Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance beaten:

For the past week or so I've been playing Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance.  The game originally came out on the Gamecube but now with modern technology can be emulated on a computer.  The game isn't remotely as good as Three Houses.  There's no divine pulse feature, so if you make any little mistake anytime during the stage -- and stages can involve 20 characters and over two hours of decision making -- you can lose a character permanently and thus have to restart the stage from the beginning.  This is maddening.  It's infuriating.  Especially when it isn't even a mistake but just bad luck -- an enemy gets a crit or a hit they shouldn't have and whoops, there goes your two hours of efforts down the drain.

I beat the game on the highest difficulty, so maybe that's what made it so impossible to win stages, but still, with just a few divine pulses I could have fixed everything and won so much faster.  The earlier, easier parts of a stage eat up time as I redo the exact same moves as before, over and over, as I try to reach the challenging, later part of a stage which is actually tripping me up.  All those earlier segments redone are complete wastes of my time.

There are other problems with the game -- characters you barely know walk into camp and are much stronger than the characters you've been leveling and nurturing all this time.  It feels so impotent.  You work so hard to make a character strong and they're too weak for the later stages anyway -- instead you have to use these new people who just waltz in at twice your party's level.  There were way too many characters, you couldn't deploy even a third of them in battle, which meant you barely knew any of them.

The graphics are quite good, not as good as Three Houses but plenty good enough.  The music was awful, not a single catchy tune.  (Three Houses was full of great music).  The plot was okay, though much simpler and duller than Three Houses.  There's an evil king trying to spread war and chaos to unseal a dark god, and it's up to us to stop him.  Yeah, that's about as simple as it gets.

The gameplay was super fun.  Using the right weapons and right units against the right opponents and winning fight after fight makes you feel so smart and capable.  Keeping your characters equipped even as your weapons are constantly breaking makes you feel efficient and economical.  Building battle lines that stretch halfway across the map and defending yourself against overwhelming numbers makes you feel like Napoleon.  If this gameplay came with a few divine pulses it would've been perfect.

There's a direct sequel to Path of Radiance involving the same setting and characters, Radiant Dawn.  So that's my next objective to beat.  The highest difficulty setting I can choose for this game is 'normal' so it should be a lot easier than Path of Radiance was.

In other news, Index GT volume 7 is fully translated now.  I'll finish reading it soon enough.  Then I can read the newest SAO volume 25 which is also available.  Tons of fun stuff to do right now.

Russia has only now realized it doesn't have enough troops to win the war, something I've been saying since day one.  Hopefully their new mobilization, which is still way too few troops, will be enough to stop the constant losing of more territory to Ukrainians who have promised to jail anyone who voted in this referendum (which is over 50% of the population now) for treason, even if they voted against joining Russia.  The bizarreness of Ukraine's evil really can't be fathomed.

It actually reminds me of America -- the Republicans are the stupid party, never doing what it takes to win, while the Democrats are the evil party, maliciously hellbent on doing whatever it takes to destroy America.  It all goes back to that Yeats poem, the 'Second Coming.'  "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

The ending to Extreme Hearts promised it would be continued.  There's no second season announcement, but there will be eventually.  Like Sailor Moon Cosmos, it said 'to be continued,' and then was continued eventually.  The same will happen for Extreme Hearts, just nobody knows when.  I'll be eagerly awaiting their performance in the Nationals now that they've won the Kanagawa Regional tournament.  Especially with this second season coming, this series has cemented its place in my top 200 anime rankings.  It was splendid, though poorly animated, from start to finish.  The plot, characters, and intense sports competitions were so good it didn't need many frames.

Tokyo Mewmew New is also getting a second season, which is great news.  I like the romance and the action (with rousing music).  It's still not enough to reach my rankings, though.  After all, the previous Mewmew had something like 50 episodes and it wasn't enough to make my rankings.

The new Rurouni Kenshin anime is, as I feared, another remake of the same old content.  Maybe, someday, this new Kenshin series will reach the Enishi arc, but I doubt it.  It will probably end at Kyoto like all the previous versions.  It's the Kenshin curse.

Grimgar's latest book was decent but as always very negative.  More people died, and they still aren't any closer to saving Shihoru.  How bad can a situation get?