“Epic Badasness” would be the most appropriate word to describe this chapter.

Fate is pissed off at Negi because he has a better idea than his idea of destroying the world. N0 one believes this, and I actually started doubting it even more when Negi mentioned that it involved the Class Rep… How exactly could an annoying blonde shoutacon help saving anything?

Anyways, Zazie’s Sister raises again from the rubble she was buried under and exclaims that she doesn’t believe it either, and goes Xenahort’s Heartless. Chisame’s comment: “Oh, God! She’s totally a Final Boss character! Just look at that design!“. Apparently, she’s one of the Demonfolk, and yes, she holds high enough status to be Final Boss Material.

Zazie’s Sister is seriously sceptical to how a 10 years old kid could possibly save the world (I am too!), and has her Guardian do a seriously overkill attack that’s parried by Mana, Kaede, Setsuna and Ku-Fei who awakens from Cosmo Entelecheia. Kaede apparently “spent an excessive length of time in the company of my late grandparents” in there, Mana looks silly, Harumi apparently dreamed of World Domination (anyone surprised?), Setsuna is ashamed of her dreams involving a lesbian relationship with Konoka, and Ku-Fei is also getting all embarassed despite her dream seems to have been to fight someone whom I can’t recognize.

Zazie’s Sister, whom Negi decices to rename to “Poyo Rainyday”-san (Chisame: “…we’re calling her Poyo now? Seriously?”), decides to go overkill again. Negi tells the others to go after Fate while he fights Poyo-san. However, he is stopped by Mana who triggers a bunch of Gravity Mines (made by Chao Lingshen) she had apparently put in there (Chisame: “Yep, she’s a monster”), which presses Poyo into the ground and creates a huge crater (just how thick is that floor!?) and jumps after her down into the crater. Poyo theorizes that Negi’s method will lead to the future which Chao Lingshen came from (the one where everyone dies, remember?), but Mana bets that Negi’s method works while loading some of the Time-Space Displacement Bullets used for disqualifications during the Mahora Festival Arc (I sure hope she modified them, having a Xenahort’s Heartless-ripoff appear out of nowhere outside school could scare anyone out of their minds), then transforms into a… Demon!? Mana is a Demonfolk!? Okay, it was pretty clear already that she wasn’t human, but a Demonfolk? Random but awesome!

Next week there will be yet another break (hopefully we won’t have to wait a month like last time)… But there will also be a special One-Shot of Love Hina included!! Woo-hoo!

I just got the Visual Novel game Little Busters! working on my Macbook through Wine. However, since the process was far from easy, I thought I’d share how I did in case someone else wants to play Visual Novels too. Note that this guide is made for Key/Visual Art’s Visual Novels, like Clannad, Kanon, Air, Little Busters, etc. and other game makers’ games may not work at all. You should check them up in this database before trying to run them, if they’re gold or platinum, they’re playable. Note that you also need an Intel mac, any mac with G3, G5 or G5 processors (pre-2005) runs on the PPC architecture which makes Wine impossible to run. The initial steps also requires you to be logged in as administrator. If the admin account is separate from your normal account, make sure to have the admin account’s credentials available, or ask your administrator to run the first step for you.

Note that this guide uses examples for installing the game Little Busters, other games may place the installed files in other locations, if that’s the case, you just need to change the paths.

Quick Guide to many of the special characters present in this guide:

• ~ = Refers to “/Users/<your username>”, and gives the exact same result as typing that instead. Typed by holding ALT and pressing [N] (American Keyboard) or [^/¨] (European Keyboard), and then pressing Spacebar.
• ; = Links several commands together to be performed in succession. e.g. typing “command1;command2″ is equal to first running command1, waiting until it’s done and then running command2.

General advice for interacting with the command line:

• There is a difference between “/path/to/file” and “path/to/file”. The first (begins with a “/”) will search from the root of your startup drive, while the second will start from the directory you are currently in
• There is also a difference between something between quotation marks and without. In the former case, the text is taken as a Literal, and shortcuts like ~ will not be expanded like intended. In the latter case, you need to prefix any spaces in the path with “\” without the quotation marks (space -> backslash space) or it won’t work (note that spaces separating Arguments to a command should NOT be escaped like this; in that case this is the intended behavior)

Step 1: Getting the necessary files

(this step only needs to be done once, and does not have to be repeated for every novel you install)

