Category: Special Articles

ToHeart is an interesting beast. It’s considered the second non-Hentai anime adaptation of a visual novel, only beaten out by the very first one, Nightwalker: Midnight Detective, which came out in the summer of 1998. The original game was an 18+ eroge and didn’t have as much of a marketing push as previous VN adaptations, but the 1999 anime would go on to be pretty popular, selling 10,000 copies in terms of home video sales, which was considered successful back then. It even managed to get an English dub and DVD release in the US a few years later, and even got a sequel series, ToHeart: Remember My Memories, though I’ve heard said sequel isn’t very good. I did watch the first episode of ToHeart on a whim years ago, but child me thought it was dreadfully boring and dropped it. My tastes have evolved quite a bit since then, and in light of the original game getting a remake that came out this year, albeit based on the all-ages version, I decided to go back and revisit it with fresh eyes. Man, child me was an idiot, because even if it’s not the most faithful adaptation of the game, ToHeart the anime is surprisingly good, and has aged a lot better than one would think.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Unearthed Treasures with Firechick: ToHeart (1999) (78/100)” →

Hakumei and Mikochi is a series I initially skipped out on when it first aired. Not for any reason, as the premise did appeal to my tastes and I put it on my list of anime I planned to watch, but at the time it came out, I was burnt out on anime. From 2010 to the end of 2015, I watched a ton of anime…but after I graduated college, I felt myself unable to watch even a single episode per month unless it was a new episode of Pokemon. A number of things contributed to this for me: Too much time on my hands, too many titles that had elements that turned me off, job hunting with no success, cyberbullying in one particular fandom, having seen too many shows, and so on. Anime always brought me joy, and I honestly tried to get back into it, but I couldn’t muster up the motivation to go back to what I did before. I just couldn’t get myself in the frame of mind to watch anything anymore, even the shows I really loved. Then the crapshow that was 2020 happened and one day, I watched an episode of an anime. And another. And another. Slowly but surely, I found myself going back to the old routine that sustained me throughout my school years. I had finally managed to claw myself out of it. Not completely, but I’m feeling a lot better and more motivated than I was before. To think it actually took a pandemic for me to get back into the medium that brought me so much joy throughout my life. In that regard, I finally managed to watch and finish shows I was interested in watching, with Hakumei and Mikochi being one of them. God, this series is so cute and sweet and deserves way more love than it gets!

Continue reading “Guest Post: Unearthed Treasures with Firechick: Hakumei and Mikochi (85/100)” →

Good lord. I can’t believe I wasted my time on this crapfest of a show. What we have here is an anime that’s part of yet another multimedia project to promote a cell phone game involving cute idol girls. Lapis Re:LiGHTs main selling point is that it takes place in a made up fantasy world with made up countries that are much more European-style in nature as opposed to something like Love Live or 22/7. Now, the only reason I watched this was because nothing else really interested me, and since the plague was still going around and putting a bunch of anime on hold, I thought it’d be a nice time killer. It was…but now I wish I had every minute I spent watching this crappy show back! Basically, a young girl goes to a fancy magic idol school where she can become a witch, which in this case is basically a magical idol. But she winds up getting stuck with the flunkies who are about to get expelled because they suck at everything. They decide to try and become an idol group and raise enough points so that they don’t get expelled.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Unearthed Garbage with Firechick: Lapis Re:Lights (46/100)” →

