Lover of heavy metal, high-word-count books, dark chocolate, and dad jokes.
Using Japanese names for consistency with database.
*=highly recommended
School/rom/com (and/or):
Ansatsu Kyoushitsu*
Asobi Asobase
Bamboo Blade
Cardcaptor Sakura*
D-Frag!
Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun*
Kannagi
Kokoro Connect
Machikado Mazoku
Shokugeki no Souma (S1 and S2)
Yagate Kimi ni Naru*
Slice of Life:
GJ-bu
Gochuumon wa Usagi Desu ka?*
Hanayamata*
Ichigo Mashimaro*
K-on*
Lucky☆Star
Mitsuboshi Colors*
New Game!
Non Non Biyori*
Sansha Sanyou*
Shounen Maid
Slow Start*
Sore ga Seiyuu!
Tanaka-kun wa Itsumo Kedaruge
Yama no Susume
Yuru Yuri
Sports/game:
Baby Steps
Chihayafuru*
Haikyuu!!*
Hikaru no Go*
Initial D
Major*
One Outs
Prince of Tennis
Saki
Yowamushi Pedal
Action/adventure:
D.Gray-man
Digimon Tamers
Dragon Ball
InuYasha
Kill la Kill*
Mushibugyou
One Piece* (go to onepace.net if you want spare yourself from the horrible pacing)
One Punch Man
Shijou Saikyou no Deshi Kenichi
World Trigger
Yuu☆Yuu☆Hakusho*
Seinen/serious:
Baccano*
Black Lagoon
Fate/Zero*
Higashi no Eden
Gankutsuou
Gyakkyou Burai Kaiji: Ultimate Survivor*
Mnemosyne: Mnemosyne no Musume-tachi
Monster*
Phantom: Requiem for the Phantom*
Psycho-Pass
Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu*
Sci-fi/Fantasy:
Akatsuki no Yona
Garo: Honoo no Kokuin
Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu*
Houseki no Kuni
Made in Abyss
Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha*
Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica*
Senki Zesshou Symphogear*
Shingeki no Bahamut
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann*
Tokyo Ravens
Yuuki Yuuna wa Yuusha de Aru
00 Gundam
Other:
Girls und Panzer
Inferno Cop*
Pripara
Shirobako*
Sora Yori mo Tooi Basho*
The Idolm@ster
Yuri Kuma Arashi
Movies:
Koe no Katachi*
Mononoke Hime
Ookami Kodomo no Ame to Yuki
Perfect Blue*
Sakasama no Patema
Stranger: Mukou Hadan*
10 - Masterpiece. Personal favorite.
9 - Great. Thoroughly enjoyable and sets an example for other works to follow.
8 - Very good. Would re-watch.
7 - Good. A solid show I would recommend without reservation.
6 - Decent. Worth watching despite some small issues.
5 - Satisfactory. Good for passing the time if you have nothing else to do.
4 - Not good. Has issues I can't overlook.
3 - Bad. Unengaging and/or poorly written.
2 - Awful. Can still be enjoyable but for the wrong reasons.
1 - Appalling. Should not be watched for any reason.
Many of my scores are old and my tastes have changed substantially over time, which is why I try to record the dates I watched each show. As such, it's best to not take my scores too seriously. I imagine a lot of what I've seen would get a lower score if I were to watch them again.
In my opinion:
ACII>Origins>IV>Brotherhood>III>Odyssey>Revelations>Syndicate=Rogue>Unity>AC
FFXIII>XIII-2>X>Type-0>XV>LR>VI>X-2>IV>III
Totori>Meruru>L&S>Ayesha=Firis>Ryza 2>Ryza>Lulua=Rorona+>E&L>Shallie>Sophie
Xillia>Berseria>X2>Symphonia>Vesperia>Zestiria>Graces F
Star Ocean: The Last Hope International
Tier 1 trophies:
Collect all weapon data
Collect all monster data (including post-game bosses)
Open all treasure chests in a single playthrough (missable)
Complete all 201 quests in a single playthrough (missable)
See all character endings (finnicky)
Complete the Colosseum
Earn 100 victories in class 100 bunny racing (put simply, a boring waste of 10+ hours)
Complete the game on normal, medium, and hard (chaos) difficulties (no stacking, the game is ~50 hours long)
Tier 2:
Defeat the boss of the first post-game dungeon.
