Report Week 31 Jul - 06 Aug 2022

Light Novels

I finally finished reading volume 9 of Kuma Bear, although I still have a couple of side stories/chapters left. I think overall it was a pretty good volume, however the ending fell a bit flat. I mean, I’m not really expecting high level literature anyway, but we basically got a taste of typical cutesy stuff even when the story was about to get interesting. Yuna is tasked to help her elf friend in recovering her family heirloom that she sold to a merchant. The merchant tells her he can’t give it back unless she manages to go get a precious painting from across the river, in the other town’s store. She pulls off some kuma shenanigans (walking over water lmao) and manages to get it in time. Due to some trading shenanigans next, she meets another rich man trader’s niece who is super into her kuma book. Yuna decides to give her her picture book for free, and also a couple of the new kuma plushies she made. In exchange to thank her, the rich merchant gifts her an old abandoned house where she can set up her kuma portal (classic). The volume closes with our elf party resuming their trip towards the elf village. I really hope volume 10 will have some more exciting stuff happening, because the elf village sounds cool.

Manga

I finished reading Volume 11 of Made in Abyss that I had started last week. Right as the story started to get very interesting, the volume ended. Guess I’ll have to wait for another year for volume 12 to come out… I’m not a fan of flashbacks and background stories, and half of volume 11 felt it had that vibe. We get to meet some unknown black whistles delving down to the last dive. Riko and her party meet the corpse of one of them, and manage to loot a few rare artifacts including a brand new arm for Reg. Continuing through the 6th layer we get to see some more black whistles who are under a new white whistle we’ve never seen before. That’s where the volume ends. There’s interesting references all around, but they open up more questions than they answer, honestly. The one thing that stood out the most to me is that for the first time (I think?) we hear a reference to the 7th layer and there seems to be an implication that it’s the last one? We’ll see in a few years if the pace keeps up like this.

Videogames

Xenoblade 3. Xenoblade 3. Xenoblade 3! That’s pretty much 90% of my reading time this week. The game is absolutely amazing, and the story has me really hooked. So far I’m only up to chapter 4, but if I had to relate it to any other media or story, it really reminds me a lot of Darling in the Franxx. There’s some serious implications that the main characters are all disposable clones, and that the big baddies are somewhat involved in some kind of planetary 900IQ chess game with each other, while sucking out the life energy of their pawns. I still don’t know the reason why this is happening, and it’s unclear yet if there’s some implication of time travel or not yet, however I got the feeling that all will converge with our band of heroes trying to break out of this “game” to discover yet another more terrifying truth about the world. I’m very excited, the game is a real blast.

Pie Chart

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