MCV

So, are you looking for Japanese animation that other people think is good, or Japanese animation that we think you'll like? Because I can't give you much for the latter but I have a selection of the former....

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, which is a neat two-season series which concerns the efforts of a para-military secret police unit with AI-controlled spider-tanks to fight cybercrime in transhumanist Japan. Well-animated and, in my arrogant opinion, intelligent as it deals with things like meme theory and alienation and decides to kick xenophobia in the balls. Unfortunately, it takes the main character 19 episodes to discover the existence of pants. The Japanese special edition of this series is the English dub.

Serial Experiments Lain, which is a series about the Internet and the separation of the real world and cyberspace, told from the perspective of young 16-year-old girl as she gets a new computer. Beautiful, creepy and fucks with your mind, tying drug use, the Omega Point, conspiracies, memetics, the development of computers, the MEMEX protocol and surreality into the narrative. None of the VAs in the dub are very emotionally engaged, but that just ups the creepy. (Warning: series known to give grown men nightmares)

Neon Genesis Evangelion, which is a series about a young boy who is called upon to pilot his fathers giant robot against alien invaders from space. He lives with a stunningly beautiful military commander who teases him sexually and a German redhead who pilots another giant robot alongside him. There's also a blue-haired girl who pilots in a third giant robot. The series is old and it tried to make the most out of it's budged, so the animation can be disappointing and boring in places. Promises lots of fanservice. The dub is meh. (Oh, I forgot to mention; nothing is happy in this series. Nothing.) I especially recommend episode 25 of the series.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which is the only un-ironic entry on this small list. It's a genre-defying series about a hyperactive, callous girl who seeks out the weird and abnormal, and her snarky, sardonic male companion. She forms a school club and invites a bunch of other students (a taticurn bibliophile, a petite well-endowed meek senior, and a transfer student) to join her in her search. Not everything is as it seems, and the series likes to play with conventions. Usually watched in a non-chronological order, but despite what madmen tell you, it's not that bad when watched chronologically either. Can get a bit repetitive at times, but is really funny and enjoyable. Dub is well executed. (You might actually like this one. All the other suggestions were jokes.)

YKTTW - You Know That Thing Where - the place where tropes are proposed and discussed before an actual article is launched.

In the original draft for Faction Calculus the factions were called NATO, Russia, Terrorists, USA, Europe and China, and I was wondering what the heck India would do - the names were later changed because they were a wee bit political, but Westwood is pretty much the Trope Maker for 2 and 3 Faction Calculus.

A faction can fit entirely within it's calculus, but that's be boring because it would come down to Zergling vs Mammoth Tanks, which isn't any fun. It's much more fun to have some diversity so you can have actual strategies.

This is just my take on it. If anyone has a different perspective or thought, feel free to share.

Having YKTTW'd and written Faction Calculus that's pretty close to my understanding too. There's nothing to stop you from including the Horde descriptor for 4th-level calculus though, Generals had Horde on 3rd-level calculus without problem; it's a subversion. I'd say that the FL are a bit more Subversive than you attribute them though; they have lots of fun infantry.

Hey, Faction Calculus was written mostly based on me having played a lot of C&C and it's mods, so there's no wonder you can pull clear lines; it's also one of the reasons it doesn't stretch beyond five factions; I've never played games with more than five fundamentally different factions that wasn't a 4X game.

I think I had Robot Storm in mind when I pYKTTW'd the article too...