One of the best things about Japan is its volcanic hot springs, though since nothing in life is free, these come with a cost in the form of volcanoes and earthquakes. Yesterday Japan’s southernmost island of Kyushu experienced a rare 6.4 magnitude earthquake which caused lots of damage to homes and buildings and sadly killed nine people, mostly from old houses collapsing. (The 400+ year old Kumamoto Castle was also damaged.) Currently authorities are scrambling to care for thousands of displaced people, who spent the night outside and who can’t return home until the structures are inspected. While this quake was centered over land, happily avoiding the tsunami-related horrors visited on the country five years ago, one of the great fears in Japan is a major “megathrust” quake caused by movement between two tectonic plates to the south. Since earthquakes in one part of the world always seem to act as a trigger for major quakes days or weeks later, maybe today is a good time to review your family’s earthquake preparedness plan, if you’re in a danger zone?
The boom in fantasy-kei anime started by Sword Art Online continues to dominate the industry, this time with a dramatic new show called Re:ZERO -Life in a Different World from Zero-, which might be described as ERASED meets KonoSuba (without the backstory though). One day Subaru is shopping in a convenience store when he’s suddenly summoned to another world. Fortunately for him, he’s an avid RPG gamer and knows exactly what to do to start getting along in his new environment, including what “flags” and “events” he needs to unlock. The show is extremely high budget: in a world where many shows are just 5-7 minutes per episode, the first episode of Re:Zero is nearly an hour. More than anything, I feel anime often lacks good writing and structure, and when I find a well-written story — Steins;Gate, Gakkou Gurashi, Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 — I do my best to evangelize it to other fans. I think this show will certainly make that list.
In addition to selling English visual novels and “H” games via convenient Internet download, we go out of our way to carry package editions of our games, so fans who are collectors can display them proudly on their shelves. To keep games in print as long as possible, we combine them into handy 2-in-1 combo packs that fans love. Sometimes games go out of print anyway, though, like Shuffle! If you want to get this great game, we’ve got around 200 copies left. Hurry!
