Title: 成恵の世界スペシャル (The World of Narue Special) Drama CD Vol. 1: Steel Heart
Original Creator: 丸川トモヒロ (Tomohiro Marukawa)
Release Date: 8/21/02
Catalog No.: VPCG-84767
Rating: 4/4

あなたの胸に直撃よ〜！

I love that phrase. I recently got some used drama CDs, and the Narue no Sekai Special trilogy was in the loot. The cast is pretty similar to the eventual anime show, except that Yagi is played by 渡辺明乃 (Akeno Watanbe) rather that Saeko Chiba. They sound really similar though.

This is yet another concert drama CD, similar to the stories in Hand Maid May, Strawberry Eggs, and an earlier Ai yori drama CD. The story has the main characters following the story of Yongo-chan, Kazuto's favorite anime series and character. As they're watching the show, occasionally they would discuss aspects about the Yongo-chan story. Once they get the background out of the way, Narue and Yagi go perform at a karaoke concert. I don't remember this story every being in the manga, so it's probably something new written specially for this drama CD.

In addition to the three ~20 minute long drama tracks, there's also a mini-drama track and the Yongo's theme song sung by Narue and Yagi (too bad it wasn't Saeko Chiba).

CD comes with a picture card that has the lyrics on back. It also contains mini-summaries of each track (very rare for drama CDs).

1. 恋と平和の魔砲少女 (The Magical Girl of Love and Peace): Kazuto has something to tell Narue and she thinks he's going to confess to her. However, he brings news of a Yongo-chan cosplay karaoke contest where the winner can have her own record deal and thinks she would be great with her homemade costume. At first she refuses, but after a night of thinking, she decides to participate. First though, they have to do some research on Yongo-chan so Yagi, Narue, Maruo, and Kazuya watch some episodes of Yongo-chan. 大当真名花 (Manaka Daito) belongs to a family famous for their archery, however, she doesn't have the motivation to live up to and despises her name. As she is moping, a battle breaks out at the school, Yongo-chan appears, praises her and then gives her a pendant before disappearing. When the opponent, Boljiks (?) appears again and destroys the school trying to find Yongo. Manaka uses the power of the pendant and becomes Yongo-chan and defeats the enemy.

2. 魔砲の力 (The Power of Magic): Kei Shaman senses some new magical force and decides to investigate to see if this is a friend or foe. Meanwhile, Manaka is trying to activate her magical powers again, but can't seem to do it on demand. Kei arrives and Manaka explains to her that she just happened to receive magic. Kei tells her to help her protect the world from Boljiks. Managa responds saying can't they just be friends and spend the day together as regular school girls. When Kei goes back, her mother says that they can't be friends and Kei comes back and tells Manaka to hand over her magic or she'll have to kill her. Later, Kei decides to just run away from home and live with Manaka, eventually becoming her sidekick.

3. スチールハート (Steel Heart): Kei and Manaka face the enemy, Rokugo and Sango. As the fight is starting at school, Manaka sees a police and tells him to run away if he wants to stay alive. The fight continues and the heroines wins, but not before the school buildings become blown to bits. Yongo-chan thinks she failed because she couldn't protect the school, but the policeman comes back and thanks her for saving his life. Yagi and Narue go to the contest and are surprised by the turnout. Like before, they're criticized for their clothing but win anyway. The Inspector arrives and tells Kazuto that Narue can't be allowed to become famous. Fortunately, the presenter for the award is Kirari-chan, who Narue and Yagi detest and don't accept their victory, which works out for everyone.

Title: 魔法騎士レイアース２ (Magic Knight Rayearth 2) Vol. 3
Artist/Author: CLAMP
Book Size/Pages: B-6, 220pp., w/furigana
Volume: 3/3
Original Serialization: Nakayoshi 1/96-4/96
First Printing: 1/23/03
Rating: 4/4

I believe I was in the zen of reading as I went through this book. As I was going page by page, I really could hear all the sound effects and the characters speaking. Very strange, but enjoyable at the same time. The series as a whole surprised me by how short it was. There wasn't much fluff, and every page contributed to the main theme. I really do appreciate it when a story is thought out in its entirety before being put on paper.

Bare volume, just the story.

Eagle asks each of the other two kingdoms why they want to become the pillar of Cephiro and give each some time to decide if they want to back out. Clef is puzzled about why he can't sense the path to pillarship and Hikaru decides she wants to go out and find it. The three vying kingdoms start fighting each other and suddenly, Mokona shows his true self as the creator. He explains the purpose of creating Cephiro after a failed Earth and allows Eagle and Hikaru to undergo the trials to become the next pillar. As the two of them are fighting, Eagle explains why he wants to be the pillar, but Hikaru explains that it's just the same as Princess Emeraldo before. Hikaru is eventually selected as the new Pillar, but she refuses and manages to bring back Eagle from the trails in Tokyo. The Magic Knights end the pillar tradition. Later, they pay a visit back to Cephiro and in a cheesy ending, allow the reader to choose the name of the new world.

After that scare with the script taking too long to re-generate this site, I decided to go inside the code to see what I could do to speed it up. It turns out that there was a huge bottleneck in sorting Japanese text with Perl's Unicode::Collator. A little caching using some hashes did the trick so it didn't have to generate a new sort key everytime it needed to do a comparison. It took more than 55 seconds to generate the site before, I nailed it down to about 30 seconds now. It no longer gives me a timeout error.

In addition, with the savings in time, I implemented a little counter underneath each section in the manga listings. It now shows the number of books for each hiragana grouping. Hmm...most of my books fall in the "ka-ko" group.

I guess I don't need Moveabletype 3.1 after all and can postpone upgrading until I max out the server again.

I'm finally under the 30 book threshhold, this time hopefully it's permanent. Bad news is that I think I'm maxing out the server everytime I upload a new entry as it has to crunch through the few hundred entries I have and regenerate all the pages (sorting the manga titles in the category pages I think really kills it). Hopefully Moveabletype 3.1 will be released soon.

Mao-chan manga just finished today in Magazine Special, according to Ken Akamatsu. I actually had a few issues of Magazine Special before, but stopped reading it when Asahiya closed down in New York.