#the storyboards are so fuckin' good

[none-tadashi-left-hiro]

hmmmm. Sad

[oddygaul]

Zenless Zone Zero

Well, I’ve been playing the shit out of this game, so fair warning, there will be significant brainrot ahead.

Overall, I really dig it. I’m a huge mark for character action games, and well-done life sims tend to suck me in; Zenless Zone Zero is nailing both those aspects pretty damn well. In fact, it’s nailing them well enough that… how do I put this… it starts to slip into the territory of being A Good Game Generally, rather than just a gacha. And while this is a big accomplishment for ZZZ, this also puts it into direct conversation with other full-price games, resulting in its gacha elements causing more friction than Honkai Star Rail’s ever did*.

*I’ll be comparing this to HSR a lot, because I play way too much of both and they’re made by the same developer. I recognize that it is pretty odd and potentially even problematic to A / B compare them when I could be looking at the game through the lens of, you know, Gaming At Large. But hey, that’s why this is a subjective journal and not a holistic review blog! It is what it is.

So, the aesthetic of this game fuckin rules - it’s like, late 90s to early 2000s VHS-core. The main characters run a Blockbuster, for Christ’s sake. Presentation-wise (and systems-wise, and, hell, music-wise), ZZZ is obviously borrowing a lot from the Persona series, but like… great? I’d love it if more things cribbed that style and made it their own, from the confidant hangouts, to the small but comfy explorable areas, to the dynamic menus with edgy character poses. The character design itself is all superb, all the way down to the crowd NPCs - some the shopkeepers here have cooler designs than the main characters of some other games. Even aside from the designs, ZZZ is doing a lot with lighting and color desaturation that really lends it its own unique vibe. They actually have a cohesive artstyle in here! wild.

The presentation of the story is also killer. Sure, a decent chunk of the conversations are just models lip-flapping at each other - although they at least emote and pose a bit here, unlike the Star Rail dialogue scenes with their demure princess waves. In the main story, though, we get not only a heap of fairly lengthy cutscenes, but also this really cool comic panel-style presentation.

I feel like there was a bit of a trend in the PS3/360 era of games to present a game’s story in this comic panel / storyboard style. I understood the motivation: games increasingly demanded a more involved, consistent storytelling approach, rather than the ‘One big rendered cutscene at the beginning and end’ they used to get away with, and the generation’s increased visual fidelity meant that doing even basic, in-engine cutscenes took a lot more resources to make something half-decent. In Spyro the Dragon on PS1 you could get away with a fun little 15-second gag with a barely animated polygonal yeti or whatever; in the PS3 era, you were going up against tryhards like Metal Gear Solid 4. Amidst this landscape, the pitch of having your illustrators pretty up some storyboards and put them in the game sounds like it’d save a lot of work - plus, consoles were finally outputting a high enough resolution that this sort of flat image wouldn’t be compressed to hell.

Thing is, I always kinda hated that approach. In some cases, I think that’s the popular opinion - I fuckin love Bayonetta, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone defend its weird slideshow cutscenes. Even in games where the execution is perfectly fine, though, it rubbed me the wrong way. I think of Infamous - objectively, the art’s solid and fits the tone of the game, and the motion graphics aim to capture some of the dynamism typical cutscenes would provide. Despite all that, it still feels cheap to me - all of the panning, effects, and graphic imagery feel like they’re trying to polish up something that inherently doesn’t fit.

In ZZZ, though, I’m loving every one I come across. It’s obviously still done for efficiency reasons - there’s already a handful of characters that exist only in these panel scenes, saving the team the effort of having to model and rig them. But the freedom this allows for staging and storytelling is huge; the characters are more expressive here than anywhere else in the game, and we’re able to see situations with huge crowds and new locales much more often than would be possible in typical cinematics. And the illustrations are genuinely good, too - full of character, cool poses and creative compositions/angles.

if everything actually had to be modeled, there's no way we would've gotten Legally Blonde Nicole

Plus, the cutscenes are constant, and boy do I love the animation here. It feels so rare nowadays for a high-budget game to do stylized 3D animation of this ilk. Your biggest budget games are all going for the cinematic look, and pushing realism as much as they can - and while I know an immense amount of work and craft goes into animating something like The Last of Us, boy, I just could not care less about something so lacking in flair*. Even bigger properties that use a stylized artstyle these days, like Breath of the Wild, still tend to lean towards fairly naturalistic animation. Zenless Zone Zero’s cutscenes, on the other hand, spin and stretch motherfuckers around like we’re back on the PS2, are filled with forced perspective, and I am absolutely living for it. It’s not even reserved only for bombastic action scenes, either - we get honest to god character acting-focused conversation cutscenes.

