Nice Thanksgiving Break!

Nice Thanksgiving Break!

So far, so good. Thanksgiving Dinner went off without a hitch. It was probably the cheapest, least effort dinner I’ve ever put in short of having it catered. Basically, a pre-cooked turkey breast, a bunch of cornbread muffins, some hawaiian rolls, stuffing, and mashed potatoes. The only major damper was that there was not a pumpkin pie to be had anywhere (like wtf?!)

Fate Grand Order Stuff

After god-who-knows how many attempts, Gacha luck finally smiled on me and I snagged Musashi during her rate-up on Wednesday. Frankly, that development was awesome in more ways than one. Aside from finally getting Musashi, it also means I’m free to focus on Okita Alter during the New Year’s garanteed gacha. What makes that roll so funny is that she basically spooked me. I went into it with few to no expectations, and saw no sparkly rainbow balls at all. Just a gold Saber card, which could’ve meant that it was any of the 4🌟 Sabers, or another copy of Artoria. Lol, nope. Then the card reveals just who I summoned and I was like “oh fuck no, oh hell fucking no” in the best possible way, of course.

Of course, the rest of the roll was shit but I didn’t care because I got what I wanted. “Eh, more green prisms—they all spend, don’t they?”

Leveling Musashi

Well, I succeeded—faster than I thought I would, too. I got Musashi to Level 90 and it maybe only took me a day and a half. The half-ap cost on ember farming helped enormously there. I also managed to get all three of her skills to Level 6 before I ran out of gold saber gems and shields. Guess what I’m going to be farming for the foreseeable future.

Musashi needs a lot of gems and shields. Farming is going to take a while.
The oof-level on the amount of shields she needs for all 3 skills to be leveled. She’s also going to deplete my stock of Void Dust, too.

Lostbest 3 Progress

GamePress’ Spoiler-free Walk-through is currently available.

Meh…Honestly, meh. Difficulty isn’t an issue—however, the story-telling is becoming an issue. Compared to Lostbelt 2, this story isn’t as engaging. It makes it hard to actually progress through the chapters—even if I did have fun trying out newly leveled Musashi against Lancer enemies. The Saber boss (Prince of Lan Ling) has so far been pretty easy to beat. Both fights, Euryale charm-locked, drained, and destroyed him in one shot. I didn’t even need to rely on Chloe as a backup.

Can We Stop with This Trope Already?

I guess the one trope that’s becoming extremely tiring is the commentary from the Crypters about how “weak” the MC really is. Well, obviously he/she isn’t weak, considering that they’ve survived not just 2 Lostbelts, but 7 Singularities, plus the 5 Pseudo-Singularities. It sounds to me like it isn’t just Kadoc that has an inferiority complex. The Lostbelts kings still aren’t shit compared to Goetia or the AoE spams from the Demon Pillars.

Maybe/hopefully that changes with Lostbelt 4.

Tangential Comparisons Ahead

On that tangent of weak MCs—I’ve been on a re-read of Mercedes Lackey’s Mage Winds and Mage Storms series. The best example of a MC that could be considered weak (weak as in no, or very little special abilities to speak of similar to our own MC from FateGo) so far has been Karal, the Karsite secretary (and later ambassador) in Mage Storms. Granted, it’s probably not a good comparison because Karal doesn’t face off against an enemy that considers him weak—actually he has to be the focal point of a macguffin against a world-ending disaster. Maybe that’s somewhat similar to our MC? The person-to-person conflict he faces is from other people doubting his abilities because of his age, and ignoring the experiences of the various trials he faced before and after coming to Valdemar.

I want to do a review of both Mage Winds and Mage Storms—things I liked, things I didn’t, and things that could have been expanded on.

That seems to be a trope in anime nowadays where the villains automatically assume that the MC is weak, and then acts surprised when the MC hands the villain’s ass back to them on a platter. Wash, rinse, repeat for next week’s adventure. Like any trope, it can get old and stale if it’s used too much—and I think we’re getting there with Gudao/Gudako being seen as weak by the Crypters. Looking ahead at spoilers from the Japanese server, you’d think that the remaining Crypters would start taking the MC seriously after Lostbelt 3. I will add that could be me misinterpreting—I’m reading badly proofed translations of the story dialogue.

