Why not Portable Ops? Whyyyyyyyyyyyy?
I hate how PO has been ignored like this for both collections given how great an entry it is, and where it fits in the canon.

Why have we got a decade of NES+SNES retro rehashes, but so few games that emulate the "prerendered backgrounds, world map" model from FF7-9, Chrono Cross, etc? I'd love to see more of this kind of thing.

Yeah, on EU's Nintendo Direct it was said we were not only getting it, but getting it in 2013. Which I suspect means that the US is getting it in Q1 2014.

Yes, definitely. However, this has a Theme Hospital aesthetic that's totally great in its own way.

I only recently discovered Vinland Saga, so I'm exploring seinen myself at the moment. But the following series (some of which I'm sure you've read) run the gamut from fun to clever and plenty in between:

HSD Kenichi has the absolute weakest main character to begin with, and has slowly (and mostly consistently) been building him up to where he's at a decent level now (though still not comparable to the Master figures of the series). It's the only series I know of other than Hajime no Ippo that did consistent power…

I don't think that the food is to be judged along a linear "better-worse" track. Stuff like salads are great in their own way that doesn't negate how good a steak might have been.

Yeah, it might potentially suffer with power inflation both of foods and of characters, but no worse than DBZ ended up doing, I suspect.…

20th Century Boys probably won't be animated, given the film adaptations and all (the most expensive Japanese films ever made, that somehow still seem to have an effects budget below that of a TV show). Tragic, but I think that ship has sailed.

Vinland Saga they'll probably wait a while longer like they did with Blade…

I'd argue that even Arlong Park was only as 'serious' an arc as Naruto's Zabuza arc. One Piece has a much slower pace than most other series, and that's fine. It's NewSpecies's insistence that Toriko being differently paced or more comedic than One Piece somehow makes it utter tripe (as if anything that deviates from…

"Yes and no" was pretty much the essence of my argument. You can "yes and no" pretty much every short description of Chinese, since we don't really have the best specific words to deal with it.

I could name two or three Toriko arcs that've happened already that are of similar (or greater!) all-round importance to the ultimate plot. If anything, Toriko's moving faster and has gone further than OP has - but then that's what has made OP so great, its deliberate pacing, knowing it's a 1K+ chapter series and…

My point about the "Admiral" characters was not about who cares about living or dying, but to demonstrate the power difference between characters - definitely OP characters started off less established and weaker (but then you could claim the same when comparing HSD Kenichi to OP, which doesn't make HSD Kenichi better…

Viva Pinata and Bioshock got about equal love if not playtime (VP is way more time-consuming!) from me. Interesting that Microsoft would be so conflicted with its own attempts to ship non-bro stuff.

I still say you're comparing later arcs to earlier arcs of Toriko. Zoro was a feared Pirate Hunter, Sanji was a combat chef, Luffy beat every arc without doing anything different (except finding gimmick weaknesses like Crocodile's, which has been done in Toriko also at this point). Yes, there were people better than…

The term is "swan song year" if some of these lists are anything to go by!

Though in fact God of War 2, Persona 4 and Rogue Galaxy came out even later than that iirc...

Honestly the majority of these complaints could be levelled at the first 200 chapters of One Piece.
Of the dozen or more shounen action series I read, Toriko is one of the more interesting ones at the moment, and definitely one of the few that carves out a niche all of its own. It's a slow burn, but the current and…

I wonder if the new one is what Mew actually evolves into, but I suppose maybe that's just the obvious assumption.

Sounds like you're more upset with the abilities & food set up than anything else. The characters are pretty much comparable (Luffy was just a one dimensional beats-everyone-up guy to begin with, as was Goku - they both changed on-screen as we're seeing with Toriko, but Toriko is about 600 chapters behind OP). Which…

Hardly! It's only 200 chapters or so in! One Piece was barely gathering steam at that point (it had a very slow start, after all), and Hitman Reborn didn't even get into the action stuff until 100 or so chapters in. I don't watch much anime anymore, and certainly not of series I read in manga form already.

I think…

It's awkward to determine what words we should use, because it doesn't fit so neatly into "Related languages - Language - Dialect" groupings like European languages do (which shouldn't come as a surprise, as those words were invented to describe European languages).

But yeah, the written language is so close amongst…