For whatever reason, I, too, went down the anime hole and watched a bunch more anime this year and last year than I ever did before. However, I went one step further down the Japanese pop culture/weeb hold and started reading a bunch of manga, which I'm pretty sure condemns me to an even deeper circle of hell. I figure I might as well vent here, as well, if that's cool!
I completed some sort of rite of passage and watched Neon Genesis Evangelion this year, and after years of "it's so crazy and weird, bro," I have to say I found it... surprisingly straightforward? I'd say it actually harmed my enjoyment, since I spent a lot of it wondering, "Alright, when does it get crazy?" when I'd say it only really gets 'out there' in the last few episodes. Still, I enjoyed its "this is probably what would actually happen if you put a 14-year-old in a robot and made them fight weird aliens" business, the psychological examination of the various anime character tropes, and the general misery and horrible-ness of it. I still haven't watched End of Evangelion. I should probably do that.
Konosuba is pretty funny. I've seen is described as anime Always Sunny, which, after actually having watched all of that this year, is pretty accurate.
I skipped the BS and just watched Fate/Zero and the 2014 Unlimited Blade Works anime, and I have to say I enjoyed both. I also read the prologue of the VN on LP Archive and didn't read farther than that, so... yeah.
Samurai Champloo, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: 2nd Gig, Recovery of an MMO Junkie, Made in Abyss: Not a ton to say, other than I thought all those were pretty good.
I watched the first season of My Hero Academia and enjoyed it, although I'm now torn between continuing the anime and starting the manga.
I'm currently about halfway through Revolutionary Girl Utena. It took me a while to warm up to it, but at this point, I'm all in for its crazy melodramatic rock opera business - it helps that a lot of said rock opera music isprettyawesome.
To speak to manga: I read all of Berserk last year (as in, 2016), and I have to say: Berserk is pretty fuckin' awesome. The art is amazing, from horrible monsters to beautiful natural settings to insane violence. What surprised me is that the writing is actually pretty great: the characters have a lot of really interesting development, and there's actually a good amount of depth underneath what could very easily be seen as some over-the-top edgy shit if one were to just glance at it.
I also read all of Monster (which is pretty great), Fullmetal Alchemist (which is also pretty awesome; I also never finished Brotherhood, so it was my first time seeing the 'original' story), xxxHolic (which I thought was good, but kinda got a lot less interesting by the end), and am currently reading Fist of the North Star (which is awesome in terms of over-the-top violence, but I find kind of lacking in the character department, especially compared to something like Berserk), Kengan Asura (which is a super brutal martial arts manga), and Eyeshield 21 (which is about football and I find to be pretty good, despite my negative interest in football; it helps that the art is good, apparently it's the One Punch Man artist?)
I hope this wasn't absurdly long (it probably is)! Happy New Year!
Persona 5 is pretty great. I think some parts of it are kinda weak, looking back (there's definitely some stuff in the plot I could point to) but I think it's still pretty fantastic on the whole.
I played the first Nier (Nier Replicant, I guess) for the first time right before Automata, and... I think I liked the first one more? It's entirely possible that it's just because I played it first, but looking back, I can't help but feel that a lot of stuff from Nier - the characters, the music, the story - stuck with me more than Automata. I still like Automata a lot, and I want to give it a replay at some point with some distance, but... yeah. I just thought that was kinda odd.
I really wish I played Nioh. It sounds pretty fantastic, and I'm definitely looking forward to grabbing the complete edition at some point.
Merry Christmas! Also I'd totally read an anime blog.
@marokai: If I may continue shilling shamelessly, I would say to grab the PC version of Cold Steel. It's got the usual better visuals/frame rate/load times and junk, but it also has a turbo mode that speeds everything up. That game (and the series in general, really) is something of a slow burn, so being able to speed through some of the longer dungeons and battles would maybe help power through some of the slower bits.
If your PC can run it (and since it's also on the fuckin' Vita, where I played it, it probably can), it definitely seemed like the way to play that game.
Once a year for the past three or so years, I've resubscribed to FFXIV, thinking I'd get way into it, and I always end up stopping after like, a week or two. Some of it is just that I think I'm maybe done with MMOs for good - I actually resubbed to WoW on a whim a while ago, and after a few days of mindlessly chasing objective markers, not really paying attention to anything and just kind of vegging out, I had a very profound "what am I even doing" moment where it all felt really... pointless, I guess? I think I uninstalled it a day or two later, and actually didn't play many games for a while after that. Maybe that was more profound than I realized.
