Riuva : Research Institute for Unicultural Visual Arts

Frankly, I’m disappointed. This song was rated quite highly by many including myself and it fits Black Lagoon like a tailor-made glove. But after hearing the full version, its obvious flaws surface.

Due to popular requests (I get like 50 hits a month from google searching for this), I’m posting this. I couldn’t find the Japanese version and it’s hard to translate from romanji so here’s a rough version. I took the lyrics someone on the Nanashi forums posted and then corrected (I hope) some mistakes by ear. Would any kind soul send me the Japanese Kanji version of the lyrics?

Incl. wins the best female vocal ED for this season. The ED sequence features a colourful array of the girls’ portrait closeups and them in rubbish dancing moves. The sequence itself is pleasing to look at, I like the design and the use of cheerful and vivid colours. Each girl gets her own makeup scene, a random funny-face scene and then a cranky dance scene. I like how these aptly convey the spirit of the whole show - it’s all about weird girls acting vain and stupid while making us laugh and ogle. The sequence ends off with uber-manly designs too. Oh btw these screencaps are from episode 2 and LIME’s translations aren’t correct in this episode. In later eps, they fixed it.

Himeji and the unfocused camera

Recently I DOWNLOADED the complete discography of the Brilliant Green. Who are they? I’m not sure if anyone remembers, since they haven’t released new songs for some time now. Back when I was 15 or so, my playlist had quite a bit of their songs, like Angel Song, Ai no Ai no Hoshi etc. 

After falling in love with Last Alliance’s newest single, Shissou, I went and stole all their older songs. A large proportion of them were good but this one in particular is special. Not many songs are capable of making the listeners go, "Wow this is a great song!" upon first hearing. It normally takes a few times for listeners to get familiar and then start liking the song. I only started realising that Shissou was fantastic at about episode 3 of Ouran, while Red Faction took me 5 episodes.