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Some Numbers posted:I make bad decisions. Or like having a blinded low-HP character attack....
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Oct 26, 2016 02:44
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Fie continues to be the best member of Class VII. Episode 38: Portable High-Powered Explosive No commentary
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Oct 30, 2016 03:27
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Some Numbers posted:Fie continues to be the best member of Class VII. At this point in the plotline I'm pretty sure I suspected Fie was a bracer. I mean, Jaeger's are basically dark bracers so I guess I wasn't far off. Of course, from here on I assumed she was involved in (SC spoilers) the Jaeger/Bracer war that took place in Erebonia during tits FC.
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Oct 30, 2016 03:52
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You can tell the difference between area-target spells and enemy-target by the Area (Set) next to the range. Set means it's area-target. If it's simply Area, then it targets an enemy and hits things around it as a consequence.
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Oct 30, 2016 05:02
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Ah the classic Incredibly Spacious Sewer Dungeon. I appreciated the little closed door just past where you met Jusis to explain where he came from. A lot of games forget details like that. Silver Thorn? This early? AND just in a single quartz? In Trails in the Sky FC, Silver Thorn was a unique spell used only by a very nasty boss. It was an AoE which did a lot of damage and had a 90% chance to Confuse. To stand any hope of winning that fight you needed to dedicate one of your two accessory slots to preventing Confuse. In Trails in the Sky SC, you could finally get to use Silver Thorn yourself, but it required you to have a certain configuration of high-level quartz, and it wasn't realistically possible until a bit more than halfway through the game at the earliest before those quartz became craftable (and even that probably required some grinding to scrape together enough sepith). And in this game, you're getting it in Chapter two? Okay, who the gently caress is Fie? It sure as hell cannot be a coincidence that she, someone who is very used to combat, who carries around explosives and smoke grenades, knows and is known by Sara, the instructor who has a Very Suspicious Training Device, and is surprisingly powerful in combat as well. Okay Rean you are raising some extremely excellent questions, and I normally approve of characters confronting highly suspicious party members, but that door being breached was really, really loud, and I'd be be more concerned about a nest of angry provincial soldiers hearing that and getting all up in your face REALLY QUICKLY, so you should seriously just rescue Machias and get the hell out, and ask those questions later! Hmmm... okay Fie being a Jager would fit with my theory, yes. The soldiers heard the voices, but not the HUGE EXPLOSIONS? It is good that the party is finally going to fight them, though. But after this they should probably get the hell out on the first train leaving. As in, forget picking up their stuff at the hotel first, just leave.
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Oct 30, 2016 05:39
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:Silver Thorn? This early? AND just in a single quartz? In Trails in the Sky FC, Silver Thorn was a unique spell used only by a very nasty boss. It was an AoE which did a lot of damage and had a 90% chance to Confuse. To stand any hope of winning that fight you needed to dedicate one of your two accessory slots to preventing Confuse. In Trails in the Sky SC, you could finally get to use Silver Thorn yourself, but it required you to have a certain configuration of high-level quartz, and it wasn't realistically possible until a bit more than halfway through the game at the earliest before those quartz became craftable (and even that probably required some grinding to scrape together enough sepith). And in this game, you're getting it in Chapter two? That was my initial reaction, but it's balanced by ratcheting down the confusion rate from 40% to 90% and also (I assume) reducing the overall strength of the spell. It's still quite strong.
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Oct 30, 2016 05:44
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it's justified in fiction by someone mentioning in every game that the new model orbments are more powerful than everything that came before 
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Oct 30, 2016 05:55
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:The soldiers heard the voices, but not the HUGE EXPLOSIONS? It is good that the party is finally going to fight them, though. But after this they should probably get the hell out on the first train leaving. As in, forget picking up their stuff at the hotel first, just leave. Well enormous explosions are probably just normal sewer noises. I can understand why they'd ignore it.
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Oct 30, 2016 12:54
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To quote Rean from this episode, let's wrap up this month's field study! Episode 39: Some Fancy-Sounding 'Stage Name' No commentary
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Nov 5, 2016 06:03
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Man, your dogs didn't use Double Cracker nearly as much as mine did. To note, the true terror of that fight is them going Howl (both get +50% Str/Spd), and then both Double Cracker on their turns (guaranteed kill on two targets). This may or may not have happened to me, and Double Cracker is stupidly annoying. That's why taking out a single dog as quickly as possible is incredibly important here. Even if the remaining dog got a permanent 50% Str/Spd buff, I'd still prefer it to them having Double Cracker.
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Nov 5, 2016 07:31
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Some Numbers posted:To quote Rean from this episode, let's wrap up this month's field study! I swear, I was yelling at you for not using Jusis's S-craft before switching him out, and not using Fie's S-craft when she was at 200 Cp and opting to use normal attacks instead. I can have moments of... eccentricity and sometimes be quite curious about things. Please forgive me if I do something foolish or rude.
