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Any reason MATE over Xcfe? Just curious if the performance is close or MATE is better at things, not trying to question your decisions. I have a >9 year old PC at this point and installed Cinnamon on it but was finding it a bit laggy. I tried out the other editions but am sticking with LMDE for now, but sort of feel like I don't really need nice animations, I just need more CPU for faster compile times, haha

Could've gone with an Estelle shot to farm that sweet, sweet clickbait😝

I guess it might be a good thing I'm not a director since I probably do focus on unimportant things. I just sort of always got the feeling from the source, and I don't think this is a spoiler it's just my feelings, that Root was a very conceited / egotistical kind of person. Maybe I just hallucinated that, because that's where I'm coming from is when the anime doesn't match my expectations of the character. Like I would've expected him to respond to being told someone is stronger than him with "You always were a kidder, Tomoe". I don't know, I feel like he's not really matching with my expectations, especially since people are calling him Luto instead. Like, did they really change that? Why?! It's like taking someone named Kuro that dresses all in black and being like "Actually, we'll translate their name as Jeffrey. Close enough". /rant

I knew as soon as I saw the preview post last week that I was going to have to prepare myself again for the comments on lack of action.

At least there was at least two fights this time, and both involving the main cast! Hey, that's something, right?

I'm trying to imagine what people were thinking when Ilumgand was talking about helping the hero and not interfering with Makoto. Cliché second chance? Then Mio is just "nah"

It's interesting Tomoe says that Root wouldn't be able to scratch Makoto. I feel like we're missing a lot of internal dialogue here, I couldn't quite tell from Root's reaction what he thought of that, did he just say "Interesting" or something? I feel like I remember there being a lot more thoughts in the source material, but maybe I'm wrong. Just feel like definitely feeling the weight of trying to adapt this as there's probably a lot of thoughts being skipped.

I didn't like Hinata when she originally appeared, doubt I was alone there. I like her a lot more here where she's mostly just strategizing, regretting her initial encounter (appearance), and coming to her own conclusions about what is going on.

I guess this series has always grappled with people really not liking when it spends time on other characters, like the students here or on the heroes before. I never really minded that too much, like in Overlord my favorite volumes are 7 or 12. Think it helps keep things fresh seeing from another perspective as long as the characters are relatively important, though I guess we haven't really seen any reason to care too much about the students besides the sisters so far.

To me that was fine, like I sort of interpreted it as: first they tried to let the professional (purple coats) handle things. When that didn't go well it cut to the students pointing and discussing, so I would imagine they were strategizing / buffing (similar to their Blue Lizard fights). Though I guess it is weird to let the enemy (supposedly) power up as well, it did work out in the end, so I'm like, you can't really blame them, maybe they needed that time to win too, we can't say without knowing what would've happened if they didn't prepare.

Edit: Thinking more about it I can agree with you that it could've been better. Even if they didn't animate some generic fight scene in the background I think they could've improved it if they had the casters casting buffs on the frontline while the frontline pointed/discussed in that scene, just to make it seem like they were doing prep work rather than standing around.

I guess I saw a lot of hate on that other site for this episode but, perhaps it's because I've read the source material, nothing here really surprised me, all those scenes (the sisters, merchant, teleporting, king/prince, etc) happened in the novel, which is kind of why last week I said "just one more episode, and then another and another" because I don't really expect the climax of this whole thing any time soon.

The monsters do look a bit goofy, well Ilumgand looked a bit intimidating in some stills, maybe it's just the ED effecting us.

Overall a pretty calm episode. They should have served some tea and cakes. 😆

Fitting that Abelia gets the final blow, though perhaps not how Ilumgand's father would've wanted things to play out?

I did completely forget that it was Root that came up with the sword thing, I had thought it was Tomoe, so it's kind of interesting that he would say that seemingly randomly.

The only thing I disliked was I felt they made the one attacking Makoto look a bit weak. I thought it was meant to be on par with Ilumgand but maybe not, without seeing it eating or wiping out nameless groups I feel like it sort of diminishes him one-shotting it.

Rimuru planning to invent the dubstep gun from Saints Row IV (I actually thought this was from Worms WMD but looked it up, didn't realize it was a crossover)

Only round table politics again this episode, they can't keep getting away with this!

Edit: Not to constantly complain as politics and world building can be fun (like Overlord), I think what I dislike is the past few episodes have been a daily stand-up meeting of "Ok Diablo, give us a status update". I'd rather they just like, show us the stuff happening, like do a few episodes from Youm's perspective. Maybe controversial, but I'd rather that then this sit around a room panning stills and talking...

My favorite was always Fear Not This Night. Unique, I know

Pretty cool you were able to eventually get it. I remember a coworker of mine got the collector's edition solely for the Rytlock statue, but kindly let me have the art pieces / frame. I did borrow the soundtrack to listen to, but gave that back.

That's very surprising to me as it's a two year old game at this point. Looking it up, I guess there were three years between 1 and 2. Wonder if they're working on a 3 at this point

I got all the EW relics fully upgraded for all classes, and finally got all the first rank of tank mounts for all tanks. There's still the cooler mounts for tanks but, not sure I want to keep that grind going