Incoherent Thoughts

I sure spent an exciting night in my dreams last night. I followed the story of a certain L.A.O. (strangely enough, it was pronounced O.L.A. But I 'saw' it written, too, and it was written L.A.O... The 'A' stood for Alis and 'O' for Olsen, although I can't for the life of me remember what her first name was), who was some sort of a secret agent/warrior in training... There was a proper story progression and all, starting from a relatively normal day at the academy, to a sudden field trip that turned into a full-blown chase through the city (some enemy showed up) and an eventual discovery of its reason (an accident during a lab work that had resulted in a new life form - a kind of a being with supernatural powers - developing inside the blood of this L.A.O. person. It got named 'Alis', according to her middle name. The enemies had gotten wind of it first though, and came after her) and an ending with a 'to be continued..' feeling. And yes, all in third person, I was just an observer following this story. Kinda felt like I do when reading books.
I love my dreams, have I mentioned that? xD

Wrote profiles (or at least their beginnings) for all the remaining FF2 characters yesterday.. Although I had to add several to the character list and I'm not too certain if they used the same names in the English version. 'Filip' doesn't sound exactly right..? (Ricard Highwind's friend, father of Kain) Will have to check when I get around to playing FF2 again, for now it'll just have to stay like that.
They sent my copy of The World Ends With You (and FF2 PSP) yesterday. Yay! Shouldn't take long to receive them, they're coming from Canada. Quite unsurprisingly, it was cheaper than buying them from Finland, or even other countries in Europe. Even with the shipping costs.

Now I'm off to watch Vampire Knight epi 5. That day of the week again. =D

Damn Zeromus. You didn't give me this much trouble in the GBA version. D: I tried to beat FF4 DS to get it over with, but noo... Of course Zeromus wouldn't let me do that. My doom ended up being that strong attack of his (sorry, forgot the name. I was too busy issuing commands to read the messages) followed almost immediately by Meteor. And of course Kain had 0 MP due to Zeromus being overzealous with using Aspir, so even Phoenix didn't kick in.
Lunar Subterrane and Lunar Core ended up being relatively easy. Levels 80-84 when I last checked, and I guess the same levels in my latest save since I hardly fought anything on the way down. Just one Behemoth that surprised me (it ended up being easier to kill it than to escape from it) and one of Zemus Mind and Zemus Breath each, since I didn't yet have those in the bestiary.
The cutscenes? Once again blew my mind away. As well as the Lunar Core. Am I completely off the mark or was that a gigantic crystal? It's hard to believe this is on the 'underpowered' DS. Totally looking forward to the ending, that should be amazing. =D

Wrote a couple FF2 character profiles and the start of their summaries. Need to do more of them.. I guess it would be easier if I'd played it recently, but I'm getting the PSP version this month so don't really feel like starting another playthrough on the GBA version. Plus, you know, enough games to finish already... Anyway, might try writing profiles for Minwu and other temporary party characters today, the 20th Anniversary Ultimania Character File is insanely useful in something like that. It's part of the reason why I got it. :P

Sometime in the past couple days, the trees have gotten leaves.

Last night I did some pretty heavy editing at waff...not that it was something very useful, just renamed a bunch of pages so they'd have more natural titles. That ended up almost an all-night job, though, considering that every mention of those pages had to be edited to link to the new page title. I could have just left it to redirects, but that's a clumsy way to go about it, so I changed them. :P So now the page titles at least are a bit prettier.

Quite determined to finish (or at least nearly finish) FF4 DS tonight. I've avoided it long enough. Even going through the final dungeon again doesn't feel so bad anymore. =D; (if you don't remember, I lost a couple hours of playtime and lost my will to play it)
It seems that it's coming out this summer in Europe, too. SE seems to make good of their promise of simultaneous releases in NA/EU. If they'd just add Japan to that bunch, all would be well. =D While I prefer buying the Japanese version if possible, there's still those region-locked consoles, and I prefer not to mod mine. In those cases, it'd be really great not to have to wait a year after Japanese release for a game.....
(not that this new system is all that much better, with half a year or more between Japan and NA/EU release. That's what's happening to FF4 DS and FFTA2)

I think I had something else to write about, but I can't remember what...

Managed to write a summary for the first volume of Beyond the Boundless Sky. Huh. Had forgotten how small the text in manga can be. x__x Still the second volume to go, and then character profiles...
(as a result, I now want to continue playing Crystal Chronicles. While I've gotten rather close to the end of the actual story, I've never finished it..)
Should remember to do something else than summaries once in a while, but.. Maybe I'll add the remaining attacks from FF12, so it'll stop bugging me.