Defeat the Ethereal Queen (EQ) at the end of the second post-game dungeon.
Some things you should know about this last dungeon is that it
a) is randomly generated
b) has a over a dozen powerful bosses
c) takes 4-6 hours to get through depending on your luck
d) if you leave you have to start again from the beginning
e) HAS NO SAVE POINTS (this is for ps3 and xbox 360, so no rest mode)
Now, to beat the EQ you need to have your characters at max level (255. You should be around 60-80 when you get to the final story boss) and the best gear possible by using the item customizer to combine a litany of attributes on all your gear for each character (you need a guide for this); the most important equip item is found with a merchant that randomly spawns in this dungeon and will cost you an obscene amount of money which you may not have enough of even this far at the end of the game.
Having spent dozens of hours on the setup, fighting the EQ (with 13,000,000 HP. Your basic attacks do damage in the thousands) requires a careful strategy (ok, so there are a couple. Here's the one I used) which entails your healer staying the hell out of the way on the far side of the rather large battlefield and using items to keep the aggro of her (few things are this terrifying), all the while being careful not to get hit by a one-hit KO blast (yes, even with the gear) which covers HALF OF THE DAMN FIELD. After a nerve-wrecking 10 or so minutes this particular trophy (because xbox players would have gotten the red ring of death in lieu of an achievement) is yours. If you lose, say goodbye to several hours of your life.
Now onto the difficult stuff.
Tier 3:
Create all 321 items in the item creator.
The game does not keep track of which items you created, only the number, so you'll need everything written down to keep track of them. Several items are missable and you will be farming like crazy for all the materials.
Oh, remember the Ethereal Queen? Well, she drops an item you need and you need five of them.
That's right, you need to defeat the Ethereal Queen FIVE times. By the way, after defeating her the first time her health increases to 26,000,000 and beating her a second time raises it to 39,000,000 HP (this is on normal, I regretfully did this on the next difficulty up at 50.7 million HP); each battle takes about 30 minutes at this point. As a consolation, the dungeon is endless and she appears more often after the first encounter (initially floor 20 then every even number floor afterwards), but you're likely to run low on items by the second battle and you lose all progress if you die.
Tier 4:
Congratulations, after about 300 hours you have finally reached the halfway point.
.
.
.
And this is where I gave up, because this was the fun part and what’s left is mind-numbingly boring.
What is left, you may ask, that could be so tedious? Oh, just a simple task of obtaining all battle trophies for each character. How many of those are there? Only 100 for each character. And how many characters are there? Nine.
There are 9 playable characters. That’s 900 mundane tasks you have to complete in battle which more often than not involve grinding.
True, more than half of these will have been acquired passively by this point and they carry over separate playthroughs, but progress for each does not carry over. Examples are as follows:
First, we have some fun ones such as deal 99,999 damage without a weapon, jump a total of 8,848 meters, win a battle in exactly two minutes, deal exactly 65,536 damage, use taunt on the Ethereal Queen ten times (R.I.P.), and, my personal favorite, deal at least 90,000 points of overkill damage.
Next, we have the trophies where you have to defeat each character’s “shadow.” These are difficult bosses that appear at specific points of the game and each character needs to land the finishing blow on his or her copy. Several of these are a good way into the second post-game dungeon and if the wrong character lands the final hit you have to restart from the beginning of the dungeon and spend several hours to try again. Also, one of two characters leaves your party permanently mid-game, so you need to do two separate playthroughs for post-game content, which will take several dozen hours after completing the story to get your party ready for the boss you couldn’t get in the other playthrough.
