Star Ocean 5 Beaten:

I don't get the bad rap this game got.  This is not a '20-hour game.'  More like 70 hours.  Even then, I could've played longer if I wanted to power up further in the infinite dungeon.  The plot is perfectly satisfying and had plenty of twists and turns.  I don't know what people want.  Every game should be as long as War and Peace or they aren't satisfied?

Once I could synthesize Elemental Armor the game got a lot easier, but it was still challenging enough to remain fun to the end.  I maxed out all the specialty skills and tried them all out using the cool Altruist ability which substitutes all experience gains for more skill points.  That was a really fun mechanic.  Once I got control of my own spaceship I could speedily warp anywhere I wanted on the world map, which greatly improved my quest completing efficiency.  Honestly, the gameplay was the most fun aspect to the game, given how generic the plot and characters were.  But this is a game, so good gameplay really should be plenty.

Star Ocean 5 is a worthy successor to 4.  That marks the third Star Ocean game I've beaten now, since I also took down 1 when it first came out ages ago.  Due to 5's quality, it pole-vaulted up in my video game franchise rankings to #21, just behind Lunar.

With the force of nostalgia on my side, I listened through 5's soundtrack again.  Now that I'm fonder of the game, it's only natural that I'm fonder of the music, which resulted in the promotion of 4 more songs to my music hall of fame.  In this way the game will continue to benefit me for decades to come.  Never mind 70 hours of joy, the music can entertain me forever.

This brings Motoi Sakuraba's total to a nice round 875 songs, well above anyone else, and the total music hall of fame to a nice round 4840 songs.  Motoi alone is responsible for 18% of my favorite music.  What a monster.

Between the books I needed to read, the anime I needed to rewatch, the video games I needed to play and the music I needed to scout this whole year has felt like a giant game of catchup.  With Star Ocean 5 beaten and its music fully incorporated into my hall of fame playlist, I've finally caught up with everything.

Meanwhile, the latest chapter of Eromanga Sensei volume 8 was translated.  To my astonishment, most of it was covered by the anime.  The anime supposedly only covers volumes 1-3, but it's managed to adapt segments from all over.  There's still plenty of uncovered material for a season 2, though, so I still won't forgive them until a season 2 is announced.  Perhaps they're waiting for the story to end so that they can give it a fitting conclusion too?  They did adapt Oreimo in full so it's not out of the question.  But for that to happen, the author would need to actually finish the series.  That's difficult to do considering he hasn't written another volume in over a year. . .