Aaand because I haven't done anything else but worry about waff, that's it for today. =D;

Well would you look at that. Palom has found a pretty girl for himself in Troia. She's called Leonora. I wonder if she was the girl mentioned with Palom before... And she can apparently use both white and black magic! Hmm.
Just by the way, May's FF4 The After chapter is Palom's.

It's bothering me. The Japanese blog that I usually get my Final Fantasy updates from is...no longer there. I went to a connected site and it said there's some renovation going on and to be patient..but why erase the blog completely while at it? Its URL only brings up an error message now. .___.
...of course, the most annoying thing about this is that I actually have to visit the official sites myself to get the updates. And that I can no longer angst over all the cellphone content (art, tunes, videos, etc) only people in Japan get, since I don't get frequent updates on them. =D;
Also, an English FF news blog that I follow seems to have largely stopped updating, too. What's with these people? All at the same time? *sweatdrop*

Updated some FF11 novel series content at waff. Wrote that summary for 星の誓い and rewrote all character pages but one that I already had up. Will need to do that last one and write more of them when I'm not so fed up with writing summaries...

I'm bad and linking to someone else's Photobucket, but... lookie here! Isn't that just the most awesome thing ever? xD
(...just in case you can't tell. It's from FF5. The 'heroes' are Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The 'enemies' are Bartz, Lenna, Galuf and Faris. One of them just stole Gilgamesh's Genji Glove...)

I've been good today. Did page templates for waff. =D Not all of them, but several. And..well, not for pages that'd actually need them the most...they seemed too complicated so I started from simple stuff. *sweatdrop*
Also, added some pages, and fixed a ton of links. There's always link-fixing to be done, it seems. That's what I get for being stupid and forgetting to check what the exact page names are, and instead presume I know them. Even a broken link doesn't always clue me off as there's so much content yet to be written...

Now, I'm off to do something suitably easy (like filling out sudoku!) to regain my ability to concentrate.

Weeell now. Haven't ended up playing an FF yet, but did some other stuff. Not that I've had too much time for other stuff, as the lack of caffeine in my blood made me unbelievably tired and I fell asleep..again. Nice.

Did some background stuff to prepare writing more pages for waff, and added a couple simple ones. And changed some words into the English version ones. I never learn to make those changes right when I hear of them, do I. It's a bit tedious going through every recent FF game to see if I've changed some specific word(s) into their English equivalents.
And it occurred to me that My Life as a King should be coming out in May. But I have so much other stuff to buy in May (like train tickets to Tampere..) that I probably can't get it then. Boo. .___.

I should really back up my stuff again. I don't even remember anymore when it was, but my sister needed my external hard drive temporarily to back up her own stuff (had to take her computer somewhere to get it fixed or something) and I haven't yet gotten around to hooking it up again after that. My FF folders especially have seen some heavy changes recently...I'm pretty sure the versions on the external even have the old folder structure, let alone the tons of new stuff I've saved in them recently. (the old folder structure got too unwieldy due to too much content so I rearranged pretty much everything to make finding stuff easier again. That was a looong time ago)

The day has disappeared again. o.o;

I did get something done yesterday. I wrote...err...a prologue summary? =D; For FF4TA. I meant to do more but I got distracted. Nothing much happens in the prologue, and I'd gotten bored of it by the point I finished writing that. Most of the dialogue in it is just Biggs and Wedge teaching Ceodore the basics of the fighting system, and the Mithril villagers telling Ceodore the basics of the Blue Planet history. Those are not something to include in a story summary, so it turned out short. The first chapter is where things start to get interesting.

Today, I've just angsted over the endless amounts of information out there about FF7. Every time I try to start looking into it, I get overwhelmed. Not only did the first game offer a wealth of information that's been pored over again and again by rabid fanboys/girls in the ten years since it came out, but damn SE keeps adding more and more stuff to it...I was never all that familiar with the FF7 world to begin with, and it's never been an FF favorite of mine. It seems that waff is doomed to not have FF7 info for some time yet.
I'm in a rather similar situation with FF10, and although there's not quite as much info out there about that one as there's about FF7, it's still plenty enough that I can't easily absorb it in a couple days. Which is about my limit of intense concentration, after that it evens out, the amount of stuff I can stuff into my head gets exponentially smaller, and in a couple more days leads into a complete annihilation of interest in the subject for a long time. *sweatdrop* Although usually I manage to distract myself until the last step happens, and can renew my interest in the subject earlier than I would if I went to the end of it...

