Official Entertainment Recommendations

Ckan said:
How should one get into Kafka?

Zergneedsfood said:
It's the best novel in the Western canon. :P

Okashi_sama said:
I'm looking for anime with great mecha fighting scenes and good choreography. any recs? other then Gundam though, since i'll start that after i finish LoGH.

Okashi_sama said:
Can i start with Macross Frontier without watching the prequel Macross?

QuattroVaginas said:
Real Robot or Super Robot?

cupc said:


Sure. Besides some small references here and there, it is its own show. I remember that at least Ckan watched Frontier before SDF, and said it worked just fine.

QuattroVaginas said:
Macross Plus has arguably better choreography than Frontier. It's a better show, too.

Other than that, Layzner, King Gainer, and the more recent GaoGaiGar has pretty awesome fights. Also, for less flash, VOTOMS is great.

cupc said:
Yeah I've been meaning to watch Macross Plus, just haven't gotten around it it yet. But you're talking as if Frontier had bad choreography, which is not exactly true in my opinion.

By the way, should I go for the movie or the OVA of Plus?

QuattroVaginas said:
And I haven't seen the movie, but it's supposed to just be a compilation of the OVA plus extra scenes, so I suppose you can't go wrong with either.

fst said:
what even is FLCL

fst said:
If I wanted to know what was on that page I would have just gone there instead of asking.

Gymkata said:
Anyone with a rec for an old gem? A great score would be a huge bonus too but not vital.

Gymkata said:
Anyone with a rec for an old gem? A great score would be a huge bonus too but not vital.

Gymkata said:
Anyone with a rec for an old gem? A great score would be a huge bonus too but not vital.

fst said:
Is Wings of Honneamise any good? I seeing it mentioned occaisonally as being very good, but I almost never see it mentioned. Seems super obscure relative to it's quality.

Ckan said:
I remember the story as being pretty weird, but I probably wasn't quite ready/in the mood to see that sort of film at the time, so I'm not sure what I'd make of it now. I don't remember much of it anymore.
The production quality was pretty great though.

My guess would be that it has some dodgy storytelling, but is a solid film and looks really good.

fst said:
Is Wings of Honneamise any good? I seeing it mentioned occaisonally as being very good, but I almost never see it mentioned. Seems super obscure relative to it's quality.

fst said:
This seems to be a thing that you do quite often

Higashi_no_Kaze said:


It did have enormous production values and looks fabulous from start to finish, though it was one of the biggest flops in anime movie history because of that. Not sure why though, I personally quite liked the theme of dreaming of space exploration in an unsupportive environment, but I can't remember too many details and tbh my bias for space stuff + the visuals were probably more than enough reason for me to give it the 8/10 it got from me. I can't say anything about the political side of the plot, but I at least don't remember being bored at any part of the movie which is quite a feat considering it's over 2 hours long.

fst said:


When you say "enormous budget", do you mean CCA enormous, Unicorn enormous, Bebop film enourmous, or UBW enormous?

Higashi_no_Kaze said:


wtf is the difference -.-? I'm not making much sense out of these comparisons. except maybe the two movies, but even then I don't know their budget and find it hard to compare action-heavy stuff to Wings of Honneamise.
Just know that it looks awesome and had the highest budget of any anime movie at the time, even more than the early Ghibli movies that came before it. 800 million Yen to be exact (some sources said 8 billion but that would be insane and can't be true since Kaguya-hime had 5 billion and is officially the most expensive anime movie up to date).
It also had a great staff including Hideaki Anno as animation director and lots of Gainax veterans (well, back then they weren't veterans since the studio was just founded during the production of the movie) and a total of 3000 animators/artists. Especially the level of detail in the artwork and backgrounds is extremely impressive and I'd say almost unparallelled in anime up to this day. It also had a pretty great OST. So yeah, take that as you will :>.

Feaor said:
Anyone have recommendations for sub groups for Gundam?

Feaor said:
Next you'll tell me I should watch Stardust Memories or something.

Ckan said:
I remember loving Roald Dahl's recordings when I was a kid. His voice and reading of his own work was really something.

Zergneedsfood said:
Hmmmm....

I have zero experience with audiobooks, so I have no clue how they might affect the reading but as far as like good/enjoyable/entertaining reads, you can try books by Diana Wynn Jones, who is an incredibly underrated author (Howl's Moving Castle is probably what most people in the animu world will know her for).

I guess it might just be good to throw out some simple sci-fi/fantasy related material since those tend to be less dense than literary fiction (and can also be much more exciting). Maybe try some stuff by Ursula LeGuin like Left Hand of Darkness (sci-fi) or maybe Tales of Earthsea (fantasy?). I can't vouch for the latter but the former is a very good book.

Umm........I personally enjoy Italo Calvino, and I think he's an incredible storyteller, so if you can find audiobooks for The Baron in the Trees, Cosmicomics, The Cloven Viscount, The Invisible Knight, all of those are fantastic (and short) reads (or listens).

Hmmm, what else might work.....if you're down for like weird macabre, freaky shit, maybe try audiorecordings of Edgar Allen Poe? Things like The Fall of the House of Usher, The Raven, The Red Masque of Death, are all fantastical and surreal works that might sound really good in an audiobook.

And those are the first things that fly to my head. Let me know if those don't satisfy you. I'll try to think of others. @_@

Feaor said:
My only real experience with audiobooks is the Harry Potter series when I was growing up, Jim Dale is a really fantastic reader, doing all the different voices for the cast.

Other than that, not quite the same as audiobooks but similar, I can say the BBC radio dramas for both The Lord of the Rings and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are great, they're much more like plays than readings though with an actual cast and sound effects and such.

Ckan said:
I remember loving Roald Dahl's recordings when I was a kid. His voice and reading of his own work was really something.

Higashi_no_Kaze said:


I found a collection of his audiobooks to download, but it doesn't say if he's the ohne reading them or how complete the books are. Are his stories rather short? Because it seems to be like that in the download I found.

Zergneedsfood said:
I can personally vouch for:

Ender's Game, Dune, Foundation, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, I, Robot, Neuromancer, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ringworld, Hyperion, Brave New World, and Snow Crash for being decent to good books with Ender's Game, Dune, and Hyperion being amazing novels.

However, I would probably not recommend Hyperion or Snow Crash as an audiobook. Hyperion might be okay but it definitely has a much higher level of vocabulary usage then most of the books in the list, as well as just being a much better experience to read. In a similar vein, I think Dune is a massive novel and might be hard to follow in that respect, but it's not that challenging. If we're talking about a complex world I'd argue Hyperion has a much denser story to tell with arguably less time to tell it. I would highly recommend not reading Snow Crash if only because it has incredibly technical language and would definitely be one of the hardest to follow. The rest of the books are probably fair game.

I've read The Time Machine and Slaughterhouse Five and am not a fan of either. However, Slaughterhouse Five is incredibly simplistic in its vocabulary and just because I don't like it doesn't mean that it's not one of the more famous American war satirical novels.

Zergneedsfood said:
If you haven't read Ender's Game, that'd be my top choice tbh.

Otherwise, I'd pick like Foundation or Fahrenheit 451. And obviously if you haven't read 1984 or Brave New World you should pick out those.

Oh shoot. Don't read Neuromancer either for the same reason as Snow Crash. It deploys a lot of technical language and can be really hard to follow at times because of it.