Geez, could they have chosen a worse place to put a three-month break in Fate/ZEROs broadcast schedule? Probably, but maaaaaan, it’s going to be a long three months. Well, actually, I suppose it’s technically a short three months, given that, even in a leap-year, February isn’t the longest of period denominations, but let’s not argue semantics.

Anyway, I’d like to wish all of you reading a pleasant Holiday season from all of us here at Beta-Waffle – and since it’s just me here, that’s not a difficult operation to complete, being free of any grumpy or tsundere staff members to extract pleasantries from. Personally, I’ll probably celebrate by watching the Haruhi movie or something, since that’s nice and seasonal and all. Or maybe Tokyo Godfathers. Or maybe neither.

Or I could just call it Catalogue 3, but that feels a little disingenuous given that much of this content is also hitting the 360 version of the game, where it certainly isn’t just the third catalogue.
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This is just me following up on something I mentioned when I saw it theatrically a little under a couple of months back, although this isn’t something that came in the same package as iM@S which I got yesterday, rather being something I’ve just procrastinated posting about.
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I realise that I’m not exactly being prescient with this discussion here, but I was watching the second BD volume of iDOLM@STER yestereve (itself not exactly prompt, but I guess you can’t expect too much out of international mail this time of year) and Producers tie started bugging me again.
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I guess this shouldn’t be much of a shock given that there was one in Disgaea 3, but they seem to be a bit more common on the field this time around.

Hey, has it really been almost a month since I last updated? Whoops, must try harder, though I’m sure many of you are caught in the middle of the end-of-year Gameagedeon right now as well – personally, I jumped straight from the main story of Disgaea 4 (well, I got as far as Etna post-game, but don’t really have time to devote to power levelling right now) into Zelda Skyward Sword, have the new Assassins Creed queued up already, and I want to crack through another couple of cycles of PS3 iDOLM@STER at some point as well…

So, I’m kind of behind on my anime watching at the moment, aside from my weekly Sunday double-bill of Fate/Zero and WorkNaria’!!?@£%&@!, and the later of those has really just been carried along by it’s airing proximity to former. I kind of feel the second series of W! is really uneven – at times it’s a lot better than the first season, and at times it’s a lot worse.

As for Disgaea 4, it was alright. I love the new higher definition sprite art, but the characters are a little too one-note. Not that Disgaea has ever exactly been the pinnacle of quality character writing, but this one seems way more aggressive in it’s repeated pushing of the same jokes over and over again.

I’m also rather missing the PS2 days, where the mainline N1 SRPGs always brought something new to the table in terms of the way they played – La Pucelle, Disgaea, Phantom Brave and Makai Kingdom (not to mention Soul Nomad), whilst all being SRPGs, had mechanics which gave them all a very different flavour to each other. I know that the Disgaea team made ZHP between Disgaea 3 and 4 (and I’ve played a fair deal of that game), but there really isn’t enough difference between D3 and D4 for my liking. Just as well I’ve only bought this the once this time, then.