gofile - https://gofile.io/d/JYjIRi
gofile(poll animations) - https://gofile.io/d/sJF9Gr

A combination post, since I didn't feel like making two. First off, Yukari animations. I went a little wild with these, since Persona is ripe with scenarios to be used. I could have easily come up with several more possible settings/situations to be done with Yukari alone, but I held off since I was already going overboard. This is just my first real foray into Persona, so I was extra motivated. Yukari is a good 'entry point', honestly. I was always waffling with who should be first, so once I settled on her it was like taking off the training weights and getting a speed boost so to speak. I will say that these are rendered in 4k, mostly by accident. Anime stuff renders pretty quick, so I didn't notice I was rendering at 4k until about seven renders deep and at that point I was just like 'well, might as well'.

As for what comes next... not sure. I finished these and have been kind of brain dead, so I'm gonna take a small break in terms of regular releases to sort of recharge and figure out what I want to work on next. It won't be more Persona, since I don't want to flood too much of one thing, but I'd like to do more Persona this year. But I've got a lot of things I'd like to do this year that I probably won't be able to get to, so I'm just taking things one thing at a time.

For the poll, the winner is...

Jihl. The results are as follows.

Going into this poll, I expected Ifalna to win. And she almost did, at least in terms of pure number of votes. But she lost by quite the margin when it comes to total points. How the cookie crumbles sometimes. At the very least, Ifalna will be guaranteed an animation from the Loser poll. Since, let's be real here. Gladiolus has no chance. He did get more votes than I expected(5 more than my proposed 8), but unless more people jump aboard the troll train in favor of Kyrie, Lulu, and Ifalna, I can't see him getting enough to get third place. So there's that. The FF Loser poll will probably be in July, though. Since next month will be a DOA poll, then the following will be the FF loser poll.

Anyway, that's about all I've got for today. Poll will also be slightly delayed(just a couple days) since the first poll was delayed, and I need some time to whip up some Jihl stuff, AND rig the three characters for the upcoming poll. It's a bit of a doozy. I'm actually not sure who will win this one, since it's probably gonna be a 1v1 in the end but I'm not sure which of the two will prevail. Though, for all I know the third character will be the dark horse and win. Life is funny like that, sometimes.

This is just a small interim post just to reiterate that the poll post won't be going live tomorrow. If all goes to plan, I'll have it posted by the 3rd, ideally. Just been distracted with working on the next set. It'll be a fairly beefy one, as I was randomly inspired to work on a specific someone. Eagle-eyed viewers(or rather, people who know the character) will be able to tell just based on the silhouette, but I'll go ahead and tell everyone who it is. This will be my first real foray into Persona, starting with the Lovers Arcana of Persona 3. Yukari. Which might come as a surprise, since I've mentioned before that I feel Mitsuru is best Persona girl. And even Aigis is second place in P3 for me. But Yukari is pretty hot, and since I'm not as attached to her, I feel more comfortable doing something with her by comparison. I want Mitsuru's animations to be perfect, which I can't do since nothing is perfect, so I'm just working my way up to her right now.

Still, Yukari will hopefully just be the tip of the iceberg. I've long planned to get around to Persona, and there's a lot of other characters I'd like to get to from 3, as well as the other games, so hopefully this will be the turning point where I can actually get around to doing that. I know I've had a lot of people ask me for them in the past, so hopefully this will be wroth the wait.

Lastly, I'll go ahead and reveal the poll characters, just so you know what to expect. I haven't actually previewed them in recent times, mostly just due to laziness.

This isn't April Fool's. I mentioned last time that I added everyone from the Maiden series to the possible pool for FF, and I wasn't joking. Big G is back, ready to lose. Because let's be real here, he's gonna get eight votes at max, and 80% of them will be ironic/troll votes. I don't even need to include him here, really, but I figured I wouldn't veto him. After all, when I get around to the FF Losers poll, the super loser will just be him, so the worthwhile characters will get an animation instead of one missing out on it. Works out for the best.

gofile - https://gofile.io/d/QVc6Fm

May seem like a rather odd character this time, but I've been meaning to do 21O for a while. Nothing fancy, since I mainly plan for Commander to be the next big one from Nier. Just wanted to do something in the interim for a 'filler' sort of thing. Since I'm still not 100% and can find myself struggling to animate at any random moment due to a shift in mood. 

