Anime & Manga All-Purpose Shipgirl Discussion And Picture Thread

MrBirthday

Agent of Catgirl Genocide
(Note: I'm giving the thread the current tag due to nothing else being a better fit and two of the involved series having anime adaptations.) This is the thread for all things shipgirl. Kantai Collection (KanColle for short), Azur Lane, Warship Girls, Victory Belles (although that last one looks like it might end up as vaporware), and any others that come along. As a courtesy, please place all pictures in spoiler boxes.

Now, I'm starting off the thread with the following thought: I find myself wondering if Kancolle might do something with the U.S. destroyers that were given to the JMSDF after the war.
 
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Tzeentchean Perspective

Well-known member
Yeah, that's a pretty easy route for the devs to go down. Probably a necessary one too. Because, based on what I've heard from one Japanese user, the simple fact of the matter is that Kdkw wasn't expecting Kancolle to last this long. It was just supposed to cater to a certain nerd subset of Japanese otaku-dom. As a result, the devs jumped the gun one introducing new ships too quickly relative to how long the game's been out.
That's why so much time's passed without an official Shinano character release. That ship is one of the last major IJN ships they can introduce. There's some leftover destroyers that aren't escorts or ww1 types, but that's about it.
Azur Lane is a mixed bag in terms of character designs. But at least the stories seems creative and weird from the outside. And it is a story unlike Kancolle.
Victory Belles should've released by now, really. Not to mention the characters suffer from the twin problems of same face syndrome and same body syndrome. You can't really tell a battleship from a destroyer from a cruisers with no outside info or no in-depth recognition of little bits like turret shapes.
 

Terthna

Professional Lurker
Honestly, I feel as if Azur Lane has more interesting character designs. At the very least, I've never felt like it was difficult to tell any of the girls apart, unlike with many Kancolle characters. I mean seriously, look at this nonsense:
latest

latest
They literally just changed a few things with her head, made her give a "peace" sign, and called it a new character. Don't even get me started on the lack of creativity in their outfits; nearly all of which are some variation of school uniform, kimono, hakama, or (for the submarines) one-piece swimsuit, and many are identical across multiple characters. Azur Lane just has far more variety, not to mention the art is of a consistently higher quality.
 
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Bacle

When the effort is no longer profitable...
Founder
Honestly, I feel as if Azur Lane has more interesting character designs. At the very least, I've never felt like it was difficult to tell any of the girls apart, unlike with many Kancolle characters. I mean seriously, look at this nonsense:
latest

latest
They literally just changed a few things with her head, made her give a "peace" sign, and called it a new character. Don't even get me started on the lack of creativity in their outfits; nearly all of which are some variation of school uniform, kimono, hakama, or (for the submarines) one-piece swimsuit, and many are identical across multiple characters. Azur Lane just has far more variety, not to mention the art is of a consistently higher quality.
Azur Lane however has the issue of reskinning every country and have the girls with thier hulls present at Port despite not taking the hulls into combat.

It also has the issue of being rather random in how it depicts the different ships and countries.

Finally, AL is a Chinese property at it's base, while KC isn't. Money spent on AL stuff helps the CCP, money spent on KC stuff doesn't.
 

Terthna

Professional Lurker
Azur Lane however has the issue of reskinning every country and have the girls with thier hulls present at Port despite not taking the hulls into combat.

It also has the issue of being rather random in how it depicts the different ships and countries.

Finally, AL is a Chinese property at it's base, while KC isn't. Money spent on AL stuff helps the CCP, money spent on KC stuff doesn't.
Good thing I don't actually play any of the games then, isn't it? I refuse to support gatchas as a monetization scheme.
 

Bacle

When the effort is no longer profitable...
Founder
Good thing I don't actually play any of the games then, isn't it? I refuse to support gatchas as a monetization scheme.
I don't play either of them as well; never been a fan of gatchas as a game design.

I might actually play KC if it operated more like WoWs in terms of economics and interface, or if the play style was something more like Empire at War where you can actually control the units. the current set up of basically 'pick/equip fleet rosters, pick formation, and pray the rolls are good' is not my cup of tea.
 

