The background to Code Geass is interesting in itself: it’s set in an alternative Earth where the British Empire never went into decline and has gradually conquered a sizable chunk of the world’s surface, in part helped by their giant robots called Knightmares. The latest country to be conquered in 2010 was Japan, which was subsequently renamed “Area 11″ and its people dubbed “Elevens”. The rest of the world seems to be divided amongst several superpowers, such as the Chinese Federation. Naturally not all the Japanese took this invasion lying down and have formed a resistance to fight back against the Holy Empire of Britannia. You can find more information on the background on the Wikipedia.

The main story begins 7 years after the conquest of Japan and revolves around Lelouch Lamperouge, a Britannian teenager who attends the prestigious Ashford Academy and seems to have a hobby of using his chess genius to embarrass minor Britannian nobility. After such a match Lelouch gets mixed up in a resistance operation that results in him gaining the power of Geass, which allows him to give anyone who looks into his eye a command which they are compelled to follow. Even if the command is “kill yourself”. Lelouch uses this ability, along with his tactical genius, to form the persona of Zero and take command of a group of rebels and use them to do considerable damage to the Britannians. Lelouch’s motives for this become clear over the course of the series.

Along with Lelouch there is a supporting cast of interesting characters, most of which manage to conform to some clichéd anime archetype or other. There’s the shy girl who’s not-so-secretly in love with Lelouch, the obnoxious best friend, the bossy student body president and so on. The characters manage to be just different enough to keep things interesting though, especially as the series progresses, or at least fun. In case you’re wondering why you’re getting flashes of Cardcaptor Sakura or Tsuabasa, the character designs were done by CLAMP, although the series is not one of theirs.

Like many other anime, especially those involving mechas and high school students, the show tends to have a mix of drama, action and comedy. The pace of the show doesn’t exactly start off slow but it still manages to pick up towards the final episodes. There’s plenty of twists and turns in the story as well, enough to make it a reasonably good thriller.

There’s quite a bit of character development for the leads during the course of the first season but Lelouch really steals the show in some of his more contemplative moments. His character is similar to Light Yagami from Death Note but where Light has only a few initial concerns about his path, Lelough struggles with it almost until the end. I think this makes him far more interesting to watch: he’s never truly convinced that what he’s doing is right and has to do a lot of rationalisation to get through all the terrible things he does. In a way, he’s even willing to sacrifice himself – or at least his humanity – to achieve his goals, which are surprisingly unselfish.

Although the show only recently finished airing in Japan it has already been licensed in America by Bandai Entertainment, perhaps due to its (apparently) large following. I’ve already seen it referenced or parodied on at least two other anime series. A second season has been announced as well, which is just as well since the first ends on a cliffhanger.

Now, there is one thing I’m slightly upset about already with the English dub: it was announced that Johnny Yong Bosch would be doing the voice of Lelouch. Now, I don’t actually mind Bosch’s voice work but he has a major strike against him in almost everything he does – he always sounds like Johnny Yong Bosch! Vash, Ichigo, Renton and Itsuki all sound pretty much the same (despite their wildly differing characters) and, at least in this case, I think his voice is not a good fit for Lelouch at all. I’m probably being a bit harsh here: we can’t expect everyone to have the range of Crispin Freeman. I’ll reserve final judgement for when I actually watch the show but I guessing I’m going to be watching this one with subtitles after the first viewing.

Overall, I absolutely loved this series and I can’t wait for the second season. If you enjoyed shows like Death Note or Full Metal Panic! then I’m sure you’ll enjoy Code Geass as well.

For the last month I’ve been seeing the following on an increasingly frequent basis:

For the lead up to Christmas, and to coincide with Madman’s various sales and promotions, this error page is seen more often than not. At least by me. When I see this I tend to get visions of a lone server sitting in a drab room in a Collingwood office building, quietly struggling to keep up with the number of connections and serve out hundreds of pages, images, scripts and, now, high-quality streaming video.