*Seriously, take me back to the Naughty Dog that animated Jak & Daxter. Jak’s hero animation is top tier to this day

Of course, the combat animation slaps too; each of the playable agents is absolutely dripping with character. Even characters whose designs initially left me cold won me over once I saw the amount of care put into their movement and combo strings. It’s honestly shocking to me that this is the same studio that made Genshin Impact, a game I dropped after about 2 hours because of how lifeless all the animation felt*. Unique run cycles for every character, actual non-human designs, the flourishes everyone has when stopping mid-combo to snap them back to idle, the absolute synergistic audiovisual bliss of the parry… it’s really impressive stuff from a young team.

*Same studio in name only, totally different team, I know, but still

Mechanically, I have some mixed feelings about the combat as a whole. Zenless Zone Zero is, without a doubt, aiming to present complexity and depth as a team battler - that is to say, it’s more about team synergy, tag combos, and knowing who to use when, rather than soloing as any particular character. Nonetheless, I really would’ve appreciated individual characters having a bit more depth to their movesets; a jump, a launcher, cancels, anything. As outstanding as all the animation work is, there’s some characters that only have a normal attack string on square and one special attack on triangle. Like, sub-Dynasty Warriors level of complexity here. It’s rough.

This is where ZZZ’s gacha nature gets a bit ugly: so far, more complex kits and skill expression are mostly locked behind rarity, which is kind of scummy. In Star Rail, for the most part, 4-star characters are defined as such due to their numbers: they still have mechanics and complexity, they just aren’t tuned as high as the limited characters. Hell, in some cases they have more complexity. Ruan Mei is an almost incomparably stronger unit than Asta, but Ruan Mei’s play pattern is fucking boring: you use skill every three turns when it runs out. Asta, meanwhile, basically has her own risk & reward minigame that demands more thoughtful SP management.

In ZZZ, on the other hand, the lower-rank characters straight up have less going on in their kits. Nicole has like… one tech, sorta. Anby has one single animation cancel to chain her normal into her special quicker. Lucy’s only skill expression is choosing whether to tap special or hold special. Meanwhile, Zhu Yuan, a limited character, has a normal string that bounces between melee and ranged attacks, can be dodge-canceled at any point in the combo to branch into variations of the string, and a hold-normal attack string that’s completely different and has the same branching dodge-cancel tech.

It’s one thing to lock raw damage and meta viability behind a gacha, but locking the characters that are mechanically more interesting to play straight up sucks. If I hadn’t been lucky enough on the standard banner to pull exactly the two characters I find the most mechanically satisfying, I don’t know that I’d still be playing - and this is the point where ZZZ begs comparison to other, non-live service character action games. Sure, it’s probably not fair to compare a random A-rank’s moveset to Devil May Cry V’s iteration of Dante, a feature-creeped nightmare of a kit 3 console generations in the making. But what about Sengoku Basara Sumeragi, my personal character-action GOAT? By all accounts a mid-budget title, yet it offers 40 full characters chock-full of more unique mechanics and animation cancels than you can shake a stick at.

Fuck, can we please get a new Sengoku Basara? Please? I’m desperate out here. I’ll take anything, y’all.

There’s also the inherent issue that plagues every action RPG (usually deftly avoided by the character action genre), which is the delicate balance of player success depending on the numbers vs actual mechanical skill - a balancing act made even more noticeable due to the gacha genre-standard of characters taking weeks of grinding to level up. This is a topic for another day, but suffice to say, a big part of the reason Honkai Star Rail works for me as a very pretty version of Cookie Clicker is because of the Autoplay option. In Zenless Zone Zero, if you’re not willing to grind out the same mob fight for a week or two, you’re gonna hit an endgame roadblock of doing chip damage to a boss you’ve mechanically mastered because you’re underleveled, and boy, that never feels good.

For all those issues stemming from the gacha, I will say, it’s great that the story missions let you use the characters that are actually supposed to be present for those missions, even if you don’t own them. Aside from how nice it is to have an opportunity to put the whole roster through their paces, it goes a long way for actually getting invested in the story. Honkai Star Rail’s storytelling is a hot mess for many reasons, but it’s always particularly jarring rolling up to a sidequest at like, a local theater troupe with a wanted space criminal, the sitting president of a completely different planet, a ten year old child, and a shirtless cyborg cowboy, none of whom have canonically met each other; ZZZ’s approach sidesteps this issue. The proxy angle even provides a pretty valid diegetic explanation for why agents that don’t know each other might be working together.

