Dates are inexact for precisely when I finished a certain thing or choose to log it. I am not always in the mood to jot down my thoughts immediately after, so the dates are simply marking when I logged these opinions.
Here on Tumblr. Currently ongoing.
Jan. 2, 2025. replay because i wanted to try out the perfect works build, and ahhh, yeah…it's very, very solid. even just having cultural and religious references translated more accurately is lovely to see, but the parts of the script that have been tweaked for translation corrections or clarity are soooooo great to have. fully rec it to anyone replaying gears or hitting it up for the first time.
i've been wanting to do a full series replay/play (i haven't played the blade games terribly extensively. my copy of xb3 has sat there untouched lmao), so it was nice to finally get going on that. gonna reread perfect works next.
Jan. 14, 2025. the amount of times i repeated "oh, you shouldn't have!" in delighted surprise to this game as it pulled out more and more cannibalism and weird fuckiness around the human bacon mummy…
really enjoyed it.
Jan. 19, 2025. the cover art caught my eye when i was scrolling through older fan translated games, and what a lovely little find! very silly and cute idol adventure game at just the right length.
April 24, 2025. rewatched all three last weekend with my baby sibling. they had good taste and also came out really vibing with hanekawa/araragi and just overall digging the films. they're sooooooo fucking good.
May 11, 2025. or, german skyrim.
yeah….yeah…….this is one of those things where you experience it at the exact right time in your life and it has all the impact of an 18 wheeler plowing you over and truck-kun-ing you into some kind of epiphany. there's literally so much i could say about enderal. that general theme of hope in fatalism just……i really can't express how hard that hit for me at present.
i've never cared about skyrim, but i've never been so happy that it does exist so that enderal could come into being.
i love you, german skyrim. thanks for low-key changing my life a bit.
May 25, 2025. nothing short of fucking excellent. as a huge lifelong jrpg fan, all those influences and the love for those influences felt clear as day. i literally just finished and bawled my eyes out. i'm not sure if the ending i picked will be the popular one or not, but it felt right to me. so much fun. i have a few nitpicks, but i overall loved the fuck out of this and it feels like the people who made it also loved the fuck out of it.
also jesus christ is maelle broken
July 16, 2025. a rewatch so i could force xofi to watch one of my favorite comedies. there's always money in the banana stand, and there's always me losing my mind over how buster reacts to the roomba being hungry.
Nov. 17, 2025. i fell behind on logging stuff again. whoops.
this is a show that i always was a little curious about because p.a. works has a shocking hit rate for me–and the horse girl anime lives up to the legacy i made up for them! it's a bit ponderous in its narrative structure, but it's also very charming and strikes the right tone for a silly but earnest premise like this.
the most confusing part for me is that i ended up DEEP into the divorced-but-never-even-married energy trainer guy (of the worst haircut i've ever seen) and hana (the other team's trainer) had. like, what the fuck even is that. i need them to get married and divorced like five times over.
special week is my special friend and special girl, and i love her and her two moms!!!
Nov. 17, 2025. so. i dropped it (for now??? i might come back??) after completing the first hundred days and getting into a proper second route. i put over thirty hours into it and gave it a good shake, imo.
i also think it might be umineko 2.0 for me. extremely long, fanbase hyping it to death, and uhhhhhh me giving it a shot but not liking it enough to put over a hundred hours into it. ._.
amemiya is my favorite. her and the twins are the best characters. aotsuki is also a very respectable komaeda type.
Nov. 17, 2025. just fucking excellent. from the visual style to the story to the characters to the structure to the research (the amount of times i was going like !!!!! seeing random nuggets of history i knew), it's just wonderful. you can tell it was a passion project.
(also very funny that my german-speaking friend was impressed by how good the german is.)
Nov. 17, 2025. i love honse. :)
an equally fun follow up season with end credits that pandered to my wonder grass/special week shipping ass. i am a little sad p.a. works wasn't fully on the job for this season. i felt like it used a lot more 3d and wasn't nearly as smart about said usage as s1. but still very fun, and god…mcqueen was doing her mcfucking best to get out of being golshi's designated wife. anyone but her grandson pls.
Nov. 17, 2025. the translation is REALLY trying my patience at this point, but i still very much like xie lian and hua cheng. they're an extremely enjoyable couple that elevates the story for me.
