152 insights into my soul

I figured isabel79 would find this slightly amusing.

Anyways, its that time of the year where the normal TV season is just about over but the summer shows on like cable and stuff haven't started up, so I have more free time. Finally watched the Lego Movie, which I borrowed from zarathustra94 and turdburgler. I liked it, I thought it was pretty good.

Also, finally maxed out everyone in WO3U. I suppose I could also max out everyones bonds with everyone, which actually isn't that hard to do in gauntlet with getaway.

After a long, exhausting day at work, curled up in front of the TV to play some WO3U. Finally finished the last level of Gauntlet I needed to get the Conqueror's Den Trophy, so now I can go back and start working towards the Charitable Contributions trophy by fulfilling the Mystic's requests. Actually have a lot of requests to go through, but since all the levels are unlocked, I can cherry pick things and work on specific requests.

Anyways, since the music can be kinda tedious, opened up itunes on my laptop to listen to instead of the game music. With the new Annie movie coming out, kinda had Annie earwigged. So I put Annie in the search box. Which not only picked up songs from the soundtracks of the 1999 and 2014 movies, but also Annie Lennox, the Pistol Annies, as well as Heart's Dreamboat Annie, and for some reason, "Back That Thing Up" by Juvenile.

TV commentary:

OUAT- Interesting. ( spoiler cut )

WO blather- Between crafting orbs and the blacksmith store, I've actually managed to almost get everyone windslay and tri-element +10. I only have a handful of people who don't have those maxed, but even then, I think the lowest windslay is a +9, and maybe a couple of people with only tri-element +8. I'm just surprised is all, I was thinking it was going to take longer to get everyone's weapon attributes the way I want.

But yeah, I've also gotten to the 4th floor on the purple path of Gauntlet. So just need to sweep that up and then finish the other paths again. I also have done all the non-named troop requests from the mystic, so now its all a matter of just finding stages with those troop types.

As I've said, I've promoted everyone else once already. Just need to get them back to lvl 100 to unlock those last two slots. Which can be done on the way to getting max proficiency on their secondary skill, maxing compatibility with their X-weapon and acquiring their mystics. And once they're done with that, I can use xp from gauntlet mode to max the stats of everyone I so desire. The ones I have maxed out right now are Ayane, Xu Shu, Mitsuhide, Xu Shu, and Kojiro. Xiahou Dun, Zhang Liao, Xu Huang, and Wang Yi are almost there.

I do have a whole bunch of people I want to max. Depending on how quickly I get xp and gauntlet, I might actually end up maxing everyone.

I am getting old though, and my reflexes aren't what they used to be- I can't remember if I mentioned the usefulness of the heavenly sash/raiment of unrest combo for technique people. It allows you to sidestep after a charge attack (and the raiment makes you invincible for a second while doing so). So you can use it to cancel out of the end of a charge attack- like after it does its damage but before going into recovery frames. This lets you have a constant offense going. But yeah, if I was younger, I'm sure I could have the timing down better. Like sometimes I'll miss the cancel, or I'll do the wrong charge. And I guess attacking immediately after the sidestep is the equivalent of coming in with a running attack. So I either have to pause before attacking after the sidestep or count out an extra normal attack to get the right charge. I just feel I'd mess up less where it 20 years ago.

TV commentary:

The Strain- Seriously, he had so much time to practice, and that's what Eph came up with? ( spoiler cut )

Castle- Wow, I did not expect things to go that way. ( spoiler cut )

NCIS: LA- Weird, what's with them getting all science-y this ep? Sam calculating how much air they have left from the dimensions of the chamber they were in, Callen figuring out how to make a makeshift thermite bar from rust and the lithium in the batteries in the room they're in, Deeks talking about chance of death vs the percentage of burns one has sustained in their body. It was a little jarring to see them talk like that.

WO blather- So, I've finally unlocked gauntlet purple stone stages. So now I can work on the beat every stage in gauntlet trophy. Also, I have now promoted everyone at least once. So everyone will eventually have access to 180 speed and 6 item slots by the time they reach 100 again. Gauntlet does give a crap ton of XP to help with that, though its a pain in the ass to sort through inventory afterward.

I am slowly getting wrath/windslay/tri-element on everyone's weapons as well. All the DW characters have wrath now. I think the only remaining people who need wrath are in other 2 and SW1 and 2.