Maybe the amount of info already out there for Crisis Core is why I'm not in a hurry to get it. Plus there's the fact that I keep wondering if they'll release an International version in Japan. I want the Japanese voices (they'd keep the Japanese voices in an International version of FF7CC, right? o.o) but I also want the extra content, you see... For some time yet, I'm content with waiting. There's plenty of other new FFs to keep me occupied - and who knows, by the time I actually decide to get that game, my interest will have turned to FF7 instead of more obscure FFs.

I'm trying to decide which FFs to take with me to the train tomorrow. The train trip to Helsinki (where the Versailles gig is..) takes five-ish hours. Plenty of time to play. =D; Maybe I'll just take all my portable ones and decide along the way.
(but that presents the problem that I have detailed notes of my intended character growths for FFT and FFTA, and I'd need to remember to take those notes, as well as a pen, otherwise I can't bring myself to play the damn games. I always forget the notes, so...that's partially why I haven't yet finished either of those games)

Note to self: remember to charge the DS and the PSP and the cellphone and the mp3 player. @__@

Saiunkoku Monogatari... I've now finished watching the first season. Damn, did I miss Ryuuki there towards the end. He hardly showed up at all. .___. This series is tearing up my heart, why can't they just be together?
Of course, it keeps me watching. Hmmh.

I scanned that Kain picture from FF4 Official Complete Guide, just in case anyone's interested.

( It be here )

I didn't mention it the day before yesterday, but I was working on waff character pages, thinking how a finished page should look like and what it should include. Came up with something, and applied it to Cecil's page. Well, at least half applied it. The rest of it needs to be filled out. If anyone thinks it should include something that seems it won't be included (although I have no idea what that could be, as the basic info, his parts in the game and his stats are/will be all there) feel free to let me know.
...it's kind of discouraging, thinking how many characters there are in FFs..and then realizing how much work I have ahead of me. Cecil is only one character out of many, and writing these huge pages for all of the characters that require it will take a loooong time... Waff is an eternity project, that much I've known since I started it, but still. Kind of discouraging. =D; (maybe I should trim down on the details of what happens during the game. It all seemed relevant at the time, but..)

Due to watching too much Saiunkoku Monogatari, I now have 757 780 unread feeds in my RSS reader. Nice. *sweatdrop* This always happens when I find something new and interesting, it consumes my time and I don't remember such things as keeping up with the news. I did read some of the more important tags, like 'friends' and 'final fantasy' and 'japan'. =D But that's it. Going through even a small portion of a tag with so much content as 'science' or 'tech' (let alone 'news' itself) would require unacceptably long. I wonder what I'm missing...
See, that's the problem with being a news addict. If I don't have the time to catch up with the newest new all the time, it starts bothering me that there could be something important there.

Well isn't this nice. I just lost two hours worth of final dungeon in FF4. Was just at the save point, wondering which of the three doors actually leads to it. In case you don't know, the other two lead to monster-trap-with-rare-equip-as-price rooms. I, of course, picked the wrong one. Thankfully, I got out of the first room I tried, too. Then I tried the other (wrong) one, and took one step too far. Lunasaur killed me. But I didn't even want the Ribbons, you stupid dragon! .___.
I'd gotten up to level 71-75. Now I'm back to 68-72. Not fun.

It's March already. Suddenly the Versailles gig seems that much closer.

I feel like writing summaries for waff. The only problem is that I can't decide what to write summaries of. =D; Maybe FF Unlimited. People have a sad tendency to ignore it, even though it's a decent enough series at its core. Just remember not to stop at the anime and read/listen to the rest of the story, too. I can provide links to translations of the post-anime bits if it comes down to that, but they're easy enough to find just by googling, I should think.

Got my copy of Lyrical Sympathy just now. =D It's totally awesome. Will learn the lyrics to all the songs before the gig. Will not take long, I think, I already know half of them..

Also got my FF3 Official Complete Guide. It's making me want to re-play FF3.. but that would be a spectacularly bad idea. First finish Ring of Fates. And FF4 DS. And preferably FFT and FFCC and FFTA and FF6 and Folklore, too. *sweatdrop* (Oh, and I just remembered I never finished Tales of the Tempest, either! I have a really bad problem with finishing games, it's probably really obvious, too...)
Anyway, now I have even more stuff to work on for waff. I haven't even finished adding the data of the previous games I got guidebooks for, and I keep getting more of them... hopefully there'll be a time soon when I'll just wander to the site and feel disgusted about how incomplete it is. It seems that's the only way to get me going, even though I really like working on it if I just manage to start... =D;