Now that we’ve sort of meandered back to the story after talking about animation led us on a long detour - the story is surprisingly solid. In particular, I really appreciate how straightforward the writing is. I don’t know if the issue lies with the original text or the localization, but Star Rail’s dialogue, even in simple missions, tends to be incredibly meandering and overstuffed; ZZZ is a lot better about letting all its characters talk like actual humans. It also helps that the plot so far is a lot more grounded, and spends more time focusing on each faction’s group dynamics rather than the overarching plot. These games live and die by their characters, so leaning into those strengths is a smart move.

Zenless Zone Zero is, unfortunately, fully in line with Hoyo’s weird conservative politics - in particular, 1.0 and 1.1 are absolutely stuffed full of copaganda. With how many safety regulation jokes they made at the construction company, I initially hoped they’d lampoon the police faction a bit, or make a commentary on how comically heavily armed New Eridu’s police force are. In a vacuum, Zhu Yuan shouting combat lines like “Stop resisting!” or “Freeze, hands up!” while blasting someone with her gigantic, ‘JUSTICE’-emblazoned rocket launcher shotgun feels like it ought to be satire. Every time we talk to the officers, though, it’s just line after line about their solemn duty to protect the people of the city, how essential and important they are for the community, and so on and so on.

This wholehearted embrace of the world’s current power structure is something Zenless Zone Zero approaches in nearly the exact same way as Star Rail. In both games, your playable character is someone that’s sort of operating outside the law - in Star Rail, as the maverick organization that is the Astral Express, while in ZZZ you work as an illegal proxy. Despite this setup, any time the protagonists come into contact with a governing body, they are no less than thrilled to help them enforce the will of the law.

In Star Rail, you aid the local governments (one of which is an undemocratic monarchy) in committing massive cover-ups to hide their failures from the populace not once but twice. In ZZZ, you aid the police to an obsequious degree - playing along with them to not arouse suspicion is one thing, but helping them organize a fucking community day on Sixth Street? Fuck that. Hell, said community day is even shown to initially be DOA because none of the local residents trust the police - and you best believe we get two full scenes of the MCs changing the resident’s minds, resulting in them spouting shit about “Oh, it was our fault for judging the police too harshly - they really do have our best interests at heart!”

is it tho

There’s an argument to be made that the N.E.P.S. are a little different, given that they exist in a post-apocalyptic world with monsters popping up every day - and ZZZ’s copaganda is certainly a little less flagrant than something like Spider-Man helping the NYPD install civilian surveillance networks in Insomniac’s Spider-Man. And, sure, perhaps this can help excuse why they post fully armored, rifle-wielding soldiers in the Lumina Square DMV, and provides some justification that their existence is more helpful than the real world’s civilian-murdering property guards.

Thing is, though, at every turn you’re hit with dialogue and situations which make it clear that, no, they’re the normal cops. Every other sidequest seems to involve calling the N.E.P.S. in on somebody or helping with an investigation, and for every time we see them handle ethereal activity, there’s two instances of them being called in for petty property theft or something similarly minor - even the playable character has heaps of dialogue choices threatening to call the police on someone*. Much like Star Rail’s reactionary politics were strangely at odds with the ‘blazing a new path’ ideals of the trailblaze, Zenless Zone Zero’s obsession with the police puts a damper on its underground, counterculture aesthetic.

*Including a case where both options threatened this, leaving me without a non-narc dialogue choice.

illustration by Lv01KOKUEN

And finally… I don’t know where to fit this in, so I guess it just goes in its own little section at the end here. Lots of people, myself included, have touched on the Persona inspirations - and they’re certainly significant. One thing I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone mention as a huge influence is Yasuhiro Nightow’s Kekkai Sensen / Blood Blockade Battlefront. From its sense of style to its worldbuilding, ZZZ damn near feels like fanfic to me. Hell, it’s right in the name - BBB? ZZZ? And this is on top of the dimensional crossover / big city vibe, the retro fashion, the different factions. Victoria Housekeeping might as well be Libra 2.0 - Von Lycaon is a damn near perfect 50/50 expy of Klaus and Stephen Starphase. And then Belle / Wise, who assist these powerful fighters in a noncombat role just like Leo, also turn out to have some sort of special magical eyes granted to them by untold powers from within the dimensional rift??

I’m here for it, don’t get me wrong - love Nightow. But that can’t be coincidence, right?

[alligatorjesie]

*glances at the raging cunt who keeps posting harassment to this fandom's tags every month or so*

You know the last time I checked you're not a fucking reylo so beats the fuck out of us why you're up in our goddamn shit so often @watchingtheearthrise

Cait Corrain isn't active in this fandom. She's hardly a reylo, and if she's gonna act like that she's not fuckin' welcome here.

