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I now write at the new blog, the joint-staff blog project, Behind The Nihon Review. Go there instead.

I haven’t done an NHRV related article for a while, so I figured now was the time.

I think we have a great staff with mature opinions and appreciable anime knowledge, but, as is the case with any review database stitched together by multiple people, there are going to be disagreements. I’m the strange one in the group in that, whenever a review is posted where I don’t agree with the contention, I don’t bother expressing my own opinion in a second review of the same title. I just don’t see the point for various reasons. But, needless to say there are a number of reviews in our database that I don’t agree with. That’s just the nature of things… people aren’t always going to see eye-to-eye on every occasion, even though I do find most of my colleagues to be generally reliable. But, here’s a few of those reviews that I don’t agree with and a few words on where our opinions split.

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So, I made the foolish “promise” to the staff that I’d somehow write a soundtrack review for Death Note’s (awesome) OST. Soundtracks is a bizarre section we have on our site. It’s the most neglected and I’d say far and away the toughest section to maintain. The link between these two postulates is obvious. But, with most anime series seeing one, often two, sometimes even more complementary soundtracks released, a site of our size (which, I’d approximate, manages to cover six or seven anime each season within a few months of their release, which I’d say is pretty good coverage considering our size) would have to demand at least one soundtrack review a month out of every one of our staff before we could even think about covering the soundtrack industry with the same comprehensiveness with which we do with anime. That might not sound terribly difficult until one tries to sit down and actually write a soundtrack review. Man, they are not easy things to write.

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We want to put ourselves on the map. Personally, I don’t see the point in hiding our ambition, our desire to be respected writers on anime and other facets of Japanese culture and establish a reputation for our site among fans of anime and Japanese culture as a reputable source for information and recommendations. It requires good writing, good taste and a positive culture and attitude to get a review site like ours to be recognized. That goes without saying and, in my opinion we have that. But, it also requires something more… a given amount of flexibility and willingness to adapt to the current climate of the internet which is constantly growing and evolving, as well as a readiness to trial new things. That’s what I’ve tried to put on the table during my time at The Nihon Review and it’s lead to ideas like the Live Action section, the Imageboard and several other small changes around the place (a lot of which is still too far in its infancy to call a success or failure, although some recent plot twists are giving me reason to be optimistic that those decisions were the correct ones). (By the way, I’m not claiming credit for all these ideas… eg, the Live Action section was DarkKanti’s idea from memory).

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