Also, the first poll of the month may be delayed slightly, since I've been focusing on the next pack since I have actual motivation to work on it at the moment so I'm trying to ride the way until it calms down. Just a heads up.

gofile - https://gofile.io/d/jlAgZJ
Results for the loser's poll are in.

Taki ended up taking the victory by a fairly large margin in terms of points, but she lost the war in terms of popularity by a slim margin. Rather interesting. However, since this is a unique poll to begin with, I'm gonna change things up since I'm a fickle overlord and since I apparently like to give myself extra work. I'm going to do two animations for Taki, and then one animation for both second and third place. They're losers no longer. While last place will be a 'super loser', and when I finally accumulate four super losers, I will have a super loser poll to determine who is the ultimate loser. And if somehow I get four ultimate losers, I will hold a poll for the ultimate losers to determine the supreme overlord of losers. So, look for that I guess.

As for my ramble, it's not related to animations. It's not even that relevant to anything in general, I just wanted to ramble about something in particular. As you know, I have played Dragon's Dogma 2 recently, and while this isn't an actual review of it, I wanted to talk about something near and dear to me. Dragons. Dragons are cool. Like, really cool. They're big flying lizards that breathe fire, live for centuries or millenia, hoard treasure, and are(often) wise, smart and powerful. What's not to like about them? But one thing I've always thought about dragons is that despite being really freaking cool... most dragons in games suck. So many of them are just mooks at the end of the day. They're big lizards that scream and shoot fire. You whack at their feet and then they die. They almost never feel like a real intimidating presence. They're just either 'mid-boss' or 'final boss' fodder, without really feeling like a major threat.

But that's one thing Dragon's Dogma, I feel, does right. I wish both DD1 and DD2 had more of the dragon, because Grigori in the 1st, and the 'Dragon' in the 2nd are some of the coolest dragons I've personally seen. They are what I think of when I think of dragons. They may be the most '1st Edition Dungeons and Dragon Red Dragon' Dragons ever put into a video game, but I love it. The scale of the dragon in DD is massive. One person is about the size of one of the dragon's fingers. Not to mention it's an actual DRAGON. And yes, I am one of those people who will go "Umm... ackshually that's a WYVERN" when I see someone call a "wing-on-the-arms" wyvern a dragon. Skyrim doesn't have dragons. It has wyverns. I know it's semantics and not something most people care about, but dammit I like four legged + two winged dragons more than two leg + two hand/winged wyverns. But just compare Grigori with Alduin from Skyrim. Seeing Grigori standing there with his wings looming over him is way cooler than seeing a lizard bat. Which is what wyverns are.

And speaking of Alduin, he's supposed to be the "World Eater", and he's just the same as all the mook dragons you encounter throughout Skyrim, with just a few 'shouts' you have to use to make him land. Don't even think he's bigger than the rest of the dragons. Whereas DD's dragon is so big, he could pick Alduin up with one of his hands and crush him. When it comes to the coolness of a dragon, size does matter. And most dragons are always just kind of... not that imposing? You fight other creatures the same size, a lot of times. But in DD and DD2, you fight a lot of big creatures. Cyclops, Drakes, Griffins, Chimeras, etc. And you kind of get used to seeing a big creature like that. They're big, you gotta climb around, but you get used to it. Then you encounter the dragon and all of a sudden one of its legs is as big as that Cyclops you had to fight twenty of in the game. It really sells the sense of scale well, and though the fights aren't the most mechanically interesting, or even the most 'cool fight ever' in video games, I genuinely think they're the coolest dragon fights in a game. Flaccid dick from Elden Ring might be more flashy with a teleporting dragon with big lasers and the like, but at the end of the day you're just smacking its butt with a sword like everything else in that game. It doesn't feel like a grand moment of fighting off an otherworldly dragon. I dunno, I just have this image of a dragon in my head, and the closest thing I've seen to that image is Dragon's Dogma.

At this point, the ramble is getting repetitive, so I'll end it there. But I did do an image of the Dragon from DD2 since I like the dragon so much. I must warn you, however, of what you are about to see. Avert thine eyes, pitiable reader, for I doth possess the power to etch immortal images into thy mind. And mine images cannot be undone easily, for they are cursed images containing the most unholy of magicks. If ye wishes to be spared, ye must not venture forth, for here there be dragons... dragging deez nuts all over yo face! Gottem!

>me when I gottem with an elaborate deez nuts joke
Dragon? More like get "DABBED ON"!