Site Enhancements!

…Boy, the second week of November did not go well, did it? There’s many things I could say—and often do say on Bluesky. Here, I’m just going to restate my broad positions: I support things that are good and kind, and loathe those which are bad and evil. I hope this doesn’t land me in any hot water.

Site Advancements

The site has been making many strides. For several days, I’ve been working on the site for at least eight hours a day, with the remaining hours being spent on self-care. I haven’t been playing many video games, even. Just don’t have the time. If I’m doing tedious, minimally-creative work, I’ll often have news coverage playing in the background. It’s not great for my mental health, but I have likeminded commentators that make it easier to bear.

Anime Category

As for the site, a huge milestone is the frontend completion of the anime category. I say frontend, because every page now has a custom excerpt and cover image. I prioritize those aspects because this site doubles as my portfolio, and I don’t want an obviously in-progress section to give the impression that I neglect my work. It’d be a hasty judgment on the audience’s part, but you can never underestimate (overestimate?) hiring crew.

Tag Tribulations

Also, I’ve done massive, massive upkeep on the site’s tags. I’m standardizing tag descriptions, adding many new ones, and giving them backend SEO elements. I only recently discovered that a tag’s slug (the URL suffix) can differ from the tag’s displayed name. This is great, because I obviously prefer technical accuracy, but recognize the common usage of more expedient terms.

For instance, the Sonic the Hedgehog tag’s URL slug is now just “Sonic.” Stuff like this improves viewer retention, as some people search by modifying the URL. Most people would likely type in “sonic” and not “sonic-the-hedgehog,” and now they’re less likely to leave the site from lacking results.

SEOh My God, Please

While that might sound marginal—because it is—a more practical benefit is its shortening of my URL length. I just learned that factors into Google’s esoteric indexing somewhat, and I’ve managed to get some pages indexed just from changing their URL. Expect me cutting down on that a lot going forward.

It hasn’t worked for everything, but I have a few more things I’d like to try to get problematic, unindexed pages in search results, like my Super Robot Wars: Alpha Gaiden mech guide. You can see the slug for that one has been shortened, but it wasn’t enough to index it. It’s literally always a crapshoot with Google. Regardless, I’m feeling increasingly confident that I can figure out a way to have every page on my site indexed.

An End to Site Outages

But none of these announcements have anything on the update that my site outage problems have been solved! For most of my site’s existence, it would occasionally crash for upwards of five minutes, with every page resulting in a 404. This mostly happened when I was tinkering with the backend (specifically, tags).

I’ve lost tons of time and work to these errors, and previous attempts at diagnosing the problem were unsuccessful. This time, the sleuths at my host discovered it was likely due in part to a modified .htaccess, and some miscommunication with something on their end. Whatever the jargon was, I haven’t had much to complain about since.

Occasionally, I do see some tags not show up when I enter them in quick succession, but it doesn’t result in an outage, and it’s trivial to just retype the tag—a far cry from entire editing functions breaking like before. It’s such a relief, man. I think whatever caused the issue also impacted my site’s tracking; I’m now able to see page hits that weren’t showing up before.

Current Site Priorities

My current focus on the site is getting everything indexed for good, and whatever that might entail, like the aforementioned SEO upkeep. It’s a lot of BS data entry, and I’ve done what I can to cut down on the workload, but without coding knowledge, I’m limited in my abilities. Better than doing nothing, anyway.

I have some slight grammar inconsistencies I need to iron out, which might be doable with a find and replace tool, but as long as things are parsable, I’m not in a huge rush. An example would be that I should have been using single quotations for the auto-italicized except text in category pages, but I was using double or no quotations. I’ll get around to fixing those.

Article Updates

I was hoping to have my next article out by now, but bullshit kept getting in the way. I have worked on it a lot, however. The scope increased, as always, but I think it’s worth it. Eventually, even I run out of shit to talk about.

For a morsel, I did write some brief musings on Black Lagoon. I’d been consolidating some anime franchises into single review pages to cut down on the clutter in my categories. Damn it, I guess that’s another thing I forgot to mention. It might not be ideal for traffic, as that’s less key phrase variance for when people search for specific entries that are now all on one page, but until I make a better organizational system, I think this is preferable.

