rallamajoop

On to day 2 of Wai-con and the costume that has been the primary reason why I haven't gotten hardly anything else done around here for the last couple of months.



( More photos and the usual making-of rambling )

As I was saying, we recently finished playing Birth by Sleep – the latest Kingdom Hearts instalment – in Japanese, of course, as the English release isn't due out for months, but my PSP now connects up to the TV so pinneagig can translate as we go without one of us having to peer over the other's shoulder the whole time. This was a game with a lot of expectations riding on it. I have been looking forward to playing it ever since seeing the closed theatre preview at TGS '08 well over a year ago, and after the misery of 358/2 Days, a Kingdom Hearts game that doesn't make me fear the whole franchise has gone to hell is way overdue.

My brief summary was: the loading times suck, the story is based around some good ideas and some great moments but falls down badly in the execution in a lot of places, the characters are thoroughly likeable, and the gameplay is beyond excellent. Here's the long version, point by point. Contains spoilers, but I've tried to keep them vague where the details aren't crucial, and whited out anything important. Highlight the text to read it.

( Loading Times )

( Battle System )

( Story - The introduction )

( Characters: Terra )

( Characters: Ven )

( Characters: Aqua )

( Final story thoughts and conclusion )

Wai-con was the weekend before last. (Today's post brought to you by the experience of receiving a rent inspection notice three days after the con and realising a) you are not getting anything but cleaning done until next week, and b) you should just thank your lucky stars it didn't happen last week. House looks much neater now though ;)

I'm hitting the point with Wai-cons where the majority of what I have to say about them starts to get a bit repetitive* – we came, we saw, we cosplayed, we sold lots of stuff, we won prizes, we (mostly) failed to melt in the heat**, we took photos, we caught up with friends*** – we basically had an awesome time.

*A few more, and pointing out the repetition is going to be a bit repetitive - oooh, recursion!
**Thank god we brought a standing fan to stick behind the stall this year. I'm all for having the con in January rather than December, but the weather is not on our side this time of year, and Ky has this real neck-to-ankle thing going on that is not well compatible with the heat.
***Sometimes in something of a drive-through fashion as people rushed past in opposite directions. Cons, they keep you busy.

So let's get straight down to the photos.

( Saturday: Overture!Sol and Ky, A.B.A. and Lina Inverse )

The big highlight that was new and different this year was the Eminence concert on Saturday night – and I really didn't realise just how much I was going to love the performance until we were were there. The evening started with the My Neighbour Totoro theme and ended with Super Mario - just to give you an idea of the range, and honestly, everything they played in between was gorgeous. But there's an extra layer of fannish squee to hearing songs you know – and an extra double-layer on top of that when it's connected to a movie or a game you love, so the high point of the night for me was The Dream That Time Dreams from Chrono Cross. I'm not much of a CC fan, but Chrono Trigger was the first real RPG I ever played and will probably always be one of my all time favourites, and what I'd forgotten about that particular piece is that it's actually a remix of the Chrono Trigger theme, extended with some beautiful orchestral segments. *_* It's a crying shame none of the CDs for sale after the event (and we bought *two*) had their rendition of that particular song. We have the in-game mp3 of it, but it doesn't begin to measure up.

( Sunday: Guilty Gear!Ky, Trunks, Dissidia!Tifa and Sora (+extras) )

So that was about it for Waicon 2010. As always, we owe a lot of gratitude to everyone who helped mind our table during the day, especially Ken and velithya.

We have lots of bit photoshoot plans for these costumes. Going to wait until the weather's cooled down a bit though, 35+ degree heat is not good cosplay weather.

As mentioned in previous Japan trip reports (I've only got a couple left to go now, I swear!) one of the many trip highlights was personally getting to see the trailers shown in Squeenix's closed theatre at the Tokyo Gameshow. I'm not going to bother going into too much scene-by-scene detail, since my memory is not that photographic and there'll be places all over the web you can find those kinds of summaries by now (not to mention low quality video versions all over youtube). But I (and the rest of our party) did come out of there bursting to talk about it, and we all know how much I love editorialising, so I'm going to focus more on what we thought of it all.

Like many Square Enix fans I’ve had some mixed feelings about a lot of their recent products. They’ve been responsible for producing most of the games that have ever made my all time favourites list (Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VII and X, Kingdom Hearts II, The World Ends With You), but also a lot I’ve never managed to muster more than ambivalence towards at best (most of the rest of the FF series, including spin-offs) and a good few others that have made me want to take to their lead designers with the Clue-bat of How Not To Destroy Everything I Ever Loved (Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy X-2 and XII, everything they’ve done with FFVII since 1997, and the last five minutes of WEWY). Each to their own and all that, since even most of the rest of titles have their own devoted fans out their somewhere, and their good games still remain really, impressively good – but the bottom line is that it’s very hard to be impressed by the shameless hype-mongering they’ve been keeping up in recent years by releasing all their newest trailers only in the UBER EXCLUSIVE closed theatres at events like the TGS, for which seats are so limited that we missed out on them completely on the first day and had to leave the hotel at 5:30 AM to make it through the queues on the second. The point I’m building up to is that those trailers were going to have to be really damn awesome to make all that bother seem worthwhile, so getting halfway through the show and already finding myself thinking “Wow, this was completely worth everything!” in between a whole lot of completely fangirlish incoherence was a very welcome surprise. Whatever’s actually in store for us once all these games make it to the shelves, they definitely know how to put on a good show.

