Life is suffering. But sometimes the suffering is worth it.

They pretty quickly started looking at Anna as "this other girl", eh? Don't even notice when they talk about her ... just back when she was still human ^^;

Wholesome handholding ...
... psycho sadism.

I see the connection.

Why are the Japanese so into alpacas, anyway?

Aren't they pretty popular everywhere these days? Alpaca wool is kinda "trendy". Either way, I know Swabian and Bavarian alpaca farms and petting zoos. Clearly there some global alpaca fad going on ...

Except that you... can. You can literally use just guards and clear story content without vanguards or medics or whatever else.

Of course you can. As I said. But is that the kind of advice you'd give a new player who has only one guard character? The point was: that's enough. You don't need any more.

You can of course clear maps in completely ridiculous ways. Especially for the early chapters you don't even need to actually block any lanes, you usually can set up things to have enough DPS to kill everything without any block at all. Especially once you got all those crazy 6-star characters that make the game a snoozefest. But that's not advice; if you are at that point, you don't need to go on a forum to wonder whether your characters are enough.

Useful for someone to know who only has a guard is: if you want to clear the story content, that's more than enough. If you are struggling, then the problem is not that you don't have more guards, it's that you're missing some aspect of the mechanics.

This is untrue considering how people always joke about how Arknights is basically guardknights. Once you get higher rarity guards, they're basically the most OP class in the game. Once you have your 5/6 star guards leveled, you can pretty much have a team full of guards and clear most of the content. Examples of OP guards being Silverash, Hellagur, Blaze, Lappland, Specter, etc etc.

Yes, nice. But you still don't need them for the normal content. Try playing through normal content without vanguards or guards or healers or whatever else the situation requires - possible sometimes, but not orthodox strategy. Meanwhile, guards aren't necessary. That's not saying they can't be great. It's just saying they aren't necessary. Because, as I said, they aren't necessary.

Guards are pretty whatever for the normal content. There's probably no situation where you absolutely need to have one (vanguards can do as well usually), and if not, then Melantha is perfectly sufficient.

Anyway, for playing for the story the level barely matters in my opinion. ATK/DEF etc. don't actually scale that much. Getting some skills to Level 4 is useful and of course as stuff gets more difficult you sooner or later need some raw firepower, but especially for the first few chapters it's more about understanding what you're doing with your units.

I mean, random example - Amiya has 276 ATK at level 1, 320 at level 20, and 390 all the way at level 50 (all before promoting of course). It's not insignificant but it's rarely a decisive difference. This is not like an RPG where a Level 20 character is roughly 20 times stronger than a level 1 character; it just scales stuff a little.

last edited at Sep 7, 2020 3:00PM

Everyone arguing this way around. Well, what of the opposite direction? This is a prequel, and Nikaido is the child of those two. Which is why she's so freakishly strong.

Giving how Japan is all about conformity I'd say the message will be about the robots being in the wrong to upset the social order; so it'll end with everyone deciding that they need to be banned altogether so people can continue on living in peace. ^^

Jessica's skill is great. Love her.

Perfumer is great for those maps where you get some sort of constant-damage effect. Whether it's burn or just generally a map effect or whatever.

Now for a super hard-boiled death match that levels the entire city between the loli and her snek nee-chan for a finale.

... gotta say though; it came up a few time in the comments: based on previous series people expected a variously rushed or otherwise underwhelming conclusion and I'm getting the suspicion that wrapping all this up in 1 (or 2, if you want to count it that way) chapters will feel kinda similar. Again.

According to my impeccable knowledge of manga and anime Japanese sex sounds can be heard approximately in a reach of 23.7m in all directions irrespective of whether there's any wall between source and listener, and irrespective of what type of wall it is.

Therefore it would have been pointless trying to stifle her sounds either way, unless she was prepared to go to a love hotel just to masturbate (which presumably all Japanese teens have to do when figuring out their sexuality if they don't want to be overheard by their parents).

Personally I'm a bit skeptical that the third-party actual-villain-magical-girls were part of the concept from the start. They feel to me more like "it's going well, we can expand the story now" than "all according to keikaku". Not that I'm complaining; it's an interesting direction to take.

with the reincarnated princess not being automatically good at everything

Literally a genius at the one thing she cares about.

