Lurker > Strife2

goblins

WhiteLens posted...

People are thinking that it's Avex, the publisher, that provided the subs and they're forcing Crunchyroll to use them.

And for whatever reason, they think machine translations are acceptable because they lack quality control.

So they think Metal Gear "I FEEL ASLEEP" is acceptable. Sad.

Not shocked, not surprised. They don't want to pay actors, so why would they bother paying translators.

I've taken a long overdue chainsaw to my seemingly endless backlog of shows. I've gone through about 20 different shows, varying from instantly repulsed to sticking for an episode or two. I guess it was bound to happen that I'd hit a stretch where I just had to dive in and get rid of things that weren't either any good or interesting enough to stick with.

That's what I get for putting anything I've never seen before in my watchlist without thinking.

Started watching Black Cat. Not a complete hit with me (some really doofy comedy and visuals at times), but the crime thriller/bounty hunting stuff always gets a rope. This seems a show I'd stick with, unlike GunxSword, which kinda died off a few episodes in. There's a bit more going on, and it takes itself a smidge more seriously.

How did the bumper for that Anya game miss out making the "ooting" reference?

Anyway, finished My Home Hero. Kinda goofy final fight, complete with a shit animation budget. However, Tetsuo and especially Kasen hold the show together.

Trying out My Home Hero. I'm not completely sold on it yet, but the main characters (especially the mother) have some weird quirks that grabbed me. The show isn't completely there though. It's very stiff, and I get the sense I'm not completely into thi. Might bse a 3-episode rule here.

I finished Fractale, and uh...I'm confused. Is this the anime equivalent of Rise of Skywalker, cause there's too much that went on, and yet not enough at the same time: the definition of overstuffed yet undercooked. What was good ended up...pretty bad. Nessa and Clain were great though.

The OP/EDs though: fucking hell they were great. Kept me going strong even when the show itself was falling down the stupid tree.

Oh geez. The week before Reload? That month stretch is packed. Still getting them all.

6.9 or so isn't bad enough to shit on something. Anything sub 6 is my red flag warning.

Are we talking Anohana "dude wears a dress for some reason" worse, or, EVA, "We ran out of our budget, so we made up some shit to sound smart" worse, or, Anohana and Ice Queendom, "We had 4 episodes of material, but were forced to make 12 episodes" bad, or "Yeah, it just sucks because reasons" worse?

Cause getting worse could be many things.

Started watching Fractale. The characters and writing are pretty good, and I found myself getting more sucked in as episode 1 kept going. I wanna see where this goes.

I think it does, because if I didn't have fondness for the characters, music, or setting, the gameplay would probably drive me up the wall. It's not, "bad," just annoying with the AI smarts of a Magikarp. Boss fights can also be laborious affairs if you don't use the exact strategy they designed.

Hell House and Rufus. Fucking hell. Poison was my friend to dick those fights.

I get what FF is becoming, but that doesn't mean I like it. Everything other than the combat was fun though, because the FF7 coat of paint was perfect.

Thing is, the first half being stupid strengthens the second half intensity. Stampede goes full dour, and takes time to get its head on straight.

It isn't helped that Milly's replacement is "too cool for this shit" old dude who never amounts to anything. Thank God Milly is probably a given for season 2.

It gets better once Wolfwood shows up. It eschews the dumb comedy of the first OG cour, playing more how the last few eps were very serious.

More Sleigh Beggy in school? Gimme.

Started the Nier Automata adaptation. So cool, and those ending puppet things. So funny.

HiDive is the Sentai Filmworks based service I think. I don't use it (because they never had Playstation apps for some weird reason).

SpyxFamily if you want family fun (and ootings)
Cowboy Bebop, Black Lagoon, and Gangsta. if you want different ways of Guns, bounty hunting, and (probably the word f*** somewhere)
Konosuba if you want fun (and explosions)
Madoka Magica if you want to feel depressed
Gankutsuou if you want to feel STYLISHLY depressed
PSYCHO-PASS if you want think tank melodrama, with a side of serial murder
Ghost in the Shell if you want think tank with...less series murder

Plenty to start with, with varying degrees of "I want to be happy, or I want shit to blow up and make me angry."

Was this the one that Taro said a producer or director didn't take any of his ideas and had him redo it all the time?

Started watching a show called 86 -Eighty Six-. Been a couple days, but the first few episodes hit me pretty hard. The two main leads are pretty fascinating, and this has some buzz around it when it came out.

And now I finished it up (the first season anyway; ends on a "we might do more, or read our manga" cliffhanger)

Really good noble/political romance drama. There's quite a bit of ground they can keep covering if this gets a second season (which I would definitely like). The two leads are fantastic at playing coy, and keeping everyone around them guessing.

