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Strifehart

Lonelymiracle's
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Strifehart

Comics!!!

2 min read
I doubt many of you are still around but as you've probably realized, this page is pretty much dead. Some of you may already know the best way to find me is WinterPro (or sometimes WinterPr0 with a zero), I'm semi-active on vine and youtube. But down to proper updates:

First and foremost, I have started a long term comic series (:iconcommuniversity:) that I hope to one day animate into a cartoon, I have some actors, a good sound setup, and well... just about everything but the animator. But in the meantime please read the comic and show your support! For now it's just simple gag comics, but if I get enough subscribers (between FB, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram) I will commence with the actual storyline.

Once again I would really appreciate some reviews, feedback, or follows if you like it enough. Check it out here: :iconcommuniversity:


Alright next piece of business: I have joined a youtube crew called SpinDash. We will be producing youtube videos regularly for your entertainment. I don't have the details quite yet since our first pow-wow/script writing/brainstorm thinger will be this sunday, but I will post a journal with those details when our first video is up. So please consider keeping an eye out for that!

If you're one of the people who visits either Communiversity or SpinDash from being an old Strifehart follower, mention that in a comment over there and I'll give you a shoutout! Hope to see you guys around!
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Support my video!

4 min read
Long time no see everyone! (I'll fill you in below) I have a request, please watch my video:



I'm starting up my YouTube channel and looking for actors, cinematographers, editors, etc. It's mostly going to be humor, but I have a few action types I'm considering. I really would like support via likes/views/subscribes (hopefully at some point I can fund better videos with the monetization).

So if you're in the L.A. area, hit me up and you can work on these with me if you like. When the videos start paying off, I'm going to start paying my team, I'm not in this for the money so it'll all be distributed to the team.

TL;DR - SUPPORT BY WATCHING, CONTACT ME IF YOU WANT TO BE IN VIDEO!

Okay so now who is this strifehart guy and why was I watching him again? Good Question. I've all but fallen out of cosplay and am pursuing my career in acting. Honestly dA seems a bit dead now anyway. I still check in a lot, but I think if you like my sense of humor (like the comics) and want to continue to follow my adventures then subscribe to me at www.youtube.com/winterpr0

On that note, if you remember me at all, I apologize for abandoning you guys. School, military separation, unemployment, legal stuff, marriage stuff, jumping from apartment to apartment stuff... lots and lots of stuff... I made a very hard decision to pursue something as unstable as acting with my GI Bill, and decided if I need something stable that pays well in the future, I don't need a degree for a lot of my backup plans. So now that studying here in CA, I'm putting 100% into making this work. Well it's nice to see it paying off, because my "talent" for acting has been extremely well received by the filmmaker students here. Unfortunately I've been a bit frustrated for one reason or another with almost all the student films I've done... the biggest one being they are nothing close to my style. Somehow I got a great response for my slapstick, comedic timing, funny voices... and then get requested for nothing but drama and tragedies... I won't even mention the ways some of the filmmakers have treated me >__> ANYWAY!

I started a youtube channel because of my role model TomSka (If you havent seen him, go watch...now) mostly so I could act in things I wrote. On top of that, who knows, I may make a buck or two. I'm not in it for the monetary gain, really I would like some supplement to my dwindling wallet since it's all out of pocket. I've purchased half an army's worth of guns and costumes, and I can't afford a good camera on my own. I'd also like to start paying a sound designer / editor / everything else. But the long and short of it is, I want my videos to fund more videos so I can do what I love, get practice, possibly come out with some stuff for my reels, and have fun.

This is extremely hard to do when you're broke and all the film students around you aren't motivated to work on films... especially when I'm offering to pay (not much mind you but theyre doing for free anyway...). Well once again if you're near L.A. (or feel like driving here from wherever you are) drop me a line, I want/need as many dedicated cast/crew members as I can get. Big disclaimer though: I mean dedicated! If you want to work on these videos you can't just show up when you want, if you show up at all. I mean either be in the film or don't. You don't have to be in every film, just show up on time and ready to work for the films you DO volunteer for.

