Cowboy Bebop and the Matter of Expectations

 So, the venerable anime Cowboy Bebop recently received a live-action adaptation, courtesy of Netflix.  People were understandably skeptical from the moment such a project was announced, and the response once it released was very negative indeed.  It was so bad that (consequently, I assume) Netflix opted out of doing a second season of the show, which I understand to be pretty irregular for them.

So, what's the big deal?  Expectations.

Cowboy Bebop is, as I said, a venerable anime.  It's one of those unassailable classics that you can't criticize without drawing some accusatory looks, like Resident Evil 4 or Super Mario World.  So when you tell people you're going to do something new with the property, whatever it is, there are immediately high expectations.  The show fell short of those expectations, and people are never going to let Netflix and the production crew hear the end of it.  This is a bit problematic to me.

Too often in fandoms, you get cases where people are only able to judge something for what they want or expect it to be, rather than for it is.  It happens all the time in videogames, as classics get remade.  I struggled with it myself when Ace Combat: Assault Horizon came out, so I understand what it's like to see a beloved property get twisted into something else.  But it's really stood out to me with Cowboy Bebop because for as much as I hear about this show, almost none of it has much to do with the show itself but specifically how it fares against the anime.  This isn't useful!

ANN wrote a review of Cowboy Bebop, and spent essentially all of it breaking down how it fundamentally misunderstood the source material and was an utter failure as an adaptation.  It was an interesting read, but ultimately not useful to me as a review of the show.  The problem is that when it came to make a verdict, most of its criticisms were based on its failure as an adaptation.  But really, what practical reason is there for anyone to really care about its quality as an adaptation, enough for it to impact a review of the show itself?  The anime isn't going anywhere.  People can still watch it.  This remake doesn't replace it.  In such a situation, the matter of whether the remake accurately adapts the original makes for an interesting editorial, a side discussion.  But it's ultimately not that relevant when it comes to deciding whether it's a good show on its own.  What I ultimately want to know is whether it's a good show, not whether it's a good adaptation.

To be clear, I'm not out to defend the adaptation.  I haven't even seen it.  The reason why I'm writing this post is because I'm a little frustrated, as someone a bit curious about it, by the fact that all anyone apparently has to say about it is how it fares compared to the anime.  I've seen the anime, I can go watch it again, I don't need to know how it compares.  Like I said, that's an interesting side discussion but it's not important.  It's not useful.

You want to know a situation where I DO care about the quality of an adaptation?  When the adaptation is meant to replace the source.  For example, this happens occasionally in videogames.  Sometimes it's a hard replacement, like what Rockstar tried to do with the recent GTA Remasters where they literally delisted the old versions so they could sell the new ones.  That's a case where the quality of something as an adaptation is very relevant, because it's effectively all you're getting.  But there are softer cases, too.  When a remake comes out of a very old game, one that is otherwise hard to access because it's on deprecated hardware, people also tend to (rightly) care about the quality of the adaptation.  For example, if EA announced they were going to remake one of the old SSX games, you can bet your ass I'd be scrutinizing it for deviations, because SSX 3 is not a game I can easily play without emulating.  There's practical reason to care about how the adaptation is handled in such a case.

But in a case like this, where the live action sits right alongside the anime?  Who cares!

Play Log: Mostly Mobile

 I'm back!  For a bit.
So in all truth, I haven't really been playing a lot of videogames and I sure haven't been watching much anime.  But I can talk about what little I have gotten around to.

My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU (Season 3)
In all truth, I hadn't really watched any anime in around two years, but I came back to finish off Yahari.  It's one of my favorite series of the modern era, and I absolutely wasn't going to miss the conclusion.
Unfortunately... I came away kind of disappointed!  People will and have written long, drawn out essays pulling apart this series moment by moment, but I'm not really here to do that.  I'm just here to say that this season was hard to watch for me at times.  Yeah, I was on team Yui.  But even putting that aside, I felt like the role she was forced to play here was pretty poor.  We get multiple scenes and episodes across the season of her being forcibly sidelined and just kinda being forced to deal with it.  While I suppose her ending of accepting the new status quo was supposed to be relieving, to me it really just felt tepid.  

The other half of this issue though wasn't just how they wrote Yui's story, but how they wrote Yukino's.  While Yui is forced to play the tragically pining character who we as viewers must acknowledge will not get what she wants, Yukino is thrust into the spotlight through spurts of character development that felt uneven at best to me and often straight up unearned.  How she became the person she is in the final episode is honestly still somewhat unclear to me.

It was a double-whammy of one character being forced to suffer almost expressly so another could excel, and that's not a great feeling.

That all said, the series still retained most of its other strengths.  While it might not be a stretch to say I was exhausted by the main trio's dynamic by the end, other inter-character dialogue continued to be excellent.  Looking back over the course of the entire series, I think Komachi, Haruno and Iroha are far and away the best-written characters in Yahari, and I thoroughly enjoyed pretty much every scene involving them.  Komachi and Hachiman's conversations feel incredibly authentic, Iroha is a witty character with interesting layers, and Haruno plays the straight man to many of the series' idealistic values with a mix of cryptic cynicism and good-natured teasing.  Sometimes, for brief moments, Haruno feels like the closest thing the series has to an antagonist, even though I generally think her position has more to do with a vast difference in perspective and experience rather than any antagonistic intentions.

Anyway, I enjoyed the series overall, but I liked the second season more.  I plan to read the light novels eventually to see if the character development is handled better there.

Arknights

This is what the last year or so has mainly been for me, in terms of game time.  I like tower defense, and I like RPGs, and Arknights is basically a tower defense game where your "towers" are characters.  This is a pretty niche comparison, but it's not unlike Defender's Quest, for those who have played it.  That's a pretty good game, by the way.

Anyway, Arknights is a Chinese game by developer Hypergryph, published internationally by Yostar (who also handles Azur Lane).  It's set in a post-apocalyptic world that has been ravaged by oripathy, a terminal disease that comes from originium, a mineral of sorts.  The problem is that originium is also prized for a variety of applications, energy being big among them.  In Arknights, much of the world's technology is fueled by originium.  Oripathy is a highly infectious disease though and has so far proven incurable, so society has become divided between those who are infected and those who aren't, with the infected frequently being ostracized or having their human rights infringed on.

You play as the Doctor, an enigmatic figure who is recognized as a strategic and tactical mastermind and also a leading member of Rhodes Island, an independent medical organization whose mission is, at least on its face, to fight oripathy and aid the infected.

Arknights' world and characters are pretty interesting, and its clear that there's a lot happening under the hood.  While it is ostensibly a pharmaceutical company and does indeed have a large staff of medical experts working on figuring out oripathy, RI is pretty clearly a political entity as well, and it employs a force of PMCs known as operators, who are also typically the units you use in gameplay.

Unfortunately, it's kind of hard to enjoy this world, mainly because the writing is usually very stilted, roundabout, and vague.  Characters can have entire conversations with each other and manage to talk around the actual point in such a way that once the scene is concluded you still might not actually be sure what the purpose of it all was.  The result is that its VN-style story scenes are, more often than not, a chore to get through unless you're prepared to really try and squeeze as much context as possible out of each and every line.  I'm inclined to think this is less a localization problem and more a failing of the original writers, though the odd translation error or grammatical screwup doesn't help.

Furthermore, the game makes absolutely no effort to keep you updated on when events are taking place relative to each other, chronologically.  Aside from the main story, you have many side event stories that run the gamut between canonically having happened in the past or actually taking place in the future, far ahead of where the main story is.  The game almost never spells these things out for you though, so the best you can do is try to piece it together from context clues.  It's pretty hard to stay engaged with a story when you really don't even know the order that the events happening in.  I've more or less thrown up my hands and resigned myself to trying to enjoy each of the event stories as self-contained arcs, with little consideration to how they fit into the broader tapestry.