TV commentary:

Doctor Who- Neat ep. ( spoiler cut )

WO blather- I'm close to have everyone unlocked in gauntlet mode, just have Sanzang, Nene, Tamamo, and Masanori left. I was getting annoyed because deeper in the dungeons, the miasma levels start high enough that the characters are actually dropping better stuff than their sworn ally item, which is good if you need items/weapons/orbs, but annoying when you're trying to unlock characters.

But, this game gives you so many damn formations, I didn't realize I already have the formation that can lower miasma with the clarity skill. So I've been using that, finding the people I don't have, then activating clarity to take the miasma down to 1 then quickly taking them out to get them to drop their sworn ally item.

Unfortunately, I don't actually know where Tamamo and Masanori are, none of the stages I have unlocked have either of them. Sanzang is in on the third battlefield of the transition stage between the 3rd and 4th layers along with the rest of the mystics. And Nene is on one of the random other boards. I just haven't seen the other two native to any boards.

I'm also close to getting everyone's X-weapons- I'm down to 9. But, I have all the materials needed from the chests, so all I need is their officer drops, which just entails finding the stages they're on and keeping at it until they drop it.

TV commentary:

SoA- So I think I got my head wrapped around Jax's plan, even though it didn't make sense to me at first. ( spoiler cut )

WO blather- So like I said yesterday, I forged a bunch of X-weapons, I counted it out, and looks like I have 63 of the 145. Getting the other 82 shouldn't be too much harder. I mean, if I know what stages have which officers, I can farm for their item drops to get their weapons. The only thing to worry about is the second item needed. Of course, I haven't been seeking them out, I've just been playing the mode, and if I see I can forge a weapon at the blacksmith later, I do it. Heh, I'm sure once I start actively trying to get these things, and get down to only a few X-weapons left, it will prolly be hard finding that secondary item.

Owel, I did find a way to consistently get windslay and tri-element orbs. Doing the mirror versions of Mt. Nitou and Xuchang on chaos, you get those as rewards for getting Kyubi's tails on those boards, respectively. They're not too difficult on chaos (particularly with someone like Ginchiyo or Xu Shu), and no stupid side missions or fellow officers that need protecting/rescuing. So each can be done around 10 minutes, so its only about 30 mins to an hour to get to windslay and tri-element +10 (2 windslay +5 orbs, 2 tri-element +5 orbs). So at least now I don't have to go hunting around the blacksmith shop hoping one of those drops.

WO blather- So after mentioning how awesome Xu Shu was, I thought I'd make an updated list of my top 10 favorite WO characters.

1) Xu Shu- I know, maybe its new character syndrome, but he is pretty awesome. I mean, even without the cheesy r1, he's still really cool. He has a great moveset, the rapier and hook dart looks really cool. If I have any complaints about any of it, its his running attack. He goes airborne on it, which means he can't chain his normal combos off of it like other characters can. That, and if you're charging towards a crowd of mooks, he'll basically just fly over the majority of them. (On the other hand though, its fine against officers because you can use it to knock them in the air and air combo them to death.) Plus he has a really cool musou, a la Wesker's hyper in UMvC3, the whole zig zagging back and forth slashing in hyperspeed. The fact that you can just throw out R1 arrow rains and then do all of this other stuff is just gravy.

I also love his character design, especially in Wei colors. The hooded cloak makes him look like an Assassin's creed character. In the game, he's in the Shu faction, but historically, he started in Shu, but then was forced into Wei's service. Still, I hear in DW8, he willingly joins Wei's service. Between him, Jia Xu, Guo Jia, and Sima Yi, Wei had some awesome strategists. I can't see how anyone not think Wei is the best- they have the coolest warriors and strategist, and the best leader.

2) Ginchiyo Tachibana- lightning girl herself. She's a beast. She has a great and varied moveset, being an SW "normal" type, with awesome moves at c5, c6, and c8 and c9. c9 is a good starter, as not only will that cause lightning bolts to start dropping, it will charge her sword, beefing up her other combos. She also has a really great R1 with elemental activation, which serves as a good panic button- get in trouble, just whip it out and it will auto-refill her to full automatically if she has absorb and osmosis. I mean, I can chaos "speed is of the essence" with her no problem at all. She also has an amusing personality.

3) Mitsuhide Akechi- Like Ginchiyo, he's a SW "normal" type, so he has a whole bunch of different and cool looking charges, and he has a really good R1 with elemental activation, so again, it serves as a good panic button to refill him to full when he has absorb and osmosis. Plus, I like that he starts out as Oda's bad-ass right hand man, like his personal reaper (reaper was his name in Devil Kings, which his appropriate), taking out anyone who stands in his master's way. And he has a cute daughter.

