Weltall

The minigame is based on the Magical Alisa spinoff. It got started in CS2 with costumes for Alisa and Rean and became its own full-fledged spinoff (there's a light novel series published in Falcom Magazine) with cameos in Tokyo Xanadu where it's treated as an in-universe multimedia franchise. Think of it as a Magical Girl series using the Cold Steel characters. Those two are the Magical Alisa versions of Juna and Musse (known as Magical Juna and Magical Twintails respectively) who are secondary magical girls. They all got DLC costumes in CS4 and you can see their specific ones below along with Magical Darkness (Altina) and Duvalie: The various special abilities that are in the shooting game are also based on the Magical Alisa versions of the characters. For example the trailer shows a special ability that's associated with 'Kunoichi Fie' and if you look at the cut-in, the outfit that she's wearing there is her Magical Alisa design (see it here).

Spoilers for the ending of CS4 for anyone concerned about that.

There's a ton of stuff to unpack in that trailer. I think the most interesting just might be that Arios seems to be in the same 'we can't tell you about it because spoilers' location that McBurn was previously seen in. And in a nice touch, that shot that's the featured image has Lloyd calling the whole group the SSS, meaning that Juna seems to have graduated from honorary to full member while also pulling double-duty as part of Class VII.

Brandon implies that Divine Breath healing restoring a Platonic ideal of health and hence Susebron being able to talk even though normal Cosmere healing wouldn't be expected to have that result is 'on the right track'. So yeah, it's likely a function of the Divine Breath and not Susebron having a lot of Breaths. Brandon has said that Shashara (and by extension Vasher) know of no way to recover the Breaths that went into Nightblood and while there are technically ways to get the Investiture out they're not removable by an Awakener in the normal way and Nightblood can't give them away.

Whoops, time to rewrite my theory about the upcoming games then, you've clearly found the real Sept-Terrion of Time. And yeah, each new arc I find the same thing happening. I remember how much I loved the last cast and wonder if the new one will be able to compare and by the end of their first game I wind up loving them. Though I think CS1 was the first time where I was really interested in a character even before the game was out. In that case, it was Jusis in particular and he turned out even more interesting than I was expecting from the pre-release teasers.

So, Geofront's translation of Zero no Kiseki just got its release date announced: This Saturday. They also made a trailer that recreates the original Japanese trailer from 2010.

We know there's a region of emptiness that's still considered within a world's Cognitive zone before you hit interplanetary/stellar space and start traversing huge distances with a step (see Mistborn Secret History) so there probably is some sort of gradient as you get closer to Sel meaning that you'd have time to see the storm before you walk right into it. As for how Hoid gets to and from Sel, we know that it's really dangerous but it can be done with preparation. Khriss and Nazh have been there at least once for example. Meanwhile Hoid finds it worthwhile enough that he's made the trip multiple times. Brandon has said that you can make it through with proper preparation. Relatedly the Ire 'conduit' is in some way a safe passage but perhaps not in terms of a direct route you could walk through and in the future, FTL could get you there by bypassing the Cognitive entirely.

Axies mentions it in reference to himself in WoK We don't know if this is something peculiar to Axies, to all Siah or all Aimians. A quick Arcanum check shows that nobody seems to have asked Brandon about it yet. Since the mention follows very shortly after Axies thinking how stories of 'his kind' had likely crept into the general knowledge it's probably related to the distinctive traits that can identify a Siah and how people react to him (hence his apparent unluckiness) but we really don't know.

Brandon has mentioned that Odium is intended to reflect both the feeling of strong hatred and the provocation of hatred, and that he originally called that Shard 'Hatred' but he changed it because Odium sounded cooler. My guess is that there's no intentional connection between its possible meaning of repulsiveness (in the sense of arousing disgust or hatred) and the physics meaning of repulsive. That said, it's not a bad idea in terms of how Odium operates (it seems to fit with how Moash feels deadened at the end of Oathbringer) and how he or his splinters corrupt things and possibly mess with their Connection to Honor/Cultivation. I'm just not sure the semantics are anything intentional.

Given that Brandon has admitted being a huge fan of that game in the franchise in particular, I'm pretty certain he had those in the back of his mind when designing at least some of the swords. Like Oathbringer, whose description sounds ever so slightly like Tidus' Brotherhood except with the hook on the dull edge of the blade. It's pretty much how I pictured the sword even before I found the WoB where he mentioned liking FFX a whole lot.

Brandon confirmed a long time ago that Alendi was spiked.

