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WickedHate posted:Cool! Didn't know this thread existed. Minor note; There's two translations of Hellsing. One's by Dark Horse and the other by CY Manga. Don't get the CY Manga version because it has nowhere near the quality of the Dark Horse one. I'm gong to recommend two series by the same creator - Tsutomu Nihei. First up is BLAME! Which I've long-suspected is a badly-translated version of BLAM!, the sound the protagonist's gun makes.  BLAME! is a pretty simple story of a man named Killy traversing the Megastructure, a colossal over-built automated city in search of Net Terminal Genes. A very very long time ago, people could access the internet via telepathy or just with the appropriate genes as a code (think like Ancient stuff in Stargate: Atlantis). Unfortunately a virus corrupted the human genome, and ever since everyone's been locked out. Which is bad, because it's resulted in things like construction robots just endlessly building things over previous structures haphazardly. And the security systems don't recognise the various scattered villages of humans as human, so they get killed on-sight, which is not a good thing when they can transform solid mass into robot soldiers. What makes Killy special is his gun - The Graviton Beam Emitter. It's his only weapon through the entire ten-volume run, and the only one he needs. It does this;  That's Level 2. Level 1's basically a high-powered handgun shot. It goes up to a total of five power levels, and at Level  Something is about to have a bad bad day. As is Killy due to the recoil. What's part of Blame!'s charm is Tsutomu Nihei's amazing artwork, creating grim vistas that seem to go on forever and look like they've been there a very long time. Indeed there's a few stretches in the early manga volumes of Killy just traversing buildings just to show how far a trip is between the few colonies of people. And probably with the author cutting out very long stretches of Killy's travel time too. The only negative thing about his artwork is his characters tend to wind up looking a little wall-eyed  .  He also has an amazing cyberpunk aesthetic in his characters to create an eerie merging of flesh and machine.  Blame! has ten volumes in total, and though it's a slightly older series you can still find all ten volumes fairly easy on Amazon. Next up is BiOmega.  BiOmega's set much closer in the future, and follows a Synthetic Human named Zoichi Kanoe. Synthetic Humans are essentially nigh-unkillable motherfuckers working for (and created by) TOA Heavy Industries as Agents to combat a nanomachine pandemic that is turning people into zombies called NJ5. And the virus is especially nasty due to it being spore-based. All it takes is one zombie sporing in a high wind to infect a lot of people. Something to note is the zombies aren't actually a focus or antagonist of the story, they're only really part of the scenery.  Synthetic Humans are immune to the infection (their genetic makeup is way off normal humans, to the point they survive on just water), and Zoichi's assignment is to track down a girl who is one of a rare few with natural immunity to NJ5 (in fact it actually makes her relatively immortal with rapid-regeneration). If you're noticing a similarity between Zoichi and Killy with the handgun and all, Tsutomu cribs a bit from his other works  . TOA Heavy Industries also appears in BLAME, incidentally, though Zoichi's gun isn't another GBE. It's simply a nasty little electromagnetic railgun with only two settings and is about as powerful as an anti-tank rifle. He keeps a big-rear end rifle stored in his bike for anything worse. He also has a goddamn axe  . BiOmega also has this;  Meet Kozlov. He's a Russian scientist who circumvented the chance of infection by having his brain installed in the body of his pet bear  . The story takes a weird shift half-way through, but it's still an entertaining journey on the whole with a slightly weak ending. It's also a fairly recent series, so all six volumes are easy to come by. Tsutomu Nihei also has a third series that is still ongoing, Knight's of Sidonia, but this post's getting long enough as-is.
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Mar 15, 2015 16:20
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The Impaler posted:Seconding the recommendation for BLAME!. I reread it every now and again just for the sweeping vistas and cyborg designs. Also, there is a one-volume prequel to BLAME!, called NOiSE- containing a bit of a backstory to the megastructure and other lifeforms that end up inhabiting it. I keep meaning to hunt that down, and really should get it off Amazon before it's just gone for good. Captain Invictus posted:Yep, I put KOS in one of the samplers a while back. It also has a cyborg bear-human hybrid though that one is a girl and wears frilly aprons and stuff but also pilots robots because she's a badass. She's the best. I swear I looked through the samplers to make sure it wasn't there already  .
