Weltall

There's really no reason to posit any connection at all. The coin was in Wax's pocket and that's how Drewton discovered it, along with everything else he found in there like a bottle cap. The way the man is described as laying everything out neatly (and in a way that makes it clear this is expected behavior from him) means we don't need any connection from Hoid to explain why the coin is there or why it's presented in a way that Wax might notice it. And yes, Stormlight Archive's first half takes place before Era 2 so Hoid should have full Lightweaving at this point. Unless something happened in the interim anyways.

Word of Isaac is that not all of the stars seen in the chart are actually part of the Cosmere. What we're seeing with at least some of those is stars in the larger galaxy that aren't part of the star cluster we know as the Cosmere. 'An Adonalsium Did It.'

Alternatively if you have the patience, Brandon has said that Dragonsteel Prime is going to be released as a Sanderson Curiosity when he does the Words of Radiance kickstarter (WoB contains Dawnshard-related material if you haven't read that yet).

Geofront just released the 1.1 patch for Trails from Zero, which includes a whole bunch of edits following the work on Azure and the official localization of CS4 (so all the terms now match for example), graphics improvements and all sorts of behind the scenes stuff intended to make it an even better experience. Sounds like Azure is probably not going to release this month, but April is looking pretty good. Haha, enjoy Chapter 3!

Yeah. I mean they might come up in the context of enhancing the effect of the latter metals but they don't really make much sense on their own, except maybe if it's F-Nicrosil.

We don't know what type of spren bond with the Ryshadium but there's a theory that it's musicspren. We do know what Chiri-Chiri bonds and it's a luckspren. Odds are that if a shrimp could form a bond it would have its own specific type. Considering that Roshar's native ecology is inspired by tide pools anyways, I imagine a crustacean would have an easier time convincing a spren that it belongs and to bond one. Hypothetically speaking. xD So far as we know, you do require language skills to Awaken since the spoken Command is part of what makes the magic work; we see Vahr gagged in the porlogue precisely because this makes it impossible for him to perform that part of Awakening.. You can bypass the 'speaking' part with the Tenth Heightening and training but some kind of higher thought and language is required.

Yep, and the reason you see it mentioned in the context of those metals is because we know that magic in the Cosmere is set up to eventually allow FTL travel (as opposed to moving between worlds via the Cognitive Realm) and we've tried working out how it might be possible based on what we know of the systems.

And by 'weird' we mean that she wants to try shooting rainclouds to see if that will make them go away. She also doesn't approve of genius musicians attempting to use her store's roof as an impromptu venue.

The real answer for why there are so many half-spoken conversations is because that's how it is in the Japanese version too and when the games are localized the code is already set up for voiced lines to be inserted in those spots and not others. Given that voice acting isn't cheap (and Falcom can get big names to do their characters) plus Falcom being a small company and you have your answer for why they don't do full voice acting. When their games do have it, it's in the form of in-house ports where they didn't need to spend much money on anything else (Oath in Felghana PSP) or much more commonly because they were partnering with another company that paid for the studio time and actors (the Evolution games). But only in the PC ports (which got added to the PS4 ones as well by extension) and not the original games for PS3/Vita. Which is analogous to Falcom being able to add more voice acting to the Oath port. They'd already done all the hard work, had a good idea how it would sell and could afford to spend a bunch of money on extra voicework and do the insertions themselves. Maybe if NISA did one port at a time they could do likewise but instead they appear to prefer simultaneous Switch and PC ports. Though they have gone back and done very nice things in their ports (look at adding a co-op mode to Ys VIII) so it's not like the ports are entirely straight jobs.

Sen no Kiseki: The Anime. I wasn't expecting anything like that out of the livestream.

MacBain from the Gagharv Trilogy comes close at 62. <headdesk>

Kuro's official website updated with a bunch of info and some teaser videos of the combat system at work. There be some Hajimari spoilers in here There's also more screenshots and some actual battle footage (but no audio) showing off the Action and Command systems and how they can be shifted instantly. Sepith Mass is returning based on the post-battle display and so is the Tactical Bonus system for multiplying your EXP, though the display doesn't currently show how the bonuses are added up yet. Interestingly, this wasn't completely out of left field.

Have you seen the new engine scene in Hajimari? Because yes, it is visibly a graphical leap over every other scene in the same game using the older engine. Kondo even uses those exact words to describe the engine in the first Kuro interview. It's like you don't actually know as much as you like to think you do about these games...

As mentioned, CS4 is the same as 3 and Hajimari is mostly the same in terms of graphics (the animations are more dynamic at appropriate place however) but they threw in a teaser of the new engine they've been working on for one scene. Kuro no Kiseki will be the first game to make full use of it, so it will represent a graphics leap compared to the games before it.

