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[NobodyPro]

Clearly we need to give Armstrong his own series.

[Leafsnail]

That's one thing I really liked about Fate/Stay Night, actually.  The cast is really pretty gender balanced and I'm sortof sad that Fate/Zero didn't go down that route (FZ is still better though) (and I guess it does pass the good male characters test).

Beyond that I'm sortof struggling to think of other examples.  Umineko I guess?  Although most of the characters who really matter are female there.  To be honest upon learning something has a female-heavy cast I tend to recoil and assume it's gonna be either heavily sexualised or cutesy to a creepy degree.

[Chaoswizkid]

Black Lagoon has men. And a boy. Sort-of. Sometimes.
Soul Eater has men and boys and girls and women.
Actually thinking about it, there's a considerable amount of anime that has all that. Even sometimes the focus. Newer anime, though, no idea. Not really seen anything with a real focus on the males since Code Geass/Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann/Baccano! I think they all came out around the same time. Maybe they didn't though. /shrug

[NobodyPro]

I just read all of Uzumaki.

Fuck everything.

[Chaoswizkid]

I just read all of Uzumaki.

Fuck everything.

Yes. Yes.

[Flying Dice]

Black Lagoon has men. And a boy. Sort-of. Sometimes.

This. Black Lagoon was pretty good about it. Code Geass was as well, to a certain extent, though there were moments where it backslid into pointless fanservice. And hey, Claymore's a great example of a series that's incredibly gender imbalanced (there are, what, three male characters that matter at all; two of them are villains, and one is put on a bus for years so he can move beyond being Clare's morality pet) without being all fetishistic fan appeal (even if the "armor" is pushing it). Of course, the anime adaption has a shit ending.

Gantz sorta does it, but the anime goes really weird when they cut it off, and it still has a lot of fanservice, even if some of it tends to go both ways. In either case, it's much less tacked on than usual. That's a big part of the problem, though, insofar as that most of the series that aren't just mindless indulgence of the fans (either fanservice or "cute-girls-do-cute-things", if not both) and have something approaching gender neutrality in terms of casting will still indulge in fanservice. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm at the point where I unconsciously cringe at every unfortunate camera angle, etc., especially when it comes from otherwise serious shows. It's like... imagine what, say, North by Northwest would have been like if there had been a bunch of unnecessary and blatantly suggestive shots of Eva Marie Saint. Absolutely bizarre, and quite jarring.

[Cheesecake]

Code Geass was depressing. I mean, seriously. It was a happy ending for everyone except Lelouch. I think this show was the only one where the MC can be a douche while still having people root for him.

Also, started watching Kill la Kill. It's amazing. Especially the art style and comedy.

[ToonyMan]

Finished Ace Attorney 5 over Thanksgiving Break.

I think it's pretty good and the polygonal graphics are much better than Zero Escape 2, but just like VLR I find some points...odd.

Spoiler: vague spoilers (don't open this if you really care about spoilers) (click to show/hide)

I fingered the true culprit way before they were intended to be revealed and I feel kind of cheated on that front, a similar problem I had with VLR (though that wasn't actually the true culprit)...I can't remember deducing the real culprit so soon in the previous games like case 1-4, 1-5, 2-4, 3-5, you get the picture.  And in fact every case in AA5 pretty much shoved the real culprit at you right at the start, at least in the older cases they had the decency to hide the real culprit until the end sometimes, even if it was shameless.

Spoiler: detailed spoilers (don't open this if you haven't finished AA5) (click to show/hide)

Case 1 and 2 outright show who the culprit are in those cases.  Case 3 is probably the best one in that I was a bit torn between Means and O'Conner, but as somebody else said Ace Attorney is far too ideal to tear up a friendship so it would have to be Means.

Now this is where things get wonky.  Case 4 made Fulbright too obvious.  I am quite disappointed in how heavy-handed they showed Fulbright at the end of Case 4.  It was too suspicious.  Finding that lighter?  The oddness in his actions at the end made it impossible for me to ignore.  When Case 5 started I was quite sure it had to be either Bobby Fulbright or Aura Blackquill, but then Blackquill took hostages or something ridiculous and that killed the possibility of them being the Phantom.  For the entirety of Case 5 the game had planted the idea in my mind that Fulbright fits the criteria of the Phantom perfectly, and did almost nothing to dispel that until the end where it's revealed that...yes, Fulbright is in fact the Phantom!  That felt kind of shitty.

Detective Arme's actions didn't make any logical sense either, and it's never explained what she was doing.  Why did she try to kill Yuri Cosmos?  You wouldn't shoot at somebody you can't see in the dark unless you were an insane psychopath or you knew who was in there and wanted them dead.

I also would have liked if Ted Tonate was involved in a deeper level beyond "mere coincidence".  He didn't actually detonate the bomb, sure, but he was a bomb expert and used the explosion to cover his own murder, isn't that far too coincidental?  The game could have explained that.

On the plus side I never got stuck.  AA5 did a good job making the game easier to understand even if it felt easier than usual.  I never had to use the hint system either, but it was there!

The bulk of the plot (Case 1, Case 4, and Case 5) had some good scenes as well, but I don't feel any of them were expounded upon nearly as much as I would have wanted.

The Phantom's Theme is amazing though.  Athena's Objection Theme is also very good.

I sort of have more complaints than praise, but I think I'm a bit more critical after these years of being a defense attorney.

EDIT:

Spoiler: more thoughts (small spoilers) (click to show/hide)

Now that I've had a bit of time to reconvene I should point out what I think worked:

-The majority of the new models look very good.  The animation is very smooth and dynamic.  Only a few characters have "off" or "eerie" looking vibes.  The breakdowns are very nice.
-A majority of the cases were relevant to the main plot.  Case 2 would be the farthest from the main plot, but still manages to make use of the Mood Matrix and have a very silly and chaotic murder.
-The new font is larger and easier to read, and the GUI is more accessible in general.
-The writing is still pretty good even with the oddities, and the "middle cases" were fun and not boorish like it can sometimes feel like.

The voice acting was pretty terrible, but it led to me grin a few times in the ridiculousness.  The yelling in particular was awful.

"UUUWAAAAAhAaAAAaaaaaAAahaHAhAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"

The murder mysteries themselves were pretty cool and unique, but I found figuring the culprits out to be too easy or obvious.

So to put this into three factors:
The music is very good, the voice acting is not.
The new art is very good, the CGs are also very good.  The stuff involving Athena in particular could get pretty amazing.
The writing is probably better than usual for AA, but I don't think it really hits exactly where it wants.

[Korbac]

Code Geass was depressing. I mean, seriously. It was a happy ending for everyone except Lelouch.

BIG SPOILER ALERT

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

except Lelouch?

[Cthulufaic]

I heard there is a Madoka Magica movie being made or something that takes place after the series.

Spoiler: You hath been warned (click to show/hide)

But I thought everything blew up at the end?  And all the main characters caught a bad case of the death?  How do they squeeze a movie out of that?

[Darvi]

I guess somebody didn't watch the ending.

[Yannanth]

.

[Leafsnail]

Code Geass was depressing. I mean, seriously. It was a happy ending for everyone except Lelouch. I think this show was the only one where the MC can be a douche while still having people root for him.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

He achieves all of his objectives.  He should be pretty pleased.

Also while he's crazy as hell he's still probably just about a flawed hero rather than a villain protagonist.

[Sirus]

Saw this in another thread:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

what the hell is it

[Tellemurius]

I heard there is a Madoka Magica movie being made or something that takes place after the series.

Im going to see it next week at a theater 20 minutes from me
Im not much of a fan with magical girls but hell special screenplay for subbed anime? im sold.