Ladies and gentlemen, The Alan Parsons Project.
I decided to use another music video to open the second page of this post for those who decided to skip the first page. The above Alan Parsons Project song has sort of become my personal theme song for this month. I hadn’t ever heard the song until recently when it came up as a recommended video for me on YouTube. Then a few days ago the song played over the P.A. system at my current place of employment. After that I decided to download the album that song is part of.
So when I last wrote a month ago, I was having issues with the Crunchyroll store. The good news is all but one of my preorders have since shipped out and have arrived in my possession. Of course I did have to go and rescue one of those preorders from the post office because those idiots at Crunchyroll put the wrong street name on the shipping address again. It ended up being kind of a thing because this package had arrived at the post office at the same time as another package from Crunchyroll that did have the correct address on it. The thing that really irritated me was that the postal worker I dealt with told me that any package that has the wrong street name on the address could be shipped back to the sender.
I really hate it when people give me blatantly obvious advice. I can’t help but react to it as an insult to my intelligence. Plus this woman talked to me like I was the one who put down the wrong street name on the shipping address! I mean she handed me another package from the same company that did have the proper address on it! If she had taken at least a second to think about it, she would’ve realized that this screwup was the fault of the company I had ordered this stuff from, not mine!
Anyway, I’m definitely not going to preorder anything from the Crunchyroll store anymore. I’ve decided to keep using them to get anime shows on blu-ray though, the reason being that they’re still the best source for that kind of stuff. I’m not buying manga from them though unless I either am able to bundle it together with some anime blu-rays or maybe if I’m buying three books or more. The reason is because Crunchyroll’s shipping and handling costs make it too expensive to buy just a single volume of manga. With the shipping and handling costs for Crunchyroll being about seven or eight bucks, it’s just way cheaper to buy in-store. Of course with certain manga titles, finding them in a bookstore just isn’t an option. Plus shipping and handling costs are an issue with pretty much any company that sells stuff online.
Actually with my manga purchases I’ve been trying (and mostly failing) to go digital. Early last year I broke down and bought an Amazon Kindle, with the original purpose of getting manga that was only available digitally. I’ve come to face the fact though that going digital is the only good solution to an ever constant problem, which is running out of shelf space. The transition has been a very difficult one though, mainly because I just prefer physical books to digital ones. For one thing, I don’t like having to depend on something I occasionally have to recharge for my reading material.
A couple of months ago I sort of forgot that I even had a Kindle, and when I finally needed it to get some new manga, I discovered it had no power left. Still, I’ve come to face the fact I’m going to have to go more digital with my future manga purchases sooner or later. Besides, it turns out that digital manga is generally way cheaper than physical manga. Case in point, I decided to try reading Junji Ito’s Uzumaki manga after seeing part of that disastrous anime version that Adult Swim and Crunchyroll put out last month. A physical copy of the original Uzumaki manga costs a little over thirty dollars, but the digital version for the Kindle only costs about eight bucks.
I also mentioned in last month’s post that for a while it looked like my dad would need surgery to fix the aneurism in one of his heart valves, but then it turned out he didn’t. Well at the start of this month, around the time of the election in fact, the surgeon my dad had spoken to called him and said they should probably do the surgery anyway. The idea is that the surgery would prevent any serious problems that would arise in the event my dad had a health emergency concerning his heart. The good news is that it’s a fairly minor procedure, and they sort of left it up to my dad regarding when to have it done. Last night my dad told me that he’s decided to have them start whatever preparations needed for this surgery. At the moment I have no idea when this surgery is going to be performed. I just hope they have the good sense to wait until after Christmas to do it, because this holiday season is already stressful enough.
In other news, I’ve still been playing last month’s big Sword Art Online video game, Fractured Daydream. The biggest issue with the game right now is that a lot of the big multiplayer quests in the game are kind of dead. What happened is a lot of the people who started playing at around the same time I did have gotten burned out on the, and so far the people running the game haven’t done much of anything to bring those players back. Right now the feature of the game I’m having the most fun with is the Free Roam mode, which is still multiplayer but is actually played solo. Really all you do is just explore a map, beat any monsters you may encounter and loot any treasure chests you happen to find.
