Our first night in Asakusa was pretty disheartening. Filled with the pains of leaving ‘our home’ and then wandering around for hours lost in the rain looking for our place of stay – it’s safe to say Asakusa wasn’t winning us over much. Thoughts that tended to fill our minds consisted of “This is shit”, “It’s raining”, “I wanna go back to Osaka” and “This is it?!”. But our first day in Asakusa was a turn around a corner for us all. The sky was clear, it was a damn nice day and the niceness of the locals shone through every person we came across. Asakusa is a pretty old town. Much like the kind of place where you might want to retire to, or a place you’d like to vacate to when you’re in your 60’s. Lots of convenience stores, cheap 99 yen stores, markets, Onsen’s, cheap restaurants, temples and no chronic hustle and bustle.

It’s easy to see the attraction to Asakusa when you truly open your eyes and look beneath the lack of neon signs, girls in knee high socks, arcades and electronics stores. There’s something really nice and warm about Asakusa that feels inviting, non-threatening and homely. The only problem with Asakusa, is that at times it can feel so warm and sedate that you tend to get complacent and forget you’re on a holiday, and that you’re in Tokyo at all!

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(Please excuse the  one-day-later post but this couldn’t wait another whole week). *Ahem*. . . Hello there, fellow Dark Diamond readers and friends, and welcome back to another one of my very well-received coverages about events that gather our one similar trait; that what makes us wake up early on a cloudy Saturday to be ready just in time to assist the one event you’ve been waiting all year long: The -anime- Halloween Party (because most of the other parties . . .just don’t cut it).

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As we wrap-up another hectic month, in true Halloween fashion, we had a scare of our own. Nahu and Velcor were down with a sickness by the H1N1 bug. Thankfully it was only temporary, but while they celebrate dia de los muertos, the rest of us get to don our favorite costume idea, eating candy and watching horror movies. What did you do for Halloween?

The posts this month seem be all across the board, but here’s what got you talking the most:

Modern Warfare 2: The Elusive Banned Video
When you’re guaranteed to sell a bagillion copies of a videogame, you have to up the ante. When does it go too far? rbk3ai tells it to us straight: can i say you all are a bunch of P***YS its a game.

Windows 7-tan: The Whole Nanami Madobe Voice Clips
Nahu provides us with with his take on the Nanami Madobe Window 7 theme: it turns errors into features and nerd rage into a moe-induced trance.

Kirsten Dunst’s Cosplay Was For A Movie: Akihabara Majokko Princes
While snaggletooth Dunst was playing dress-up for a music video, it seems part of a larger project highlighting the Akihabara culture. Thankfully the film is in the hands of Takashi Murakami. I’m sure we won’t be let down.

Did You Know: There’s A Triforce In The Dollar Bill
You know where you hear stories about the founding father’s being part of a secret society? You can find traces of the Illuminati in the pyramid, the seemingly insignificant spider in the corner, and now the Triforce hidden in the “e” of the $1 bill. Sleuthing fenixdown110 says: There’s Hyrulians among us and high up enough in the government to influence the printing of money. Conspiracy!!!

Movie Night: “The Dumbass Who Stumbled Through Time” Edition
The movie night for this month involved pudding, and lots of it. Pudding so good one would travel back to the moment after they ate it, just to eat some more…this was certainly a love story… Angelywind cries: OMG I can’t cry more TT.TT… oh wait… yes I can T^T so sad and so fun, that I love it.

Well, there you have it. We are looking ahead for what November will bring. You guys have any suggestions? After all we are here to serve the DDN community.

Tekken 6 isn’t the series’ best soundtrack. I don’t think Namco are ever going to touch the awesomness that was Tekken 3’s soundtrack. But 6 is certainly the most varied of the bunch sonically. Each piece is completely different in style and tone to the last. Many of them you wouldn’t associate with a Tekken game at all.

Amongst the various styles that the Namco sound team play with, “Fallen colony” is my pick of the bunch. It’s just a bad ass piece of music. Distinctly Japanesey, yet with many musical styles thrown into the mix. Live drums, kickin’ guitar solos, strings, chants, trumpets, percussions, drum ‘n bass, synths and several bars of awesome.

