At the beginning of the week I put in six more hours of the Elden Ring network test and probably still didn’t manage to find everything there was to find. Still not sure if I want to count this towards my games goal for the year but I guess I have the option if SMT5 eats up all of my time.

Speaking of which, I did start SMT5; barely played anything so far besides the intro cutscene and character creation, but I’ll be focusing on that for a little while (and hopefully sticking with it! I can get totally sucked into Persona games but mainline SMT has been tough for me for some reason).

This week I finished 呪術廻戦 vol. 7 and read about half of vol. 8. Apparently my sister mainly wanted me to get caught up to read the chapter where Yuji meets his old schoolmate, which comes immediately after the anime-adapted material, so the pressure is off! but I’m still going to keep reading since it’s great.

Kept on reading プチデビル後輩 slightly faster than my before-end-of-year pace, over 1/3 through the book now. As with book 1, lots of nice narration and dialogue that didn’t make the cut for the anime.

Finally, I watched the last eight episodes of Re:Zero season 1, plus both the OVAs. Pretty much everything regarding the white whale and the witch cult had faded from my memory so it was almost like watching a whole new show and my newly-improved opinion of Subaru actually helped me appreciate his cool moments instead of being annoyed by them. The OVAs were totally new to me though and I enjoyed them quite a bit; the first one was your standard no-impact lighthearted fanservice stuff, and the second was actually a pretty neat look at Emilia’s backstory. I’ve always found her to be terribly boring so this new look at her was very welcome. I gotta say though, “talks entirely in on’yomi compounds” is definitely my least favorite character trait.