I think one thing has been made painfully obvious at this point, and it’s something that should have been learned during the 10th Anniversary Sale: Madman need to upgrade their web service! I mean, really, there are ways to deal with higher than normal loads and they don’t need to be terribly expensive.

Optimise the web application.

This should be the first port of call. I’m thinking that the number of database queries should be minimised, output size should be reduced, Java code optimisations should be researched, caching should be implemented and generally have the whole thing given a thorough going over.

Break up the processing responsibilities.

Since the site runs on Java I’m going to assume they’re running a Tomcat server. I hope this same server is not used for serving static content like images – the Apache HTTP Server is a much better fit for that. At the same time, it’s probably best to use a few servers to perform load balancing and to allow the database server(s) to run on different hardware to the web server(s). This should ensure that no one place is placed under too much load.

Use a Content Delivery Network

This would probably result in the most drastic improvement for the least amount of work. Using a CDN like Amazon S3 or Akamai would allow all the static content (and there’s a lot of it) to be served from servers that are designed to handle almost any load and bandwidth requirements. I’m thinking the streaming trailers would benefit the most from being moved to a CDN, if they’re not on one already. On top of the benefit of reducing bandwidth needs and the number of active connections required to the Madman server, Akamai and possibly others provide services to increase the availability of web applications (“Web Application Acceleration”) – particularly Java-based ones. I can’t say how well these would work here and whether they’d be necessary once other optimisations are performed but it’s definitely something to look into.

Well, I think that about sums it up. A few things that could be done, the last being quite simple, to improve the availability of the Madman site and ensure potential customers get turned into actual customers and the raving fans are placated with their anime crack.

Rather than go into a long and involved review of the plot, characters and culture of the show I’d like to cover the local release by Madman Entertainment. For a proper review of the material itself you can check out Anime New Network’s review or, as usual, the Wikipedia.

The first thing to cover, if only to get it out of the way, is the episode ordering on the discs. I’ve discussed my feelings this previously and while I still fell the show works better when it’s not in the correct order, I find now that I’ve largely gotten over the whole thing. Watching the DVD you’re still introduced to the series with Episode 00 The Adventures of Mikaru Asahina, which is the same episode used to introduce the broadcast ordering. After that I wasn’t terribly put out watching the series in chronological order. Really, the only thing you miss is the increased sense of wackiness the show exudes when nothing is where it should be and the hilarious episode previews by Kyon and Haruhi (Yuki introduces them now in her typical monotone).

The quality of the video and audio is great, as you would expect. I’ve been a bit put out by anime DVDs in the past when it turned out that the video quality on the DVD was actually lower than the quality of the fansubs I’d downloaded. This is definitely not the case here: Melancholy has some of the highest productions values of any anime in recent years and Madman would have had to be insane (har har) to treat such an overwhelming fan favourite with anything less than their utmost respect. As I have ranted about before, I do wish that interlacing would be removed before the video hits the DVD but that’s about the only complaint I can level at it. If your DVD player does a decent job of deinterlacing you won’t even notice anything.

If you’ve previously seen a fansubbed version of Melancholy then chances are you’re going to want to listen to the Japanese dub again on the DVD, of which only Dolby 2.0 is provided, simply because that’s what you’ll be most used to. I would urge you to have a listen to the English dub though as it really is quite good. Crispin Freeman does a fantastic job of capturing Kyon’s tone; you have only to listen to the work he does in Episode 00 to understand what I mean. The only voice that is still irking me is Johnny Yong Bosch’s performance as Itsuki Koizumi. I don’t have any particular reason for this except that his voice is quite distinctive and he sounds too much like he does in his other anime roles (Ichigo in Bleach, Vash in Trigun, etc). I’m sure I’ll get used to it as the show continues.