(not) and massively popular,

Yet everyone indulges her.

rejecting her claim to the throne

The noble hero who gets into a position of power despite not wanting it. How novel.

and focusing on science and research rather than personal power or politics.

Essentially the standard recipe of the "our worlder" bringing their knowledge to the other world and this making them successful. I also really disagree; I've read at least two if not more isekai that are about "magic research" - it usually is coupled with the "child genius" trope.

And if any of those novels ever were about any serious sort of politics I'd praise them for it, that's certainly not standard.

Plus, you've conveniently ignored all the other crap - like the "heroine vs villainess" setup with the prince and his goons. Or the generic Western-ish fantasy world. Or the overindulgent-yet-stressed father.

last edited at Sep 1, 2020 4:43AM

Surprisingly I got Ceobe. I don't even know what to do with all those mages. ^^; There's so many great and useful ones ... and then they make the "main" story character a crappy mage that's useless compared to all the ones you can get elsewhere. Such a weird decision ^^;

I get why manga like Akuyaku Reijou Tensei Oji-san lean so heavily into the genre-cliches but with these it just drives me into despair. Not a shred of originality. Not even a single moment in those first two chapters is anything you can't find elsewhere. Sure, it's puzzled together slightly different each time, but that's about the level of originality and creativity LN authors and mangaka bring these days?!

Bleh. Unworthy.

Wait... How did she get on an escalator, with a wheelchair?

Given that it's balanced on just the large wheels it's probably possible. Steps should be wide enough; I'm sure that futuristic thing has some sort of out-balance gizmos installed so you don't tip forward or backward ^^;

e: Actually in Chapter 2 it even drives down stairs. That must be ... fun ^^;

last edited at Aug 30, 2020 3:21PM

Those two dorks, seriously ...

Whoresome and wholesome. There's just something to this combination.

But, yeah, mangaka really discovered lesbian brothels really, haven't they? I kinda expect them to randomly appear in a shounen battle manga chapter 176 for no particular reason; just because they've become such a trope. ^^

Awww. I'm now kinda hoping Heidi becomes a regular.

I'm still not sure their trans, tho...

The name is what makes me so "suspicious". They don't strike me as a foreigner character and I think this would be the first regular Japanese character I've ever seen in any manga that just randomly has such a stereotypical Western name. Crossdressing male or trans characters though ...

Mhm, honey, you look so ... normal ... in that lingerie ...

Mhm. Something about this manga doesn't click with me. dunno. It's weird. Oh well.

AFAIK it's not epidemic to a degree that would require A) women-only cars B) guarded women-only cars as a placeholder remedy while societal attitudes shift in their usual glacial pace.

I'm not sure. Here (Germany), they already keep working at this issue - so far it's mostly cameras, better lightning, schooling of personell, re-doing access points, women-only parking close to exits, and so on. Stuff you don't 'really' notice. Japan chose women-only cars (usually only during rush hour) and an awareness campaign to combat this.

But I've seen studies that make claims like 60% of women being harassed in public transport. I've seen similar figures for Japan. But it's something they focused on, so it gets reported, and is in the news, and it's (sort of) visible with the women-only cars. But looking at actually persecuted cases:
"the number of reported indecent assault in subway carriages in Japan between 2005 and 2014 ranges from 283 to 497 cases each year"
... that's nothing. That's not even 0.0001% of passengers every year (Tokyo alone has 3.3 billion passengers per year in their subways...). And I suspect that's again similar to the West.

But, anyway, this is all off topic; sorry about that ^^;

Also Japan is infamous for groping on subway trains, to the point that they have special women-only train cars during peak hours.

Yeah, but to be fair, groping and sexual harassment in public transportation is a common thing in the West too, it just goes unreported ... so one might say that's the (assumed) inverse to reported other sex crimes here.

Anyway, I don't think sexual violence should have anything to do with "is incest fiction fine" debates; clearly these are separate issues.

Yeah, something that doesn't makes sense there. "It's not actually that far." "So you can't come home on the holidays." Uh!?