Star that we have hundreds of other anime showcasing the day to day lives of schoolgirls, office workers, monsters, mermaids, all sorts of people.  It's fascinating, and comforting, and relatable.  

World of Warcraft: from the Wrath of the Lich King to Legion

World of Warcraft is a truly massive online roleplaying game.  It's servers first went live in 2004 and the game still persists today.  For several years, this game was a large part of my life.  I played the original WoW trial the year it came out, and decided it was too large a scale for me to get involved in at the time.  My trial character was a Tauren, and their starting zone, Mulgore, was HUGE.  Having no one to teach me how to navigate such a massive game at the time, I did not subscribe.

A few years later, I was with my boyfriend (future husband), who had played since vanilla, and their first expansion, The Burning Crusade, was releasing at midnight.  We stayed up late, at a Gamestop, waiting outside, to get his special edition boxed set.  I still did not play.

Style Savvy & Style Savvy Trendsetters

Style Savvy, called Style Boutique in Europe and Girls Mode in Japan, is a retail management simulator focused on women's fashion.  It was released in the US in 2009.  Around that time, I had my very first personal console, a Nintendo DS.  Being an avid fan of dressup games, I had to have it.  Though it's not really a dressup game primarily, it does allow you to dress up your character with inventory you buy to sell at the fictional clothing shop.  It boasted over 10,000 fashion items for you to obtain, but 90% of them were repeated recolors.  It was a very ambitious new idea and many young people picked up the game.  It's very easy at first, but as time goes on, gets difficult because repeat customers expect you to remember them and what styles they want, or worse, they want you to guess what style they want based on what pixelated mess they're currently wearing.  Between this, and painfully limited shop inventory slots, it becomes a surprisingly difficult game.  A guide book was published, but it completely lacked the most important part, notes on what each customer wants.  Yes, I wasted money on that book.

Style Savvy Trendsetters, called Style Boutique 2 in Europe and Girl's Mode 2 in Japan, came out for the Nintendo 3DS in 2012.  At it's core, it's the exact same game as it's predecessor, but with vast improvements.  The more powerful hardware of the 3DS allowed for much better graphics, and bigger screens made everything easier to see.  And Syn Sophia, the developers of Style Savvy, took full advantage.  The 3d models in SST are so much easier to look at.  The clothes look a hundred times better too.  They didn't reuse any assets from Style Savvy, it's all new and improved.  The cover boasts an extra 2,000 items more, but I'm pretty sure that's for the menswear section they added to the game.  In SST, you get to assist and sell to male customers too!  I like this a lot.  Another improvement I could tell pretty quickly, was the shop's inventory space wasn't nearly as limited.  It starts off nice and big and you unlock more space as you go too, such a relief!  Sometimes clients make you guess what style they want, but they are a lot easier to see what they're wearing, and if you're really stumped, other players have contributed to a customer guide here!  Thank goodness for the internet coming through this time.

Style Savvy Trendsetters was so successful, that a third and fourth installment were made before the end of the 3DS era.  Style Savvy Fashion Forward, also known as Style Boutique 3 or Girls Mode 3 was released in 2016 and it is very difficult to get a hold of.  The last installment, Style Savvy Styling Star, is only available on the Nintendo Eshop.  Sadly, it did not get a physical release in the West, and has to be downloaded.  As of this moment, there is no evidence of Syn Sophia making a Style Savvy for the Nintendo Switch yet.

Aura Kingdom

Aura Kingdom is a Free to Play Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game that I became addicted to when I quit World of Warcraft.  It's very low-budget compared to other MMOs, and if you're not careful, it can make you broke, but it's been a huge source of comfort since leaving WoW.  It has brightly colored, anime style graphics, cute, generic anime player characters, adorable animal monsters, flashy but simple combat, and a simple storyline.

When I say it's low budget, I mean there are a lot of places where the developers cut corners.  They recycle NPCs, monsters, set dressings, icons, dungeon maps, almost everything.  The only things that don't get recycled are costumes and Eidolons.  These are their two moneymakers, so this is what they spend the most time and development on.  Costumes are the appearance of clothes your player character is wearing.  Eidolons are essentially combat pets you collect and level up to increase your power.  Eidolons are inspired by characters from fairytales and mythology, and usually take the form of attractive warriors.

