This Is Not a Bug but a Game Feature

Chapter 485 - 296: Chiba Love Story

Jiangning, Divine Grace Animation Association.

Early in the morning, Chen Ba drove to the association’s headquarters. After all, today is an important day for the announcement of the gold and silver awards and the award ceremony of the Divine Grace Animation Competition. As the "mascot" president, he had to be there.

A total of 30 Divine Grace Animations made it to the finals, including 20 selected works and 10 recommended ones.

Chen Ba was also a member of the judging panel, but he was so busy with work that he hadn’t actually watched all 30 shortlisted works in full.

So, when it came to the voting process, he decisively abstained, as he hadn’t watched them and felt he wasn’t qualified to evaluate or rank the works.

However...

When he stated his reason for abstaining, the judging panel almost disbanded on the spot because not all members had watched all 30 works either.

Awkward!

Don’t call them unprofessional; it actually had nothing to do with professionalism. It was purely because of the high time cost of watching an entire Divine Grace Animation.

Exactly!

This is Divine Grace Animation, not traditional animation! With traditional animation, 30 works can easily be finished in half a year.

But with Divine Grace Animation, it’s not just 30 works; even with just 3 works, do you know how many episodes they total, or how outrageous the total runtime is?

One Divine Grace Animation has the volume of 10 traditional animations. That’s the harsh reality.

No way around it!

Divine Grace Animation is known for high output, and it doesn’t require as many people to produce, so the production threshold is relatively low. Therefore, the average number of episodes is staggering.

This is somewhat like the difference between traditional published novels and online novels.

A traditional published novel, even if it’s a long one, rarely exceeds 500,000 words, and those over 300,000 words are quite rare.

But online novels are the other extreme. 300,000 words? That’s just when the author has overcome the tough public period and is starting to write VIP Chapters. And you say it should be finished?

Finish what?

It’s absolutely impossible to finish without writing two or three million words. If the book is popular and profitable, the author might even write ten million words.

Traditional published novels correspond to traditional animation, while online novels reflect the status of Divine Grace Animation.

As a result, when Ba claimed that "he couldn’t give an accurate evaluation without watching it all," many judges found themselves in an awkward position and chose to follow Ba in abstaining.

"No way!"

Seeing so many people abstaining with him and the judging panel about to disband, Chen Ba had to change the rules.

It’s not necessary to watch it all...

For a Divine Grace Animation, the judges just need to have watched part of it to participate in the voting. Watching it all is unrealistic because many nominated works are too long and still "serializing."

With this approach, the judging panel can finally function normally, and Chen Ba doesn’t have to abstain.

Although he didn’t watch all 30 nominated works, he had seen parts of some of them and had his own opinions.

After a week of discussions, debates, and voting, the final list of one gold award, five silver awards, and ten excellence awards was out!

Let’s not talk about the excellence awards. Among the five silver awards, two were foreign works, and the remaining three were domestic animations.

This year’s gold award was also won by a foreign Divine Grace Animation producer.

Regarding this, Chen Ba was quite helpless.

Domestic animations still have obvious shortcomings, especially when it comes to the quality compared to their foreign counterparts.

Even if he wanted to rig it in favor of an outstanding domestic work, there was no chance. The gap was too evident; the gold award work’s script, story, creative ideas, completion, dubbing, and music all completely outclassed the silver award works.

How can you rig this?

Anyone with eyes can see the level gap. Unless Chen Ba was shameless, there was no way he could push down the gold award work to support another "undeserving" silver award work.

Obviously, that’s not possible!

Chen Ba wouldn’t do such a thing; any rigging would only occur if the gap between two works wasn’t glaring and was more like "neck-and-neck."

If the hard skills aren’t as good as others, there’s really no need to rig it. Just take a silver award home honestly!

"...The winner of the gold award in this year’s Divine Grace Animation Competition is... ’Chiba Love Story’ by Takasaka Daisuke, congratulations!"

What kind of name is that?

As Chen Ba opened the envelope and announced the gold award on the live broadcast, many people were obviously typing question marks in the comments, expressing their confusion and lack of understanding.

Of course, this is normal.

After all, this animation hasn’t been broadcast on domestic platforms, so many haven’t heard of it, let alone seen it.

But there’s nothing wrong with this gold award.

The author of this animation is clearly a devoted fan of Makoto Shinkai, using this as a starting point to create the Divine Grace Animation ’Chiba Love Story.’

In the animation, there are many shadows and homage segments and lines from Shinkai’s works.

But this doesn’t mean that ’Chiba Love Story’ is simply mimicking or borrowing from Makoto Shinkai’s works.

Quite the opposite!

’Chiba Love Story’ is merely an homage, using the medium of animation to depict the youthful and unrequited love stories of teenagers.

By the way, it’s a tragedy.

Chen Ba didn’t finish watching it, mainly because he felt too emotional halfway through, so he was a bit afraid to continue.

However, based on the part he watched, Mr. Takasaka from Chiba truly is immensely talented, well-deserving of the gold award.