Octopath Traveler 0 Fully Beaten:

It's taken all month, but I've finally defeated Octopath Traveler 0.  I always assumed there would be some tough fight at some point, but there never was.  I was always overleveled, overgeared, and overpowered.  I completed every quest and every character conversation, defeating the secret true boss where you get to fight with your whole party of 40 at once.  All in all it took 142 hours.

The plot kind of meandered.  I never felt attached to the story outside of the times I was rebuilding my city, Wishvale, and re-gathering its refugee townsfolk from abroad.  That's the only thing I really cared about.  The rest was just smiting over-the-top villains who were evil for evil's sake.

The graphics were nice when it came to the environment, but pixel art characters look pathetic compared to the beautiful graphics of FF7 Rebirth.  I expect more from PS5 games.  The gameplay was fun until my party became too overpowered.  At that point all I did was the exact same strategy for every fight, which beat everything flawlessly.

In the end the best aspect of Octopath Traveler 0 is the same as the best aspect of 1 & 2 -- the music.  Yasunori Nishiki composed over a hundred new pieces of music for this game, on top of all the borrowed music from the past games.  Nishiki is a genius so getting to listen to 100 of his new compositions is a treasure.  He was already my 7th favorite composer before this.  Once I rate all these new songs for my music hall of fame, he will be rated higher than that.

While the actual gameplay lasted 142 hours, my enjoyment of this game's soundtrack will stretch out for years and decades into the future.  I do plan on adding some of the characters from this game to my wonderful hall of fame, but before then I need to decide which of Octopath Traveler 0's songs are the most important to represent, so I can assign the new characters the correct suitable tunes.

Meanwhile, I finished reading Index GT volume 15.  The remainder of the book was no more inspiring than the beginning, but at least I'm done with it now.  I wish people would instead translate Ryuuou no Oshigoto!  The final volume of that series comes out this July in Japan, marking another milestone event for 2026.  But it will pass us by like a ghost ship in the night for lack of an English translation.

With perfect timing, the new Xanth volume, Knicklepede Knight, has come out immediately after I finished Index GT 15.  So that's my next goal.

Realistically speaking, people only have 12 hours a day they can live during.  Eight hours goes to sleep, and four hours goes to maintenance activities like bathing, eating, cooking, shopping, grooming, toilet, etc.  Until you're 20 or so you're stuck doing busywork in school, so all that time is also unavailable for living.  Let's say you live a healthy life and last to age 80 with a still-intact body and mind that can enjoy life.  That's 60 years of lifespan, but only 30 years of usable time on Earth.  If you don't work at all, you get 30 years of entertainment to enjoy.  If you do work even a part-time job, you could easily half that amount of free time, giving you only 15 years to enjoy life.  And if you work full time, you could half that again.  Now you're looking at 7 years of entertainment in your entire life.  Not nearly enough time to enjoy all the offerings of my halls of fame.  Barely enough time to enjoy anything.

If a full time job is a required ticket to get a wife, that wife had better be damn amazing.  She's sapping away 2/3'rds of your life for the privilege of her company.  The kids you have had better be damn amazing to justify the time you spend working to afford them.  If they're anything short of perfect angels, you'll have sacrificed your precious lifespan for nothing.  Basically, every moment with your wife or child would need to be three times as good as the best entertainment available on Earth for the math to make sense.  It would have to be three times as fun to chat with your wife than watch Clannad.  I just find that hard to believe or imagine.  What kind of wife or child could be three times as enjoyable or emotionally moving as Clannad?  They'd have to be demigods or something to manage that.

The only way the math makes sense is if your work is as enjoyable as entertainment.  If you're working for fun then all those years lost to work aren't lost.  In that case you're back to 30 years of enjoyment in life -- 23 years of enjoying your work and 7 years of enjoying your family life that comes as a reward for being successful at work.  Which is why I say only 5% of people should pursue careers and degrees.  If you're one of the 5% who can land a dream job, like a celebrity or a rock star or something, the math works out in your favor as more enjoyable than just staying home and watching anime.  Anything else falls short.  Yes, realistically, it's possible to work hard and study hard, earn a middling wage and get a middling wife and middling kids as a result.  I can't bring myself to work hard at things I actively dislike, so it's a path I could never take.  But there are psychologies that can endure such things for the sake of the 'rewards' at the end of the rainbow.  The problem is, as laudable as their endurance is, by my math the rewards fall far short of what would be necessary for this deal to make sense.  It's not even close.  You're literally dying for nothing.  A wife who will most likely be fat, liberal, mentally ill, cheat on you, divorce you, and stop having sex with you (then again if she's fat that's a blessing.)  Kids who are born of that very wife and subject to that wife's influence.  You can't tell me that's worth two-thirds of your lifespan.  I don't buy it.  No one could buy that.