Even the Windrunners might not be. AA weaponry isn't generally designed to hit human-sized targets (unless you're looking at anti-missile weapons specifically, in which case a human is a relatively 'big' target in terms of a radar cross-section) and their accuracy requires some method of locking onto the target in order to direct that fire, which is going to be a challenge and subject to all the various tricks that exist in reality, plus whatever can be done with Investiture. Then there's the fact that we know their hypothetical powers include creating sufficiently stable atmospheric bubbles that a Windrunner could travel through space unassisted, which means they can probably do equally funky things to assist against incoming fire as we see Wax do with his steel bubble, like Kaladin's trick of deflecting the stormwall briefly but on a more contained scale. And that's before you factor in that they can manipulate gravity. Brandon has confirmed that a Reverse Lashing can alter the trajectory of bullets, so I'm sure the Windrunners could come up with creative tricks to make sure that bullets aimed at them go astray from far enough away to comfortably miss the Windrunner. It's still going to be an interesting intersection of technology and magic and no doubt some arms races will result, but AA weaponry by itself isn't going to neutralize a Windrunner.

Pretty much this. You can play through CS3 without the past games and while you'll miss emotional resonances, the relevant plot points are explained well enough by characters from the previous arcs/locations that you won't be lost in terms of what's going on with the main story. CS4 is the point that really starts assuming the player has experienced all the previous entries and throws things at you that won't make sense if you haven't seen Scenes X, Y and Z from Games A, B and C. One of which just might involve Lechter by the by.

Truefact: Everyone is Wazysexual, even if they don't know it yet. And agreed on English localization. Kondo mentioned in an interview last year (before the ports were announced) that Falcom wanted the games available in a format that could be localized for English-speaking fans, so it's a safe bet that they either have an agreement in place already or expect to have one soon. And yes, they've pretty much confirmed the entire main casts of Crossbell and Cold Steel by now, with hints dropped about various Sky characters and some really evil teasing about characters who might finally become playable. McBurn was confirmed as reappearing in one of the first rounds of screenshots, with a cryptic comment that the location he's in (which we've never seen before) is itself a spoiler that they can't tell us about. Whatever that means... Zero Kai comes out on April 23, Ao Kai comes out May 28. If you mean in terms of getting used to older gameplay, it shouldn't be too bad. All the fundamentals are pretty similar across the series so they're not hard to get into, and if you can make it past the slow buildup of Cold Steel 1 you'll do fine with other games which also take the slow burn approach. Probably the biggest non-cosmetic differences to get used to are the lack of counterattacks in the Sky games (they were first added in Zero no Kiseki) and the fact that pre-CS games used a different Orbment system where quartz gave you 'points' in the elements and you had to form certain combinations to unlock Arts, instead of the quartz themselves giving you specific spells. The older system is actually more flexible and better for casters (a point that gets commented on in CS2) but it takes a bit more time to get used to it. In story terms, if you like Cold Steel there's no reason you shouldn't like the earlier games as well and for the most part you can play the earlier games and retroactively recognize the references to them made by later entries, up to the end of CS3 anyways. You've got all the same sorts of writing beats so the things you like about CS will be things you'll find in the previous entries. Oh, since you mentioned not doing PC gaming, is that a personal preference or a hardware limitation? I ask only because the games aren't demanding at all and you can pretty much play them on any computer made in the past fifteen years that's not actively on fire. The only Falcom game that was ever really demanding in its own day was Zwei II (localized as Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection) which actually did require a good machine, but that was twelve years ago. Underrated gem, that one. Point being, if it's just a hardware thing you should be able to run the games perfectly fine.

We've gotten a few cool tidbits on the Crossbell ports and Hajimari recently. They confirmed the addition of Towa, Juna's siblings and (presumably) her mother and father, which means adding in whole new NPCs instead of just repurposing an existing one or redesigning their sprites/portraits (the same update confirmed this for the Stahlritter). There's not too many more characters they could add who aren't already there but it's nice all the same. And for Hajimari, they revealed the second of its two story routes (the 'Hero' route focusing on Rean) with some hints for what the members of Class VII are up to and some very interesting potential developments given who's going where. And then they revealed a screenshot that's driving people nuts because of what it might mean in light of the end of CS4. The hype just grows and grows. The PS3 versions of the Sky games are Japanese-only so unless you can read it at a fairly high level it's probably not worth it unless that's the only platform you can play it on. The PC version that XSEED localized is by far the most feature-rich of them, unless Falcom eventually does PS4 ports like they're doing right now with Crossbell.

