I'm surprised at the level of restraint on this banner. Yeah the weapons are powercreeped as hell, but no alts and 4 skills on 3 of the units? I guess it might just be them wising up to people automatically guessing the demote every time (even though there's still a pretty likely candidate this time around).

Keaton's kinda unique with his Meisterfang, but even with all the other goodies built into his weapon he's not going to be another Reinhardt pretty much due to mobility alone (+1 move from transforming >>> wo tooth). He also doesn't have a 2-range weapon and hits on DEF. IMO Tibarn's still going to be way worse to deal with, a 3-move flier with guaranteed all-breaker provided he's the first to reach your team, which he probably will be. It's too bad Valor marks him for unlikely demote, because Special Spiral on a demote would've been so damn sweet.

Even though Velouria's pretty likely as a demote (on top of the aforementioned Close Def 3 being powercrept, it's also available from Grails via Joshua. Wards are just sorta niche in general aside from armors), her unique weapon guarantees her as someone worth investing in. Funny for them to instantly powercreep the onsen weapons like 2 weeks after they came out, but whatever. Aside from the obvious instant Moonbow shenanigans (she's also infantry so she can get Pulsed), first thing I'm thinking? Galeforce teams. The fact that her weapon also has SPD+3 leads me to think she'll have at moderate SPD. Sure it's a waste of the Wo Dao effect on her fang, but with her support partner you can walk into a match with two Heavy Blade Galeforces ready to charge without taking any counters, which can be very valuable for people who put nothing but mages and whatnot. Downside to that is that she's infantry, so you have to support her with a cavalry, teleport her in with WoM, or Smite her in.

Kaden himself will be a worse Green Tibarn with his follow-up prevention and likely-to-be high SPD. Trades in the guaranteed follow-up and flying over shit for moving 3 spaces all the time and very annoying support capabilities. I'm pretty sure some people will opt to actually keep him around on a horse emblem team untransformed all the time just to give out the extra +6 to everything on everyone (because only whales are going to be running beast emblem so far).

Selkie is of course the obvious whalebait, and Christ not only is that weapon really OP, but it's also going to be a PitA to calculate shit when facing her. For SPD it makes it slightly easier for her to double, but makes it so you need to beat her speed by 10 before you can double her. Since she looks like she's going to be a RES unit Reinhardt probably isn't going to the save the day, and most physical hitters are probably going to trigger +8 DEF on her by default if she has rock bottom DEF so she might be able to tank a Brave Sword or Lance even. Really depends on how her stat line shakes out but that's a pretty insane weapon. Sabotage Attack is okay I guess.

Ok, so it's been enough episodes that I can say Doukyonin wa Hiza, Tokidoki, Atama no Ue is good.
First half of the first episode is meh until you get to the second half that makes the whole thing way more interesting.
The format makes it fun.

Meanwhile, 6 episodes in Egao no Daika and I still have no what that thing is supposed to be.

I've been listening to RWBY's soundtrack a lot (seriously, it's great stuff, especially the character themes), so I decided to give the series another shot. The first 8 episodes were still extremely rough, and I found myself having to skip around a lot just to make it through it - the animation, direction, and tone were just all over the place! I found myself laughing at it rather than with it more often than not.

However, it did start to shape up after the mid-point of the first season, and now that I've finished episode 16, I think I'm unironically enjoying it now. The characters do seem to have an interesting dynamic, the world is fleshed out enough that I actually feel like things are building towards a major event instead of just making things up by the seat of their pants (with that said, credit to the RvB team for making that style of writing look easy), and some of the jokes can be funny & clever. I really look forward to watching the next season tomorrow.

Animation's still dogshit, though, but understandably so. I spent the first couple of episodes racking my brain trying to figure out what program they're using, since I notice a few quirks that looked familiar. Turns out, if I just finished an episode I'd get the answer in big bold letters, but hey. I've definitely seen other indie animations that were made in Poser to varying degrees of quality, and it reminded me of the scale of their operation. There are much bigger animation teams that have utterly failed to do what they set out to accomplish, even at their relatively short average run times. I mean, just look at some of the CGI anime shorts from the past few seasons if you want examples of how bad it could be.

