Good day, gentle viewers.
Welcome to scenic my house.
The family and I spent the last
not insignificant amount of time trading fevers back and forth.
So rather than bother anybody at the regular studio, we're doing it
home style today. Please don't mind the mess.
This is a literal closet, but regardless, in
today's news, Konami is suing about horse girls.
Trigun gets an English manga rerelease and we all love Lain. All that today
alongside a look at the Spring 2023 anime seasonal rankings.
So without any further ado, I am Tristan Gallant and welcome to Glass Reflection.
Let's jam.
Let's start today with a bit of a recap from a week ago.
Since I've been in various levels of medicinal hell
and I'm actually really disappointed that I missed it when it actually happened
a little over a week ago,
a hacker gained access to the well-known list website, My Anime List,
and caused the website to be taken down for emergency maintenance.
The hackers goals were not particularly subtle.
Their major changes to the website's database included changing the title
of every anime to Let's All Love Lain.
The hacker also made every user on the site give glowing
reviews of said series.
At the time,
my anime list
made several public announcements that didn't really explain the hack,
but they did apologize to users for the inconvenience
and said that they were working on a solution.
It took quite a few days to actually resolve.
You may notice I've been smiling this whole time
while talking about it, so why do I find this so hilarious?
Well, first off, you probably need to be enough of an oldtaku
to have actually watched the 1998 anime series Serial Experiments Lain.
It's a series that follows a junior high school student, Lain,
who receives an email from a dead classmate and begins to immerse herself
with a late nineties interpretation of the World Wide Web to the point
where she begins to question the differences between reality
and a digital world.
This is all before the Matrix came out.
By the by it was pretty groundbreaking for when it aired.
And honestly, it's still pretty
almost scary
with how relevant it still can be.
The series is also very well known for being one of those that to try to put it
simply, is not one of those shows that you can really describe.
Beyond that very brief synopsis that I did.
So much of this series is steeped in philosophical metaphors.
It uses technology that never really existed,
but was where writers thought tech might go in the nineties.
It's all from a time when the Internet was this
extremely new thing and nobody knew what it was going to do.
Nobody knew just how much of an effect it was going to have,
not just on society as a whole, but specifically kids.
Protocol seven is expected to allow the seamless sharing of information,
information that will be shared between the Wired and the real world.
And now the following message.
Let's all love, Lain.
Let's all love Lain.
Let's all love Lain. Let's all love Lain.
Let's all love Lain Lain Lain Lain Lain Lain Lain Lain Lain.
So hacking my
anime list and making everybody all love lain.
You know, despite the inconvenience of screwing up the site for a couple of days.
And all of that is still ridiculously hilarious to me
because, like, if you ever wanted an excuse
to watch this series, this hack kind of put a spotlight on it.
The hack itself,
some might say, is also a perfect introduction to the kind of weird stuff
this series is about, because I personally love the series
even though I can admit it is not for everyone.
By now though, yes, my anime list has returned to normal
and all of the changes that the hacker has made are gone and everything is fine.
Not every show has Lain in the name anymore.
All the scores are back to normal.
But I'll leave it to you to determine whether or not that's a positive.
Konami has decided
to sue Cygames and its parent company
over a disagreement about Uma Musume Pretty Derby.
For some context, Uma Musume Pretty Derby
was a gotcha game that was supposed to release back in 2018.
Star is a bunch of idol horse girls who also participate in Derby races.
It's a little complicated, but just go with it.
So many others have to the point where the franchise is now massively
successful between adaptations and of course, the game itself,
which launched in 2021 after being delayed.
To quote, raise the game's quality, which is not an excuse
I'm used to trusting from the video games industry.
Since the game's launch, it has earned over
2 billion.
Yeah, billion U.S. dollars.
As of last March and during its
second anniversary event, the two week
period where that was happening, it earned another 55 million.
Gatcha Games am I right?
Frickin cash cows, the lot of them.
So that's a lot of money. A really big pie.
So to speak.
And apparently now Konami
would like a piece of said pie. CyberAgent, CyGames’s
Parent company did say that they were in discussion with Konami
about some patent rights for the game system and program.