I do quite like the characters in the game, though.  Hypergryph did a great job finding talented VO and artists to build memorable and interesting characters.  The world of Arknights is adjacent to ours, with analogues to major states like the US and Russia present.  But most people living in it have animal features (cat/dog/rabbit ears, lizard tails) for... reasons?  That's just the world it is, I guess.  Probably to sell more merch.

Gameplaywise, this is a free-to-play gacha game, which means there's plenty of reason to be guarded.  I'm not that experienced with gacha games for the same reason, but having put over a year into this one I think it's pretty fair.  Characters are classified in order of rarity from 1 to 6 stars, with higher rarity characters typically being more sophisticated.  The rates for getting high-rarity characters are fairly pitiful, but they do have measures in place to ensure you're guaranteed to roll a 6-star at least periodically.  Furthermore, nearly all of the content in the game is designed to be doable with easily obtainable 3/4 star teams, which you can find plenty of evidence of on YouTube.  If you stick with the game, it's also possible to slowly build up gacha currency without ever paying a dime, though as is typically the case with F2P games you're going to need a lot of patience and the ability to accept that you can't have everything.  Personally, I buy their $5 monthly pass, which combined with some planning and research has given me the resources to get me nearly all the characters I've wanted so far.  I'm also not someone who gets hung up on trying to ace endgame content though, so your mileage may vary if you're the sort who prefers to aim high.

As is typical with tower defense games, you have one or more spots on a map to defend, and enemies arriving in waves that you need to kill before they reach said spots.  You do so by deploying operators, who are characters in the game.  Operators are broadly classified into eight categories.  You have Defenders, who are classically tank-like characters who can take a lot of damage but aren't the best at dishing it.  Snipers are your traditional ranged units who also tend to be the best at hitting airborne enemies.  Guards are your bread and butter DPS units who aren't always the toughest but will probably be the meanest.  I have to speak in generalizations though, because even within each category there's a ton of variation.  Guards and Snipers especially come in all shapes and sizes, from explosive-lobbing AoE Snipers to Arts Guards who exclusively deal magic damage.  The challenge comes from figuring out what composition of units from such a diverse pool will effectively ward off the enemies in each stage.  And as with any good tactics game, there's rarely if ever only one solution.

I've quite enjoyed myself with this game.  It's not without its flaws (the writing isn't the only qualm I have), but it's specifically a good mobile game, in that I can engage with it for hours or minutes and get something done either way, and it doesn't demand fast reflexes.  And did I mention I really like some of the characters?

Punishing: Gray Raven

This game launched very recently worldwide, just this month in fact.  I heard about it through some rumblings around the Arknights community and, knowing that it's often best to get in on the ground floor with F2P games if you have the opportunity, have been tooling around with it casually.  This game's future on my phone is uncertain.  The core gameplay is both technically smooth and pretty satisfying, but I know it will only get more difficult as I get deeper in, and I'm not convinced that a challenging action game is really what I want from a mobile game.  I'd rather have a controller for when things get difficult, and I'm not the sort of person who is interested in carrying a controller around for my phone; I've been there, and I'm over it.

Moreover, while PGR is a good action game at its core, it's a good action game wrapped in an F2P superstructure.  You mostly roll the machine to get new characters and weapons, and you level up your abilities and such using a bunch of different currencies and resources that will no doubt become scarce as you get deeper in progression.  I could play this good action game wrapped in F2P trappings, or I could play another good action game like DMC or Bayonetta where I don't have to deal with the extra fluff.

Finally, unlike with Arknights, I'm not sold on PGR's characters, world or story so far.  Basically, it's another post-apocalyptic world, where humanity has been decimated by some sort of virus that destroys organic matter and corrupts machines, called the Punishing Virus.  The remnants of humanity have escaped into outer space and are now fighting a proxy war with the corrupted machines on Earth that, upon being infected with the virus, have become single-mindedly devoted to the extermination of humankind.  You start the game as the human commander of Gray Raven, a unit of combat androids that is deployed down to Earth on missions investigating a new type of machine that has emerged lately.

If this premise and setting sounds startlingly similar to the outward premise of Nier: Automata, you're not alone.  I think 2B and company are even featured at some point as limited crossover characters.  At any rate, neither the story nor world are really hooking me so far, and the character designs (which I think are honestly pretty important to the success of a gacha game) have been pretty so-so.  

This game seems to be going the route of having multiple different versions of the same character across the rarity spectrum, where the S-ranked version will look and play different but will still be more or less the same personality and have the same VO.  These are androids and consequently can be reconfigured with different frames and weapons, so it makes sense in-world, too.  It also seems to be possible for lower-ranked characters to actually go up in rarity and maybe be statistically comparable to their peers, although I don't think a B-rank character that makes it to A-rank will have as sophisticated a gameplay kit as a proper A-rank character.  

You could look at this and see it as them skimping out on making actual new characters and maybe trying to save on VO costs, but I don't actually have much of an issue with it because different versions of the same character do seem to play very differently.  And at least compared to Arknights, each character has had a lot of VO work done for them.  I also like the rank up system; it feels like a smart compromise for people who really like a given version of a character and want to keep them relevant farther into the game.

I guess the short version of all this is that while I think PGR is a good game, I'm not sure it's a good mobile game, and I'm not sure I feel like giving it the attention I expect it will want as I get deeper in.  The good news though is that I've figured out how the auto system works, so in theory it could be possible to complete the dailies in a few minutes?  I'm not sure yet.

Genshin Impact
The game that's all the rage, lately.  I've been on and off with Genshin.  I played a little around the time it first released but it didn't pull me in.  Then I came back again to try for Eula, and didn't get her so I put it down again.

I'm the sort of person who is really deeply attracted to strong character art and animation.  It's a big part of the appeal for me in Kingdom Hearts and Nier Automata, for example.  I love Genshin's character design.  It's colorful, friendly and expressive, and the animation oozes personality.  As much as I don't love the moment-to-moment gameplay, I still find myself thinking about the game, wanting to spend more time in the world with its characters.

Whereas I previously played it on mobile, I've now downloaded it on PS4 and decided to give it a third try there.  I'm going to take it really casual, and just see how I feel about it that way.

Another Eden

Yeah, this was the year of me dabbling in gacha games.  Arknights is currently still the only one I've paid any money into, though.

I tried Another Eden after seeing it mentioned in a reddit thread as a game that both respects your time and doesn't have as much FOMO going on.  I'm not 100% sure I agree with the former evaluation but it is far and away the most laidback gacha game I've played.  It doesn't really have any daily or weekly missions to keep up with, no energy meter, and there's no time-limited content; anything added to the game is there indefinitely.  The only reminder the game really gives you that it is an F2P gacha game is a soft prod to watch an ad for some free currency.  The in-game currency store is stashed in the options menu, and the gacha machine is a sleepy world of dreams that doesn't get in your face.

In many ways, AE feels like a JRPG first and an F2P game second.  It's a heavily story-driven game, with sprite-based cutscenes and lots of world travel.  It uses a turn-based battle system, with a 6-person party (3 active, 3 in reserve) that would be right at home in a late 90's console JRPG.  You get new characters mostly by rolling for them in the gacha machine, but the game gives you a stable of story characters as you progress; and interestingly, it's possible through grinding resources to rank up characters into higher rarities, like in PGR.  Unlike in PGR though, you are literally upgrading them into their higher rank version, not just a statistical upgrade of their base rarity, which means they get all the abilities and such along the way.  It's a flexible, if grind-heavy system that allows patient players to often skip the gacha entirely.  In Another Eden this is called the Another Style (AS)/Extra Style (ES) system, where a given character might have a higher rarity AS or ES that is the same character but better or different.  You can pull an AS character from the gacha just as you would a wholly different character, or you can work through the process yourself.  Either way, you can swap freely between each version of a character that you have.

This is somewhat important, because Another Eden utilizes a strictly paid currency for most of its worthwhile gacha banners.  You can roll on basic banners with a currency that is built up slowly over time doing quests, but from what I can tell there is absolutely no way to roll on the majority of the featured banners without using a special currency that can only be purchased.  Genshin uses a similar split currency system for its featured banners, but the difference is that Genshin lets you convert your F2P currency into paid currency.  Not possible here in AE.  What's more, Another Eden doesn't have any sort of monthly pass or subscription, like all the other games I've written about here so far do.  You either buy the paid currency in somewhat expensive lump sums or you don't buy any at all.

