MASSIVE ARTIFACT by COSMIC FORGE

Sneaking into the schedule a very short review of this little thing I picked up in my latest OtakuRepublic order - it was cheap and I always wanted to get at least one dōjinshi from this circle, even though I was actually hoping for a different one which seems to be unavailable...

MASSIVE ARTIFACT is a short illustration work by COSMIC FORGE, which usually split their work between Touhou fanworks, and food moefication/guides a la Sayu Studio. This one, instead, is part of a genre I happen to enjoy quite a bit, when well done - 2d characters in a photographic environment. 20 pages, full color, horizontal A4 format. The peculiarity seems to be that the photographic backgrounds are rendered through some kind of hi-def technique called HDRR. The end of the dōjinshi features a long and detailed explanation with pictures, but unfortunately I'm not a photo fanatic, so I can't really go any deeper than that.

What I can say, is that the insertion of the day's 2d moe chick into the photo backgrounds is really well done: there are no abrupt lightning shifts, and one can tell COSMIC FORGE really worked into blending together highly edited 2d and 3d. Even the two distinct elements can hold their own: the photographs, in particular, give that kind of 'nighttime urban cruising' feeling that I liked so much in works from the kojo moe genre, like 廃墟探索部 's Midgard. My only complaint? 20 pages, even for this kind of painstaking work, is way too short - a critique that could actually be moved against a lot of dōjin works. Still, a nice little buy I didn't regret the least.