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Mar 16, 2015 01:45
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Boogaleeboo posted:The series is, in fact, "BLAM!". Or "Buh-lam-uu" in the Japanese. It's also cool as ice, with a ridiculously unique aesthetic. Everyone should jump on it. And Blame!², and NOiSE, and really everything he's done. I love Tsutomu Nihei's stuff just for the aesthetic  . I'm actually half-tempted to get that recent model kit of the Tsugumori (the protagonist's giant robot from Knight's of Sidonia) just because it's probably the only memorabilia there'll ever be of any of his stuff.WickedHate posted:This reminds me a lot of Chi-Chian. Which is a good thing, that kind of style rocks. Character designs like this are his bread-and-butter, so go take a look at any of his stuff if you want more. Incidentally as this is in BSS, he's also written and drawn a five-part Wolverine comic called SNIKT! and illustrated a story in the Halo Graphic Novel called Breaking Quarantine.
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Mar 16, 2015 06:53
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I actually have one more manga to recommend; Blood Blockade Battlefront , aka B3, by Yasuhiro Nightow. (His other big work is Trigun, which is also well worth a read or watch.) The premise is simple. Long ago, in the shady distant past of three years prior, the city of New York vanished overnight. And in its place a new city appeared called Jerusalem's Lot, filled with every supernatural entity you can imagine, can't imagine, or don't want to imagine . Ever since then every nation, cult and criminal syndicate's moved in to try and get a piece of the action because the center of the perpetually-foggy city is a passage to the Beyond, the world where all the supernatural denizens have wandered in from. Basically everyone and anyone with dreams of ruling the world using magic or weird supernatural technology is scheming away somewhere in Jerusalem's Lot. In theory, humans are safe there (there's an accord keeping the more exotic denizens from just chowing down on people), but that's pretty much only so good as they don't go wandering into dark alleys. The standard Police response to crime is to go in with six-meter-tall powered armor and shoot-first-ask-never with automatic weapons. And they rarely actually win against anything their own size. In the middle of it all is the main character; Leonard Watch.  He made a deal with an elder god, partly by accident, and in return for his sister giving up her eyesight (she willingly gave up hers so he wouldn't have to) Leonard got The Eyes of the Gods. With them, Leonard can see anything within reason (microscopic zoom, fast-moving objects in perfect detail, as well as seeing straight through illusions to see what's actually there, that kind of thing). But only for short bursts, or his eyes start to literally overheat in his head. And shortly into the first volume he gets mixed in with the only real good guys in the city by accident - Libra. They're a secret society keeping the city from falling off the knife-edge by going round and dealing with all the nastier threats trying to sweep the board. They actually pre-date the appearance of Jerusalem's Lot by centuries, it's just that up til now they've mostly dealt with the isolated threats that have popped through from Beyond on their own (stray vampires and the like). Almost all of them use varying styles of Blood-based martial arts and magic, which is where the manga's title comes from.  The art can get a bit busy and hard to follow at first glance in some fights, but the writing is quite fun and it's amazing to see just what weird creature will sit down at a table in the background or be walking along the street besides the main characters. Rather than sequential chapters the manga is broken into individual episodic stories with roughly 2-3 per volume. The content of which can range from a life-or-death game of demonic chess with constantly-changing rules to get much-need intel, to having to chase down the cat belonging to the girlfriend of one of the main characters. Or the curse she put on his dick and balls will blow them up if the cat isn't found within twelve hours. Special note should be made that the main villain, who very sadly has only appeared in the first volume to-date, is called "Femt: The King of Depravity"  . He's a very fun madman of a villain, and it's a genuine shame he hasn't poked his nose out again.
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Mar 17, 2015 15:43
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Captain Invictus posted:Everyone ought to watch this here teaser trailer right now Leave the image off. Let it be a surprise .One episode and we'll explode though 
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Mar 23, 2015 05:23
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Captain Invictus posted:Ultimately I think Monster was a great series, but the author definitely has a problem with just loving ending things. Same thing happens with 20th Century Boys. Pacing-wise, is Monster a better read or watch?
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Jun 24, 2015 01:58
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Dias posted:I'm a sucker for music-related stuff and these gently caress-japanese-high-school slice of life things so this was a pro-click. Have you tried reading Solanin? It's a single omnibus and a really good slice-of-life manga.