Now comes the hardest part. Several characters need to land the finishing blow on specific enemies within a time limit. The big one is having Lymle land the final blow to the Ethereal Queen within ten minutes. This is a pretty tight constraint, but you may be thinking the developers chose a good character to do this with.
Well, about that.
She is a decent healer at the start of the game but quickly becomes replaceable, and her attack power is mediocre compared to everyone else (i.e. she sucks). Fortunately, you can switch out reserve characters mid-battle, so you can fight the EQ as usual with your normal lineup until her health is low enough.
To summarize, you have to get the EQ’s health down really low without killing her (in her first form), make all of your characters stop moving so they don't accidentally get the kill and pray things don’t fall to shit, swap out a character with Lymle and attack like crazy, and all of this needs to be within 10 very stressful minutes. Screw up and you’ll have to spend ~6 hours for another chance for this tiny window of opportunity. Good luck.
If you’ve reached this point, congratulations, you have achieved more than most gamers and have likely lost several years off your life due to all of the stress this gave you. All that is left now is a peaceful homestretch.
Did I say peaceful? I meant soul-crushingly dull.
How bad could it be, you ask? Well, two specific characters need to land the finishing blow on 30,000 enemies, that’s 60,000 total. I played through the game and defeated the EQ five times and all the enemies between controlling just one character and I was only at about 8,000 for that character.
That’s 180+ hours for this particular playthrough and only 27% done with one character.
Focusing just on this in the best spot, it’s gonna take up to 100 hours of mindless grinding to complete.
I think that speaks for itself.
For the masochists that have completed all of this, you have my eternal respect and pity.
“Discipline is the greatest weapon against the self-righteous. We must measure the virtue of our own controlled response when answering the atrocities of fanatics. And yet, let it not be claimed, in our own oratory of piety, that we are without our own fanatics; for the self-righteous breed wherever tradition holds, and most often when there exists the perception that tradition is under assault. Fanatics can be created as easily in an environment of moral decay (whether real or imagined) as in an environment of legitimate inequity or under the banner of a common cause.
Discipline is as much facing the enemy within as the enemy before you; for without critical judgment, the weapon you wield delivers - and let us not be coy here - naught but murder. And its first victim is the moral probity of your cause.” ― Steven Erikson, The Bonehunters
All failures of the individual are the failure of society to provide the means by which they could have achieved success.
Corporations are just small governments but worse. The purpose of government, conceptually if not in practice for whatever examples come to mind, is the betterment of society and those who exist within it. Within a capitalist society, corporations exist specifically to accrue profit; all else is at best secondary, but usually all else is thrown out the window in the name of greed. Furthermore, democracy is used in government to ensure accountability of those in power to their constituency; corporations have at most regulations and unions to empower those on the bottom rungs, but ultimately what the boss says goes.
When governments are criticized, it's always do to its failure to respond to some perceived need, yet we need not look to hard to see the influence money has on appointed officials which motivates this behavior. Inherently, that money comes from the wealthy business owners who have exploited their position within a power structure in which they have no accountability to anything other than profit at any cost, including, most importantly, the exploitation of the workers that are the bedrock of the operation.
The point is this: all power hierarchies, no matter their form and so long as they exist, must be accountable to the least powerful groups within them, for tyranny anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere. Government is not the root problem but capitalism itself, and the solution is workplace democracy.
In order to a have a society without a government, the first step is to get rid of capitalism, for the needs of all inherently cannot be met if self-interest is the prevailing motivator in society.
"Woke" is just thought-terminating buzzword bigots use for anything that triggers them.
I came here to comment on the wonderful bookshelf with manga books that you posted in the forum. Looking at the pictures, I can see that it is very organized and well cared for, and I would love to build a bookshelf like this myself.
All Comments (13) Comments
Thanks for showing us your beautiful bookshelf!
That's so awesome! I'm hoping for some cool recommendations from you :)
Happy New Year!! Hope it's a good one for you!
That's good though, I also heard the manga was really good so I'm excited for that.