I mentioned that S2 for Code Geass went off the deep end at around the halfway mark with Lelouch's brother (whose name I can't remember right now) somehow persuading the Black Knights (an organisation that Lelouch basically built from the ground up under the guise of Zero) into betraying Lelouch/Zero by telling them about his geass (and because Ougi, one of the founding members wants to fuck Viletta Nu) and this is where it goes off the deep end because douchebag brother rocks up to the organisation with these claims but no proof any self respecting organisation would just laugh in his face and tell him to fuck off no matter how persuasive he is. That one interaction requires a lot of fairly intelligent people to become drooling idiots in fact it's so out of character for them that it took me out of the story.

So here's out how I'd fix it and it goes all the way back to the first and second episodes of  S2 where the remnants of the Black Knights that escaped after the failed insurrection at the end of S1 are going to get Lelouch back. This group includes Kallen and one of Todo's subordinate and they know that Lelouch and Zero are the same person, obviously everyone bar C.C. and Kallen get killed but in my rewrite I'd have Minami (Todo's man, at least that's what I think his name is) and a small group of the rescuers survive along with Kallen and C.C. this would result in Lelouch having a small group of diehard loyalists within his own organisation and on top of that with Minami being in that group he can bring Todo and his three other subordinates into it as well. So after this the next big part is when Jeremiah joins, Jeremiah has the ability to cancel out Geass and at this point I'd have Lelouch tell his loyalists about Geass, reveal that out of all of them only Kallen was Geassed and then have Jeramiah cancel out any Geass that are present if the group still has reservations, THERE WAS NO NEED to hide Jeramiah's Geass cancelling ability in the main show and Zero could have gotten away with telling the Black Knights that there's supernatural bullshit out there rather than some dude they had literally been fighting against a few months prior. Finally the betrayal, rather than having the brother be just that persuasive I'd actually have V.V. give him his own geass which makes him very persuasive (or make it them same as Lelouch's) and cause the Black Knights to fracture with Lelouch's loyalists still staying loyal to them and a group, led by Ougi, going off with the brother after that I'd have S2 continue as is with a decisive showdown between Lelouch and his brother and have them both die (basically killing each other) but not before Lelouch has made his plans for Suzaku to take over as Zero and Lelouch's loyalists taking care of Nunnally resulting in a happy ending.

As you can see my attempted rewrite attempts to get rid of the idiot moments within S2 and explain why Lelouch's brother is so persuasive. It also tried to avoid coincidences and other wtf scenarios whilst keeping the rest of the story mostly intact, I'd probably get rid of Lelouch's mother's miraculous resurrection and have his brother kill the emperor rather than Lelouch

but other than that one moment of mental retardation from the Black Knights S2 is pretty decent. 

So I ended up buying Monster Hunter Stories 2, I've completed its main story and thought I'd give my thoughts on it in this entry as well.

First and foremost this is really a kids game in a similar vein to pokemon and the story (as well as the characters) reflect that. However that doesn't stop it from being a fairly enjoyable experience for me as it gets rid of my main complaint about the Monster Hunter games: it's combat. what do I mean by that? Well Stories is a turn based JRPG creature collector and by making it turn based rather than an action RPG I don't have to deal with the clunky, slow combat which tuned me off of World and Rise (I played the demo for Rise) so I could actually play this one to (near) completion. Outside of the combat it's a creature collector, however you don't catch the monsters with "monster balls" or anything similar you actually need to go into mosnters dens and steal eggs to hatch (I saw a humourous fan tag line of "Gotta hatch 'em all" parodying pokemon's famous tagline) in order to add to your party, you also have three tiers of egg; normal, rare and super rare so obviously rare monsters are more powerful than normal ones and super rare monsters are more powerful than rare ones but in my playthough it didn't really seem to matter. As for the story it's similar to the bog standard pokemon story where your character is a rookie rider (what people who have bonded with monsters are called, think of them as effectively being pokemon trainers) and you go on an adventure to stop the world from ending after meeting a mysterious girl with a Rathalos egg. It's effectively a coming of age story with the threat of world destruction on the side, similar to the more recent pokemon games, but done far more competently than the recent pokemon games. You also fight alongside your monster rather than commanding them from the sidelines and the combat operates on a rock-paper-scissors mechanics where you need to choose the correct kind of attack (they're separated into power, technical and speed attacks, power attacks beat technical attacks which beat speed attacks which beat power attacks) in order to win head to heads, this requires you to pay attention to what the opponent is targeting so there is an element of tactics to it.

As far as the graphics go, they're pretty decent and the female characters at least look like women and not just skinny men. As for the music, I found it largely forgettable it's still used much better than in Western games but still not as good as in other Japanese games I've played (but then again Capcom has never really been good with the music side of things in their games imo) I did have a few weird glitches but nothing major, like a random FPS drop causing the characters to talk like they were in a badly dubbed martial arts movie (you know, where the english VA speaks and then the character's lips move) which while amusing isn't anything game breaking. I've seen reports that there's a bug involving going into online with a specific skin tone but I've not bothered with the online component so not encountered anything like that. Also the Rathalos and Rathians (big wyverns, so lizards) enter into uncanny valley due to them having visible ears.

So overall I enjoyed it and if I were to have score it the game would get a good 8/10 from me. It manages to scratch that itch that modern pokemon games have been failing to scratch.