Board 8 > Jeff Zero & Leonhart in Different Houses: Trails of Arcadia Edition [JZLF]

(+) Yeah! (+)

Listened to the audiobook of Agatha Christie's "Murder on the Oriental Express" while I was at work today. That was a pretty cool story with an interesting solution that I probably wouldn't have been able to guess in a million years.
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Ruined my formerly perfect escape room record today

I think we could have escaped if we had had about two more minutes

I also just started Layton's Mystery Journey (which I guess was released on mobile earlier). The opening music was pretty fantastic.
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okay I think I'm sold on this "My Wife is Wagatsuma-san" manga

I mean the premise was already pretty good and interesting enough to keep me reading to see how it all plays out

but one of the characters is now cosplaying as Haruhi Suzumiya

excellence
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speaking of Haruhi Suzumiya (sort of)

Now playing: The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan - Koi no Kirakira

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QS3rgoz2y2M

I wouldn't rate this as a greatest of all-time type tune or anything, but it's fun and catchy.
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Oh hey, it's a favorite Mortal Kombat character poll for the POTD today (Sub-Zero all the way). Used to love those games back in the day. Haven't played one since MK4, although I've heard 9 and 10 are really good. I've watched their story modes on YouTube, and they are everything a fighting game story mode should be.

Plus, the original MK movie is still one of the best video game movies ever made. The sequel was an abomination though.

and this gives me an excuse to plug the theme song from the movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAwWPadFsOA
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Did you ever play Persona 4 Arena? I thought that had a really good story.

Also Super Smash Bros. Brawl, but I'm more or less alone there.
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I've played both P4A games, and I liked their story modes. The original P4A could've used some trimming because you ended up treading so much of the same ground over and over and over and over again. P4AU handled its story mode better, I think.

Also, I enjoyed Subspace Emissary for what it was, but it wasn't anything special.
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Huh, didn't realize the Aureole got name dropped this early into FC. They were really playing the long game here, huh.

Man, they sure do lay the foreshadowing on thick with Joshua and Weissman, don't they?

Friendly reminder that Weissman sucks.
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Leonhart4 posted...

They were really playing the long game here, huh.

Yes. But the question is to any of us even know just how long of a game they're playing? I'm still convinced there's foreshadowing for stuff in the Sky series that hasn't even happened in any game that's been released yet in the series.

Leonhart4 posted...

Friendly reminder that Weissman sucks.

Eh...yeah kinda. I like his first scene (as Weissman) at the end of FC, and I like his stuff at the end of SC also. Other than that though yeah he's pretty not great.
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Should've been relatively easy to foreshadow in FC, since FC and SC were originally going to be one game. They would've had most of SC's plot figured out before FC released.

I dunno if you read books in general, but that's also one of the reasons Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy works so well. The third book's first draft was done before the first book was published.
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All right, Prologue complete!

...why wasn't this just Chapter 1? Eh, details. At least we got to meet our favorite tomboy tsundere, Josette! Although her hairstyle isn't the best. Not sure what's up with those really long sideburn type things. Well, Nagato kinda sorta has them, too, so I guess it's okay, but hairstyle isn't her strong suit either. Long hair or bust.

Anyway, I'll probably shift gears to Skies of Arcadia for a bit. I'll probably switch every time I acquire a crystal in Skies and complete a chapter in Trails.

Mac Arrowny posted...

I dunno if you read books in general, but that's also one of the reasons Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy works so well. The third book's first draft was done before the first book was published.

Yeah, this kind of stuff is fun. I had an entire FFVIII fanfic continuity planned out at one point back in the day, although I only ended up writing two of the stories. I guess I could always go back to it since I mostly remember what I wanted to do.
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Leonhart4 posted...

Huh, didn't realize the Aureole got name dropped this early into FC. They were really playing the long game here, huh.

Yeah. But also, "you have no idea." There are things in FC that don't come back into play until Trails of Cold Steel. Like pyre said, there's probably stuff there that's waiting to come back in games not even out yet. IIRC, there's some speculation around Grancel Cathedral based on the timeline given casually in some NPC dialogue compared to the known history of events.

Leonhart4 posted...

Man, they sure do lay the foreshadowing on thick with Joshua and Weissman, don't they?

It's super obvious in hindsight, but on my first playthrough I don't think I caught any of it. On replays it's like "god how did i miss this"

LeonhartFour posted...

Anyway, I'll probably shift gears to Skies of Arcadia for a bit. I'll probably switch every time I acquire a crystal in Skies and complete a chapter in Trails.

