My personal backlog of things I meant to post but never got around to is now so long it's long since become a matter of great personal embarrassment. Case in point: when I first finished playing The World Ends With You, I got halfway through a really extended critique/fangirling over it's various elements before I got distracted (possibly by a trip to Japan, possibly by a million and one cosplay projects, possibly by roughly the same number of writing projects, possibly even by the terror of starting a PhD or something similarly trivial). Anyway, excuses aside, the point is I still have three WEWY fic to post (as soon as my beta reader gets back to me), and a whole heap of photos taken in Shibuya to share (as soon as we get them all cleaned up), but in the meantime, getting this bit out of the way has to be a good start.

In brief, I loved it! The battle system, despite being confusing at first and often best handled by button mashing, is surprisingly fun after a little practice, the characters are all impressively developed and likeable – including most of the badguys, and the plot’s every bit as the involving as the best of Squeenix's work. The game gets a big tick in pretty much every box.

So it’s a real shame that the ending... kinda sucked.

( A whole lot more discussion about that ending problem, spoilers galore )

( Just to prove how very carried away I'm getting here, alternate ending pseudo-fic! Complete with emote icons! )

( Okay, now that's all over with, back to the stuff I *did* like about the game (ie, *everything* else) )

Spent last weekend at Genghiscon, which stands out as the one con we go to each year which has no cosplay competition, no vendors room, no special guests and not more than maybe a couple of hundred attendees, and the major attraction is hanging out with other fans for a weekend, eating pizza, doing weird crafts and maybe chasing each other around with laser guns or hitting each other with foam-padded sticks. And waving shiny things. Can’t forget waving the shiny things.

It is consequently the only con we ever get to go to where we actually get to relax for a weekend rather than going through nearly as much stress as fun, and damn but that is nice and this year was no exception. Especially when we’ve now got two and a half weeks until Waicon, which is at exactly the other end of the con scale, and before then I’ve still got to finish painting and decorating a giant key, paint a sword, style two wigs, make an eye patch, finish organising temporary tattoos, iron a costume and probably a few things I’ve forgotten, not to mention all that fic I’ve still got on my to-do list or a bunch of other posts I’ve been meaning to make for way too long… but eh, the fic WIP list never ends, but at least after January I’ll be able to take a nice long cosplay-break. This is the one upside of deadlines – at least they make you get stuff done.


In completely unrelated fannish news, we of the local household swallowed our pride and gave Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles a try last week.

( It... doesn't completely suck? Only being me, I couldn't leave it at as few words as that. )

In conclusion: Undecided. Will probably give it another episode or two and see how it goes.

As mentioned in previous Japan trip reports (I've only got a couple left to go now, I swear!) one of the many trip highlights was personally getting to see the trailers shown in Squeenix's closed theatre at the Tokyo Gameshow. I'm not going to bother going into too much scene-by-scene detail, since my memory is not that photographic and there'll be places all over the web you can find those kinds of summaries by now (not to mention low quality video versions all over youtube). But I (and the rest of our party) did come out of there bursting to talk about it, and we all know how much I love editorialising, so I'm going to focus more on what we thought of it all.

Like many Square Enix fans I’ve had some mixed feelings about a lot of their recent products. They’ve been responsible for producing most of the games that have ever made my all time favourites list (Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VII and X, Kingdom Hearts II, The World Ends With You), but also a lot I’ve never managed to muster more than ambivalence towards at best (most of the rest of the FF series, including spin-offs) and a good few others that have made me want to take to their lead designers with the Clue-bat of How Not To Destroy Everything I Ever Loved (Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy X-2 and XII, everything they’ve done with FFVII since 1997, and the last five minutes of WEWY). Each to their own and all that, since even most of the rest of titles have their own devoted fans out their somewhere, and their good games still remain really, impressively good – but the bottom line is that it’s very hard to be impressed by the shameless hype-mongering they’ve been keeping up in recent years by releasing all their newest trailers only in the UBER EXCLUSIVE closed theatres at events like the TGS, for which seats are so limited that we missed out on them completely on the first day and had to leave the hotel at 5:30 AM to make it through the queues on the second. The point I’m building up to is that those trailers were going to have to be really damn awesome to make all that bother seem worthwhile, so getting halfway through the show and already finding myself thinking “Wow, this was completely worth everything!” in between a whole lot of completely fangirlish incoherence was a very welcome surprise. Whatever’s actually in store for us once all these games make it to the shelves, they definitely know how to put on a good show.

( Assorted KH mobile games )

( Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days )

( Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep )

( Dissidia: Final Fantasy )

( Final Fantasy XIII )

( Final Fantasy Agito XIII )

( Final Fantasy Versus XIII )

And that was it for the trailer session (please make sure you’ve picked up all your belongings and head for the exit to your right, and oh, btw, the large guy in the Squeenix shirt wants a word with you about that camera he saw you sneakily trying to use in there…) To summarise, really looking forward to Birth by Sleep and Dissidia, definitely interested in all the FFXIII games, not especially fussed about the mobile phone games or Parasite Eve, and majorly disappointed with 358/2 Days and the idea they want us to buy yet another version of AC.

