Valkyria Revolution & Soma Bringer Music:

I've finished rewatching Berserk (2016).  Berserk (2017) hasn't come out in blu-ray yet so it will have to be deferred to another time.

Next up is New Game season 1.  It also came out in 2016.  It also had a sequel in 2017, which hasn't come out in blu-ray yet.  So again I'll just be rewatching the first season for now.

I've also finished re-re-rewatching Index in preparation for the phantom third season's arrival, whenever that is.

I've finished Death March books 11 and 12 of this massive series.

Fairy Tail: Final Season is slated to air this fall, just like SAO: Alicization.  It's going to be a great fall season, but it's still so hopelessly far away.  Six months of downtime must still be endured.  Let me guess, Index Season 3 will also be coming out this fall?

Hiro Mashima's next manga will debut June 27th.  It's only been a short time since Fairy Tail ended.  This guy is an inhuman workaholic.

At the horrendously slow rate of defan's translations, the Alicization anime will cover book 18 before the translation of book 18 is finished.  The regular commercial release might translate book 18 before defan too at this rate.  There's no point translating something if you're going to be so slow that it equates to just not even doing it.  I wish translators would take their tasks more seriously or hand them off to someone else who will.

My music hall of fame shrunk back down to 4513 songs after discovering another Star Wars remix. Still no sign of Valkyria Chronicles 4's soundtrack to bump that number back up again.

However, there is another Valkyria game.  Valkyria Revolution.  From the same franchise, but composed by Yasunori Mitsuda instead of Hitoshi Sakimoto.  Since Yasunori Mitsuda is a fine composer in his own right, I just collected music from this game instead.  That netted me 22 new hall of fame songs.

Since I was on a Yasunori Mitsuda roll, I also downloaded the soundtrack to Soma Bringer.  This was far and away better than Valkyria Revolution.  It doesn't have any nostalgia value for me, since I never played the game, and it doesn't seem to be a very good game anyway because no one has really heard of it or talks about it.  But the music to this soundtrack is probably, technically speaking, just as good as anything from Chrono Trigger or Xenogears.  It's frighteningly good.  It's hard to even measure.  The quantity of songs was welcome in and of itself, at 47 songs.  But that doesn't begin to describe the quality.  Everyone just has to hear it for themselves.

With Yasunori Mitsuda on my side, even without Valkyria Chronicles 4, I was able to raise my hall of fame up to 4582 songs, 10.4 days in continuous play duration.

Yasunori Mitsuda personally is now responsible for 253 songs in my hall of fame, which far outshines Hitoshi Sakimoto's mere 207 songs.  Even with Valkyria Chronicles 4 coming soon, I doubt Sakimoto will be able to make up the gap.  Which puts Yasunori firmly into 3rd place on my all time composers list.

If Soma Bringer was this good, how many additional Yasunori Mitsuda soundtracks still lie out there, undiscovered?  It makes one shudder to think that so much untapped brilliance, never noticed by anyone, is going to waste in a variety of additional overlooked games no one's played.  For now I'll be content with these two soundtracks.  I feel like I have all the Mitsuda-like songs I need after this giant acquisition.  But probably someday that feeling will pass and I'll be hungry for even more.