I put around 12-15 hours into Another Eden before deciding it wasn't really for me.  It's a competently made JRPG, with a reasonably engaging story, decent music and characters and a general interface and flow that is well-suited to mobile.  There were a couple of things that ultimately made me decide to put it down.  The first was the grinding.  Another Eden has a lot of fluff.  It's littered with side quests that are unapologetically just banal fetch quests that your main character agrees to do because he's the archetypical Good Guy(TM) and a huge sap.  There's literally a quest where he meets a random little girl who's heard super heroic, larger-than-life things about him and demands he go fight a bunch of monsters to prove he is actually who he says he is, and he agrees because... he cares about proving his identity to some random little girl?

You could just ignore these quests, but they award gacha currency, XP, and materials for upgrading your gear, which are all worthwhile.  Your alternative for getting these things is to just go out into the world and fight monsters a bunch (which you'll do anyway to keep up with the story levels), but that won't get you any currency.  This is not a problem that is unique to Another Eden; it's an obvious trope in games that the good guy in games is a huge dope that will do ridiculous stuff just because the NPCs ask them to.  Another Eden is maybe among the worst offenders of it, but it's more that I just kinda don't need another game doing the same thing that a lot of games have been doing for decades.

The other thing was that I like my stories to end eventually.  This is always the thing I have to watch for with online games that try to be story-focused, as it's inherently not in their interest to have a properly paced story that comes to a natural conclusion, because then they have to figure out what happens after that.  It's an issue that I think FF14 has walked a fine line with over the years, sometimes triumphantly with Heavensward and sometimes frustratingly with patch content.  It's also a small part of what drove me away from Granblue Fantasy and Shadowverse.  I don't know if Another Eden's story ends, but I didn't feel all that optimistic about it, considering they're still adding new chapters now.  If the game had more compelling gameplay and characters to fall back on, I would be less inclined to worry about it, but in my opinion Another Eden is a competent JRPG, not a particularly standout one, where gameplay is concerned.  

I think if I were someone pining for the olden days of JRPGs where it was just simple characters going on an adventure, Another Eden would hold more appeal for me, and that's the sort of person I would also likely recommend it to.  It's a competently made old-school RPG that you can play on your phone for as long or as little as you want.  It even has some core staff from Chrono Trigger working on it.  But I'm not really that person, and so I decided to duck out.

Hitman 1-3

I had gotten Hitman 1 and 2 gradually from sales, and had been meaning to play them because I enjoyed Blood Money and Absolution.  I initially dabbled in each before deciding to just go buy 3 and play the entire trilogy in 3's engine.

What a great experience.  IO really made something special with these games.  They look great, they're deftly written, and they have so much depth.  Nearly every location is packed with things to mess around with and discover, it's phenomenal.  It's all the rage for people to rank their favorite Hitman levels, but I think this post is already very long, so I'll just say which level from each game I found to be the most memorable.

Hitman 1: Hokkaido.  I tend to like snowy levels, and Hokkaido is the first level in the trilogy that throws a few wrenches in the formula.  First, you're not allowed to bring any gear in because the place is tightly secured, so everything is acquire on-site.  Second, access to deeper parts of the level is tightly controlled with an ID chip system, which made your choice of disguise even more important.  Conversely, I can see this being frustrating for people who prefer Suit-Only runs, but I for one prefer to embrace the Hitman games for their social stealth mechanics.  Hokkaido also has some of the more interesting scripted kills.

Hitman 2: Whittleton Creek.  This one's a little tricky, because I liked Mumbai a lot as well and think Mumbai had somewhat more interesting mission stories.  But there's something about stalking around a sleepy suburban neighborhood filled with caricatures of American life that I find incredibly entertaining.  Especially because one of them is almost certainly a serial killer and they're not on the target list.

Hitman 3: Dartmoor.  This one was difficult as well because I think every single Hitman 3 level had some interesting twists going on except maybe Chongqing (I respect Chongqing though because of how kindly it treats Sniper Assassin players).  Dartmoor's just resonated with me the most.  There's one mission story in particular that turned what could otherwise have been a pretty standard level into something with a completely different flavor, as you can basically commandeer the role of a private investigator.  Not only that, but it's one of those rare levels where you're not the only one who is out to get your target.

I haven't messed around with Haven Island, New York, or any of the other non-story missions/locations yet.  I'm definitely looking forward to it, though.

Play Log: Love and War

The next synopsis for Spice and Wolf is still oncoming.  It's just, where I'm at now the plot suddenly got kind of complex, so I was having trouble wrapping my head around it, much less putting a summary together.

Valkyria Revolution
The first two hours or so of this game seem to consist largely of cutscenes.  You do one tutorial battle a few minutes in, and then it's a lot of menus and talking heads.  This doesn't bother me so much as the story is somewhat interesting, but it does suggest poor pacing.  I just got to the point where free missions open up, so it seems like there will be more battling going on.

A lot of people were pretty harsh on this game leading up to and through its release, because how different it is from the previous Valkyria games.  I try hard to judge games for what they are, rather than what I want or expect them to be, so even as a huge fan of Valkyria Chronicles I wanted to give this a shot.  The parallels between VC and this game are...superficial, I guess you could say.  It has the storybook structure of the first game, the "underdog nation fighting against an empire" premise, and the sorta artsy graphics style that helped Valkyria Chronicles stand out.  And there's a valkyria in the game.  Those are kinda all the major things in common that stand out.  While the story has similar trappings, actual plot and even the world are completely different.  There's no indication so far that Valkyria Revolution actually takes place in the same universe as the previous games.  The technology is different, as are the countries and history.

And of course, the big difference here, the elephant in the room, is the gameplay.  Valkyria Revolution is an action-RPG with light strategy, as opposed to the strategy-RPG with light action that Valkyria Chronicles was.  For some reason, when I think of games to compare it to mechanically, The Last Story actually comes to mind.

Anyway, I'm too early to speak qualitatively about the game, but I don't hate it.

Total War: Warhammer
Having now played Rome II, Shogun II, and just a bit of Medieval II, I felt it was time to dip into Total War: Warhammer.  I've put a couple dozen hours into the game now, and there are some distinct things I do and don't like about it.

The biggest thing I like is the fantasy.  The Warhammer license really brings a lot to the Total War formula.  Now you're not just working with swords, cavalry and spears, you're working with huge beasts, tanks, and griffons.  Mages cast spells that sweep across the battlefield while undead dragons fly overhead.  Rocket batteries release hell on distant targets while trolls charge headlong through crowds of infantry.  Tactically, large creatures and flying units add a surprising amount to the traditional formula.

And yet, Warhammer is also probably the simplest Total War I've played, in most respects.  There's really no managing of finances to be done (you can't for example adjust tax level, even faction-wide), true sieges (with walls to breach and such) only happen at province capitals, and your formation options are reduced to just "melee at the front" and "ranged at the front", a big departure from all the options Rome II had.  This makes it probably the most accessible Total War, but I do feel like Creative Assembly sacrificed a certain level of depth to accomplish this.

Shogun II had a meta-mechanic in the campaign called "World-Divide", that was designed to keep the player on their toes and shake up the status quo.  Similarly, Rome II has internal politics that you have to stay wary of as you expand.  In Warhammer, the meta this time is Chaos.  Chaos corruption is a constant threat throughout your game, but at some point a few hours in, you start getting warnings of a huge horde of Chaos mustering far in the north.  It's not long before they're knocking on your door, and if you're not ready, they'll roll over you.