Then I found something called "Why Raeliana Ended Up At The Duke's Mansion." I'm seeing a lot of cool behind the scenes machinations and darker characters amidst the few scenes I saw. It helps the main characters are pretty confident and charismatic. I might stick with this.

Saw episode 1 of Yamada999 (dubbed). I like Akane, and she carries the show in a "drunken depressed Marin Kitagawa" mix that holds everything together. It would be nice if Yamada didn't have the personality of a stick...but we can't have everything I suppose. When Ayanokoji from CotE has more charisma than you, that's fucking sad. Anyway, it was nice seeing college aged people for a change.

Fix up Yamada as the show progresses (as in show ANY emotion at all ever), and I might like this. At least, it can be in my weekly show rotation with Part Timer S2 for now.

Eternights

Hold R2 to hope for a good game

Yay it's back. Facing off against Sultan first thing is a trip down memory lane.

I left my creepy dolls and shoes in a closet somewhere. I'll just smash Sultan's face in man to man, with fists, and chokes, and chairs, and TAYBLES, cause i know I'll need to.

BURN MY BREAD...again

Re-watching Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien again, and I remember all over again those feelings of, "This is not meant to be a nice, pleasant show." That said, I'm kind of amazed how well the show ended up, given some of the plotlines of the actual game were...uh...something.

The game is less Madoka Magica, romance version, and more Future Diary, Clannad version...fucking hell.

Adol explains the new game!

Started rewatching Ascendance of a Bookworm. Given where the series goes in short order, it's fun retreading the simple fun of learning about the show's world and especially the characters. It's not quite Spice and Wolf when it comes to "a show about a medieval world and much ado about nothing that just works," but it's that fun and enjoyable solid show that never drops in quality.

S2 of Classroom of the Elite done, and I uh...need something lighter right now. The re-watch of Ascendance of a Bookworm can't come at a better time.

Now that I'm done with Quintuplets, I think I can safely say it's a top 3 show all time for me. It's got some clunky storytelling (specifically the ending), but I don't know any other anime (and the manga was like this too), where I just wanted more. I just spend hours thinking, "I don't want to be doing anything except reading another chapter or watching another ep right now." The fact that I can know how the manga ends, go into the anime, and still be sucked in all over again is a rare feeling. I even spent the last half hour or so reading Reddit threads about this to kind of gather thoughts and vibes around it. I almost never do that sort of thing.

It's not perfect by any means, but I don't know if I've had such a visceral reaction to a show like this before. SpyxFamily is probably the closest.

It's such an easy watch. I finished the manga super quick after seeing Season 1. It feels weird waiting so long to see what the anime version did.

Speaking of not goblins, I'm in my re-watch phase after Sonny Boy, and stuff like Quintessential Quintuplets was the trashy, yet fun and dumb romance I needed. I kept putting off the new seasons, but I can probably rush through this show in about a week. I need to catch Classroom of the Elite again, plus some other things. Maybe a rewatch of Casshern Sins if I'm sick of fun junk and want to be depressed.

But hey, gotta have some fun watching old shows from time to time.

Goblins

Oh geez

Go Maya, but dammit

I finished up Sonny Boy. It's fine, even if they didn't spend as much time answering the "What the fuck is going on here" question rather than doing what just having fun with the concept.

Now onto re-watch phase. Gonna bust through the rest of Quintuplets and CotE (the seasons I missed), plus maybe a few others series.

Go WrestleQuest and Sea of Stars

Gumshoe will finally get the raise he deserves. Soon, he'll upgrade from ramen to canned goods.

Yes, but his "cool guy liking coffee" schtick is more overdone than Franziska's whip. If he wasn't so integral to 3-4, 3-5, I would loathe anything he does.

At least Edgeworth's sly dickishness comes off as charming in spots.

The other main issue is prosecutors tend rely on their "gimmicks" mostly as character crutches.

Edgeworth is "pompous rich boy"
Franziska is "pompous rich girl, but with a whip"
Godot is "coffee dude with mask"
Klavier is "pop star guy"
Blackquill is "almost painful caricature of old school samurai"
Nahyuta is "praying dude."

You can kinda see where I'm going. A blend of them losing their aura and kinda falling into "they are the one note guys" ends up leading most post-Edgeworth people to just feel lackluster. I understand why Godot and (to an extent) Blackquill have fans. Godot sure gets way more plot intrigue so he somewhat escapes the trope. Blackquill doesn't have that same sense. Maybe if they focus on Athena and him in later games, he might get more. I like Athena and Blackquill's relationship, but it doesn't seem enough sometimes to balance out and make him stand out. It just does more for Athena.

