Weltall

Actually, when it comes to slow burns Trails to Zero has everything else beat quite handily. At least, assuming that Kuro doesn't somehow manage to top it when it comes out later this year, but I doubt it. And @NattyBo, enjoy SC!

Since the topic's active again, I'll throw in that Raboniel's sentence endings is also a thing in (both spoken and written) Japanese. There are syllables that you can add to the end of a sentence to do things like turn it into an explicit or rhetorical question, or to function as the equivalent of an exclamation point, or to express politeness or informality or... you get the idea. Brandon may have initially picked up the idea from Korean, which he learned while he was a missionary and which (per my limited knowledge) has a similar way of changing the function of words and sentences via suffixes. Brandon also draws a lot on Hebrew in SA which might have influenced Alethi grammar as well as names.

EX Master Quartz are basically special ones locked to Guest characters. They can gain experience like normal but they can't be removed and don't get added to your inventory. It's basically a way of letting you see some MQ before they become available full-time or (in a couple cases) to see MQ that you're never going to get in CS3, usually at a slightly higher level than what you've got at the time. Trails of Azure (the game that introduced Master Quartz) had its own version of this in the Prologue where you had a pair of guests with Lv4 MQ while the others were at Lv1.

While I'm not completely sold on the idea of a Dawnshard on Scadrial, it's worth noting that Brandon had already conceived of them six years before writing Hero of Ages, because as he says a plot point in Dragonsteel Prime (written in 2000) was people unwittingly becoming the hosts of Dawnshards. The term didn't exist in the original apparently but the concept was already in place, so it doesn't really strain credibility to me that he had enough of what he wanted to do with them worked out that he could have slipped some foreshadowing for one into MB1, if that's what this ends up being.

It's automatic, you don't have to do anything once you've obtained it. As far as experience goes, the game has a hidden weighting system that's designed to enforce New Class VII being slightly underleveled compared to everyone else. You'll note in that shot that Rean and Claire are getting the same amount of experience at the same level, while the NC7 members are getting appropriately weighted experience relative to each other.

Osborne was a shame but the new actor absolutely nails the big moments. Meanwhile, and counter to the earlier assertion that NISA somehow just doesn't care, they got the original actors for much of the returning Sky cast (and Tita being recast is perfectly understandable since the character is now four years older) including Johnny Yong Bosch for Joshua. Oh, and the voice acting for Ys IX has been phenomenal from what I've heard so far too. Picking Erika Harlacher (who voiced Juna) to do Raging Bull was inspired.

Have you read the Era 2 books yet? Spikes can be melted down or otherwise broken and each piece will still have some power. There's a threshold for hemalurgic decay so no matter how small the piece is or how long it's been outside contact with fresh blood, it will still have some charge. This is where all those Pathian earrings come from and why they work the way they do. Remember that a Shardblade doesn't annihilate Investiture, it just damages it a bit, which is also what's happening when a spike is damaged through more mundane means. Whacking a spike with Nightblood would be another matter...

There's a reason for all that lore: Vantage Masters is based on an older Falcom game where the titular Masters were characters and there's a lot of background lore that went into that which Trails is just scratching the surface of. The game got a sequel set in Fantasy Japan and an enhanced port of the original title to PSP, which replaced the earlier guest Masters (from other Falcom games like Ys and Brandish) with a selection of characters from Trails in the Sky. Not really. XSEED only added extra voiced lines for the ports, not the initial releases. Maybe if NISA were focused on one port at a time they could spend some extra cash for more voiced lines but they've instead focused on doing PC/Switch releases at the same time. Meanwhile they do put extra effort into the games in other ways (like the improvements to the PC port of Ys VIII) and they put more into their limited editions. It's less 'Who cares more?' and more 'Where does the time and effort go?'.

Nice job on the transcription! Based on the chapter numbers given in the published excerpts, this would be some ten chapters before the start of the Bridge Four sequence. Looking at the gaps between the excerpts, I'm guessing there's three or four more Jerick chapters in between the two?

Yes, it's a new system introduced in CS3 that will unlock soon(ish) and the game will explain the mechanics of it when it does.

Welcome to the Shard! If you remember the in-universe Words of Radiance excerpts, one of them tells us what happened: In other words, most of the former Radiants were killed shortly after the Recreance by people angry at the perceived betrayal.

Extremely relevant WoP: In other words, the icons are significant but they can mean a lot of different things.