=(

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Speaking of shifting gears... Mr. Robot Season 3 comes back this Wednesday. Probably my favorite TV show. I don't know if you have a line of communication to Jeff but if so you should tell him to check it out. I remember we talked about it briefly when it had just started and was maybe a few episodes into Season 1 and I got the impression that he'd enjoy it. Then you can have him tell you if you'd enjoy it, because I'm honestly not sure! I mean if I used anime recommendations as a basis I'd say... I still don't know, but slight lean towards no, but I don't know if that's relevant.
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xp1337 posted...

Tales of Berseria: berseria and i are having a fight right now. i want my monster book to be complete and it refuses to have this monster type drop an item. worse it is limited in number (well i suppose hypothetically i could keep re-running the bonus dungeon but screw that) and not even a guaranteed appearance and despite countless reloads it continues to troll me.

god don't do this to me at the end berseria

Next, complete the Equipment Book by getting every single piece to +10.
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no thanks

there are limits to what i can do

(I actually have most equipment around +2-4 but there's just no easy way to quickly gather the ridiculous amount of material you'd need. I think the highest equipment level I've had all game is +6!)
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So all that's left for Zestiria Platinum is cooking every snack, which is random and might just leave for another playthrough, and beating the powered up final boss on Hard or above. Guess I'll grind for Ancient Nova spam.
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xp1337 posted...

Yeah. But also, "you have no idea." There are things in FC that don't come back into play until Trails of Cold Steel. Like pyre said, there's probably stuff there that's waiting to come back in games not even out yet. IIRC, there's some speculation around Grancel Cathedral based on the timeline given casually in some NPC dialogue compared to the known history of events.

Man I just spent like an hour reading theories/speculation from other fans about the series and all I have to say is "good god". Not even done with the discussion thread I was reading either.

Most of the good theories I read were based mostly on stuff from The 3rd and onwards admittedly, as those games do introduce a lot more of what's going on, but still. In particular (I'll spoil this just in case but there's no specific details of the theory in here) someone made a pretty compelling case for the identity of the 5th Anguis, and if it turns out to be correct I'm just going to throw up my hands and applaud because three hours ago I didn't even remember this character existed.

I can already tell this whole thing is a rabbit hole I probably don't want to go down any further, but I know I'm still going to do it anyways.
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man I just can't catch a break with my fantasy team this year

second week in a row I've had two players get knocked out of the first half of the game

and of course as soon as I get rid of Cam Newton he starts playing awesome
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and now for something completely random in the Now Playing: Bret "Hitman" Hart's theme song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btS0OVdqkb0

I used to be a huge wrestling fanatic up until I was around 14 or 15. Then I dropped it and I haven't ever really gone back. Bret Hart was always one of my absolute favorites. The best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be.

although the reason I thought about this was because I was trying to think of some sort of propaganda for my potential Squall/Tifa alliance in SMFFFC, which I nicknamed the Hart Foundation, which is an excellent blatant ripoff name

I also found a couple of fun pictures




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Speaking of Final Fantasy Football, I was wondering if you were to make up a team of football players using FF characters, who would you pick to play each position?

The only one I feel certain about is having Zidane at either cornerback or WR. He's fast, and having a prehensile tail is a decided advantage.
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Gilgamesh as WR because he has 8 arms.
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I feel like you could make better use of 8 arms as a lineman or maybe a linebacker. Even as a WR, Gilgamesh would have a 1/4 chance of dropping the ball. That Excalipoor is always there waiting for you.
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Sabin at DE. Relm draws up the plays.
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xp1337 posted...

Relm draws up the plays.

I see what you did there.

Sabin would be a pretty excellent pass rusher.

I guess the really big dudes like Ward and Kimahri would play offensive line.
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I know very little about football but I vote either Jecht or Tidus as kicker.
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yeah Tidus or Jecht have the most natural talent at kicker

although I'm pretty sure a Jecht Shot would be illegal in football or at the very least it wouldn't count as a FG if you kick it off multiple players' faces first
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Hope as QB because of the boomerang thing?

Having a hard time coming up with a good QB.
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I was actually thinking Ward for QB because doesn't he literally hurl an enormous spear as his attack? Or am I misremembering?
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Yeah, I'm kind of stumped at QB. Is there someone in the series noted for accuracy or something like that?

oh hey Squall and Seifer literally never miss with the gunblade

or maybe Tifa with the Godhand gloves
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I guess that only means he can pass maybe, but still
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pyresword posted...

I was actually thinking Ward for QB because doesn't he literally hurl an enormous spear as his attack? Or am I misremembering?

Yeah, he has a giant harpoon as his weapon.

Oh right, maybe Wakka since he literally uses a ball for a weapon.
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I know literally nothing about football but from the context of this conversation is QB the one who throws the ball? Wouldn't that be perfect for Wakka? Dude can throw a blitzball like half a mile and hit a flying monster hard enough that the ball then bounces back for him to catch.
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Robazoid posted...