After all, his only non-prosecutor case is one of the worse cases ever with that rakugo, clown, and noodle junk. It's not really his fault. But yeah. He needs more fleshing out.

That said, Blackquill being better than Klavier and Nahyuta (Franziska has some connection to Edgeworth, so she gets some points) isn't that high a bar to clear.

Blackquill suffers the same problem all prosecutors deal with: once they lose once, the intensity and aura they have is gone. There's no real way to combat this, because the player is expected to win every time. If they had showcases of the prosecutors winning their cases in their off hours (like mini cases or whatever), it's go a long way. I think the reason Edgeworth avoided that is because they quickly pivoted him into a anti-hero/chief prosecutor role after the first game.

Besides, he's facing off against Maya. He's not winning this.

I watched Reincarnated as a Vending Machine
I lasted 30 seconds
I'm surprised I lasted that long

I remembered one of the more annoying tendencies social media tends to foster. The "first message" problem. Say I'm engaging with someone about a topic. I make a post, and I make a statement that I was rushed, didn't phrase right, didn't have the knowledge, etc. Could be anything. If a person is really being a dick, they will reference it later, even if you've retracted a statement or said, you know, I kinda agree, but let me take a different approach. It becomes a "NUH UH, yOU SAID DIS THING FIRST! DON"T MOVE THE GOALPOSTS!"

I don't think I've heard of anything so annoying a phrase as "moving the goalposts" in the last few years. It's almost like, "Dude, I'm done. I get it. I've probably lost the argument here. Just let me fucking leave."

The thought here is, if you say anything, even a single word completely off or wrong, a person may analyze that as some sort of "gotcha" and harp on that as the thing and only thing you ever said ever. God forbid someone makes a mistake thinking about a thing they are going to type going about their day.

• Twitter is a hive mind of assholes and memes
• Haven't used Facebook in years for anything other than posting LEGO builds
• Reddit is fine if you nope out of any obvious toxic places or topics almost immediately (r/JRPG is mostly fine)
• Never used Instagram or TikTok
• GameFAQs is fucking sad. Go to any game board, and you're asking to see some guy go, "Well, what the fuck are you asking here for? Just look up some other fuckers topic or a guide already!" PWB is obviously full of memery and pathetic WWE v. AEW BS, that I often question what the fuck even happens. Board 8 and the one metal topic I review albums for are about the only non-dickish part of the boards now.
• Discords of small size are usually ok.

I have long understood where to go and not to go (i.e. Twitter, any non-B8 GFAQs board). I don't need what most "social media" amounts to. A lot of people just want to antagonize. I'd rather not deal with that. I'm pretty thin skinned, so being on social media in any obvious toxic setting is grounds for going insane.

Well, I was talking about trying to bypass all the sameness and find something unique, and then Sonny Boy happened. Not sure if this is going to end up being good. Psychological and weird think pieces are like that, but I'll be damned if it isn't different.

MacArrowny posted...

There's plenty of non-isekai to enjoy!

I know. If nothing else, the "finding a show to watch" phase is helping me take a chainsaw to an almost neverending list of shows. Can't find those Lull In The Seas and Space Battleship Yamatos if I don't suffer through 50 different Land of Leadales first episodes first. I suppose.

*Note: Lull in the Sea and Yamato are not Isekai. Just saying picking a show and seeing, "I'm just a normal guy or girl doing normal guy or girl things" is old, even by anime standards at this point. It really makes me appreciate when shows actually TRY being creative."

*Looks for new show, cause it's "Find a new show" phase*

That Time I Got Reincarnated...
Magical Isekai...
Otherworldly...
The Popular MMORPG...

God, even if we're after the wave from a few years ago, there's still too fucking many. Even the first episode of a show is just, "I Reincarnated." I mean, sure. There are great isekai (Konosuba) or even solid/good ones (Ascendance of a Bookworm), but goddamn. These shows have to work extra hard to even stand out, much less not just "exist" at this point.

I think for me, Pearl is one of those characters (kinda like Marlene or Nanako) who the game tries to write as endearing or kinda sheltered/unsure of themselves, rather than the annoying bratty types of like a Relm or Eiko.

Pearl's just excited about life, cares for Maya a lot (and both likes Nick, but doesn't take his bullshit), and the weird quirks she has aren't always in your face every five minutes. They do just enough stupid bullshit where it doesn't say, "This is all her character is, and this is all the "comedy" we could make for her. LAUGH DAMN YOU!" Like a Teddy or Ringabel being a perv every five seconds.

I always found that so hilarious...because look at Dahlia, and look at Mia. For fuck sake.