4) Zhong Hui- Ida know some people don't like his moveset because its "unrealistic", but I like the floating swords and him doing the whole flying torpedo thing. But yeah, his personality is great, I love that smug arrogance, bragging about his special training. I also like his whole, "You must have had some sort of special training" that he spouts out whenever he gets beaten or someone does better than him.

5) Xiahou Dun, Xu Huang, and Zhang Liao- My Wei warriors 3. These guys just drip bad-assedness. I'm sad they don't have a unique triple attack together. And, they all use different weapon types (Xiahou Dun the Podao, Xu Huang the big-ass Axe, and Zhang Liao with the twin axes) with their own unique style. Heh, and I think you could even do an elemental theme with them. Xiahou Dun is obviously fire, what with his c3 and c6 being very fiery and explosive, Xu Huang would be earth, what with the giant earth strike he does for his musou, and Zhang Liao air, what with his rushing musou attack. All they need is someone to be water.

6) Kojiro Sasaki and Kotaro Fuma: I think they're really cool character designs, very Exalted Abyssal-ish in nature, like an undead samurai and ninja. I first noticed this pairing in SW, where one of the boards had them together going after you. They just have this scary, demonic aura about them, and they certainly revel in killing and causing chaos. In the vanilla version of the game, I couldn't think of anyone who matches them to be their third, but now I'm thinking Tamamo might work. She's got a similar aura of demonic-ness and death.

7) Lu Bu- C'mon. "It's.. it's.. Lu Bu!" The big bad-ass of DW himself. I'm sorry, I think he's more bad-ass than Honda or Keiji. At the very least, I think he has a way better moveset.

8) Zhou Tai- I may think the Wu are a bunch of low-class river people, but they do have cool guys like him at least. I mean, the silent bad-ass in black armor with the iaijutsu-ish fighting style? He just oozes bad-assedness.

9) Wang Yi- Again, Wei just has all the coolest people. This girl is easily the most bad-ass of the DW characters. Plus, I like Ma Chao and all (he just barely got edged off this list) but he's always babbling about his spear of justice, and since they're nemeses, I like using her to shut him up. I think her story also points out the hypocrisy of the Shu (heh, can you tell which faction is my favorite, given how much I badmouth the Wu and Shu). Its like, Ma Chao is always carrying on about wanting revenge on Cao Cao, but what about what he and his people did to her family. At least she's honest about it being revenge.

10) Masamune Date- I wish his moveset was a little better, but c'mon, he uses a katana and twin pistols, that's awesome! He does have a great look too, as well as a hilarious personality. He has some great lines.

Other comments, I do like all the Ninja Gaiden folks are in here now- Hayabusa, Kasumi, Ayane, Rachel, and Momiji. And Sophitia from Soul Calibur is definitely someone who fits well into the series.

I do like the new boss characters too. Hundun is a monster. Literally, he's as tall as Gyuki, and looks like this 4 armed, 4 winged demon creature. His R1 lets him take flight and rain down death on the hapless. Tamamo, as I mentioned before, has this cool demonic aura, and her moveset is really good. She has some gaps in her defense, but if you know those and protect them from being exploited, she's unstoppable.

Her upgraded form, Kyubi, is no less bad-ass. Like her c4 automatically hits 700 times, so she'll always be activating alacrity when you pull that off. Her air r1 makes her invincible, and her ground r1 summons a PC officer to fight for you. Normally one of the closest enemy PC officers, but if there are none, a clone of one of the people on your team. But yeah, I guess if you also press down on the d-pad to make your team active all at once, doing her R1 gives you an additional 4th person to fight?

WO blather- So, just slowly chugging through this game, doing the story, doing a little bit of gauntlet, raising the new characters up, and getting people's mystic weapons.

Heh, speaking of, that's one thing that made me really angry about the game at first. So, in this game, people can get 5 star weapons now. There are mystic weapons, which you get by accomplishing a specific objective in free/story mode, and there are synthesized weapons, which you get by finding the right materials in gauntlet mode, and crafting them. The synthesized weapons are ultimately way stronger, because not only is their base attack 5 higher, but at max compatibility, they give +99, as opposed to the mystics +18.