Imagine if a devil came down to you at age 20 and offered you a deal -- he would guarantee you an average wife and an average two children born from that wife, if you signed over 2/3'rds of your lifespan to him, and furthermore promised that for at least 2/3 of your life you'd make yourself miserable.  That's what working at a non-dream-job is like, so this is no exaggeration.  Who would take that deal?  The world has 8 billion people, it isn't necessary to have children at any cost.  The world will be full of people whether you sign your soul away to the devil or not.  This world doesn't need more children, it needs more quality children raised in a quality environment due to a quality loving relationship between the parents.  There's no way you can gift your children that from such a poisoned beginning.  From such a devil's deal.  Find a way to drop out of the workforce entirely.  Inherit wealth, or perhaps make a lot early in life and then retire as quickly as possible and start living off investment income.  Do whatever you can.  There's no perfect answer because money is still necessary for food and shelter and the like, but do whatever you can to maximize your true lifespan.  Your true lifespan is invaluable.  There are so many great uses of your free time.  Hundreds, thousands, almost more than can be named.  Don't let the vultures strip you of your free time and peck at you your whole life.  Freedom is free time.  Free time is freedom.  Don't give away your freedom for nothing.

Men are taking my advice:

For decades now, I've been pointing out that relationships with girls aren't worth it.  Girls have become loathsome liberals intent on child genital mutilation and other sick goals, with whom a single hour of company would be torture.  They also have a slew of mental disorders that makes life chaotic and unhappy around them.  They're no longer attractive, with 70% of American women either overweight or obese.  They won't have your children, with the fertility rate cratering every year to new record lows.  They're likely to cheat on you, separate from you, divorce you, or just go cold fish and never have sex with you despite supposedly being your wife, and now have the legal right to accuse you of rape and throw you in jail if you object to this.  If you are divorced, which can happen via 'no fault', one-sided decisions, you will lose your income, your assets like your home, and your children, all of which will go to the woman.  It's a completely one-sided agreement where she owes you nothing but you owe her for life.

There will always be a few blessed men who beat the odds, with perfect girlfriends and wives who none of these complaints apply to.  But what are the odds you'll be one of those men?

Slowly but surely, my call for a complete boycott on dating or marrying women or even seeking their approval, has been adopted by the public at large.  Over 1/3 of working-age men are no longer in the labor force.  Like me, they've all given up on impressing women (women won't date men who lack jobs, so dropping out of the labor force is equivalent to dropping out of the dating market), and are seeking happiness through things entirely under their own control.  We will never become dependent on someone as unreliable as the modern woman again for happiness or fulfilment.  We can find all that on our own, and no one can take it from us.  No one has any legal claim against us.  No one has any right to our property or our time.  We were born on this Earth free and we can remain free our entire lives by just not signing our souls over to women.

Even attempting to associate with women is rife with danger.  If you don't seek sex you can't be accused or convicted of sex crimes.  Does this sound like a remote danger?  Not really, a million men are convicted sex offenders in America.  Many more are accused and have to go through some legal process due to said accusations.  No doubt millions have been sued over this in civil court.  Multiple presidents have been successfully prosecuted for this, so it doesn't matter how 'high status' you are, or how unlikely it is you would need to stoop to crime to have sex with a woman.  Professional athletes are likewise accused of this all the time, a category of men you would imagine would never need to assault an unconsenting woman.

Kids all have dream jobs like artist, scientist or athlete.  Very few of them aspire towards anything outside this high-pay, high-prestige, high-fun field of activity.  If you can actually achieve a job like this, it makes sense to work hard and study hard and do whatever it takes to achieve your dream.  Your life will be rich and fulfilling even before a girl enters the picture -- but girls invariably will enter the picture, because they'll be attracted like bees to honey by your success.  Then you can cash in your dream job by also getting a dream companion, who won't be one of these Hillary-supporting, mentally ill, overweight, unreliable slobs.  But that pathway towards a good life is closed off to most men.  Regardless of what children dream, at best 5% of them will get a job like that, followed by an elite woman who's acceptable marriage material.

