the staging zone^α

Black Butler is an anime set in Victorian London about a boy from a wealthy family who traded his soul in return for being served by "one hell of a butler" (a pun from the subtitles that you'll probably get sick of by the end of the series and isn't even an accurate translation of the original Japanese phrase) — literally a demon butler with supernatural abilities. The two make it their business to fight crime for whatever reason.

I liked the general concept of the story, though the episode-to-episode execution of the plot can be somewhat weak. There is a very slight mystery element, but the viewer isn't really provided with enough information to be able to make any deductions.

The animation quality is average and appears to have been produced with limited resources. Despite that, I did like the stylised visual aesthetics.

The voice acting is consistently good. There aren't any outstanding performances, but they all suit the characters well. I liked the opening and ending songs. For the ending song in particular, it was quite a nice surprise to hear BECCA's vocals in it, which I recognised instantly. The rest of the audio elements are minimal and don't draw attention to themselves.

Overall, Black Butler is a mixture of weak and decent components. I enjoyed it a fair amount.

Over ten years after it was first released, hit Japanese visual novel CLANNAD is finally arriving at the English-speaking market.

The 2004 game was developed by the studio Key, whose previous works KANON and AIR reached 2^nd and 1^st in the national sales rankings respectively. Despite the successfulness of those games, CLANNAD managed to surpass both of those, and is still widely considered to be the best visual novel of all time.

CLANNAD was later adapted into an anime TV series by Kyoto Animation, which proved widely popular the world over. However, for many years there was no prospect of an English release, with many fans unfortunately unknowing of the story's origin.

Luckily Sekai Project, a Los Angeles based start-up who have previously released visual novels such as Narcissu and Key's very own planetarian ~the reverie of a little planet~ on Steam, have managed to gain the support of VisualArt's (Key's parent company) to publish the visual novel in English — a feat previously thought impossible. To raise funds for this, they have set up a Kickstarter crowdfunding project. With three days to go, the project's pledge funds have reached three times its original goal of US$140,000.

There is still time to pledge, so if you're a fan of the CLANNAD anime and want to experience it as was originally intended, head over to Kickstarter where you can snag all manner of backer rewards from the game itself to soundtracks, fanbooks and T-shirts!

A synopsis of CLANNAD's story from the Kickstarter page is as follows:

After losing his mother in a car accident and subsequently falling victim to an abusive, alcoholic father, Tomoya Okazaki is an emotionally-distant delinquent student at Hikarizaka Private High School. On his way to school, he meets a strange young girl, Nagisa Furukawa, who is repeating the year due to a severe illness. From their brief encounter, she decides that they are friends and enlists his help in order to revive their school’s drama club. With not much more to do, he cooperates with her, making friends with many of the students and learning about the different problems that they face…