No. If you want to play them in English go PC which is easily the best version. You can't even get Sky The 3rd on PSP because the console was deader than dead by the time XSEED was able to release it. Any computer that's not ten years old and on fire can probably run them just fine, given their age and the fact that they weren't exactly pushing the hardware envelope even when they were brand new.

They would have been, the trilogy was released on PS3 as a second-degree port (PC original to PSP to PS3) so they have the extra content of the middle release but still don't look as good as the original, since the trilogy was originally designed for the PC. XSEED's release managed to back-port the PSP additions and some of the PS3 textures into the original PC game, making it by far the best version. You might want to wait until the end of Chapter I to read this since it relates to one of your earlier guesses:

Whoops, fixed now.

Brandon has said that some forms of magic like emotional allomancy require a level of sapience to work, so they won't affect animals. I'm guessing that something similar holds in the case of the Breath-transferring Command and you need a similar level of sapience to actually receive the Breaths and an attempt to transfer them to something that isn't at that level would simply fail. Now, assuming it worked for purposes of argument, Brandon has said that his magic systems can handle senses that don't work quite like the average human's. For example, someone who was blind could still 'see' atium shadows and use them like a sighted person could despite the visual nature of the magic. Likewise he's said that synesthesia would have different effects on people vis a vis Breaths (depending on the form it took) but they'd still get the benefits of them. So I imagine that a highly Invested shrimp would gain a better ability to distinguish colors (which they aren't actually good at) and it would probably do funky things to their ability to perceive light polarization. There's a really cool video here where you can see researchers with an underwater camera that's designed to try and capture how a mantis shrimp sees the world in a way humans can process. Likewise I'd imagine that anything able to receive Breath that can perceive infrared or ultraviolet light would get better at distinguishing those spectra.

You might want to plan a bit of extra time for optional content. While The 3rd's Finale is easily the shortest in the series in terms of mandatory content, it opens up some optional content that can be a pretty good time sink if you get into it, or feel the need to grind for anything, or want to complete all the Doors. I'd say the odds are pretty good, given where they are and their stated goal of finishing up (if all goes well) this month per their last update. Even better odds if you take a little break between 3rd and Zero like you're considering.

Brandon appears to agree, since he describes compounding (which would otherwise bypass the efficiency question) as not being perpetual motion for that exact reason.

Looking really nice there! And welcome to the Shard. xD

Perfect ending (or result) for the series and a milestone for his career, not the ending to his career. If he has plans to end his career on anything, it would be a remake of Gagharv.

We got a nice teaser for Kuro no Kiseki today, more to come in a week. Mechanics stuff: Story stuff (Hajimari spoiler):

If the estate sent letters to everyone who borrowed ideas from Tolkien that would be a full-time job. I mean, the number of places that mention mithril alone... That one isn't a deliberate Xenogears nod, it's that both are drawing from the same material. Contrast to the end of CS1: Likewise a sword named Vierge being described as a self-defense weapon for noble girls isn't intentionally a nod to Elie's Gear but draws on the same imagery, Rean's sword is named Uzuki not because of Citan, Shion and Jin but because it's a traditional Japanese month and so on. That said, if you look for them you'll find lots of very definite references to anime, manga, novels and games. For example, there's an enemy in Trails to Azure called the Ra Cailum and Tio and Elie both have nods to Lyrical Nanoha in their Craft selections, the strongest Earth art in CS3/4 is called Gravion Hammer, Shio's Vorpal Weapon in Tokyo Xanadu resembles a slightly tweaked version of the Eva Series' giant swords from End of Evangelion and for bonus points the name itself comes from Lewis Carroll, etc. Falcom clearly has a lot of fun when they decide what to name things in their games. xD This one most definitely isn't on Falcom's part, but it might have been on XSEED's. One thing that can't generally be conveyed in localization is that some characters have Craft names written in kanji (the writing system adopted from Chinese) while others use mainly katakana (one of the two phonetic systems, used especially to sound out foreign words). Estelle's S-Craft is one of the former and is one of the cases where you can actually see it in localization, because her animation includes the text cutin; you can see it with most of Rean's S-Crafts too. Her Craft is, in Japanese, Ougi - Taikyokurin, which translates roughly to 'Secret Technique - Ring of All Creation'. That being a mouthful, it got localized as Wheel of Time and that might have been a deliberate nod from XSEED. By the by, there are more references to western fantasy than just to Tolkien but those are the most obvious. You can also find references to Earthsea and The Belgariad in the Japanese text, to say nothing of all the mythology they pull things from.

We know that Cognitive perception is a huge deal and almost nobody seems to think of the sand and the little beasties living on it as separate, it's just 'the sand'. So I imagine that if Slatrification works like Soulcasting on a fundamental level and the Sand Master is basically telling the combined entity that is the Invested sand that it really wants to become water, and it happens. We know that when magics appear to be doing similar things, it's generally because they're working on the same underlying principles so two forms of 'turn X into Y' probably work very similarly in a mechanical sense.