Anime Afterglow apologises for any inconvenience, and wishes you the best of luck

“Remember when the platform was sliding into the firepit, and I was all “Goodbye!” and you were like “NO WAY” and then I was all “We pretended we were going to murder you, Happy New Year!“?

That was great.”

Clannad After Sidestories

During the first few episodes of Clannad After Story I became afraid that they would just check off all the minor characters sidestories that didn’t fit in the first season over the whole run of the second one, but with crossing the school graduation border with Tomoya the series goes where only a few other series have gone before. After this (story-wise) point of no return Tomoya has to face a new kind of reality and has to find a place in the world he lived so far, and by telling this in a realistic, comprehensible and especially interesting way this series reaches a whole new quality. Before I was always in some degree comparing Clannad with the other two Key/KyoAni productions Kanon and Air, but now this isn’t any longer sufficient, because the topics just don’t match anymore. Clannad just can’t be seen as a mere (more or less equal) “copy” of the other two series anymore. A very welcome development I’d say.

And of course:

4 weeks later

Here are the final 8 cards , of course GAINAX also got a group on its own in the end, the last 4 cards are again a mixture of different studios, but this time they match a bit better theme-wise I think. This  completes the set of 32 cards and my work on them, which was a lot more than I first thought it would be, but it was at least as much fun, too.
For example while putting these cards together I sometimes had to search through my long ago saved video files which was quite entertaining on its own. Here seeing that my 6 year old CD with the Gunbuster files was still working fine today gave me a especial pleasing surprise, and watching the 320 x 240 pixel video with 15 pictures per second made me really happy for living those 6 years later now.

So, here are the links to the cards. I also added a set of card backsides if somebody really wants to print out these cards. As always I hope you have fun with them!

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and for the card’s backsides:

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A little late, I know…

… but still better than never, here are the next 8 cards. The delay is caused by me being offline at home at the moment, because (surprisingly) my new phone company didn’t manage to properly connect me at time and I’m still waiting for them to do so for now. Thus I’m misusing my workplace at the moment for this post, so I’ll make it quick. This time the 8 anime shows are produced by 7 different studios. I tried to sort them theme-wise, but just plain failed for the second-half. I thought about adding Air and Lucky Star to make those 4 cards completely KyoAni based, but in the end it was more important to me to add those two other series instead, although or rather because their are rather underdogs compared to the KyoAni series.

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Eight new cards

As announced here are the next 8 cards for the anime top trump set. This time the featured studios are Madhouse Production and Studio Deen, both having a rather broad spectrum in story themes and in quality of their animation. In fact  I was pretty surprised about which basically different animes were produces by the same studio, because I never really took notice of the producing studio while watching anime until recently. Of course it’s quite natural for a big studio to produce on different quality levels and within different anime themes, but I just haven’t bothered to think about it until now.

Well, here are the links:

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Tales of the Abyss

Surely Luke is a jerk, and pretty good at it, too, but I think it could help sometimes to try to enlighten him about what he has been or is doing wrong and bring him on the right track instead of just being upset about him and ignoring him. I can’t say that I like him, but I can empathise with him getting frustrated, angry and contra-productive about everything as well as clinging to his old teacher who gave him the feeling of worth and appreciation.