The Railgun manga empire has grown yet again, this time with a spinoff about Item before Frenda's unfortunate death. Item was one of the best things that emerged from the Railgun manga, a group of four girls who, albeit antagonists of Mikoto, turned out to be just as lovable. Ever since Item has been showing up in the main Index series, in Railgun, and now in To Aru Anbu, people can't get enough of them.
Meanwhile, the latest volume of SAOAGGO is out, volume 13, at Amazon for purchase. But I have plenty of World of Warcraft to play so I'll wait and see if it's released online for free. Right now I'm re-reading 'The Wild,' book 3 of 'A Requiem for Homo Sapiens,' a series that had a formative impact on my thinking and fictional writing. The series has good concepts but the writing style now strikes me as too longwinded and flowery. It feels like everything could be streamlined massively. I had this same complaint with Sword of Truth. All these books are so long and with so little justification. Even when I'm reading big hits I respected in the past I find they're nothing compared to my own books, whose density of content and clarity of expression trumps all competitors.
The only franchise I can really respect coming out right now is Uma Musume. (Sousou no Frieren is adapting manga material that came out long ago, but every episode of Uma Musume is brand new.) Uma Musume does not waste time or distract with showy nonsense, it gets straight to the point and zooms along from event to event, character to character, exactly as quickly as a horse race. I'd like to see more shows like Uma Musume and fewer like Requiem, or Index for that matter, which is already on its 50th volume or whatever.
As for Warcraft, I've reached max level with my new Dracthyr Evoker. I admit the class plays differently than all previous classes in the game, which is impressive since this is the 19th year of the game, but I wouldn't say it's more fun or intuitive than the previous class mechanics, so I guess I give Dragonflight a C+ for effort. Most people agree Dragonflight is one of the worst expansions of WoW so far, which might be why I've gone back to playing Shadowlands content, trying to complete all the Covenant campaigns on all of my characters. Shadowlands isn't that great either, but now that I can fly in Shadowlands it's a great place to level everybody to 64 or so.
One thing I miss about Shadowlands vs. Dragonflight is that in Shadowlands I had two cool new spells and a bunch of cool Covenant Soulbind abilities, but in Dragonflight I don't have anything special. All I get is my basic talent tree with no bells or whistles. Compare that to the awesome abilities we got from Legion's artifact weapons, or the Heart of Azeroth, or the Covenants, and it feels pretty drab. Plus flight is finicky and difficult in Dragonflight, while still overpowered in Shadowlands and previous expansions, and it just feels like Blizzard is deliberately kneecapping its players.
I'm looking forward to undefeated Ohio State taking on undefeated Michigan tomorrow, as I'm sure all of America is.
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