Weltall

Yeah. The first two games were released out of order in English and it doesn't make a huge difference in the long run (you really just need to play Song of the Ocean last) but that's the first game in Japanese release order. While it's true that by the time you get to The 3rd her balanced nature means she stands out less, it's worth noting that her S-Craft is one of the hardest-hitting in the game second only to Sakura Morning Moon (which is single-targeting).

Fortunately, there's easily available copies of the books (and most in the series) online. Chapter 1 Chapter 2 If you're worried about spoilers and miss any future chapters, the safest way to do things would be to use the 'next chapter' button at the bottom just after the Japanese text, since the main page for Carnelia mentions something that's... well, it's not a spoiler if you've played all the previous games (and read some side material) up to that point but as you're just starting with Cold Steel, it'll give something away that's more fun to find out for yourself.

I don't believe that you can get the Carnelia books if you miss them. Micht's pawn shop does randomly allow you to purchase volumes of Red Moon Rose you missed but he doesn't carry the others. As for Angel, it's a good Master Quartz for a caster, especially if you want to use Space-elemental Arts. It will eventually teach most of the magic of that element and has a very nice effect at max level that makes them even better. Its primary effect is a nice panic button to have in tough fights without sacrificing an accessory slot. So yeah, it's got uses but it pretty much comes down to your play style.

I'm not either, but Falcom has a history of waiting a while before jumping consoles so they've got incentive to make sure their games are playable when their fans jump to the next generation while they're still working for the PS4. For reference, that console released in Japan in February of 2014. Falcom's first game for the PS4 didn't get released until September of 2016 and the first game they developed exclusively for the platform was a year later still. So between that and the fact that we'll probably have eighteen months to two years between the Japanese release and an English one for Sony to do whatever they need to and I'm not too worried about Hajimari's viability.

Given that the PS5 features backwards-compatibility, PS4 games should remain viable for a good while longer than PS3 games did after the PS4 came out. If nothing else it could be released digital-only (which NISA is doing with a Vita release of Utawarerumono right now) but I don't think a physical release in 2022 would be unreasonable.

[gets popcorn ready] Oh, and Falcom released product info on Hajimari today. There's going to be an LE with a bunch of nice goodies called the Platinum Meister Box and preorders of both it and the regular addition will come with the usual mini-OST. The LE goodies this time are a 'Zemurian Heroes' desk calendar, a set of 24 semi-transparent mini-posters showing character art and a two disc '15th Anniversary Vocal Collection' album. Oh, and a box patterned after Lapis' case, which if it's anywhere near as nice as the Ys IX LE box should be a nice addition to the shelf indeed. They also updated with the next chapter of Three and Nine.

ATS is short for Arts Strength and ADF for Arts Defense, they primarily dictate how powerful your offensive Arts are/how well you resist damage from Arts respectively, but there are a couple of instances where they'll apply outside that context. Some characters have Crafts that are designated as Magical in their description, that means they use ATS to determine damage instead of STR and they're checked against the target's ADF instead of DEF. Elliot's Blue Lullaby is an example of this sort. Likewise a few characters have normal attacks that are designated Magical (Elliot and Emma for your purposes) and they're calculated based on STR just like normal but they're checked against ADF instead.

One word for this: Moebius. And yeah, Gaius is a pretty good dodge tank and becomes an even better one in later games while Fie is practically made for it from CS2 onwards when she gets long-range counterattacks. Probably my favorite 'fun' build though is Machias. With his Orbment setup you can stack a whole bunch of status-causing quartz on him and once he learns Petrification Shell (which is already a very nice move on its own) he has a huge AoE attack that can also inflict close to a dozen other effects depending on what you've given him. And if you hit enough enemies with it, it won't even cost you any CP.

Another thing to keep in mind is that your Master Quartz level up and when they do you'll usually unlock new Arts for them, so you'll eventually get a decent pool of magic just from those. By way of example, Elliot's starting MQ 'Canon' will eventually grant pretty much all the single-target heals, a revive spell and a couple offensive ones. Characters who don't have good ATS like Laura can generally get by with only what their Master Quartz provides, and maybe one or two other spells to fill whatever support niche you need. They won't do much damage with offensive Arts due to low ATS but support spells don't rely on that stat.