My two cents on the matter is they should do stuff to improve the game’s Free Roam mode, like add a few environments to create some variety, and maybe add some communication features to reach out to any other players you may encounter. I feel like that would draw in more casual solo players like myself who mostly play the game as a way to relax. At this point I only play Fractured Daydream’s Co-Op and Boss Raid Quests in order to complete the challenges for the game’s monthly battle pass and obtain the cosmetic items that are occasionally dropped by the boss monsters in those quests. This month I was finally able to try my hand at beating the Extreme Boss Raid, which is a battle against a powered-up version of the Skull Reaper from the anime/light novels. I played that raid about eight or ten times and only won three.
The third time I won the Extreme Boss Raid, I managed to obtain the only cosmetic item from that question, which is a Skull Reaper themed helmet. That was my only reason for trying that quest. Anyway, I’m still hoping that the people who run Fractured Daydream will start adding content to liven it up here in the next month or so. In the meantime, it’s still something to play until the next Pokemon game comes out, or rather until they do the Shiny Rayquaza event for Scarlet and Violet next month. That’s something I definitely can’t miss.
I also used most of this month to rewatch Mobile Suit Gundam SEED (and of course Gundam SEED Destiny). I got a little nostalgic for that series after watching G-Witch last month. I had actually bought the newer blu-ray version of Gundam SEED and Gundam SEED Destiny earlier this year as a form of preparation for watching the recent Gundam SEED Freedom movie in theaters. Of course I never got around to getting to the theater to watch the movie, nor did I get around to watching those blu-rays until this month. Stuff happened.
Anyway, I had forgotten how good a series Gundam SEED was. I still think G-Witch is better, but you have to admire a series that can successfully rip off parts of both Star Wars and Star Trek without crossing the streams and offending legions of fans. As for the recent blu-ray release of Gundam SEED and Gundam SEED Destiny, they really went all out to improve both shows. The new English dub took a little bit of getting used to, but it also improved on the dialogue. They also added scenes that I’m assuming were originally part of those compilation films they did for each series a few years back. This was a major improvement for Destiny though because they gave the series an actual ending!
Another big change with the blu-ray release of both Gundam SEED and Destiny was the replacement of certain opening and ending themes for both shows, which I sort of had mixed feelings about. For instance, I always kind of liked the final opening theme for Destiny, but at the same time I felt it was an inappropriate theme song for that type of series. They also did do special ending themes for certain episodes, which I also liked. They had some pretty good visuals to go along with them too. So with this blu-ray release, what they did was they took both parts of a classic series and managed to perfect it.
Now the Gundam SEED Freedom movie is currently available for streaming on Netflix, so at the first opportunity after finishing Destiny I went ahead and watched it. The movie wasn’t perfect but was still pretty good. It was basically a piece focusing on Kira and his relationship with Lacus. This movie’s plot was the only instance where their relationship faced a serious obstacle. The climactic final battle in the film got a little absurd in spots, which is neither good nor bad, but rather just one of those instances where you just have to shrug and go with whatever’s going on.
The only thing that really gave me pause was the tight formfitting flight suit Lacus ended up in during the final battle. I knew it was coming because this particular outfit was mentioned in the Anime News Network review of the movie, but I was not prepared for how “interesting” this outfit was. On the subject of that review, the reviewer mentioned that they found the use of such fan service like that flight suit was out of place in such a serious series like Gundam SEED. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to call crap on that one. There was fan service running all throughout both Gundam SEED and Destiny; it’s just most of it was really subtle…less so in parts of the updated blu-ray version.
The last thing I have to say about Gundam SEED Freedom is that I hope the movie eventually gets a blu-ray release, but with stuff on Netflix one can never tell. Anyway, this concludes my latest monthly update. Sorry this post was so long, but I had a lot to say this time around. If you actually read both pages of this post, I thank you and hope that you found some of the stuff from the first page to be a little bit helpful. Like I said towards the end of the first page, all any of us can do is keep living our lives as best we can, and that's what I've been doing. Trump may have taken back the White House, but life still goes on. So to close this post, here's a video of the second ending theme to Gundam SEED Destiny, "Life Goes On".