Anyway, I thought Roberta’s Blood Trail still deserved its own page for the time being. The TV series DVD specials certainly didn’t, but they weren’t on Blood Trail releases. For continuity’s sake, I made a landing page for the TV series, because I didn’t want those awful specials getting their own page. So naturally, I had to write some off-the-cuff stuff about Black Lagoon. I hope you find it entertaining despite its brevity.

Remember to subscribe via email or follow me on Bluesky to immediately know when articles drop. Also, please share my work with your chums. Thank you!

What I’m Playing

Super Robot Wars W Thoughts

Story

I finished Super Robot Wars W. I’ve now seen all of the game’s Scenarios, which is good enough for me. I didn’t restart my resumed file from the beginning, which isn’t an ideal way to experience the narrative for the unfamiliar Scenarios, as I had forgotten background details.

However, having just replayed Super Robot Wars J in full, I was generally able to follow along with what happened in W. They share many of the same series, so when certain terms and names came up, knew what they were even without seeing W‘s exposition. I think it was fine.

My opinion on W is kind of mixed. I think, in isolation, it’s a particularly good entry. It’s generally well-written, and I feel there’s much less text density in cutscenes than J. I dreaded having to read more in J, but in W, it all went by quickly. It’s not Alpha Gaiden levels of writing, but I think it has to be the second-best SRW story in English that I’ve played, with the exception of Original Generation titles.

Unit Availability

Outside of the story—which again, isn’t amazing—I think W has diminishing returns. The time skip really fucks with unit availability, with many returning units having absurdly late join times. The replayability is hindered by how many units return from J, the unavailability of new series, and the absolutely bungled post-game Shop.

In the Shop, you can buy extra units to use, like grunt mechs. It’s a pretty awesome idea, and it addresses an issue SRW has always had which I cannot fathom. That is, the franchise’s near-refusal to let the player use enemy units, even on a post-game where narrative contradictions should not be a concern. Like, really; why? It’s a fanservice game. Let people use Serpents and Leos. Good lord.

Unfortunately, W addresses this in just about the worst way possible. Its unit selections are downright horrible. Almost all of them are from Gundam SEED series, making them essentially unusable until over halfway through the game, as that’s where most of their plots are covered. Certain Shop units have their availability cut even further by being inexplicably pilot-locked, as well.

Lame Selections

I don’t know about you, but I’m not exactly chomping at the bit to use one of the dozen GINNs on offer. I like that they’re an option, but what about the dozens of enemy Gundams that could have been purchasable? Why do they only let us use the Gold Frame for a single stage? Why are they so mean!?

It felt like nonsensical self-sabotage to me until I realized an apparent pattern in the unit selection: all of the units had standard HP values. At least, as far as I could tell. To be more specific, the units in the Shop had non-boss variants. This explains the existence of the Sword Calamity Gundam, baffling for being the only truly unique unit purchasable by the player.

This appears to be because the Sword Calamity Gundam is the only one that temporarily joins the player in a normal playthrough. Yes, it’s a secret (guest) unit, but still. When it joins you, I believe its HP is set to a four-digit value comparable to your own units, which is in stark contrast to the six-digit values seen on boss-exclusive units.

Shop Explanation?

While I don’t know how W is specifically coded, usually boss variants of units have separate entries in the game data. It’s easier to avoid unforeseen bugs and exploits by doing this, as you don’t have to worry about changes to one entry affecting another. If something goes wrong, at least only one variant is affected instead of all of them.

Simply put, I think W‘s developers just didn’t want to create new unit entries for boss-exclusive units that could’ve gone in the Shop. That’s not necessarily unreasonable, but I have a hard time buying it as a justification.

All of the data they would need for a playable unit is there, and all they would have had to do was change its HP. Remember, these are post-game units. They wouldn’t have even had to think hard about it. They could’ve set them all to 4000 or whatever arbitrary number; at least they would’ve been playable.

Hell, they could’ve kept the boss HP values, even. Yeah, they’d scale to hilariously high amounts with upgrades, but who cares? W is already extremely easy, so why the concern about breaking the game after it’s already been beaten?

I just don’t get it. It seems to me that it would have been a minimal amount of work to either modify their HP values, or even less work if they were kept the same. The payoff would have been exponentially more replay value and less reliance on repeated units from J. I think it absolutely would have been worth the effort. On my playthrough, I used Cagalli in the Sword Calamity Gundam. It was fun—for the 14 stages I even had Cagalli.