I think they may have wrote a few reylo fics a long time ago but they're not a big name writer and the fandom as a whole don't really know who the fuck this person is.

I've seen a few people online mention Cait's book is published reylo fanfiction but I can't find anything from the writer confirming it so we’re all just assuming it started out as a reylo fic.

Looking at it, it seems more like lore olympus fanfiction than reylo but again, until the author says otherwise we’re just assuming.

Cait did however talk a gullible friend into helping her sabotage other people's book reviews and when the lacky she coerced did it wrong because she didn't really explain her dastardly plan very well and the moment she realized how badly the 'friend' fucked up she threw that kid under the bus.

But even that shit is kinda sus because these timestamps don't fucking line up. This conversation looks doctored to a lot of people meaning the only person responsible for being a cunt here is cait and you @watchingtheearthrise.

The friend is mentioned to be a reylo but you can't really put much of the blame on them since they were just doing what their cool(shitty) published writer friend asked them to do, assuming this friend is even real.

Cait didn't get mad she did a bad thing. She got mad she did it poorly and got caught. Which speaks volumes about Cait.

You being here assuming the worst out of this fandom every time someone so much as sneezes without saying 'god bless you' speaks volumes about you @watchingtheearthrise.

Please for the love of fuck would you find a fucking hobby to pour this endless passion into.

You know something really fun that I've spent a lot of mental energy on over the years and has brought me great pride and joy is this Star Wars Episode 9 rewrite comic I've been working on.

Legit!

I got character sheets and new alien designs.

Most of the script is wrote out, I'm currently working on storyboards and page framing.

I'm only as far as I am because I have a life outside the computer and can't dedicate endless hours a pet project but it's got 2 of my favorite things in it:

A narratively cohesive continuation of The Last Jedi-

And furries.

Because fuckit why not it's my fucking comic.

You're welcome to laugh, and I know you will because you're a huge pile of shit, but doing this has been incredibly cathartic.

we live in a world were we have increasingly little control over basic shit in it. Media can feel like it wants to make money more than it cares about the story and character development and if I want media I’ll actually enjoy well goddamnit I guess I’ll make it myself.

I want it to be good. I want the salt of the fact a random furry wrote and created a better Star Wars EP9 to burn. I think thats funny.

I personally didn't like EP9

(Notice how I dislike EP9 but don't go out of my way to harass people who like it @watchingtheearthrise?)

So I decided to just make my own. Instead of being asshole to people in a fandom who do like it.

(Notice what I'm doing there @watchingtheearthrise?)

I don't see you in here when the fandom does nice shit like donating a shit ton of money to Adam Driver's arts for the military foundation.

I didn't see you in here when Thea Guanzon, a southeast asian reylo's published book became a new york times bestseller.

I don't fucking see you pop in when the dedicated members of this fandom post art and stories and celebrate the thing they love.

Don't let a single person who is acting shitty color your entire opinion about a whole ass fandom man. God fucking knows if I took this approach with finnreys I would just assume all of them are huge pieces of shit because nine times out of ten the people posting anti hate to the reylo tag are finnreys.

But since I'm not a complete fucking dumbass Like Some People Here

I'm able to use some common fucking sense and see it's not the finnreys that are shit.

finnreys are fine.

It's just like... 4 unique people with a lot of extra accounts.

real fucking bold to comment on someone making extra accounts to do nefarious things online from someone who already does that.

I’m pretty fucking sure at least 6 of the antis I regularly come across in this tag Are Your Accounts @watchingtheearthrise. You admit to 2 extra ones you’ve used to harass people in this fandom in the past In Your Fucking Bio

( I love hate how you have reylos in your DNI but paradoxically will not stop posting to this fucking fandoms’s tag I swear to Jesus Fucking Chri-)

God fucking bless you @watchingtheearthrise I hope you find someone who helps you learn how to not be such a festering cunt.

I started out this post not even know who the fuck Cait Corrain is. I still don't give a fuck because shit people can go fuck off into oblivion for all the fucks I don't give but since some asshat antis can’t be fucked to do a goddamn second of research I guess much like that ep9 I'm rewriting I’ll just fucking do this too.

Cait's a reylo about as much as you @watchingtheearthrise and you’re both welcome to let the door hit y’all on the ass on the way out.

