Current progress:

• Up to Chapter 23

• Unlocked all the Zodiac Weapons so far EXCEPT the Scorpio Staff (I swear I’m the only one in the world who can’t unlock it)
• 63% completion on powers
• Haven’t even tried unlocking the “beat boss x with y weapon” challenges

Chapters 15 to 17 are the ones I hate the most because the story’s so “out there” (haha, I made a funny). It’s got some really great dialogue, but it doesn’t help much. So I stalled for about a week before doing those, and because I take 18-22 very personally, I did those in pretty much one shot.

What’s also slowing me down is the fact that I’m recording my progress. I’ve done Chapters 1-6 and Chapters 18 and 19 (18 has a one-time cutscene that I had to grab on my initial playthrough). They’re actually on Youtube as unlisted links, but I might post the playlist if there’s enough demand. I need to record 7 to 17 eventually (did I mention I hate 15 to 17?), and then 20 to 25 should go relatively quickly.

I’m still having fun with the game, but I’m looking forward to finishing it again so I can get back to the same point I was at before I restarted.

Current Mood: Sleepy

Continue reading: Well, crap.

The cover suffers from "American Kirby is Hardcore"... he's smiling in the original.

Oh yes. The fangirl is strong here. You have been warned. More below the cut.

Continue reading: Sorry to keep you waiting!

I have Ryoga Hibiki‘s sense of direction, meaning that I get lost if I’m even one block away from my house. I once circled my block for twenty minutes because I couldn’t find my street. (I’ve lived here for close to nine years.) I will get lost in a department store for hours, and not because I’m buying stuff.

My legendary (lack of) sense of direction extends to video games. I still get lost in Sarutabaruta (for those who don’t play FFXI, this is the backyard of one of the starting cities).

Why am I telling you this? Because I’m about to do the few quests that make it very clear that I have no idea where the heck I’m going

Continue reading: Cas Gets Lost (Part 1 of Infinity)

Actually, I can’t do them anymore. See, if you’ve completed Mana Orchards, Path of the Blacksmith, Instruments 101, Monster Corral, and Golem Go Get ‘Em, they’ll remain complete even on New Game+. Amusingly enough, if you have stuff growing in the Orchard when you finish, it’ll still be growing when you start again. Same thing with the Golden Seed that you get much later on.

It’s worth noting that Mana Orchards is the one quest that usually stops people from getting a perfect cactus diary. It starts the second you go into the orchard, and it ends when you kill the three four lullabuds. If you finished a quest and hadn’t talked to your cactus, you lost the entry for whatever quest you’d finished before Mana Orchards. Moral of the story? Talk to your damned cactus after every quest, and don’t talk to Bud until you’ve done so. (This comes into play much, much later.)

Anyway, all this to answer why I was able to pick up my rabite right away.

Current Mood: Sick

One thing I’m seeing is that with the amount of time it takes me to actually kill stuff, it’ll take me far, FAR longer than 50-ish hours to do this perfect playthrough. I’m officially wondering what the hell I was thinking when I started this.

Oh, and another thing. I was an idiot and didn’t realise until close to the end of Niccolo’s Business Unusual that I didn’t have a pet with me. I keep forgetting that they automatically dump the pet you have when you do your New Game+ save into the corral. I chose my rabite because he’s an aggressive little bastard that seems to attack everything that moves, and he’s still not level 99 anyway (he goes after my exp crystals, though, so that shouldn’t take too long).

Anyway, onwards!

Continue reading: Kick-Punch-Block

Never have I been so afraid of saving my New Game + data...

More under the cut.

Continue reading: Let’s Get This Party Started

Allow me to explain under the cut.

Continue reading: And now for something completely different (but still Legend of Mana)

Well… it’s my fault, technically. More under the cut, because this is long (but there’s pretty pictures!).

Continue reading: How I Screwed Myself in Legend of Mana

Okay, now that that’s out of the way… hi!

Sky has had a hankering to run something new. We’ve been going at Dragon Quest: Voyages for two years, and while I’m still enamoured of it, I can understand why he’d want a change.

Back when he did NaNoWriMo 2010, Sky wrote a short story called Dream of Mana. It’s no secret that we’re both in love with the Mana series. Anyways, the premise of Dream of Mana freaked me out a bit at the time (I don’t really remember why, and I hesitate to re-read the story), because it seemed like a complete mindscrew to me. I kinda grew interested in playing another Mana campaign, though, and he REALLY wanted to run one, so here we are.

My character is named Liam, and I rolled him up as a Skald (from the Heroes of the Feywild 4e book). I’m having him use an instrument instead of voice to trigger his aura changes, though (yet I still feel silly and self-conscious because lolBard). I’m having the same problem playing him as I do with Mark in that he’s entirely too good and unassuming to be protagonist material, so I’m having a hard time getting into his personality, but I’m having fun so far.

Then sometime around we started playing, I decided that I’d play Legend of Mana to get in the mood.

Ho boy.

For those who don’t know, Legend of Mana is an old-ass PS1 game that came out in 2000. It was the black sheep of the Mana family as it seems NO ONE liked it because it wasn’t like Secret of Mana or Seiken Densetsu 3. It has a limited world building system (you decide where to put areas on the map, and it affects elemental balance and such), and it has 68 quests, most of which are obscure and easily missed.

I’d say I played the game to death in 2000, but that wouldn’t be true. I actually never personally finished one of the main storylines (though I’d watched Sky do it). No, I was very fond of the tempering system (synthesis on crack), and I was very proud to have made a 567 damage Dragon Scales Knife with close to 8 essences for each element. (The recipe I’d used has been long superseded with better, however.)

Legend of Mana is what inspired my character for Reflection of Mana. Keith was basically an expy (warning, TV Tropes) of the male character from the game, but I think I made him different enough that in the end, he really was my character. I did keep his overly long curly hair, though, and he had a red bandanna (they make it obvious that it’s a hat in the official art, but I was going off the sprite so bleh). I’m still really fond of that character, and despite differences with people, I can still read the logs and remind myself how much of a delightful bastard he was. I’m seriously thinking getting a commish of him…

More under the cut, to spare your poor RSS feeds.

Continue reading: Nostalgic Song