Back in June of 2010, when I was in my junior year of high school, Anime News Network announced that they would be streaming an old series from 1977 called Ie Naki Ko, or Nobody’s Boy Remi, alongside many other shows. ANN would put up five subbed episodes every week, and it was their first license directly from Japan. Back then, I was still forging my tastes in anime, but thought this seemed interesting, as its premise reminded me a bit of Les Miserables Shoujo Cosette. Let me tell you, I was hooked from the first episode, and absolutely DEVOURED this series every time episodes were dropped each week. It really struck a chord with 16/17-year-old me. Sadly, ANN is no longer streaming Remi, or anything else. I didn’t learn of the existing home video release it had until much later, and by then it was long out of print. Luckily, fansubs were easy to come by, and in 2025, AnimEigo (The new iteration of it, that is) released it on blu-ray. I bought that blu-ray set as soon as the MediaOCD store got early copies in. Seriously, rewatching this show has been a really sobering experience in the best way possible, and I still love it now as a 32-year-old adult woman as I did back when I was in high school. I previously reviewed it on MAL back in 2010, but honestly, that review was one of my first attempts at seriously reviewing/critiquing something, and re-reading it…yeah, it’s rather slipshod and overly gushy and fangirly, so I’m rewriting my review from scratch so it’ll be up to par with my current stuff.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Unearthed Treasures with Firechick: Nobody’s Boy Remi (94/100)” →

In the year 2000, a man named Kaz Ayabe and his team at the company Millennium Kitchen released an…interesting game for the PlayStation that was unlike anything that had come out before, called Boku no Natsuyasumi. The game was all about a little boy spending his summer in Japan’s quiet countryside in the year 1975, and you could do things like explore, catch bugs, go fishing, hang out with family and friends, and so on. It wound up becoming quite popular, and Ayabe-san decided to try his hand at the concept again with Boku no Natsuyasumi 2, for the PlayStation 2. It would go on to outsell the first game and become quite popular in its own right, with two more sequels to follow. Having only just discovered the Boku no Natsuyasumi series thanks to Natsu-Mon: 20th Century Summer Kid, I actually do want to check out more of Kaz Ayabe’s portfolio, as I really enjoyed Natsu-Mon. But the BokuNatsu games have never been released in English, probably for a number of reasons I don’t have the time to go into here. Luckily, a group of fans made their own fan translation of BokuNatsu 2, which they released last year, and I got to play it now that I’ve learned how to set up emulators on my computer. Yeah, I can see why people want the BokuNatsu games to be brought to America, because BokuNatsu 2 is a really cute, wholesome, charming game, even if I feel Natsu-Mon is better.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Unearthed Treasures with Firechick: Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 (81/100)” →

It’s funny how things we now see as cliche, generic, or overdone were once novel and completely new. Such was the case for a little game called Lunar: Silver Star Story. Previously released on the Sega CD as Lunar: The Silver Star, the game was famous for its litany of 2D anime cutscenes, amazingly adapted songs, generally bright and colorful anime artstyle, which back then was unheard of for games that came out in America at that time, and for its script having a lot of 90s pop cultural references and slang thrown in. It got a Playstation 1 remake a few years later, which is the version many fans grew up on. I’ve mentioned before that I never grew up with home consoles such as the Playstation or Nintendo 64, so I never even heard of Lunar back then. I did dabble in it a bit via watching some videos of HCBailly’s Let’s Play of it and playing a bit of the PSP remake, Lunar: Silver Star Harmony, but I didn’t get very far with either. I should really get back to playing Harmony on my PS Vita. But in September of 2024, GungHo Online Entertainment announced that a remaster of both this game and its sequel were due to come out in April 2025 on modern consoles. I managed to snatch the Switch version as soon as it was available. As someone who didn’t grow up with Lunar but did grow up on a lot of anime during the 2000s, I certainly do enjoy it, even if nowadays it’s nothing really special. I can definitely see its charms and why people like it so much.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Unearthed Baubles with Firechick: Lunar Silver Star Story (75/100)” →

(This review covers both the first season and the second one, Bananya and the Curious Bunch)

Now here’s an anime that I’m sure not a whole lot of people know about. Bananya is a short TV series that’s literally about the adventures of cute pocket-sized kittens that live in banana peels. That’s it. It’s a very simple premise, and the first season mainly shows them going through mundane situations, like going inside the refrigerator, or trying to greet a stray cat outside the kitchen window. Every episode is 2-3 minutes long and there’s no real dialogue except for a narrator who tells us what’s going on. Now, if you’re looking to watch this, I should warn you, the story is pretty episodic, and the characters don’t really develop beyond their one singular personality trait. In this case, it can be forgiven, as they’re cats that can’t talk, and the first season has a rather small set of characters that are easy to follow, even if four of them look exactly the same.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Unearthed Baubles with Firechick: Bananya (69/100)” →

