Feels weird coming back here after so long just so I can practice expressing my thoughts again. I really just wanted to gush about my favourite anime this season. I wasn’t sure if they were going to be bangers or just alright but I’m so glad they’re the former.
The trailers did not do them justice except for maybe Kujima since it basically did what it said it would do.
Idk if other people didn’t like the humour in Kirio Fanclub or smth but I found it to be such a fun ride. The hidden twists grabbed me even if they weren’t the most surprising but the story makes it work by continuing to weave in those details with other fun comedic scenarios to keep it engaging. The more they revealed characters and their backstory the more I felt for them and just hope they can all be happy together, those precious funny beans
The replica anime is also soooo good. I actually liked how the guy was so forward with the main replica girl and it made it more sense as you continue watching. I also like the timing and how they reveal every piece of replica lore to keep you engaged and wanting more instead of a dump or too little and confusing. I do wish the story could dive more into the lore of puppets on a string theory since that might actually be true but who knows if they can do it within the next 2 episodes. It still feels like there’s a genuine love for their original counterparts that are hard to explain and I hope the show or at least the novel/manga explored it. Maybe they have and I need to look deeper into it but we’ll see
hi shutters! i'm not sure if you're still answering arknights questions but can i ask your opinion about amiya's medic variation? everyone says she's pretty bad but i'd still like to use her...
I haven't been as active lately (work is busy and I have lost my free time getting into proper, not-gacha games), but sure I can still answer this!
Before we start though, please consider a donation to this family in need! I want to help them.
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I'm going to be honest with you, it doesn't look good for our bunny on paper, but the good news is it probably doesn't matter anyway.
Let me explain. Just like her Guard form and Caster form, Amiya kind of screws herself over as a unit thanks to the incredibly harsh drawbacks HG keeps putting on her best skills. In Medic Amiya's case, her S2 has the same restriction as her Guard S2: it can only be used once per fight.
Unlike her Guard form however where you can get away with using it only once if you treat it like a boss or critical elite killing tool, you really don't want a "can use only once" drawback on your medic, who mostly wants to be supporting her team. The skill effect itself is actually decent (-60 ASPD, -60% movement speed, ATK up, true damage, and 2 target attacks), but the once per fight restriction means you need a pretty good idea of what's even going to happen in a stage in order to know when the most efficient time to pop the skill is.
Meanwhile, her first skill with no per battle limit has a 70 SP cost, gargantuan for a Year 5 Operator, and its Bard-like range means she doesn't actually cover every ally she's usually healing with her autoattacks. What I mean is since Incantation Medics have standard medic range, usually you place operators to use that range, but since Amiya's S1 affects allies in a bard-like diamond shape range, not every ally she's placed to heal will be in reach (though she does heal behind, above, and below herself now) which just feels pretty weird.
So does that make Medic Amiya unusable? Absolutely not. Her talent that heals operators by a percentage of their health over time counts as HP regen and not heals, so if you love unhealable operators like I do then Medic Amiya joins Perfumer as standard support picks for Soloblade / Juggernaut clears and other fun niches like it, just like how Guard Amiya became a support unit for buff army gimmick clears. Having another class also further extends Amiya's value in IS, being a medic, guard, or caster unit you can recruit from any medic, guard, or caster vouchers, great when you really need a ground unit (like in IS4) but voucher rng is only giving you ranged units, or when you really need a healer but you're only getting guard vouchers.
Also, general Arknights content doesn't really try to be hard anymore so even if a unit is much weaker than others on paper, in actual practice they can usually clear the jobs you want them for.
What I mean by this is the trend that Arknights has taken lately is that units get stronger and stronger (the meta operators of today are exponentially stronger than the meta ops of yesteryear), but the actual difficulty of the game has not increased to match, because it would look very bad on the game if early 6 stars were no longer able to clear content.
