Been A Long Time Gone.

Is that the title of a song? I don't think so, but it sounds cool anyways. So I didn't really update this more than once or twice during the summer. Honestly, I really didn't feel like it, and I'm not going to waste your time or mine doing something I didn't really feel like. I'm blogging, not dictating the Declaration of Independence here. But, now I'm back up at school and I actually feel like typing stuff in here.

So, what did I do with my summer? Mainly played Persona 4. It is quite possibly the single best game I have ever played. I was going to put up a massive review, and I will, but I got a bit bored of that and wasn't really in the mood- for some reason I've been on a Fate/Stay Night kick recently, so I'm not really feeling Persona 4 tonight. Other than that, I beat Bioshock (great game), got addicted to NCIS (great show), and generally mucked around on the webbernetz. Not much worth telling. Maybe I'll put up a post on Bioshock later, but probably not.

So, let's go over what's happened in my 3 weekley manga over the Summer. God, last time I talked about Naruto, Pain had just died. So, since then, we've gotten a bit more ninja politics, a bit more Naruto being a Determinator, and more love triangles. Let's start.

Oh, right, Pain revived everyone he killed, even the folks he killed by shoving sharp, pointy objects through them. It totally killed the drama of the past 30 or so chapters, but I'm not as incesed as most, simply because I didn't want Kakashi to get that crappy death scene, not to mention I don't really take this stuff particularly seriously. So afterwards, there's a particularly nice scene where the entire village turns out to thank him for saving their collective asses and they all realize that he's a goddamn hero. And he gets a hug from Sakura, but absolutely nothing on the Naruto/Hinata front. Anyways, after that, Tsunade's in a coma from burning out all her energy trying to keep the villagers and ninja alive (which turned out, as we see, to be ultimately pointless), so Danzou gets Hokage over the objections of a bunch of jounin, who wanted Kakashi. As it turns out, it would seem he used mind control to do so, which was actually a decent plot point. No prizes for guessing just how he pulled off the mind control- he's got a Sharingan! I actually don't mind this plot point very much, as it was revealed that he took it off a dead Uchiha (Uchiha Shisui, that dude Itachi supposedly killed for his Mangekyou). His first action, at the behest of the Raikage, is to declare Sasuke a missing-nin and a criminal, which immediately makes me respect him a lot more and Naruto hate him, as he still thinks Sasuke can be redeemed. He wants to open Sasuke's eyes and end this whole "circle of violence" thing that's going on. It's cute, and I let him have his indulgences because, hey, shonen manga. Danzou heads out to the meeting of the 5 kages along with Gaara!, the Raikage, and the other two. They bring along two companions each, and of course Gaara brings along Kankuro and Temari (woohoo!), but the character designs for all the others are cool. Sasuke follows along, having been told by Madara that Danzou will be there. Sasuke, obviously, wants to kill Danzou. Naruto went with Kakashi and Yamato to try and convince the Raikage not to kill Sasuke, but Raikage's not having any of this "mercy" business. He's going to kill Sasuke because Sasuke's a goddamn criminal, just like a ninja should. There's politics talk at the council of the 5 kages, about creating a joint task force to deal with Akaksuki. Danzou uses some mind control to try and get this force under his command, and overplays his hand as a mist ninja with a stolen Byakugan figures out his game and calls him on it. At that point, Zetsu sells out Sasuke and Raikage goes on a killfest. His crew and Sasuke's crew are currently fighting, and it's a lot of fun. Madara's villain monologuing to Naruto, and there's a whole Cain and Abel thing going on. I don't take it seriously, and the politics bits are relatively well done. Here's hoping Sasuke loses.

Bleach...um....they're still fighting. The Vaizard showed up and Hacchi teamed up with Soi Fon (who incidentally has a bazooka for a bankai- pretty awesome) to bring down Barrangan, but Bleach has been Bleach for so long it's not really worth talking about. They're fighting. Whoo. There's better fights to be had, and I'm only really reading it because it takes all of 2 minutes.

Negima!...eh, I'll talk about it later.