Welcome to the Shard! As mentioned, yes it is and kudos for spotting it. It's also not the only reference to a worldhopper in that story. xD

We got some more scans for Hajimari and a release date (August 27). They showed off the Valiant Rage mechanic which sounds like it's a new thing layered on top of the ARCUS link attacks, becomes more powerful depending on how many characters are in your reserve and has multiple possible effects. The scans also show off some characters we were expecting; Matteus and Aurier Vander appear and the latter looks confirmed to show up in combat, so the rest of the family probably will be as well. There's also more Crossbell arc characters with Ilya, Rixia and Arios getting blurbs and (spoilers for Crossbell/CS4) The article also details the bonuses you'll get based on system/clear data from earlier games and it looks like pretty typical stuff. Rewards for system data from the upcoming Crossbell ports and CS3/4 plus goodies based specifically on clear data from CS4. I don't believe there is one until the end of the field exam. A hundred mira is a battle worth of sepith mass so it's not that hard to afford. One trick for the future that can help a lot is to equip the Master Quartz Sceptre, since it nicely increases the amount of sepith you get. It works on a 'per hit' basis so attacks with multiple hit animations (especially Fie's S-Craft) cause enemies to drop a lot of sepith. It should be available for purchase now, if you haven't grabbed it already. And yes, Laura is a beast indeed. And all-around awesome.

Ooooh, if you like lore and in-universe books (and especially both at once) you're gonna love this series. xD As far as money goes, every game in this series has a trick you can perform that makes it easy to earn a lot of it in a short while without grinding fights, once you figure it out. If you want to know:

Yeah, one thing this series has done since the start is scale EXP to your level. The enemies in a given area will give more experience when your characters are below the level the game thinks you should be at, then it starts to fall off a cliff once you get above that point. This means it's extremely tedious to grind for experience and largely pointless since an hour of grinding in one area will give you about the same return as a couple of battles in the next area. Grinding for cooking ingredients, sepith and the like is entirely reasonable, mind you. It's just EXP that provides such diminishing returns that it's rarely worth it. One way to easily tell if you're overleveled (aside from getting lousy EXP) is if you can not just stun but kill enemies with field attacks.

Check the sofas on the second floor, you'll find her missing book.

One caveat to the above about not talking to characters you don't need to: Aside from seeing their own stories and the worldbuilding that comes with them, NPCs can give you things like recipes, books and (for Thors students and faculty) entries in the character notebook. On their own none of them are essential but recipes can be used to make useful items for combat, the books can be traded for a very useful item late in the game and having a sufficient number of character notebook entries is a requirement for several rewards, and all of these count towards various trophies if you care about those. The books at least can be purchased later if you miss them but the other stuff is time-limited. So you certainly can skip all unnecessary conversations but you'll miss out on some potential goodies down the road.

It was originally developed for PS3 and Vita, which means it was kind of limited by what could be fit on a single cart for the latter. That said, Falcom always puts graphics last in their priority with this series so while the games can look really nice, they're never going to be the kind of jaw-dropping visuals you'll get out of a AAA title. Yeah, just a few things yet to be explained... including the acid trip that was the final Moon Door. xD

It's a flash-forward to events that happen later in the game, with a large chunk of what comes next being a 'how we got here' sort of thing. It's designed to give you a taste of what you can look forward to in terms of your Arts and Crafts and to give you a sense of urgency for what's coming next. For those who have played the previous games it's also extremely sneaky foreshadowing because it takes place simultaneously with events that happen in the immediately prior game (set in neighboring Crossbell) and also calls forward to events that will happen later in that same game. @Eluvianii Amusingly, the first time they did this (Trails from Zero) they didn't even give you a chance to fight, you just saw a sequence from waaaaay later in the game and got to run around a bit but it ended before any actual fighting could happen. Though I guess you could also call the start of Trails in the Sky The 3rd a similar deal, except without any flash-forward stuff. There you got endgame-level Quartz to play with for the Prologue and then the game took them away from you to make you work for your victory. I have a feeling that Hajimari is going to have a similar feel, since like The 3rd it's shaping up to be the series equivalent of a D&D epic-level campaign.

Just for the record, Hallandren is less than a thousand years old at the time of Way of Kings (~600 years old as of Warbreaker, which takes place in the ~300 year gap between Mistborn Era 1 and Stormlight Archive) while Alethkar goes back thousands of years to the kingdom of Alethela and the glyphs are even older than that. I'm not sure we know how old Hallandren's alphabet is since it likely predates the nation but I'm guessing 'not that old'. This isn't the only example of a linguistic convergence that doesn't actually mean anything. Another is Ati, which is the name of Ruin's original Vessel and also the name of an Aon. Brandon has confirmed that it's a coincidence and Aon Ati was named after one of his wife's students. Tons of similarities in the Cosmere are deliberate but every so often, there are coincidences.