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Nov 5, 2016 14:02
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Stephen9001 posted:I swear, I was yelling at you for not using Jusis's S-craft before switching him out, and not using Fie's S-craft when she was at 200 Cp and opting to use normal attacks instead. I'll take this under advisement but there's still almost 20 episodes of backlog.
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Nov 5, 2016 14:55
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Some Numbers posted:I'll take this under advisement but there's still almost 20 episodes of backlog. Well, after the fight, you kinda bragged about not using S-crafts, and then admitted that you probably should have used them, so I took that as a good sign. Was still kinda annoying though. I can have moments of... eccentricity and sometimes be quite curious about things. Please forgive me if I do something foolish or rude.
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Nov 5, 2016 15:04
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Stephen9001 posted:Well, after the fight, you kinda bragged about not using S-crafts, and then admitted that you probably should have used them, so I took that as a good sign. Was still kinda annoying though. doooooooooooooom
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Nov 5, 2016 16:00
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Ha ha ha oh wow, less than 30 seconds in and the "Provincial Army" charged with upholding law and order in the province is literally mustache twirling villains knowingly sending monsters to execute students. Now I'm unfamiliar with Erebonia's legal system, but I don't think that's part of their standard judicial procedure. Am I confused on the layout, or was it possible for us to reach one of the portcullis gate switches before the cutscene took hold? Is Jusis just really bad in combat, or did you want Emma for Serene Blessing? Because it seems like the monsters were pretty resistant to magic attacks. Also after Fie revived Emma, there was a good place for Machias to use his healing shotgun to help both Fie and Emma (even though it turned out you didn't need it). I too was expecting one dog to get a buff when the other one died. The soldiers are smarter than I gave them credit for, since they didn't just send the monsters after, but used the fight to gain time for the soldiers to catch up. I am guessing from the music though that for some reason, the students will arbitrarily decide to not try to fight the soldiers, even though the soldiers clearly are acting illegally and that probably won't end well for the students if they take them into custody. FEDIT: If Sara and Rufus hadn't show up then, and if Jusis had failed to talk his way out of the situation, would the students really have surrendered? Let "the others" know, eh? Conspiracy vs. Conspiracy. I like that it's not just the good guys getting totally outplayed by sneaky plots, the good guys seem to have their own sneaky methods and plots which the students aren't even aware of yet. I don't believe Sara is a former Jager. I believe that she is a former Enforcer for Oroborous. She has the requisite Enforcer Nickname of "Purple Lighting", and this update basically gives complete confirmation that Baron Bleublanc is the same Enforcer "Phantom Thief B" from TitS SC. As an Oroborous Enforcer, she could also know a Jager like Fie. I do like that Group B was also having its own interesting adventures involving faction conflict, and that the students laughed at Sara's corny speech. I am going to hate Light Blue Haired Girl, I'm sure. At best she will be tiresome. At least she dropped a couple names for future reference.
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Nov 5, 2016 16:05
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Jusis is pretty mediocre until level 26, at which point he becomes slightly less mediocre.
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Nov 5, 2016 16:52
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Jusis's problem is that he mixes up melee and magic to be pretty mediocre at both. He's more of a magic specialist, but he's got worse magic than the casters (not sure about Alisa), and significantly worse martially than Laura, Fie, and Rean. He does get one of the best crafts in the game, but even that couldn''t get him onto my endgame team.
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Nov 6, 2016 20:53
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Magic is really orbal arts, which means affinity with orbments, so I'm guessing that Alisa is probably 3rd best at magic, no lower than 4th.
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Nov 7, 2016 00:22
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:Magic is really orbal arts, which means affinity with orbments, so I'm guessing that Alisa is probably 3rd best at magic, no lower than 4th. Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is actually correct. I don't know if Alisa is better than Jusis, but they're definitely 3rd and 4th behind Elliot and Emma.
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Nov 7, 2016 06:32
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Some Numbers posted:Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is actually correct. I don't know if Alisa is better than Jusis, but they're definitely 3rd and 4th behind Elliot and Emma. Alisa is better than Jusis, but falls under the problem of not being as useful as Jusis. Magic in CS1 isn't anywhere near as useful as it was in Trails In The Sky, it takes longer to cast, costs way too much to use, and enemies deal so much damage that it's rarely worth the time it takes to cast an Art when you could instead have that character free to do healing or Crafts during that time frame. The only real exception to that rule is Emma in my opinion, because she actually has the ATS and EP pool to make Arts worth using. After all of that, to me it feels like Alisa is a mediocre magic user with no real offensive options, in a game where you're better off using Physical Attacks and Crafts 90% of the time. Granted some of her crafts are good, and she can make a decent healer since she's obviously built to be Support, but it's really hard to justify giving her a position over so many other characters who can either just out damage her by miles, or just do flat out more useful things than her most of the time. Though it's probably really spoilery to talk about any of that since we're only about to start the games third chapter. .... You know, it's really nice of the Noble Army to kidnap school children on trumped on charges, then sic trained murder hounds on them. Really screams "We're decent people!".
