Neighboring Foreign Nostalgia

I sure have been keeping myself busy, pumping out reviews and bringing in news that really interests me here on this blog. It certainly feels nice getting things done and being productive, which is one of the goals I've had for myself when I started this blog. Of course, while I am reaching a limit to my capabilities right now with my hard drive being too full to download and start new PC games until I get an external hard drive, and the flea infestation in the house shutting me up in my sanctuary is keeping me away from both the Wii and PS3, I am left with portable games like the DS and PSP games for now. It won't be long before I start talking about older games that I find worth mentioning. Wondering whether if I should attempt to write about them as a review or have a new category, like a Game Spotlight section perhaps. In the meantime, here's the latest poll results.

You see a poll before you. What do you do?
Answer truthfully: 5 votes
Pretend you don't see it: 1 vote
Answer randomly: 0 votes
Choose the most popular option: 0 votes
Choose the least popular option: 0 votes
Usually most/least popular option, but doesn't currently apply, so this pointless option instead: 0 votes

Yeah, this wasn't really much of a poll, since I was curious as to how many votes in general it would get. 6 votes total is .. well, twice as better than the last poll, but I think there's more potential for more votes to be had. At least, I'd like to think that I have more than 6 readers. >_>;

So, in the past week or two, I finished watching Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko, Motto: To Love-Ru, and... that's all I can recall at the moment. Not sure if I enjoyed either of them as much due to them not having a very strong plot that grabbed my interest. I'm certainly more interested in the plot of Bake/Nisemonogatari though. Can't wait for the next episode. In the meantime, I've been watching some old anime that I wanted to watch as a kid, but never had the opportunity to; Slayers.

It was a series that I've heard the title of back in the 90s, and certainly had my interest, but I was simply interested in a lot of anime as a child. Renting VHS tapes for a few days cost quite a lot, back when that was still a business. Either way, Slayers is like many other anime of the similar genre of RPG-inspired anime. There are quite a few that I watched as a kid, like Dragon Quest: Legend of the Hero Abel, and Magical Circle: Guru Guru. Despite not having seen Slayers before, I felt a sense of nostalgia watching the episodes, as the overall feel of the series just seemed... familiar. Whether it be the comedic timing of their gags being slightly manga-centric, the characters' personalities and attitudes fitting some of the older archetypes in anime in contrast to modern anime's characters, the sound effects and the use of back ground music, as well as the art styles feeling dated, or perhaps all of those things overall felt like a can of fresh air packed and sealed in the 90s for me.

Limited Edition Ocean Blue PS2, like mine.

Perhaps due to the old RPG nostalgia I had from watching these episodes, but I had a strong urge to play an RPG. With the PS3 being inaccessible without the consequences of sleepless nights of scratching myself throughout the night, I decided to start Star Ocean: Second Evolution on the PSP finally. I... may have rushed through a lot in this run though, in an attempt to catch up to where I previously was before I stopped playing SO: The Second Story on the PS1. The only reason why I stopped playing it was because of the frequent game freezes it had, and moving away to a new town also had me packing up the PS1 and not set it up while I had a PS2 around. Unfortunately, the game tends to freeze even more frequently on the PS2 than it does on the PS1, so I wasn't going to deal with that. ._.;;

This time around, I'm playing the game in English, despite my preference to Japanese voice acting. I still think that I would have enjoyed the game more in Japanese, but my decision of getting it in English may seemed to have gotten Vicki's interest in the series too, although for a reason that I wasn't really too enthralled about. D= She says that the game is "cheesy", and... I can't say that I can't disagree either. Bad directing during the recordings of voice acting sure can change the mood and feel of the cut scenes. It sometimes completely ruins the game, like in Final Fantasy X's case. At least in Second Evolution's case, it's just cheesy and not outright bad. If I have played The Second Story in English, I would give a comparison, but my copy was in Japanese. I don't even know if they sound the same or not between the PS1 and PSP versions. I'm not entirely sure if I could give a good enough review for my own standards for this game due to my lack of knowledge in the original version in English... but we'll see how that goes. In the end, I mostly write my reviews whenever I have a strong enough opinion on what I've experienced.

Unfortunately, due to me rushing through to catch up to where I was originally, I seem to have missed out on recruiting both Ashton and Opera this time. D= I was planning on recruiting Ashton to have another swordsman in the party, but... yeah. That leaves me with a party of Claude, Rena, Celine, Precis, Welch, and Leon so far. Looks like the last two characters will be Noel and Chisato, since I'm already getting my Psynard. ... And... nevermind. It seems I missed out on Chisato as well, leaving my 8th character slot vacant. Great.... Wish there was a save point after the huge cut scene right before the important part. I left the city to go save immediately because Vicki rushed me. @.@

Anyway, I've been working some on making more banners, and although I'm still lacking good pictures, I figured I might as well make a Firion version of the head banner. I may start implementing the random banner code in soon, so look forward to having a little more variety.