Fynn
is an EoFF Hero and/or Heroine
Radical Dreamer

I still haven't watched the much of the newer seasons. It is a bit sad they've already decided to stop making more as well.

Indeed it is.

Driving is a big deal in the U.S. most people own cars and it's the easiest way to get around, which is why our public transportation services are way behind Europe. It helps that our states are not densely populated making trains and subways systems impractical outside of a major city or the East Coast. Sidewalks depend more on the growth of the city, but some places just don't bother. My father's neighborhood, despite being a suburb of the city capital doesn't have sidewalks for some inexplicable reason despite being one of the older neighborhoods in the area.

Granted, you have to also remember most of the state's west of the Mississippi River, outside of some of the coastal areas previously owned by Spain/Mexico, are relatively young compared to Europe's countries at least in terms of European/American development in such areas. The indigenous populations were either kicked out or had their cultural heyday a few hundred years before Europe knew the continent existed, so the lands are still pretty raw in terms of development. We didn't even have a proper highway infrastructure until FDR's New Deal era in the 1930s, and even that kind of needs to be redone cause the roads only had a lifespan of a few decades.

Another way I can put this is that while your country is slightly bigger than my state, my state has a quarter of your population and our population is almost twice as much as Oregon's.

Well I do want to visit Russia and Turkey...

Oregon is a pretty beautiful state, though the coastline is the best part with all of the fishing villages. I still want to go back to Washington and check out Seattle myself.

Lol, well that's true. I plan on hitting eastern Europe at some point.

Very true with the experimentation.

I imagine you have your hands full with the coming arrival of a third entity within your home, but I'll be here to read it when the time comes.

Glad you're having a blast and you should take a trip abroad sometime. I think once things settle here, I'm really going to see what it would take to got to Japan or even England for a little while. I've never truly been out of the country, or at least not off the North American continent, and I've always dreamed of traveling.

Once I get a bit more written I may take you up on the offer. I may even simply just go by an outline as opposed to a chapter by chapter scenario since a good chunk of the first part will need to be rewritten anyway.

I'm not surprised they nailed Hawaii so well, it's like Japan's favorite part of the U.S. and the one most familiar to them, which is hilarious in hindsight cause Hawaii is probably the most foreign state culturally from the rest of the country.

Legend of Mana has been a neat trip so far. Not sure if I'll play it to completion since I've beaten it several times before anyway and I have a host of PS4 games begging me to play them as well as Romancing SaGa, but I'll stick with it as long as I can. I think the biggest insights of playing so many PS1 games lately is how completely daring Square was in this time frame in terms of design and content. It's hard to feel like the modern company would greenlight anything like Chrono Cross, SaGa Frontier 2, and Legend of Mana nowadays. I mean there was a brief moment in the PS2 era, but it feels like the company wouldn't really do anything as experimental as these titles unless they were mobile titles. I also forgot how much Square pushed the PlayStation Pocket and how Legend of Mana actually had save file bonuses for having other Square game files on your Memory Card. LoM gives you a Chocobo Pet for having an FFVIII file while you can acquire the Cinderforge (best Steel Weapon in SF2) for having an SF2 file on the card.

Well, just keep working on that writing sine it's ultimately more important. I wasn't nearly as productive as I wanted to be this past weekend but that's largely due to RL stuff getting in the way. I hope to do a better job this week. Good luck on your own story and drawings.

Hawaii is one of the few U.S. states I've never been to along with Alaska and Maryland. I do dig the Hawaii vibe the game has, but didn't some of the previous entries get inspiration for their areas on places in Japan?

I ended up starting Legend of Mana, which was enough of an eye opener for me that I ended up going back to my Top 100 list and rewriting the whole section on it because I don't feel I did the game justice like later entries. Been pretty groovy so far.

I don't think it's bad to at least start developing some of the primary characters later on, of anything you can use it as an opportunity to add foreshadowing in the earlier chapters. So don't worry about working on the guy. The new idea story is simply me trying to create a baseline of the general flow and direction of the story. In truth it's likely going to read like a collection of smaller stories that happen to be interconnected as opposed to my usual grand epic nonsense. I don't know why I'm thinking of the Destroyer story so much lately, maybe I'm tapping too much into my misanthropic moods lately which that story is a bit of an outlet for. Soul is one where I'm just wanting to sit down and really dive into it. Like not my usual careful and slow pace, like I seriously just want to get the basic plot out and just start fixing the chapters. My goal for the summer is to have the full story written out by August, and to have a final draft ready by the end of the year. I feel if I just focus on getting the main details out and worry about foreshadowing and "being clever" in the revisions, I can finally get the bulk of the story out and give myself a better chance of editing down the early bloated chapters and fix the pacing. It helps that I've always wanted Soul to be just one book despite knowing it could easily be a trilogy in itself, but I would rather do the former.

I was doing a Mana playthrough a year or two back but got distracted by shiny new stuff. I did finish one of the newer games and was going to start Legend of Mana but instead opted to try out SaGa Frontier 2 since I never touched it. My first attempt didn't go so well since I started in Wil's scenario and it's not only a slow burner story-wise, but a serious kick in the teeth gameplay-wise as well. I kind of want to go back to that replay of Secret of Mana, but the TV I have my SNES attached to finally died, and I also acquired the remake recently... I think the reason Legend has been on my mind is that it has a bunch of stylistic and gameplay similarities to SaGa Frontier 2, so playing the one is getting me into the mood to play the other kind of deal. It's also been ages since I've played it and it was one of the more interesting surprises for me in the PS1 era.

Speaking of games I started and never finished, I need to get back to Pokemon Ruby, I think I got halfway through before stopping. Sun and Moon always looked like they were trying to really revamp the series, so it's cool to hear the confirmation that it did. Pokemon was always an interesting idea, though I still feel Nintendo has never really tapped into its full potential outside a of a few oddballs games here and there.

Hey, every lit bit helps if you ask me. I've been jumping back and forth between brainstorming ideas for three different stories I'm writing. My new one is just in the phase where I'm jotting out ideas for it, I kind of came back to the Destroyer storyline, and of course Soul is never far behind in my mind.

I've also really want to replay Legend of Mana for some reason.