Not at all FanCruft’s usual content, but some people have been tossing around the idea of having Bill Gates as President of the United States. Given that he couldn’t possibly, possibly do worse job than the people who currently look like they’re going to run for the major parties right now, I wholeheartedly endorse the idea. Go Bill!

This is a new regular feature for FanCruft. As I’m watching anime, I’ll write down raw notes and observations and post them here. Be aware that these these notes will contain mild spoilers, which may be more sever if you haven’t watched previous volumes of a series.

Ok, so I’m watching Noein. I know virtually nothing about this series other than the fact that my friend Scott “Silence” says that it’s good. The opening has a very “WTF” feel to it. There’s some guy name Karasu, and he’s fighting a giant mechanical battleship thing with a freaky looking face or two. I dunno.

There’s a lot of 3D CGI here and there, not perfectly blended; hopefully it clears up like in DNAngel. There’s a kid talking about how things won’t be better when he’s an adult, so maybe this is a coming of age story.

There’s a bunch of dramatic chanting in the soundtrack. The music is a bit repetitive here and there, but it’s really good.

We find out that the mysterious figures that we’ve seen are Dragon Knights from some place called La’cryma. They seem shady, at best, and it seems they work for aliens or something. They say they’re working to save their “screwed-up” dimension. There’s some rebellion here, and there’s obviously not a perfectly unified team.

There’s some sort of love-triangle subplot; I wonder how big an element it will be as the series progresses. It sort of seems resolved right away, which is unusual.

I’ve been replaying Xenosaga again from the beginning. I’m beginning more and more to think that, as the years go by, the Trilogy will eventually be recognized as a great work of literature, similar to the novels of fifty to sixty years ago (Lord of the Rings, anyone?).

Going through the opening of the first game, I can appreciate how much foreshadowing and planning went into the series. T-ELOS is mentioned, and Shion dreams of chaos in the graveyard of anima. chaos recognizes KOS-MOS, and asks her, covertly, about her identity. The accident with the KOS-MOS archetype seems perfectly clear now, as does the identity of the person how gave Chernkov the controller. A few small changes in premise clearly occurred as the series was developed, but that’s hardly surprising given its massive scale.

Anime is an art form; video games are closely related to a greater or lesser degree. Xenosaga is the space opera, perfected.