Welcome To My Little
Anime/Manga/Game Showcase

Seen the nice looking cut-scenes from Squaresoft's new game yet? Guess you'll be seeing a lot of it in the near future. And I mean A LOT. Click HERE for some FF9 Manga I made of the last few scenes in the game, and a little wallpaper collage from various other in-game images.

So what's hot in Japan? (and incidentally, hot on my list too ^_^) Behold: "Love Hina" by Ken Akamatsu, a wonderfully humorous, romantic, and fast-paced story of a girl (Narusegawa Naru) and a guy (Urashima Keitarou). Ken Akamatsu, of "AI Don't Think So" fame, had "Love Hina" serialized in "Shonen Weekly Magazine" in late 1998. To date, the series has spawned 8 volumes of manga, numerous 'desktop collection' CDs for J-Windows 95/98, a drama CD, 2 character image song singles, and a TV series (which is still on air in Japan, having reached expisode #17). The anime series currently ranks as #1 in Newtype August's charts, and a total of 4(!) of its characters occupy the Top-10 character popularity charts.

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So what's so good about "Love Hina"? Ah, the storyline, dear surfer. If I were to reveal any tiny bit of the plot to you however, it would spoil the fun of the whole series. There's no end to the ever shifting plot, its fans clued of the changes to come only by a few small details within the story. For your reading pleasure, I have translated the 1st two colour pages from the Manga. These are not scans- they came straight from the author, and no- there is no English version of the manga out yet. Also, you can stream a trailer (of the two meeting for the 1st time) from the 1st episode of the TV series here Please do not distribute any of these images without permission, as doing so may imperil the availability of officially translated copies in the future.

Item 2: INFINITE RYVIUS -A Collage- Lord of the Flies goes to space. Although this series is about a year old by now, I figured that I'd just post some pics from this angst-ridden series just for the heck of it. Download the screen-capture collage I made from in-series stills here.

Ever heard of Leaf Software (of TO HEART fame)'s "COMIC PARTY" before? It casts the player in the role of a 'doujinshi' (fan) artist, taking part in various 'Comic Markets' in Japan, and generally making acquaintances with some other female 'doujinshi' artists (as well as a few minor idol-singers and such). This game was released in mid-1999. The character designs for this game are quite cute, as you can see from this collage I made.

It's nearly impossible for anyone outside Japan and Taiwan to have heard of this game. Nevertheless, it has a pretty catchy opening song by some unknown singer- and I've encoded it in the Realmedia format: Download the RealMedia Sound File (1.88Mb Stereo) here. Requires the RealMedia player. No distribution or public showing of this file allowed, as usual.

The latest game from Studio E*go! features a different lead singer(!). Ah, well- I was getting tired of the old one anyway. I've made a small wave file out of the first few seconds of the opening song- it makes a great Windows starting sound clip. Download the Wave File (604Kb) here. ...and I've also encoded the opening movie into a 34Kbps RealMedia file: Stream or download it (461Kb) here. Requires the RealMedia player. See Yamamoto Kazue's much vaunted character designs! ^_^;