Bakemonogatari and DFO

So that's my life right now.
Watching Bakemonogatari (I'm late I know) and playing DFO.
Bakemonogatari is a portmanteau of bakemono (monster) and monogatari (tales), the translation as "Ghostory" is pretty clever I think.
I want to make a comparison to XXXHolic but it's not quite right there.
It is the same kind of eclectic material, except it's directed by Shinbo, so everything has an extra layer of WEIRD STYLE over them.
If you liked XXXHolic you might like this, it's like the same kind of material from a totally different point of view director-wise.
Also it's quite cute in a lot of areas, and a lot of the dialogue is really amusing.

DFO stands for Dungeon Fighter Online, or Arad Senki in Japan, or Dungeon and Fighter in Korean.
It's basically a free to play Streets of Rage the MMO, aka a 2D side scrolling brawler you play with up to three friends in a party.
The game is more fun than it has any right to be and made me realize that while 3d over the shoulder MMOs are pretty and I'll play them, I'll hardly stick with them because I get tired of the over the shoulder spam your skill nonsense.
And because it's built like a brawler/fighter IF YOU GET HIT it's cause you were dumb, not because you were forced to sit in front of a mob and spam skills at it and it spammed skills at you.
This game though has a really nice combo system, PVP is fun and silly as hell, I really like how the entire game works.
No blocking though, unless you're a slayer :V
Unfortunately Nexon USA is trying it's hardest to make me quit this game, first by raising the experience curve significantly compared to the asian versions, second by capping us at level 40 when level 60 is the normal max.
There's also a fatigue system that limits the amount of dungeons you can enter per day (PVP uses no fatigue), so raising the exp means basically artificially expanding the time it takes to get to max.
From what I have been told they actually have the newest client, and each patch is basically OVERWRITING the triggers that lock out the newest contet.
What a backwards way of rolling out a game.
And don't get me started on the item shop, you pay for avatar "tokens" and spend one to get a random item of a random type (so say a headpiece) with random stats.
With something like 5 looks and 4 stats that's $2.50 (holy crap) for a 1/20 chance of getting what you want.
Right now it would be actually more efficient to buy gold from all the Chinese gold spammers in town and buy your avatar items using in-game gold.
But anyway I hit level 40 (the last 3 levels are sheer torture ugh ironically because there is a very efficient two fatigue dungeon that takes six to ten minutes to complete, however since you start with 156 fatigue in terms of hours you're looking at six hours plus of grinding this dungeon because everything else gives less exp per fatigue point) so right now I'm just chilling.



If you can't tell the game has attracted quite a few "real" fighting game players.