Manga/Gate -- Modern Military meets Epic Fantasy

OMG Just a few days left lol

Dang.

There goes my idea for a Call of Duty meets Warcraft videogame.

Well, not really, but boy do the words "Nothing new under the sun" apply to me right now.

Did you just see this topic because of my bump or were you really looking for something like it already?

First one. The description caught my eye.

And here I thought I had a novel idea for a story. But given the number of people on the planet, it shouldn't come as a surprise that someone else would beat me to the punch of telling such a story.

Nonetheless, I'm eager to read and/or watch this.

Well, unless your idea also had heapings of nationalistic jingo thrown in and right-wing politics thrown in, I'd say that you'd find Gate as how it was originally fairly different. :P

Could you rephrase that?

EDIT: BTW how many of you here thought "Dark Portal" during the first few pages of Chapter 1?

edited 1st Jul '15 2:47:48 PM by Worlder

So I take it that, like Mark Millar film adaptations, the anime will be modified in order to get rid of the extreme right-wing leanings and the like?

Doubt it. Mahouka wasn't modified to remove the rather disturbing morals, so that's not a good precedent (and it doesn't help that a disturbing degree of otaku seem to agree with those rancid morals, as well as the saddening tolerance some Western fans have for them, too).

The rerelease for English of the manga actually had a fair bit removed already, on the other hand. And it must be remembered that being a right-wing militarist in Japan does not necessarily equate to being a right-wing militarist in the rest of the world, given Japan's rather unique take on the use of force in international affairs in modern times. The manga's having Japan use military force to recover its citizens when they were kidnapped by an armed aggressor is anathema to modern Japanese politics and marks the author as a right-wing extremist in his own country, but to an American, Russian, German, French, British, sending in Special Forces to sort out this kind of situation is utterly normal.

Is this an odd, but apt, description for the Gate?

edited 2nd Jul '15 9:23:25 PM by Worlder

Not really, especially if you've read the books.

Specifically, the Gate originally opened by goddess Hardy, was meant as a temporary thing that was supposed to facilitate the transfer of peoples and cultures as a means of avoiding stagnation. It explains the wildly-differing tech levels and races found on the world beyond the Gate, because Hardy's been grabbing folk from across time and space to populate it.

After a while it was supposed to slam shut, as keeping it open was described as something akin to trying to bridge the gap between two balloons that spun in opposite directions from each other with a straw — eventually, it'd rip both balloons apart. However, mages of the Empire found the Alnus gate, and had the bright idea of keeping it open (by building the stone arches that we see in both the manga and book covers), because they found it useful as a tool of conquering what was on the other side. Or so they thought.

Eh, it was worth a try at being clever.

Huh, with all I'd heard about the series I'd assumed it was popular, but the anime definitely doesn't have the budget of something they expect to sell well

I think the bigger surprise for me was how it's apparently 2-cours.

In any case, there's a whole lot of Adaptation Expansion going on here, as well as distillation — for example, it took a whole episode to introduce why Japan's forces has to cross into the gate (and 30 in-universe days of political wrangling to bring it about).

Then there's the fact that the JSDF was able to bring in tanks during the initial foray; in the books and the manga, the aperture of the Gate was only wide enough for a jeep or APC, which meant that anything larger had to be taken apart THEN reassembled on the other side.

Of course, since they're setting up the Battle of Alnus hill next episode, the JSDF needs something flashy to fight back with (hence the tanks). In the book and manga, the JSDF managed to dig themselves already before the Empire made its move again (the fort on Alnus already had barbed wire, mines, and trenches by then, on top of the heavy artillery), but here, it's made that the Empire forces were already there, and the JSDF ran into them. Heh.

edited 3rd Jul '15 4:38:15 PM by MyssaRei

A lot of shows are 2-cours recently, some are even broken up into two 12-episode "seasons", even though they're consecutive seasons (like Durarara for example)...LOL

EDIT: Shame, the tanks are still Type 74s rather than the Type 90.

edited 3rd Jul '15 7:40:58 PM by entropy13

Well, they at least better not use Chi-ha. XD

Call of Duty: Final Fantasy very interesting...

That first episode was a lot more entertaining than I expected. Noticed Kishida Kyoudan doing the OP song and that's pretty hypeworthy.

How far's the translation for the original novel?

There isn't any. The manga, however, IS being worked on, and covers books 1-2, which the anime will likely tackle as well.

I'm kiiiiinda hesitant on manga adaptations but I guess I'll give that a go if I can't wait for the next episode...

You should read the manga as it's better that you can really see something (even if it isn't moving). And while they're still focusing on the LN itself it seems that they are also taking some cues from the manga.

Well, Baka-Tsuki has a project page for it. But there hasn't been any work since 2013, and besides teasers, it only has the prologue and first chapter. About equivalent to up to Pina's introduction in the manga adaptation. (And the original novel, not the light novel, has even less done.)

edited 6th Jul '15 1:08:50 AM by Vehek

At least where the manga reaches so far is probably where the anime will stop actually.

After watching the two episodes out so far, the anime is pretty much how I was afraid it would be. They skip over a lot of the combat, with discretion shots everywhere so much that there's barely any blood or actual dying people shown, like ever. (Not a single civilian in the Ginza attack was explicitly shown to have died) And the anime tropes are played up way worse. The original force that invaded Ginza was originally (in the manga, at least. I'm not sure about the LN or WN) mostly human soldiers, but in the anime it's a bunch of generic ogres and pig-orcs and goblins. A lot of the character designs are really "anime-fied" too, specifically those on the other side of the gate. Lots of spiky anime hair and technicolor hair. Pina Colada looks like a generic moeblob preteen rather than a young woman trained to be a knight, and she goes from at least somewhat realistic and practical armor to having a friggin cleavage window.

For what it is, I think they've made it too tame, especially compared to what you'd see in other anime these days. But, I'll give it another few episodes before I make a decision on it.

Oh new chapter for the manga LOL. Different loli (an actual one) this time LOL

edited 16th Jul '15 9:39:32 AM by entropy13