However, neither they nor Konami have publicly stated
which patterns are in contention here.
Least of all what has been violated to the point of the ¥4
billion that Konami is asking for through its court injunction.
From my end,
having not played the game, in fairness, I can't quite see what Konami
is getting at.
Like the game itself is a unity engine gatcha game, and while Konami has helped
publish gotcha games in the past, I can't seem to find any conclusive proof
that they had any hand in the actual development of this game.
That said, since so many gotcha games kind of use the same mechanics
all throughout, it would not surprise me that even if Konami did not help develop
the Uma Musume gatcha game that parts
of their mechanical code were still used.
Hence the patent.
Rumor has it that Uma Musume uses a similar system to Konami’s
Power Pro Baseball series.
And that could be the patent in question.
So they could just be rightfully asking for payment for use of,
you know, their patented technology.
Or Konami could have looked at that really big massive pie
and just thought, Hey, if we make a big enough stink,
we might get a nice juicy settlement out of it.
Who knows?
It's not like Konami has been the paragon
of righteousness with their business dealings since ever.
I'm personally leading a little bit more towards the latter,
or at least a part of the latter.
It's like they may have a step to stand on.
I feel like it's small because like it just so happens that Uma Musume
is one of the hottest things in the Japanese market right now.
It just had this wonderful two year anniversary celebration that raked in
quite a bit and now they seem to care about their patent violation.
Like if the patent is valid and they were supposed to get paid,
why did something not come up a little bit earlier than this?
I'll keep an eye on the story the best that I can
and see if anything else comes to light.
But it could just, you know, be all sorted out of the public eye
with a massive settlement, which I'm sure Konami would prefer.
Now, before we continue, I
did want to give shoutouts to supporters of this channel over on Patreon
because, yes, this video in this closet is not sponsored.
And the more support we get over there,
the less sponsors the Glass Reflection will need at any given time.
So an immense thank you, especially to patrons like
You cannot do this without your support, So however much you are able to help,
I am eternally grateful.
Dark Horse Comics has announced that they plan to release
deluxe hardcover editions of the Trigun Manga.
This includes both the original manga series Trigun, which ran back
between 1995 and 97, as well as its much longer sequel.
Manga Trigun Maximum that was in print from 1997 all the way until 2007.
Just to be clear, this is only for special
editions of the manga in a very similar way.
I would assume too, what Dark Horse did with the Berserk Special Editions.
Dark Horse has already published Trigun and Trigun Maximum in English previously,
but this deluxe edition is just in their oversize format in a wonderful
hardcover book with hopefully amazing image quality.
If those Berserk Deluxe editions are anything to go by.
It is a good time to be a Trigun fan,
and I am actually somewhat surprised that these releases are happening at all.
Though perhaps it's not all that surprising
considering how Trigun is now back into public consciousness
with the release of Trigun Stampede from earlier this year.
This might just be dark horse trying to jump
onto that particular bandwagon and I am all for it.
At least I was
until I noticed the major downside with this particular announcement.
Exactly how long we have to wait for it.
The deluxe edition for the original Trigun does not enter stores
until December 5th of this year.
Oh yeah.
And Trigun maximum is not set to enter stores
until April of next year, which means any excitement
that I had upon reading this announcement was instantly dashed.
I am no longer a person who is willing to jump onto a hype train
like six plus months before it even comes out.
Or in the case of Trigun maximum, almost a full year like no.
That is way too long for this hype train to reach its destination.
I would much rather just not know about it until either like couple of weeks,
maybe a month or two before it comes out, or better yet, when I can actually buy
the thing, I want to have it in my hands, not, you know,
some figurative imagination of it that maybe I'll have in a year.
I mean, yes, I suppose it's nice to have something to look forward to,
but far too often I have seen companies announce things that I want years
in advance and then expect me to be like, Hey, hey, hey, hey, get excited.
Why? It's not here.
We'll see how excited I'll get, you know, in December.
Until then, it's just the thing.
And now we get to do seasonal rankings for this video.
It's been a bit of time since we've got to look at any of them
and we are specifically going to be focusing on week five,
which is a little hilarious depending on how things are counted.