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Nov 7, 2016 17:27
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Lynkericious posted:After all of that, to me it feels like Alisa is a mediocre magic user with no real offensive options, in a game where you're better off using Physical Attacks and Crafts 90% of the time. Granted some of her crafts are good, and she can make a decent healer since she's obviously built to be Support, but it's really hard to justify giving her a position over so many other characters who can either just out damage her by miles, or just do flat out more useful things than her most of the time.
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Nov 7, 2016 20:59
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Lynkericious posted:
The game does focus a lot more on issues with the Noble Faction than the Reformists, though they get their time in the "sun" too. Probably partially because those coming over from Trails in the Sky should already be familiar with the "interesting person" in charge of the Reformists. Unfortunate for those who don't, but that can be talked about more later.
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Nov 8, 2016 03:02
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Lord Koth posted:The game does focus a lot more on issues with the Noble Faction than the Reformists, though they get their time in the "sun" too. Probably partially because those coming over from Trails in the Sky should already be familiar with the "interesting person" in charge of the Reformists. Unfortunate for those who don't, but that can be talked about more later. Yeah, that'll be a discussion for Chapter 4. Spoilers.
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Nov 9, 2016 04:10
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Studying is why we're all here right? Episode 40: How Does a Book Sit Pompously? No commentary
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Nov 13, 2016 08:20
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I have to admit that even though the academics side is obviously less exciting that breaking into army bases with high explosives, I appreciate that the game has not forgotten that this is a school and from time-to-time, shows that the students are supposed to be doing all kinds of normal school things offscreen. There sure seems to be a scary amount of very different topics students are expected to know about. Okay game, it's a three-person study session, so why on earth does the link between the two non-Rean people NOT increase? Yes, it's only 100 LXP, so not much, but still. Also I still don't know what's going on with that strange black cat, but at least it's not quite as terrible as I feared at one point.
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Nov 13, 2016 16:30
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:I have to admit that even though the academics side is obviously less exciting that breaking into army bases with high explosives, I appreciate that the game has not forgotten that this is a school and from time-to-time, shows that the students are supposed to be doing all kinds of normal school things offscreen. There sure seems to be a scary amount of very different topics students are expected to know about. One might also expect the students to be hanging out among themselves (not just the main character and only when the player pushes the button) and going to athletic practice or military physical training, fishing, finding items, etc... so by that reasoning there should be numbers passively increasing during those weeks that just zoom past. How much harder would it be to code in a widget that pops up at the end of each day and has the RNG decide "meanwhile, Laura and Useless [Ditched a no-proles-allowed tea party: gain 50 LXP] and Fie [Accidentally got swole, somehow: gain 2 maxHP] today" before it ticks over to the next day. Maybe the designers didn't want to tie gameplay mechanics to story/immersion/fluff to save their own sanity when it comes to balance and debugging, even though it would give more opportunities for the writers to add characterization and filler for marketing to advertise how many hours it takes to clear the campaign if you don't click through the messages as fast as possible like a normal player  oath2order posted:The game actually does a good job of doing this via the story. If you walk around extensively during the non-field study portions of the game you can pick up on at least a dozen running plot lines throughout the game. Pretty much every member of Class VII has a friendship with at least 1 incredibly minor NPC that you wouldn't know about if you weren't talking to people on campus. That level of detail is one of the best parts of the trails franchise, honestly. The peripheral details are a nice touch but I was more referring to the way central RPG elements could interact with those storytelling details. In this case, Stabbey_the_Clown pointed out how the game repeatedly and specifically draws attention to the S-link mechanics but story-related XP seems a little arbitrary/awkward/forced; I extended that logic to indicate other elements that could similarly be used to hint at minor off-screen events to fill in more worldbuilding details. Looking at it the other way, the added complexity might not be worth whatever additional depth those interactions would create, depending on how they are handled. edit: to sum it up in a lot fewer words, "it's interesting how the narrative affects gameplay, but that aspect could have been done better" silentsnack fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Nov 14, 2016 |
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Nov 14, 2016 01:56
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silentsnack posted:One might also expect the students to be hanging out among themselves (not just the main character and only when the player pushes the button) and going to athletic practice or military physical training, fishing, finding items, etc... so by that reasoning there should be numbers passively increasing during those weeks that just zoom past. How much harder would it be to code in a widget that pops up at the end of each day and has the RNG decide "meanwhile, Laura and Useless [Ditched a no-proles-allowed tea party: gain 50 LXP] and Fie [Accidentally got swole, somehow: gain 2 maxHP] today" before it ticks over to the next day. The game actually does a good job of doing this via the story. If you walk around extensively during the non-field study portions of the game you can pick up on at least a dozen running plot lines throughout the game. Pretty much every member of Class VII has a friendship with at least 1 incredibly minor NPC that you wouldn't know about if you weren't talking to people on campus. That level of detail is one of the best parts of the trails franchise, honestly.
