Rokka no Yuusha Read:

If an anime is great, its source work must be great too.  When there's more translated content in the source work than the anime covers, it stands to reason that it should be sought out and consumed.  Who would turn their back on a story they love?

This is why, whenever I label an anime great, I must also go and read the visual novel, books, manga, etc upon which it is based, (or in Utawarerumono's case, play the video game), so long as they're translated.  When I labeled Rokka no Yuusha's anime great, the quest to read the books began.  Since the anime only covered the very first book, that meant I was left to read books 2-5.  6 still isn't translated, so there's nothing I can do about that.

Because the books were good, I read them all in less than a week.  Pretty impressive, huh?  Rokka no Yuusha is complete.  I've read all the translated books and watched the anime twice.  Its greatness is now completely indisputable.  Now I'm just waiting on a translation of volume six like everybody else.

Books 4-5 weren't as good as 2-3, but you can't expect every book to be that good.  The author is only human.  They're still well above the level of, say, Spice and Wolf, Baccano or Hataraku Maou-sama!  I have no complaints, except that the story ends on a cliffhanger.

It's been 2.5 years since book six was published, and the story still isn't complete.  There's no evidence that it will ever be completed at this rate.  The author seems to have all sorts of mental and physical health problems, so maybe this series was doomed from the start.  Maybe this is all we'll ever get.  If so, it was a nice ride while it lasted.

There's still time before the Olympics begin and DW9 arrives in the mail, so next I'll start reading the Gate light novels.  I need to read four of them as well, books 7-10, though 10 isn't fully translated yet.  I'll worry about that bridge once I reach it.

I've been on a crash course of reading books ever since Christmas, and it doesn't look like the deluge will let up any time soon.  (There's still all of Death March to read once the first season of the anime ends. . .)

Meanwhile, I found another remix, so my music hall of fame is down to 4457 songs.  Every time I shrink my list the quality density of my hall of fame improves, every time I grow my list the amount and variety of good music I have to listen to improves.  Either way I can't lose, so every change is another sign of progress.

I found two remixes from Final Fantasy 6, but I also discovered that by using the itunes tool that allows you to start or stop a song early, I could retrieve only the 'new' musical portions of FF 6 songs I'd previously identified as remixes, and thus salvaged them back into the non-remix fold.  The end result was plus minus zero.  I wonder how many other songs that have been discarded as pure remixes could be salvaged in this way?  It's definitely food for thought.

Well, I could have been more thorough, but this will suffice.  I resurrected Anxious Heart and Treasure via careful editing of when the music starts and stops to make them all new songs instead of remixes.  The new total is 4459 songs.  It's a cool tool, but hardly all powerful.  For instance, I can't start, stop, then start then stop again, as often as I like, which would have been a much handier version.  Like this I only managed to save four songs.