1.1: X11 and Wine
To install a Visual Novel, you need a number of things. For a start, you need Wine and X11 to run Windows .EXE-files. To install X11, you can either grab it from the OSX Installation disc or from here. Then, you need MacPorts to install Linux/UNIX-packages from the Command Line, grab that from here and follow the installation instructions (NOTE: it’s not just installing the package!). After you have installed Macports, open Application->Utilities->Terminal. Then type the following command (Copy it exactly! A typo will make the command fail!) and press Enter:

clear;sudo port selfupdate;sudo port install wine-devel winetricks cabextract +universal;sudo port upgrade all

Congratulations, you can now run windows applications! However, before we start doing that, we need to make said windows applications work. Type this command into the terminal (some parts are supposed to end with an “Installation Failed” message) WARNING! This step will fail (for real) if you’re not logged in as yourself!:

clear;winetricks corefonts;winetricks comctl32 comctl32.ocx d3dx9 d3dx9_28 d3dx9_36 dinput8 directmusic directplay dotnet20sp2 fontfix vb6run


The script will install much of the components required to use most Windows applications for you, just sit back and watch, however, do not leave the computer since it will occasionally ask you to accept a license agreement or ask for confirmation (Notice the gray ugly windows-style boxes? Those are actually Windows applications!). When this is done, you can theoretically run most Windows applications unless they are too complicated. However, to make it play anything in Japanese or with a japanese origin, you need to fix some more…

1.2: Japanese Fonts
(from now on, make sure you are logged into the account you are planning on playing on)

To run Japanese games, your computer need to be able to render Japanese text, of course. If you try without these installed, you will just get ASCII-gibberish and there’s a large chance of the application crashing or acting strange. To enable Japanese fonts, grab this file and type this command (don’t type the [[DROP HERE]] part, instead, drag the downloaded file from Finder to the terminal when you get to that part to make it paste the full path to the file in there):

cd ~/Desktop/;LANG=ja_JP.SJIS wine [[DROP HERE]];mv -fv ./*.ttf ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/Fonts/

This will install the required fonts. However, we’re not ready to play just yet.

Step 2: Preparing the game itself

(if you want to install more novels, repeat from here)

Step 2.1: Installing the Game
This is just what it sounds like: Install the game. If you have the physical disc, insert it. If you have an ISO or DMG with the contents of it, double-click on it to mount it. Then type the following command into the Terminal to open up the installer:

cd "/Volumes/LB";clear;LANG=ja_JP.SJIS wine ./Autorun*.EXE

If your Installation Disc is called something else than “LB”, you must replace it with the name of your disc. Note that it is case sentitive, so “LB” is not the same as “lb”, “Lb” or “lB” and so on. If the name is long, you can replace cd "/Volumes/LB" with cd /Volumes/[first few letters of the disc name]* where you insert enough letters in the disc name to make sure there’s no other devices (Hard drives, Web Servers, Discs, etc.) that are mounted (that is, appears on the desktop or the finder sidebar) that begins with the same letters. Make sure you replace any spaces with “\ ” (Backslash Space) without the quotation marks.

Step 2.2: Patching the Game Engine

(Little Busters! Exclusive; though if you have other patches you want to install, you will still want to follow this step, adapting it to use other filenames as appropriate.)

If you are installing Little Busters!, grab this patch for it. If you are installing a novel that requires a No-CD Patch, you can use the same steps there, but you have to get the Patch yourself. Note that a lot of Visual Novels doesn’t require you to patch anything, but Little Busters! and a few others can’t be played without the physical disc without a No-CD Patch. If you run the game in the final step and it doesn’t run and is saying something about a missing CD follow this step. Also note that this step assumes that your game uses REALLIVE, if your novel uses some other engine, you have to replace “REALLIVE.EXE” in the commands with the name of the executable you want to patch.

Place the downloaded EXE-file on your desktop and rename it to “Patch.exe” for the sake of simplicity (again, case sensitive). Then run this command:

cp ~/.wine/drive_c/KEY/*/REALLIVE.EXE ~/Desktop/;cd ~/Desktop/;LANG=ja_JP.SJIS wine ./Patch.exe

And choose to patch the file “REALLIVE.EXE” that will be located on your desktop. When it’s finished, run this command:

mv -f ./REALLIVE.EXE ~/.wine/drive_c/KEY/*/;rm -f ./Patch.exe;rm -f ./REALLIVE*

This will update the game engine and make it possible to actually run the game, as well as removing the used patch (remove the “rm -f ./Patch.exe” part if you want to keep it).

