AKB48: Sailor Zombie

So yesterday I went to a place called Spo-cha which is a kind of public sports centre.  Aside from all the sports and physical activity stuff, they have a game arcade where all the machines are set to free play so you can get your entry fees worth of money just by playing a few rail shooters.  One of the rail shooters that they had this time was the rather strange AKB48: Sailor Zombie and thanks to free play I managed to play it from start to finish so I better say something about it.

If you don't know, AKB48 is a pop group consisting of a large number of young girls performing catchy yet ultimately terrible J-Pop and they have a stupidly large following of rabid fans who are almost completely on the wrong side of obsessive.  Personally I don't give too many shits about them, if you're drunk in karaoke then they are there to provide stupid songs that are easy to sing in Japanese but I'm not the kind of person to put them on by choice.

Anyway, this isn't the first game I've seen from them, they have some kind of dating sim looking thing which I THINK is called AKB 1/48 but that game kind of makes sense to me.  The idea of being able to romance your favorite member of AKB must have been prime spanking material for the aforementioned rabid fans but the idea of a game where you shoot the group in the face strikes me as kind of odd.

I skipped almost every cut scene during my play through but from what I could tell there is some kind of zombie outbreak that has changed a bunch of the members into zombie and it is up to you, the player, to use your vaccine gun and un-zombie them.  You are joined by the one remaining not zombied member who will give advice, get in the way, spout nonsense and help combat the outbreak with catchy pop music.

Game play wise it's a standard theatre type rail shooter.  You sit in a dark booth with guns that are attached to a pivot and you use those to shoot school girl zombies in the face until they un-zombie.  There is also a boss monster that sort of looks like a big wolf thing that you have to fight a couple of times during the game who likes to jump around and be generally hard to hit but this wasn't an issue for me because ha ha free play.  However, this game isn't JUST a rail shooter, oh no, it's also a rhythm game!

 At the end of every stage you have to play a simple rhythm game where you use the guns triggers to hit notes to some of the most well known songs of the group.  They are pretty easy and it's hard to fail but if you're playing 2 player then your partners fuck up can cost you health which is a little annoying.  Then again, providing that you have a working brain these rhythm sections shouldn't pose any difficulty, it's overly simple and is more of an annoyance than anything else.

Anyway, just to round things off have a short video of some of the game play.  It would have been a little longer but my wife, who was recording the footage, wanted to play so this is all you get.

Gekijourei

So a few weeks ago I went to the cinema and saw this horror flick and now I'm finally getting a chance  to sit down and say a couple of things about it.  First just for people who have no idea what the title means let me explain those weird squiggles for you.  "Gekijou"  is the Japanese word for a theater and the "rei" means spirit or ghost.  So I guess a loose, shitty translation of the title would be Theater Spirit but that sounds shitty so I'll stick with calling it Gekijourei for this post.

So the movie follows a young girl called Sara Mizuki (played by Haruka Shimazaki for AKB48 fame) and she is hired to play a role in some stage play for some skinny prick.  She is joined by some other try-hard wannabe actresses as tension builds during the preparations for the performance.  While all this is happening, an even doll possessed by a ghost is going around offing people and it's up to our plucky heroine to put an end to the ghost, save the day and save the production.

To cut a potentially very long post short, this movie just isn't all that good.  It has a few moments but they are too short and too few and far between to make sitting through the whole thing worth it.  If you have ever seen a Japanese horror movie before like The Ring then you've seen this.  It's about a cliche as it gets and you can see the "twists" coming from a mile away.  Just go and watch any Japanese ghost movie and replace the word "ghost" with "doll" and you pretty much have the entire plot of this film.

I want to say that the acting wasn't particularly bad but I think that's because I went in with absolutely 0 expectations from any of the talent.  Haruka Shimazaki especially, being an AKB48 pop star idol, I was expecting her performance to be just complete cringe worthy bullshit but she played her part well enough.

That's all I really have to say about this film, it's not shitty enough for a long rant and it's not good enough to gush over in any kind of way.  It's just one of those "meh" cliche Japanese horror movies that you watch and then forget about  about a week later.  It speaks volumes when one of the highlights of the movie going experience for me and my friends was laughing at the guy 2 rows back who had fallen asleep and was snoring loudly.

Still, if you've not seen any Japanese horror movies before or you're one of those creepy weirdos who likes AKB48 and wants to watch Haruka Shimazaki make terrified faces at the camera then maybe you'll get a kick out of Gekijourei.  Otherwise, avoid it because it's going to be one of those shit £5 DVD movies that you'll see about a million copies of in the "Foreign Cinema" section of your DVD store.

That Chick Who Shaved Her Head

So apparently this story was being spread all over the place, it's even on the fucking BBC.  I was far too absorbed in doing more important shit, like video games or folding my laundry, but this highlights a really creepy side of a certain sub culture in Japan.

The girl in the above picture is called Minami Minegishi, and she is a member of a "band" called AKB48.  AKB48 is a incredibly shit band that make incredibly catchy music, so no matter how much you want to get mad at their incredibly dumb tunes, you'll still end up humming it down the street/singing it at karaoke.

So the reason for the whole head shave thing is that she was caught spending a night with her boyfriend.  It sounds weird but this is what fans of AKB48 are like.  They are put forward as this all girl group full of innocence and whatnot and there is quite a large group of fans that feel way more connected to the girls than they really should.

We are talking about kinds of people who will buy multiple copies (and this can be way more than 10 sometimes) to get invites to "hand shaking events" as well as multitudes of other weird shit.  I get mad at AKB48 gaming CD sales like this, because it basically means that the Japanese charts are a load of shit, and I'm barely made aware of good artists because the charts are clogged with this garbage.

Anyway I got way off point here.  The whole deal is that the girls in this group have to maintain the whole "innocence" thing so that the thousands of forever alones who make up the fan base don't get upset and their imaginary wife "cheating" on them.  Of course she broke the rules and shaved her noggin but the whole thing is incredibly stupid.

So to sum up the whole thing

Shit band with catchy music and strange rules
Overly attached, creepy as fuck fans numbering in the thousands
Member tries to do something that every other normal human being would do, and it backfires hard.
She's an idiot

Which reminds me I should really give that AKB48 video game a go some time.......