One other thing that I like about Warhammer is the confederation mechanic.  Unlike in previous Total War games, humans aren't the only ones competing for power.  Other races like Dwarves, Elves, and Vampires are also on the map.  Within each race you have multiple factions.  For example, I might start as the human Empire, but there will be plenty of other human factions on the map, too.  I can choose to just conquer them, but in Warhammer if you can get friendly enough with other factions of the same race, you can convince them to basically join you willingly.  A situation that you run into fairly often with TW is that you get onto good terms with a relatively small faction that, while not particularly strong, isn't worth the diplomatic penalty you'd incur for betraying and forcibly annexing them.  So you leave them be and hope you don't find yourself having to swoop to their rescue too often.  Now, in a situation like that, that small faction would more than likely be willing to just be assimilated by you (which the game calls "joining your confederation").  Especially as the Chaos horde approaches and a need for unity comes into play.

The biggest thing I dislike about Warhammer compared to previous entries is how frequently routed units come back to fight.  A lot of this has to do with how simplified morale is compared to previous games, but I can't count how many times I've had an enemy unit retreat, only to come running back into the battle minutes later.  This happens in other games too, but uncommonly.  If you routed a unit, there was always a chance they'd come running back maybe once or twice, but in Warhammer routing a unit almost feels meaningless unless you actually run them off the map, because without fail they'll come running back into the battle sooner or later.  Sometimes units that have been routed multiple times still come back for more.  The thing that makes this distasteful to me is that it turns a lot of battles into ones where you end up fighting to the last man, which is supposed to be really uncommon in Total War, at least until end-game.  I never feel like a unit is truly out of the fight until I've literally exterminated them, which is costly and time-consuming.  This feeling is compounded by what I feel like is a proliferation of units that basically don't rout at all, like the Axe Champions and Mace Flagellants, who will in fact fight until they're all dead.  I dunno, call me weird, but I've grown accustomed to the more gentlemanly battles, where the enemy runs when they know they're beaten.

God Eater
This is one of the few anime that I'm watching with English voices, because the voice actors are largely the same as they were for the games.  Though it follows the same overall story as the first game, it definitely takes some interesting swerves.  That's kinda what I like to see in an adaptation, to be honest.

Play Log: Lapses

The whole point of writing Play Logs was to give myself a way to continue writing, using a short-form style that would be easy to manage.  This past month or so has been so busy I guess I couldn't even manage that.

Company of Heroes 2

The PIAT change has really changed UKF's mid-game for me.  Now I don't feel nearly as much need to rely on the AEC or Bofors to deal with vehicles.  Luchs are still a big threat, but I can live with that.

I'm finding myself slowly revising my opinion of the vanilla Sherman.  It's still kind of crappy at dealing with other tanks, being equal if not slightly inferior to the Panzer IV in a straight matchup, but the combination of HE rounds and a top-mounted MG make it a killer infantry tank.  If you think of it as a unit for blasting away vehicles and infantry that can also defend itself against enemy tanks (if necessary), it becomes a more compelling unit.  I'm actually curious if the Easy 8 (which lacks the ability to switch between HE and AP) has the same splash as the regular Sherman's HE rounds.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 2

On to the sequel.  It occurred to me that I'm not sure I've played a series of games where the stories are so tightly interlocked.  Most of the time when games have sequels, the individual games' stories still stand apart from each other.  Take Kingdom Hearts, which I think is the closest example of a JRPG series following a single overarching plot.  The original Kingdom Hearts had kind of a mysterious ending, but it was an ending all the same; Sora rescues Kairi and Destiny Island, and manages to briefly reunite with Riku.  Then you have Chain of Memories and Kingdom Hearts 2, which explicitly follow up on the overall story but are still individual sagas in and of themselves.  The same goes double for games like Birth By Sleep and 358/2 Days, which plug fairly neatly into the series' narrative but still tell standalone, focused stories of their own.

Trails of Cold Steel (and presumably Trails in the Sky) isn't like that.  Trails of Cold Steel 2 is chapter 2 in the same book.  Cold Steel 1 essentially didn't have an ending.  A whole lot of stuff happens, and then the game is over.  Picking up Cold Steel 2 is like coming back from a commercial break mid-way through a TV episode or movie.  They even start you out at level 40 (which is about 25 levels lower than I finished CS1 at, but remarkable all the same), with all of the crafts you learned in the previous games.

I just... Don't know what I think about that.  If you buy Cold Steel 1 intending to finish it, you're basically locked into buying and playing the whole saga if you ever want to see a proper conclusion.  It's like if each episode in a Telltale game was 70 hours long and cost $40.

Bloons TD 5

I'm sure I've mentioned before my enduring fondness for Tower Defense games.  I played Bloons TD 5 a long time ago and didn't think much of it.  The cutesy visuals the premise of popping balloons didn't really ring home with me.  Well, for it's had a consistent following over they years so I figured I'd give it another shot.  It still feels a little hollow to me, but what eventually got me into it was the tower variety.  There's about 25 different units, ranging from planes that patrol the battlefield to super monkeys that blast balloons at ludicrous speed with eye beams.  The amount of enemies thrown at you and number of resulting projectiles flying around the screen means that the game can get somewhat hectic.

It's not bad.  In other news, I finally decided to wash my hands of Kingdom Rush.  I gave it its fair shake, and it's not for me.

Lara Croft Go

I couldn't get into Hitman Go, as much as I wanted to.  While the visuals and presentation were slick as hell, the core game just wasn't doing it for me, and at the end of the day didn't actually feel much like Hitman.

Lara Croft Go is way better in this respect.  It has just as much if not more visual flair than Hitman, with colorful, exotic environments and slick animation.  But to me at least, it truly evokes Tomb Raider.  I haven't played the PS1 games, but the trilogy Crystal Dynamics made during the mid-2000s were as much about quiet exploration as they were about blasting away at hostile wildlife.  I would even say they had a meditative quality about them.  Lara Croft Go captures that perfectly.

Play Log: New Semester

New semester has started for me and as a result I've suddenly gotten considerably busier...

Trails of Cold Steel
I'm finally at what appears to be the final chapter, and it's clear that in the grand scheme of things the story is only just getting started.  I'm not sure how I feel about putting 80-hours into a game and basically only having the prologue to show for it.  On one hand, it helps establish the sheer scale of the story the developers are trying to tell, but on the other, it makes me feel a little ticked off that I put all this time into the game and ultimately there's no payoff unless I keep going to the sequel.  Like, there's nothing wrong with multi-volume stories, but a good series doesn't just leave you hanging between works, and that's what I feel this game is doing.  It's setting up all sorts of plot strings that are very obviously not going to get resolved before the end of the game, and that sort of sucks.


Company of Heroes 2
I've been playing a lot more USF lately.  They're a hard faction to play on this setup because I don't have any keybinds, but their versatility and mobility is always a breath of fresh air coming from UKF.  And while I don't think much of USF's vanilla armor, the Easy 8 and Pershing can get a ton of work done.  I'm finding the Pershing's cannon to be astonishingly good against infantry, perhaps comparable to the IS-2 or King Tiger in splash radius.  And the ability to triple equip bazookas on Rangers does wonders for your roaming AT capability.  Most of all though, it's so nice having such a highly mobile mortar team.  The range got nerfed pretty bad last patch, but the lightning-quick set up and pack up times almost make it worth it.

I've also been experimenting with using my Major more on the frontlines.  The Major is traditionally a valuable unit because he can act as a secondary retreat point.  Pair him up with an ambulance and USF players can essentially pick anywhere on the map to retreat to for full-service healing and reinforcements.  But the Major can also call in air recon and artillery barrages, which makes him a pretty valuable asset on the frontlines as well, despite not really being cut out for heavy combat (he's really squishy, and unless you give him a BAR or two his damage sucks).  Lately I've been doing a sort of three-musketeers style thing with him and the Captain and Lieutenant.  Since all three can sprint at full veterency, they work well as a first-response unit before my full force of Riflemen and/or Rangers arrive.  I also use them as point cappers, which saves other, more combat-oriented units from having to halt their advance.  Normally I use Rear Echelons for capping, but lately I've been relying on them to provide light AT with bazookas, so I run into a lot of situations where I'm torn between having them stay behind to cap a point, or allocating them to help with a nearby enemy tank or vehicle.  Plus Rear Echelons have a number of things in general that only they can do, so I've found that giving them bazookas suddenly makes them perhaps the busiest unit in my army, constantly running between engineer tasks and frontline combat.