To get back to FFXIV, though, while I never really made it past level 20, I definitely felt some of what you mentioned even that early on. All the gear pretty much seemed the same, and I was really bummed out there was no kind of character building or any kind of customization. The old WoW-style talent trees of "put in a point and get +1% to some garbage stat" probably isn't ideal, but at least it feels like I'm doing something with my character. Combat was really boring too - I actually was just pushing 1, then 2, over and over and over again. If I gave it more time, I probably would get way into FFXIV if I made it over that hump, but I have a bunch of other games I want to play, so... yeah.
I'm also kind of mildly miffed whenever people bring out the "never been a better time etc." stuff. There certainly is tons of great stuff going on, and I played a ton of amazing games this year and there are still more I want to play, but there's also a lot of really scummy, lame shit going on. If nothing else, I don't think it's that much better or worse than many other times to be playing games.
Mass Effect as a whole feels like this representation of the course of BioWare over the last generation, with the first one being very much the janky, RPG-ass RPG you would have expected them to make, to the second one whittling down a lot of the RPG elements and streamlining everything (likely to chase some sort of mainstream), to the third one basically feeling like it was 90% of the way to just being a military-sci third person shooter. I feel like you could even look at stuff like the armor and weapon designs to see that shift; I remember a lot more curves to the weapons and bubble-y designs to the armor in the first game, while in 3 everything was all harsh lines and the kind of space marine armor plating that wouldn't be out of place in, like, Gears of War or something.
I often wonder if I would like the trilogy as much if I replayed it now (or if I were playing it for the first time) as I did when the games came out. I imagine the jank with the first one has only gotten worse with age, and even removed from the ending, I really didn't like 3 all that much, mostly due to that shift in tone. It's made me think that maybe I only really like Mass Effect 2. Still, for a setting with so much potential, it's sad to see it go out like this.
Like you, I have spent a lot of time this year watching loads more anime than I ever did before. Also like you, I played Danganronpa earlier this year! My thoughts pretty much mirror your own, especially the part about not really liking many of the characters. I did decide to grind my way through that post-game clicker thing (mostly while watching TV, 'cause it's real boring otherwise), and while I feel like some of the characters fare better having seen their personal stories through, I still wasn't that keen on many of them.
I'm half-tempted to just look up spoilers for Horizon and see what the deal with that story is, since I know I'll never play it. I haven't even played it, so I shouldn't be too mean, but apart from robot dinosaurs, almost everything about that game seemed so... rote? Played out, I guess? I had a similar feeling when watching preview gameplay of ME: A and seeing how it went all open-world with objective markers everywhere. Despite it not even having been released yet, I felt like I had already played that game a dozen times.
Speaking of Mass Effect, Andromeda sure seems like a thing, huh? Honestly, I felt pretty done with Mass Effect after 3, so I really wasn't interested in more Mass Effect even before Andromeda being... well, bad, it seems. If you do stick with it, I look forward to you tearing into it.
@countdedede: I'd imagine Nocturne would be doubly hard to get into considering all the quality-of-life improvements that have come up in that series over the years, like being able to pick what skills are inherited in fusions.
Oh well. I made it through SMT IV, so hopefully Nocturne won't be too bad.
I played this around the time it came out (which was five years ago, oh god) and remember... pretty much nothing about it. The most lasting feeling I had from this game was a sense of "Why did I play that?" whenever I would see it brought up. Guess I had much more free time to kill in high school.
Your 'junk food' analogy seems very apt, in that it's only really satisfying 'in the moment.' I used to stick to stuff like Amalur - that kind of 'this is fine, I guess' type of game for when I just needed to kill time - but I feel like I've moved away from that a bit. As I've gotten older and felt the unrelenting march of time weigh down on me, I've been pushing myself towards trying new stuff and playing types of games I normally wouldn't play in search of something more memorable. I hate the feeling that I'm playing something just to waste time, so I've been trying to resist the lure of 'vegging out' in favor of spending my free time in a more memorable fashion. I probably worry about that too much. Oh well.
What was this about? Amalur? Right. Your description of the general story and combat squares with my limited memory, with the combat getting really easy by the end, characters feeling like they were reading from a wiki, the 'WoW-like" way I sprinted from fetch/kill quest to fetch/kill quest, and a story of which I remember absolutely nothing. You fight a big monster at the end, or at some point, or something? That's really specific.
Nice blog!
(also I really liked lurking and reading your blogs and was super happy when you came back)
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