peffy

My gut reaction upon seeing the group pic was "omg this is the first time I think Koichi looks bad"
But upon closer inspection of his solo pictures, I think he looks beautiful as usual. Probably the best feminine-looking VK dude, IMO.
This is possibly the first time I think Tsuzuku actually looks interesting.
Meto looks like 
MiA is so boring.
Also, I hate consecutive singles. MEJIBRAY does it so often that it's thoroughly annoying.

Browsed around another Japanese download site, and found a lot of stupid names. I don't think these were mentioned before:
 
OLEDICKFOGGY
Plastic Girl in Closet
ROOKiEZ is PUNK'D
GAS CRACKERZ
Wake Up, Girls!
Phew
THE BED ROOM TAPE
agenda is packed
A Barking Dog Never Bites
my ex
toe
BOYS AND MEN
Beat Buddy Boi
i am robot and proud
never young beach
YOUNG JUVENILE YOUTH
BUMP OF CHICKEN
Awesome City Club
I Don't Like Mondays.
Upset Heroes!
for example you sell the sea
Suck a Stew Dry
Do As Infinity
the chef cooks me
 
 
...
... that's probably enough for now.
 
Honorable Mentions:
 
Wagakki Band - I really love this band, but their name literally translates to "Japanese Traditional Instrument Band". ..............
 
I'm surprised nobody mentioned K (the Korean R&B singer who also had a successful Japanese career) during the single-letter discussion. There was also a solo female punk/rock "singer" using the name D[di:]. I really liked her because she couldn't sing at all.
 
Let us not forget ν[NEU], especially because that thing that looks like a v is actually the greek letter "nu", and I think their name is just pronounced "nu", but I keep calling them "Vee new".
 
And lastly, the VK band †яi￠к . 

Browsed around another Japanese download site, and found a lot of stupid names. I don't think these were mentioned before:
 
OLEDICKFOGGY
Plastic Girl in Closet
ROOKiEZ is PUNK'D
GAS CRACKERZ
Wake Up, Girls!
Phew
THE BED ROOM TAPE
agenda is packed
A Barking Dog Never Bites
my ex
toe
BOYS AND MEN
Beat Buddy Boi
i am robot and proud
never young beach
YOUNG JUVENILE YOUTH
BUMP OF CHICKEN
Awesome City Club
I Don't Like Mondays.
Upset Heroes!
for example you sell the sea
Suck a Stew Dry
Do As Infinity
the chef cooks me
 
 
...
... that's probably enough for now.
 
Honorable Mentions:
 
Wagakki Band - I really love this band, but their name literally translates to "Japanese Traditional Instrument Band". ..............
 
I'm surprised nobody mentioned K (the Korean R&B singer who also had a successful Japanese career) during the single-letter discussion. There was also a solo female punk/rock "singer" using the name D[di:]. I really liked her because she couldn't sing at all.
 
Let us not forget ν[NEU], especially because that thing that looks like a v is actually the greek letter "nu", and I think their name is just pronounced "nu", but I keep calling them "Vee new".
 
And lastly, the VK band †яi￠к . 

^ same. actually, i never used the search function. 
 
i am experiencing the forced redirecting as well, even though i have auto correct disabled.
the covers are also not being displayed correctly. for example, if they release a single and then include that single in the album, even if you clearly tagged the song with the ALBUM, they force the single's cover on your scrobbles. ugh.
 
they made changes to the library again
https://getsatisfaction.com/lastfm/topics/website-update-16th-december
Features Restyled library pages, 50% less whitespace! Custom date range filtering in the library Support BBCode and fix formatting of overview page wikis Bring back support for the www.last.fm/user/_ shortcut Bugfixes You can now unfollow people Voting on images for artists containing non-roman characters Bring back profile about me on mobile Bring back dashboard introduction text Maintain i18n path when adding first image Language switcher preserves your location in galleries Stop ads breaking the layout on mobile some of these bugs i was experiencing nonstop so i am glad they fixed it. i didnt even notice the library changes lol.   while browsing the forums like 3 months ago, people were asking for the double artist charts to comeback (when we had one as a list and another as a image grid). they either hired new people or the current staff didn't know their users at all. one of staff members asked "why would you want two things that say the exact same thing?" ????? If you browse the website enough (and thats what i expect from a staff!!!!!!) you would know that majority of your userbase used the image grid for 7~30 days range and list for 90~all time range or vice versa. This is one of the things i'm hoping they'll add back, although it will probably look ugly as fuck because everything is so big and cluttered now.
they have no idea wtf they are doing and im pretty sure they have less than 15 people working on lastfm rn. probably less than 10.

I'm still scrobbling, because I've been doing it for 9.5 years, have 191k scrobbles, and (perhaps foolishly) invested a ton of time into making my charts "accurate".
 