Dishing out cans of whoop ass to this song feels incredibly gratifying. More so if you manage to smash your sucker of a victim through the glass floor of the stage this music features on, and then juggle their arse up off the floor. Good times…good times.

Listen: Fallen colony

Tekken 6 OST
© 2007 Namco Bandai

For the mp3 players: Fallen colony

The day had come. Where we’d say goodbye to the place my friends and I had affectionately referred to as ‘our home’. It’s insane how much of a connection we all felt to Osaka. Especially seeing as many of us felt very little towards the place before we got there. Not that we’d heard anything bad about the place. But we all had this idealistic image in our minds that Tokyo would be the best thing in the world ever, and immediately paled every other place in comparison to it. So we were more than a little surprised that Osaka turned out to be such an amazing place which we did not want to leave.

We were sure to see ‘our home’ out with a bang though. Albeit it an unplanned one. Said bang consisting of: heading to an Irish pub, then to a tiny little bar which was packed to the walls, and then onto to a nightclub to drink and dance our sorrow’s of leaving away. It seemed to do both the trick and make us feel worse. Because the night was so good and we’d met and made so many random friends on this one night, that we were ever more reluctant to leave.

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You go to Japan. You gotta do some karaoke. It’s an unwritten law. After all, Japan is the home of it (depending on who you speak to) and nowhere else in the world quite revels in it like Japan. Whilst the full on karaoke experience in the Western word is rather expensive and only of real value if you go with lots of people – in Japan it’s affordable and won’t burn holes in your pockets. Well…if you ease up on the food and drinks it won’t anyway. Everybody from school kids, to salary men, to part timers can just wander  into a Big echo to drop some karaoke un-planned and scrape together some Yen to belt their Nihongo classics, the Oricon’s chart toppers and the Eigo hits.

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Self-described as a narrative paramedic, Rhianna Pratchett is most known for her work on the Overlord series with additional credits in Mirror’s Edge, Heavenly Sword, and Viking: Battle for Asgard. I had the opportunity to interview Rhianna about her creative approach to writing, general thoughts on videogame development, and emotive storytelling.

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One of my good friends is a Persona freak. He loves the games and owns every single PlayStation release of the series. A few days ago he’d got himself a copy of Persona 4. He was opening it as I was talking to him on the phone. “Oh, it comes with the soundtrack!” He put it on and as he skipped through the tracks, I caught a whiff of some J-Pop. “Stop. What song was that? Go back!” “My affection”. I have a soft spot for easy breezy J-Pop that are so sickly sweet and happy-go-lucky that it’s enough to make you sick and vomit an ice cream cone with a side of rainbow. And “My affection” has buckets of sweetness. All it took was the “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeeeaaah”’s and I was on the song like a fly on shit. It’s just a really nice song. It isn’t a main theme or a major centerpiece song or anything. It just plays when you’re wandering around a town! I love it. I’ll probably get too sick of it eventually. But for now, it’s my pleasure that I’m not even guilty about. The entire Persona 4 soundtrack is pretty spiffy. In the realm of RPG’s, many tend to forget there are other hot composers other than Nobuo Uematsu.

Now if you’d excuse me whilst I go sing my shit. “Your affectioooooooon! Your affectioooooooon! Take it for coffeeeeeeee!”

Listen: Your affection

Composed by Shoji Meguro
Performed by Shihoko Hirata
Shin megami tensei: Persona 4 original soundtrack
© 2008 Aniplex

For the mp3 players: Your affection

Wow, you guys made the 2nd movie night a complete success once again! Thank you all for coming. For those that couldn’t make it, you have some explaining to do! Now it’s time for you to voice your comments on the movie, that is, if you’ve stopped crying. Whatever you want to discuss, whether it’s pudding, fixing your bike’s brakes or the intricate workings of nut-based time travel. Let us know what you thought of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

It’s Friday and its the movie night! Same as last time, the theater is here, do join us a bit before for some chatting and random videos. The movie starts at 7 or a bit after, be there!