I've got many things to do once this flight is over and I'm back home from my trip to Japan. I hope the flesh abomination I've been raising in my basement has behaved itself in my absence.
Besides that there are also the ever-important matters of the Splatoon spin-off* that released a couple days ago, and my sworn and solemn yearly duty of Playing, Rating, and Reviewing games from the GMTK Game Jam**. They call me the PRR Department.
Speaking of the GMTK Game Jam, I indeed informed my Taiko-savvy compatriot that I would not be participating this year, and spoke of the other jam next month that I have my eyes on. However, while I am not a pathological liar, I might colour myself the hobbyist backpedaller, for I wound up making something for the jam despite my location.
My outings with my family and friends would not take up the entire day, you see, such that mornings and evenings were rather free. Therefore I had much time not only for Umamusume: Pretty Derby, watching the recording of this season's Dominion League Championship, and revising a certain 長い blog post, but also to work on a little game.
What I wound up with was the hastily titled "Lift Down," a short dodge-em-up featuring my fun-to-doodle OC***: Corpunel Queens Tantamount of Lambast Travesty. An embed is embedded below. (If it doesn't bug.)
I'm pretty happy with this hastily developed title. It's quite simpler than every other GMTK jam game I've made and, believe it or not, opting to make a simpler game rather than a (somewhat) more complex one when under time constraints is rather nice. It is also one of the few jam games I didn't pull some crazy all-nighter for, nor submit a tad dangerously close to the deadline.
The additional time constraint of being on vacation, it turns out, helped me better manage my time and expectations. How splendid.
As of this writing it's also gotten quite a few nice comments, all of which have mentioned liking the art style. I'm glad, and also rather amused as the art style was simply my drawing in my handy dandy notebook and then snapping a photo.**** Below are a triplet of such photos.
Well, I figured it'd end up kind of unique, but mostly went with it because it seemed the easiest thing to do. As asteriskically touched upon, it perhaps was not, but it all's well that ends well.
Somebody even mentioned liking the music, which is great since I'm pretty happy with that swiftly assembled track***** as well. It's still kind of stuck in my head after having listened to it so much.
What else must I do when I'm home? Man, besides the GMTK games and the new Splatoon, I also wanna make more headway through the visual novels I'm playing before I'm whisked back unto another family trip, and then subsequently back to university.
I am currently playing through Chaos;Head, having finished Steins;Gate a couple weeks ago and wanting to hit more of the Science Adventure series****** it is a part of. C;H is pretty cool thus far, and the connections I've noticed between it and S;G have been very interesting.
I must admit to being excited to play more once I'm back in my storage container. And after Chaos;Head I plan to hit Steins;Gate 0, since I feel like I have through various means deduced what its premise or at least setting may be, and very much wish to see if I'm correct...
Gah, but besides these mystery-suspense VNs, there's also Kanon, which I started a couple weeks before I started Chaos;Head, and then begun ages before that and admittedly infrequently played is "Go Go Nippon! ~ My First Trip to Japan"
These two games I've been opting to play primarily in Japanese to practice my reading, though it makes them a bit more daunting to boot up. (Hence some infrequency.) On another note, the latter is also a bit ironic, considering I just went on my own IRL first trip to Japan.
I suppose I let the video games I play influence me a bit too much. Next you see me I'll be on the news for having killed people, or for having stacked blocks in an efficient manner, or for having a Japanese girlfriend. All, for the record, wholly unrealistic scenarios.
And besides my game backlog, there's my anime backlog too... Have you been taking a shot whenever I say "backlog" in these blog posts? I hope not.
Intoxication may impede your ability to understand my amazing jokes, which as I've established consist of nothing but "I have a very long game and anime backlog" and "I spend too much money on game and anime related items."
On the topic of spending too much money on game and anime related items, another thing I'll be kept busy with once home is figuring out where to store all that manga*******, doujins********, and figurines. My shelves are already packed (with manga and figurines). I may have to impede upon the fourth dimension to get it all spick and span. Wish me luck.
Indeed, my visits to Akihabara, Nakano Broadway, and Nipponbashi********* were most prosperous. For the local economy. Not for my me.
That reminds me: I forgot to set a fast travel point in Japan. That's just as well. Had I set a fast travel point to any of the aforementioned places, it would all be over. And by it, heh, let's just say, having a roof over my head.
As mentioned in my prior post, I'm lucky to have had some friends in Japan to show me around. The "End of the Line" chap mentioned in said prior post, who henceforth will be referred to as Line**********, showed me some notable shops in Akiba.