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Jul 25, 2015 03:29
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They still haven't announced Last Order Omnibus 6 though  .
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Aug 18, 2015 03:52
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Captain Invictus posted:I'm gonna guess it's live action! The Gantz movies were pretty fun, and at least they pulled more from the source material past the drat Temple Mission. The ending of the second movie was pretty crap, but it at least tried.
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Nov 20, 2015 13:53
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Begemot posted:That's okay, it's impossible for it to be worse than the original ending to Gantz. You're forgetting the anime series ending.
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Nov 20, 2015 17:24
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Bunny Drop (aka Usagi Drop). Oh god no, watch Usagi Drop, don't read the manga.
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Mar 16, 2016 07:09
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Speaking of Gundam, has no-one mentioned Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin yet? Because it's a real disservice to the thread if not.  MSG:The Origin is a retelling of the original Mobile Suit Gundam 43-episode anime series, keeping most of the series as it was but editing a few things to make them flow better. The original series was partly written by the seat of the pants week-to-week, along with a lot of toy-centric stuff like a clumbsy vehicle form for the RX-78-02 Gundam, and suffering from a cut episode order near the end that necessitated actual begging and pleading to get enough episodes to get an ending. The Origin streamlines the general plot of the show to flow better from start-to-finish across its 12 volumes. It also came in gorgeous hardcover editions for the english release .If you don't know jack about Gundam, or at least the original series, here's the basic rundown. Earth (The Federation) is at war with its orbital colonies (called Sides, that orbit in groups called Bunches) under the banner of Zeon, and is getting its rear end roundly handed to it due to the Zeon's far superior Zaku Mk.II Mobile Suits just wrecking their day across the planet and over it. The story starts with Side 6, a neutral colony stay the hell out of the war as best it can, turning out to be the secret site of a Federation project for a new Mobile Suit - the RX-78. Unfortunately Zeon have learned of its existence, and the very start of the story is an infiltration team coming to destroy the project. The RX-78-01 goes down ruining three Zaku's with it (which was a big deal for the Federation compared to how most fights go), and buys time for everyone to get the -02 and -03 out the door to the ship waiting for it; White Base, a new battleship disguised as a mere cargo transport. It's the progenitor, or at least one of them, for the boy-falls-in-cockpit archetype with Ray Amuro, the Gundam creator's son, finding the convoy about two minutes from getting hosed badly by a pair of Zaku's and gets in the cockpit of the RX-78-02 to try and do something (the test pilots being very dead). The general gist of the story at-large is the Zeon heirarchy trying to stop the White Base and Gundam getting to the Federation's underground stronghold on Earth so they cant reproduce and continue development, sending ace pilots galore to try and sink them. And while it's not an original idea, The Origin actually takes it to its logical conclusion as to why the Federation starts pulling back from the brink late in the manga - with so many aces and commanders funneled towards killing White Base and the Gundam (not to mention getting killed fighting it), they aren't on other fronts and major operations where they might've won the battle.
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Aug 24, 2016 08:16
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If anyone hasn't read BLAME! yet, Vertical Comics are releasing the first volume of the Master's Edition of the manga on September 13th. The Master's Edition of BLAME! reprints the original ten-volume run in six volumes that are larger than the original standard manga book size, and have new colour artwork for some pages. I own all ten volumes of the original print run and I'm still seriously considering getting the Master's Editions 
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Sep 8, 2016 18:37
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Captain Invictus posted:The other couple is a pair of tsunderes, which I always love, because while a couple with one tsundere is common and pretty rote, both parties in a couple being tsundere leads to some of my favorite shenanigans. I can only picture a couple like this as the guys from the I'll Marry Your Stupid rear end sketch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_IYrltqYrU
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May 27, 2017 05:02
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Zetsubou-san posted:i'm not too good at the whole "explaining about why i like a thing enough to recommend it" thing, but I do want to recommend Liar Game. A series about a naive woman and a con man caught up a series of games of trickery and deception organized by a mysterious group. There is a live-action TV series of Liar Game with english subtitles, however. It is well worth a watch. What makes it so good is the Games all have very simple and basic rules rather than being overly contrived. How it gets clever is the way the protagonists and antagonists work those rules in their favour. Neddy Seagoon fucked around with this message at 18:29 on Aug 13, 2017 |
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Aug 13, 2017 18:18
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Nate RFB posted:I bet you regret posting this one now You can't say that without telling us how to goes down the toilet  .