There are quite a few extras on the disc, including the usual assortment of textless opening and closing, TV commericlas and Madman trailers which here are Highlander: Search For Vengeance, Afro Samurai, .hack//Roots, Ah! My Goddess – Season 2, Hellsing Ultimate – Volume 1 (which nicely shows off Crispin Freeman’s Alucard) and Karas. Also included are a couple “Making Of” clips and three episodes of “The Adventures of ASOS Brigade” which, from my brief glance, seemed to be worth a few chuckles.

In typical Madman style they’ve provided you with the usual cover, featuring the hideous OFLC rating logos, and an alternative cover which is lacking them. I think I prefer the normal cover because I like the picture of Haruhi dragging Kyon around by his tie but you can decide for yourselves.

On the topic of OFLC ratings I have to wonder if an MA15+ is really warranted in this case. Sure, the show does contain contain sexual themes (I think Mikaru gets put in some compromising position in every episode) but I don’t think this really goes beyond an M15+ rating at worst. The only thing I can think of is that it’s due to the allusion in one episode to Haruhi spreading around that the computer club president sexually assaulted Mikaru. The weird thing is, nothing like the word “rape” is ever heard since it’s actually bleeped out. So why such a strong rating? Especially for an animated title. Oh well, the things classification boards come up with these days.

I think the timing of this DVD release was quite inspired: it came out only days before Manifest so most of the otaku in the state (and even interstate) would have been in a particularly purchase-happy mood. I must admit that this is one of the first DVDs I’ve bought of an anime series that wasn’t in a complete boxset. I guess the temptation of a special bonus DVD with the episodes in broadcast order for simply too much for me to resist! If you’re planning on buying Melancholy in the near future keep in mind that the bonus DVD voucher is only in the collector’s box version and does not come with the DVD by itself.

Well, I think I’ve covered everything about the local release. I don’t think I need mention that The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is one of my all time favourite shows (anime or otherwise) and is highly recommended. It makes me hope that Madman will pick up the light novels for local distribution!

Incidently, if you want to grab a copy for yourself online you find Volume 1 and Volume 1 & Collector’s Box on the Madman website, as well as Volume 2 available for pre-order.

If I left anything out or you’d like to know something further please leave a comment.

The third day started a bit later than I would have liked but I still managed to get to the campus around 10:30am. So I missed the screening of Nagasarete Airantou but that didn’t matter too much since I’ve seen most of the series already. Mostly I like seeing comedies at Manifest because I can enjoy everyone else laughing at the same stuff as I do! What I was in time for was the Hare Hare Yukai dance competition at 11am. Oh, and there was yet again a large queue for passes, although not not as large as the previous two days.

Unfortunately what I did not realise is that the competition itself was in the PLT and the mass dance was to be at the Economics Courtyard. So I ended up completely missing the competition but managed to see the mass dance, which took place at about 11:30am. In the mean time I had front row seats for the final performance of the festival by My 6 Cents Worth who were belting out all manner of anime themes. The Pokémon theme actually got played twice. the band’s performance in general was excellent and they had a few people dancing around – including a great performance from a “dancing Aizen“.

The dance itself was quite impressive. As a guess I’d say there were more than 50 people taking part, which already makes it the largest Hare Hare Yukai dance in Australia. I wonder if the numbers will increase next year or if everyone will have moved on to Motteke! Sailor Fuku by then. If you want to see what it looked like plenty of people were taking photos, including myself – you can see mine below.

After the dance it was time for some more spending so I headed back to the trader’s hall. There was nothing new of course but it was marginally less crowded than Saturday morning (which is nuts). I also went back in the afternoon for a final look around and I ended up buying a ridiculously overpriced, yet downright adorable, Yakumo plushie and a subscription to Animavericks, a locally produced otaku magazine. I got the subscription for the “freebies” they were giving away with it – an old Madman Bleach poster that I missed getting at Animania. The magazine looks alright so it will be interesting to see what future issues have in it.

I ended up leaving the campus to head down to the city for lunch, as well as to do more shopping at JB Hi-Fi and Minotaur. I got volume 5 of Chibi Vampire manga, volume 3 of the Chibi Vampire novels and the first two volumes of Welcome to the NHK, along with the Cowboy Bebop movie on DVD.