In fact, I would argue general content Arknights has gotten easier over time. Babel's EX-8 for example was a ludicrously simple roadblock map where you could chokepoint the whole stage on the left and statcheck the entire enemy lineup with a bunch of Year 1 6 stars. The latest annihilation map is as simple as placing Thorns (now a very old op) in front of Kirsten's steel balls and watching him solo 2/3rds of the stage when Anni 3 back then had even 6 star teams getting annihilated by hordes of laser drones (unless you had Silverash). Nowadays, you can bring pretty much anybody to clear anything but the actual challenge stuff (like High difficulty IS, RA, or high risk CC) and the most you will be asked to do is borrow Wisadel and press her skill just once.
While I'm personally unhappy about the more casual direction AK's level design has taken (take me back to the days when OF-EX-4 was completely destroying me even when my roster was strong as hell), it does mean if you want to use Medic Amiya you can and it won't be difficult to slot her into a team. Who cares if people say she's bad, Arknights is not hard enough to need you to only use the good units. I mean people are out here doing Vigil main DPS clears, you can do whatever you want with a little creativity.
Just treat her like a Caster with healing properties rather than a proper Medic, and Medic Amiya will do just fine. If a particular stage is giving you trouble and you're having difficulty slotting Amiya in, then let me know and I will see what I can come up with.
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guda doesnt know shit of fuck about any servant they summon like theyve heard Of people and when its soupar famouse people or stuff they’d learn in jp history class like kintoki or nobu they know a bit more but for a lot of servants theyre like whomst? it’s always the rest of chaldea staff delivering the exposition on whomstoever that is like dantes kept talking abt mercedes and abbe faria in prison tower and making it super obvious but guda had no fucking clue who he was. but servants are famous and naturally assume they’re known right? it’s a fair assumption for them to make that the person who summoned them knows who they are. but guda just doesn’t beyond the absolute basics and on top of that they’re not the type to pry into other people’s sad pasts unless they’re being dragged into yet another nightmare to play therapist, and it also just feels weird to read books containing the entire private history of someone you know personally, not to mention that they don’t have a lot of spare time to be reading history books and mythological cycles and classic literature anyway. so it’s like, a servant will be telling a funny anecdote like “yeah my wife used to-” and guda goes “YOU HAD A WIFE???”
This reminds me about how Hakuno knew about the life of Elizabeth Bathory in excruciating detail, but had never even heard the name Gilgamesh is their life.
I love the comments on this video about how card game-focused Yu-Gi-Oh’s worldbuilding became over time.
“Ironically, despite Kaiba’s attempt to redefine Kaiba Corp as a game company instead of arms manufacturing, he turned Duel Monsters into the world’s weapon.”
“Can we take a moment to appreciate how customer friendly Kaiba’s products are though? In the finale of GX Jaden dueled Yugi, who was wielding a duel disk that was roughly 10 years behind his own model and they were still compatible”
“This video doesn’t even mention the time in GX where Kaiba fired trading cards into space that were designed by children so they could be bombarded by space rays and gain superpowers. The more you follow this series the more you realize that it’s also the story where a supervillain successfully reshapes the world in his image, died beloved, successful, unrepentant, and accomplished all his goals, except for the only one that really mattered: beating someone in a card game.”
“Kaiba didn’t just change an entire city’s way of doing things, or even the entire world for that matter. He literally changed how villains try to conquer the world. He’s so influential that villains are still playing his game.”
“Something else that is both hilarious and terrifying in 5Ds: the cops play Duel Monsters to catch lawbreakers. In fact, the rules of Duel Monsters are so immutable to the law and order of Neo Domino City that the bikes called Duel Runners are able to remotely hacked by the police to force a duel, and losing that duel shuts down your bike. The rules of Duel Monsters sit above the police in terms of hierarchy, since if they could hack Duel Runners to force a duel, they could probably just shut down your bike remotely. I like to imagine Kaiba is sitting on his capitalist throne saying “If a criminal can beat you in a duel, then what authority do you have to catch them”, and just forces the police to adapt to his survival-of-the-duelist world that he made.“
“Without card games, people like dartz would be invincible“
i really can’t stress enough how much i recommend regularly engaging with older art– movies, books, whatever. like, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it” and all that, but also, there’s just something really fascinating and kind of beautiful about reading something written by someone who lived so long ago and really connecting with it, recognizing the humanity of people who once seemed like abstract concepts to you
I started reading The Tale of Genji during the pandemic, figuring I might as well improve my mind during lockdown. It’s considered the oldest novel on record, possibly the first one ever written. Early in the book, there’s an incident where the main character has a crush on a girl, so he tries to sneak into her family’s property to get close to her, and along the way he runs into this ancient old grandma who can’t half see and who mistakes him for one of her grandkids. So she’s standing there going on and on about her digestive difficulties and whatever, and he can’t speak up because if she hears his voice she’ll know he’s not who she thinks he is, so he’s just having to stand there and nod and hope she’ll go away soon. And I’m reading all this and thinking that with a couple of adjustments this could be a modern day sitcom, and it made me happy to think that a thousand years ago someone was laughing at the same sort of stuff we laugh at today.