In spite of being low budget and focused on Eidolon sales, I still enjoy this game very much.  The tab-targeting and hotkey combat system is very similar to WoW, which is good for me, because I learned how to play MMOs in WoW.  In addition to leveling up, and collecting Eidolons and costumes, there are a number of professions you can level up in Aura Kingdom, and I enjoy most of them.  Fishing is my favorite, it's a minigame that can be played at selected locations, usually a beach, river, or lake.  There is fishing gear, that you can only obtain by fishing more fishes.  You can display your most impressive fish catches as trophies in your home.  Oh yes!  You have your own customizable home in Aura Kingdom, and I love mine very much.  Furniture crafting is one of the professions you can level up in the game, and the more furniture you craft, the better furniture you unlock.  Other professions available include alchemy, cooking, archaeology, and gathering.  Cooking is a particularly tough minigame.

Would I recommend this game to a friend?  I'm not sure.  It has it's ups and downs for sure.  You can complete most of the story content with only one eidolon, which you get for free every time you create your character, but it is terribly easy to feel the need to purchase them all, and that can get very expensive.  The gameplay itself is rather simple, which I personally enjoy, but others can find very boring after a while.  If you just want to play through a story, I recommend stopping at level 80.  The primary story wraps up there, and the content added after seems... not as relevant to the original story.

Puni Puni Poemy

Puni Puni Poemy is a parody anime that came out in Japan in 2001 and the USA in 2004.  I got my copy on DVD from a local shop back in college.  At only 1 hour long, it's lewd, it's rude, and it's one of my favorites when I'm hyper.  It references and mocks all sorts of anime, from magical girl to mecha, to hentai.  I searched for a source manga, and never found one, so my guess is there is no manga related to it, however, she might be related to Excel Saga, another very funny anime done by the same people.

In this short anime, a schoolgirl named Poemy is put in a catastrophic situation by alien invaders and uses a magic dead fish to become the scantily clad hero, Puni Puni Poemy, all while trying to become a successful voice actress.  Her doting best friend, Futaba, also has super powers, but her older sisters stop her from using them until the finale.  Poemy is also infatuated with classmate Kei, who never sends her a message or call, but he turns out to have a ridiculous backstory and hidden intentions that come out in the second episode.

This show is pretty bad, and I love it for it.  It's probably a good thing that this hasn't been picked up by any of the streaming services.  I would never share this show with polite company.  It's really only funny if you watched anime during the timeframe that it was making fun of.  It's one of those "You had to be there" things.

Sailor Moon (season 1) VIZ dub

Sailor Moon was a big part of my childhood.  This anime was near and dear to my heart when I was a kid.  The version I watched on TV as a child was dubbed by DIC, later 4KidsTV.  It was very brutally edited for a young, American audience.  Subtitled, less edited versions were available on DVD, but I could not purchase them when I was younger.  I just had some dolls, a music CD, and my memories.

When the Sailor Moon franchise got a big revival in the mid 2010's, I was overjoyed.  I was an adult with income, and all the classic Sailor Moon manga and anime were re-released, with less edits, and more accurate dubs of the anime, and of course, plushies and other merch too.  I scooped up as much of it as I could, getting the VIZ release of the entire series on DVD, and the entire manga, re-released by Kodansha, and some plushies of the Sailor Guardians.

Watching Sailor Moon again was amazing for me, even as an adult.  It took a few episodes to adjust to the newer voice acting cast, because my brain still remembered their 90's voices very well, but I was able to get used to it easier than I expected.  The VIZ cast seems less cartoony than the DIC cast.  They sounded more serious, which fit the less edited version of the show.  The whole anime has a more serious tone than the version I remember as a kid.  The situations felt more dangerous.  The stakes were higher, people were in danger of actually dying.  Also, the subject matter of some of the episodes was more adult than I remembered.  I'm prolly gonna repeat these points when I review the manga.  This anime is way more directed at teenagers than the DIC edited dub was.  Overall, I'd say the differences that make it more true to the original make it even better than I remembered.

So far, this is my favorite Sailor Moon season to date.  I feel the Queen Beryl story arc has a magic that following seasons didn't quite capture for me. If you're not gonna watch all 5 seasons, season 1 is still a good story to enjoy on it's own.  I laughed, I cried, and I'll treasure this season forever.