Saying Goodbye to 2018

MAN ALIVE it’s been a taxing year! I had so many plans for stuff I wanted to get done, and hardly any of them happened. But I will get one more project out before all is said and done. You’re going to have to wait just a little bit longer before you get to see it though.

If you’re familiar with my past works, then telling you that this is in keeping with them should let you guess what this project will be. All else I will say is that the character I was working with this time without a doubt has the biggest set I’ve ever drawn. I mean, I thought Euphemia was pretty big, but this one definitely takes the cake.

I’ll get into full details on that project once it’s out. As for other topics, I do have a few story ideas percolating at the moment. Nothing really finalized yet though, but I hope they’ll get somewhere by the start of next year. 

I did get a chapter out for Cromwell Universe a little before Halloween. I am cautiously optimistic that I can get the following chapter up in January or February. If I can do that, I should be able to get a couple more done not long after that.

I also have a brand new story in the works. It is Geass related, so my hope against hope is that I can at least roll out the first chapter of that to coincide with the “season 3” movie in January. I also have an image for the project. I mostly finished that one back in September, but I was holding back on it specifically for this timing. Even if I can’t complete the chapter in time, I will release the image in time for the Geass movie release in Japan anyway.

I’m kinda excited for the story I’m doing. When I originally started the idea, I was hesitant since it picks up after the anime. I of course knew about the movie at the time, and so I was somewhat concerned about whether the idea I had for a narrative would be overly truncated by the movie. Even when I borrow from existing stories, or play my stories off of others, I try my best to be mindful of what elements of the original I choose to use, eliminate, or modify. My goal isn’t necessarily to avoid these things, but to be able to cogently state, if asked, which elements I did deliberately utilize, and which were merely circumstance or coincidence.

Good news for me is that so far it doesn’t look like I have much to worry about. It doesn’t look like my plans cross much unique territory that the movie will apparently cross, so I don’t likely need to change much. Part of that has to do with he fact that the movie is a season 3 to the recap movies which did change some key elements of the anime’s story. Since I haven’t seen the recap movies, I can’t comment on how much is fact and how much is overreaction from fans, but the prevailing opinion seems to be that the movies are better off considered entirely separate from the series – an alternate universe perhaps. Regardless, I made my choices based on the series, not the movie, so any similarities or deviations are along those lines, not the movie’s. As a result, anything the movie does is more likely to be coincidental to what I do in the story.

Either way, in January before the movie drops, I plan to do a series of posts about the story I’ve got planned. Nothing staggeringly new or uncharted, but it’s still pretty interesting direction I think. Is Lelouch alive? He’s always been alive… in our hearts. But no, story wise he’s dead as a door nail. If I had to guess right now, the movie is likely to cover a group of Lelouch/Zero devotees inspired by his actions and zealously pursuing a warped version of his ideals, hoping to use Nunnally as the figurehead, or else blaming her for his downfall. Narratively, that only really works if he’s actually dead, else it stands to reason that if he had faked his death and were in hiding he would come back to save Nunnally again, leading to a rather cheap reunion on the backend with a “sorry for faking my murder right in front of your eyes and not saying anything for ‘X’ years. But you’ll forgive me since I’m your favorite brother who keeps saving you.” Not to mention it stalls the story’s hope for progression if you find some excuse to bring him back to save the day. That’s one of Gundam’s problem with the Universal Century and it’s incessant revival of Char in one form or another. But, since this is Sunrise we’re talking about in both cases, that is entirely a plausible route for them to go. Back when Geass originally aired I questioned whether Sunrise wanted it to become another Gundam-esque type property – a never-ending, constantly expanding, franchise centered around another masked anti-hero, and semi-realistic giant robots in stylized battles with a political war story.

Gacha games have also eaten up some of my time this past year. Really it’s been this past 7 or 8 months. I started playing Fate/Grand Order around April or May, and in August I picked up Azur Lane too. FGO was deliberate – I had been hearing about it forever, wasn’t sure I wanted to take a stab, and finally took a jump. AL was more of an accident. I saw it was coming out of Beta, didn't look into it at all, thought the title was a localization of Kantai Collection, found out it wasn’t.

I’ve been considering putting together a guide on one or both games. I’ve pretty much decided against doing one for FGO just because it’s just so huge a property already, there are dozens of people with blogs and YouTube and Twitch videos out there about what’s going on in the game and how you should play, I don’t know that I would end up doing much to help even a single person. As for AL, I can only really provide some generic stuff that most folks can either find elsewhere or figure out for themselves. Without getting into a whole rundown of the game and its mechanics, the stuff someone would really need to know is either already out there from someone else who has looked at it in way more detail than me, or as such would require far more detailed analysis than I have time to do at the moment. If you are interested, let me know and I’ll put some info together. Just let me say ahead of time – tier lists are mostly worth less than the not-paper they’re written on, and you really don’t need to spend one red cent on this game to be excellent at it – not just “good” but “excellent.”

I already pre-ordered Ace Combat 7 since summer, so when it releases in January, I will also be spending some time on that. Unlike gacha games, I should be able to take my leisurely time getting through it without worrying I’ll miss some event that drops some critical plane or weapon or something (speaking of; ‘Azure Sky’ when?).

I’ve also started playing Girls Frontline. I am very, very, passive in that one right now. I picked up that game because it had a collab with BlazBlue and Guilty Gear where Noel and Elphelt Valentine could be gained as playable units. Unfortunately, I picked up the game about a week too late, and I couldn’t get to the point where I could reasonably challenge the event and aim for them. I got close, but ended up probably a few days short.

My impression overall is the game isn’t terribly compelling, but maybe just enough so to keep me around. I won’t get into a full-on review, but I’ll say that it has some fundamental parts I view as flaws, and therefore leaves it as a game in want of polish that I don’t know it’ll get. About three weeks or so in of very, very casual play, and I’m already close to finishing all of the available story – of a game that’s a year old already. Yet my best team is only just at around level 60 with only one of them with a skill that is past level 1… all the way to 2. Of the three gacha games I’m currently involved in, it is definitely in last place among the three, but it’s not without its merits. I could see myself sticking with it, but it’s one of those tenuous things where if I have to stop logging in for a couple days to play it for whatever reason, I probably would have trouble picking it back up.

There's so much more I could talk about - it has been quite a while after all. But I'll check out for now. Right now I plan on dropping the new art project either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, so beck back around then. As usual, I'll have a dull breakdown on the reasoning for how I came up with the project, details on certain choices and aspects I like. Since this is a first for this particular character, I'll also include a description of just who they are.  Until then, take it easy.