Since storing Identity makes you super-vulnerable to all sorts of things, compounded Identity should make you more resistant and we know it could be useful to heal from various forms of Cognitive damage. Add to that the fact that A-Aluminum is at least theoretically useful on its own as a way of cleansing Investiture from the user and a Twinborn with double aluminum is definitely not the most useless combination. Double duralumin also looks like it would be a potentially useful ability since Connection has some nice implied benefits though we don't know enough of the mechanics to understand the full ramifications yet, though allomantically duralumin is even less useful than aluminum on its own. My guess for most useless compounded power would be F-Copper as it's one of the only feruchemical traits that doesn't have an obvious benefit if you can compound it (most of them) or an implied benefit via WoB (aluminum) and Brandon has singled it out in comments as a power that doesn't necessarily do much.

It's worth remembering that Brandon is up-front about the fact that sometimes a RAFO really means 'I could answer this but I like to watch you tie yourselves in knots, MWAHAHA' so something like '(Hoid) currently has no Honorblades' could mean 'He had one once but doesn't any more' but it could just as easily mean 'He never had any but I enjoy the seeds of uncertainty I'm sowing by hinting otherwise'.

Yeah, it should be pointed out that Hoid is sufficiently afraid of Nightblood that he wouldn't want to pick it up. It would be even more dangerous for a Cognitive Shadow since they're literally made of Nightblood's food. While a CS that can supply Nightblood with a lot of Investiture can wield it for a time (as we see Vasher do) it's still incredibly dangerous given the exponentially increasing drain. A Shade is not only so weakly manifested in the Physical Realm that they probably couldn't even lift Nightblood but since they don't have any other means of supplying Investiture other than what's keeping them 'alive' the result of one of them trying to touch Nighblood would be one sword nomming one soul, game over man, game over.

Breath isn't something that hemalurgy can steal, meaning it also shouldn't be possible to alter. Also, the degree of alteration you're thinking of is way higher than what hemalurgy normally does, since it's not just stealing something but trying to alter it in ways that involve the principle of Intent. If you're thinking of ways that you could alter Commands, Forgery is a much more likely avenue since it's actually intended for just this sort of thing. Brandon has said that you could try and alter Nightblood's Command with Forgery (with caveats) so you could probably use it on a Lifeless too and likely easier since they're considerably less Invested. You would of course need to know enough of that Lifeless' history to make a stamp and know enough Awakening to change the Command to something that would actually work. How much interference there would be from the Lifeless themselves we don't know, as Brandon has said that they're more aware than people realize which means you'd probably get a stamp that only works for a limited time just like an Essence Mark that only lasts a day at best.

Yes. It's theoretically possible for something really funky to exist if Adonalsium or a Shard wanted it to but in general worlds in the Cosmere form the same as they do in our universe. The most extreme it gets is Roshar (whose moons aren't stable in the long term) and Taldain (also unstable across astronomical timespans) which bear the touch of Adonalsium but are stable enough on the timeframe that Brandon is concerned with.

Several, in fact. Here's the big one:

@Pathfinder They're just reading Way of Kings, they probably don't know what that means yet.

Each type of spren has a characteristic appearance. For example, angerspren look like pools of bubbling blood, lifespren appear as green motes of light, painspren look like grasping orange hands etc. You'll get more descriptions as you keep reading. Syl takes on a variety of appearances but usually prefers to appear as a small humanoid woman, glowing blue-white. Brandon has mentioned that her penchant for switching between other appearances like a ribbon of light and her lack of wings was a deliberate choice to avoid her being too Tinkerbell-ish.

The screaming voices are likely a Spiritual 'echo' rather than evidence for a uniquely Rosharan afterlife, which jives with Brandon's statement that people from worlds other than Roshar who went through similar experiences to Szeth would experience something similar. We know that the spiritweb persists after death for a long time.

Welcome to the Shard! Hope you enjoy it here. Some of the usual suspects have already talked about most of the points so I'll just add something here in case you're not aware of it. Futuresight in the Cosmere is affected by the presence of other people with the ability to see the future. So not only is it not entirely reliable (even for a Shard) but whenever you get into a foresight vs foresight match, the results are going to get distorted no matter what the relative power or skill of the parties are. Renarin's visions aren't absolute and they come whenever they feel like it but they're still enough to interfere with Odium's vastly expanded ability to see the future and process what he sees. Given your username, think of it as two prescients in Dune see the future, except it's not guaranteed that one of them is going to 'win' because the future in the Cosmere isn't as deterministic.