i read dickens’ great expectations in little fifteen minute installments on my breaks at work, sitting there dirty and tired and sweaty in a hot factory, and it made me think about how a hundred and sixty years ago there were probably tired guys in hot factories reading the story the exact same way, bit by bit, at their stupid jobs they couldn’t afford to quit and were damn lucky even to have, and they too were glad to read the next chapter of mr dicken’s latest weird little story about weird little people
in reading War and Peace I’ve discovered that “doing math homework at the dining room table with your angry dad” has been a common terror since the 1800s
i remember reading tom sawyer, specially the part where he gets chastized erroneusly for dropping the sugar and he just spends minutes sitting in silence sulking and fantasizing about how sad everyone would be if he died and reveling in the self pity of how lonely and misunderstood he is and as a teenager who did exactly that with my 14 years of age i was shocked that an adult in the 1800’s had managed to capture that so well
Remember all those memes about “what if we just pretend 2016/2020/etc never happened and never mention it again”? In 2004 BC, a refugee from Ur looked back on the past year and wrote: "May this year not be placed in the reckoning of years! May its number be taken down from its peg in Enlil’s temple, and may its name be unspoken, to far off days, to other days, and to the end of time.“
There’s another heartbreaking one from the same period in which a woman mourning her son’s murder specifically grieves for “my son who will never bring wedding gifts to his father-in-law’s house, my son who will never bounce a child on his knees.”
And some time between 2200 and 1900 BCE, a refugee from the destroyed city of Isin (now in South-Central Iraq) wrote this:
“This is my house, where good food is not eaten (not anymore).
This is my house, where good drink is not drunk (not anymore).
My house, where good seats are not sat in (not anymore)
My house, where good beds are not laid in (not anymore)…
My house, where no happy husband dwells with me,
My house, where no sweet child dwells with me.
My house, through whose doors, I, though jts mistress, never grandly pass-
Never grandly pass, the doors of this house,
In which I dwell no more.
I- let me go into my old house, let me go in,
Let me lie down, let me lie down!
Let me go into my storehouse, oh let me in
Let me lie down, let me lie down there,
I- Let me lie down to sleep in my own house,
It was sweet sleep I had there.
Let me lie down in my house, let me lie down there in my bed,
It was a good bed.
I- Let me sit down on my own chair-
It was a good chair.”
Just released Cardfight Vanguard Turnabout ch.1 in English.
You can read it HERE
Unfortunately I have no idea whether it is translated officially or not, and the only translation I found was pretty subpar. I didn’t bother cleaning it, I just translated, erased the dialogue, and typeset it.
Names are Firstname Lastname format because it isn’t Japan, but the commentator had it the other way around for some reason.
I’ll release chapter 2 if there’s enough interest and I’ll stop if there are official translations available somewhere. Please let me know.
On another note, can anyone get in touch with the YouthQuake scanlator? I’d like to work on that.
Volume extra from chapter 1 of Turnabout. The storyboards here are actually planned out by Itou Akira.
“The beginning of the story. In order to show both Kai and Gaillard in the color spread, we used a trick in which it seems like they’re facing each other despite them having cardfights in two completely different places.” (-Editor)
Still running an interest check on whether it’d be worth it for me to continue translating + typesetting Turnabout so please reblog the first chapter release if you care. If not, I won’t release the chapters publicly since it’s a pain and the first 3 volumes in Japanese are available online if you look hard enough.
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