I know literally nothing about football but from the context of this conversation is QB the one who throws the ball?

man you were right about knowing literally nothing about football

but yes
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Now playing: Final Fantasy X - Path of Repentance (Via Purifico)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NChYgygCiLw

Dat piano. I love a good piano song.
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Anyway, in manga news, I read the latest chapter of ReLIFE. It wasn't anything special. Seemed to be more of a transition chapter that segues into the next arc. A bit of a breather episode after the last several chapters were so intense.

I'm going to try to pin down my feelings on "My Wife is Wagatsuma-san" by writing them out. Let me start off by saying I like it. The time slip aspect makes it pretty unique for a slice of life romcom, but it's almost entirely a gimmick/plot device that happens whenever it's convenient (and almost always for laughs with regard to the timing of when they begin or end). Like, if you're into the sci-fi aspect of time travel/time slippage, there's none of that here. It hasn't even been explored how or why the protagonist can do it. Maybe it will be at some point, but I'm not expecting some in-depth, profound reason. It also seems to flip flop back and forth between the future being easy to change and being hard to change. Sometimes there's a butterfly effect type thing where one event radically changes everything, and sometimes when the protagonist feels like he's utterly screwed up everything, nothing changes.

Part of that is the nature of the love interest, Ai Wagatsuma. In many ways, she's the ideal woman, almost unrealistically so at times, but she's ridiculously inscrutable. The entire overarching plot is the protagonist trying to figure out how she fell in love with him in the first place, but she's very hard to read. Even when the protagonist feels like he must have done something to make her hate him (and even when she outright rejects him when he asks her out and very clearly friend zones the guy), in the next time slip, they're still happily married. She's a really good character though, partly because she refuses to go along with the flow at school. She stands up for the "losers" at school, and she's willing to give anyone a chance and help them out, even those everyone else has shunned. Like I said, she's unrealistically perfect in many ways, but she's kind and goodhearted, so it's hard not to like her unless you just have an outright distaste for the trope.

I think I'm starting to see why this dream girl would fall in love with a seemingly average guy though. Part of the thing with him getting these views into the future is that it spurs him on to do things that he would normally never do otherwise, and he's slowly been growing from a reticent loser into a good guy who does what he can to help people when he sees what they're headed toward in the future. His character development has been pretty solid.

As far as most of the rest of the cast, they're okay, I guess. Most of them are losers on purpose the way Sunohara in Clannad is, although they don't quite have the same charm he has. Unfortunately, they play up the "LOL teenage boys are all perverts" trope a bit too much, but they've had a few arcs with some minor characters that have been surprisingly poignant and heartwarming. The only other major recurring character who I'd say is good is the rival to the love interest (a.k.a. the girl who cosplayed as Haruhi Suzumiya). Like the love interest, she doesn't go along with the flow either, but in a different way. She doesn't care if people like her or not, and she's blunt and honest to a fault. Honestly, I'd probably get along with her better than I would the actual love interest, but whatever. I'm not the protagonist!

No one will read that, but I feel better for writing it since it's helped me organize my thoughts about it.
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LeonhartFour posted...

No one will read that, but I feel better for writing it since it's helped me organize my thoughts about it.

I read it!

It seems interesting, and I'd probably read it if I were more of a manga person. (I've read a total of two manga during my lifetime.)
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I haven't read much manga either, and I dunno that I'll read another one for a while other than maybe Attack on Titan. This was the only one on Crunchyroll that really stood out to me, and since it doesn't have an anime adaptation (and I'm guessing is probably unlikely to get one), I decided to dive in and give it a shot.

I also like the fact that it's pretty self-deprecating and shamelessly breaks the fourth wall at times.
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Hmmm...So I ended up just binge-reading the rest of that manga (whoops), partly because it took a turn I wasn't expecting (and didn't totally care for), and I wanted to see if they actually managed to correct it by the end (because manga and anime tend to be bad about this sort of thing).

Well, it wasn't a totally satisfying ending, but they did manage to salvage it from being an outright bad one. The last few chapters were really good. However, overall, the last third of the manga wasn't as good as the rest, mostly because the focus drifted away from the three best girls (including a second rival, who had been a pretty minor but very good character up to that point, who ended up completely supplanting the first, who barely showed up ever in the last third). It was kinda weird because they showed the results of a popularity poll at one point during the manga, and the original rival ranked second overall, and she literally almost never appeared again after that. The weakness of the rest of the supporting cast was made pretty evident by the fact that they had to carry a lot of weight with the three girls only sporadically appearing. The protagonist was still really good, at least, so it wasn't a complete loss. He was just as determined to make sure the manga didn't have a trainwreck of an ending as I was, so I felt a sense of kinship there.

