Corolla AE86
Was browsing on Amazon and Ebay and it amazed me there was a huge amount of useless merchandising for Initial D fans. And I don't mean useless merchandising like some tofu sticker to stick on your wannabe tofuboy Silvia S12 with panda paint scheme. Here is my top 3 useless merchandising:
On number three:
Initial D Playing poker card deck
Of course you can play poker with this, but not without being laughed at! And what is the deal with the Toyota Sprinter Trueno AE86 being the Joker?? Is this a joke??
On number two:
Initial D: AE86 Trueno Car 12-inch plush
A plush Trueno?? What am I supposed to do with it? Sit on it? Or sleep with it?
On number one:
Initial D 86 Trueno Carbon Bonnet Mini Screw Driver Set
Amazing! A screwdriver set inside the Panda Trueno AE86!! Why? What has this to do with Initial D? Am I missing the link here?? And if this is the normal type, what other types do we have?? And the screwdrivers look like they will break upon loosening any screw! What is that good for?
I watched the first 7 minutes of Initial D Extra Stage 2 Japanese raw I found somewhere on the net.
First impression: nice cartoony graphics during the intro. :)
Second impression: too bad they didn't continue with that during the rest of the episode. :(
So far it looks like Mako is missing Iketani and the Akina Speedstars decide to take a drive up Mount Akina. Nothing much happening so far:
What I like is usage of the split screen graphics, just like in the episodes in Stage 4. The screenshot above of the four different Akina Speedstars cars (Takumi's Corolla Levin AE86, Itsuki's Corolla Levin AE85, Iketani's Silvia S13 and Kenji's 180SX RPS13) show nice usage of this. Hopefully this will also feature more during the battles. :)
Overall I think the quality of the graphics is as good as we saw in Stage 4. I actually did expect it to be another improvement as we saw during Stage 4. Music was again by Move and the soundtrack sounded catchy and not too Eurobeat.
Can't wait to watch the rest of the movie! :)