Back at Manifest the highlight of the day for me was again the AMVs. On Sunday, rather than a competition, the AMV screening is a showcase of what the organisers think are some of the best works from the last year. Again, there were quite a few videos I had already seen but I didn’t mind seeing them again. I was happy to see Skittles! in the line up and even happier to see it go down very well with the crowd. The announcements of the winners from the previous day were done right at the end and everyone in the theatre was ecstatic to see Plunder Propaganda again. I’m so glad that it’s been put up for download now! (Update: In case you don’t have an account on animemusicvideos.org you can find Plunder Propaganda on YouTube.)

The Iron Chef competition was a lot of fun as usual. The judges seemed to be less harsh this year but that might have something to do with the extremely high standard of the entries. Some of the contestants were quite creative with the Naruto manga scans. From the sounds of it it was an extremely close call for the judges and I don’t envy them for having to pick a winner from this year’s selection. I know the videos from EvilTom, lockstock and xpaperclip are available for download and I’m sure some of the others will be in the near future.

Following Iron chef was the closing ceremony, which featured some video from the festival and concluded with a plea from the organising committee for more people to sign up to MOC. Apparently this year’s problems with queues was partially due to the fact that they simply didn’t have enough people to effectively organise the event. If you want to see Manifest grow then you should think about joining MOC.

Although there were still a few panels left, as well as the karaoke events, I was far too tired after a weekend of little sleep and lots of walking – not to mention having a brain on anime overload – so I just went out for dinner with my friends and headed home. My thoughts overall on the event are extremely positive, as per last year. The AMV events alone are something to turn up for but having a ton of merchants available in the ones place (rather than requiring traipsing all over the city), being able to check out new anime with a crowd of fellow otaku and seeing all the cosplayers out in force make it truly something special. Manifest is one of things I look forward to all year (although my wallet doesn’t feel that way) and I hope that it can be even better next year.

Now, I’ll leave you with some personal photos from the festival but if you need an even better fix for cosplay action then you should check out the collection of photos from participants on the Manifest forums.

The first thing I did for the day was check out the fan traders as they were again placed just outside the main events theatre. I think the fan traders are a great asset to the festival – you can usually find some excellent artwork and various non-canon scenarios envisaged – such as typical yaoi/yuri couples or pictures of canon pairings that haven’t … err, announced their relationship. You can also find doujinshi, original artwork and a couple tables were offering anime-styled portraits for very reasonable prices. I ended up buying a set of 20 Harry Potter bookmarks of various characters.

After the fan traders it was into the theatre for the Manifest Opening Ceremony, which was mostly a short welcome by a member of the organising committee (MOC) followed by an amusing short video about Peppa-chan making her way to the event.

Following the Opening Ceremony was one of my highlights of the festival: the AMV competition and AMV Iron Chef Unveiling. The AMV competition showed off some excellent videos from the year, many of which I had already seen from animemusicvideos.org. One downright hilarious video which I had not seen, called Plunder Propaganda, had the entire audience in stitches. To sum up, it was a send up of the ubiquitous anti-piracy ads from the movie publishers, set to the anime One Piece which, if you didn’t know, is about pirates. Irony ahoy!

The Iron Chef unveiling was rather interesting. If you don’t know how an AMV Iron Chef works, it’s like this: a group of AMV makers are given roughly 24 hours to complete a video from a given set of anime footage, the “ingedients”, and a “secret ingredient” that they must use (other ingredients being optional). The anime they were given to work with was Murder Princess, The Girl Who Jumped Through Time and Byousoku 5 Centimeter, which I had seen the previous day. the secret ingredient was perhaps the most insane thing I have ever seen: the chefs had to use 10 seconds of the Naruto manga! Yes, that’s right, they had to make a video including 10 seconds of video of a comic. There were actually a few cries of anguish.