Spice and Wolf Synopsis: Volume 6

"You won't go quarreling with your companion over anything quite that foolish again, will you now?"

In the grand scheme of things, not a lot happens in volume 6.  It's a transitional story, focused mainly on foreshadowing volume 8, introducing Col, and, as always, developing the relationship between Lawrence and Holo.

And yet I struggled to keep this one from getting too long.

Play Log: The Ride is Over

Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans

Well, it's finally over.  The ending... wasn't very satisfying, but I guess I can't complain too much.  I think IBO is going to go down in history as a pretty polarizing show among Gundam fans.  It's very different.  That's not unusual for an AU show, but IBO really has a fundamentally different feel to it from even most other AUs, in terms of everything from mechanical design to tone of its story.  Okada brought something very new to the franchise, and in the end I think that's a good thing.

After War Gundam X

I finish watching one Gundam, and promptly start up another.  Coming from IBO I was very worried that older shows would suddenly feel very dated (even though I've already seen and enjoyed plenty of them), but X is hitting it off with me right away.  I like Garrod, and I really like the overall set up of the show.  "After War" turns out to have been a very apt timeline title, as the show takes place only a few years after humanity has already largely destroyed itself in an all-consuming war.  It's the typical Earth vs. Colony feud, except this time nobody was around to stop both sides from going all the way.  Now it's just scattered remnants trying to pick up the pieces in a Mad Max-esque world.  As a result the show is weirdly dark sometimes.  Like for example, there's a scene early on when a bunch of bandits are trying to steal Gundam X from Garrod, but they're not united at all and the moment one of them falls over or is defeated by Garrod, the rest dogpile him/her and finish them off, just to reduce competition.

I guess Gundam X is fresh in its own way just because how cynical it seems to be in its portrayal of humanity.

Amagi Brilliant Park

I ended up watching the 14th episode of this for reasons, and enjoyed it.  So I decided to come back and give the actual series a try.  I'm already having a blast with it.  It goes without saying that it's a beautiful show (with lots of beautiful women, hue), but it's got a lot of character.

Black Lagoon

Another one of those well-known shows that I haven't seen.  Let's fix that.  I'm only a couple episodes in, but it's not bad.  I think I might have a soft-spot for anime set in places in the southern hemisphere, in places like Malaysia and South America.  Those are places that I know little about and don't have much interest in visiting, but there's an exoticism to them that I enjoy seeing portrayed in fiction.  And if nothing else, it's a nice break from the endless stream of anime set in Japan or facsimiles of it.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel

Now that some of my Master Quartz are maxing out and I'm getting some really good slot quartz, combat's been kind of a breeze.  I'm in Roer now, that's a cool place too.

Company of Heroes 2

So, the balance patch is out.  Penal squads have anti-tank rifles now, which... Isn't totally strange I guess, but I didn't feel like Soviets were really hurting for extra AT options, and giving Penals PTRS rifles makes Guards less attractive.  The fact that satchel charges can stick to vehicles now is hilarious, though.

The PIAT got a big buff too.  Overall, I'm happy with the changes.  The shots home now, which is silly in action, but makes the weapon much less frustrating.  This is counterbalanced by a big reduction in range, which makes it easier for enemy armor to kite you.

And, well, right on the heels of this patch, it seems another one's cooking.  This time Relic's finally giving in to the whiners and nerfing the Comet and Cromwell.  Personally, I felt the Cromwell was in a great place, so it stings a ton to see it get nerfed.  The Comet was a really good tank, so good that it rarely made sense to choose the Churchill over it, but the balance changes currently suggested seem way too harsh.  Especially buffing the population cap up from 16 to 20.  That's right in line with a King Tiger.  It's one thing to make it cost more popcap, but they're also reducing its overall effectiveness at the same time, so we're getting a worse tank for higher popcap.  I think the ride might really be over for me if this is the future of UKF.

Shadowverse

So a new expansion came out recently, Tempest of the Gods.  For me, the most exciting cards came for Swordcraft, but it feels like almost every faction got some pretty scary new additions.  Dragoncraft in particular got buffed like nuts.  But what seems to really be shaking up the meta is Heavenly Aegis, a new Havencraft card.  Heavenly Aegis is an extremely strong card just looking at its attack and defense, but the kicker is that almost nothing can kill it.  It can't be damaged, it can't be banished, it can't be removed by spells.  Theoretically, the only way to deal with it is to use a a card with Bane.  It seems like with every expansion, Cygames pushes the boundary of what ought to be permissible for a balanced meta, and they're really stretching it this time.  There are some factions that, as far as I'm aware simply do not have cards with Bane (like Havencraft, heh), so Heavenly Aegis becomes unstoppable.

Granted, Heavenly Aegis costs 10 points, so you're not going to see it until very late.  This means you can realistically kill a Havencraft before they ever get a chance to play it, especially because Havencraft decks often have a slow start anyway.  That said, I feel like if your strategy to defeat a card has to be "beat the player before they can play that card", that card might be a little too strong.

I'm not even sure what Cygames hoped to accomplish by introducing Heavenly Aegis, as it's not like Havencraft was a struggling faction.  In fact, I've long considered Havencraft to be one of the strongest factions; even though it's not my favorite faction (that'd be Swordcraft or Forestcraft), it's the one I usually win the most with.

Play Log: Fun Times

I spent a good portion of this month traveling, hence the break in activity.

Yozakura Quartet: Hana no Uta
I believe I commented earlier that this show was pretty easy on the eyes.  That was an understatement.  The animation is honestly pretty damn topnotch sometimes.  And Kotoha is awesome.  I like her character, I like her design, I like her ability.

I went and did a bit of research concerning just where this anime sits in the continuity, and apparently it is actually supposed to be generally covering the beginning of the manga.  It sure as heck doesn't feel that way, though.  Take the vampire twins, for example, or the cop.  The story treats them as familiar characters, but they never had an introduction...

Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans
I think I finally understand what's been throwing me for a loop with IBO.  I don't want to make Gundam sound like some super intelligent franchise, but I do feel like they're usually more cerebral than IBO.  It's a franchise that loves to portray clashes between various philosophical and political ideals.  IBO has this as well (mainly in McGillis and Rustal), but on the whole it's less about a bunch of high-minded individuals fighting to change the world and more about people fighting to preserve what's important to them, or better their own lives.  So the battles are more emotional, more base, and more brutal.  What the show lacks in complexity it makes up for in raw impact.

Company of Heroes 2
I'm probably lying to myself even as I write this, but I don't know how much more of this game I have left in me.  It's still fun, but the community is insufferable, and it's obvious Relic's not going to add anything more to it beyond perhaps the occasional skin or balance patch.

Cowboy Bebop
This is a great show and I'm glad I finally got around to watching it.  However, as mature adventure stories go I think I liked Michiko and Hatchin more.

Play Log: War Rages Again

Company of Heroes 2 
Whelp.  I feel like by getting this game working my Surface I've re-opened a forbidden well.  I don't think I realized how much CoH2 was cannibalizing my time with other games until I found myself regularly turning to it instead of continuing Trails of Cold Steel or Grandia.

Sadly, while the game is workable on here, I think I might have to veto maps like Sittard Summer.  I love the occasional bridge game just as much as the next guy, but my poor Surface can't handle all the action that gets compressed onto that bridge.  I ended up in a 4v4 custom game with 200 popcap and double resources, and my FPS would regularly dip into slideshow territory.

In other news, Relic is inching closer to another significant balance update.  Very little of it is of much interest to me, but they're completely overhauling the PIAT, which is a godsend.  They also seem to be nerfing the AEC vs infantry which is a little bit of a bummer since unlike every other faction, Brits don't really have a mid-game option for dominating infantry.  But on the other hand it's getting a boost to its overall vehicle hunting capabilities, which is probably the bigger boon in the end.