I'm also working on a police web-series. Let me know if you're interested. Even if you live far away we can talk about it. Anyway, enough about that, I hope you enjoyed my crap video. And understand that the quality will get better, but I have to improve as the money does. Thanks, bye!
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Wedding and Check-in

2 min read
Long time no see. A lot has happened since I was last active on dA and I just figured I'd drop everyone a line (or the 10 people who still watch me). I recently wrapped up my military contract and am looking for a place/car/college. I'm back in the states and keeping myself busy with things like fire emblem, monster hunter, doctor who, etc. May or may not get back into cosplay eventually; I still don't have a place to properly work on anything so I'm just trying to take care of what needs to be taken care of.

More importantly, some of you know I got married recently. And for those of you who don't, you probably at least know who it is (lonelymiracle).

I've known her for about 4 and a half years now and have been regularly surprised by her. I generally tend to get along poorly if not dislike people I meet after a week at best, but she makes me a more patient and happy person. Well the last three years, we've been fighting a losing battle to make things work out: money issues, schedule conflicts, legal issues, being accused of severe crimes I didn't do, matching wits against satan, and a whole plethora of other bad luck. Even now we haven't quite surpassed the last hurdle. We decided to have a small, unofficial, local wedding so that her family could be included and so we could have just ONE victory after all this time.

For those of you who are (or know you should be) invited to the wedding, we are still going to have a local wedding so you're still coming.

I sorta lost my line of thought so wedding photos:

s22.photobucket.com/user/lionh…
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Stuff and Stuff

1 min read
Star Wars The Old Republic.

If you play, hit me up. If not, sorry about not posting anything and thanks for the comments. Blah blah hiatus, blah blah too much work, blah blah nobody to cosplay with. But seriously star wars.
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Update and FFXIII-2 Review (SPOILERS MARKED)

16 min read
Okay I know I've had a fairly long leave of absence. I've been working quite non-stop on college, marriage planning, college, housework, and attempting to have fun so I don't die. As much as I hate to admit it, cosplay isn't really a high priority for me right now. I know some of you may have posted a question to our tumblr, I'd like to say it's not dead, but it'll will go at a very slow pace. Honestly, the only reason I even posted that valentine's comic was because we were invited to wonder fest, and thought the candid photos could almost be made into one....almost...

So that aside, I apologize to anyone who's commented and not received a response. I check my deviantart at least once every few days. I respond to anything directly warranting a response, but I dont really have time to comment back every "lol" or "nice comic bro" for now. I'd like to say things will pick up eventually, but things are only going to get busier, and moovar is about to graduate high school and he will likely have less time as well. So I guess my conclusion is, I hope you guys wont forget about us even if we only post something every so often.

Alrighty, while I'm here, I need to get my thoughts of FFXIII-2 out. I will mark each section of the rant with spoilers/no spoilers, and how far in the game you should be not to spoil anything. If you want reviews of certain parts, or just want to discuss something without spoilers, comment or note me and I'll give you what I can without spoilers.

GAME REVIEW
NO SPOILERS

To start out I will say this game gets the following grade (out of 10) from me: GAMEPLAY- 8  VOICE ACTING- 9  AS A SEQUEL- 3  STORY- 5 / 9  OVERALL- 7 (possible 10, see as a sequel section)

To summarize, Overall I loved the games play style. They fixed up the XIII system and then some. This one felt like a bastardization of a classic FF, and X-2... so I'm kinda middle road overall. The story.....bugged me for quite a lot of it, and in other parts I got excited. Personally I think the new Square Enix storyboard writer is a sociopath. That's just me, but putting it bluntly, the characters get too worked up over nothing, and then act like they dont give a damn about things that SHOULD rile them up. As a sequel... honestly it's classic Square. It has those crazy WOW moments, but for the most part, if you loved XIII prepare to be disappointed with how unrelated it is. My final evaluation of this game is that it wasn't half bad. But, there is an underlying message in the game, that if my theory is right, then I would instantly switch my 7 to a full blown 10. See "As a Sequel for details (and only if you've beaten the game)

GAMEPLAY
"Spoils" gameplay elements introduced very early on. No story spoilers.

