Updates from August, 2023

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  maegamisama 5:22 pm on August 24, 2023 Permalink  
  Categories: video games ( 8 )

  I know I posted a video two weeks ago of me rolling in a gacha, but I’m here today to say I’ve quit gacha. Well, for the most part at least.

  At first my decision was to quit Fate Grand Order on the JP server. Reason being is I had gave in a moment of weakness and spent money on the game. The bad news is that it was a lot and I wasn’t able to actually spend it on the game (due to me attempting to do it through google play cards) The good news (kind of) is that I potentially can get a refund, but I have to wait until someone else purchases that card

  Regardless, I felt like I was out of control and needed to take away what was tempting me.

  Then I chose to quit Honkai Star Rail. Not because I feared being tempted, but more because I haven’t found the time to play a lot lately. Plus, getting Kafka had been my ultimate goal since starting the game, and now that was finished, it felt like there was nothing left to shoot for (and I didn’t feel like getting sucked in by another character) It’s a shame that while I really enjoyed the story, it was still a bit of a chore to keep up with everything they throw at you (Kind of what happened with Genshin too)

  That leaves the only gacha game I’m playing right now as Fate Grand Order English server. I contemplated quitting that too, but in comparison to the other two titles, there’s a huge difference in terms of play time investment and danger of spending money. That is in FGO English’s case I have all the servants I want for at least 2 years and it takes me no more than 10 minutes every day.

  Part of me wants to quit that too to make things feel complete, but it’s harder to cut oneself off completely when the community (anime/videogames) is probably going to keep exposing me to Fate for the forseeable future. I know I’m probably going to be tempted back. Thus, for a while at least, I think the best thing to do would be to hold off. Considering there’s no pressing need to spend money and it wastes no time, it’s shouldn’t be a problem I have to deal with right now.

   
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  maegamisama 2:19 am on August 11, 2023 Permalink
  Tags: Honkai Star Rail   
  Categories: video games ( 8 )

  I forgot to post it yesterday, but one of the gacha games I play, Honkai Star Rail, debuted the banner I’ve wanted to pull since starting the game. You can see the results here.

  This is mostly all f2p with a scattering of battle pass and the other pass.

  Hoping to get another copy of Kafka before the banner ends

   
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  maegamisama 4:01 pm on August 8, 2023 Permalink
  Tags: dream   
  Categories: blog ( 15 )

  I had a nightmare last night.

  I was supposed to get together with some friends, but for some reason I was staying in a hotel while they were staying somewhere else. Frustrated, I asked them if we could talk about things and if I could see them, but they responded saying there was nothing to talk about. It felt terrible. I was so desperate to get them back but they didn’t want anything to do with me.

  Maybe it’s because yesterday I saw a clip on Youtube that said never make someone a priority who considers you an option. Or maybe it was due to some negative feelings I had a week or so ago about my declining relationships. Probably both.

  I need to see about making some more friends and connections

   
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  maegamisama 6:30 am on August 7, 2023 Permalink  
  Categories: blog ( 15 )

  

  Something I never really got into the habit of, compared to other people is saving pictures to post elsewhere. Though it does occur to me that people naturally don’t find posts that are just text to be very appealing, and I’m going to try to change that by hopefully finding something to post with more of my updates. Whether that be taking screenshots of games I’m playing or posting just a random Youtube music video

   
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  maegamisama 12:07 am on August 5, 2023 Permalink
  Tags: Suikoden IV ( 4 )   
  Categories: video games ( 8 )

  I’ve been playing bits and pieces of Suikoden IV every night, and I’m amazed at how terrible of a game it really is. I would say I remember this happening when I initially tried playing it, but I honestly don’t. Here I’m going to write down some of the complaints I have so far.

  #1: The Hero has no personality, or background. He’s just there at the start to fill as your proxy.

  The hero of Suikoden games (except for 3) is always silent. However Suikoden IV is the only game where the silence feels like a detriment. Normally the other games do a good job at showing you the protagonist reactions or how other characters interact with him. IV though, there’s none of that. He feels pretty emotionless and just kind of accepts things. The choices you’re given don’t allow you to give him much character either (at least so far)

  #2: Fuck the enemy encounters

  Okay, to explain how annoying enemies are, I have to explain some other stuff first.

  A lot of the early game, so far, has been spent sailing on this boat in this WIIIIDE ocean. To give you an idea of how wide, imagine it taking you a solid 5 minutes to get from one place you’re at to another. If that doesn’t sound like much, keep in mind there’s almost nothing in modern games that takes a person 5 minutes. You could get from one end of a map in Fallout 4 to the other in that time if you booked it (heck even less I think)

  That alone wouldn’t be so bad, but ontop of that 5 minutes it takes you (keep in mind I haven’t timed this) imagine random encounters every 15 seconds or so the whole way. Also imagine that these random encounters are not only pretty rough but after a certain level fail to provide worthwhile exp. So imagine you’re at a fairly high level, can’t get exp, and are forced into these somewhat harder than they should be battles every 15 seconds of a 5 minute boat trip

  If that doesn’t sound annoying yet, well let me just tell you of something that happened in my game.