Cowboy Bebop
This show continues to be good, but at the same time my enjoyment of it has waned a little.  I'm not sure why.

Moana
So I saw this.  It was good, but this is one of those movies that I think I enjoyed more for the visuals and animation than for the content.  The story was fine, the songs were fine, and I did like Moana as the main character.  But it's a really colorful movie, which made it fun to watch in and of itself.

Inside Out
I guess I'm playing catch up with animated movies.  I didn't think much of Inside Out based on the pitch and trailers, but I ended up really enjoying the premise.  There were a few beats here and there that I found predictable, but it was overall a pretty imaginative movie.

I also found myself rewatching Frozen in Japanese, as it was airing on TV.  I had forgotten how charming that movie was.  They clearly did an outstanding job on the Japanese dub.  I vaguely remember hearing that Frozen was absurdly popular in Japan, maybe even more so than it was in the US.  That seems to hold true, as my dormmate said he's seen it five times, and also apparently had memorized the lyrics to every tune in the movie in the process.  Him and anyone else that walked by would happily sing along to the music as it cropped up.

Play Log: Easy times

Shadowverse
They put out a pretty big update yesterday that finally added some new story chapters.  I've only played a bit of the new Swordcraft chapters, but the AI sure did open a can of whoop ass on me, despite the fact that I think my decks are a lot more developed than when I first beat the story.  I did beat it, but I'm not looking forward to the new AI difficulties they also added.  Elite was already quite a pain.

In other news, there's a Granblue fantasy crossover event going on.  I haven't played Granblue because the mobile version's still Japan-only, but at least this means more rupees and card packs!

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel
So, I finally got to the part where the prologue takes place.  It's been well over a year since I started this game, so I had completely forgotten that the prologue had in fact shown a bit from the middle of the game.

The state of technology in this world is a real hodgepodge.  They have guns, armored cars and main battle tanks, but air power and automotive transportation is still in its developing stage.  Meanwhile you have the Internet in its infancy, and people still running around with swords and staves.  I'm definitely thinking about this too closely in terms of our own world's technological history, but what they have going on in Zemuria is very interesting.

Company of Heroes 2
Had a compstomp game yesterday where we were so thoroughly outpaced in tech by the AI that they had tanks on the field before I had my first light vehicle.  I'm dumbstruck how it happened.

I've been tinkering with more Soviet commanders.  I'm usually all about Armored Assault tactics, but there are some commanders that give Conscripts submachine guns, and that seems like a match made in heaven.

Spice and Wolf Synopsis: Volume 5

The girl giggled. “There is that, but there’s something about you that just makes a girl with a bit of confidence want to have a go. Do you get that a lot?”

I haven't seen the anime in a while, but I'm pretty sure this comprises the second half of Season 2.

Play Log: Surface Gaming

Company of Heroes 2
I tried running this on my Surface a long time ago, and was discouraged by the results.  But I couldn't stay away from it, so I decided to try tweaking the settings some more.  It's... playable.  I had to lower the resolution a ton and most of the quality settings are at low-medium, and I also had to download AutoHotkey because Relic can't be bothered to implement proper key rebinding in-game.  Also it's probably never getting more than 30 frames.  But it works.


Endless Legend
This game was on sale and an alternative to Civ V sounded attractive to me, so I decided to give it a shot.  It's interesting, not sure how I feel about it.  The biggest mechanical difference that jumps out at me is how open-ended the research is.  In Civ, you have a branching, but linear chart of research.  One technology leads to another, and some technologies have prerequisite technologies.  In Endless Legend, it's not like that at all.  The techs are organized into Eras, and you unlock new Eras as you continue your research.  But within each Era, there's no structure.  It's just a giant pool of techs, that you can research in whatever order you want.  You can even opt to pretty much ignore techs if you want, as you only need a fraction of each Era's techs to unlock the next Era.  It's very different from Civ's "no research left behind" approach.


TheoTown
This here's basically SimCity, but for Android.  And not SimCity 4, either.  Something earlier, more basic, like SimCity 2000.  It really does feel like like a SimCity game, through and through, complete with the fact that I basically wasted a whole evening staring at my phone playing it.  It's also completely free, which is cool.

The Legend of the Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel
The more I play this game the more I somewhat wish I had the background of having played the Trails in the Sky games.  Once you get to Heimdallr and later Legram, the references to the older games get more common.  It's not in any way affecting the main story at hand, it's just that sometimes you have scenes or bits of dialogue that I can tell I might have gotten more of a kick out of if I had played the earlier games.

As a side note, Legram's a pretty cool place.  It's the first field study location that I really find myself admiring.

Starbound
I bought this game a long time ago, back when it was basically in its fund-raising phase.  The promise of a way-expanded Terraria was too enticing to pass up.  I played it briefly a couple years ago and wasn't pulled in by it, and it has since then evidently had a lot of ups, downs, and big changes.  I finally decided to give it another, more serious shot and... I like it.  It kinda does feel like an expanded Terraria, but I've only just scratched the surface, so I don't want to get too into comparing the two.

Yozakura Quartet: Hana no Uta

So, I watched some of the first adaptation this series got back in... 2007, was it?  I remember thinking it was decent, though I never got around to finishing it.  Anyway, the visuals of this one attracted me to it.  It's a fun show, with charming characters, clean animation and colorful designs.  But watching it, it really does feel like I've been dropped right in the middle of a story.  These characters already have established traits, histories and developments, and it's clear that some stuff has already happened before episode 1.  It's like picking up a 50-episode show at episode 25.  Funny enough though, this hasn't really impeded my enjoyment of the show, because I just like watching the characters.

Play Log: Quality phone time

Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans
For whatever faults IBO has, the one thing I really must praise it for is how consistently it delivers on the fights.  This series has pretty much never gone more than one or two episodes without some kind of battle scene, and this frequency combined with the high quality of the choreography make it really entertaining to watch, regardless of anything else.

Cowboy Bebop
I just watched episode 15 today, which was a Faye-centric episode.  I didn't find Faye to be that interesting up till this point so I had held off on watching it, but it was better than I thought it would be.  I guess I shouldn't have been so quick to underestimate this show.

Train Conductor World
I installed this a while ago but never got around to trying it.  It's actually really fun!  It kinda reminds me of Flight Control, a game from the early iOS App Store days where you had to manage incoming flight traffic.  Train Conductor World gets incredibly hectic and challenging, but in a sort of exhilarating way.

Fire Emblem Heroes
Well, this is a thing.  It's okay, I guess?  The core gameplay is definitely Fire Emblem, but heavily simplified.  The in-app purchases seem exorbitantly expensive, but at least for now there's enough to do without spending anything.  To my surprise, it also has a bit of a story, though it's not like Fire Emblem games have a history of engrossing tales, so I'm certainly not expecting a lot here.

Grandia
I never had a PS1 or SNES so the often-called "golden age of JRPGs" was mostly lost on me.  I'm not on some quest to fix that, but I do like JRPGs and wanted to try something different from the modern fare I'm used to, so I popped in Grandia.  I'm already impressed, it has such a lighthearted, easygoing tone.  And it has voice acting, which is surprising.

Muramasa: Rebirth
I played several hours of this game closer to when I first got my Vita.  There's even a brief writeup about it somewhere on the site, I think.  Anyway, it's been on my mind a lot lately so I decided to come back to it.  After spending a couple hours playing it, I already feel like I remember what eventually drove me away from the game in the first place.  The combat is cool and challenging in a way that's just right, but the game pretty much has nothing else going on.  You're just running from place to place, killing enemies and sometimes talking to people.  I had the same problem with Dragon's Crown, but that had the excuse of being a beat 'em up.  I'm starting to wonder if this is just how Vanillaware operates.  Makes we want to try Odin Sphere, and soon.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel
The story in this game is getting pretty interesting, and the combat's reasonably fun too.  Yet something about playing it feels a little monotonous.

Play Log: Switching gears

For the past couple months I've been playing primarily on my 3DS, but a lot my Vita games were calling out to me.

