Superstar Returns!:

Far earlier than expected, Love Live! Superstar! resumes this July, immediately after Love Live! Nijigasaki ends.  It's a Love Live! year-round festival.  I can't wait for April all the way through September!  Accompanying the great new anime will be great new music from both shows.  Love Live never fails, that's why it's #14 in my top anime rankings.

For now it's March and March Madness is here.  I've already watched an exciting overtime upset of a #2 seed, Kentucky, by the plucky #15 seeded Peacocks of St. Peters.  That's what Madness is all about!  I love these Cinderella stories.  There's plenty of basketball to fill out the entire calendar until Nijigasaki starts airing.

I've almost finished Bravely Default II, with only the final chapter, chapter 7 left to complete.  The Beastmaster class has been overpowered from the start but for the sake of fun and novelty I keep switching to other classes and trying them out, which makes the fights much more difficult.  Whenever I absolutely have to win I can always switch back to 4 beastmasters and plow through, but the long and winding path is the more enjoyable way to play the game.

I think in summation Bravely Default II is an inferior version of Octopath Traveler.  It has worse graphics (I hate claymation), worse music (though still quite good, it's just that Octopath Traveler is unbelievably good musically), worse characters (they don't feel distinct at all since they're constantly changing their classes and fighting with completely different skills than seconds ago and can all be the same class which I commonly choose), and a worse plot (the world is much smaller, with only 5 cities, and the villains making life miserable for those cities are so simplistically evil it beggars belief that the rest of the populace has flaccidly put up with their machinations all this time before the playable heroes arrived on the scene.)

The gameplay is about as good as Octopath's, but I was never that impressed with Octopath's gameplay to begin with.  Octopath is very much an atmospheric experience with the gameplay playing second fiddle to the music, story and landscapes.

The only reason to play Bravely Default II is if you've already beaten Octopath as well as every other decent game ever made -- Xenoblade, Final Fantasy, Tales of 'X', Mega Man, Mario, Dragon Quest, Valkyria Chronicles, Dynasty Warriors, Soul Nomad, you name it.  If you've beaten everything else it makes sense to purchase and play Bravely Default II as well.  Unfortunately for me I have in fact beaten everything else so this was my next best recourse.  Since I've enjoyed Bravely Default II for over 50 hours, the expense of the purchase is quite justified -- if I can have fun for $1 an hour that's much cheaper than a movie ticket.  But I dearly wish I could have been playing Tales of Arise on the PS5 instead.  Oh how I wish the PS5 would overcome its supply chain issues!