No matter how high you pile it …
The stuff coming out of Comiket this year has been garbage upon more garbage. Sifting these collections for any rare gems is akin to clawing through a flaming pit of radioactive turds. The quality of doujin manga and doujin music is appallingly low in general; I haven’t touched any of the professional stuff or eroge yet. Combined with the standard minefield of deviant fetishes, the low quality makes it hard for me to feel that any of this was worth the effort. There was a lot more Macross F material than I anticipated; unfortunately, pretty much none of it was any good. Some older shows and games continue to make appearances, particularly in art collections, and these tended to be better. There were, of course, other surprises as well.
Srsly guyz? The game has been out for less than two months.
The music has taken quite a while to get through, and despite liberal scanning and skipping I’m still less than half done. The bulk of what I have listened to ranks between nails-on-chalkboard and screaming babies. Pretty much anything with vocals has been instant fail, and non-techno instrumental pieces weren’t great either. On the other hand, most of the techno is decent – but come on, it’s techno. For Touhou fans, it’s another audio buffet, as usual. The overall highlight for me has probably been MintJam, but there were only two or three good songs on that CD.
The doujinshi are well, doujinshi. We all know how that goes. Frankly, I’ve seen far too much of t3h pr0n for ero doujinshi to be particularly compelling. Ironically, eight or nine years ago, when I had no clue about Comiket, I’d probably have considered it a priceless fap hoard. But the road between then and now is paved with hundreds of thousands of pages and hundreds of hours of fanservice, ecchi, and hard hentai. Sorry if I don’t find any of it particularly special anymore.
The standard fetishes are all in attendance: snuff, giant breast, dickgirl (there’s a Grace x Sheryl one I wished I hadn’t opened), loli, etc. Much of the drawing is bottom-tier, to the point where some pages just look like angry splotches of vomited ink; forget trying to figure out what the image is actually showing. In doujins I’m typically looking for better art than what the original productions had to offer; my thinking is that real fans should have a better idea of what fans want to see. The best works in my older collections were plainly drawn with far more care than mainstream products, and many featured better costumes and poses. This summer’s Comiket stuff has none of that. That said, I didn’t come away completely empty-handed. Here’s a sampling of the better art:
Old-school lovin'
Fitting homage to one of the best PS2 games, ever.
I actually have no clue where this is from.
I’ve looked at what I think is a representative sampling of Comiket, but I’ve still got a ton of material to go through. I don’t know if I’ll end up touching any of the eroge since, again, I’ve seen it all. After all of the doujin material is done with, I’ll be free to dive into the pro goods; I’m definitely expecting better results from the main studios, particularly Key, Alicesoft, and Type Moon (yes, I said it).