God Eater Resurrection
Well, I finally beat every single story mission.  Not that there's really any more story after you beat Arius Nova.  I like to think I've kinda extricated myself from the trophy hunting game, but I've come to like this game a lot over the months, and I'm reasonably close to platinuming it.  I even managed to do the solo rank 14 survival mission trophy.  The rest is essentially grinding out missions and completing a set of rank 14 gear.  One of the things I like most about this game is that you can really feel your progress.  When you first start out you're fighting Ogretails and other small fry.  You move up to medium size critters like Gboro Gboros and Kongous soon enough, but it's a long time before you feel like you're a bad enough dude to take on a real aragami solo.  By the end you're the top dog in the branch, and there really isn't much that can push you around.  I can only think of 1 or 2 enemies in the whole game that I would give me a hard time 1v1, and plenty that I could take down by myself even outnumbered, as long as I paced myself.

God Eater 2 Rage Burst
I finally bit the bullet and decided to move on to GE2, now that I've seen largely all that Resurrection has to offer.  It feels like I'm going 100+ hours back in time, starting from square one again, it's brutal.  Jury's still out on how I feel about the game compared to Resurrection.  In Rage Burst devouring doesn't seem to be nearly as important, and the burst mechanic is just kinda there.  To be fair, I felt largely the same way about the devour mechanics in Resurrection until I really started playing around with Predator Styles, but at least here at the outset, devouring seems like much more a complementary mechanic than it is in Resurrection.  I like the idea of Blood Arts; the one I'm using on my hammer that gives back stamina makes that Boost Hammers on the whole feel more viable than they ever were in Resurrection.  But it seems like Blood Arts take a lot of grinding, so it'll be a while before I can see how it really pans out.

I decided to make a character that, in my headcanon, is the sister of my character in Resurrection.  It made that scene where Alisa first showed up more fun, that's more sure.

Oh, and it was weird as hell fighting a Ravana in rank 2.  You don't encounter one of those in Resurrection until like rank 7 or something.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel
I'm a little irritated with this game because it took so long to really get on its feet, both in terms of story and mechanics, but now I do find it pretty engaging.  The character writing is tropey but still manages to lend some depth and context to the characters, which is impressive because I think that's a pretty tight balance to walk.  I have zero interest in 100% completion but I still play with a guide in hand because I don't want to miss any chance for extra character interaction.

Thomas Was Alone
This game has been sitting on my Vita for ages, and I finally sat down with it for a couple of hours to see what it's all about it.  I see what this game is doing and I find it interesting, but eventually the tedium of playing a puzzle-platformer overtook the charm of going through a story inhabited solely by a cast of quadrilateral shapes.  It's unfortunate, because I read the synopsis of the game on Wikipedia and it sounds like it goes to some ridiculous places.

I also liked that each level had developer commentary.

Spice and Wolf Synopsis: Volume 4

I'm a big fan of the Spice and Wolf anime, and started reading the novels some time ago.  As a way to keep writing, and also as an exercise in reading comprehension, I decided to try keeping a synopsis of the books as I read them.

The goal is to provide a reading that is as brisk as possible while still providing a thoroughly detailed understanding of the story events in each volume.  What I specifically try to avoid doing is covering character interaction in great detail.  There are two reasons why.  One is because doing so is an incredibly easy way to end up with an unnecessarily bloated summary.  The other is that character interaction is the series' greatest strength, and arguably what you're really here for, and I don't want to spoil that.

So, why am I starting at volume 4?  Because the idea to do this didn't occur to me until I was reading that volume.  Then, without further ado:

Play Log: Back to God Eater

God Eater Resurrection
I played a tooon of this game last summer when it came out.  Just recently decided to get back into it. It's super fun.  I'm on Rank 14 now, finishing up the story and maybe going for the Platinum.  I played through most of the story using spears, blast guns and (in the later half) assault guns.  I've finally gotten just a little bored with my loadout though, so I decided to revisit other weapon types.  I still think hammers are really damn cool, but what I've really fallen head over heels in love with now is scythes.  I didn't think much of them when I was first starting out, but they're synergize so well with certain Predator Styles and skills.  I use Predator Style bonuses that boost oracle with each hit, and with the scythe's long range and ability to hit multiple times per sweep, I can rack up tons of ammo really quickly.  So now I use a scythe and blast gun, with custom shotgun-style canister rounds.  My scythe also has a chance of stunning enemies.  So I play the mid-range game, zoning enemies with the scythe while harvesting absurd amounts of oracle.  Than as soon as the paralysis kicks in, I move in and unload shell after shell into their face.  It does massive damage and usually breaks a lot of armor.

I've been doing a lot of tinkering with shotgun shells in general, mainly to make sick-looking airburst rounds.  Unfortunately, it seems like the game always calculates shell damage based on the distance between the player and the enemy, even if the mechanism firing the shell isn't actually the player, but a control orb launched by the player.  That's pretty unfortunate.

Oh, and the Vita's Party function works pretty well!  I used it to play this game for a couple of hours with friends over the weekend.  We would run missions and just chat about stuff.

Shadowverse
Had someone I played send me a friend request the other day.  I'm not sure what the point of friending random people in this game is, since there's no chat system, and no way to interact beyond private battles.

Matchmaking's still rife with Shadow and Blood players, but at least I played a somewhat unusual Blood player recently.  He used all neutral cards.  I've been thinking about trying out a neutral card deck myself lately, as there are neutral cards that are very explicitly designed to synergize with other neutral cards.  Trouble is, I'm not sure which character would be best suited to a neutral deck.  I mean, they're neutral cards so maybe it doesn't matter.

Switch Stuff
Nintendo made a number of questionable calls here with the Switch.  The fact that they're doing paid online doesn't bother me in and of itself, but what they're offering for the price seems a little insulting.  NES/SNES games that you can only keep for a month?  A phone app for voice chat?  Come on, guys.  And while they teased a lot of upcoming projects, both 1st and 3rd party, the actual launch lineup seems pretty sparse.

That said, it's a really interesting gizmo, and I want one.  And that Breath of the Wild trailer was truly amazing.  I went from being largely uninterested in that game to wanting to play it immediately.

Play Log: Happy 2017?

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations
Started and finished the first case.  So far, so good.  It's just as good as I remember.

Shadowverse
I'm finally starting to come into some decks I can have a bit of confidence in.  Though right now this game's meta is pretty frustrating.  It feels like almost every player I run into these days is playing Bloodcraft or Shadowcraft, and it's getting really old, really fast.  That said, there are some interesting Forestcraft and Dragoncraft decks coming up too.  And we can't forget the all-powerful Dimensional Shift Runecraft deck.  With a bang and a boom!

Tiny Rails
This is one of those "games" where once you get up and running, you basically only boot it up a couple times a day to check in on it and spend any accumulated resources.  I like it well enough, though.

Super Toss the Turtle
Apparently this is a souped up version of an old Newgrounds flash game.  When I saw it, it instantly reminded me of this browser game I once played on Cartoon Network's website.  Basically, you have a cannon or catapult of some kind, and a hapless animal, and the goal is to launch it as far as you possibly can, using the environment and a limited amount of manual nudges.  This one's extra silly.  My poor turtle got shoryuken'd by a walking banana, suicide bombed by a Mad Max-style biplane, and had the stuffing kicked out of it by Super Saiyan Goku.

