Hey folks.
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In the grand scheme of things, I’ve realized several things:
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1. That trying to juggle working nearly full-time, full-time college, and any sort of private life is nearly impossible, at least not without killing myself. Ah, there’s some joy.
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2. It’s also the fast road to sickness, judging how I handled a 35 hour work week in addition to Senior crunch time with was almost the same amount of time when factoring in my usual class and homework time. That’s nearly half the week there, and when you factor in eating, sleeping, and an hour and a half roundtrip commute, “free” time becomes rather scarce. Not that I’m really complaining or anything, if I was you’d be seeing a picture of my in mounds of black eyeliner and a bad black dye job since it is more or less that stressful.
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3. It also puts the kibosh on updating blogs and other cathartic wastes of time. I did find some time this weekend to open up and play some FES, so that cheered me up, along with seeing Iron Man and Speed Racer.
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I won’t promise that I’ll be updating more regularly, at least not until after finals are over this weekend, but I will more often.
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Addendum: I’m currently trying to write a final paper on George Lamming’s Natives of my Person for a lit class, and considering the beating my brain took earlier today on my History final, I’m surprised at how coherent I am writing both it and this. Boy, deconstructing and phrasing the relationships between men and women in post-colonial colonial fiction in terms of nation and national (as in peeps, not things belonging to a nation) is actually sort of fun.
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Please shoot me now.
Well, as my first post in a bit, I bring you Druaga no To: the Aegis of URUK, an anime version of the Tower of Druaga, a long-timey dungeon crawler from Namco. We got the Fushigi no Dungeon version for the PS2 a few years back, and it serves as an enjoyable introduction to the roguelike genre for those of you scared off by the depth and inscrutability of nethack and Shiren.
Anyhoo, the important thing here is that it’s a laughable sort of idea to begin with, given that roguelikes as a whole aren’t exactly noted for their character and plot depth. And yes, I do know about Izuna, but that’s an exception rather than the rule. Upon further thought though, DnT: tAoU (God, I love acronym-ing things) might prove to be an enjoyable sorcery and steel hackfest, always a good thing for an old time Final Fantasy and DnD fan. The few vague hints I’ve heard about it seem to say that it’s not a turd either. Joy!
Also, enjoy the poster shot:
EDIT: Also, it appears that GONZO is more or less officially translating and subbing two of their shows, Druaga and Blassreiter, and is releasing them on a number of outlets. Blassreiter’s a solo GONZO project, so expect lots of CGI and boobs. Probably CGI boobs too!
When I talk to myself in my head, I usually find that I’ve outgrown my visual novel phase, a phase that co-existed with the high-school me’s arrogance that after watching anime for a few years and studying Japanese here and there I really knew the language. The kanji alone humbled me, but that’s another story.
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Anyway, Utawarerumono’s pretty awesome actually. It’s mostly a straight up visual novel paired with a simple, yet entertaining SRPG backend. You’ve still got your mountains of text and static backgrounds and character portraits, but the setting, characters, and slowly unfurling plot are all pretty entertaining. There hasn’t been a whole lot of really risque art yet either, a plus for those of you uncomfortable with hentai and a minus for those who “play” vis. novels and eroge for it. Uta’s awesome enough to justify the sheer amount of timesink that any normal vis. novel enjoys, not to mention the extra time spent playing the SRPG half of the game.
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It’s why I love that vis. novels let you save and pick up anywhere, although Uta won’t let you save during a battle sequence or when the game does a scene in the battle engine rather than the standard vis. novel static backgrounds. Timesinks aren’t quite so painful to the rest of your life if you can pick it up and play whenever you want, and something like Uta would be really nice on the DS or PSP I think.
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The fan localizers did a pretty good job on the game itself, some slight Engrishy-ness and grammar quirks aside. It makes the game that much better when you can understand just what the heck peeps are saying this time around.
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Also: Music’s pretty good.