However, they've already messed it up because, for example, my unicode REIGN tag is now auto-redirecting to unicode Reign, which is a different VK band. Same is happening for SHIVA -> Shiva. Even though I disabled the "auto-correct" function!!! I don't really want to change the tags to something more fucked up, like mixing unicode & regular letters.
 
Like everyone else, I hate the new design. I don't understand why they launched it while it was still in beta. How could it take them so many months to re-add something as basic as image uploading & voting?? Granted, I don't know very much about website development, but the way they've handled it doesn't make sense.
 
 
Search is useless, I just type/paste the band name into the URL.

This is a photoshopped PEN. 

True, it's rare to see a JRPG protagonist that isn't a boring overused trope, the only example i can think of right now is the Drakengard series, and Tales isn't particularly known for storytelling, it's more about flashy combat and character interactions if anything. So even if the whole cast are a bunch of walking stereotypes, watching them interact with each other might be fun.

Hell yeaaaaah, Tales of Berseria latest trailer was just released.
 

 
English info: http://www.siliconera.com/2015/12/15/tales-of-berseria-details-on-its-battle-system-and-a-new-character-laiphaset/
 
I'm super excited for this, because the main character is a lady, and it seems like she has a dark past and some "beast" issues. Looks like she'll be fun to use in battle. Her outfit is totally ridiculous, which is a plus or minus depending on your sensibilities. (it's a plus for me, but these games usually give you costume options anyway).
 
Graphically, it kind of looks exactly like Xillia did (and maybe Zestiria, but I haven't played that yet). Whatever, it doesn't bother me that much. Mostly excited for what looks like a "darker" tone. Yuri made Vesperia great for me because he straight up *SPOILER*murdered a dude*SPOILER*. Awesomeeeeee.
 
ETA:
Eh, they put a child character in. But it seems like he is not a normal kid, so I probably won't be too annoyed.

Hell yeaaaaah, Tales of Berseria latest trailer was just released.
 

 
English info: http://www.siliconera.com/2015/12/15/tales-of-berseria-details-on-its-battle-system-and-a-new-character-laiphaset/
 
I'm super excited for this, because the main character is a lady, and it seems like she has a dark past and some "beast" issues. Looks like she'll be fun to use in battle. Her outfit is totally ridiculous, which is a plus or minus depending on your sensibilities. (it's a plus for me, but these games usually give you costume options anyway).
 
Graphically, it kind of looks exactly like Xillia did (and maybe Zestiria, but I haven't played that yet). Whatever, it doesn't bother me that much. Mostly excited for what looks like a "darker" tone. Yuri made Vesperia great for me because he straight up *SPOILER*murdered a dude*SPOILER*. Awesomeeeeee.
 
ETA:
Eh, they put a child character in. But it seems like he is not a normal kid, so I probably won't be too annoyed.

I forgot about this line.
Now I know why Karasuna Mei's latest look (for Ankoku sekai wa yami) features him carrying a red backpack with long black hair hanging out of it.

He always has the red backpack live as well, if not during the entire live then at least during Gesshoku (everytime I've seen them so far). He sometimes put it on Koyomis head xD

Just added type B to my order.
 
I spend so much money on you, Ikuma.

^ Yes that's basically what I was trying to say. (Except that I didn't like the aesthetics very much.)
 
I didn't say anything bad about the story. The story was fine. I just didn't like playing as child characters, and the gameplay became a turn-off over the course of the game. I only mentioned it here because I'd heard rumours of Level 5 making a new PS4 JRPG for the past year or so, and I was hopeful it would be something different. Was kind of disappointed to hear "Ni No Kuni 2". Well, whatever, it's fine, lots of people loved the first game, I hope the second one is better. =)

Things about FF VII Remake that theople over here are not taking into consideration:
 
It's only natural that this game is episodic/sold in chunks. Production costs are too high to create a game like FF VII with today's standards without making huge compromises. JRPGs have been getting smaller and smaller since we jumped to HD development because of this. Only now that tools and know-how are much better they are doable again, but they are still much more expensive to make. The FF VII Universe has expanded quite a lot since the original was released wich means even more stuff to put, re-arrange, etc. Doing it this way lets them do it without having so much pressure. It's more expensive for us customers that way but I think it has a much better chance of delivering a good experience. They have also promised that each chunk will have content worthy of boxed game release. That doesn't mean much but, but it's better than nothing I gess. S-E is developing some parts/episodes and Cyber Connect 2 (Asura's Wrath, .hack, Naruto Ultimate Storm) are making others. This lets the be experimental with some sutff and advance faster developing multiple parts of the game at once. So the first part could be released next year with no issues. Because FF VII Remake is being developed both internally and by a contracted company, it's just dumb to use an engine half of the workforce don't know how to use, like FF XV engine. Unreal 4 it's really easy to use and both S-E and CC2 already use it, so it fits perfectly. I hardly care about FF (only FF IX doesn't give me an smug and pretentious vibe that I don't tolerate in games... even though I know it's just my perception) but this is a very interesting project. I'm very interested in seeing and playing what comes out of this.