Cowboy Bebop
I've seen more than my share of anime, but this has long been one of the gaps in my completion list.  Don't get me wrong, I've seen Cowboy Bebop.  But only what episodes I would sometimes catch on Adult Swim back when I was a kid.  I've never done a proper, continuous viewing of the series.  Anyone who's even dabbled in anime will have heard plenty of praise for this show, as it's widely considered to be not only one of the greatest series of all time, but a very good gateway into the medium.  It's not uncommon for products to buckle under such prestigious reputations, but from what I've seen so far Cowboy Bebop really does earn every ounce of praise.  I'm only a handful of episodes in and it's already one of the most charming, engaging shows I've ever seen.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans
I powered through all of season two a week or so ago.  I'm still not sure what my overall opinion of IBO is.  There are things I think it does better than most other shows in the franchise, there are things that I think it does well, and there are things I think it does poorly.  For example, the action is top notch.  Or more specifically, the choreography is top notch.  The animation, however, often looks cheap.  The music is also great, and I really like the character dynamics.  Yet at the same time, I find it difficult to even remember many of the characters' names, even as I enjoy watching them interact.  The show does dialogue and interaction well, but the characters themselves aren't very interesting individuals, with some exceptions.  I also am still not really taking to the show's mechanical design.  The only suite I really like so far is Vidar.  Barbatos is cool, but that has more to do with it having a lot of cool scenes rather than it being a particularly cool MS, at least to me.

Play Log: Downtime

I've been on winter break for the past few days, and I've mainly used that extra time to play a lot of Civilization V.

Civilization V

I don't love this game, so I don't know why I keep coming back to it, but I do.  Like The Sims 3 (which I actually do like, a lot), Civ is a game that I play intensively for a week or so and then forget about, only to inevitably come back to it some months down the line.  I'm not very good at the game, so I ended up playing at Warlord level (which is just a step below Normal difficulty).  What's engaging to me about Civ games nurturing an empire.  I always go for science or culture victories, and try to stay out of wars.  I find war in these games to be really tedious until you get air power, so it's not fun for me, even when I'm winning.  So when I get leaders like Askia and Dido, who want nothing more than world conquest, things get very unsatisfying very quickly.  Ironically though, in my current game as America I've become by far the most militaristic entity.  It all started when Dido decided to invade me for no apparent reason back during the Ancient Era.  I fended her off with everything I had.  Fast-forward to the Information Era, and Dido's long been conquered by other civs, while my military has become the largest and most advanced on the planet.  The last thing I did before quitting out was nuke Austria's capital to delay them from stealing my scientific victory.  They're the biggest country in the world in most respects, and their military is second only to mine, so I suspect I have a huge war in my future.  But for the time being, they were content to give me all of their luxury and strategic resources in exchange for peace and their capital.  If, after the peace treaty expires, they want a war, they'll have to come to me.  I wasn't ready for Dido, but I'll be ready for Austria.

Mount & Blade: Warband

The Mount & Blade games have always been a curiosity to me.  With the Steam sale on, I decided to try one for myself.  They always seemed to have a strong cult following, and now I can see why.  I'm not sure I've ever played a game quite like Warband.  Basically, you're a nobody who's decided to venture to the land of Calradia (modeled somewhat after medieval Europe) to make a name for themselves.  Calradia is a continent occupied by six factions, who are pretty much constantly at war with each other.  It's also infested with bandits, looters, raiders, and deserters.  What you do when you arrive is largely up to you; you can take up merchanting, sign on as a mercenary for one of the factions, fight in arenas, whatever.  But whatever you do, you'll want to have some followers to protect you, as Calradia's a dangerous place.  So you end up building an army.

Right now my group sits between 30-50 men.  It's a humble number, hardly an army, but most of them are really well-trained, some even elite fighters.  It's enough to make your average band of cutthroats flee on sight, and enough to lend meaningful aid to large-scale battles between lords and kings.  For the past couple months I've been operating in Swadia as a mercenary group.  I like Swadia well enough.  Eventually I'd like to own land there.

Invisible, Inc

Well, Klei's done it again.  I didn't like Don't Starve that much, but it was a well-made game all the same.  I feel mostly the same about Invisible, Inc, except I think I can have a better time with this one.  It's really tough, even on easy.  It's almost discouragingly difficult, to be honest.  I never really feel like I'm making significant gains, and mistakes are costly.  Still, I like the game well enough.

Shadowverse

I don't know if I just suck at this game, or if my decks suck.  Probably both.  I rarely win.  But I'm still having a good time with it.

World of Tanks Blitz

They just started some sort of Winter Festival Event.  I got a day of premium time (which I used exactly 0 of), some credits, and a Tetrarch.  Kinda crappy.  All of my missions these days have been for Tier 6, which I only have my Cromwell for.  I love playing the Cromwell, but I'm still not sure how to play it successfully, especially in Tier 6/7 hybrid games.  The Cromwell's best-in-class mobility means it's often the first on the scene, but you don't want to first on the scene, because that makes you the center of enemy attention.  My best games so far are ones where I stay on the periphery, taking potshots and being a nuisance, or in the case of Supremacy, zooming off to take an unguarded enemy point.  And then everyone calls me a coward because I'm not jumping in the fray, guns blazing.  At least the 75mm HV packs a decent wallop.

Play Log: Mobile Gaming Strikes Back

Getting a new phone has motivated me to give mobile gaming another look.  Having finished Justice For All, it's about time I moved into the trilogy finale.  I really goddamn miss Company of Heroes 2.  Like, a lot.

World of Tanks Blitz
The extensive amount of time I've put into the Company of Heroes games has gradually turned me into a light tank enthusiast.  I even ended up writing a term paper on British WW2 tanks a few months ago, and it was fun as fuck.  Anyway, I've been eyeing World of Tanks for a really long time, but never had the gall or spare moments to jump into it.

Well, I don't have a computer capable of playing World of Tanks, but I do have a lot of free time now.  So I opted to give World of Tanks Blitz a shot, which runs quite nicely on my Surface.  At first I tried it on my phone, and it's a functional experience there but kinda hard to steer.  Playing with a keyboard and mouse is way better.  I don't know how closely it resembles the main game, but I'm having a good enough time with it.  I played pretty intensively over the past two weeks or so, making a beeline straight for the Cromwell.  Now that I've got my nimble British cruiser, I'm content to just pop in once or twice a day and play some matches for the multiplier bonus.

And admittedly, I'm afraid my skills won't get me much farther, anyway.  Tier 6 is already pretty serious business, I can't imagine what 7-10 are like.  Nah, I'm happy messing around in tiers 1-6.

Michiko and Hatchin

The next anime I decided to watch after Chaika.  I'm on episode 18 or so as of this writing, and it's a damn good show.  Definitely one of those anime that even non-anime lovers can get into, and I think it deserves to stand shoulder to shoulder with shows like Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo.  The dub is also really good.  I might go so far as to say Michiko herself is dubbed better in English than in Japanese.  In Japanese she's kind of a cool, tough character in the vein of Major Kusanagi.  The English dub paints her as reckless, and quick to fly off the handle.  I think the latter suits her behavior a little better.

Hitman Go
I got this (and Lara Croft Go) on the cheap a couple months ago, just got around to trying it out.  I love the aesthetic and general concept, but it's way more of a puzzle game than I was expecting... I played the first several levels and wasn't really hooked at all.

Shadowverse
People weren't kidding, this really is Hearthstone: Anime Edition.  And fuck it, I'm totally okay with that, especially because it seems every bit as mechanically competent as Hearthstone.  I've only dabbled in Shadowverse so far, but the thing I'm already enjoying about it over Hearthstone is that it has a lot of singleplayer content.  There's a central storyline, with voice acting and cutscenes, it's neat.  And the developer seems to give out card packs like nobody's business.

Shantae and the Pirate's Curse
Fun little game!  The gameplay's not that amazing, but the presentation is stellar.  The writing's fun, the animation is expressive, and the art's quite nice.  It's a game with a lot of character, even if its actual gameplay isn't anything to write home about, at least so far.  And hot damn, why does every female character in this game have to be smokin' hot?  The protagonists, the antagonists, the NPCs, the enemies, if it's female you can bet they'll be ridiculously curvy and voluptuous.

Kingdom Rush
I've played Kingdom Rush before.  Tower Defense is historically one of my favorite game genres, and so I was quick to give it a shot when people started talking about it.  I wasn't impressed.  I'm still not impressed.  I'd like to keep with it a little longer this time because it is a serviceable game and I want to see if it has anything more to offer than I'm seeing.

Rayman
I got this for free from Ubi's 30 Days promotion.  I've never played a Rayman game older than Origins.  I don't know if I'm into it.