[graciousdragon]

I FUCKING DID SOMETHING FOR ONCE LET'S GO!!!

ok so i was listening to this song like a week ago and i saw this animation clear as day in my mind and i knew i had to try and storyboard it out while i was thinking of it. i wanna do the full song at some point because it is So Very Them-coded but i do not have the time rn and will not for a while (i barely had the time to make this) so for now i just made sure i got the really complicated part out of the way. figured i'd post it because. why not lol

anyway. this is for my Darkest Desire AU story!! it's called Glitching Fates!! i am so normal about it and i have been for years now. it is. so far removed from the source material but i do not care it is very special to me :]

as a sort of summary for what's going on here, the night guard and Will used to be really good friends but they both ended up getting busy with their own lives so they couldn't interact as much, and then the whole Glitchtrap possession thing happens which reunites them but also drives a wedge between them since Will is blindly following Glitchtrap while the night guard is trying to find a way to stop Glitchtrap.

i am so not fucking normal about these characters you all have no idea. oh my god. they have permanent residence in my mind rn. i need people to ask me about them or else I Will Become Violent (/j)

hope y'all liked this, or at least i hope y'all found my passive-agressive notes to myself funny lol. under the cut i typed up all the handwritten ones in case y'all want to read them but can't make out my handwriting

a fuckin uh.. pillar or somethin idk

ooh cool scene transition

how do i convey that he's walking onto a train

dismissive wave

hair is longer to indicate passage of time

pretend this shot doesn't look like total dogshit ok?

hey how did my anatomy manage to get That Much Fucking Worse this far in

there is Something wrong here. i just cannot tell What

that is. so much better what the fuck

ok that's all thank you for looking at my post :]

[aihoshiino]

So I was randomly going through the first episode trying to find the ghost Ai scene and I noticed something that wasn't in the manga…during the mini concert part where the twins do their ritual dance, there was also what looks to be white roses as congratulations…? It's around 35 minutes in, the only other person who we've seen so far use white roses in this franchise was Hikaru...unless those aren't white roses and I suck at recognizing flowers lol They did pause on those specific flowers though

So...! For anyone who didn't quite catch it as they watched, one of the establishing shots of the performance venue before the promo mini concert is of a huge bouquet of white roses.

They are directly center frame and the eyeline of the proceeding and following shots are all constructed to keep your eyes exactly in the middle where they will be.

These roses were something we briefly chatted about in the Oshi no Brainrot Discord when Nik (@akane-kurokawa) was kind enough to share some pics from the episode 1 storyboards but it wasn't until this ask that I went back to take a really good gander and realized some very interesting things.

First of all - you're correct that these are white roses, because the storyboard note here explicitly identifies them as such. In fact, it's the only thing it says; 'there's a flower offering of white roses at the bottom of the stairs'.

You'll also notice that the image here is basically just a grayscale version of the screencap above, which means it was fully rendered before the storyboards were even done. I'm not a hundred percent sure how early into episode production these would have been completely (aside from... you know... pretty fuckin early!) but these seem to have been done so early on in overall series production that a bunch of the settei hadn't even been finalized yet. Peep these scrunkly ass early B-Komachi designs:

Not only that, but as you can see from this image and checking out Nik's post of the storyboards, that a ton of them are roughed out like this with basically nothing already rendered to this degree of detail. This implies that this shot was extremely important - important enough to have fully completed and ready to go before the storyboards were even complete.

Oh, well. That's not quite true... Nik did spot one other thing that was prerendered.

The rose bouquet Ryosuke brings for Ai, that the storyboard specifically mentions should be the same colour as they were in the original work.

All together it has some, uh... very loaded implications, huh?

[unicorn-spirit-studios]

WIP - It Doesn’t Matter - Zone 01: It’s About Time - Scene 17 - 2024-08-22

Man! It took me nearly a year to get through a minute forty long scene...fuckin' hell! I'm so, so excited we got this scene done!

(I think I said somewhere that scene 16 was the second-to-last scene in Zone 1, but then I realized that the transitional part was its own scene. So, scene 17 is the second-to-last scene in Zone 1--hilariously, that's what it is in my storyboards, BUT I'd cut an earlier scene introducing Knuckles/Hank for time, and because I thought the AK-47 scene that was filled in/written later was as good or better as his introduction. So yay, accidentally getting my storyboards corrected.)

Getting hit HARD by the mind changes!

I actually really like mind changes in TF, though I HATE identity death. Part of that's a values issue, part's preference, but a large part is, well, what's the point of it being a TF, then? I'm just a big fan of glorying in the difference the TF makes in the person's life. I like the contrast. As always, I'm a sucker for the TF being a change for good in the individual's life, BUT, that doesn't mean it doesn't present new difficulties. That's the place I love to live. How does this unmitigated good fuck up these people's days? I'm very much of the wish fulfillment brand of TF fans, AND I like to see the more grounded consequence. Look. I'm Otherkin and trans. There's fallout to the things that are important, and while there's a place for stories where it's just the fluffliness, I want to explore what happens after that wish is granted. I love that shit.