Anyways, what was irking me that in addition to those, you could also randomly get special versions of the 1-4 star weapons either as random drops in high miasma level gauntlet boards, or by paying 100K for battlefield bonus in free/story mode. So they're basically just like the 1 to 4 stars, but could randomly have as high as a +99 additional attack bonus. Which blows away the mystics and pissed me off, because why offer up a really good thing that you have to do something specific to get, when you could randomly just get something better. bbv('That's total BS!') I hate random stuff like that in games. I want the best stuff for my characters, and I don't want it be totally random to get it- I want to have to do a specific thing to get the best stuff, not rely on luck.

But I did some number crunching, and even if you found a 4 star weapon with +99 bonus, the synthesized weapon would still be stronger if the 4 star's base attack + compatibility bonus was lower than the base attack of the synthesized weapon, since the synthesized has +99 at full compatibility. And indeed, every single character's synthesized weapon's base attack is higher than the 4th at max compatibility. So I'm glad for that- I can be sure that having their synthesized weapon, that's the best they can get, there's no random better thing out there.

Ooh, Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate finally comes out in the US next week. Ah can't wait! And levels and DLC and story progression and all that jazz carries over. And if I ever wanted to upgrade to a PS4, I can actually carry my save over to the PS4 version of the game! So its nice to know that my progress won't be lost if I change systems. More games should be able to carry over like this!

I had gotten around half (maybe a little more, maybe a little less) of the characters to level 99 already, but now that max level is 100. Not only that, when you level reset a character, they gain 2 additional item slots. Which, I usually don't reset a character, because why would I knock them back to level 1 when they're at level 99? But yeah, the extra item slots are a definite boon, so I guess I'm going to have to. Those extra slots will definitely come in handy, since now I don't have to short change someone of actual useful equipment like attack or defense upgrades just so I can have a horse.

But yeah, the game definitely adds tons of new things so its not just the same game with more characters. Like they have the switch combos. Like I never did too much with switching attacks in WO3, but since certain three person teams have unique switch combos, its definitely a reason to learn.

Also, you can have all three of your team be active at the same time. I mean, obviously you can still only control one, but instead of the rest of your team being in some otherspace, waiting to be tagged in, you can have them on the field controlled by the AI doing they're thing. Which allows you to do a special SUPER musou attack, with certain teams having unique ones.

And they also have a color editor so you can customize the colors of your characters outfits, which is great. It will be nice to switch up the color schemes on some of the characters.

For all my talk about wanting WO3 ultimate to come out here, it kinda sucks that since its just a "special" version of WO3, it doesn't have anyone from DW8/XL since the game predates that. But they always stagger WO from DW/SW, so you can never play a version of WO that has every playable character in existence.

And DW8 added a lot of new characters- 10, 2 new Wei (Yu Jin, Li Dian), 2 new Wu (Lu Su, Hang Dang), 3 new Shu (Zhang Bao, Guan Xing, Guan Yinping) and 3 new Jin (Jia Chong, Wen Yang, Zhang Chunhua). And XL keeps adding more. So far, its one new character for each faction- as I've said before, Yue Jin for Wei, so both YJs are PCs. Zhu Ran for Wu, presumably so when you have to stop the fire attack at Yi Ling, you're fighting a true character and not some glorified scrub. And Fa Zheng for Shu, I guess so the original 3 all get a character. But since it sounds like XL is focusing on Lu Bu and his story, they're expanding the "Others" faction. Chen Gong as strategist, and now Lu Bu's daughter Lu Lingqi which seems awesome.

I mean, she looks cool, too bad she uses those damn cross halberds Lu Bu used in DW6 that are corny. But yeah, of all the new characters, she seems the most interesting, mostly because I want to know what her personality is going to be like. And given the Lu Bu story always played up the romance between him and Diao Chan, and obviously Diao Chan is not her mother, how will that go? Are they going to say he had a previous wife who gave him a child? And like how old is he supposed to be if he has a child that's grown up?

But I digress, that's 15 new characters lacking in WO3, not to mention they're developing SW4. So I guess in a couple of years, WO4 will have damn near 200 characters? Currently, WO3 special has 145, so with the 15 from DW8/XL, that's 160, I'm sure they'll add some more from SW4, as well as some new WO-specific characters and guest characters from other games. They did everyone in Ninja Gaiden, but they still have more people from Warriors of Troy and Bladestorm to raid, and whatever that game Nemea is from (which had some cool character designs). And Sophitia being in this brings a bunch of Soul Calibur possibilities into the mix.