This is going to be a short, update post on my Love Live project. To give this post a bit of context, I'd like to begin with an appropriate short quote from Gunslinger Girl. 

I'm still very, very, very far from where I want myself to be with Photoshop. Which, by the way, is an incredible tool. Every time I start a new session I always get something new out of it. But it is an incredibly complex tool, and how good the final product comes out depends entirely on how good the user is.

So far into the project, I've found that planning is incredibly important. You have to know what you are doing beforehand and still allow enough leeway to make changes. I didn't plan early enough or as far ahead as I would've liked. So definitely I'll have to improve on that.

Here's something I wished I did earlier: a mockup. It doesn't look like a masterpiece, and what I'm working on doesn't look too much like it either. But there's only so much you can hold in your head. To go ahead and actually sketch out those ideas is the best way to see if they are going to look crap or not. Sometimes, ideas that seem brilliant in the head end up being awfully impractical when you actually do it. Note to self: make sketches, make mockups.

Here's another thing I wish I did earlier: a colour guide. A lot of the really good projects I see use the same colours over and over again. I think this achieves two things. First, a consistent palette ties different elements of the project together. So in my project, I've tried making the orange parts correspond with the Honoka parts, and so forth. 

And second, a consistent palette stops one from putting too much colour in a project. Too much colour is confusing. For Love Live I think it's easy because the girls are 'colour-coded' to begin with. But eventually I'll have to learn how to put together complementary colours.

Finally, I've learnt that it's super important to keep things organized. A PSD file can get very messy very quickly. So it's important to label all the layers and keep things organized (I'm lazy, and that laziness can bite you in the ass more often than you think!) Keeping things organized also helps with your workflow. 

For those character profile/report cards, it's really convenient to start out with a template then just copy-paste. The on the top is about halfway to the real thing. I think it needs some more rendering. The general rule, I think, is that big elements should be 'mass produced' as much as possible. Small tweaks and rendering should be tackled on an individual basis.

That's about it. I spent half the day looking at idol pictures and now I feel like a creep.

P.S. despite what critics apparently think of it, I really like this song by Sayuri Sugawara. You can easily put it into something like Kimi ni Todoke and it won't sound weird.

So today, I started playing FF13. And so ends my 24 hour break from video games! I first watched my friend play it about 4 or so years ago, and as usual it takes about that long for me to actually get down and play it. I'm about two hours into the game, so I guess I'll talk a bit about my first impressions.

First, let's talk gameplay. So far the gameplay has been very linear, although since I'm barely into Chapter Two, things might improve. Contrary to what a lot of critics think, however, I'm not a particularly big fan of the free world. The more free a world is, the more diluted the story becomes. And Final Fantasy games are known primarily for their stories. Of course there's no fun in just walking from one end of the corridor to another and do nothing but grind on the way. Side-quests and mini-games are ways to spice up single-player RPGs and I expect to see both in FF13.

I wish this was a gif so you can see how Vanille runs

The graphics are, as usual, astounding. So far the world setting has looked very spectacular, and FF13 definitely has been a visual treat. The character designs are basically what you'd expect from every FF game since FF8 -- I call that the 'generic Final Fantasy face', a blend of Caucasian facial features and colourful hair that seems to never go messy. On this note, Lightning's character design is actually very good. I feel that her looks is feminine enough to look attractive, but also masculine enough to justify her being the main character.

Her personality, so far, has been very bland. I really hope that they would, somewhere down the line, make her less of a kuudere and giver her a bit more humanity. So far, my favourite character has been Vanille. I can't really say if it's her voice, the way she walks, or the way she acts around Hope. But she's really nice, and I hope this doesn't come off as creepy (I think it already does).

Some final words on voicing: I started out with the default English voice, but when I switched to Japanese I actually thought their body language and expressions felt much more natural. The Japanese voice actresses for the female characters also have a higher, more 'kawaii' pitch which sounds just that much more pleasant to my ears. 

So yea, I hope FF13 delivers a really good story. I'll be sure to enjoy it slowly, which is hardly an issue since I spent way, way, way too long looking at Vanille.

P.S. I was listening to the FF13-2 theme song earlier today. Tried doing a piano transcription which came out pretty good...until I realized I couldn't sing. I also think that Charice's version is a bit more exciting than the Japanese version.

So recently I've tried squeezing in some anime between my work sessions. I haven't watched much for quite a long time. In fact I haven't watched anything seasonal for a while. Which I suppose is okay, because not many good shows have come out this year (and no, I'm not into Type-Moon). So I don't feel I've missed out on much. On the topic of Type-Moon, let's talk about Canaan.

I finished watching Canaan a few days ago. It was an okay show. Canaan is just really, really average, and after having watched it I realized how much P. A. Works had improved as a studio during the past several years. For me, Canaan resembles a less well-executed, less exciting version of Black Lagoon. Most of the action scenes were pretty hilarious (Canaan is just that good at dodging bullets), and only a show like Jormungand is arguably worse when it comes to animating unrealistic gunfights, even by anime standards. The show was literally a trainwreck. The story is okay, but I felt that the pacing is a bit too slow and for someone with a short attention-span like me, it was hard for me to keep myself engaged. 