Just added type B to my order.
 
I spend so much money on you, Ikuma.

Only 10 tracks? And it looks like 3 old songs.
Disappointing...
The preview sounds good though.
 
 
 
Umm not sure if this is a joke post... but this is a totally different "Reign"
 
I wish bands would stop reusing band names.

OH
so you're telling me i have to buy both types now??? >_<
 
also, I just spent quite a bit of money to get that live limited single.

Before we all freak out about FF7-Remake being "multi-part" and being "action RPG".. here are some points from interviews with Nomura & Kitase (taken from another forum)
 
 
I don't trust Square Enix very much, and I'm totally convinced they are splitting FF7 to charge more $$$. However I understand that the game is rather huge, and re-creating all of those different towns, environments, and characters with modern graphics cannot be cheap. If they really cannot fit all of this into one disc, I would actually support the decision to split it up. They can use revenue from part 1 to fund part 2. It also means you'll be able to play part 1 a lot sooner than if you had to wait for the entire thing. Too bad they have to milk the rabid fanbase to do it. 
 
..That said, they have not revealed anything about the pricing or how many parts there will be. I would wait for that information before having a meltdown.
 
As for battle system, I would prefer turn-based. The part where it's "similar to Dissidia" has me a little concerned, because I played Dissidia on PSP for about 1-2 hours, did not get the battle system at all, and quit playing it. But, whatever, this game's battle system will be a hybrid of multiple styles, and I will be more motivated to learn it because it is FF7.
 
 
-------
 
As for Ni no Kuni 2, I wish I was more excited about it. I played the first game, and ~sort of~ liked it up until that last dungeon where there seemed to be a difficulty spike and I had to grind out levels. It really killed all the momentum of the story and made me hate the game. I also do not like the Miyazaki art style, and I hate playing as small children. The best part of the game was naming all of my Pokemon tamed monster things after VK band members. ..... I guess this series is just not for me.
 
-------
 
Upcoming games I'm presently hyped for (I'm a PS4/PS3/Vita player):
 
Tales of Berseria
Star Ocean 5
Yakuza 0 (I might actually just play the Japanese version if it goes on sale)
"Yakuza Extreme" (aka Ryu ga Gotoku Kiwami)
Yakuza 6
Dragon Quest XI
Danganronpa 3
Zero Escape 3
Ikenie to Yuki no Setsuna
Hatsune Miku: Project Diva X
South Park: The Fractured But Whole
Wattam
Final Fantasy XV
 
Pretty sure all of these are scheduled for 2016 release. My wallet just fainted.

@Scarlet Obsidian, if you're still looking for this..
 
I have posted kanji/romaji for every song except for Codomo Dragon's "Sick?" Couldn't find that one.
http://hiphopvomit.blogspot.com/2015/12/index-royz.html
http://hiphopvomit.blogspot.com/2013/06/index-codomo-dragon.html
http://hiphopvomit.blogspot.com/2011/05/index-kiryu.html
 
@lei0418, Mahiro did not even write Utakata. That was the work of Hiyori & Junji  It was indeed every bit as torturous as Mahiro-written songs, though.

QFT. Miko is cute and all but Jyou is the one who brings something special as a vocalist.

I was hoping that with Nimo on board this band would get better. Are they destined for mediocrity at this point? The heydays of D'espairsRay are looking dimmer and dimmer...

@Scarlet Obsidian, if you're still looking for this..
 
I have posted kanji/romaji for every song except for Codomo Dragon's "Sick?" Couldn't find that one.
http://hiphopvomit.blogspot.com/2015/12/index-royz.html
http://hiphopvomit.blogspot.com/2013/06/index-codomo-dragon.html
http://hiphopvomit.blogspot.com/2011/05/index-kiryu.html
 
@lei0418, Mahiro did not even write Utakata. That was the work of Hiyori & Junji  It was indeed every bit as torturous as Mahiro-written songs, though.

All pictures from the collaboration between ペンタゴン and KERA.
Pijamas






T-shirts and hoodies

I don't really have time to partake in discussions.. or even check the news regularly... but I come here for my download needs and now post all my uploads here. It is a great pleasure to serve the VK fan community in some way =)

PRE-ORDERED
 
ahhh ikuma looks great 
Glad to see they are still going after losing 2 members, I was kind of worried
 
 
Here's Ryuzi's "official" picture.. most of it anyway