Fred the Barber

I played so much SWTOR, up until about 1.5 years ago. The class stories are pretty good, and although I never thought I would enjoy PvP in an MMO, once I got peer pressured enough to try it a few times, I started really enjoying that side of the game. I think I played 5/8 full class stories (all four republic, one empire), and did a bunch of end-game raiding (and that's where the problem is...). At the time it was usually fun, but... man, lots of my life sunk in that game. As long as you don't try to do "end-game" stuff, it's a great game. Good thing I got out of that; instead, I started spending my spare time watching anime. I started playing Atelier Ayesha yesterday, and I am having an absolute blast. I feel like this game was designed specifically for me. The only lingering doubt I have is that I might go too far messing around with all the sub-quest and crafting stuff and miss the deadlines on the main quest.

It's somewhat unclear what age range the audience is, which makes it somewhat harder to recommend. So, I'm going to stick to recommendations that work basically regardless of age. I wholeheartedly second Moribito - that's the single best fit I can think of for "things to recommend for a little sister" Wolf Children is a good movie recommendation, so I'll second that as well, but Summer Wars doesn't feel quite right; it doesn't give much stage time to its young female characters, except for the very early part and the very late part of the movie, from what I can recall. If I'm just misremembering on that point, then that's a good recommendation too, since it is a very good movie. Natsume's Book of Friends might be a good choice... a little bit of fantasy, a little bit of everyday life, and every episode is a beautiful story. However, it also suffers from "not enough stage time for female characters". Another potential major down-side: no dub available. This doesn't line up with the theme of fantasy at all, but if I had a little sister, I'd probably be recommending K-On! to her. Could be that's a misread on my part, though, and it probably depends on whether your sister is interested in music (or likely to be interested in music). You might also go for something more shoujo that isn't too over-the-top/heavy. Perhaps Fruits Basket? Probably not Ouran, unless she's older than I'm inferring.

It's 4 in the afternoon here, and I keep pretty ordinary hours, so, false. Next person has never been ninjaed in this thread.

I like long common routes, generally - I really enjoyed the Little Busters! and Rewrite common routes, for example, and in contrast Katawa Shoujo always felt kind of rushed to me because the common route in it is so short. One of my favorite parts of any story is watching how all the characters interact with each other, letting you see different aspects to their personality, so I really enjoy it when a common route mixes everybody up and has them play off each other. Rewrite did this well with the club meetings, and Little Busters! just had random interactions happening all the time as well as a scene just for this purpose, with the test of courage near the end of the common route letting you pick any pair of characters and watch them be hilarious. Watching all the heroines interact with each other (and also with any of the other characters who tend to be prominent in common routes but fall by the way-side in heroine routes, like comic relief characters) helps build character depth, particularly because a typical VN designs all its heroines to have fairly different personalities; when this is leveraged well, it results in seeing the heroines put into more social situations they otherwise wouldn't run into, even with a focused character route. If people are mostly just talking to the PoV character, or the PoV character and a cast specific to a heroine route, then they are more likely to end up pretty flat. I'll pick on Katawa Shoujo for an example - the characters there generally felt really one-note, to me. Character depth isn't everything, of course, and many VNs focus more on plot or "plot" than characters, which is fine, but for the subset of VNs that aim for you to bond with the characters so they can better manipulate your emotions, a well-written (and, yes, long) common route is pretty crucial to success.

Very confused. Milky Holmes appears to be licensed for streaming by Crunchyroll, and I can add it to my queue there (and shudder to think what their predictive analytics will make of that). However, that done, it isn't actually in my queue (whereas other shows add there just fine). I was intending to honor my word and actually watch it (and then never make the mistake of joining the Fuwa anime club again), but I don't even see a way to legally watch this anime...

Confession: I do not belive anybody who claims to enjoy anything that is "so bad it's good", and am thus fairly annoyed at the people who knowingly voted for the universally-derided Milky Holmes for the anime club.

but seriously, why

False, I follow 0 manga. Next person is a good cook.

Rest easy that your nomination at least got a couple votes; 0 for mine Actually, I probably would've voted for yours, if I hadn't seen the desperate need to try to avoid impending doom. Apparently there are two votes still out there that could potentially destroy us all, though, so hopefully that late vote was not cast in vain...

Sonuva... I'm obligated to vote for Sakigake just to make it more likely I won't have to watch Milky Holmes. What is wrong with people.

True. I have an older brother and parents, and that's about it... if you go out another layer on the family tree, I have two cousins, but I haven't seen them in something like 15-20 years. Next person isn't old enough to remember EarthBound.