So, let’s talk about Hello Kitty! Even if you don’t know her name, you’ve definitely seen her at least once in your life. The official mascot of a company called Sanrio, Hello Kitty is the second most financially successful franchise in human history, only beaten by Pokemon. First created in 1974, Hello Kitty has won many hearts with her cute design and wholesome innocence, and even now, merchandise of her and her family, friends, and cohorts continue to line shelves, as she’s one of Japan’s most beloved cultural symbols, an emblem of creativity, community, and yes, cuteness, that has joined the pantheon of global pop culture. But would you believe that it actually took a while for her to start appearing in anime and cartoons? Many think she made her animation debut in the 1987 American cartoon Hello Kitty’s Furry Tale Theater, but that’s not true. She did make some non-speaking cameos in Sanrio’s early movies like Nutcracker Fantasy, the first Unico movie, and Journey Through Fairyland, but her true animation debut was through a rather…odd stop-motion short film called Kitty and Mimmy’s New Umbrella, which was bundled with one of the Unico movies for home video.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Unearthed Baubles with Firechick: Kitty and Mimmy’s New Umbrella (75/100)” →

(This review is solely based on the GameBoy Advance version, which many say is the best version of the game. I will mention the Pixel Remaster version a bit, as I started playing that recently, which is why you see screenshots for that edition here)

When people ask what they consider to be the worst Final Fantasy game, or the one that they like the least, chances are you’ll get three answers: Final Fantasy V, Final Fantasy VIII, or Final Fantasy XIII. The first three happened to be the most controversial games to come out during the 90s-2000s, especially in America. Final Fantasy V, coming after the more well-liked FF4 and just before the revered Final Fantasy VI, was considered to be too comedic and light-hearted for a franchise that many praised for daring to be dark, gritty, and going against the boundaries of what could be shown in video games during that time. It didn’t help that the version that got ported was the PS1 version, which was not only not a very good port on its own, but the English translation it got was universally panned for being shoddy and generally awful across the board. Now, I’m not entirely involved with the fandom, so I don’t know if this opinion has changed much, but I have played some of the games, only completing three, this being one of them. In all honesty, I really don’t think Final Fantasy 5 is as bad as people are making it out to be.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Unearthed Treasures with Firechick: Final Fantasy V (82/100)” →

As of mid-2024, a good majority of the games Key/Visual Arts have put out are legally available in English, with the exceptions of Air, Kud Wafter, their Prima Doll kinetic novels, the Rewrite fan disc, and Summer Pockets: Reflection Blue. Before 2015, it was nigh impossible to procure their games outside of fan translations, but now almost their entire library is available. Hell, just a few months ago, their first visual novel, Kanon, FINALLY got an official English translation and release in the US, 25 years after its 1999 release. Now that I’ve played a good majority of their games—mainly their kinetic novels—and seen anime adaptations of the ones I haven’t played, I’ve gotten a bit familiar with their formula. I like the anime adaptations of Air, Kanon, and Clannad, but haven’t played the VNs for Air and Clannad yet. The game version of Air, while an important piece of Key’s legacy, has a lot of problematic aspects that really did not age well; Harmonia is fairly good but a big chunk of its lore doesn’t make sense, Loopers suffers from not doing enough with both its large cast of characters and premise, and while I enjoyed Lunaria: Virtualized Moonchild, it only started getting good in the second half, and the first half of the game is a bit of a climb. I have mixed feelings on the games of theirs that I have played, but that’s not to say I hated them. There are two that I genuinely enjoyed without any reservations: Planetarian, their first kinetic novel, and the subject of today’s review, Stella of the End.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Unearthed Treasure with Firechick – UT: Stella of the End (84/100)” →