When I'd last played the Switch version of Tales of Vesperia back in 2019, I'd just returned to Dahngrest after finishing up at Ghasfarost, immediately before the next major set of events that happened there.

Since I picked the game back up just over a week ago, I've made it to Mount Temza -- slightly past the farthest point I'd ever gotten to in the 360 version!

( Some assorted thoughts, with spoilers for up to Mount Temza )

I think I've got a hard boss coming up very soon, so I'm wishing myself luck with that...

I wish I could hit a reset button on this year. It's gotten off to a terrible start for me.

As if injuring my arm last week wasn't bloody awful on its own, today my Switch seems to have randomly died -- even though it was working just fine just last night. The screen went black and stayed that way when I was booting up a game like usual, pressing the home button didn't do anything, going from TV mode to handheld mode didn't do anything, and after turning it off it's refused to turn back on again at all. That'll be several hundred hours worth of progress in Fire Emblem and Zelda and Pokémon gone...

NEXT DAY ETA: Looks like my Switch works again now! I didn't lose entire playthroughs' worth of progress after all! Still, I really could've done without that unnecessary stress!

I finished my Utena rewatch. Still one of my favourite anime. ♥

( Scattered thoughts )

I plan on rewatching the movie and rereading all the manga (first manga, movie-manga, After the Revolution) soon.

That feeling when I watch what's ostensibly a comedy episode, yet the analysis notes I write down for it wind up going to incredibly depressing places. :(

Utena's comedy episodes are odd beasts, because when you rewatch them with knowledge of the whole show, they turn out to have a fair amount of unhappy subtext and/or foreshadowing that makes them hard to laugh at in hindsight. That said, I don't agree with the implicit notion that the show has no genuine comedy and that every single thing is actually secretly horrifying; then again, it's mostly little moments that I find funny, like the endings of some Shadow Girl plays or Juri wanting a turn in a massage chair Nanami was sitting in.

Next up for me is eps 28-29, which I'm not looking forward to all that much because ugh, Ruka. It's possible that I might end up not hating him as much as before, but I don't exactly expect my opinion on him to do a 180, and just seeing him in the episode preview had me cringing already. ~.~

I'll do it for Shiori, though! And for everything that comes after these episodes!

I love episode 9 of Revolutionary Girl Utena so much. I have about a million feelings about the coffin flashback alone.

I finished Yuri Kuma Arashi on Sunday. With that, here's a bit of commentary on the final three episodes, followed by some thoughts on the series as a whole.

( Spoilers for all of YKA; warning for mentions of the usual things about it )

I'm still willing to turn this series over in my head a bit more, and while I do have very mixed feelings about it and I can't see myself having too much fannish attachment to it, I can see myself revisiting this series sometime in the future.

With the 3DS going offline tomorrow, I've finally gotten around to doing the one thing I absolutely had to get done while that console's online services were still active...

I got Benny and Beruka married through My Castle battles in Fire Emblem: Fates.

There was a point to this! I'd hit a point in Conquest where both the next main story battle and the My Castle defence thingie had nothing but promoted enemies, and I felt like my party hadn't been raised as well as it could've been, so I wanted to make Ignatius exist so I could use his paralogue (which IIRC is the one child character paralogue that's recommended to do relatively early instead of later on) to get people's levels a bit higher.

Dunno when I'll get round to actually continuing Fates, though. I could barely remember how to play the bloody game, which makes me glad for the trend of people making Their Castles easy to seize! (If anything, if I do go back to Fates, I might start a new file for Birthright and make progress there before picking my Conquest run back up.)

It's just funny to me that, with so much going away along with the 3DS's online functionality -- with plenty I'll miss and things I straight-up missed out on like SoV's DLC -- this of all things was what I really wanted to achieve before the deadline!

I just finished Virche Evermore about a week ago, and because I loved it so much, I thought I'd do a personal ranking of the characters and throw down my thoughts on all of them.

To be honest, I'm partly inspired to do this because I heard Mathis is the least popular love interest to the point where he even got rated beneath a few side characters in the Japanese official popularity poll, which I think is absolutely criminal.

( Needless to say, major spoilers for the entire game below! )

I think my fannishness for the Star Ocean series might make a huge comeback relatively soon.

Why? Because I happened to get the new SO2 remake for the Switch as one of my Christmas presents this year -- which was unexpected, but certainly a pleasant surprise. I still have my copy of the PSP version, where I'd gotten close to the end of a playthrough with Claude before, but I think this'll be a good way to both have a fresh experience of the game and finally play Rena's side of the story!

It's rekindled my feelings for the series to the point where I've now bought the R version of SO1 on the eShop (with a bonus being that I'd accumulated enough points to get it for essentially free while it's on sale)! Not only that, but since I recently got a PS4, I'm finally in a position where I can play SO5 and SO6 for the first time... and as it so happens, the HD remasters of SO3 and SO4 are on sale right now too, so I might go ahead and get those while they've got money off! The whole dang series on modern-ish consoles!

I won't get to any of them right away, though. First I want to beat Mario Wonder, and then I want to have another go at Iron Leaves in Pokémon Violet now that's come back round, and then I want to finish Virche Evermore (I've been on a bit of an otome kick in the last few months), and then I'd like to do some more routes in Olympia Soirée, and I'll want to jump back to Pokémon Violet again when the DLC's epilogue drops in a couple of weeks' time... in other words, I've got things I want to do in other games beforehand. Still, once I've done all that I'd really like to jump back into the good ol' ocean of stars. :3

I'll most likely play SO1 R first, as one playthrough of that shouldn't take too long, and then I'll go for SO2 R. I'll be looking forward to meeting my favourite characters again, and getting to know people in SO2 I didn't recruit before!

Something I've noticed about fictional characters who are assassins, serial killers or anything along those lines is that they tend to be written in one of two particular ways that hinges heavily on their gender: female killer characters are more-often-than-not brainwashed or otherwise forced into it, whereas male killer characters are far more likely to have at least some agency in the matter. In general, I'm really not a fan of the "men have agency, women are brainwashed" dichotomy that's so abundant in fiction, and this is one area where it particularly sticks out.

All this just makes me all the more fascinated with a certain character from a game I've been playing -- a male character who was brainwashed into being a killer. I won't say who the character is here, since this is quite spoilery both for the game he's from and especially for the specific character in question, but the playing around with a gendered trope here is one reason why I really like him and find him interesting -- even if he does seem to be a polarising character from what I've been able to observe of the fandom so far.

It goes to show that even tropes I normally find irksome can catch my interest if certain details are flipped around.