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Nov 14, 2016 03:17
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oath2order posted:The game actually does a good job of doing this via the story. If you walk around extensively during the non-field study portions of the game you can pick up on at least a dozen running plot lines throughout the game. Pretty much every member of Class VII has a friendship with at least 1 incredibly minor NPC that you wouldn't know about if you weren't talking to people on campus. That level of detail is one of the best parts of the trails franchise, honestly. Hint: They're friends with the people in their clubs.
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Nov 14, 2016 07:14
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"Political Economics" and "Art History" sound like the sort of fancy nonsense a noble would traditionally be expected to know. What to do when your serfs mistakenly exercise their right of dunnage on another liege's lands, and so on. this anime video game is never going to be very much like real life and it's probably best to come to terms with that sooner rather than later Hwurmp fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Nov 14, 2016 |
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Nov 14, 2016 12:59
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Both are actual things you can major in at actual colleges/universities in real life, so it's not like Falcom made up the subjects or anything. And political economics in particular would be of use for both nobles and those interested in entering the government because it specifically deals with the effects on production and trade of stuff like laws, customs and the government in general.
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Nov 14, 2016 20:09
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I don't think it's a huge stretch to imagine that a class of students whose composition is, in part, intended to bridge the gap between classes in a country divided along class lines almost to the point of civil war would be studying political economy.
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Nov 14, 2016 22:04
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I can't be the only one who noticed that Machias called Orbal Arts "Magic for the everyman" there can I?
I can have moments of... eccentricity and sometimes be quite curious about things. Please forgive me if I do something foolish or rude.
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Nov 17, 2016 00:53
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Machias is just channeling his inner Arthur C Clarke.
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Nov 17, 2016 03:04
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Studying's over! Time to take the actual mid term exams! Episode 41: My Name is Sharon Kreuger No commentary
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Nov 19, 2016 08:59
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Some Numbers posted:Studying's over! Time to take the actual mid term exams! "Don't burn the dorms down or anything!" I'm sorry, what was that Sara? Because all I heard was "PAAARRR-TYYYYY!" I can't blame Laura for not being a fan of an ex-Jaeger. After all, Jaegers are notorious for their complete lack of ethics, and there were also a couple of incidents two-three years ago. First, a corps of Jaegers (Trails FC/SC) wiped out a lot of Erebonia's Bracers. The Bracer Guild in Erebonia remains crippled to this day. Secondly, (Trails SC) Another corps of Jaegers invaded and attacked Liberl in multiple places, especially the capital city. Even if Laura isn't upset over one of those previous incidents, there are many other possibilities, such as (Trails SC) The rape and massacre of the Erebonian town of Hamil ten years ago. Or it could be another incident. I imagine there are no shortages of vile things Jaegers have done which would leave Laura bearing a grudge. It would be hard to separate such a grudge against Jaegers in general from Fie specifically.
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Nov 19, 2016 23:22
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I think none of those incidents are common knowledge in Erebonia.
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Nov 19, 2016 23:42
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Really Pants posted:I think none of those incidents are common knowledge in Erebonia. Laura I believe has mentioned there being a Bracer Guild in Legram, so it's not unreasonable to suspect that the Jeagers may have attacked her hometown in the recent past.
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Nov 20, 2016 02:50
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The general knowledge set re: Bracer guild attacks in Erebonia, as I recall, has not been mentioned yet, but I'm pretty sure jaegers weren't publicly noted as a part of it. The first SC incident is probably somewhat hushed up, and the second is still a complete secret. That's not to say that there aren't other incidents that caused jaegers to be regarded badly, it's just that those aren't exactly the best choices to pick regarding public opinion on jaegers.
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Nov 20, 2016 03:03
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Oh Aidios, is it Sunday? On this week's installment of Cold Steel, we do more Bonding Events! Episode 42: I Guess She Didn't Just Charm Her Way Into Office No commentary We'll hit the Old Schoolhouse next week! Look forward to it!
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Nov 27, 2016 19:27
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Some Numbers posted:Oh Aidios, is it Sunday? I'm not quite sure why, but when I saw that Rean and Laura both get cover, meaning they would take hits for each other, I thought "that seems kinda romantic somehow". Must be because that's the sort of thing I would imagine some kinda warrior couple to do all the time. I can have moments of... eccentricity and sometimes be quite curious about things. Please forgive me if I do something foolish or rude.
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Nov 28, 2016 23:34
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