Step 2.2: Language Patch

If you have a Language Patch (for translating the game to english), name it “LangPatch.exe” (or change the name in the command below to whatever it’s called; just make sure to replace any spaces in the filename with “\ ” (backslash-space) or it won’t work), place it on the desktop, and run this command:

clear;cd ~/Desktop/;LANG=ja_JP.SJIS wine ./LangPatch.exe

Repeat this step for any additional patches.

Step 3: Running the Game
Step 3.1: Creating the Script
To actually run the game, there are several steps involved. To make this a easy as possible, we will be creating a script that does most of the work for you.

Open a text editor of choice (any editor works, like the built in one, which I’ll be using), and create a new file in your home folder (/Users/<yourname>) with a name along the lines of “littlebusters.sh”. The name can be anything, but it should end in “.sh”, and should only contain characters a-z and underscore( _ ).

WARNING: You should save this as PLAIN TEXT. If you’re using Text Edit, select Format -> Convert to Plain Text to remove formatting. Also, never EVER use Word, Pages or other word processors to save these files. Saving formatted text will cause the script to stop working, and instead throwing weird errors at you about commands not being found.

If you have a disc, type this into it:

if [ -e /Volumes/<< The full name of your CD >> ]
then
echo "The CD is inserted, starting game..."
LANG=ja_JP.SJIS wine ~/.wine/drive_c/KEY/*/REALLIVE.EXE
else
echo "The CD is not inserted!"
fi

Replace << The full name of your CD >> with the name of your CD (Case-Insensitive). If you have an ISO or DMG, use this code instead:

if [ -e /Volumes/<< The full name of the disc image >> ]
then echo "The Disc Image is mounted, starting game..."
else echo "Attempting to mount the Disc Image..."
hdiutil attach << The full path to the disc image >>
fi

LANG=ja_JP.SJIS wine ~/.wine/drive_c/KEY/*/REALLIVE.EXE

Replace << The full name of the disc image >> with the full name of the disc image as it shows up in the Finder sidebar when it’s mounted, and replace << The full path to the disc image >> with the full path to the Disc Image file (Note that if you move it, you need to change this). You can get the path by dropping the file into the text editing area in most cases (like the Built-in Text Edit).

Then run this command:

chmod 755 ~/*.sh

Done!

Step 4: Play!
To play the game, open up X11. You should get a large white terminal. If you don’t, press Command+N. Type this into the terminal to launch the game:

~/<filename>.sh

Where you replace <filename> with whatever you named the script you created in the last step. So if you named the script littlebusters.sh, you type ~/littlebusters.sh. It should print a few (or a lot of) messages, and start the game.

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Lucky Star can be described with two words: Epic Randomness. It’s 8 hours of hilarious random, character-driven, top-class humor. There’s essentially no plot, zero character growth, a ton of references to other Animes and the entire show just oozes of quality. The so-called story centers around Konata Izumi, who is something as uncommon as a female otaku and too lazy to study despite she is pretty smart, and her life. That’s the entire story, did you expect something more from a show described as “epic randomness”?

Lucky Star’s main strength doesn’t lie in it’s nonexistent story, but in it’s characters. The main character, Konata Izumi, is 17 years old, but looks like 12. She’s too lazy to study, despite she is pretty smart, and doesn’t join any sports clubs despite being very athletic, because if she did she would miss her Anime shows. Konata is well-known as “the queen of comedy” for good reasons – she’s simply the funniest character ever made, and one of the most easily recognizable ones too. She makes completely epic faces, has one of the most unique voices ever (she’s voiced by Aya Hirano who has done Haruhi in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Misa Amane in Death Note and Lucy Heartfilia in Fairy Tail among others), that is, she always sounds like she’s talking through her nose while having a cold, which is a lot cuter and funnier than it seems. Konata’s best friends are the twins Kagami and Tsukasa Hiiragi, who are essentially Kyou and Ryou Fujibashi from Clannad. Kagami is is a typical Tsundere (acting tough while she’s actually soft on the inside), or a “Dere-Tsun” as Shiraishi classifies her as later. Kagami (aka “The Great Kagamin”) is constantly being made fun of by Konata, and while she isn’t made fun of she acts as the Straight Man. Her twin sister Tsukasa on the other hand is more like Konata in that she enjoys reading and playing games a lot more than studying, but unlike Konata she doesn’t study because she loses focus not because she’s lazy. She also tend to sleep in all day (she sleepwalks and turns her alarm clock off), is extremely unlucky and generally feels that the entire universe is dead set against her. Then there’s their overly smart classmate Miyuki Takara, who just like Hanekawa from Bakemonogatari “just happens to know” everything, and who according to Konata is “a wandering pillar of moé” with her unreal clumsy cuteness. Later in it also introduces Yukari Takara (or “Yu-chan” for short), who is a first year high school student who looks and acts like a grade schooler, who is the only person Konata can feel superior to and she is generally clueless about everything. Along with Yu-chan there is her best friend Minami Iwasaki who has the most obsessive flat-chest complex ever seen (if you’ve played Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, think Etna and Flonne together) and who is essentially Korone from Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou in all other aspects – except for the fact that Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou was 3 years later. Some other notable characters are Konata’s father who openly admits that he’s a pedo, a cop that drives like a car thief, the homeroom teacher who has formed a guild with Konata in an MMO, and an american transfer student who lapses into english or pretends not to understand what people are saying when it’s convenient, a Doijin author who writes perverted Doujins based on her friends because she can’t find anything else to write. Also, Soujirou (Konata’s dad) is the only male character in the entire show not counting Shiraishi Minoru and Daisuke Ono, the former who has a total of two lines in the actual show and mostly appears in Lucky Channel, and the latter who only appears in Lucky Channel.