[rock-pokemon-appreciator]

everyone always praises mystery dungeon meshi and it IS good it really is, but you know WHY that is? cause harta is a MONTHLY publication! kui had a whole MONTH to storyboard and work on chapters, instead of needing to work herself half to DEATH every week! and it has two whole months of the year with NO publication! jump mangaka get 4 WEEKS a year, 3 of which are december, and one of which is in january... of COURSE jump manga often has quality issues... everyone is so fuckin burnt out all the time...

[vanlegion]

. . . I hardly ever do this, but I went ahead an edited an image I previously posted. It was 3Am and the joke was funny ~to me~ because it felt like a very funny In Character moment . . . but I don't think it landed very well for others. Normally I wouldn't care, but like. . It *does* kind of get to me sometimes when I spend hours awake - arting through the entire night until it's morning and super happy with out it turns out and feeling good for the amount of effort I put into it, only for the joke to not land with others and push people away I guess. Not the first time it's happened, but I think this particular time it hits harder because A) Now that the show is done and gone, any new content will be from us creators, B) Any content of this pair is being consumed at rabid pace because of how S19 ended and C) it's pride month. Basically a perfect storm of 'Well Damn'. I may also just be in a mood. Either way, the story I'll eventually post over on A03 will have the original version (Because I didn't know this but you can post pics in fics there!!) so it's not gone. I use CSP - anything I make is very GONE, its just a hidden layer somewhere. Fuckin' love CSP so much. >.> The program anyway. Pissed a Celsys for doing the whole sub shit, but that's another tangent I aint getting into now. Back to Storyboarding!

[sapphire-weapon]

ID Leon was the worst in terms of being brainwashed into a gov. lap dog

dude, ID Leon was...

I don't even fuckin know, man. And I don't think the writers knew, either. His character is all over the place in that series. He cycles through moods and motivations so fast it felt like someone just collected a bunch of notes/storyboards out of QuanticDream's dumpsters and slapped them together in a rush.

And it's so frustrating, because the very few times that ID is good and on point, it's really fucking good and on point. I will always, always, always hold up the scene of him and Jason talking about treason as being one of the best scenes in RE, period -- not only because the tension and pacing are on point (as well as it being super fucking hot when Leon shoots him in the heart), but because it's the only time we ever really get to see Leon At Work(TM). What he's saying in that scene isn't necessarily something that he, personally, believes -- but he's here to do his job, and he's going to fucking do it.

The CGI movies in general do this really interesting thing with Leon career-wise where they establish that Leon doesn't just sit around on-call waiting for an outbreak to happen; his primary job duty is to be a bounty hunter, essentially. He's basically the US government's own personal Yakuza sent out to do the real dirty work. I like that a lot, actually.

And so ID in particular is kind of interesting in the sense that, like. I wouldn't say that he's brainwashed per se, so much as I would say that his head is still in the game. He knows what's expected of him, and he's going to do it, whether he agrees with it or not. It was kind of a similar thing during Operation Javier and RE4 -- this was the job that he was sent in to do, so he's going to do it regardless of anything else.

It isn't until Damnation that he starts to become really cynical and jaded about the whole thing, and by the time of Death Island he's just like YES I'M GOING TO DO THE THING, I ALWAYS DO THE THING, GET OFF MY FUCKING BACK SO I CAN DO THE THING AND THEN IDK JERK OFF AND PASS OUT BECAUSE THIS IS MY LIFE NOW

I just wish that the entirety of ID was as high quality in this regard as that one scene was, because it probably would've been easier to map the trajectory of his character arc if it was.

[cherry-bomb-ships]

🙈!! (@spacestationstorybook)

HI NYX THANK YOU FOR THE ASK 💖💖💖 So this clip is from the season 4 episode "Forced Kin", which I'm now realizing I definitely need to rewatch cuz I did NOT appreciate it enough the first time 😅💖💖💖 Also uhh cant believe I have to add this but slight content warning for a white guy voicing a stereotype character ya gotta understand it was a different time they didn't know this was rly bad yet don't cancel me 💀

Real quick before I get into anything, I want to mention the change in animation, as this was one of the very first (if not THE first) episodes done in digital, as opposed to the cel animation the rest of the series had been in for the first 3 seasons. While it is cool to see it nice and crisp here, I do feel like they were still kinda figuring out how all this digital stuff works, since to me it feels more stilted and stiff than the animation has looked previously, along with the art style being just a bit off. Maybe that can be chalked up to the storyboarder of this episode as well, but the way Mojo, as well as the Girls later on in the episode are drawn is just the slightest bit off to me. That could always just be me tho 😅

