[Kurona]

I definitely would have preferred if you asked permission first, but this is very much something I agree with -- and you probably won't find too much pushback on this forum, considering how much we go on about recent shows having too many toys!

I've been thinking about this recently in two particular ways as well. First off, I was without a laptop for almost two months and hence I missed a LOT of ongoing Toku -- and I love Toku enough to not, like, go on Kissasian with my phone or whatever; I decided to wait till I could actually watch it on a new computer. And when I did finally get it, I was able to watch through episodes 21 through 29 of Kiramager!

... and hooooly SHIT that was a massive deluge of toys all at friggin' once. And I liked these episodes, quite a bit! But it was hard to escape the feeling that the vast majority were writing around having to advertise a billion toys at once. We'd just gotten the Mashin Driller and PB Yodon Changer; but now they got a new train, then the Kiramai Arrow, and now the Oradin mech. And every single one meant that while writers have gotten clever at writing around these; this forced them into a loop of writing the same story every two weeks -- bad guys up the ante, need a new powerup, get a new powerup in part 2. And while I like how some of these went (LOVE the moral of the Kiramai Arrow 2-parter; wasn't expecting it at all), it was difficult to feel like I wasn't watching the same thing over and over; and that if they'd just cut out the second train or something it would have been a lot smoother. It was most noticeable with this stretch of Kiramager, but there's countless other examples recently -- Saber's episodes so far have had like three new toys each, and bless your soul if you were keeping track of Build's fullbottles or Ryusoulger's keys. In many ways modern Ultra is a little more resistant to this; still being on a budget meaning they have only a handful of toys and the auxiliary forms still actually matter. Still have a lot of irrelevant items like Z's lance but it's nowhere near Toei's big two.

The second way is... as stated in that quoted post, my SHF collecting is relegated to a specific few collections of characters that I like. And I have a list of those -- which recently I've been pretty ruthless in cutting down. I have a W/OOO/Fourze display, and I'd like to see that completed; but do I seriously like Accel enough to hunt him down and drop £60 on him when I care way more for Birth and Fourze that I got for far less? Like I'd go for an FRS in an instant, but... no. No. You're cool, dude, but c'mon. I've also been cutting Ultras from the list on the realisation that the two I have coming up I'm more than happy with at the moment and I could always go after the other few at a later date especially with how good SHF Ultra is about re-issues; I've been realising that certain earlier SHFs are probably good enough instead of waiting for renewals; etc. As such my potential spending list has been cut down by a lot and it's very refreshing.

I think just... I dunno. The whole thing gets a bit depressing after a while if I'm honest; and I'll be happy to get to the point where the few new SHFs I want run out and I can just focus on earlier SHFs and FRSes, which are both much cheaper and always readily-available so I don't have to be ready to dump down £50 by next wednesday.