So number one is Mobile Suit
Gundam Witch from Mercury Season two, which ended on a stupid cliffhanger.
It ruined my whole day, by the way.
Not going to spoil it, but my God.
And the reason why I say that this is interesting
is because I am assuming that this number one spot
is including the episode with the cliffhanger.
But we also know the last time that we did a news video that last last Sunday
this most recent weekend, we had a recap episode rather than an actual new episode.
Now, considering that anime
trending usually updates and like puts out
a tweet of the chart on Sundays, and that is also the day that mobile
Suit Gundam, Witch from Mercury actually airs.
I can assume that this is because
of that cliffhanger episode we had two Sundays ago.
Just happens to be how things line up, which means that the series
might actually be due for a bit of a fall because, you know,
we got to recap episode who's going to rate that highly unless,
you know, people just rate the show highly in general, which is fair.
I mean, that's what I'm doing.
But going on the list, we have [OSHI NO KO] continuing.
It's absolute supremacy of like being ridiculous and not tied down
to freaking anything.
Skip and Loafer
though, is coming up into third place, which I'm quite happy about.
Heavenly Delusion in fourth is hilarious to me.
I am now caught up fully on heavenly delusion as I sit here and,
you know, for a series that's on Disney, it has a lot of things in it that
I would not
peg Disney as normally being approving of.
Do they know what show they got?
Beyond that, Hell's Paradise is dumped down to five.
I can't tell you why because out of all the shows, I'm not into that one yet.
Hell's Paradise has become the show for me.
That it's like I already know I'm going to, like, already
like the type of setting
I enjoyed the characters from the first episode when I did my
my recap of the entire season.
It's a MAPPA series.
It's going to be good, though.
Apparently, according to the anime trending people,
there are other shows that are better.
Cool. Glad we got that sorted.
Then we got Demon Slayer, Insomniacs after school and The Dangers in my heart.
Don't have a lot to say on either of those.
I'm not caught up with Demon Slayer at all
and I kind of put insomniacs and Dangers in my heart on my drop list.
I have other things that I've been watching instead, namely number nine
and number ten, which are the reasons why Raeliana ended up at the Duke's mansion.
And my love story with Yamada-kun at Level 999.
I've been keeping up with these
for a variety of reasons, Raeliana had a kind of weird start.
Didn't really know where it was going.
I kind of went with it anyway.
But there is a level of I don't know what it is about
some Japanese writers and their take
on what some kind of fictional fantasy
noble society is like, but I just love their interpretation on it.
It's almost like a genre in and of itself
where there are certain themes and tropes, but they're very specific
to Japanese interpretations of a noble society.
So I feel like it's like this weird combinations of things from actual
historical, like European noble society, and then also things from potentially
the Shogunate and a bunch of other things that just get melded together.
And I just love the flavor of it and how and how it is written
and the things that it showed us
and Raeliana is a perfect example of that, despite the fact that, you know,
I don't know if I actually like the main character.
I love the story in the world of the show rather than Raeliana
as a character at the moment.
But that's mostly I'm attributing to the fact that
she knows what's going to happen ish.
She has knowledge of the entire world because she lives
currently in an Isekai version of a book she read.
That's where she is.
That bit I kind of wish
wasn't as much in the spotlight, but you know, it's still a fun watch.
And then my love story with Yamada-kun at Level 999 is just a fantastic romp.
It is upbeat, it is light.
It saddens me that it has dropped down five positions
in one week, apparently, because last week it was
it was in the fifth slot and now it's in 10th.
So we'll see if that goes down.
And I mean, it was in second place at one point in time and now it's in 10th.
We'll see if it even stays on the list next week.
And of course, yes, I am also truly sad that one of my favorite
shows from the season, Otaku Elf, is all the way down to 26.
My God,
the anime trending people just don't like my flavor of slice of life
apparently, but that is it for looking at that this week.
And of course that is our video for today.
So subscribe if you haven't hit the like button if you enjoyed the video
and until next time, whether I am back at the regular studio
or still in this closet,
watch more anime and stay frosty.