 Hello everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and it's time for a follow-up review. So, this is the Ascend Messenger bag. I do have a full review of this on the channel. If you haven't seen it, I will try to link it in the description. However, this is not a review of the bag itself or to go through the features and stuff. Like I said, I have that video and I'll link it down below. This is a follow-up. I've had this bag for about four years. I bought it in 2018 and sometimes it's good to just kind of do a follow-up and check in on things. So, barring the one issue that I am gonna talk about in a minute. Overall, I wanna say I like the bag. I don't know if you're gonna be able to tell, but this thing still basically looks brand new. There's not really a lot of wear. I got some slight fraying up here on the handle. I don't even know if you were able to see that. And other than that, this thing still looks pretty good. And I used it pretty hard for about two-ish of those years. In there it got semi-retired. See, the bottom is still even pretty good. However, this gets mediocre, moderate use these days, not necessarily like everyday use like it used to for a while. So, it's still a great bag. I still love it. I would still recommend it. There is one thing though that happened to me. And the only reason I bring this up is because it happened twice. What happened is the buckle on, this thing has two buckles to connect to the bag. So I don't know if you were able to see this here, but here is the buckle. And that connects to the bag. Now the cool thing about this buckle is that you can completely detach it and remove it from the bag. Like, oh this is gonna be a pain to get back in later, isn't it? So, okay. So it easily clips on and off and removes. So that's what the buckle looks like when it works. Well, this has happened to me two times now. It was about a year ago, it hadn't happened, and then it just happened again yesterday. That buckle snapped. So as you can see here, that's where it broke. So this is the bottom piece, this is the top piece. Now the problem is of course, when that buckle snaps, you lose your entire shoulder strap. And now the only thing you'll have to carry the bag by is this handle. And if you don't really want to do that, well, you're kind of in trouble. And if you were out on a trip or you were somewhere else and that buckle snaps, well dang it, now you lose your shoulder strap. Now, I will say, one, it's pretty fixable, okay? So what I did with that buckle snap is I just ran a piece of paracord through the bag. I knotted it, figure eight knotted it, and then ran that paracord through the strap. So it's readily repairable. I mean even in the field, right? Like, if you're on a business trip or whatever and it snaps, if you can get some shoelace at a hardware store or paracord or whatever, like you can fix it and you can keep going. And it really, you know, if you have black on black, it really doesn't damage the look too much. So I don't think it's the biggest issue in that regard. It's annoying. I was very annoyed yesterday cause it just snaps, right? It's not like any give or bending, it just straight snaps and it's totally destroyed. And I wouldn't even bring it up except for it happened the last year in February and now it's February again this year and one year apart. Now to be fair, it might not be the same buckle that broke, right? Last time it could have been the one on this side that broke and now this time it's just the one on this side. I don't remember which side broke. So that is, you know, a point to take into consideration that could have just been the original buckle from four years ago. And you know, eventually stuff breaks and wears out and whatever. However, I just want to mention it because it's a phenomenal bag otherwise. Love the bag, disappointed in how the buckle works. And I will say the other thing, I emailed First Tactical last year and asked them to replace the buckle because hey, you know, it just broke and they replaced it, they sent me out a new one. I just emailed them again this morning. I'm sure they're gonna send me out a new one again. So I have high confidence in them as a company and standing by their product. But I think probably for me going forward, I'm probably just gonna paracord these so that I don't have that issue again, right? Because again, it's super annoying when you're using the bag, you pick it up and it snaps and then it plummets to the earth and you're like, well, what just happened here? So that is the only kind of follow-up issue I would really note about this bag. Again, other than that, construction, durability, finish, holdup, all that stuff, done phenomenal. Looks like I said, still pretty much brand new and this is four years old. Right now, actually, I just checked this morning and these are actually on sale on First Hackville's website. They usually go for 100 bucks. They're going for 75 bucks right now. If you are at all interested in having a briefcase messenger bag type thing, I would highly, highly recommend you check this one out. I hope that's helpful. Do brave deeds and endure.