Move over Miyazaki!

This is fine enough. As long as the writing holds up, I'll have a good time.

So SF has posted their own summary of the trailer. https://serenesforest.net/2019/02/13/three-houses-february-2019-direct-analysis/#more-49377

And they make some interesting observations. Including a few I missed like the stuff exclusive to the JP direct, a few comparisons to what was shown back in 2018, and a few 'blink and you miss them' screenshots. But there's one important plot point they missed out on.

Note the following:

As they mentioned, this looks a lot like part of that Prf chainwhip sword Valentine. What they didn't mention is that this is most likely one of those blameable 'crests'. Specifically,



this one right about here^. Two down, right above the one that's damaged, smack dab in the center of that chart.

This means that we're looking at a Jugdral situation where every house of note is running around with their own fantasy WWII tanks while everyone else is playing cowboys and indians (although maybe not all of the Crests got fashioned into weapons since there'd be 21 of the fuckers otherwise). So yeah, I could see that the Crests really are to blame in this case.

One more thing I should mention is that while the above Crest is likely part of a weapon, I don't necessarily believe it to be part of that chainwhip sword, but of another fantasy nuke instead.

Following up on what Hathen and I posted yesterday.

The Academy looks to be an excuse to bring Villagers back since everyone seems to be starting as a Noble before having to study to become a Brigand or something (interesting that they have both Mercenary and Thief, but no Myrmidon). Additionally, in regards to skills and skill learning, it looks like certain characters still have specific weapon proficiencies (in the Training Grounds segment, Ferdinand had Lv 1 ranks in Swords, Lances and Axes versus Sylvain's Lances and Axes; considering that other interfaces have Weapon Ranks represented by Letter Grade rather than by Numeric, it could mean either a character's given proficiency or it could refer to Arts or Gambits (especially since Bernadetta had some other kind of skill shown on her UI).

If anything, the Skill Level business reminds me more of Suikoden III's and onward Skill Tutoring system (where characters skill levels capped out at different stages due to that particular character's innate proficiency, with heavy duty fighters like Chris being more proficient at learning skills like Heavy Armor proficiency, Heavy Blow, and Mobility enhancements to simulate getting used to and proficient in moving around in heavy armor but could still take up boosts to Accuracy, Attack Speed and core elemental magic (with her highest proficiency in Water at like B or something) even if she had a low cap due to her lack of aptitude, compared to Hugo who was easier to train in lightweight fighting skills and Fire Magic and harder to train in raw combat and Water Magic, and Geddoe who got better at nuking people with Magic, but wasn't a slouch in hand to hand combat, with Lightning Magic and Magic performance enhancing skills being his specialty due to his True Rune shenanigans).

Of course such a system would mean that unfortunately, I can't raise an army of Punch Mans. It also reminds me of Berwick Saga's skill levels over raw stats approach. With promotions and recruitment requiring building skill levels up to certain thresholds (as well as managing a mercenary company, being in a small neutral country caught between a couple warring world powers, and possibly having to manage your mounts separate from the characters that ride them; especially if characters need to be trained in how to use them).


On a separate note, I lol'd at FemByleth having huge knockers by default. I guess if anything came out of FEH, its that players like 'em big. And on a similar note, I really do not like the character designs in this game. Especially if going forward past 3H, everybody's forevermore locked to their boring ass school uniforms because that's what their default character art has them as.

I would also be really pissed if all we got for recruits this time were students. FE at its core is about cobbling together a ragtag band of animes to fight the evil empire/dragons. Fates was really awful about this as well since the few people who weren't Corrin, Corrin's Retainers, Corrin's Siblings/Relatives, or Corrin's Siblings' Retainers were low level grunts in the service of Corrin's Country of Choice or Prepromotes that pretty much beelined to the bench.