Still, why are anime and manga so bad about not having satisfying, happy endings, especially when it comes to slice of life stuff? Even when they have happy endings, they're not totally satisfying (like Toradora; actually, the ending of "My Wife is Wagatsuma-san" sorta reminds me of the ending of Toradora, especially since they both gave me the same dissatisfied feeling despite technically being happy endings). Argh, now this has me paranoid about ReLIFE (although that one is still trending in the right direction this late in the game, which is encouraging). Is this just a difference between American and Japanese sensibilities? Or maybe I'm just expecting the wrong things out of it. I dunno. I'm still glad I read it and I enjoyed it overall, but I'm feeling a bit conflicted.

Anyway, my brain is mush now from all that binge reading, so I should probably just go to bed and think on it again when I've had some sleep.
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Hmmm...I went back and read the last few chapters again this morning, and I feel a little better about the whole thing now, I think. Still not totally happy about the direction the last part of it took, but they handled the ending well enough that I can forgive it.

Yakumo > Kurisu > Chizuru > Yukiko > Aqua > Makoto > Mitsuru > Yui > Shiori > Wagatsuma > Ritsu > Akane > Pepper > Amy > Namine > Yurippe > Mikasa > Eureka > Art3mis > Valentine > Zelda > Vera > Elizabeth > Cora > Kotori
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xp1337 posted...

speaking of zero no kiseki

Apparently the placeholder site that XSEED has had for Zero for the longest time had a brief change for a few seconds earlier today before reverting back to normal. It's probably nothing, but god my heart can't take things like that.

https://mobile.twitter.com/endlesshistory/status/916806078180085760

RIP the dream

Also Leon I don't really feel that a lack of satisfying endings is an anime specific thing. I think endings are just hard to write well in general.

I guess for slice of life specifically, it might be because those stories are generally built around maintaining the status quo, so finding a concrete and satisfying way to end them can be more difficult maybe?
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I dunno. Feels like it happens there more than it does with other media for me. I know there are plenty of things out there with bad endings, so maybe I've just been lucky with other media. Or who knows, maybe School Rumble's ending was so much of a mess that I just project it onto everything else in the genre now. Man, I still can't believe that ending. Maybe part of it is just my desire to want to see a more concrete resolution. Sometimes they end with the implication that this is a "happily ever after" situation, but it ends at such a weird point that it leaves you with a, "...Wait, that's it? Shouldn't there be more?" feeling.

"My Wife is Wagatsuma-san" actually shattered the status quo for the last third and went in a completely different direction. I guess I wouldn't have minded it so much if they had handled it better, but like I said, the three best girls largely disappear from the narrative at that point. I guess to put it in Toradora terms, it would be like if they didn't time skip Ryuji's senior year to the end where he reunites with Taiga, and there was a large final arc with no Taiga, and Minori and Ami were barely around either. It wouldn't be as good if the story had to just be carried by Ryuji (no matter how good of a character he is), Kitamura, and some other random classmates.
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I think a lot of people consider School Rumble's ending to be the worst manga ending ever, so it's not quite representative of the medium.
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Well, it would be hard to be worse unless you were deliberately trying to write a bad ending or you just had no ending at all.
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Man, I'm really tired today. Not sure why.

might need to take a nap before I try to watch or play anything tonight
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whew, that's better
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All this talk about Toradora is making me want to watch it again since it's been a while.

Also, I tried to read fan translations of the light novels a couple years ago. I forgot exactly how far I got in terms of what number the novel was, but I got through the school festival arc. I'm still very slowly working my way through the fan translations of Full Metal Panic! too. Fan translations of books are rough reads, man, no matter how much I like the story and the characters.
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What was toradora's ending? I don't remember it being bad.
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Eh, I didn't say Toradora's ending was bad. It felt a little rushed and was unsatisfying, at least to me.

plus I kept holding out hope for Minori to the bitter end

too bad that Toradora VN will never see the light of day in English
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Whoa, I just looked up stuff on the Toradora light novels, and I found out this past summer, they announced they're actually getting translated into English, starting next year!

And the first one's already up for pre-order on Amazon, aw yeah.
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Man I'm really tempted to just block the Kiseki wiki on my computer to prevent myself from ever accessing it again until after Cold Steel 3 is released. "Oh this time I won't get spoiled," I said. "This time I'll be REALLY careful," I said.

:(
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learn to self-control better man

the best way to avoid falling off the cliff is to stay as far away from it as possible not tiptoe the edge
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