In case you have problems keeping up with the show, they added the mentioned “Lucky Channel”, which is apparently supposed to be an explanatory corner. However, they left the role as “navigator” to Akira Kogami, who is a child idol who frequently falls out of character, to the point of it appearing like a split personality, whenever she gets annoyed the slightest. She also wants to appear in the real show, but after finally managing to get an appearance, she catches a cold that week. Along with Akira, there’s Minoru Shiraishi (a real voice-actor playing himself), who just ends up being ordered around by Akira or shouted at by her whenever she gets annoyed at something. They’re apparently there to introduce new characters and explain stuff, but Akira always either gets annoyed at some detail, gets jealous of the character they’re introducing or goes out of character for some other reason. Lucky Channel is also filled with 4th wall-jokes, starting with Akira’s wish to be in the real show up to when she sprouts water onto the camera lens and the cameraman wiping it off with a piece of cloth, or even the background falling apart.

The entire series is crammed full of references and parodies, like Konata doing her own MMO-version of the song Bokuen Desho Desho from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, “Solo-Hunting Desho Desho… (hm hm hm hm hm hm) Will make you strong… (hm hm hm hm)”, and suddently getting a backpack with wings and saying “Uguu~” (Ayu in Kanon), Kagami being Hatsune Miku(Vocaloid2) and Cinderella at the same time, or Konata spening an entire episode talking like an 18th century upperclass-lady because she’s reading Marimite (short for “Maria-sama ga Miteru”). Unlike a lot of other shows, like Hayate no Gokoku! or Seitokai no Ichizon, you don’t have to get the references to have fun, the only exception being the parody of Cinderella, and having seen Haruhi is recommended since there’s scenes that’ll make even less sense than usual otherwise, so you can watch this without having to watch a lot of other shows. Of couse, it gets funnier if you get at least a few of the references, but since there’s tons of them I wouldn’t expect anyone outside of Japan to get them all.

To say that the art style is unique would be an understatement. Everyone looks like a doll and everything is chibified and cute, and all facial expressions (especially Konata’s) are over-the-top and exaggerated to say the least. The backgrounds are generally abstract or one-colored, but never feels rushed or out-of-place. It also has a certain liking of bright colors, something which is evident from just about every character design. It all fits neatly into the overall unserious tone of the series. The soundtrack is not on par with masterpieces like Clannad or Pandora Hearts, but always creates the right atmosphere (that is, create an 8 hours long unserious atmosphere without equal) without ever being repetitive or annoying. The opening theme, Motteke! Sailor Fuku, is the most hyper song since Love Hina’s Sakura Saku, and is extremely upbeat, fast and fits perfectly into the series. The ending themes are different every time, and is always parodies on existing Anime songs. Actually, Lucky Star’s only fault is that it has an end. And after it ends, there’a 45 minutes long OVA too.

Watch it here, or grab the PSP/iPhone-files here. To put it on an iPhone, read here for instructions.

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Kimi no Iru Machi (A Town Where You Live) first seems to be just an ordinary love story-manga. A well-made one, but still nothing out of the ordinary. However, just like Clannad, that’s just on the surface – give it a chance, and you won’t regret it.

The story centers around a guy named Haruto Kirishima, who is living a fairly ordinary life until a girl named Yuzuki Eba turns up who will live in his house because she is the daughter of one of his dad’s friends and she desperately wanted to transfer to the school in Haruto’s town. Haruto doesn’t have any interest in Yuzuki since he’s already in love with a girl named Nanami Kanzaki. Yuzuki on the other hand has a clear interest in Haruto.

