Erufailon4

In my previous collection update a year ago, I expected I'd buy in 2023 "maybe not as much as in 2022 but we'll see". I definitely did buy less manga this year, but for Blu-rays we did see and what we saw was that I ended up pretty much doubling my Blu-ray collection. I can thank the monetary graduation gifts I received as well as my work try-out for giving me the necessary budget to spend, but on the down side the shelf space is really starting to become an issue. Let's see how my collection looks as 2023 comes to its close.   Manga & Light Novels   Even in a relatively quiet year on the manga front, my collection grew enough for the larger size volumes to now occupy almost all of my top-left shelf. New arrivals on the English side this year were Bocchi the Rock!  vol. 1, Children of the Whales  vol. 2, Soloist in a Cage  vol. 1, the first two volumes of Oshi no Ko  and The Promised Neverland  vol. 3. As I recall most of them were ordered onl...

What better way to spend Christmas Eve than looking back on this year of anime? ... Well, probably many better ways. But this is the schedule I set for myself, and I'm going to stick to it. So, without any further ado...  Top 10 (Non-Sequel) Anime: 10. Insomniacs After School Nice, chill romance that had an interesting focus on photography and did a good job of developing the relationship.  9. Shy Might seem like just another gimmicky post-MHA superhero anime with said gimmick being that it's also just another post-Bocchi "she's just like me fr" anime, but has a surprisingly solid emotional and thematic core. The characters are more than just their archetypes and many of them receive quite a lot of development over the course of the series. Masaomi Ando's direction elevates the already good story.  8. Tearmoon Empire I didn't know pretty much anything about this one going in, so I was surprised by how funny it was. While the dramatic first scene might fool...

A bit of a boring title this year. Anyway! This has been an excellent year for anime openings and endings, to the point where especially with openings narrowing down a top 10 was extremely difficult. There were quite a few, like those of Tsurune: The Linking Shot , The Apothecary Diaries , Spy x Family Season 2  and Stardust Telepath , that would've made the list in any other year. But in the end, these are not "all the good stuff" lists - these are top 10 lists. The cream of the crop, the best of the best. So, let's get started.    Top 10 OPs   10. Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead  OP "Song of the Dead"   It would be an understatement to say that Zom 100 's production has been troubled. One example of its effects is the opening, which had placeholder visuals for a good portion of it until episode 9. The final(?) opening is worth the wait though: energetic, well choreographed and, most importantly, very funny. Much like the series itself. Song is a bange...

In July 2019, back when I was still very new to anime and was enthusiastically devouring anything interesting-looking I could find, I discovered  Attack on Titan . During the couple of weeks it took me to binge all three seasons out at the time, I was completely enamoured with its story and world, and was left to wait for the fourth season. While waiting for the season that would eventually start over a year later, my familiarity with the series and its opening theme songs also led me to a discovery that quite possibly changed my life.  First it was just Linked Horizon's opening songs, then the ending song, then the other AoT-themed songs that didn't appear in the anime itself, and before long I found myself watching the Shingeki no Kiseki concert on YouTube, completely in love with LH. I wanted more, and I got it in the form of Sound Horizon, a completely new world of musical storytelling that I previously had had no idea even existed. When I had consumed all of SH content av...

When I started reading The House in Fata Morgana  back in January, I didn't know it would become one of my favourite works of fiction ever. There is just so much to love, from its carefully constructed plot and multidimensional characters to its unique artstyle and breathtaking soundtrack, that I could spend an entire blog post just gushing about it. Later I also bought the prequel A Requiem for Innocence  and also enjoyed it. But that was all that was available for PC - the rest of the Fatamoru content that has been translated to English is only included in the console ports. So, once I decided to finally get myself a Nintendo Switch, I also ordered a physical copy of the Switch edition of the VN. Since it's a Limited Run release I could only find it from resellers on eBay, who were charging... some pretty high prices. I went for the cheapest option possible, but even so it was a lot more than I had spent on the PC versions (+ soundtracks and artbook) in total.  Worth it...

My personal website erufailon4.net has now officially opened. It's very much a WIP still, don't get me wrong, and doesn't have much content yet, but I figured it would be best to have something  on it at this point, considering that I've already had the domain for over a year and been paying for the hosting for about half a year. While there aren't a lot of pages yet, I think the home page looks pretty nice even if I do say so myself. (Special thanks to the Bootstrap framework for doing the heavy lifting.)  I'll take this opportunity to also note that I haven't updated this blog since the Ema Full unboxing in June. That's because I've been busy with that massive thing (only got half of the endings at the moment) - once I finish the entire BD, expect some kind of impressions or retrospective or theories. The amount of months remaining of this year is slowly but surely decreasing, and I'm going to have to pick up my pace if I want to do everything...

It's been a long time coming, but over 2 years after it was announced, 7 months after I pre-ordered it, and 3 months after it was originally supposed to be released, Sound Horizon's 7.5th or 8.5th Story BD Ema ni Negai wo! Full Edition  is finally here. I originally wasn't sure if I was even going to buy it, but then decided to support Revo and get it... for as cheap as possible. Luckily Amazon Japan was selling it without any store bonuses for 17000 yen (19164 yen with Finnish VAT) plus 2651 yen shipping, so at the end I only paid a bit less than 150 euros - with the downside that I indeed didn't get those bonuses. Would they have been worth 5000 yen? Maybe... but probably not. Also worth mentioning is that this was my first experience with DHL as a courier and I'd say it was a positive one. I wasn't home on Monday to sign it when it arrived so I authorized them to leave it in the mailbox. The package arrived completely unharmed.  Ema Full's packaging is mi...