  I went to this island to recruit some guy for my army (that took me about 5 minutes to get there and another 5 to get back to where i was supposed to be) Then the plot said I needed to go to that very same island and recruit another character there. So imagine I’ve already spent close to half an hour just travelling.. Not a very fun thing (especially when I’m already playing this in small bursts)

  #3: Plot?
  In other Suikoden games, it doesn’t take much to get caught up on what’s going on. 4 I have absolutely no idea what’s going on. Sometimes that can be an appealing thing, but with the first 2 complaints, it’s more like “why am I even bothering with this game?” At which point, I can’t even really give a good answer other than I need to finish it to feel like I’ve experienced all of Suikoden

   
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  maegamisama 1:57 am on August 4, 2023 Permalink
  Tags: doshikuro ( 2 )   
  Categories: blog ( 15 )

  I thought I’d give a little update on doshikuro, as it’s been what I’ve been playing the most of recently (apart from FGO and my Suikoden 4 playthrough)

  I found the “patch” that changes every heroine sprite to have jet black hair. Turns out it’s actually part of the installer, and it’s all controlled by one file that you can delete to revert it back. I tried it out today, and while I can say there’s definitely some appeal (not just for memeing) I’m not sure I’m going to stick with it. Like I said in my previous post, it doesn’t affect the cgs, which kind of takes a lot of the fun/appeal out of using it for the entire game

  I’ll be using the rest of this to recap what’s happened thus far. It’s not a lot, but if you’re one of those people who want to go in completely blind and you intend to experience this game, then this is going to be the only warning I give. When I get further into the game, I will use spoiler tagging for these kind of sections, but for right now it’s still early enough to be considered the premise.

  Essentially, our protagonist likes black hair, but his family and childhood friend Urara (the girl pictured below) think it’s a problem. They force him to go on a retreat/pilgrimage to cure his affliction, only for him to get caught in a blizzard and almost die inside a cave.

  He doesn’t die because a goddess wearing a lion dog mask finds him and in his delirious death like state he proposes to her (he can’t see what she looks like but he can see her hair) She then attempts to save him, and eventually he somehow manages to return to his everyday life.

  Later, during the summer, the goddess shows up again and informs him she’s come to be his wife. While he’s perfectly willing to do this, his childhood friend (and tsundere) urara tries to stop it. Only for it to be revealed that Haruto (I just realized I haven’t mentioned MC by name yet) was only save because she accepted him as her servant. If she didn’t share her power with him, he would die.

  Currently, after a disastrous first night (Something funny happens, but it’s kind of inappropriate) Haruto is at an all time low, and Urara is trying to convince him that the goddess who came is just a con artist trying to take advantage of him. Lots of turmoil, but now another goddess, the little sister of the goddess who saved Haruto, has come on the scene to straighten things out (and by straighten things out, I’m assuming that it’s just going to make things more complicated)

  So yeah, it’s been a fairly entertaining and easy read compared to Sakura no Toki. I’m at present only doing about 200-400 lines per day, but I plan to double that in the coming days, I think.

  I think next I update about this game will be after I finish reading a route. That post will be entirely spoiler tagged

   
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  maegamisama 2:07 am on August 2, 2023 Permalink
  Tags: Yakitate!! Japan ( 2 )   
  Categories: anime ( 3 )

  I’m still really enjoying the series Yakitate!! Japan. Currently I’m about 14 episodes in now. While it’s pretty predictable in the sense of you know the MC is going to win, I find myself really appreciating all the references that get thrown in and things that are parodied. It’s just so damn comfy.

   
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  maegamisama 1:06 am on July 31, 2023 Permalink
  Tags: FGO JP, FGO NA   
  Categories: video games ( 8 )

  For those that aren’t aware, I play Fate Grand Order on a daily basis. I play on both NA and JP. My NA account is about 6 years old now, while my JP is a little over a year (I used to have other JP account I played that are older, but I don’t have access to them anymore) My NA is a bit of a whale account (where I’ve been known to spend more than I should) whereas my JP is more of a dolphin.

  Most recently on the NA server I got the last support servant that I wanted for my account (Oberon) and decided to go F2P (free to play) It wasn’t a hard decision (there’s not much I feel I want for it) but it was a decision I probably should have made sooner given my financial situation (I’m not in trouble, it just makes it hard to save) JP too, by extension needs to be free to play too (or else nothing really changes)

  Last night I stayed up until 3:30 AM watching JP’s anniversary stream. Normally, I don’t want JP streams and just wait until tomorrow to find out what’s been added. However there were posts from the NA side that seemed to suggest something big was going to happen, and because of that, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sleep that night.

