March 2017

I read arc 5 (Aces) of the Mahouiku/MGRP novels, waiting for the guy to finish translating Queens. Overall story was pretty good I guess. Princess Quake's backstory had me laughing out loud pretty hard.

Animation is really mostly done but my music guy is just taking a while. Then there's going to be more voices and sound effects that need work. I'm still conflicted on what to make next, there's nothing good storywise for me besides doing another fight scene. Don't think I'm ever going to give up animating regularly though, although if I quit for too long it'll be harder for me to be motivated... Of course a 40 hr job would make things a lot harder in the future.

Watched the second season of GATE. I just wish Zolzal and the Tyuuli bunny woman were better enemies in the end and that Itami did more stuff.

Haven't been playing Starcraft 2 at all since January -- meta atm looks like Adept spam and that isn't too fun for me. I still watch a good amount of the GSL though, especially since players are always topping each other. I have a better party in Granblue Fantasy with the recent event -- still no Sara (or lolis at all really) Not too much incentive to grind or do more story. Currently my squad (all SSRs now) is level 48 Nemone, Lvl 42 Anthuria, Lvl 28 Sophia, Lvl 67 Metera (Wind), and Lvl 60 Jeanne D'Arc (Dark).

I bought the new Zelda and have done the 4 Divine Beasts, just need Master Sword and Ganon... Only around 9 more Shrines to get enough Heart Containers for the sword really, I might go and fight Ganon straight-up though. Don't think I'll bother much with side quests. Thunderblight Ganon was the hardest boss for me so far, I took around 90+ minutes to beat him since I would just get hit during the second phase. Beat him by doing a couple of Flurry Rushes and being able to cycle him by knocking the shield out of his hand and just getting up close and spamming. Waterblight was the second hardest, especially because shooting the eye is weird and he doesn't fall down in convenient places during the second phase. Windblight and Fireblight seemed too easy. I did it in the order Wind > Water > Desert > Fire dungeons, it looks like all dungeons speedrun prefers desert before water. Spent a good 40+ hours on the game already, have been playing for maybe five and a half days. Gotten stuck on stupid things and overthinking like always.I beat Skyward Sword in 5 days flat in comparison... Didn't do a full replay of SS either.

Mipha was pretty cute too.

Prefer the old OoT/MM style of dungeons, although I can't be too critical of this game. I would like an expansion of sorts on MM even though I never came close to doing all masks or anything -- the mask concept and transformations were interesting to me. Like the big world and scenery, it's almost opposite from Skyward Sword's closed-world. 100% speedruns will be a drag to do though hahaha. Hope that Nintendo doesn't delay the next Zelda for 5.5 years to do the next big console release... The game was originally supposed to be out 2015 damn it.

**edits**
You can blame me for being a hedonistic pile of organs at this point as the new Zelda kept my hands full and took my energy. It was hard to come to terms with the shortcomings when it came to both animation and creative writing and I tried not to think too much about it. Thunder games with horrible carry, martial arts and vidya drowned it all out, it was way too much for me at the time to really review 300K words of uncertainty as I tried to go back into Zusa story.

On the other thing, when it came to animations, I was just far too inexperienced with general fighting scenes, armor/equipment, and effects and tried to mash it together clumsily -- the entire fight scene wasn't carefully planned out -- I made it in short segments like you might see in the FSN UBW route -- so overall if I had the time to go back and do it again, I probably would have made it 90 secs to 2 min with less overall fightings....

I still procrastinated a lot on everything even if I use inexperience as an excuse. I wanted supporting cast to really have their own arcs and storylines but on the other hand I didn't want to drag it out like Naruto had with every character that wasn't TenTen, but not every supporting cast fit into the main plot. Mind you, powerlevels and plot armor never got as stupid as they were with Raoh and Kenshiro in FoNS though. At the same time like in FoNS many battle sequences became straightforward gore-fests here and there.

But in something like Tad Williams the fighting is more straightforward most of the time with even more hazy dream sequence, while I always wanted to make things a bit flashier, but not too ridiculous.

I wondered if I really should be a writer to begin with as I lost control of many plot threads -- that said, in particular...

Legend of Shade 2 from 2015 to 2017 -- what were the main issues?

Jaren Steel was too much of a goody two-shoes like Emiya Shirou. He wasn't as beta as most shonen protags, but it was still problematic with how straightforward his character was. At least I didn't BS too much of his powers. The romance pairing for him felt kind of awkward as well.

The three dragon kings -- some seemed to end up as mere filler, although I don't think I did too bad with Mornius and his underlings, Gitanxias, the ultimate water dragon king and his struggles flashed in here and there awkwardly as the pseudo final villain -- and then there was no for-sure final villain at the end as the threads of fate made me want to start another happy ending.

Quinity the lightning mage was supposed to be a prominent antihero, but he faded more and more from the scene as the story grew longer. He with his goggle-head Digimon still stays in my heart one way or another. But like Peter Wiggin from Enderverse, his personality a good story does not make...

It was an emotional departure when it came to the second main heroine of the story, Keida Omaris, and how much I invested in her. I could sympathize the most? Due to the loss of my old friend from HS at that point. But she drove many of the shenanigans when it came to the mysterious afterworld, you could say.

Random filler sequences -- Although the initial spurt with Cardimon, the dark commander wasn't bad at all, I added illusions/nightmares and random monsters here and there as we went into 2016 to extend Maira and Roxie's stories without really bothering much with backstory. Not every villain can be epic but I think it could've ended up better than it was.

This is not to say that I didn't enjoy the epic battle sequences I threw in here and there -- neither do I think it was as messy as powerlevels in many shonens get -- it's just that I wasn't satisfied with the average Naruto-esque cycle of fight, sad backstory, more characters, then revive with plot armor etc. and perhaps that forced me to get as messy as I got in the end of it all...

Hanabi Holbeck's time-traveling mechanisms. She originally was supposed to explore the history of the magical system of the world and explain loose threads, tying them together, but I was too ambitious and experimented everywhere in every time plane -- some scenes just didn't really connect with me that well and she just dropped in at the end to tie them together. Honestly I maybe should have made a downright fetchquest like in Fist of the North Star -- hah.

Interesting antiheroes were born out of the risks for sure, but they themselves lost their own plot threads like Oscas the dark fencer and Cardimon, the dark commander. I didn't want to just randomly kill them off so their adventures got stranger and stranger. I didn't have that much charisma within my sidekicks either.

And then I proceeded to procrastinate rather than focus on other works...

As 2016 winded down I got too nostalgic and emotional to really put that much into Zusa's rebirth either -- a lot of my artworks came up short as well. Even though the total word-count for the year was not bad, my shortcomings left me with a sour taste -- writer's block in a certain sense and anxiety of where to continue my plots.

It is possible they themselves create their own short stories or novellas at this point.