aniki

Didn't realise the new series was out 👀

There are some cinema previews going on, but I don't know how long for. The show isn't due to air until July.

I have long held the belief that there has never been a truly great version of Ghost in the Shell, and I'm including the original manga in that assessment. They're inconsistent within themselves and across the franchise, and all of them bogged down by unnecessarily dense technobabble and surface-level philosophising.

Based on the first couple of episodes, Science Saru's upcoming series The Ghost in the Shell isn't going to buck that trend—not helped by how few original ideas it seems to have.

It hews much closer to the original manga in tone and character design, which means it shares that version's whiplash tonal shifts. It cribs a bunch of shot compositions from Mamoru Oshii's 1995 movie, though it does get some points for how different it looks from what's come before, thanks to really bold lines, more energetic animation, and the use of almost-neon colours. The music is good, but so close to elements of Stand Alone Complex's OST that I was surprised it wasn't Yoko Kanno in the credits. (It might have been the cinema setup, but it was also far too loud, sometimes eclipsing the dialogue.)

Maybe the biggest problem, though, is how it's structured. The original manga is a real slap-dash of episodic and recurring threads, and as a result it never really coalesced into anything resembling a consistent theme. It's the same here, with episodes covering the first three-and-a-half chapters of the manga. We get the opening assassination scene (with references to the Puppet Master removed in favour of the manga's confusing geopolitics discussion), the assault on the orphanage, That Scene On The Boat, and then the start of the Puppet Master plot with the garbage truck.

And the pace is breakneck. The manga just about gets away with it by letting you read at your own pace, but everything happens so fast in the anime that it's tough to keep up—and I read the manga last month. And on top of the action, there's constant technobabble being thrown around—some but not all of which is plot-relevant worldbuilding. And while Oshii's movie(s) and SAC excised a lot of the social commentary, this seems to have just transplanted Masamune Shirow's late-80s Japanese bubble economy politics, fully intact. Given some of the stuff around Israel and Syria later in the book, I'm curious how close they'll stick to it in the long run.

So yeah, bit of a mess.

I'm a little curious to see how—or if—it tries to diverge from the manga as it proceeds, and whether or not it tries to align the various plotlines into something more coherent. But given how slavishly-copied these episodes were (and how unadventurous anime adaptations of manga tend to be, these days), I'm not sure I have high hopes.

I never noticed anything with the camera in DK, but I don't know if I modified some setting or other. I did have a great time with it, though.

Am I right in thinking for MK World for any of the online stuff you'd need a Nintendo online pass?

I still have a couple of slots in my family group if you're wanting in on that.

It's truly mind-boggling that there's no way to skip the cutscenes when you find a new car or whatever. Did they really think we'd all be so rapt with attention at a bored-sounding description of each car?