  I wont deny that I was hoping they would announce a speed-up of the NA server (for those that don’t know NA is two years behind in content compared to JP) Even though I know it would fuck with my plans to be F2P in terms of being able to save, I’ve never liked the fact that I have to wait 2 years for translations of story content (which is the main reason I play FGO)

  Sure, I could use other translations or even put some effort into reading JP myself, but I’m also pretty lazy. Not to mention I’ve become attached to my NA account more due to all the time and money I’ve put into it. I feel like if I start reading story on JP it has to be my main account (which may seem like a weird hang-up but oh well)

  Unfortunately, there was no announced plans of a speed up, but I could have forgiven that if only NA had announced something worth the time I spent staying awake.. NA however announced a fat load of nothing

  Okay they technically announced some stuff we knew coming and there was a character upgrade that was coming early.. But that was really about it. Majorly disappointing

  On JP’s side of things, it was also kind of a let-down. Sure there was some cool stuff like a new kind of special paid summoning and teases of things to come. But there didn’t seem to be anything major. No coin fix, no pity adjustments, no quick fix. It was all bog-standard “here’s a bunch of quartz and a smidgen of QOL updates”

  The only part I really liked about JP’s anniversary was the anni servant. After recently reading LB6 (latest chapter of NA’s story) I’ve started to really like the character of Morgan more than Castoria. The new character being Morgan pre-LB6 version made me want her bad.

  I tossed about 300 SQ into the banner. First ten spin I get a 5 star caster spook (spook means instead of the rate-up servant you get an off rate-up of the same rarity) Second spin I get a 5 star lancer spook. Last multi I got a 5 star rider spook. I was not very pleased.

  My special anniversary summons (ones that guarantee you a 5 star that you need to pay a little bit for) were not quite great either.

  I’d post some pictures, but I forgot to actually take some. If I roll gacha in the future, I’ll be sure to show any time I get 5 stars or anything noteworthy. Don’t expect much though since I am trying hard to be F2P now (Even more so since I haven’t been able to get to anni servant… hopefully I can get her with free quartz I can scrounge together)

   
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  maegamisama 10:25 pm on July 29, 2023 Permalink
  Tags: doshikuro ( 2 )   
  Categories: visual novels ( 4 )

  Yesterday, I talked about starting Lovely Quest. While it was pretty trashy, I mentioned that sometimes trashy can be fun and entertaining. While I stick by that and intend to still go through it, I decided to take a look at some other games from the list of VNs I’ve been wanting to try.

  Today, I decided to check out どうして、そんなに黒い髪が好きなの？ Which translates to “Why do you like black hair that much” The main concept is that the main character is the son of a Shinto Priest and has spent his life around women with black hair. Thus he’s developed something of a complex/fetish for women with black hair.

  The premise sounds pretty silly, but as someone who also has an obsession with hair (what specifically I’ll leave to your imagination) I feel like I can relate. Not to mention, I’m also a fan of black hair

  What really got me interested in it initially though was the fact that they even made a patch for it that made all the heroines hair dark black

  

  If it applied to cgs too, I would have considered using it. Sadly it seems like it’s only valid for the sprites (also I can’t seem to find a place where I can download the patch) Sad because I actually kind of dig that black even if it’s a bit on the ridiculous side (Like I said, sometimes trashy things are fun)

  Anyway, I’m about 430 lines into it, and so far I’m enjoying it way more than Lovely Quest. I might play them both in conjunction for a while to see if I can potentially do them both. If not, I have a feeling I’ll probably favor this one

  

   
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  maegamisama 3:02 am on July 29, 2023 Permalink
  Tags: Lovely Quest   
  Categories: visual novels ( 4 )

  One thing I’ve decided to do, as of late, is to stop doing Anki reviews in favor of reading more of my Japanese VNs. I forgot to mention it in my Sakura no Toki post, but it’s part of what helped me get through it. Now that I’ve finished Toki though, it’s time to find a new VN to try.

  I have a long list of VNs that I’ve acquired/earmarked as future read candidates. It’s so long in fact that I’ve actually forgotten why most of them are there. Thus I had to spend some time looking at VNDB pages this afternoon in order to refresh my memory and field some potential candidates.

  I’m not expecting much of the one I started reading today, Lovely Quest. I don’t want to use the word trash to describe things (especially if it’s someone’s favorite), but it falls in line with what some people would probably consider kind of trashy. Like the tropes are super blatant and it’s clear there’s like a ton of girls that have the hots for the MC. But sometimes that can be enjoyable way to take a break