Four posts in three days? What the hecks going on? I admit, I’m making a deliberate attempt to post a little more frequently. It probably won’t last.

The first volume of Sora wo Kakeru Shoujo hits DVD and BluRay this week, which seems like as good a reason as any to hastily finish colouring a sketch I’d already had lying around as opposed to doing something new. I’d been random sketching a bunch of Sora Kake characters a couple of weeks ago, though none of them were really working. I guess I’ll dump my chibi-Alieda at the end of this post for the heck of it.

Anyway, Sora Kake Girl on DVD and BluRay. Apparently the first episode will sport an additional 50 cuts of animation in addition to what was present in the broadcast version. That’s pretty vague in terms of how much new content there will actually be – A cut is essentially what would be a switch of camera in a live-action production, so how this relates to the length of the new content depends entirely on how long they hold each shot. For SoraKake, I’d guess it’ll equate to maybe two to three minutes, though it’s not unknown for some shows *cough*Evangelion*cough* to have single cuts longer than that. There’s also a omake featurette about how the Shishidou family came to have Imo working for them on the home release – they are calling it a picture drama, so I wouldn’t expect any animation like those from the My-ZHiME release, rather it’ll be more like the Code Geass ones.

I’m getting the BluRay release, but given that Customs seem to be catching everything these days, it’ll probably be a couple of weeks before I get the thing – not to mention I don’t have a BR drive to take screencaps with. I guess I’ll report back as to the new content once I actually get the thing anyway, but it’ll mostly be a descriptive post, and entirely dependant on my ability to pick up on what’s been said in the new footage ^^;

I did manage to play the Valkyria Chronicles DLC over the weekend. The download experience was a little painful. I first had to update the firmware to be able to access the PS3 store, which was a 140mb download – at, as my internet was stuck running at the time, 16kb/s. Once that was done, I grabbed the Edy pack from the store, which was 80mb downloaded at pretty much the same rate. Then, after booting Valkryia Chronciles, it turned out I had to download a patch for the game as well. Eventually, it was about Midnight by the time I got to play a bit of Edys mission.

About ten minutes later, after a week of awful transfer speeds, my intarwebs connection magically started working properly again. Bloody typical, but at least it made the Selvaria pack a quick download.

The DLC packs were fun, though – Edy’s mission was a little harsh the first time you play it, particularly given where they hid that sniper, but it was a breeze to get the A-rank the second time through (and that A-rank ending was hilarious). The Selvaria stuff was really, really harsh, though – presumably because Selvaria herself is so overpowered, they severally nerfed the Imperial troops. The regular guys are all pretty much useless, and anyone other than the snipers seemed pretty much incapable hitting anything. I did manage to A-rank everything in order to get that final, forth mission (which was tremendous fun), but I had to heavily abuse in-stage saves to manage it. It’s kind of funny given that I didn’t use the in-stage saves at all during my play-through the main game, though I’d have probably driven myself a little less insane in places if I had.

I probably won’t try the Hard Mode EX pack. I’m not a masochist.