By all means, every boy should attempt to achieve some high status position in life by coining a rap song, trying out for their local sports team, writing their own book, entering a science fair competition, or whatever floats their boat.  If their initial attempts are met with explosive success well beyond the norm, then it makes sense to pursue that dream and put some real effort into concretizing that potential.  Very quickly there are signs that what you're doing isn't a futile waste of time but is really getting the world's attention.  If you don't see those signs then your rap song, book, sport or garage-room experiment, however intrinsically meretricious, isn't a gateway to a dream job and therefore should be abandoned (except as an enjoyable hobby.)

My advice to the remaining 95% is radically different from my advice to the lucky 5%.  For the 5%, work hard, study hard, follow all the rules and regulations, put your head down and let destiny take its course.  Wealth, fame, power and hot women await you.

For the remaining 95%, who can't leverage some special talent into material success in this world, either because they don't have any talent or the world refuses to recognize it, my advice is to not work hard, don't study hard, don't do what anyone tells you to do, drop out of society entirely.  Most of all don't waste your time pursuing women.  Any woman you could possibly get isn't worth getting.

The amount of money it takes to support yourself with basic amenities is less than $12,000 a year.  If you're really frugal it can be less than $6,000 a year.  This means you can work at any part-time job and easily make enough to pay your bills.  Say you work 20 hours a week at $10 an hour, something any waiter could manage -- that's already $10,400 right there.  Not to mention various subsidies you get from the government, like the earned income tax credit.  You don't have to bust your butt in school and go to college and take on a huge debt to get some useless degree and then work like hell to pay off your college debts and afford a home (which you won't need because you'll never marry or have kids anyway).  Relax and enjoy your life.  It's your life, you have almost all of your time to yourself, you can make of it whatever you will.

There's a plethora of entertainment that's freely available with nothing more than an internet subscription.  It's easy enough to go beyond that and buy all the video games you want, as each game lasts over 100 hours, giving you an expense-to-entertainment ratio of under $1 an hour.  If you really want to be a cheapskate, just go to an online game parlor and play other interested volunteers at chess, bridge or Go.  That could take up your entire life for free.  But you don't have to be that cheap.  Entertainment really isn't that expensive, go ahead and splurge on anything you like, and it will turn out that you still have more than enough to go around.  To fill up all the hours of your free time and more.

On this blog I've detailed hundreds of go-to entertainment resources that can last the interested partaker decades.  Video games are the largest time sink, but the most densely rewarding experiences are my top 200 anime, followed by my top 25 visual novels, my top 75 manga, my top 200 movies, my top 100 authors, and my top 10 tv shows.  Along the way, most of my favorite 5,500 songs can also be heard, as they're mainly embedded in the other works.  Not a single one of these entertainment options requires a girlfriend or wife.  In fact, many of them serve as perfect replacements for the role of 'girlfriend' or 'wife.'  Waifus are generally preferable over real women, and the romances with those waifus are more emotionally rewarding than the likely result of consorting with a real-life woman.

If, somehow, people manage to work their way through all my hall of fame entries, there's a large category of runner-ups that can deliver almost as much fun.  That list is ever-growing as the world continues to spin out wonderful stories one after the next.  Imagine if you started entertaining yourself with my list today and used the next 20 years to go through it all.  That means there would be 20 years of new art awaiting you, completely untouched, virgin unexplored fun, waiting for you to try.  If you spent the next 20 years consuming all that new art, 20 more years of new art will have appeared.  The potential pleasure is nigh limitless.

The real problem isn't the lack of fun alternatives to girls -- it's that life isn't long enough to get through all the fun alternatives to girls.

I think we can all agree that the best things in life are powerful emotional experiences that leave a positive impact on our memories that never fades.  There are very few girls who can deliver such experiences (and not betray and despoil them with their future behavior).  If you're one of the lucky few who can get girls to give you that rush, then go ahead and enjoy girls.  But for everyone else there's Mastercard -- no, that's a joke, please don't go into credit card debt.  For everyone else there's my entertainment halls of fame.  The number of powerful emotional experiences waiting in them, ready to make you laugh and cry and cheer and smile and reminisce, is legion.  Hundreds of such experiences.  Bristling, ready to go, happy to invade your brain.

