About

Hello, everybody. This is Kenshin_sama and I’ll be the primary author of this blog. Many of you may be familiar with me in various parts of the internet as I like to swing by randomly in many anime oriented websites. I’m a regular poster on MAL forums and I’ve recently started getting active on the Fuwanovel forum as well. You may also see me in the comments section of various fan translation blog for anime, manga, and visual novels. I don’t actively follow any LN translation blogs since most of those translators work at Baka-Tsuki, and I haven’t really taken to following any of the other LN sites. There’s a few review blogs I regularly follow as well.

I do try to be an easy person to talk to for the most part, so feel free to strike up a chat if you’re up to it. If it’s something you want to talk about in general, post a comment here in the About Me section. Otherwise, please keep any discussions about a particular post in that post’s comment section unless it has expired.

My main focus for this blog will be to compare visual novels to their anime adaptions. Since I have yet to gain any kind of understanding of the Japanese language, I will only be looking at visual novels with an English localization. I will also only review visual novels that have been fully adapted and fully translated. I don’t want to have to review something only to have it come out with more content that I would have to analyze as well. When I start my analysis for a review, I like to watch the anime very shortly after I finish the visual novel. If a lot of time passes, I’ll likely forget a lot of key details from my previous analysis and the quality of my article will go down. I don’t want to re-read anything either (it takes a long time to read a VN). Two examples of visual novels with anime adaptions I won’t review are Little Busters and Fate/stay night. It may be in the process of being fully adapted, but Little Busters does not have a full translation, and there are parts of Fate/stay night that have yet to be adapted. However, if the VNs are separate, and the anime covers the entirety of that individual VN, I will review it. An example of this would be Umineko no Naku Koro ni (the first visual novel has been adapted, but not the sequel).

While visual novel adaptions will be the main focus of this blog, you will see some miscellaneous entries related to anime and visual novels. I do follow anime as they air in Japan, so I may post some articles on what’s currently ongoing and just throw out my opinion on them. Considering how long it takes for me to complete a visual novel, it may be difficult to keep the blog active with just those entries. Most of my articles will be anime and visual novel related, but I will occasionally post about manga and light novels.

And as for the structure of my reviews, I’ll mostly be breaking them down to faithfulness and quality. A visual novel adaption can still be good quality even if it does leave some stuff out. Under quality, I won’t look at how the anime compares to the source, but how it handles itself as an individual work. Some adaptions might still be great despite their original elements and lack of certain source material content. Other times, they can be a disaster. But I’ll never hold it against the anime if it decides to go original, so long as it does justice to the source material. Since original content tends to be a miss, however, you’ll most likely find me bashing it! Under faithfulness, this is where I’ll be making comparisons to the content in the anime and the visual novel. I will be sectioning off certain parts of this particular area so that it doesn’t spoil any of the reader. If there are storyline elements in the VN that can spoil anime only viewers, I’ll only vaguely mention them in the section for those particular followers. Same for vice-versa (though that will likely be very rare; the only way I can see it happening is if the VN is adapting the anime). I won’t be make any mention of minuscule details that were left out in an adaption. If there was a minor character that doesn’t have any kind of significant impact on the storyline and isn’t carried over into the anime, I’ll pretty much be ignoring it. Stuff like gameplay mechanics will also be ignored for obvious reasons. The differences I will be noting is stuff like a change of voice actors, poor use or replacement of certain OSTs and voice actors, and removals/additions of main characters, storyline elements, and whatever other content that can significantly change the experience between the source and the adaption. I’ll be giving numerical scores to measure both the faithfulness and quality since I like using numbers. :> Letter grades aren’t quite as precise.

Criticism is always welcome as long as it’s constructive. If there’s something you disagree with and it’s something I can consider an improvement, feel free to suggest it.