Let's start with gameplay. Not going to lie, I was crazy hooked on the gameplay. As some of you know, your third party member throughout the game is a monster. After killing most monsters, you have a chance of winning that monster as a party member. From the list of obtained monsters, you can select three for your paradigm setup. They are the equivalent of a third party member from XIII....only downside is each monster is stuck in one job class, so for the paradigms you can switch out each of the three instead of having a third member who only changes jobs. So essentially you cut yourself down to only having three job classes for your third party member instead of all six. Adversely, the monsters can be raised to be beasts in their class. So you're sacrificing the three classes you DONT choose to have crazy high stats for the three remaining.

I thought it was addicting and amusing as hell. The generic battle system from XIII carried over, but it seems they worked out most of the kinks....like grinding for 24 hours and only unlocking 3 new spaces on the grid. Overall, I was actually quite amused with MOST of the gameplay. Now raising the monsters.... I had a few complaints. For starters, you can level them by giving them items to raise their power, magic, HP, or everything.... essetially making the first 3 quite a poor choice. Now the monsters are divided into three types: Early peakers (crazy high stat boosts, level cap at 20-ish) Well grown (moderately high, cap at 45-ish) or late bloomers (slow as balls, cap at 99-ish). Now SUPPOSEDLY, the longer it takes the higher their stats cap... although I levelled a few of my monsters to 99 (with only the best items) and they still fell pretty short of a cactuar I haphazardly dumped crap into... that catuar is a wrecking machine mind you, but he makes tedius and careful levleling seem like a waste of time.

There are a handful of very randomly thrown at you puzzles. I did not get the point of them, I did not know why they were there, I was not challenged by them... I didnt get it.Theres quite a lot to collect in the game, but this time they let you go back and get everything.... so much in fact, that they let you restart chapters of the game without sacrificing your progress. Definitely a thumbs up in my book. (Especially with major missables in XII and XIII) Also the game is very supporting of your progress. XIII felt like a hassle because there was no reward. Your "reward" for all the fucking levelling in the end was....bigger battles... whoop-de-friggin-doo. This game makes you feel much more accomplished, and you can always go back to things with your current levels/monsters/equipment. (And we all remember "going back" was a foreign term in XIII)

Chocobo Races. Good god....Chocobo races. At a certain point you HAVE to get casino coins (basically gold saucer points) in order to continue the story. Well your options are to dump the entire game's worth of gil into buying it (no thanks) slot machines (more expensive than buying it, since you have to buy the coins to play, then lose them all because you NEVER WIN!) or....race chocobos. Well I got myself a beast of a chocobo but even then you win 100 to 400 a race at best. You have to reach 10,000 in order to continue the game. If you're really good at placing the bets (100 coin max) then you can occasionally win 1000 a race, but the chances of that happening are extremely slim. Honestly, I think I may have enjoyed the races if my brother and I hadn't put in 20+ hours into raising a beast chocobo who was only on par with the others, and STILL spent 10+ hours trying to get the winnings.

Final gameplay review: They fixed up everything, were very good at rewarding your efforts, but sometimes things just get way too tedious.

VOICE ACTING
No spoilers. Attempting to give as good of a review as possible without giving anything away.

