Grancrest Senki

I've been watching a lot of anime lately. I finished Gamers! a few days ago--it was...okay--and started watching another one called Record of Grancrest War. The name's similarly to Record of Lodoss War (both of them use 戦記 senki, "war history") drew me in, and later I learned that the backgrounds for both Lodoss and Grancrest were done by Mizuno Ryō and both were based on tabletop RPGs. Lodoss was based on D&D, or rather Sword World, which is D&D as modified by people who can only find d6s in shops and who prefer MP to spell slots, and Grancrest has its own tabletop RPG. There's even a fan-translation of the first book.

The background reminds me a lot of D&D's Birthright setting. In Grancrest, there was a magical disaster in the past and some people managed to gain power from it and set themselves up as rulers known as "Lords" (君主 kunshu, "ruler, monarch, lord") Defeating other Lords makes a Lord more powerful, increasing the abilities of their crest (聖印 seiin, "holy seal, holy mark") and allows them to hold back the manifestations of chaos caused by the aforementioned magical disaster. So the story has a lot of politicking, battles between Lords, and seems like it's trying for more blood-and-mud backstabbing intrigue than everyone teaming up to fight the big bad. At least, so far. I'm only six episodes in.

That said, the pacing is very odd. At this point, the Lord protagonist has gained and lost a title, fought several battles, and already participated in a war between vampires and werewolves, which showed up suddenly in episode 5 with no previous hints that they existed. Apparently episode 5 is the entirety of the second light novel, so no wonder it seemed to fly by. Episode 6 is a romance subplot between characters introduced two episodes prior. And I actually think Birthright is a more interesting take on the concept, though maybe that's because I've read the Birthright corebook and only seen a quarter of the anime.

Also, it uses modern anime character designs, which is to say that the men have late-Renaissance clothing and armor and the women have combat thigh-highs and battle bikinis.

( The two protagonists )

I think if it didn't remind me of Birthright, and if it wasn't by Mizuno, there's no way I'd keep watching, but for now it's mindless fantasy fun. It does make me want to track down the first light novel, both to see what the world is like and for additional Japanese practice. I could always use more of that.

Game Review: Shadowrun: Hong Kong

Certainly took me a long time to get to this one.

Back when the original Shadowrun Returns kickstarter came out, one of the questions they asked of fans was where the additional campaign should be set. Berlin was the winner and so they made Dragonfall, but I voted for Hong Kong and I was really disappointed when it didn't win. One of the problems with Shadowrun's development as tabletop game is that the evolving metaplot required new supplements and editions to focus on changes to existing areas and only occasionally cover new places. We know more about Sixth World Seattle than anywhere else on the planet, for example, but most other places aren't nearly so well-described. I don't think there's ever been much published about the Confederated American States, for example, much less southern Europe, southeast or south Asia, anywhere in Africa or the Middle East, and so on. Just bits here and there scattered through the books, so a whole game set elsewhere with a companion sourcebook released with it was amazing.

The game's not as good as Dragonfall, but it comes pretty close.

Welcome to the Sixth World, and honestly, also the Fifth World.

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