By a fortuitous coincidence, at the same time women entered the workforce (the 1970's) and thus stopped attempting to become attractive to men, the personal computer was invented, which gave men the chance to construct their own reality from the bottom up.  Ever since then, the world of reality has become ever glummer for men, with their prospects at a wife or girlfriend dimming and dimming to an ever blacker shade of gray.  But the world of fantasy has simultaneously continuously brightened.  We've gone from Pac-Man and Pong to Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger to Clannad, Sword Art Online and Kimetsu no Yaiba.  We've gone from the Atari to the Playstation 5, with a few pixels for Moon Patrol turning into the beautiful 3-D models of Tifa and Aerith hugging each of our arms as we navigate through the train graveyard.

Reality was really great for men in the past.  They all had access to thin, young, beautiful girls they could marry and have lots of kids with.  As recently as the 1950's this was the norm.  The normal man, even the below average man, could look forward to this reality.

But fantasy today is so much better than anything reality back then had on offer.  Now you can have as many beautiful wives as you want, as many intense romances as you want, all for free.  And on top of that you can enjoy everything else in life, that has nothing to do with romance.  Want to experience an intense war story?  Go watch Naruto or Bleach.  Want to experience an amazing sports rivalry?  Go watch Uma Musume or Hikaru no Go.  Want to laugh at life's absurdities?  Go watch Working! or Spy x Family.  Want to solve a mystery or try out life in a new world or save the world from villains or run a kingdom or power yourself up to God-like levels?  It's all available.  There's a story involving all of that and more.  You can experience a quality version of anything desirable you can imagine.  Fellow men, talented, creative, imaginative men, have come before us and laid down the tracks which our engine of experience need only travel down.  Since men are simple and all want the same things, everything you can enjoy has been imagined and created by some previous man already.  It's all ready to go, waiting for your brain to interface with.

And it's only a matter of time before virtual reality can create a realistic facsimile of what you can experience with a real girl, at which point girls will truly have become completely obsolete.  Obviously anything the brain can experience, can be simulated and copied.  The laws of physics implies there's some way to activate the exact same sensations in the brain as real girls can activate now.  It's just a matter of time before the code is cracked.

I used to complain a lot more about how bad girls in the modern world were and how poorly they treated men.  But I don't complain much anymore, because it no longer matters.  To me girls are irrelevant, and their behavior has no impact on my life.  I've replaced them.  And it turns out at least 1/3 of the entire population of men in America have done the same.  They're quickly catching on, like I have, that girls are no longer needed for anything.

Miniscule Progress:

I spent another $67 to secure a guaranteed limit break level 1 for unison Karen, as well as a limit break level 4 for base Minori.  As a side benefit I also got hot springs Niina to limit break level 2.  I also restocked on paid quartz whose benefits haven't come to fruition yet.  Unison Karen, as part of my top squad that's meant to beat all the toughest opponents, needed to be stronger than level 0.  The spending was a necessity, sadly.

My light squad did a fine job with the latest score challenge, scoring 1.3 million, about the same score as the critical penetration squad got against the same foe.  But perhaps most impressive right now is squad 31-E, with 5 of the 6 sextuplets now having max level limit breaks, and Niina at 2 out of 4, which isn't bad either.  My original 'top' squad was the sextuplets, from the very beginning of the game they've always outperformed.  It's nice to see them thriving again.  My current priority for protean shards is to give hot springs Isuzu and wedding dress Ichiko their level 3 limit breaks, at which point Squad 31-E will be top of the line.  As will Squad 8, which uses 3 of the sextuplets - base Minori, wedding dress Ichiko and hot springs Isuzu.

No other squad has 5 base SS Memorias at max.  No other squad even has 3 base SS Memorias at max.  Squad 31-E is way out in front.  Maxed out base Memorias are permanent benefits, because they give +10% stats to all memorias of that character, whichever one you use.  They never become obsolete like other memorias do, they're helpful no matter what.

Meanwhile, I beat the last ring questline in Octopath Traveler 0, only for a new enemy to emerge and steal 7 of the 8 rings, then escape into literal Hell.  That's quite the plot twist.  I also got the final sacred weapon and have quite the well equipped party.  I'm far higher level than the plot expects me to be right now, so all the fights are quite easy.  But who knows, maybe the game will last long enough that it will eventually become challenging again.

I rewatched Release that Witch, which is one of the necessary factors for it to make my great anime rankings.  Unfortunately there's still no news on a season 2, which is the other necessary factor.  I swear, these first 8 eps could compete with any first 8 eps of any other series.  If not for Release that Witch being cancelled far too early, it could have ranked so highly.  What a missed opportunity.