By this time it was lunch so I quickly checked out the commercial traders in the Grand Buffet Hall of the Union House building. The place was packed as expected and I had fun squeezing through crowds of people and standing on tip-toes to see over heads at the merchandise. I was a bit disappointed that there wasn’t more of what I wanted to buy, which was mostly posters and anything for Lucky Star, Code Geass, Lovely Complex, Hayate the Combat Butler, Ouran High School Host Club, and a few other (apparently) more obscure anime. There were a few things available, such as a Zero mask, but overall I was underwhelmed. Posters for anything were hard to come by too – they mustn’t be as popular as things like plushies and figurines. I did manage to score a nice looking Naruto wallscroll though. Some series that were quite popular with the vendors were Naruto, Fullmetal Alchemist, Fruits Basket, Fate/Stay Night, Death Note, Bleach and, as usual, all the popular mechas were available as kits (Gundam, etc).

Overall, the traders tend to sell stuff for less than they would in their stores but that doesn’t mean a lot of the products aren’t expensive. It’s not uncommon to see the really nice figurines going for $150 or more. I ended up buying 7 volumes of the Ouran High School Host Club manga from the Madman tables since it was going for $10 a book, as opposed to the regular price of $14.95. DVDs weren’t all that much cheaper so I didn’t bother with them – JB Hi-Fi is usually my purchasing venue of choice on that front.

The cosplayers were out in force again and they did a great job of bringing a real “otaku” feel to the entire festival. There were plenty of Bleach and Naruto characters out and about along with some characters from Haruhi Suzumiya, Ouran, and even a whole group of Code Geass guys! Some people chose the more toned down way and just went with some cat ears or came as “generic ninja”. Overall, the quality of the cosplay was outstanding.

I spent the rest of the day watching screenings of D.Gray-man, Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto and Bartender. I thought D.Gray-man and BKI looked interesting and have potential. Bartender didn’t really do it for me and I found it to be pretty boring and dull, although it did have excellent production values.

Well, that does it for the Day 2 report. Days 3 coming soon!

The day officially starts at 2pm for the general public – I’m sure the organisers and host of volunteers started a lot earlier than that. The afternoon start turned out to be really good for me as I was coming out of an extremely hectic few days in which I had very little sleep, so a good long sleep was needed for me to fully enjoy the weekend festivities.

I arrived at Melbourne University at 2pm. I was on the opposite side of the campus from the Manifest registry, which was in the economics and commerce building this year (it was held in Wilson Hall last year), so I got to the registration area about 10 minutes later. I could tell I had arrived by the cosplayers.

A note about some of the cosplayers: whoever was playing Kakashi and Sakura from Naruto, you guys rocked! Especially Kakashi for dipping a girl and kissing her. Still with the mask on, of course. I also saw some people reprising roles from last year, such as Archer from Fate/Stay Night and a bunch of shinigami from Bleach. I actually saw someone playing Pheonix Wright from the Ace Attorney games, complete with “Objection!” speech … err, sign. While I was queued up the girls in front of me saw him and yelled “objection!” as loud as they could.

Overall though most of the day was pretty boring. What did I do? Here’s a hint:

Yep, from 2:10pm until 4:40pm I was standing in a very long, very slow moving queue. I now have that queueing shit down.

After that there wasn’t much to do. I’d missed the Lovely Complex screening (which is fine since I’ve already seen up to the current episode), I took a look at some of the fan traders that had set up and I went to see the screening of Byousoku 5 Centimeter (5 Centimetres Per Second) which was a superbly animated and sad/bitter-sweet story that I recommend watching if you’re into that kind of thing. So my accomplishments for the day were:

• I watched a cool new anime that I hadn’t seen before.
• I bought my first doujinshi … although it wasn’t manga-style so it was really a fan comic.
• I got my passes for a weekend of awesomeness!

Now I’m just psyched about the rest of the festival! More reports to come!

Go here for the events schedule.