Nakano Broadway my siblings and I hit on our own, before meeting up with Line for karaoke. That was darn fun, though next time*********** I oughta check in advance how I should transpose some of the songs that are in a weird range for me, which are most of my favourites, since most of my favourites are anime songs sung by female vocalists.
For instance, 少女迷路で捕まえて、AKA the Strawberry Panic S1 opening, Cool Number, and Goyururi World.
All of which I was most pleased to see were on the karaoke machine and all of which have one way or another been touched upon in this blog at some point. This is because, in case you haven't noticed, each of these blog posts is part of a franchise that I like to call the Stupid Adventure series.
I 100% need to be ready for the next time I hit such karaoke with more and better prepared anime songs. This is in line with the Japanese concept of 「だめなこいつ、」 which means, 「早くなんとかしないと」。
This karaoke session was in the stead of the prior plan to hit a board game cafe, as not only is karaoke is a more Japanesque activity, Dominion plays best at 2 players anyway, heh.
To round out the trio of one-sided epic rap battles between my wallet and otaku goods laden locations was Nipponbashi, which a Japanese friend I met through Line************ showed me around. My goodness, Akihabara was so detrimental to my accounting ledger that they made a sequel.
This friend showed me to the doujin section of the Mandarake************* over there, which is missable on account of there not being an escalator up to it,************** and also, crucially, showed me what kanji means "SFW" and which means "NSFW." Now those are terms for my flashcards deck!
The doujins were sorted by artist circle and then sorted by whether or not you need to quickly avert your eyes and return it to the shelf if you accidentally take a gander. As it may be, there seemed to be a whole lot more of that sort than the viewable stuff.
There's nothing quite like finding the SFW section for a circle, flipping one (1) doujin over, and then getting flashbanged because, as it turns out, there was only a single SFW doujin from that circle.
I better hit confession next Thursday, and hit one of those laboratory eye-washing stations next time I see one too.
That being said, among the non-dirty doujin I found quite a few nice-looking ones***************, hence my aforementioning of having to find a place for them amidst my other acquisitions.
Alas, among my acquisitions was not a copy of
Touhou Dominion, as I mentioned being on the lookout for in my prior post. Admittedly I did not really end up actively searching for it, so go figure that I didn't find it. I'll perhaps try a little harder next time I Go To Nippon! ~ My Second Trip to Japan.
Besides obliging to my greed and avarice, of course, there was quite a bit of sightseeing during this trip. From temples, to shrines, to Tokyo Big Sight, to Nara Park. The latter was perhaps the highlight of it all.
For those unfamiliar, Nara Park is chock full of pretty darn domestic deer. You can walk straight up to them and pet them. They even bow to you sometimes. How Japanese!
And as one last hurrah for those unfamiliar, here's what a deer looks like:
Apparently one (1) of the two deer depicted below is a fake. Can you tell which? I've been trying to figure this one out all day.
Hm, I say that Nara Park was the peak of all the sightseeing, but is that really true? Can it be true when, in Nakano Broadway, I saw it?
"What's with all this mystery-suspense?" you may ask, as no chill runs up your spine, "We all know you're talking about the Madoka Magica Slot Machine."
Well, yeah, of course I am, but you didn't have to ruin the moment like that, あほ。
Naturally, I didn't play it, for as I've said I dislike gambling. Also the machines to its sides were taken such that it would have been a tad cramped, not to mention I already bleed yen in this universe where I don't have a gambling addiction. Who's to say what would happen if I stepped over the (world)line****************?
Well, I'd have Summer Goldship in Umamusume, for starters. But that's neither here nor there since I'll just get lucky whilst pulling in a future gacha and pull, yes, ANOTHER Mummy Super Creek dagnabbbit I don't need another Mummy Super Creek.
I can't complain. I rolled Sweep Tosho off of one (1) 10-pull when her banner was up...
Ahem. Let's get back to the realm of comprehendibility, for a given definition of that.
I say I didn't gamble, but admittedly I did hit a couple gachapon machines. They're pretty fun, so long as you limit yourself to a single pull.
I also kind of like the randomness of it. For when it comes to some series, there may be multiple characters I like such that if I am be buying figurines of them, I feel a bit bad having to choose one over all the others on account of fickle considerations such as running out of money.
The randomness of the gachapon, however, leaves your choice of figurine up to chance, meaning that you don't end up hurting the feelings of any of your precious imaginary waifus. The Japanese really do think of everything!
They even thought to make the Communion wafers thicker. Or at least thicker than the ones I have back home. I don't know whether I like that change or not. Heh. Communion wafers, comma, Japan.
That's right: I went to Mass last Sunday at a church in Osaka. Thankfully, they had an English Mass, for while to attend a Mass in Japanese would have been neat, I somehow doubt that my current grasp of vocabulary would be sufficient to get what's going on in the readings.
And I don't want to spit on the graves of those men and women who died so that they could stop doing Masses in Latin and start doing them in God-given red-blooded American English!*****************
Well, I'm admittedly not American nor English nor Norwegian but Canadian. You'd probably coloured me as such by my spelling of colour and my occasional use of "eh" in my Dominion videos, which I know every single one of my loyal reader****************** has watched all of, cover to cover. Except for maybe the losses.
Perhaps one day I won't be Canadian. For admittedly, as unexpected as it might be, I think I might like to live in Japan someday, and word is that to become a citizen you've got to renounce any other citizenship you have.
That's a bit of a shame, I feel, since Canada starts with the same letter as my name (Cornelius) and so grants a synergy bonus that gives me a +10% crit rate when using aquatic-type (sea) weapons.
It likely won't be quite some years before I can reasonably consider making such a move, however, given that I will likely be hammering out the rest of my university degree. I can only hope that will all go well. I mean, with a +10% crit rate when using aquatic-type weaponry, how can it not?
Thankfully, I still have some time before I'm back to the number (and letter, but not kanji except for my self-studies) trenches. I will spend this time wisely getting all my leisure done in advance, so that when the academic year begins I can focus on what's truly important: becoming Dominion League Champion.
Though maybe I'll try to keep up with Zundamon's Theorem more often, in order to condition myself to the bold yet not unpossible notion that maybe, just maybe, math can be fun. Zun zun!
Like I said, I have plenty of work to do once home. And by work I mean leisure, and by leisure I mean work, because secretly it's all the same to me, except for when it isn't... Yeah! That sounds really profound! Print that, print that!
This is Not Billison whose first order of business once home will probably be mucking about, but whose nth order of business******************* will ideally be to get this blog post posted, signing off. Unless I end up contriving yet another addendum, that is.
* It doesn't seem like I've mentioned it properly in a blog post yet, so I'll mention here that I've quit grinding Splatoon ranked, maybe for good, or at least until 4's inevitable release. I simply have far too many other things to do, and prefer Dominion as a competitive gaming experience anyhow. Plus, MAN would I get tilted over the silly squid game. No... I don't mean that... It wasn't stilly to me... Hm, a bit of a shame to quit, though, considering the time I've put into it and the fact that there seems to be an annual LAN in my area that I did participate in once. Maybe I'll get back into it one day, but simply make sure to heavily moderate myself. I do that with my Dominion games by recording them all; it would look silly to tilt-queue on recording. Can't quite do the same thing for Splatoon, but can figure something out. That being said, that "one day" will not be anytime soon.
** I always like to sort go to the page where you can see a list of the games with the least amount of ratings and comments and play those. Though this might mean I don't end up playing the greatest games of all time, a parasite called "empathy" that hath taken root in my heart of darkness spurs me to apply the fact that I like it when people rate and comment upon my game as reason to ensure that as many others get to experience that also. I might urge you to follow suit when rating jam games.
*** Original Corpunel.
**** And then converting the photo from the HEIC format to JPG and then cropping and resizing so I guess there was a bit more to it, especially if you consider that doodling the right things isn't trivial. But as I've established on this blog, I'm the world's most humble and also physically attractive person, so will opt to gloss over such things.
***** Yeah, I've played a bit of "Unrailed."
****** Also known as the Semicolon Adventure series.
******* Also known as literature.
******** Japanese term for fan-made comics featuring characters from anime and games and such. I think the term may to some have connotations of specifically referring to dirty fan-made comics, which, alas, there is much of, so I might be careful using it. Or not, evidently.
********* All places with a notable amount of anime goods stores. Uh oh.
********** Even though I haven't contacted this guy on Line in my life. I mean, I've contacted him online, of course, but not online on Line, the one Japanese messaging service. I kind of want to make an account since I hear you can get cute and kawaii stickers. I mean, uh, cool and metal stickers... Yeah!
*********** As opposed to 今度。
************ The guy who I've codenamed Line, I mean. Not the messaging service. This is a bit confusing. I should codename things more often. Being confused builds character.
************* Anime goods store specializing in second-hand goods that frankly look good as new, though for all I know I'll open up one of my manga volumes once I'm home and there will be moustaches drawn over all the characters.
************** You have to take the stairs, like some kind of caveman. And I thought Japan was supposed to be futuristic...
*************** i.e. Those with Haru Urara on the cover. Well, there were some others too, but about half of what I bought had my goat on it. Or my horse, if we want to get technical.
**************** Not the guy I've codenamed
***************** I don't think anybody actually died over this matter. At least I hope not.
******************* Where n is a number, and I guess a letter too, but not a kanji.