I added three new characters to my wonderful hall of fame -- Tetia, the cute and kind fellow apprentice mage in Witch Hat Atelier.  Her long pink hair is wonderful enough right there.  Dragon, Luffy's father in One Piece, who is the heroic leader of a heroic resistance army to a very evil World Government.  (It's only become clear recently how evil the Marines really are.  It's all the more impressive that Dragon was originally a Marine but grew disgusted with how evil they were and formed a resistance movement against it, instead of choosing to stay with the 'winning' side and profit from it.)  Lastly I added a hybrid character as one entry -- Qui-Gon/Darth Maul.  This is because both characters are mirrors of each other -- they both appear and then die in the same movie.  They're both awesome while they last, representing the 'light' and 'dark' side of the same Force.  And they literally fought each other to the death to the song 'Duel of the Fates,' so the song really belongs to both of them.  Two halves of the same whole, they're given Duel of the Fates as their shared theme song.

Obi-Wan now has 'Ben Kenobi's Death/TIE Fighter Attack' as his theme song, which is fitting enough.

Tetia has 'The Town with an Exotic Fragrance' which perfectly fits her cheerful, exciting life.  And Dragon got Omnis Lacrima, a song as epic as his role in One Piece.  1817 characters in all, and I don't think the new ones are any worse than the old.

I watched all the eps of One Piece's Egghead arc that One Pace hasn't covered yet, so I'm all up to date on One Piece.

Kuroha, who wrote the Kitakubu manga, has a new manga out, called Satanica.  It's been good so far, though not as good as Kitakubu.

I've read the first three chapters of Index GT volume 15.  The remaining portions haven't been translated yet, but they should be available soon.  I don't like this new 'heel turn' by Hamazura, so the book has only been mediocre.  Currently Index and Xanth are competing to see who will waste more of my time by never ending, but after coming this far there's no way I'll drop either of them.

The next Xanth book should be out in a few days, so after Index comes Xanth again.

Small Progress:

No new event came out in Heaven Burns Red today, but there were a lot of paid quartz offers I took advantage of, seeing as how I'd accumulated a vast pile of paid quartz in the past.  This netted me a lot of useful limit breaks, like funeral Tsukasa going up to level 2, wedding dress Ichiko to 2.5, vendor Chiroru to 2.5, raccoon Kanata to level 1, light Yuina to 3.5, base Minori to 3.5, etc.  The best acquisition was a brand new suit Bon Ivar.  Unfortunately a new Ichiko SS Memoria has come out, so the total number of missing SS Memorias from my collection stays the same.

I climbed the new floors of the clock tower and got Risa and Tama's skill evolutions.  I also got the new high score rewards available there.

I got Risa's reversions up to 5 like my other elite characters.

I beat the new score challenge with a high score of 1.3 million, enough to claim all the loot available there, like usual with my critical penetration squad.

I've also made progress in Octopath Traveler 0.  I've beaten 7 out of the 8 ring questlines.  I've gotten most of the battle tested, forbidden and sacred weapons.  I've fully built out my city of Wishvale.  The best part of this new Octopath game is that it plays a lot like Heaven Burns Red, with a frontline set of characters and a backline that can be exchanged freely.  The backline units can't act or take damage, but they do acquire resources while in the back.  Then when the frontline is exhausted you can take up the slack with the backline and let the frontliners rest and recuperate in a place of safety.  It's the coolest system ever for turn-based combat with large parties.  I thought Heaven Burns Red, which lets you play with 6 characters like this, was a great improvement over the typical 3-man parties of Final Fantasy.  But Octopath one-ups that and lets you play with 8 characters at once.  The versatility of choosing any ability you want between eight different characters is unmatched in any turn-based game ever.

Driselle and Waya:

Driselle is a minor character but a consequential one.  She matters to both Rowen and Elize by giving both of them a new home and family.  She's pretty, kind and brave.  That's good enough for me, especially when the perfect song is waiting for her, 'A Merchant Town Full of Life.'  This fits as her theme song because she's the leader of the city that the song is literally about.  Hubert got a Tales of Graces song, 'Dance of the Unified Water,' because he's a Tales of Graces character.  Itsuki from Haruhi Suzumiya, who used to have Dance, was given Unused Track 05 from Air instead.