This will be a short section. Overall, the voice actors put a lot of effort into it. I didn't have any problems with the main cast, and Noel (pronounced Nole.... even the japanese version said it right >.>) was voiced by Max Goof from The Goofy Movie.... he did a good job, but the occasional line had me laughing at being convince he was going to say "My life... is a living-" "HELLO!" Any "return characters" which I will not specify for spoilers sake, were the originals as far as I could tell. No qualms there. There were a handful of characters that I couldn't tell if they were SUPPOSED to sound bad to give them a certain aura....or were just bad. Also, I couldn't get around the fact that Yuj (That's the blue haired NORA guy right?) was Jeff from American Dad and his voice was absolutely no different... I kept waiting for him to call Serah "hayley", or Noel "Mr S." But it wasn't that bad aside from the fact that Yuj now sounds like a stoner. Oh and the moogle.... sounded like a retarded fangirl who had a rich daddy pay off square enix to let her voice act >.> and the voice got more annoying as the game went...like literally. It gets deeper and more dumb sounding.

STORY
SPOILERS. LOTS OF THEM....SPOILERS EVERYWHERE

Mild/Early game spoilers: Okay, so for starters, the story was..... bleh. I couldn't help but think this was a pathetic bastardization of FFX-2, Chrono Trigger, and Chrono Cross. Serah constantly talking to Tidu- I mean Lightning about what's happening, bitching about lightning, and generally relating everything to lightning. I understand you lost your sister, but she doesnt need to be brought up THAT often. Then they took the whole time travel thing and an alternate world based on alternate results because of time travel from Cross/Trigger. It was okay, but the alternate world stuff played little to no relevance and seemed pointless to add at all. The new characters, Noel, Yuel, and Caius, had an interesting story, but they dominated the story. That would be like if Paine was the main character of X-2... who the hell cares about the new guys? If you want to make a game about a new cast, just call it FFXV. Then again the ever delayed Versus XIII also wouldnt have anything to do with it.

MID GAME SPOILERS: Noel was okay and all, but jesus he needed to lay off Snow for how hypocritical he was. Speaking of snow... He had all of 10 minutes of screen time... dafuq.... on top of that, Serah never ONCE gave a shit about him! She was like "Oh....sup snow.... long time no see. I know I was kidnapped by a falcie, frozen in crystal for months, then died, then you ran off to save my sister, and I've spent the past 3-4 years of our engagement without you, but I cant be bothered to hug you, show you affection, or even remember you when I list my friends (to include the entire cast BUT him)" Seriously, the realtionships in the square enix games were written by a sociopath.

EARLY GAME: On top of that, I did not like lightning. She redeemed herself a LITTLE by the end of XIII...but while Snow was the hero, pleasant attitude, always looking to do the right thing, he always ended up apologizing for things that were his fault, then getting hit for it, yelled at, and even attempted murder. Lightning on the other hand demoralized the party, derailed the objective, and in the end wasn't much of a main character since fang and vanille saved the world, and snow was the one keeping them forward and started the revolution during the purge. Lightning went around hitting people for apologizing, or having hope, and in the end she was like "We're friends right?" Without even a "sry lulz." Fine though, she redeemed herself, and actually she wasn't half bad in this game.... until they jane doe'd her. Now shes an all knowing, all seeing warrior goddess whom serah prays to (no joke >.>) has power over all the main characters or something, owns all the summons... oh and leading a war in valhalla.... so does that make her a valkyrie according to norse mythology? NOPE! She doesnt OBEY odin... she rides him! You know what pisses me off the most? They credit HER for holding up Cocoon at the end of XIII!! They god modded her so much, they took away Fang and Vanille's big freaking moment and GAVE it to her!

MAJOR SPOILERS: The choices you could make were amusing, but honestly, Serah's personality wasn't really developed to say most of them. For the most part, they all ended the same way anyway. In the very end (SPOILERS SWEET MOTHER OF GOD) you decide to kill Caius or not... and if you dont, he grabs your sword and makes "you kill him" anyway, altering nothing.

MID GAME to LATER GAME: Now hope was another character I didn't care to see much of. Naturally he was the second most seen main character from XIII. On the other hand, I'm glad they did. Hope was dashing as sin, and such a badass, the guy builds the foundation of future societies, cryogenically sleeps until it's finished, leads said society, builds it better, sleeps again, then leads THAT society to war.... sunuvabitch BUILT the world. Basically I love hope now... fully redeemed whatever he hadn't in XIII.

