As usual a new anime season has arrived and I’m still rushing to finish the shows from last season. One show I started watching last night is Charlotte, about a group of high school students with super powers who seek out other espers who are using their abilities in unsavory ways — for example, the main character has the power to take over other peoples’ bodies (but for only five seconds at a time), which he uses to cheat on tests and get girls to date him — and convince them to stop abusing their powers, lest they end up being experimented on by the government for the rest of their lives. The show is kind of like Code Geass meets Angel Beats! with a little of Plastic Memories thrown in, and is filled with lots of humor, usually centered around the characters’ imperfect esper abilities. As usual, characters in anime are able to get away with things no one in real life in Japan could do, like the main heroine Tomori Nao, a self-centered girl with the ability to turn invisible (but only to one person at a time), who does things like eat steaming hot bento inside a crowded train, which is a violation of manners.
Although I’m not a fan of the heat and humidity, my favorite season in Japan would probably have to be summer. Once the rainy season (mid-June to mid-July) lets up, Japan is transformed into a brilliant world of vibrant green, with lots of fun summer-ey things to do, from going to the pool to wearing a yukata while you take in summer fireworks and listening to the cicadas sing in the trees. Summer in Japan is a great time to drink mugi-cha, the refreshing barley tea all Japanese love, or maybe some ice-cold ramune. Another interesting custom the Japanese have is sending 暑中見舞い shochu-mimai or “mid-summer greeting cards” to friends and acquaintances, which basically are a kind of formal greeting card you send to take each other’s mind off the heat of summer. While the custom has faded a bit thanks to the modern world of cell phones and the Internet, it’s quite common for artists on Pixiv to create these cards and send them to their fans through Twitter.
One of the fun new game elements in the just-released Lightning Warrior Raidy III is that Raidy can now magically join with the other game characters, for example combining with the wolf girl Fonfon to become “Beast Mode,” joining with demon girl Tiss to enter Demon Mode or the Dark Elf Folles to play the game in Elf Mode. This adds lots of fun gameplay to the game, allowing you to clear the game in all three modes, plus using Raidy herself. The ecchi graphics you encounter in each mode is different. Why not order the Raidy III Limited Edition or Download Edition now?