Verdict

The decisions W made regarding its playable units really soured the experience for me, especially on a replay where the element of the surprise regarding the initial cast is gone. Once the plot is done and gone, what is W on a replay? A pathetically easy, if well-polished SRW with a largely previously-used cast and new units you often barely get to use, besides. It’s just not as fun to fuck around with as other SRWs, and I don’t think the story is so good that it makes up for those shortcomings. I might even prefer J now. I dunno.

Also, I might have liked the first final Scenario more than the second playthrough’s. Small SPOILER section ahead.

SPOILERS for Super Robot Wars W

Inference’s mental breakdown as he just gets into an all-out slugfest with Kazuma was more entertaining to me than not-Blessfield showing up to fight The Critic.

Super Robot Wars J

I won’t lie, I got kind of burned out on J during my second (for that file) playthrough. Similar to W, the units you’re given are just so uninteresting, and it takes forever to get some of the better ones. It’s, as we all know, a tedious game, and I didn’t have the patience to get to the story sections I hadn’t seen on this replay. I’m not sure when I’ll get back to it, if it’s even any time soon. My original goal of seeing Touya’s story afterwards and comparing it to Calvina’s now sounds, uh, “mentally unsustainable.”

Super Robot Wars X

I considered playing Super Robot Wars GC, because I’d probably enjoy it more. Lazily, I didn’t want to configure Dolphin though, and just wanted another game I could play portably. I never finished my first playthrough of X, so I restarted it. Unlike W, I have no faith in my ability to remember finer details of the story. I think my first playthrough stopped on Scenario 22 or something.

I’m not that far in yet. My opinions on X are hardly revelatory. Like most people, I think they wasted the great concept of a fantasy-based cast list. Other than that, it suffers similar problems to V and T. It’s ludicrously easy even by SRW standards, and its assets feel cheap and old hat. This whole trilogy is hugely lacking in pizazz and idiosyncrasies.

Regardless, it’s cool playing an SRW with modern production values again. Even if I’m put off when I notice the absence of old features. Like, why can’t I assign a shortcut function to the X/Triangle button? All it does is speed up the cursor. Shouldn’t that just be shared with the B/X button? What was wrong with that?

Also, though I think they’re not utilized well, I do like X‘s series list. Probably the most of the VXT games, even. No special reason for it; there’s just a lot of shows I’ve seen before. They’re not forgiven for making me wait the entire game for Yoko and Kittan, though.

I’m determined to see X to the end this time, even if it shakes out to be fairly mediocre. I still haven’t completed my second playthrough of V, dude.

Soul Blazer

Surprise! A non-SRW game. My friend really likes Quintet’s “trilogy” of Soul Blazer (SB), Illusion of Gaia, and Terranigma. He’s been trying to get me to play them for a while. I tried Soul Blazer for a bit and fell off, even though I did enjoy it. Now he’s watching me play it and making sure I stick to it.

And yeah, it’s pretty cool. The worldbuilding mechanics give it a more substantial feeling of progression than most RPGs, even if there’s not much complexity to those elements. I’ve beaten Actraiser, and that likewise demonstrated that even variety in presentation can pass for more substance in an otherwise typical action game.

We’re pretty close to the end at this point. I might end up reviewing SB, as I don’t think I’d have much to say (knock on wood). It’s not that it isn’t interesting; I just don’t think it’s especially complicated. Like, I dunno how many paragraphs I could spend talking about its combat, for instance.

Anyway, it’s a cool game. I like it. I’m very curious to see where Quintet’s ambition takes them.

Peacing Out

As always, thank you for reading. I’m writing this as part of my effort to put out more consistent content. I hope it paid off.

I forgot to mention earlier, but as I modify the meta elements of pages, I often clean up old reviews. If it was enough to consider an entirely new article, I’d republish it. But, I’m mostly just making syntax more pleasant to read, fixing grammar, that sort of thing. Two of the many, many reviews I’ve edited are Initial D‘s reviews and Shaman King. They’re definitely nowhere close to my current standards, as that would take an entire rewrite, but I’m at least less embarrassed by them.

Well, I have stuff to do. I hope your week goes well, in spite of everything. Let me know what you think about anything I discussed here!

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A Very Brief Update Regarding the Apocalypse