Nov. 17, 2025. a rewatch for me, but new for amanda! i feel a lot better about the end of s3 at this point. i still have some qualms, but what i like outweighs it. soooo excited for s4.
Nov. 17, 2025. an absolutely delightful bl manga rec from my friend!
Nov. 17, 2025. i'm more partial to s1 because it had a much stronger plot for rebecca, but ted himself had a crazy strong personal arc in this season. his shit was really fucking good. i also adored keeley/roy and sam/rebecca, so i'm not going to remotely fucking bother with s3 because uhHHHHHH yeah.
also that coach beard episode was oddly disco elysium-esque???
Nov. 17, 2025. love the premise. did not love the game. there's just not enough meat in the characters or story or in how they're presented to keep me going between loops. i gave it about 40+ days, but it just isn't working for me.
Nov. 17, 2025. the usual yearly rewatch. always excellent.
Nov. 17, 2025. i replayed it for amanda and then like…multiple other friends joined in. fucking excellent still. i was even well behaved and normal during it!!! i did not get weird when the cannibalism started getting cannibalism.
Nov. 17, 2025. yeah, so i downloaded a rom out of curiosity and found it played decently on an emulator. figured i would play until i got bored in a few hours like i did with legends arceus.
it is uhhhh….kind of my third favorite pokemon game now after pmd 2 and black & white. i have serious issues with it and wouldn't rec getting it for full price on either switch console, but i still had a blast. the characters are charming and well incorporated. the real-time battling works shockingly well, and the game keeps a good pace between activities. modern pokemon games have not hit for me like i hoped they would until i played this.
the best way i heard it described was by a youtuber as 9/10 fun in a 6/10 package.
Nov. 17, 2025. i think………..del toro monsterfucker movies and i just aren't made to be. i was very eh on shape of water (and honestly haven't quite forgiven it for the cat death jumpscare when i saw it in theaters). i think i liked this slightly more than that at least in the monster end? the film really picks up in interest for me when you hit the monster telling his story. there's a lot more i could say, but it genuinely didn't inspire too passionate of a reaction from me. certainly worth a watch, but also not my favorite del toro film.
Nov. 19, 2025. very pleasantly surprised by how well most of the jun wu stuff has worked for me! i'm very ready to move onto scum villain at this point, but i still love grandpa and how teasing hc can be. they're very cute.
Nov. 19, 2025. this is what happens when i see an out of context but amusing clip from a bad hentai dub. i spend an hour watching it all because i need to understand the grandpa deathfuck in said clip. it was basically what you would expect (soooo low budget), but the dub made me lose it multiple times...and somehow it had a legit plot twist in the end??? one that i think works and elevated the material?
baffling.
Here on Tumblr.
Feb. 5, 2024. second run that started in 2023, but i only switched into high gear at the end of that year. this was planned to be an azata playthrough and a secret ending one. and i succeeded, hooray! \^o^/ otherewise, a lot of the choices i made (lizard vs. wenduag, etc.) were relatively similar to my first playthrough on aeon, and i'm really glad i did this. this time i was familiar with the world and could focus on the character details, and i appreciated everything even more. i also did almost every romance because i didn't forget to toggle no jealousy on toybox! the only ones i haven't seen now are sosiel's (it felt wrong doing his on a female character…) and wenduag's. i really enjoyed them all.
special mention to camellia as i finally got to see her full companion questline. (she dips out early into act 5 if you're aeon. ;_;) i already liked her, but the swerves in that final quest were wild. she's absolutely fascinating, and her romance is very unique. even if i didn't like her, i'd be giving props to owlcat for trying something different with her. she's great.
azata was sooo fun to do after aeon! i'm especially glad i went in this order because mephistopheles politely asks to hang out on aeon but disguises himself and kidnaps my baby dragon : ((( on azata. it was a fun dichotomy. aivu is so cute…and the little side gang of free crusaders you get is also adorable!! azata was a delight.
the secret ending was also so convoluted to get that omg…i pity anyone who does it without following a guide (and then cheating via toybox to spawn in the necessary item you may have obliviously sold…..ha…..), but it's sort of delightful and earned when you go through all that dialogue with areelu at the end and these calculations, and she's just like well hot damn. i wish the ending slides took into consideration whether or not ascension happened and for who, but eh, i'm not that salty over it where it's a just one of a lot of variables.
i love wotr. ❤️ i can't wait for my third playthrough.
