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I just taped a this big guy last night. It mostly went well but there is a chunk missing out of that center that came up during taping. So it definitely happens. It's not to bad though. I haven't flipped him over yet. I wasn't prepared and he's to large to flip easily. I had to go to home depot and buy some larger boards to put him on to prepare to flip him. Once he's flipped it wont be to hard to bring the template back up and replace the missing beads.

The ones you've made look great! I have no idea what the one in the top left is from, but I love it.

A couple of suggestions for melting:

• Do not melt them on the boards, but it seems you've learned that with the tape method. The warped boards are awful for making larger projects, the beads don't line up correctly.
  
• This is one of the best pieces of advice I can think of if you are going to display these somewhere. Decide which direction you are going to want the final product to face. Put the tape on that side, and flip it over. On the side that you aren't going to see, feel free to melt the beads a little more intensely than the other. Don't worry as much if the beads fuse a little more than you'd like. This side isn't going to be seen and will help hold it together much better. Once it's ironed, flip it over, remove the tape and lightly fuse the visible side. When you are taping the visible side, if the beads feel to loose, flip it back over (use tape again if you need) and melt more it on the non-visible side.
  
• If you're going to make a lot of these, I would suggest buying a snowboard waxing iron, like this one. The iron is flat with no point, but its easy to use the corner of if you do need a point. I found this to work a lot better than a normal clothes iron.
  
• If you're melting large ones, iron it in sections. As you iron, the sections will start to cool. As they cool they will start to curl. Put something heavy on those sections (I use my old college textbooks, yay for being useful again!). If the curling is bad, go over it with the iron briefly to warm it up and continue putting heavy things on it. The curling can be especially bad if you have only one side of it ironed. As you iron the other side the it will 'curl' both direction and be more flat.
  
  Three more non-melting tips.
  
  
• To make my templates I take the sprite image into GIMP and I use the color select tool to break the image apart into multiple layers. One color per layer. Then I decide which bead color looks best for each layer. Next I put guidelines on the image to separate it into different 29x29 pixel squares for the different boards. I usually build my beads one board at a time instead of the project as a whole. Then as I'm putting the beads down, I make all the layers invisible. I start with the black layer and put those beads down on the board. Then I make each color visible one at a time and place those beads down.
  
• If you want more boards. I suggest the craft store Jo-Ann. They frequently have perler products on sale for 40% off. And if you download their app you can frequently get coupons for 40-70% off. I've bought most of my boards on the times I've gotten coupons so I haven't spent a lot on them. They have good deals on beads as well but see below for my advice on beads.
  
• Think ahead on the projects you may want to make and buy in bulk from the Perler website. If you buy 6+ bags they are only $2 a bag, but their shipping is a bit pricey. If you buy $60 worth of beads you get free shipping! In addition, if you subscribe to their email list, they will frequently go on holiday/misc sales and you can get an additional 20-30% off. This might be a little overkill but I went ahead and made templates for my next 29 projects to complete my summoner/summon/villain from each game goal while I waited for a sale. I counted all of the beads of each color and the total was around 120,000 beads (NeoBahamut was about 8,800 beads). Buying in bulk this way I spent about $1.50 a bag (though I did buy a couple of the 6000 bead black bags from Jo-Ann with coupons).
  
  Wow. that ended up being a wall of text. I did not intend for that, but I just kept writing. Hopefully it's all useful information for you. If not, sorry for the ramble.
  
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I play JP version using my Sero 8 Pro, you can get one refurbished for $60 with free shipping and occasionally on sale for $50. It lags. But the game only runs twice as smoothly on my Samsung Galaxy S5! (It plays other games like Puzzle and Dragons quite well) Plus the Sero runs stock android, has a micro SD slot so it can also be used for books and movies and netflix and whatever. The screen is excellent. I think the Sero 8 Pro is built out of parts from ~2012 nexus.

https://www.amazon.com/Tablet-Touchscreen-Quad-Core-Android-KitKat/dp/B00SK97B28/

This article compares it to the $50 kindle fire:

http://betanews.com/2015/11/18/hisense-sero-8-pro-affordable-android-tablet-fantastic-screen-review/

My condolences.

Did you wind up paying [$19.99 + free shipping] (https://www.amazon.com/Square-Enix-Variant-Fantasy-Limited-Lanyard/dp/B012ED9KZ6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1466041307&sr=8-1&keywords=lanyard+final+fantasy) or $11.48 + $3.99 shipping?

But thanks for answering my question about whether the lanyard's worth it. Ugh, it's not as nice as it looks on the SE promo offer ad.

Weird it's so expensive. I bought the physical copy from Amazon.jp (Link: http://www.amazon.co.jp/Heavensward-FANTASY-Original-Soundtrack%E3%80%90%E6%98%A0%E5%83%8F%E4%BB%98%E3%82%B5%E3%83%B3%E3%83%88%E3%83%A9-Blu-ray/dp/B018RSCA6I/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1456801171&sr=8-1&keywords=Heavensward ) and it only costs USD 37 plus about 10 for shipping.

I would highly recommend getting the physical copy btw. One good thing about ALL the FFXIV OST's released nowadays is that they will include a full DRM-less MP3 download of all the tracks in the album that you can copy to your PC/Phone to listen to.

First Soundtrack

Second Soundtrack

Third Soundtrack

Also, the individual songs of the second soundtrack are available digitally on Amazon for 99 cents a song. Link

As a matter of fact, I did! How did you know?!

https://www.amazon.com/Final-Fantasy-Ultimania-Archive-3/dp/1506708013

if anyone is looking for it

I think you need to check out this book

https://www.amazon.com/Punctuation-Takes-Vacation-Robin-Pulver/dp/0823418200/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1473775170&sr=8-1&keywords=punctuation+takes+a+vacation

Official Site
Preorder now from:
CD Japan
Amazon

if you have amazon prime, you get 20% off preorders and newly released games.

I bought this ASUS ZenPad for Christmas and it runs FFRK pretty well. Crashes occasionally (between menus usually) but not bad enough to worry about.

It's $23 on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/FANTASY-Record-Keeper-Original-Soundtrack/dp/B075N31XBD


Not great since it's $16 on iTunes:

https://itunes.apple.com/album/final-fantasy-record-keeper-original-soundtrack-vol-2/id1280882032