Mahou Meido Meganekko

I don’t normally do this, but I’m going to post Jason’s thin slicing review of HOTD in its entirety, given its brilliance:

BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BREASTS BRAIN BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS BRAINS

Well, I’d have added “BLOOD” at least once, and the ratio is off a bit, but still, you get the picture, I’m sure.

I have to say that this season has turned into a stunning winner to make up for the last two crappy quarters we’ve had to endure. Strike Witches 2 and Sekirei 2 have both turned up the quality. HOTD has just about the perfect mix of horror, blood, and breasts. Asobi ni Ikuyo is keeping me in stitches with its zany Illuminati hijinks, and Occult Academy had a good first pair of episodes to start before the reportedly atrocious third episode.

Losers: Mitsudamoe (too-perverted kids); Seitokai Yakuindomo (too-perverted teens, and derivative of recent series); Shukufuku no Campanella (too boring, wake me if anything happens).

Edit: I don’t know what happened to the 2nd half of this article; it was there when I opened the edit screen but not displaying until I re-saved it. Weird.

Holy boing-boing, Batman…. that episode was actually damn good!

In the first season, they followed the manga up until the last episode, and only changed the aftermath of the battle on the bridge. The second season has completely departed from the manga, and the results are far more promising than I expected. It was funny, it was tense, and it ended on a cliffhanger. I came for the boobies, and I’m getting a comedy-harem-action-fanservice thriller. I don’t know who’s writing this, but I’m impressed so far. Even the animation is, if not inspired, at least competent.

The conversation on the roof between Kazehana and Tskuomi was good on both the comedy and personal levels, but they set up a joke during it, and delivered at the end of the scene. Then, anyone who’s ever made a call and gotten a child on the line will be rolling on the floor during Ku-chan’s telephone scene.

If you haven’t followed the first season, you can just go ahead and pick up with ep. 1 of this season, as it’s a recap anyway.

So I’m still finishing off Kali because she cast the Spell of Return before I could bag the rest of her cities. I’m ready to attack her capital, but decided to hold off and hit some of the remaining Myrran mana nodes, just to see what dropped. I’d scouted several that were too tough for me to spare forces for, or I’d bounced.

So I hit a Chaos node with a mixed LB/Magician/EL stack. This is what I got, and I didn’t take a single hit vs 8 Gargoyles, thanks to getting an invisibility spell off.

This is one of my complaints about the AI: it’s stupid. Melee units just sat there, whereas if they moved forward, they’d eventually have found me anyway.

Only problem was, I screwed up when I took the screenshot, and caused DOSBox to crash, which lost the game state — so I didn’t have this when I reloaded. Oh well, lets hit them again! I didn’t do as well the 2nd time, because the node prevented both my attempts at Mass Invisibiilty; I had to duke it out with nothing but a Blur spell to back up my troops. So what I actually ended up with was this.

So this is what Jafar looks like now:

Yeah, I lost the druid when I put it Auto for a battle that I shouldn’t have, and he charged.

You know, there’s three more nodes I haven’t taken yet…. be back in a bit.

Update:
I lost connectivity with the server last night, so my update didn’t go through. An autosave caught part of it,

The first one:

The prisoner was Taki, and I turned him down, since I now had the Resurrect spell to get the druid back.

The second one:

One of the bows was ok, the other was crap.

I have a screencap of the third, but don’t remember what it was. I think it was 140 mana crystals and an axe. I then noticed 2 more nodes and an abandoned keep in Arcanus on a remote island. I decided to hammer them as well, but the drops were, by this point, mediocre at best. So I put Kali out of her misery and went to bed.

My next game is going to be a Myrror start with Dark Elves and all Death magic. I don’t recall ever using it that much, so that will be another learning experience.

So, once again, a post starts as a comment at Chizumatic, but the growth gets out of hand…

I’ve been playing Master of Magic lately; it seems to be what all the cool kids are doing. About which I could care less, but I’m enjoying playing one of my favorite games of all time once again. So head below the fold, and I’ll ramble on for a bit about my latest game, and strategic insights.

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“Emotional Incoherence.”

Jun Maeda and Key were made for each other. Honestly, I lost interest around episode 10.

Well, I haven’t written about the manga I’m following for a while, so here’s an “update review.” Most of these manga are ecchi to quite ecchi, and may not be safe for work, but the post itself below the fold is OK.

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Like I said about Another World, they skipped to some fanservicey time, courtesy of Setsuna and Asuna.

Quite NSFW below the fold, naturally, and not behind spoiler tags, since there’s not really much text, it’s just cheesecake.

edit: whoops! Need to put the fold IN, first…
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