Feb. 5, 2024. just gonna copy my backloggd review because kingmaker is so hard to talk about:
judging kingmaker is so terribly difficult for me. i can see the charm and earnestness through the bars of the jank jail it's thrown me in. but i utterly despise its structure and what an awful blow its pacing takes from that. the amount of time i spent just hitting "skip day" was frankly ridiculous. i wish it didn't impact my enjoyment of the game as much as it did, but god, there were moments i hated the game.
i definitely don't hate it! but its particular flaws are ones i really struggle with. this is an insanely scrappy first attempt at a crpg this huge, and nothing in me could ever hate that.
the ways wrath of the righteous improved on the structure and storytelling is really impressive to me now that i've played both. no regrets in playing kingmaker, but hooo boy, if i replay, i'll be much less reluctant to use various mod features.
Feb. 5, 2024. i don't really "play" a lot of these crpgs because i dislike real-time combat systems (no!! i was not good at command & conquer whenever i played it on my grandfather's computer!), so i stick them on the easiest difficulty possible and further facilitate my laziness with mods. i don't know what a thac0 is, and i'm scared to learn.
but bg1 is just…cute? is that the right word? looking at it from over twenty years later and as someone whose first real western rpg was dragon age: origins, i'm just so damned charmed. there's too many damn possible companions, and most have a few lines of dialogue then go silent forever before i park them in daycare (a nice grassy spot in front of the friendly arm). the story guides you into peeling back the layers on the scheme fueling the iron crisis after a bit of an awkward "damn, your foster dad is dead. uhhh, go to nashkel? jaheira and khalid are gonna go there, and these two evil weirdos also want to go there for a reason that is never explained and i am SO bothered by that," but it works. it's a bit of a tentative steering you towards the dm's plot that i think bioware were smart to strengthen. you just…cannot have a strong and compelling central plot and not set up some barriers in a video game. a game cannot adapt like a human dm. having some definition for the player character and rails on the story is necessary for the medium if you want to tell a good story, imo. (yes, i am kind of bothered that larian leaned in the opposite direction. tav has shit all. durge is good but imo should have been the only possible player character. the origin characters get their own questlines, and the unique touches to each aren't really worth it.)
ALSO YES I AM SALTY NOW THAT I KNOW SAREVOK'S CHARACTER AT ALL BECAUSE HIS WHOLE PLAN WAS TO ASCEND HIMSELF. HE DID NOT WANT TO SERVE DADDY BHAAL. I DON'T EVEN NEED THRONE OF BHAAL TO KNOW THAT THAT GUY IN THE BHAALIST SEWER COURT IS NOT SAREVOK. i straight up can't take any analysis of him or ones of other characters that rely on him at all seriously. i like orin!! but holy shit did they hinge her existence on the most ooc sarevok.
anyway, i found 8 corpses in the sewer walls and kept them in my inventory for the rest of the game. game of the year. ✌️
March 9, 2024. my friend alex wanted to watch it because he said it looked potentially funny bad. nic cage never speaking and his commitment to his breaktime was delightful. the unironic use of freebird at the end had me losing it.
March 17, 2024. that fucking slapped to see in theaters. shout out to my fellow weebs in the audience. everyone was SO quiet during the tense, silent moments of eoe. extra shout to the person behind me who stifled a laugh when the subs had misato saying nothing personal because yeah…heh, nothing personnel, shinji-kun.
March 23, 2024. a rewatch with amanda! it was just as excellent and good and gorgeous and wonderful as the first time. burial mound of arms still fucking slaps.
April 7, 2024. i was playing ts2 with ffvii sims while i waited to play rebirth, but the game crashed right after i saved (and i hadn't saved in a while), so my lizard-eyed demon toddler that was mpreg birthed by sephiroth (with tifa as the father ofc) was lost forever. :( i was too heartbroken to pick ts2 back up again and replay it all, so i was like hey, wonder how ts4 is these days since the last time i played it was…probably around when get to work dropped?
it's still not very good imo. 🫠cas is still really intuitive and fun to use, but i hate that the game opens you on cas before you can see a neighborhood. sometimes i like to build a house first or populate a new neighborhood i built or even play a premade household! i don't like it even if ts4's cas is nice.
build mode seemed flexible when i toyed with it, but i don't have the interest to really put more effort into it right now. buy mode was similarly nice. i guess they're the same mode in ts4?