Wheel of Time magic isn't explained to the degree that Brandon does, so if you're expecting a moment like the 'aha, it makes so much sense that these were the uses of the remaining metals' in Mistborn, you're not going to find nearly so much of that. There are a few things like that, but it's not as prominent. At least, until Brandon got to write one character 'his way' in the last three books and the influence is obvious. The gist of the magic is that you have 'threads' made up of the five elements and how many you use, how 'thick' they are and how you weave them together determine the result. It's kind of like Aon Dor in that we know the fundamentals (the elements vs the Aons) but we don't know the specifics (the exact makeup of the weaves vs the modifiers that tell an Aon how to perform its main function), if that helps. As far as how any given weave is learned, a lot of it comes down to teaching. I forget exactly where in the series it is (sorry, at fourteen books plus New Spring, I can't remember everything offhand ) but one character reflects on how Aes Sedai aren't nearly as good with fireballs as other channelers because when they're taught how to perform it, the training includes a physical throwing motion to help them with the weaving. The gesture is unnecessary, slows down the process slightly and means they can't use that weave if their arms are restrained, but because they learned it that way it's now mentally inseparable from the weave itself. Channelers from cultures that train their own people don't do it that way and so they can use that weave more effectively. There are also plenty of instances of characters performing a weave either by instinct or in Rand's case due to his reincarnation status letting him 'remember' a weave that his past life had known. In these instances, once they've performed the weave once they can usually remember how they did it and repeat it again later. This isn't unique to major characters though, as pretty much all 'wilder' channelers figure out a couple of weaves by instinct. This gets discussed in... Path of Daggers, I think. Point being, it's an established part of the system that channelers can sometimes just feel their way through a weave and make it work. All that said, the system is ultimately a little fuzzy. Per Path of Daggers, while a weave done correctly will produce the same output every time, a weave that collapses under certain circumstances can have completely unpredictable effects, so even if you know all the threads that went into it, how they were originally woven and what the weave should do, once that random factor falls into play all bets are off.

The Doll Knight is actually possibly the most significant of them all, because it's the one that originated in the Gagharv Trilogy, meaning that the connections go both ways. Like I said, those books have probably been responsible for more crazy theorycrafting than the rest in Gagharv put together. I think the only full novel series we've seen so far that doesn't have immediately obvious importance is Heartless Edgar from CS3 and we're probably a ways away from figuring it out because it's set in Leman which we're unlikely to see again for some time. All the others though, we either know what they're setting up or in the case of the Gambler Jack stories we can make a very educated guess. If you just want the answer (though rereading Carnelia is rewarding in and of itself):

Legend of Heroes in general is pretty darned close. In Gagharv you have bunch of books that foreshadow major characters in the later-produced games (or sometimes the same game), that explain backstory or do both, plus one that's been grounds for more crazy theorycrafting than the rest put together. Then there's Kiseki where the very first novel series (Carnelia) introduces two future important characters and a third minor one and it builds from there.

Meanwhile, I don't even want to think about how long I've been a Falcom fan, i makes me feel old. On remakes, t might be selfish of me but I'd rather see Falcom tackle the Gagharv Trilogy if they're gonna do Legend of Heroes remakes, over redoing the Sky games. Those are so good and it would be amazing to get them in 3d, with the kind of depth that the series has grown into over time. Though the kind of work that would be needed to bring so many towns up to Kiseki-level writing is pretty mind-boggling. Just the first game in the trilogy has almost as many distinct towns/cities as the entire Kiseki series combined. Oh, and Falcom recently updated Hajimari's website and they're doing something really cool; since the Three and Nine novels from CS4 are playing such a major role in the game, they're releasing the entire thing on the website so people can refresh their memory on it without having to pull up their CS4 saves, in the same ten volume format as in the game. And as an added bonus each 'Volume' has a cover illustration and internal artwork. So far we've gotten the first volume and the covers for the remaining nine, which means a sneak peek at some of the character designs, especially for the character we were expecting the 'Hermit' to be prior to the reveal nixing that idea.

Only when they're being transferred. A Breath that's animating a Lifeless is 'stuck' to them and most certainly isn't kinetic any longer.

There's a sort of Cosmere courier service for delivering messages. For communicating with Shards, it really depends on the Shard. If Hoid wants to communicate with Bavadin he just needs to send his message to one of her avatars, as he did with his Oathbringer letter. For Harmony he could get it to a kandra, put it somewhere Harmony will be observing or maybe one of these couriers could be spiked with a Pathian earring and deliver the message directly. Nalthis has a form of customs that worldhoppers go through so it's probably pretty easy to get messages to Edgli. Getting messages to Cultivation and (while he was alive) Honor wouldn't be hard with the combination of the Nightwatcher/Stormfather and how the Radiants of old apparently used to communicate with Honor directly.

I am almost certain we'll get Monstrum Nox in English next year and having played it I can confirm that it doesn't just look so good, it is so good.