To round off the day later on, most of our group headed on to the official Squeenix Store in Shinjuku (excluding me and velithya who were camped out by the ArcSys booth asking their staff difficult questions MORE ON THIS LATER), and came back laden with bags in which the full ‘Square Enix Projects’ name had helpfully had the letters ‘A’ and ‘R’ partially blacked out to demonstrate the correct spelling.

The same thing again courtesy of the official website

Two completely unrelated shows that I happened to catch up on recently: (spoilers, obviously)

( Avatar )

( Doctor Who )

A while before we moved out – possibly against her better judgement – my sister picked up a copy of Crisis Core, the latest instalment in the neverending Final Fantasy VII compilation. I would call the below a review of the game, but it’s probably more like me taking the chance to vent a whole lot of frustration I’ve had building up over all the assorted sequels they’ve released in the last few years in one go. Those of you who actually liked the game, or any of the other new material they’ve released since Advent Children may prefer not to read any further, because this bitter former fan is bitter.

( Cut for a whole damn lot of blathering and vitriol )

A couple of weeks back, jaseroque, pinneagig and I went to see Beowulf (the CG-animated movie which Neil Gaiman helped to adapt and script – this being naturally why I heard of it in the first place). Now, obviously, I’ve left it untraditionally late to rant about it, but I got sidetracked after we got home and didn’t think about it later. Only now, we just got hold of the ending theme, and listening to it again just about gave me goosebumps – that’s how great an impression this movie left on me. I’m not sure if it’s still showing at the cinemas, but if so and you haven’t seen it, go see it!

( What Beowulf is )

( Things that were awesome about Beowulf )

( Things that could have been better about Beowulf )

( Things you fsking *need to know* before you see Beowulf )

( The leftover interesting bits )

The irritating thing about being in xxxHOLiC fandom (she said, still waiting idly for enough new chapters to come out to get her out of this stupid cliff-hanger inspired block on that giant AU thing she's working on) is that it's pretty much pot luck whether we get a new chapter in any given week or not. Tsubasa's a bit more reliable, but still well short of once-a-week regular. Our problem is that while regular mangakas are content to produce just one series for years and years on end, CLAMP insist on doing two 'weekly' series at once (Tsubasa and xxxHOLiC), plus an extra one that comes out once a month or so (Kobato). Which got me all curious about just how many chapters we've gotten out of them in total when you add everything they've done this last year.

So I had a look back through the clamp_now archives, applied some basic maths and wound up with 39 new chapters of Tsubasa, 20 chapters of xxxHOLiC and 8 of Kobato. So if you thought xxxHOLiC was getting the raw deal as compared to TRC, you would've been right. However, if you thought CLAMP have been slacking off, it's worth remembering that your average Shonen Jump style mangaka probably turns out about one chapter of about 20 pages every week, and I've long been in a sort of awe that they can pull off that much. Let me take a brief aside here for for people who haven't watched artist friends turning out doujinshi ever year - even going full time with all the assistants you can fit in a small apartment, holy crap, that's a lot of work to turn out every week. Anyway, minus a couple of holiday weeks at the end of the year, we'd be looking at about 50 chapters per year. Whereas if you add up the tallies for CLAMP's three series, you get a total of 67. I'm basically thinking that's what counts as a lot.

I could go on to try and factor in the different number of pages per chapter in each series, compare this against the same totals for the last couple of years, try and include all the other odds and ends they might've had to take up their time, but it all sounds like a bit too much work for still wishy-washy results. At least we can safely say that for what they've taken on, they haven't been half bad at keeping up the productivity.

Which doesn't really make the wait for that next holic chapter any less irritating, but it's nice to know. >.>

Thanks to Nicovideo, I'm gradually working my way through the story mode from Overture via gameplay vids. Most of the scenes I've seen so far are ones I'd already seen thanks to all those screenshots, but it's still completely worth it to see the full animated version with all the gaps filled in. I've been posting this sort of stuff straight to the guilty_gear comm lately, but this is mostly rambling, commentary and general impressions, so I'll leave it as a personal journal thing.

( Characters, old and new )

( Story Mode, the first five chapters thereof )

( A few last bits of speculation RE: Sin, etc )

(Mostly) to cheloya and ficcentricity: I gave in on whatever I was supposed to have been doing at the time and read through those Pet Shop of Horrors scans you linked me to. Which is to say, all of them in one giant binge-read. So here's some blather on what I took away from the series at the end of it all.

( Impressions - bit of a mixed bag )

Finally sat down long enough to get all my assorted thoughts about the upcoming Guilty Gear title into some kind of order (good thing I did too, because they’ve been *breeding* in here, I swear o_O). Some new info, some old, and a whole of guesswork and opinions about what we might see from the game. I get a little tl;dr when I let myself start editorialising – consider yourselves warned.

( Gameplay – general impressions, vague predictions about success, and why you’re not allowed to compare it to Dynasty Warriors anymore )

( Plot – being the important bit, including what we know so far about each of those new characters (and also what we don’t) )

( Just to finish off, some collected links )