Waya is the handsome young Go player in Hikaru no Go who feels like what ordinarily would be the protagonist of the series.  He's friendly and well-liked and good looking and competent at his job.  I gave him the theme song 'The Second Element II' because he got second in the pro exam.

I test drove unison Karen in my critical penetration squad against the latest score challenge and for the first time ever got over 1.8 million.  The highest squad 31-A has ever  scored is 1.75 million.  This is objective proof that unison Karen is the real deal.  This is at level 0 limit break -- everyone in Squad 31-A is at max limit break level 4.  The reward for reaching 1.8 million was a bunch of title badge experience which got Karen, Risa, Inori and Jamie to title badge level 10, unlocking new skill slots for those four.  This one score challenge created more title badge 10 holders than everything I'd done before.

I've finished the original arc of Octopath Traveler 0, avenging the destroyers of my city.  It's a great game.  What impresses me most is how they reuse assets from the first two games, the layouts of all the cities, the music, etc., while still producing an original game with an original plot.  Maybe more games should use this model, in order to lower production costs while still producing an entertaining product.

Futamata Ren'ai read in full:

I'm now fully caught up with the English-translated Ren'ai visual novel series.  The first one I read, Karichaimashita, is still the best, all because of how adorable Hasumi is, but Futamata Ren'ai is the second best of them.  As expected, the individual routes were almost entirely sexual content with very little romance or plot.  I do think Yua's route was a bit more nuanced and positive though.  I grew to like her more during her specific route than I had during the common route.  The most important thing is I finished reading a visual novel I'd recommended to others, which makes me not a hypocrite.

Since the release of Tenpure! was delayed, my next visual novel will be Happiness 2, which has been waiting in my backlog forever.  However, I suspect Octopath Traveler 0 will take up most of my time and Happiness 2 will stay waiting.

The Release that Witch Chinese animation ended at the random number of 8 episodes, well short of the normal 12-ep runs that Japan sticks to.  I added a wish for a second season of it to my wishlist, and now the long wait begins.  If Release that Witch doesn't get a second season, I'll have to remove it from my rankings, because my rankings are for tv-series length anime, not movie-length anime.  But it can stay there for now until another great anime comes along that can reasonably surpass it.  Maybe the summer season will have a nice surprise like Witch Hat Atelier surprised this spring.

With some free quartz and free Golden Week celebration rolls, I got the unison Karen SS Memoria I've been waiting for, rococo Sumomo to limit break level 3, and two more mementos -- hacker Yuki and king Ruka -- to max.  I can't deny hacker Yuki and king Ruka's strength, since they scored higher against the dark element score challenge than my standard dark squad (which supposedly has a much higher rating).  So they deserve at least a little support.  The moment I got unison Karen I gave her an eternal daphne, maxed out her memento, and stuck her in my strongest squad, the critical penetration squad.  She's both a breaker and a blaster, and both her special attacks are critical penetration techniques.  This is the first blaster in the game with the critical penetration skill, she's an absolute necessity to my squad.  Imp Yayoi already made my critical penetration squad insane, but with unison Karen's help the sky is the limits.  Basically, in my experience, every squad needs a healer/defender/admiral (one of those), a blaster, a breaker, an attacker, a buffer and a debuffer.  Whenever you stray from that balanced lineup your damage starts going down and your resilience to the enemy's attacks also starts suffering.  All this time my critical penetration squad lacked a blaster, which is what allowed my plot squad, 31-A, my primary fire squad, to stay as my premier squad.  But now they've got some real competition.  If I got unison Karen and imp Yayoi some limit breaks it wouldn't even be close.

On my critical penetration squad, shrine maiden Risa is my healer/buffer, unison Karen is my blaster/breaker, imp Yayoi is my breaker/buffer/attacker, phantom thief Jamie is my buffer/debuffer/breaker, fox Miya is my buffer/debuffer, and samurai Inori is my pure attacker.  If there's one character I could replace with someone stronger, it would be Inori.  But samurai Inori is stronger than rococo Sumomo, another critical penetration attacker, so for now her job is secure.  It's just that these days a lot of characters can serve as two roles, while Inori is still only serving one.

All the money I spent up until now wasn't in vain.  The money I spent on unison Karen and imp Yayoi have now paid off in a miracle squad.