Yeah, pretty much. If you've got that level of power you're going to need someone with an equal degree of power to not get slaughtered. The usual counter of Nightblood isn't going to help because you'll be dead before you get a chance to draw it and Vin would almost certainly pass the 'Nightblood Test' so Vasher's favorite trick wouldn't work on Vin. Maybe Pali with her Honorblade and ability to draw directly on Honor's Investiture since the Heralds have orders of magnitude more experience than almost anyone else and her specific powerset includes healing, illusions (which may or may not be helpful depending on how they interact with A-Bronze and A-Atium) and visions that might be useful as an atium counter depending on the realmatics of 'seeing the present'. Even then it would also depend on whether she's one of the better fighters among the Heralds (and my guess is she isn't) because she'd still need to land enough hits on Vin to get past F-Gold healing, when the latter has super-speed and doesn't need to get close to be dangerous. Also, there's a pretty good chance that Vin could simply Push/Pull the Honorblade right out of a Herald's grip since the Bands are an example of the ungodly levels of power that are implicitly needed to work through that kind of Investiture resistance, and once that's taken out of the equation the slaughter would be very quick. I discounted the other Heralds because I think you'd need powerful healing to deal with the Bands and Pali's set seemed more likely to be useful than Vedel's. Other than that, I mean maybe Hoid could 'defeat' Vin by being nigh-unkillable and waiting until she's exhausted the Bands' storage while throwing harsh language her way.

The Reverie Corridor is designed to be full of chests (trapped and otherwise) and to reset when you leave and reenter it. It's literally a grinder's paradise because with enough time you can get yourself as many copies of S-Rare quartz or powerful accessories as you have the patience for. As mentioned, you'll easily rack up sepith either by fighting the monsters in it or by getting huge piles of it from chests so you'll be able to afford Mirrors pretty quickly. If you just want to lose yourself in the gameplay the Corridor is an amazing time sink.

Dieter is short for Dietrich and practically begs to be the name of fictional politicians, since it means 'People's Ruler'. If it's not a total coincidence, it's likely that both games independently chose that name rather than one referring specifically to the other. That said, it's not impossible but it's vague enough that unless there's something more obvious I'm guessing there wasn't any intentional referencing going on.

You're assuming that it has to be one of those options or another. Khriss says quite plainly in Secret History that the motives of the people present at the Shattering were varied. Some were motivated primarily if not entirely by a desire for power, others saw it as a necessary act. According to Brandon, Hoid was 'kind of' in the camp of seeing the Shattering as a necessity. So there isn't a simple Yes/No answer to this question and we have no idea what the reasoning of the 'only good option' camp was because we know so little about the Shattering and the events leading up to it in the first place.

You might find these two WoBs of some interest:

Yeah, agreed that there's probably some of that at play too and not just microkinesis. Oh, one other WoB that's tangentially related and which I didn't piece together until just now, but it's a RAFO so it doesn't really tell us anything.

I mean, it's one bone and we know that you have to look closely at the skeletons to distinguish humans and Sho Del so it's easier to look at their armor. So my guess is that it's in the neck or center of the ribcage where it can sort of hide among the rest of the bones, rather than sticking out somewhere really obvious. Good call on some of the redactions probably having something to do with that, though I'm pretty sure that quite a few of them are also Brandon wanting for whatever reason to avoid name-dropping microkinesis just yet, even though we know from WoBs that it was a magic system in Dragonsteel Prime and fits with what Jerick is doing some of the time.

Relevant WoB:

We have another WoB (albeit a paraphrase) that said that a Leecher can target metalminds but they'd take longer. More WoBs relating to Leechers and other magic systems, tagged for Warbreaker/Stormlight material and just length:

Welcome to the Shard! And yeah, as mentioned a lot of people aren't likely to need to go around storing constantly because most people aren't using their powers to the extent that Wax and Wayne are. Also, some powers ere annoying to store (F-Gold makes you feel awful and it persists for a time after you stop storing, F-Tin makes your senses weaker, F-Brass makes you uncomfortably cold...) so you generally need to be in an appropriate environment if you're gonna store those ones. F-Iron is one of those rare powers where storing is as much of an advantage as tapping so Wax can go around almost constantly lighter on his feet without it seriously affecting his quality of life.

Yes, you definitely would have, as well as extra geeking out over just plain seeing several characters and bits of Crossbell in 3d. Oh yeah, so Ys IX is officially out today. Still waiting for my LE to arrive and I seem to be in that group that didn't get theirs a day or two early but also didn't get an email warning of delays, so hopefully it'll find its way to my doorstep soon. Right now I'm enjoying the reactions of people who have already started playing. And Sorcerian Advance should hit the eshop tomorrow.

While a Cryptic can't completely hide their presence in the Physical Realm like some other spren, they're perfectly capable of being inconspicuous so the fact that we don't see Hoid's new partner in BoM doesn't mean that something has happened. We know that Hoid has wanted full access to Lightweaving for a long time and is very happy to have gotten it. I'm quite certain he wouldn't willingly give that up and if anyone in the Cosmere can figure out how to get a Splinter offworld, it would be Hoid. And Khriss probably, I'm sure she'd be able to explain the theoretical mechanism if nothing else.

Go in with protection against Burning or better yet, as much of your team as possible loaded up with an all-immunity effect like a Grail Locket because that will counter his Deathblow and special status condition as well. Once you don't have to worry about that, he's a lot easier to handle. He's supposed to be tough but literally no fight in this series requires you to use the Retry Offset option... when it even is an option because it sometimes gets disabled on high difficulties.