VERY LATE GAME: Sazh has a small bit part near the ending which was....cute, but pointless and a little inconsistent. Fang and Vanille had their bit part too which was wonderful, and well placed for an homage. But what was nice was that throughout the game, they never forget fang and vanille. Snow and hope seem hell bent on saving them, and they are referenced all the time. It's that "Square Sequel Classic" where is almost unrelated to the first game, but the few references you were waiting for are crazy exciting.

NO SPOILERS: The story itself was... okay, but often felt very directionless like XIII. Even the world/time select menu gave visual and written previews of the world....pretty much spoiling anything you may see there >.> Now the big thing is what COULD have been the purpose of the story...which I'll cover soon.

STORY
SPOILERS OUT THE WAZOO... THIS IS ENDGAME STUFF I WILL NOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE IF YOU READ FURTHER

Okay so basically as a sequel this game left out anything you grew to know and love from XIII. Basically all elements from XIII were no more than references or cameos. This section is not intended to be how I feel about it as a sequel though. SPOILER SWEET JESUS! It was intended to be how I feel about it as a Prequel. In the end Caius dies and the goddess Etro with him, which releases the force they worked to keep sealed in XIII. Pretty neat premise for a sequel. Serah very anti-climatically dies at the last second in Noel's arms and Snow has not been seen since randomly disappearing from 300AF or something close to that. Basically, the world is converted to a new valhalla, timeless and dead. Lightning is seen (I presume) to be dead. Caius claims to have killed her, but Noel and Serah just say hes trying to rile them up, and laugh it off. Apparently he got her. Basically... the worlds in the shitter and we're left with a to be continued screen.

I had bitched not too long ago about Square Enix knowing that they wont stop making games, nor wait for/listen to feedback from a game before deciding to make a sequel/remake/etc. They dont care what we think, nor are they going bankrupt THAT soon. So why do things like duodecim, where you make a closed loop story... and then ATTEMPT to make a sequel or prequel with nothing to go off of....and then it's crap? Well they finally did. The way I see it, Lightning saved serah and the world, and her final mission to stop caius was seconhandedly completed. Sazh got his kid and started piloting. Fang and Vanille redeemed themselves by saving Cocoon, hope became king of the world. Serah...well...died. Noel fixed his shit. In the end... Snow got fucked. He busted his ass to be with serah only to have some jackass kid hold her while she dies. He didn't get five damn minutes with her before running off to save her sister FOR HER SAKE. Fang and Vanille may or may not have been saved, he failed to save lightning, these god creatures killed his fiance. and Noel ALLOWED it to happen. The world got fucked regardless of all his hard work. He fought the royal ripness for nothing, and now he disappears not to be seen for the rest of the game.

So here it is. If XIII-3 is about Snow... square enix will be redeemed tenfold. Because this game will be one HELL of a precursor to a very epic story. Snow needs some royal payback, or to just get what he wanted and deserved from the beginning.  On the other hand... Square could REALLY screw this up and let someone else (and less relevant) be the hero, sweeping him under the rug. Or hell, they could go classic enix and just make a whole new cast do it, making the first two games irrelevant. Why would we want to play a game like that? Who cares about NEWER characters, I could barely get behind Noel and that horrible mog >.>

So Please square... make this about snow, that guy needs to catch a break. If you make this about new characters I'm so done with you. Its like the build up of the century with the ultimate letdown.

Overall, if 3 is about snow, then this game will be an AMAZING setup for an amazing grand finale. If its not.... then it was a waste of time segwe for something they could have just done in XIII.
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Comics!!! by Strifehart, journal

Support my video! by Strifehart, journal

Wedding and Check-in by Strifehart, journal

Stuff and Stuff by Strifehart, journal

Update and FFXIII-2 Review (SPOILERS MARKED) by Strifehart, journal