traghetto

A cover, done by Eclair, she’s been doing these for AD for awhile now. Anatomy a bit off but nicely done.

First of all, a quick congratulations to everyone who worked on this.  This is proof that the western touhou community is doing SOMETHING.  On with the show.  I’m not going to review every single title in here, rather I’ll just give a quick rundown and give brief mentions to things that stood out to me.

Very obvious to everyone who comes here.  AD is an english touhou doujin circle with very temporary contributors.  So first thing to notice is that the jokes are finally more western.  Some of you scream bloody murder at this, but it’s you same people who weep when they try to be too japanese.  Might as well be decent at something.  In otherwords I found a couple entries entertaining.  Kriegsaffe+Ruro’s collab piece and some of Gen-Atto’s stuff made me chuckle, but at the same time some of the jokes were just plain crude and made me frown.

Other doujin entries were fairly slow and didn’t really go far.  In other words, they were kind of uninteresting and didn’t stand out.  Not that I think it can really be helped since most of them tried to go for a long story.  And let’s face it, it’s the internet, I’m skeptical as to whether any of them will reach any kind of conclusion, especially if we look at the track record for returning artists.

Artistic merit.  Overall…in general…bad.   I know art quality for things like comics fall because they need to be out and done quickly.  But for fucks sake.

MSN doodles…really?

I’m not trying to single this guy out, because I could literally upload nearly the entire thing here, it’s just unfortunate he had to be the last entry and therefore leave me with the worst impression.  If you’re going to be making something for the whole internet to see, it’s probably a good idea to make it at least look like you put a lot of effort into it.  You wonder why western artists get dissed? This is why. Which leads to some endless bitchfest where people can’t stop dissing western artists which in turn lead to less productivity because english artists begin to realize that anyone who speaks english will inevitably get their shit stomped no matter how good it is, and the best they can ever hope for is to have their stuff mistaken for moondrawings taken from Pixiv.

As for the art collections, they constituted the portion of release where the drawings were better.  There were two.  One done by Nitro-Powered Kappa and another by Ria Hinami, who did Misfortune + Jealousy and Sylphide respectively.  The pencil sketches by NPK were ok.  They weren’t amazing, they were by no stretch good, nor can I say they were ass horrible,  but they look like they had effort put in, and you can probably expect good things from NPK in the future if his/her improvement is steady.

Ria.  I badgered you constantly to work on the drawings throughout these months and gave you some CC but you only managed to finish 3 all in the last several DAYS prior to deadline and largely did not take my critique, which was understandable as you only had about 3 days to do all 3 CGs. Bad.  I expected better.  Always next time though.

My verdict :

Good news everyone!  Through the advances of man and modern science, I’ve invented a device that can give this AD release a rating!

According to my new Gizometer, it says that  very rushed looking drawings and somewhat under appreciated gags have cemented AD’s position as a below average Touhou doujin circle.  Remarkable!

Entertainment : **

Art: **

Effort: ***

Guys, don’t give up, try harder.  I know you can do it, you’re pretty much the only people who produce anything other than Walfas and those original material /jp/ threads.  Row row fight the power.