Harlock

I should have expected that really
I like Azur Lane, very F2P friendly and a good variety of designs and personalities. The Devs are also in touch with the community and meme the hell out of everything. Their recent Soviet event was a nice shot at Communism funnily enough
 

Terthna

Professional Lurker
Been watching the Azur Lane: Slow Ahead anime, and I have to say; this is the first shipgirl anime adaptation to come out that I think is at least somewhat decent, if not outright enjoyable to watch. The others just got too bogged down in angst, and act as if normal human beings don't exist in their world. There's a bit of the latter in this show as well, but at least the commander feels like he's around somewhere in the background.
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
Haven't played any of the games, Gacha games don't appeal to me and the stories don't appear to exist in the games proper so I'm really only interested in the manga and anime.

KC's wiki does provide great amusement and confirms my decision not to play it as a game. Every single enemy shipgirl (save a couple of supply vessels that are apparently pure mooks unable to fight back effectively) has at least a page of players whining about how much they hate this abyssal and how she sank their entire fleet and it's so unfair. That is except for Re-Class who has about fifteen pages of that and multiple videos about how BS she is. I have to assume based on that, that it must be one of the most frustrating gacha games ever made.

Of the shows, I'm with @ATP, Arpeggio of Blue Steel is the most tightly written. I attribute this to the desire of the writers to have their cake and eat it too, by having both awesome battles and waifu-generating slice-of-life silly antics (Still not as bad as Sky Girls about this). AoBS largely avoids this by first not having 15,000 girls in the first place to need screen time and thus cutting it to a minimum, and by making the rare instances of slice-of-life antics actually a major part of the plot. KC suffers rather badly from going "Kirishima was just killed in action" to "Let's have a curry-cooking contest" in the space of a couple episodes, repeatedly. Azur Lane seems to have gone on a different track with having some Siren magitech split the timeline into multiple universes so that all the battles happen in one timeline and Slow Ahead gets to be all slice-of-life instead, which I find at least a bit of an improvement.

As an aside I also like the designs of AoBS better. Having actual massive battleships bristling with futuristic weaponry and glowing alien tattoos with humanoid avatars for the girl part simply looks right to me for the ship battles, compared to a girl with the aft half of a battleship sticking out of her back, it's bow strapped to one arm, and a radio antenna growing out the top of her head.
 

Terthna

Professional Lurker
Of the shows, I'm with @ATP, Arpeggio of Blue Steel is the most tightly written. I attribute this to the desire of the writers to have their cake and eat it too, by having both awesome battles and waifu-generating slice-of-life silly antics (Still not as bad as Sky Girls about this). AoBS largely avoids this by first not having 15,000 girls in the first place to need screen time and thus cutting it to a minimum, and by making the rare instances of slice-of-life antics actually a major part of the plot. KC suffers rather badly from going "Kirishima was just killed in action" to "Let's have a curry-cooking contest" in the space of a couple episodes, repeatedly. Azur Lane seems to have gone on a different track with having some Siren magitech split the timeline into multiple universes so that all the battles happen in one timeline and Slow Ahead gets to be all slice-of-life instead, which I find at least a bit of an improvement.
An easy way to fix that disconnect in tone would be to simply not set the stakes so high; you don't need to fill a cemetery with corpses and weeping widows to tell a good story, but some people just don't seem to understand that. Personally, I'd rather both earlier adaptations had just been action harem anime, with the commander being the central protagonist.

As for the whole 15,000 girls needing screen time thing, the way other gatcha anime adaptations get around that is just by reducing to background characters everyone who isn't either important to the plot, or super popular to the point where the vast majority of the fanbase would riot if they weren't featured front and center. Using this method, you could whittle down the cast to a much more manageable twenty to thirty primary and secondary characters.
 

Zachowon

The Army Life for me! The POG life for me!
Founder
I like Azur Lane the animation for the action packed scenes and super saiyan Enty.

Aka best Girl
 

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