Ok with that out of the way, of course the most obvious thing permeating this whole clip: the dramatics 😂💖💖 He is SOOOOO EXTRA AND FOR WHAT TBH, No one does it like him you will always be famous to me my love 💀💖💖💖

It's the smallest fuckin thing but the way he points out the egg and then... doesn't elaborate?? 😂 Like WHAT was wrong with it I'm dying to know

Once again a small thing but like... I fuckin grew up on french bread, that was SUCH a treat in our house so I am an absolute connoisseur of it and can 100% agree on how offended he is about it 😂💖💖

Ok I am almost sure that this is the first time I've heard Mojo say "peon" and it catches me SO off-guard every time, it's a good fit in his dictionary of insults of course but its just jarring to me for some reason 😅

Ohhh my god I think this is something we can all agree on... the comedic timing here is fucking. GOLD 😂💖😂💖😂 Just the long pause after being asked if he feels like he can do whatever he wants, followed by "..... Yes" and the bread-smack 😂😂😂😂 And the way he does it a SECOND TIME and laughs in the EXACT same cadence gOD. HE'S SO SILLYYYYYYYY 💖💖💖💖💖

Alright last thing and of course this is not exclusive to this clip but I loooooove his dramatic hand gestures as he speaks, like I said earlier he is always so so so extra and it's SO ICONIC like WHOOO STAY WINNING HONEYYY 💖💖💖💖💖

💜 ask game here! 💜

[halogalopaghost]

Mutant Mayhem Storyboard Leak: Why I Think It's Fake

Let's start on the legitimacy of the original poster. As far as I can tell, the video was posted by a Twitter account by the name of @/thecartoontea. This account was created in October 2022, is not following anyone, and only has one liked tweet.

The only other post on the account is a still image of a storyboard, which was posted at 10:55PM on January 20th.

Twitter also tells me that the account has made four tweets, but I only see two. There are no replies. So idk what's up with that.

Next step: legitimacy of video

First and foremost, let's acknowledge the actual content of the video. I didn't watch more than twenty seconds, but it doesn't FEEL like real storyboards to me. For starters, the scene is listed as scene four. That feels AWFUL early to me, considering what's mentioned.

And look at the designs! These designs (especially Donnie's) look like the concepts that were released months back, where he has the little buck tooth. In the most recent leaked images, which were primarily merchandise and promo material, that snaggletooth isn't present. This points to outdated information from a forager imo. The most recent stuff was posted on January 5th or 6th, and this video could have taken at LEAST that long to make, possibly longer. It's possible that someone was foraging something on information that was outdated by the time they finished. (why are they little string beans?? I don't get it. I don't mind it but I don't get it)

Next let's look at the actual content

The purpose of a storyboard is to convey broad strokes of information quickly and with good readability. It's covering motion, camera angles, the visual storytelling in whole. Let me stress this: it is NOT animation! 99% of storyboards are less than 1 frame per second—a one minute TV spot often has no more than 10 finalized storyboards. This video has more than one frame per second. (!!) It's a fraction more, but still. Could it have been sped up? Sure, but storyboards are often synched to audio—specifically the voices of characters, and these guys are speaking at a pretty average pace in the video.

Last thing: If this was real, Nickelodeon would be all over it. As of writing this, the video has been up 25 hours and has just under 20k views, 297 retweets, and 134 quote tweets. Considering how quickly they scrubbed previous leaks, there's no fuckin way this is legitimate.

[beastialmoon]

God, this. All of this, you hit the nail on the head.

GunBuster is so fucking good.

While it certainly had an impact on anime with it's first few episodes, I doubt it would have left much more than that if it wasn't for those final two episodes, and that final scene. The decision to make the last two eps in black and white really makes it pop against the landscape of color vibrancy in anime both at the time and today.

The storyboards is a really fun choice imo, it definitely feels more artsy here than in eva.

The ending is phenomenal - it's so lonely, but, at the same time, oddly hopeful? Like, after thousands of years, with who knows what's gone on or happened to our lonely pale blue dot - humanity still remains. Is still welcoming of our heroes.

And I think that's beautiful.

Fuckin great work with the remaster/dub, too, DiscoTek!

So, that new Gunbuster Dub

Rewatched Gunbuster yesterday- this time with it's sparkly new dub!

And...this anime is such an experience, honestly.

Like, as someone who has seen a LOT of Gainax and Trigger shows, this show as Anno's directorial debut is super interesting. You can see the DNA of Evangelion (and like, all of Gainax and Trigger's mech shows- I see a lot of Gurren Lagann in it) in there.

Also, the "Science Lesson" shorts at the end are just hilarious. Like Anno couldn't figure out a way to wildly over explain the both REAL and SUPER FAKE science shit, so....here we are! Also, it's exactly what Rebecca Sugar did to exposition dump in Steven Universe, I love it. Also, look at these 80s chibis!