Normally, Mages Aren’t Leaders or Tacticians

On the subject of the Crypters, you’d think that they would have learned the old rule: Once is Happenstance, Twice is Coincidence, and Three Times is Enemy Action—or in this case, Three Times, Y’all Just Suck? On leadership and tactics, the Crypters are mages, and mages aren’t exactly known for their leadership skills or tactical abilities. That’s a trope that has mostly held true throughout many sub-genres of fantasy.

Since I brought up mages and leadership skills, a few notable exceptions: Urtho, Vanyel, Skandranon (well, Skan was more of a lone wolf—err, Gryphon—but others were willing to follow him), and Elspeth (yes, throwing out those Velgarth references again), and then Belgarath from The Belgariad, and related novels (David Eddings)—a better example would be Gandalf. I’m pretty sure that there’s a few examples in the Fate universe but my mind is drawing blanks at the moment. Maybe Edison? Or Chen Gong (who appears somewhere later in the FGO-verse), but we all know that in the Fate-verse, Caster class doesn’t automatically mean mage.

About Those New “Ascension” Mats…

Umm…about that new ascension material. Maybe my mind is just way too filthy, and yes, I know that they’re technically meditation balls BUT C’MON!

Those new ascension mats, tho'
Even though BenWa balls don’t normally have strings. I’m sorry, but the strings just make it more suggestive 🤣🤣🤣

The emperor not putting up with Tamamo Vitch’s airs has probably been the highlight of this Lostbelt so far. “Koyanchihauhaha” seems the most fitting. I’m already on record as not liking Koyanskaya at all, but maybe I’m more partial to OG Tamamo and Tamamo-Cat.

Seems appropriate

I’m not sure how I feel about Spartacus being summoned, though. I suspect that Spartacus might betray the protagonist similar to what Atalante did in the first Lostbelt. It would fit his character—by wanting to prune the Lostbelt, that would by Spartacus’ definition make the protagonist “The Oppressor”. Which is call-back to Fate/Apocrypha. I really hope not, though. Mainly because:

  1. It would just be too damned predictable, and
  2. While yes, it is in character for Spartacus—it’s lazy writing.

With that being said, it is awesome to finally see some familiar faces again: Jing Ke, Mordred, and Nezha specifically. I actually liked Nezha in the Salem chapter, and Mordred grew on me in Apocrypha AND London Singularity.

Until now, Jing Ke has sort of struck me as comic-relief. Her roll in this Lostbelt is going to be more serious. Considering that Jing Ke’s (male) roll in history was the attempted assassination of Qin Shi Huang. We already know why she’s been summoned to the China Lostbelt.

With all of that being said, I will finish Lostbelt 3—eventually. I would like to have it finished before the next event, at least.

Future Site Upgrades

At some point before or around the beginning of the year, I’m going to start offloading the site images to Linode Object Storage. The reason is that this site is starting to become image-heavy—at last check, the uploads folder was somewhere in the neighborhood of 180MB. That’s not bad—especially when compared to the 20GB+ folders I’ve seen in my career as a web developer. At the same time, I don’t want it getting any bigger than that so it’s best to offload while the size is still manageable.

I’m also looking at creating some kind of mascot to go with the site. Not sure what, to be exact. The name of the site itself is a little hard to tie into any kind of marketing. I’ve had Psy-dreamer.com for almost 17 years now, and it’s hard to let go of. I realize that I need to have some form of goal in mind for the blog, and perhaps from there, I can come up with better ideas. So far, everything seems FGO-related except for a few differing topics here and there. Either way, more goals for 2021!

One response to “Nice Thanksgiving Break!”

  1. […] interesting. The scenery was basically a snooze, and the fights too damned gimmicky. My last post already covered some of this current Lostbelt, […]

Jess G.

Who am I? Well, I’m a web developer by day and an anime geek/artist/pick-a-random-subject-that-I’m-interested-in person by night. My posts do have a tendency to follow whatever mental tangent I might be on. I suspect that my ADHD may be to blame for that.
Enjoy your stay!