Finishing Line

I have yet to reach one. I had already forgotten how many months it had been but the Sena nendoroid just arrived a few days ago,

The one nendoroid with a sizable chest

I actually didn't like Haganai at all; it felt like that there was way too much pandering and the cast wasn't exactly likable either. I do like this Sena nendoroid though, especially since it comes with a TV and a PS3 (not to mention it's less expensive than all the other nendoroids I've bought). It was strangely difficult to make her sit still. Too much meat.

That's that and since I originally made this blog to talk about nothing music, here is something I thought I'd share with nobody everyone,

The second full-length album by Phantasm, a fictional band fronted by FES (Ayase Kishimoto) from Chaos;Head, the first title in 5pb. and Nitroplus' science adventure series. The album contains mostly theme songs of Chaos;Head and Steins;Gate, and is a nice change for me musically since I haven't listened to this kind of music for a while. I was going to say that it is gothic rock/metal but apparently those are rather different genres of music, so I guess I will just call it symphonic metal and leave it at that. My personal favourite is 運命のファルファッラ, which has a melancholy feeling that is perfect when I'm dealing with infinite loops while pondering about the direction humanity is heading towards. A pretty solid album with some interesting musical ideas, though sometimes the arrangements can get a bit chaotic and a few songs have strong openings but become increasingly uninteresting due to a lack of catchy hooks.

Suddenly the rating of this blog went up by a notch...or not

Obviously I lied about not reaching any finishing lines. I got a few things out of the way earlier than I had expected, so I wasted some time going through Material Brave, which turned out to be Infinite Stratos 2. Team Baldrhead really dug their own grave this time.

Guraviti!

Just one more party member and a couple of more attacks could have made the gameplay better. The battles got repetitive incredibly fast, which wasn't surprising considering there were only 3 or 5 moves to pull off and half of the time the supporting character did nothing. The dungeon exploration parts were rather carelessly planned out, as the stamina system limited the players' freedom and the dungeons themselves were nothing exciting since the terrain had no impact on the characters' movements (both inside and outside battles) whatsoever. The inability to switch between the attacker and the supporter in dungeons was also very jarring. The "Engage Board" where characters can boost their parameters and learn supportive skills was poorly implemented, as it was completely linear with virtually no room for any proper customizations.

Being a generic harem lead in a generic harem story is suffering

The truth is that I didn't play the game for the story, but about 10 minutes in I had already abandoned all hope for a decent one. I got that Ayumu's second ability "Engage" is extremely rare and valuable, but that didn't mean every girl and some boys should lust after him for that. The fact that every heroine turned all lovey-dovey towards him straight after they "engaged" was quite annoying, because it really ruined the characters (who got little to no development later on) and made nearly every scene incredibly predictable. The one thing that bugged me the most was that the supposed villains were really just student council members dressed as if they were attending a masquerade ball. The players found out they were the ones behind various incidents as early as chapter 2 or 3, and while the council members made no effort to disguise their looks or voices (even speech patterns remained the same), no one on Ayumu's side could figure it out. It was like watching a bad tokusatsu show.

There is something really inconsistent with Seiji's drawings of Kanae

Her chest. I guess at least the CGs were pleasant to look at and the music fit mood well even if the tracks became dull rather quickly. I do believe that people are being a little too harsh with their criticism of the game (backlash and whatnot), but Material Brave really doesn't have much going for it in terms of scenario and gameplay. It's like going from Guilty Gear to Blazblue, but at least Blazblue was somewhat decent.

And so I have reached another one.