Well, there are pluses, I suppose. For one, I like the character designs. Canaan looks pretty sexy. She's a cold-blooded killer but she also has that tiny dose of humanity which makes her a bit more likeable. Every other character, however, are completely 2-dimensional, which is to be expected since Canaan is largely a story-driven show (except that the story isn't very good). Secondly, Canaan also did an unexpectedly good job portraying Shanghai. I've been to Shanghai a few times and let me tell you, the run-down districts look almost identical to how Canaan portrayed it. The interiors of the trains and taxis looks very much like their real-life counterparts. So I applaud their attention to detail.

An actual Chinese market looks almost exactly like this. Minus the tits.

Danna ga Nani wo Itteiru ka Wakaranai Ken (or Danna ga Nani for short, although to be serious I have no idea what its abbreviation is) is one of the more interesting shows I've watched in a while. Well, it's not really a show because it, for the most part, doesn't have a continuous storyline. Every episode is like a comedy sketch that lasts a few minutes long. It's about the life of a good-for-nothing otaku husband with an office-lady wife, and the stuff that happens in their daily lives. The husband doesn't like to work so he stays home all day, while the wife is in a dead-end office job and gets drunk on a regular basis. What's surprising, I guess, is that they somehow made a comedy out of this.

Shows that talk about otaku typically fall into two categories. You have the Lucky Star/Oreimo category that makes comedy out of it (and is typically filled with references to the culture itself) or you have shows that looks at its 'dark side' via satire (NHK and Genshiken instantly comes to mind). Danna ga Nani starts out sort of between the two categories. After a few episodes, however, the tone changes, and it turns into more of a sketch about what you'd actually expect in the daily lives of a young couple. It's mundane, it's somewhat repetitive, and it can be pretty cute at times.

I suppose that if otaku do get married, they'd most likely stop thinking about their waifu and worry about raising kids very, very quickly. The last anime I watched that was solely about post-marriage life is Otono Joshi no Anime Time, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Japan really needs make more shows like these. Which is unfortunate, because the minds of the anime fanbase, by and large, are stuck in high school. Not many people will enjoy an anime about divorce when most fans are either single, or spend their Christmas taking a picture of their favourite anime girl looking at a cake in front of the monitor.

I've been revisiting some of the old shows I've watched. A few days before I watched an episode of Aria the Natural, and it touched my heartstrings in the same way it did three years ago. I'm also trying to finish off Tamako Market, but really, I don't think any KyoAni shows post-Nichijou is worth watching. The only show I'm watching that I found interesting is Gunslinger Girl. I'm only three episodes in and I already think it might be one of the best shows I'm ever going to watch. Somehow they managed to combine little girls with blood and gore and ended up with something that's actually tasteful, unlike Elfen Lied (which honestly was terrible). It also has an amazing soundtrack. I can't wait to watch all of it when I have time.

It seems that 2015 has quietly arrived while I'm typing this up. So yea, happy New Years everyone.

So I've been pretty tired lately. Tried playing games, but video games just tires me out nowadays. Every time I play I either feel stressed or nauseous, and I don't really know why. Maybe it's a sort of mild motion sickness, I think. That feeling goes away when I start working, though. It feels nice to work, to read, and to do all that stuff. Anything but video games...

Been working on a new project. It's not really a book, I guess. It's just an exercise where I get to try out new techniques and improve my Photoshop skills. However a lot of the elements were borrowed from some of the artbooks I own. The images below are just drafts of the real thing, so there's definitely a lot to improve on.

So as you can see, nothing too special. I really wanted to do effects that are a bit more complicated, but composition and colour are probably more important than making them look flashy. As I've said before, looking at the work of professionals really makes me want to get better. I think what made my work process a lot harder than expected, is just how much it takes to tear down what obviously looks terrible and remake things from scratch. That, and the lack of ideas. At the beginning it was hard to think of what to actually put into the project. Maybe I'm just not that much of a LL fan.

2015 will be here soon. Honestly, I'm pretty scared. I'm scared that I'll be one year older soon and that I won't amount to anything, that I would waste my days idle. The feeling of working, and working, and finally working yourself to exhaustion is the best feeling I've ever experienced. If there's really a New Year's Resolution I'd want to follow, it'd be that I can work myself to exhaustion everyday. Work is the only thing that brings me satisfaction nowadays.

I also realized I uploaded two of the pictures as transparent PNGs. I'm so retarded. Also, tomorrow morning I'm most probably going into Auckland city. Oh how much I look forward to going outside...

Whelp, here it is! Merry Christmas everyone. The files are pretty huge, actually. It'd take forever to upload it here. Here are the thumbnails for the album.

And...here's the link! Enjoy. Off to playing Shogun 2.