...it's aggravating. They still haven't sent my copy of FF4 DS Official Complete Guide. It's a new book, dammit, can't they get it already?! I ordered it at the same time as the FF3 one, and they didn't have that in stock to begin with, either. D:

I'm really tired...but hey, at least I finished reading L'Épée du Guardien. And made a page for it at waff. Damn, I'm proud of myself. One of the few actually finished pages at waff! =D; (...if you're actually going to go read the page, do ignore all the broken links. I haven't had time to do everything, you know. And okay, so the page looks a bit rough, I know..but the content at least is all there)
I need to read the first three parts again. So I can write a 'summary' for them, too. (err...just look at the page to get what I mean. I totally fail at summarizing things)

Was shocked earlier today to notice how long the series actually is (in its original Japanese version). It's 24 parts as of December! The 25th is coming out in February! o.o; The French translations are never going to keep up, you know. Five months between releasing the fourth and fifth volume is no good when the series gets a new volume every one to three months. (it's been doing that since 2002)
Provides me with a slight problem. Should I trust Fleuve Noir to keep translating the series? I really want to read it in French, it's one of the few opportunities I have to practice my French. But...if they won't keep it up until the end of it (or keep unreasonably long pauses like five months between volumes), how am I ever supposed to get to read all of them? .___.

The new FFXIII and FFVXIII tidbits are interesting. Especially the guy with eyes the same color as the Versus main chara's. Who is he..? And I could speculate endlessly on the ファルシ and ルシ tidbits, but let's leave that out of this entry.

Found the first two parts of the 果てなき空の向こうに [Hatenaki Sora no Mukou ni] manga. You know, the Crystal Chronicles one, published by SE. =D Used manga are mercifully cheap, so I ordered them. Awaiting confirmation of stock now, hopefully no one got it into their head to buy them while I was trying to decide...
Come to think of it, I could continue playing FFCC. We've nearly beaten it with my sister in multi-player mode, and I'm on...second or third year, in my single-player save. Despite the reputation that game has, I would definitely recommend it if you haven't tried it out. Some of the most fun times I've had playing a Final Fantasy game.

Trying to decide what to add next to waff. Did all sorts of random little things last night, although mostly just cleaning up existing pages and adding pictures to them. The waff resource (in its original form) wasn't meant to include pictures, so there's pretty few of them around even now...I just haven't gotten around to adding them. Come to think of it, I haven't even brought all the info online from the first incarnation of it. Oops.

An interesting dream, once more. Why do the big beasties in my dreams always have to use fire? x__x
Oh, oh! There was a cult in today's dream! ..I don't know what their purpose was, but towards the end of it I (and the other main chara in the dream) had to face off against their founder. He was hundreds (if not a thousand) years old and was thought dead. Turns out he'd just faked his own death and masqueraded as a new recruit for the cult. =D And we summoned an ice elemental on him but it didn't do any damage..then we went about trying to summon Ifrit (did manage in the end, it apparently required extraordinary courage, or some such thing) that managed to burn him...a bit. The guy just kinda..melted, and burned a bit. And continued attacking, at that point quite irate. o.o; There was also lotsa dodging attacks and a weird old house that served as the set. I have weird old houses in my dreams quite often. You know, when the set isn't a spaceship instead.
Ifrit was cool. All burning and huge and stuffs. And those attacks were quite strong, too. We nearly got caught in them a couple times, since this Ifrit had no care if we were on the way of it and its prey. =D;
Waking up after such a dream is always a pain. Most often, it happens right in some sticky situation, before we've had a chance to defeat the final baddie. How boring.

I've quite surprised myself these past couple days. I actually do something for waff instead of just thinking I should. Maybe I'll deal with one of those most boring sections tonight, like adding the data for one more game's items or attacks or monsters...

Well that's something I haven't done in a while. I've been working on waff practically the whole night. =D; Added nothing too important, just all the FF4 Decant Abilities... and added the DAs to series-wide lists... and edited in some info on a couple summons... and wrote proper bios for all FF1 characters, as much as I could remember on them... you know, small stuff like that. Did practically nothing to the completion percentage, even though it took so long. I blame those bios. You actually have to come up with the text for those, and even if it's just a couple lines for the bit-part characters, some of the more important ones do take longer. I dread to think of the more modern games, it's going to take ages to write anything passable for them.
Still 17 pages short of 3,000 pages total. I'll probably pass that mark next time I do anything even remotely major.

Also ordered Official Complete Guides for FF3 and FF4. It's going to take some time for them to arrive, though, as they didn't have them in stock.
I want to re-play FF3 now, but that'd undoubtedly be a bad idea. Need to finish games, not start new ones. D: