Various Thoughts

This series is fantastic. It is as if someone mixed The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya with Da Capo and then layered it atop a base of Air. The best parts of those series are combined to form something that easily rivals them all.

The beginning is more akin to Haruhi while the end is more like Da Capo, but the two series’ influences can be felt throughout. However… it does hiccup a bit around two-thirds of the way through, when the Harem elements threaten to overwhelm everything else. Thankfully, it manages to ground itself a few episodes later. A solid series all-in-all.

The After Story, however, is terrible. It’s nothing but a wholly inferior Kimi ga Nozomu Eien.

I feel ripped off. Completely taken advantage of.

Laurell K. Hamilton’s latest Anita Blake novel is a mere 170 pages printed in a gargantuan font. There is no reason this story could not have appeared in one of those paperback short-story collections or even as an E-Book, and every reason it should not be a hardcover. It took little more than an hour to read. Furthermore, the story is basically a (much shorter) re-imagining of one of the earlier books. I forget it’s name after all this time, but it’s the only other one in which she raised an entire cemetery to devour the body of the person who forced her to raise them.

I think I’m done with this series.

Archangel’s Kiss is the second book in Nalini Singh’s Guild Hunter series. The first, Angels’ Blood, was fantastic and unique enough that I ended up reading it somewhere around five times. This one has a distinctly different tone to it, which makes sense as everything was shaken up at the end of Blood. As of now I don’t like it as much as the first as it doesn’t really have any events that can compare to Blood‘s climax. The world-building is quite interesting though, and I definitely want to see how the series deals with Elena returning to work as a Hunter.

The second Outcast Season novel, Unknown by Rachel Caine, I did not really like at all. It took some time to properly define the reason(s) though. At first I thought it was due to Cassiel’s speech pattern… but eventually remembered that that was one of the main things I initially liked about the series. No, the problem is two-fold. The first part is how the police/government keeps popping up to force the main characters to do random things despite them having absolutely no connection to the police and/or government. Holy fuck that’s annoying. The second is the effectively obscene reverence that Luis places on the child soldiers. I have never understood why so many people seem to think children are inherent bastions of innocence. Humans are humans, and the human nature to destroy/kill/consume is equally present in all ages.

Eileen Wilks’ recent entry to her World of the Lupi series, Blood Magic, focuses on Lily’s Grandmother’s past. Specifically on an old enemy of hers that has returned to destroy her family. I had some trouble with the first half of this book because my subconscious was constantly screaming “Furries! Furries everywhere!”. I don’t recall having this issue with the other books in the series, so it must be my recent frequent trips to ED. In any case, after the halfway point the plot kicks in and the focus is more on stopping said ancient enemy than how glossy someone’s fur looks. Overall it nicely expands the Lupi world and characters, fleshing out a previously extremely ambiguous deus ex machina character.

This series is essentially a much less serious version of Spiral.

The majority of the episodes are strictly formulaic. The first half tends to be some basic build-up while the second half consists of Neuro explaining how the murder took place. It gets old fast. What keeps the series afloat is Yako’s character development, her evolving relationship with Neuro, and her reactions to the various supernatural events taking place.

It should also be noted that right around episode sixteen or so it gets a touch more serious. Most of the formulaic framework is discarded to focus more on Sai, his origins, and his connection to Yako.

My feelings toward the series are mixed. Beyond the above, it’s fairly difficult to categorize. I originally wanted to describe it as a more childish version of Spiral… and while in many ways that’s true (the suspect face morphs for instance), in others (mainly Sai’s entire existence) it most certainly isn’t. Even the animation style tends to switch back and forth between realistic and cartoonish. It’s watchable for the most part… but I would not waste any large amount of effort to track it down.

The second book in Faith Hunter‘s Jane Yellowrock series has a significantly different tone to it. I assume this is the fault of ‘The Guy in the Leather Jacket’ mentioned on the acknowledgment page. Jane’s personality was just fine in the first book. Here… here she’s nearly unrecognizable; a softer side is precisely what she didn’t need. There are more then enough Tsundere personalities floating around the Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy landscape as it is.

Ecstasy Unveiled is Larissa Ione’s fourth Demonica series novel. I must admit that I did not expect any more in this series since each of the previous had focused on a single brother and there were only three of those. She decided to focus this one on Lore, the recently revealed brother who had a human mother and, interestingly enough, also has a sister. I must say that I find it odd that Ione created such a detailed world, and then decided to focus her story on a conflux of one-in-a-million occurrences from that universe’s point of view. Why make Seminus demons all male if you were going to introduce a female? Why say that they pretty much never find mates when all four of the brothers do? Anyway, the novel itself sort of feels like a combination of the first and third books and doesn’t really have a unique framework. It’s not a bad read, just nothing particularly new happens in it. The next book in the series, which will focus on Lore’s sister Sin, will be interesting if for no other reason than being the first in the series to be told mainly from a female perspective.

The first playthorugh of the game is now complete, and I don’t like it any more now than I did initially.

The combat is fun and definitely improved over ME1, as is the environment appearance and interactivity… but pretty much everything else is a huge step backward as highlighted by the bullet-points in earlier posts. I don’t see a lot of replay value in this game, as all the ‘correct’ choices are laid out on a silver platter for you. The only real way to choose the ‘wrong’ options is to do so purposely (for roleplaying) or because you were rushing.

Speaking of rushing; I really hate how the same button is used to skip and select dialog. It has the annoying tendency of auto-choosing responses without warning.