I now have 2 limit break level 3 Seira SS Memorias and I like them both, so I figured it was about time to promote her to my wonderful hall of fame.  Simultaneously, I like the new Heaven Burns Red song 'This Game Needs Guns,' so I made that Seira's personal theme song.  This gets my wonderful playlist up to 1812.  Seira is beautiful, strong, and I totally sympathize with her favorite hobby of 'shipping' various relationships around the base.  There hasn't been a Seira-specific event yet, but I'm sure it will be great when it happens.

Lunar 2 Remastered beaten:

Apparently there's postgame content but I just looked up the ending cinematic online because I can't be bothered to play this game any longer.  Beating Zophar and bringing world peace is good enough for me.  The trick to defeating Zophar is White Dragon Protect.  Zophar keeps pounding the party with magic attacks every turn, so the only way to limit his damage output is to put a magic-cancel barrier on every character every turn.  Then the healer can keep up with his physical attacks and your party stays alive.  The only way to keep up Dragon Protect on the party every turn for such a long fight is to equip Lemina with it, because she has the highest mana pool, and then give her a constant supply of silver lights which restore her mp to full whenever she's looking tired.  Luckily Zophar's hp is low enough that I still had some silver lights to spare when he croaked.

Zophar has a hand that sucks away at your mana supply, but it can be quickly chopped off with Hiro's triple slash, so that's the first priority in the boss fight.  The second priority is to kill the hand that keeps casting all that devastating magic, but sadly it's only vulnerable to magic attacks, and Lemina, the magic attacker, has to stay busy casting Dragon Protect.  Which meant Hiro had to deal with this hand, too, using super cyclone, an ability that's hardly his forte.

I lost to the boss multiple times before I won, he's not an easy encounter at level 51.  In fact I lost to most of the bosses in the game before I worked out how to win them.  The whole game wasn't forgiving.  The bosses in Lunar 2 all come after long and grueling dungeons that sap away at your mana supply and you never get to restore your mana before boss fights.  The same was true of Zophar, I used 14 star lights (mana potions) just to get my mana back before the boss encounter.  And you can only hold 20 in your inventory.

On another bright note, it turns out Hikaru Midorikawa (the voice of Kyosuke in Little Busters!) is the Japanese voice for the protagonist, Hiro.  The Japanese audio feature of the remaster keeps paying dividends.  I also learned that Noriyuki Iwadare was the composer of Lunar 2, not Isao Mizoguchi like I had long assumed.  Isao was a lowly underling while Iwadare did the real creative work.  It makes sense because the music of Lunar 1 and Lunar 2 is very similar in style and tone.  It turns out it was by the same composer, so of course it sounded similar.  This means Noriyuki gets all the points credit in my music hall of fame for Lunar 1 and 2, suddenly making him my 11th favorite composer of all time with 444 points in all.

It took years to beat these two remastered games from the time I bought them.  I always had something better to do, until now.  I finally found some time in my schedule to stroll back down memory lane.  I love the anime style of Lunar 2, it's the same 90's style I was praising in Samurai Spirits.  Studio Gonzo did the animation, a studio that went out of business long ago, but was legendary during its time.

My main complaints with the game are how pointless and repetitive the dialogue with npc's was, and the gameplay.  It's never made clear what your equipment or spells do.  In fact, you aren't even allowed to know the stats of equipment in stores until you buy them.  And there's all sorts of hidden drawbacks to spells that are never included in the tooltip, like that your attack and defense buffs gradually wear off over time.  How much time?  Nobody knows.  It's never made clear how long the buffs last.  How can I plan around spells when I don't even know what they do?  Heaven Burns Red gives detailed descriptions of what every ability does down to 1% changes, with clear descriptions of how many uses they have or how many turns they last.  It's just an infinitely better turn-based combat system.

One ability, Blue Dragon Rise, literally in the tooltip says 'unleash your fighting spirit.'  It doesn't buff any known stat, so nobody knows what it actually does.  And yet it costs 14 mp and a turn to cast.  A buff that nobody knows what it buffs.  A mystery that's lasted 30 years since the game came out and still nobody knows.

Oh well, everyone knows Lunar isn't about gameplay, it's about the anime cut scenes and music.  And those were splendid, just as I remember them being.  Now I can play Octopath Traveler 0 which I'm sure has a much more modern, complicated, yet well-explained combat system.

I also finished Kirame's route, so all the girls I included in my wonderful hall of fame, I've now properly done their content.  I don't endorse things I'm not willing to do myself.  There's only one route left in Futamata Ren'ai, Rui's route, a girl I really don't care for, but I'll do it just to finish the game.