The story isn’t very original, but neither was Clannad. However, it has just enough originality to avoid being unoriginal, and is executed beautifully. The setting is based on the author’s hometown, which means that it has the same realistic feeling as Love Hina has, and actually feels living. The art style is also beautiful, on par with D.N.Angel and just slightly below Ken Akamatsu(Love Hina, Mahou Sensei Negima!, Mao-chan)’s art. It has some issues with misplaced eyes and sometimes there’s an arm pointing in a slightly impossible direction, but the overall quality is really impressive. The character designs are quite good too. The main character, Haruto Kirishima is not the most original character ever, and initially appears to be just a stingy, skeptical and a bit shy guy, but similarly to Ryoshi from Ookami-san to Shichinin Nakama-tachi, he can go any lengths for his friends if the situation requires him to. He’s fairly smart, but a bit too realistic for his own good. He could be considered a male Tsundere, but that’s not as obvious as for example Himuro from Fairy Tail. Yuzuki Eba is a far better character. It’s a bit hard to decide if she’s really smart or an idiot, she’s really clumsy (in a moé-ish sort of way) and reminds a lot of Nagisa from Clannad. She can also appear to be completely helpless and lost, just to surprise you by actually knowing exactly what she’s doing – though she generally actually is helpless and lost. She loves Haruto, but isn’t possessive like a lot of other heroines (Shana, Naru, Louise, etc) and actually helps him get closer to his crush Nanami. She also has a mysterious past, but as of now not much is known about this. Nanami Kanzaki is one of those characters you know will just be there to create some tension, since she lacks the details that separates main characters from major characters – just like Yoshida Kazumi from Shakugan no Shana, Risa Harada from D.N.Angel or Siesta from Zero no Tsukaima. She’s not a bad character, just not unique enough to really stand out. She’s a typical cheerful girl who will sooner or later reject the main character who will give up on her and move on to the main heroine. Then there’s Yuzuki’s evil and manipulative little sister (if you’ve seen Durarara!!, think a less prominent version of Izaya and you get the idea) Rin who somewhat shares Ryuk’s viewpoint from Death Note in that she does things because the effects are interesting, and Haruto’s childhood friends Akari and Takahashi who seriously acts like two halves of a whole, acting as a bokke-tsukyomi Comedian pair and cheering for Haruto. Akari also likes smacking people in the back of their heads with Newspapers, textbooks and similar – she once also hit Haruto with a dictionary after Kanzaki’s idea. Takahashi is Haruto’s inseparable friend and they’ve been friends since forever, and he’s also the kind of Kida Masaomi-character who hit on just about every girl he sees but never has any luck with them (sadly he doesn’t have a long list of “Girls I’m gonna’ make my girlfriend” like Kida) and has been rejected by more girls than he can remember – including Yuzuki, Rin and Akari.

The story is a typical slice-of-life one, divide into shorter arcs. It’s really beautifully written and well executed – there’s a reason why it’s one of the most popular mangas on OneManga – and it never really breaks the atmosphere like Fruits Basket among others does, and said atmosphere is on par with D.N.Angel’s. Haruto and Yuzuki also make a really cute couple, mostly by being each others’ polar opposite. The character growth may not be on par with Love Hina, Mahou Sensei Negima! or even D.N.Angel, but it is there – even though you may not notice it. Even though this is a typical love story, there’s thankfully not much Ecchi like most other love story-mangas tend to be. The first page of each chapter always has an illustration that has nothing to do with the chapter itself (up to a certain point, where it starts being an enlarged panel instead), and while some of them are annoyingly ecchi-ish, they don’t get as much on my nerves as for example Fairy Tail’s does, some of them are actually really cute. The Summary and Closing texts can also be skipped, since they make about as much sense as Angel Beats’ official plot summary (just what is a spilled memory!?). One thing that may cause you to lose track of things like the characters’ ages and such is it’s somewhat annoying way of fast-forwarding through up to half a year, but except for that the story has a good flow without being either overcomplicated or too simple.

Despite it’s faults, the overall quality of it all means that you should immediately start reading it here. It’s definitely one of the best series I’ve read in a long time. It’s position on the top list of the most popular mangas on OneManga is well-deserved.

—-
Note that this post was written before Yuzuki was redesigned to a hated bitch rather than a moé-ish cute girl…

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