In an attempt to capture some of the magic of Persona 5, without actually, you know...playing Persona 5, we decided to go back and re-discover some of the older games in the SMT series, namely Persona 3 Portable and Digital Devil Saga. I guess when all the cool kids are diving into the fresh stuff, we go back and play earlier versions of the same ones and pretend. Oh-ho-ho…and pretend we DO! If nothing else, it's good for creativity? Maybe we need to go even more imaginative and start RPing our own version of Persona 5 with origami figures and shadow puppets. It could be a thing! >:3

On other gaming fronts, we have kinda put FFXIV on the backburner for the time being as we've really just been in a console gaming kind of mood lately. It's to be expected since all the HW content has been released and we slowly trudge through grinding content until Stormblood. I know many people are really excited about it, but the way HW concluded really dampened my interest in wanting to play the expansion. I'd rant about it here but it might end up in comic form, so I'll refrain for now. The only reason we are even keeping our subs up is to attend our raid nights, but even that may not keep our interest long enough as we consider putting FFXIV down for a while so we can play console games and come back after Stormblood has been out for a bit. So you may not see many other FFXIV comics for a bit? We'll see~

Oh! I did want to say though that raiding has been a hugely gratifying experience at least! It's been the first time that Pie and I have been able to be part of a static raid group. I ended up doing some light 25-person raiding in WoW Cataclysm, but it wasn't for very long and I never felt like I was really part of the team. Our small group in FFXIV feels very tight-knit and we've successfully cleared Sophia EX and Zurvan EX without Echo (a significant stat boost you get when your group wipes).

It took our plucky team a while to undertake each of those bosses since we're not exactly raid pros and most of us are at the minimum item level requirements to enter. Within maybe about 3 weeks (2 3-hour attempts per week), we were able to reach our clear and farm status on each. Zurvan EX particularly was beyond brutal, and there were times I was fairly certain we couldn't get through the fight, but once we did it was incredibly exhilarating! Just one of those great war stories you get to have with your comrades when you think back to what makes a game phenomenal and sticks in your mind. It's definitely one of the huge benefits to playing an online game with a set team~

Even still…our interests meander and there are new, shiny things that beckon. THEY BECKON!! +_+