It's incredibly 80s. The space bug design is very Nausicaa (Anno had worked on Nausicaa previously.) One of the girls is from the Soviet Union despite the show starting in the 2020s, which is great. The fact that it's little "Aim for the Top!" catchphrase is a weird mash up of a beloved tennis anime (Aim for the Ace!) and Top Gun is wild. The art and the music is just delightful.

There sheer Runtime to Exposed Nipple ratio is off the charts, and its impact on the infamous anime boob jiggle trend is....notable. It's not even really comical the way that Gainax/Trigger fanservice tends to be? It's just...sometimes conversations happen while the girls are topless. And it's definitely horny, but in a more... subdued/realistic way than something like Kill la Kill.

The fact that the final episode is in black and white might just be an artsy choice, but the fact that the entire climactic space battle is just fucking scans of the storyboards!? Did we spend the entire space battle animation budget on the boob jiggles? How did this effectively happen to TWO of Anno's robot shows?!

But despite all the silliness- the actual like...themes explored in this show are *so interesting.* The way the time dilation is used to explore the sacrifices and the trauma? So often, we see the "soldiers return as changed men to an unchanged home" ala Lord of the Rings. But Gunbuster says "the soldiers, these events still incredibly fresh and hurting, return to a home that has moved on without them" and it hurts SO HARD. Noriko is forever a teenager, and every time she is able to touch base back home she has drifted further and further out of synch with her friends and the life she could have had. First by just a few months, then years, then...well.

It's so much more interesting and emotionally resonant than it has any right to be when the first episode has mechs doing fucking jump rope while Tom Cruise Coach shouts at them through a megaphone.

[hecksupremechips]

Every once and a while I remember the cut Lorax song for the Onceler and I punch a hole in the wall

[bbeelzemon]

im watching a professional animator on twitch rn and its crazy how, like... hes drawing entire frames so quickly.. thats what years upon years of practice and working on art and animation does to a mfer

[ruairimacarthy]

“I imagine it’d be better than any other sort of consumption they’d get, Pheebs. We might be doin’ ‘em a favor at that point,” Ruairi said with a snort. It might’ve been a bit of an off-color joke to make but it wasn’t like they were in public and it wasn’t like Phoebe wouldn’t appreciate it which was enough to rid Ruairi of any doubt in terms of whether he’d get chewed out for saying something stupid one way or another. He scratched the back of his head as he stared down at his head and shrugged in response to Phoebe’s explanation of Foster’s predicament, “Maybe if he bribes her with cat nip enough or somethin’? She’s sort of a fuckin’ gremlin, though, so that might make it worse. She might think she can just have it whenever and then that’s a whole ‘nother problem.”

He smiled at Phoebe sympathetically, “I’m not tryin’ to rub it in but thank fuckin’ God that Jaina’s the best dog in the world. I don’t think I could deal with trying to wrangle her if she was anythin’ like Misty. Not that it’d change me keepin’ her but I’d probably have more headaches and I get enough as it is.” He choked on the laugh that Phoebe’s next comment earned and cleared his throat to collect himself. “Ah, it was good! Benefit of bein’ my own boss and drawing for most of my day— storyboarding’s fun and I’m havin’ a good time doin’ it.” He moved towards the kitchen as he spoke and set the container on the counter before he pulled the lid off to show Phoebe the slices of cake he’d brought. “It’s literally just— you bake it and then jam holes in the thing and put whatever you want in there. You can make it with boxed cake mix if you wanna do it yourself. Or I’ll just keep doin’ it if you don’t think this one’s shite.”

"We'd probably streamline their untimely deaths but," Phoebe shrugged as she ushered Ruairi in, closing the door behind her, "What a way to go, huh? Overconsumption of sugar!" It was pretty morbid, to even joke about a preferred death but, if Phoebe had the choice, that was definitely up there. And she was glad to find someone like Ruairi who could play along. At the mention of the shoes, she glanced down, letting out an admiring hum. "I'd normally make a suggestion about getting Foster some but for some reason she targets his arms, so we're thinking of a backup plan because it's getting too hot for him to wear long-sleeves."

At the question of work, she let out a small noise of discontent. "It's surprisingly boring at the paper, but I had another tutoring session up Oak Gardens way. Turns out money can buy you a lot of things, but not basic reading comprehension. What about you?" Her eyes sparkled at the mention of cake. "Poke cake...I don't even know what that is, but all cake is good cake."

[crystalbehindthescenes]

did i not say making it the 90s style wasn't gonna change anything if production isseue stays the same