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First, I finally installed the reply plugin. Now I can reply to you. Yes. I know. I am a genius.

Second my email address was listed incorrectly this whole time. I’ve now corrected it. Apparently anyone who tried to email me before was getting some random guy somewhere.

For the past week I was doing characters sketches in Mabinogi. There are tons, so I’m going to only try to post the ones I liked the best. WARNING: this post is still very long. (If anyone knows of a plugin I can use that lets me “cut” like Livejournal, let me know, prease).

This last one features NPCs from the main story line:

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I like the Namingway stories. During the Cheatingway story, it was cute to see Cecil order a glass of milk at the bar. Like a kid.

I’m currently getting my ass handed to me by the Dark Elf. Now I remember what a pain this fight was. Onward, ho.

Time for a mini-review.

Final Fantasy IV DS came out in English over the weekend. I purchased it after work yesterday and stayed up for ungodly hours just to get Cecil to Mysidia.

The game is good.

Here’s a rundown of the pros and cons if you care to know. I guess there are spoilers here, but not enough detail to ruin the game if you’ve never played it:

Pros:

• The voices fit the characters (for the most part), and more importantly the voice actors actually emote (see: ACTING! ).
• The script is extremely localized into “fancy fantasy novel paperback speech”, which is a lot better than braincell-destroying Engrish. I admit, I enjoy it a great deal.
• Yes. It’s SEH-CIL not SEE-CIL (yay)
• Spoony Bard lives.
• The newly rendered 3D world keeps the same feeling as the original flat 16-bit version. Even small details are kept.
• Mini games. So far I’m better at Rydia’s Math than Rosa’s Meditation D:
• Nice details like changing weapons, and you can read a person’s thoughts if you have them as party leader (DK Cecil’s thoughts: “Oh Rosa… It’s so good to have you near again…” XDDDDD LOL SOFTY)
• The music

Cons:

• The mistranslated names from the SNES “Final Fantasy II” are kept in this version. Gilbert is still Edward, Cain is still Kain. Though, I imagine they actually did this intentionally for old fans who bought the game for nostalgia purposes.
• There are some voices that I could do without. Anna’s for one.
• The cut-scenes are unbalanced. Some seem like exact replicas of the original; the bombing of Damcyan looked just as lame as it originally did. While other scenes have nice camera angles, direction, better physics, and added dialogue. The Leviathan scene was excellent; the dragon opens his mouth to swallow Cecil and then in the next scene he’s in the “dragon’s throat” near Mysidia (see map). Nicely done.
• Not sure if this is really a con, but this game is hard. Yes, it seems even more difficult than the snes “hard-version”. But that means debuffs and buffs are actually useful now.

This game owns me for the next week or so.

Stayed up 4 more hours to color it again.

Suck it, Steve Jobs, HURRRRRRRRR

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I just wasted a whole evening on an illustration that somehow my mac ate into little pieces. Don’t talk to me about macs, because I hate mine right now. Also, I would like my night back.

Ruairi is one of the characters from the mainstream story of Mabinogi. He’s a redheaded swordsman who develops a slight emo complex… yadayada

This was inspired when someone said another character is, in fact, more attractive than Ruairi. I said take off his robe and the two would be comparable. I then took it a step further and cunducted some 13 year old girl shenanigans by illustrating my argument.

Here you go:

I think my point was understood.

Here is a list of anime people have been asking me about. They link to not-so-legal episode streams. Please enjoy!

• Slayers Revolution
  The 2008 continuation of the classic series. It is every bit as awesome as you would imagine it would be.
• Natsume Yuujinchou (Natsume’s Book of Friends)
  A boy who can see spirits reconciles his grandmother’s past. Reminds me of Spirited Away somewhat.
• Antique Bakery
  Adventures of a bakery entrepreneur and an epically gay gourmet pastry chef. Awesome. But with substance, too? Oh yes. I came to watch this via Leigh’s recommendation of the manga.
• Chi’s Sweet Home
  A charming story about the life of a kitten and her new family. Having lived with cats before I can relate to it, and I imagine many others would. Each episode is about 5 minutes long.

I’ll post more if anything else comes up.

I forgot to mention this: Slayers Revolution mini review.

A few days ago I watched the first episode of the new series. It feels exactly like the original. Really, it’s as if no time has passed at all; the only difference is digital coloring. I highly recommend it :3

So this will be good if there is,
- Cecil
- Zeromus
- Tina
- Kefka

So far the trailers have not shown them. If not, it will be a crap game

Here are some Mabinogi Comics. Please enjoy :3