( Assorted KH mobile games )

( Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days )

( Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep )

( Dissidia: Final Fantasy )

( Final Fantasy XIII )

( Final Fantasy Agito XIII )

( Final Fantasy Versus XIII )

And that was it for the trailer session (please make sure you’ve picked up all your belongings and head for the exit to your right, and oh, btw, the large guy in the Squeenix shirt wants a word with you about that camera he saw you sneakily trying to use in there…) To summarise, really looking forward to Birth by Sleep and Dissidia, definitely interested in all the FFXIII games, not especially fussed about the mobile phone games or Parasite Eve, and majorly disappointed with 358/2 Days and the idea they want us to buy yet another version of AC.

To round off the day later on, most of our group headed on to the official Squeenix Store in Shinjuku (excluding me and velithya who were camped out by the ArcSys booth asking their staff difficult questions MORE ON THIS LATER), and came back laden with bags in which the full ‘Square Enix Projects’ name had helpfully had the letters ‘A’ and ‘R’ partially blacked out to demonstrate the correct spelling.


The same thing again courtesy of the official website

And verily, we did laugh all our arses off about that too.

You know those fic requests memes you see floating around on LJ. They generally say something along the lines of:

"Give me a character / pairing and / or a short prompt / outline of a scene / crossover idea / a summary of a giant epic / your favourite cliché / a fic I’ve written before / some other prompt-ish thing, and I’ll write you a sentence / drabble / ficlet / list of five (or more) things / first part of the story / last part of the story / sequel / missing scene / alternate version / whatever."

I always wanted to try one, but now that I finally feel like it’s a decent time for me to try it, I’m having trouble picking one out of so many different variations. So instead I’m going to say: send me a prompt of any kind or combination in that list (or any other kind you can think of, really) and I’ll see what I can do about coming up with something to go with it.

I’ll probably be aiming for something sentence to drabble length, but since this is my first go at anything remotely request meme-ish, the basic plan is to just see what comes to me. Obviously, I can’t make any promises that I’ll necessarily come up with something for any possible request, but I’m happy to have pretty much anyone show up to request whatever – although I will warn people that prompts involving smut or particularly weird pairings are most likely to result in me staring at the screen feeling embarrassed for a bit, and then going to work on something else.

( Fandoms I've written for before - another one of these lists that is probably mostly for my own amusement )

Prompt at will.

Way back when we posted our first pics of our homemade Heartless with the glowing eyes, we promised everyone we'd put together a pattern for it for anyone who wanted to have a go at making their own. Well, it may have taken us... shall we say, a bit more time than we'd planned - but at long last, the pattern is finally up.

So, without further ado:

( The pattern and some other links )

( And (because there's never any end to the fun you can have with a posable Heartless) yet another set of photos )

Not technically Christmas fic, but there’s enough of a homecoming theme to this that this felt like an appropriate time of year to share it. Again, thanks go to thano for betaing this for me.

Title: The Long Way Home
Summary: Behind the scenes, the Traverse Town crew had their own story to tell during the events of Kingdom Hearts.
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Everything up to the ending of the first game
Notes:
The fourth and final part of the ‘Of Flower Girls and Falling Stars’ series. Contains a few scattered references to previous parts, though not so many that it doesn’t stand on its own reasonably well. The timeline jumps back and forth a bit, but I don’t think it gets too confusing.

( Previous parts )

( The Long Way Home )

So, I know yiji_chan has a pattern and we gave k_chan009 a copy to share with mihatenu_juri, and I can't remember clearly who picked them up at Waicon, but did anyone else want a copy of the pattern for the Heartless plushie? Quite seriously, we want to encourage as many people from Perth to make these as possible - we have this dream of assembling an army Heartless for KH photoshoots. You cannot tell me that would not be an awesome prop to be able to bring along, and the more of them there are the better.

Since it really doesn't take too long for me to do, I'm also pretty happy to do the wiring on the light-up eyes for just about anyone who needs a hand with that, just as long as they can pick up the components for me (any Dick Smith's should have them) and are prepared to bring the finished version to a photoshoot or two.

So, any takers?

---

In other news, I showed up at work on Monday and it turned out nearly everyone else was already on leave for the year and no-one could think of anything they needed me to do. So it looks like I'm on holiday early. Cool.

Finally got the second part of Of Flower Girls and Falling Stars this back from the beta and finalised! This was going to be posted as a single part, but it appears I've broken the LJ character limit, so the second half will have to go up in a separate post. Never imagined this thing was going to get so long. ^^;;

Title: Of Flower Girls and Falling Stars
Part: 2 of 4
Characters: Aerith, Cid, Squall and Yuffie, plus the Disney castle crew.
Rating: PG
Summary: Nine years is a long time to spend not knowing what happened to your world, but you find ways to fill in the time.
Warnings: A whole lot of speculation, copious use of Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters (who, in case anyone had missed this, quite definitely do *not* belong to me). No major spoilers to be found here though.

( When they arrived, Traverse Town was little more than a firm place to stand in the endless nothing of the cosmos. )