witherless:

sisterling:

One of these days I am going to write a rant about Endrance and how great and underappreciated he is and no one will read it. (I mean Elk. I mean Kaoru. I mean just the entire character in general, really.)

Also how you could send really sort of perfect responses to him in GU and yet then they made his promise card ending into pretty much a joke. Like why did you play me like that. You fooled me into thinking you were going to treat the idea of his bisexuality and Haseo/Endrance as a pairing with some respect. And then you didn’t. That was awful. (Okay you did respect his sexuality a little bit, better than it could have gone. Still, you could have done better GU. YOU COULD HAVE DONE BETTER.)

I actually have a rant of my own about this already written, I just wanted to draw something to go with it so it wouldn’t just get ignored right off the bat like most ~opinions~ are.

He’s a wonderful character, and I don’t think that people realize what a hard time he has with life. Part of it is cultural differences, but a lot of it is viewing depression as ‘weakness’, which… c’mon tumblr you’re better than that.

anyway yeah go ahead and write a rant, I plan to as well. I love seeing people defend this character, I love seeing people understand him. He’s treated so harshly by people who overlook how strong he really is.

Hello, I would happily read both of these rants! Because everything you’re saying is true, and I will never stop feeling bitter about how his promise card ending got short-changed. Even Bordeaux’s was taken more seriously, what the hell.

Let’s all just sit in a circle and talk about Endrance’s greatness. I’ll make cookies or something.

wuffen:

The “Draw all your past and present OTPs and die of shame” project, part 5/??:

Haseo/Endrance (.hack//G.U.)
Shipping status: shipping so hard you have no idea

Sometimes it is hard to disengage from Socially Awkward Gamer Mode, isn’t it Kaoru.

Seriously though I’m not very articulate today, but this picture is great and I love it.

Ahhh! One of my favourite Japanese artists has just uploaded a heap of new stuff to Pixiv. She used to have a website called Styx (and you can find some of her old pictures tagged with that, on my blog), but it was taken down years ago. I thought her talent had been lost to the world forever. So glad to be proven wrong ♥♥♥

Source: Yuka

(feel free to remove my over-enthusiastic commentary if you reblog, but please don’t remove the source)

I finally got around to finishing this, and basically I would say EXCELLENT GAME HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. I was hesitant about buying it, because I didn’t like the idea of racing against the clock, having to keep going back and giving Elena beast flesh before she transformed. And after Skyward Sword, I hate Wiimote motion controls. But Pandora’s Tower handles both of those things really well - the countdown is slow enough that there’s decent blocks of time to explore dungeons, and the controls are great, making varied use of the Oraclos Chain. Combat and puzzles are perfectly balanced, challenging without being frustrating. I loved the music, the atmosphere, the unique storyline… There’s pretty much nothing I’d fault.

I got the ‘unbreakable bond’ ending, because I’m a sap and showered Elena with presents. Next I’ll be playing Ar Tonelico II, which is rather less of a feed-your-girlfriend-monster-flesh action RPG, and more of a traditional cute JRPG.

One thing that bothers me though - and I know it’s silly - is that Pandora’s Tower is following The Last Story and getting a NTSC release. Because as a European gamer, I remember back in the PS1/PS2 era when there were heaps of amazing RPGs that never got released here. Xenogears, Valkyrie Profile, and my all-time favourite .hack//G.U., to name a few - I’d never have played any of them if I hadn’t taken the time and expense to mod my consoles, hunt around on the internet and have them imported. So it was nice to feel like PAL gamers finally had a couple of great titles that were just for us. If we’d had anything like Operation Rainfall, would anyone have listened to it quite so thoroughly? Alas, the world shall never know.

Like I said, I know it’s silly, because Pandora’s Tower and TLS getting NTSC releases mean more people will buy them, which means more money for the developers, which means more games in future. I’m just ever so slightly bitter about the past.

Lovely new picture from 山埜 (also known as PRANK).

Hey, remember when I took some requests a million years ago? Well here’s the first one. Sorry for the delay, but I’ve had a lot of stuff pile up on me, from college work to crappy file-eating USB sticks.

Anyway! This is for Eriyu, who asked for Ryou and Kaoru doing cute stuff in the real world.

Title: Outlasting The World

Summary: Socially awkward internet boyfriends, finally getting to see that movie about their favourite game. Unofficially set in the Victorious/Veritas ‘verse. 1,520 words.

Posted on LiveJournal, since it’s easier to format long, readable text posts there

drainheart:

imagineyourotp:

Imagine your OTP discovering fanfiction of themselves on the internet.

Went with fanart instead!

Since that seems more likely.

Read More

Yes. Perfect awkward internet boyfriends (or almost-boyfriends, in this case).

Good timing too, because I just spent an afternoon being shown sad animal welfare videos in college. But now I am cheered up! ;u;

Day 29 - A list of your collection.

My collection of official stuff is actually kind of small and pathetic:

.hack//G.U. Rebirth
.hack//G.U. Reminisce
.hack//G.U. Redemption
.hack//G.U. Perfect Guidebook
.hack//G.U.+ volumes 4-5 (I’d already read scanlations of the first three, and wasn’t impressed or completionist enough to buy them)
.hack//4koma

I also have three adorable Ryou/Kaoru doujinshi, and a set of .hack//SIGN DVDs I bought years and years ago, which unfortunately turned out to be Chinese bootlegs with terrible nonsense subtitles. No dude, I don’t think you’re really going to the Suzy shop to eat Suzy.

I’m still pining for my own copies of the Black and White Archives, too.

I thought I’d finished these questions ages ago, but it turns out I forgot the last few! So yeah, here’s another.

Day 28 - An unpopular opinion.

I’ve voiced most of my unpopular opinions already, but here’s another: I don’t actually think a real MMO based on The World would be worth playing. Not unless they added a huge amount of new stuff, and didn’t rely on the .hack franchise to draw people in.

Gameplay-wise, IMOQ and G.U. are very limited compared to MMOs like WoW and RO. There’s not much variety in quests or PvP, and I’d rather have 20-30 intricately detailed and themed dungeons, instead of 200-300 randomly generated ones that follow a handful of templates. As console games they’re fine, but as online games they wouldn’t cut it.

Besides that, all the elements that make The World really special - Aura, the Eight Phases, Lost Grounds, AIDA, the Key of the Twilight legends - are things outside the control of the programmers. The only ones that could be replicated are the Lost Grounds, but instead of being truly mysterious, they’d be ‘places deliberately made to look mysterious’. And the characters which brought the .hack series to life, from Tsukasa to Haseo, none of those would be around either. So I just feel that any attempt to make a real The World would fail, as Fragment did, because it wouldn’t be able to live up to the fans’ expectations.

Physical copies of it are hard to find, but you might have some luck on Japanese auction sites like Yahoo!JP. I just have a set of scans that somebody else was kind enough to upload - but I went back to the place I got them, and can’t find the download link anymore. So er, if you’d like, I can make a new download?

My set isn’t 100% complete now, since I deleted some pages of a character I didn’t like. It’s about 95% though. Or if there’s something specific you’d like to see, I can post it directly to Tumblr instead? Up to you!