Confession: At work, I have about 4 things to do right now, each of which will probably take me a week, and all of which need to be done right now. I think I'm mentally hiding from that situation by burying myself in a mountain of escapist entertainment: I'm about 40% through Brent Weeks's Black Prism (started last week), barely in chapter 2 of HDN Re;Birth 1 (started a couple weeks ago), maybe two hours into Air (started two days ago), just started Fate/Stay Night a couple hours ago, and about ten minutes ago I bought both Senran Kagura Burst and Atelier Ayesha Plus.

Amazon kept recommending this series to me over the past year or so, and I kept giving Amazon strange looks for it. I should probably listen to Amazon more often (that may be the sound of my wallet screaming in the background). Anyway, the comments above about the music actually sold me on this. Based on solidbatman's advice to follow a sub-series from the start, I picked up Ayesha Plus for my Vita just now (hopefully it will download... ever... I seem to have bad luck getting the Vita to do that). We'll see how this goes!

I've been eyeing the Atelier games for a while - are those something I can just pick up at the latest, or should I play them in some order? The wikipedia page for the series is somewhat bewildering - I guess there are a bunch of separate sub-series, and maybe I should play a sub-series in order? To phrase the question another way: where should I start with Atelier? Edit: nevermind, I found the "Atelier" sub-thread which has good guidance for exactly this question

I watched the first season of Magi (Labyrinth), but haven't watched Kingdom or the Sinbad OVA yet. Labyrinth was really, really good, though I didn't feel like much had been resolved by the end. I'm curious to see if Kingdom and the OVA tie up more loose ends than they create, but I'm not really expecting much closure from this series. It kicked ass on all other fronts, so I'll forgive it anyway.

Shiny new copy of F/SN + Hollow Ataraxia showed up at my metaphorical doorstep today, so I immediately put Air on hold and switched to that. Still in the Prologue and trying to get a handle on things, but so far so good!

False. You don't suck futomaki - you just put the whole thing in your mouth and take it like a man. Next person ain't too proud to beg.

Recently finished Is It Wrong To Try To Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon. It was definitely more enjoyable than I expected, but I'm a novice with light novels (I guess I've read Haruhi, 1/3 of Spice & Wolf, and now that). I'm not reading any light novel right now, though I have a stack of Spice & Wolf (volumes 8 - 13) waiting for me - I'm trying to space those out a lot, since otherwise I'd tear through all of them in a week, even at my slow reading pace. I'm definitely in the market for light novel recommendations, ideally for ones available on the Kindle store (or fan translations that I can put on my kindle, I suppose). This is an area where I really don't know what's good, aside from picking up stuff that already has an anime adaptation that I know is good. Are there any "classics" I'm missing out on?

@FredTheBarber was already taken years ago when I went to sign up for twitter. I decided: If I can't be me, then I just won't tweet. I never looked back. ... Ok, maybe I looked back a couple times.

It's still unclear to me exactly what Senran Kagura is, so I went reading the wikipedia article, where I was highly amused by: "The sequel improved on the original, by enhancing breast physics ...". Granted there are other improvements that it lists, but that was #1. Also, the second improvement listed was "clothing destruction". - On the one hand, sure, sales are sales, and excited Fuwa threads are clearly a sign of success (probably?). - On the other hand, I read the article and I still don't grasp the game at all. This is not helped at all by the section saying only "Senran Kagura Bon Appétit! is a rhythm cooking game available for the PlayStation Vita, in which the goal is to win a cooking competition." - On the third hand (what, you don't have three hands?), "enhancing breast physics" is apparently viable as the main selling point of a game in the series. I don't think I can assess accurately whether I should play this game without more hands.

Confession: Every time I sit down at my computer and pull up the Fuwa forums, I put my headphones on at the same time, despite not playing any music or anything. I do not know why; it is not intentional. The only thing I can guess is that I have too strong an association between Fuwa and playing VNs. Sometimes I get confused ten minutes later when I find I have my headphones on (like, say, just now, when I felt compelled to confess).

True. I don't like to talk about it because it often upsets people, but I'm an atheist of sufficient convicition that I have difficulty understanding why everyone else isn't also an atheist. I have no problem respecting the intelligence, rationality, etc., of people who are religious - but I am nonetheless completely incapable of understanding it. On a more serious note: Next person would shave her/his head for $1000, but not for $100.

That awkward moment when you realize you don't have a favorite VN character.

Explain that I am a punching bag with eyes, not a dakimakura, but then lean into the hug anyway.