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Aug 28, 2017 16:15
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ryonguy posted:I'm getting a little burnt out on the otaku pandering stuff. This is about the tenth "mc knocked on head/some other contrived incident, winds up in video game" I've seen. My guess is that Sword Art Online dumped a whole lot of chum in the water to cause the recent rush.
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Mar 8, 2018 05:01
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Nipponophile posted:Has there ever been a genuinely good one? Honest question. I certainly can't think of any offhand. Space Battleship Yamato is really good, even if you can tell the writer and Director had Battlestar Galactica playing in every design meeting. They do use what they gleaned from BSG legitimately well, it's just very obvious they drew from it.
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May 29, 2018 08:25
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Captain Invictus posted:Humble Bundle has an insanely good Manga bundle available right now. Like it's nuts how good it is. I thought it was just the original 9 volumes of Alita and a handful of volumes for each of the other series when I glanced at it in my email. I think I practically threw my wallet at the screen on this one after reading your post listing the actual contents of it .Seriously, this is an obscenely good buy, and you should get it right the gently caress now .
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Jun 7, 2018 13:52
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Captain Invictus posted:Yeah, that's a great thing that more companies are doing more to provide widespread, affordable avenues to read stuff. It being global is a huge thing, a lot of the issues with this stuff is regional licensing. Kodansha do excellent digital manga bundles and I'll be dropping the full $20USD on that lot myself .Edit: Invicticus, could you tweak that bundle list to show which ones are actually full runs? I know that Mushishi's complete at 10 volumes, but I'm curious about some of the others that have more than 3-4 volumes. Neddy Seagoon fucked around with this message at 07:37 on Jan 31, 2019 |
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Jan 31, 2019 07:34
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I'd written off RE:Zero for the same reasons, but I think I'll have to check it out now.
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Apr 8, 2019 13:56
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APOSIMZ is Tsutomu Nihei's new work. It's pretty decent. Also it should be noted that BLAME! is the Masterwork Edition, so those six volumes are in fact its entire run (the original manga run being 10 volumes and WELL out of print). The Movie Edition is an adaptation of the standalone CGI anime film on Netflix. It's based on the Electrofisher arc, and a decent way to kill 90-odd minutes.
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Jun 11, 2019 12:59
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BLAME! is an absolute classic and well worth owning. The movie isn't a direct adaptation of the manga, it's loosely based on one of the more prominent arcs of the manga. Tsutomou Nihei's also created BiOmega and Knights of Sidonia, which are both good reads (Sidonia also has a two-cour CGI anime series), a one-off graphic novel called Abara (which has a lovely hardcover release in english), and currently has a still-ongoing manga called Aposimz. Neddy Seagoon fucked around with this message at 09:29 on Aug 23, 2019 |
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Aug 23, 2019 09:26
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I've just read the first 9 chapters of that and ohhh nooo, "x years since Himmel passed" goes up every few chapters and Fern keeps getting older and that means eventually... .
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Jul 29, 2020 07:26
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Captain Invictus posted:continuing the trend of "elves are old", there's a promising new series about a shrine maiden who takes care of her shrine's "goddess", who is just an elf that got reverse-isekai'd into our world hundreds of years ago and basically turned into a massive weeb. it's cute, and hints at the sort of melancholic immortality theme that frieran does. I like that there's no effort to masquerade or mystify her with regard to the locals, they all fundamentally know she's "just" an immortal elf sitting in their shrine who comes round to buy videogames and snacks every so often.
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Aug 4, 2020 09:40
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Anything to recommend out of the current manga Humble Bundle? The only thing I recognize is that NOiSE, the prequel to BLAME!, is a part of it.
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Oct 8, 2020 06:53
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A Sometimes Food posted:Also as bad as AoT got there's no way they're gonna do an anime original after how badly Promised Neverland's anime original season two went. There's a difference between "let's not use this one stupid chapter" and "let's assume we're not getting a third cour" and then making GBS threads the bed by condensing multiple long arcs, into a single second cour".
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Apr 27, 2021 09:52
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