I think that the Love Detective Hisui advice column was wildly successful. Clearly there is an untapped market for an advice column for Otaku on the Internet. Sadly Love Detective Hisui was busy helping Otaku find love and was too busy to do a column today. But he pulled some strings and was able to get us an equally impressive board certified psychotherapist to fill in. Let us all welcome Grail-kun and his overflowing cup of wisdom.
Category: Type-Moon
Melty Sprites

I have been occasionally playing the little treasure that have come from Comic Market 81 including the two anime fighting games I cared the most about, those being Melty Blood Actress Again Current Code and Ougon Musou Kyoku Cross. Far be it from me to even pretend to be a serious Type-Moon critic but I must complain about Melty Blood. Playing both games back to back makes me realize that Melty Blood SERIOUSLY needs to upgrade their sprites. If you compare the crisp HD sprites of Ougon Musou Kyoku to Melty Blood’s wonderful but outdated character graphics the difference is so noticeable. I’m not saying that I don’t enjoy playing the new Melty Blood. Adding the new selectable fighting styles and added characters is very much appreciated. But I would rather the next addition of the game make minimal additions to any game play (which is already quite good) and instead work on the graphics. It would take a great game and modernize it into a spectacular game.
I realize that this is partially a selfish and very complicated request. Upgrading sprites is a major undertaking and fighting games are loathed to change the artwork on sprites that already work unless they have no other choice. The infamous example was the use of the outdated Morrigan spite until Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars. I also know that French Bread would probably wish to spend more time and effort on the graphics for the artwork of their own original property game, Under Night In-Birth. It might be a somewhat selfish request but it is one I make anyhow. I know it is a serious investment but it is one that I think would result in an equal amount of returns.

Fate/Extra’s Archer Route: Archer Has Officially Become My Roommate’s Hero!

While this is slightly delayed I have finally got through my second play through of Fate/Extra this time with Archer, a female protagonist, and taking the Rin route. Essentially I changed everything you could change to see how much it actually effected the story and how the game played out. If you are looking for a proper review of the game you just check out my first article about my Saber playthrough. That has more analysis of the game proper. This is just a supplemental look at the viability of a replay and what bits of nuance I got out of using Archer. This review took about a month longer than it should have as I swear the universe did everything up to including making it so my PSP would no longer read UMDs to prevent this review. Le sigh. But here it is.