live mode was…expectedly disappointing. i wanted to slog through to get to see what actual family life looks like with all the additions to the game, but i don't like the core gameplay enough. i never liked the emotion system, and it still feels shallow to me. ts4 is very good at throwing shit at you and giving you a lot of options, but not much feels properly integrated with the base game to me. it's features feel awkwardly grafted on. i don't care how deep and detailed a single mechanic might be if it doesn't tie back to the actual life sim core.
and god, the fucking cell phone. i'm fine with it, but the pop ups from it were aggravating. in past sims games, the phone would ring and shake and only give a pop up until your sim picked it up. you get an immediate pop up in ts4. i hate it. fucking salim called three times in a single hour and then came over to stand in front of my sim's apartment door. ts4 is obnoxious in certain ways.
anywho, despite wanting to like it and make use of its big modding scene, i dislike the core enough to put off. making my own neighborhood to build a story around it and its sims is either impossible or stupidly annoying to do in ts4. it's probably my least favorite mainline sims game.
May 3, 2024. feel like this is gonna be a real minority opinion, but dai feels shockingly good post-bg3. this was a bizarro replay spurred on by the ps5 i am borrowing from a friend to play rebirth getting stuck in the mail. it feels insane to me that all the character arcs and romances in dai are solid and complete?? the game was made under horrific crunch, but fuck if the character charm isn't there like in dao and da2. cass is so goddamn pookie, and sera is my faaaaaave, and i love bitter unhinged leliana trying to not go full merciless spymaster, and josie my darling, and viv my love my love my love. really fucking ace women in dai. and the da2 refs… PLEASE LET VARRIC GO HOME AND STAY THERE, BIOWARE!!! he's like a mother to me, and varric being pretty unrepentent about lying about where hawke was to cass because hawke's been through enough…!!!! (also varric dodging around talking about anders and being understandably bitter, but when hawke quotes varric, he calls anders "blondie"….)
trespasser still slaps so goddamn hard. that ost! all the character bits are so cute and charming and the story is such a great conclusion compared to the wet fart of corphy.
i'm unfortunately excited for dreadwolf now. :(
(but lmaoooooo seriously how do cullen and josie have full character arcs AND romances while being non-party members while bg3 has wyll like That. actually comical.)
May 25, 2024. ooooh, i hate that this dampened my ending experience, but i'm so disappointed that they changed the final line!! i don't care if it's more of a literal translation and could be relevant to rebirth!! "this sky…i don't like it" is so much clunkier than the original "the steel sky. i miss it." i loved that original line! it was wonderfully evocative and nailed the ending for me! maybe i'll be eating crow come finishing rebirth, but for now, i'm so disappointed. :(
but setting that aside, ahhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHAT A FANTASTIC REPLAY!!!! viir just hits so good!!! this time i knew it wasn't a straight remake and loved it from the start. i love how they extrapolate on the cast and the locations! the only new section in viir that ever got close to feeling like padding to me was hojo's jenova dungeon, but even that had the fun of cloud and barret whaling on a locked door because they are a one brain celled organism together. i love them. the cast is soooo good. i loooooove the combat; it's just a perfect fusion of real time and turn based.
i never want to get off mr. nomura's wild ride, and i trust him with my life currently. i love viir so much for not being a straight, boring remake and going ham on the kh-esque meta nonsense!!!
and now i am onto the yuffie dlc!!! i've never played it before and am so excited!!
May 26, 2024. YUFFIE IS….SO STUPIDLY FUN TO PLAY AS??? it took me a bit to get used to her, but i think she's beaten out tifa for the most fun to play for me. and god, her writing and performance and animations were absolute perfection. teenage fantasy japanese girl who rolls into capitalism city so she can gollum over a shiny and fight jockstrap face goth. she's the perfect level of annoying and earnest cringe. i love her.
i completely forgot that deepground showed up lmao. dirge of cerberus has always been….kind of a weird game, but it's also always been extremely funny to me. nero's design is not the best, but by god, he has useless belts by the dozen and a jockstrap on his face!! sonon was likable, but the game leaned too hard into flashbacks for his death to really hit better for me. i liked the scenes of tifa and barret returning to sector 7 without cloud and being able to talk to jessie and wedge and get told to buzz off. wedge was comforting one of his cats because the others were absent. ;_; MISS YOUR THIRSTY ASS, JESSIE. MISS YOUR SWEET PERSONALITY AND CAT LOVING, WEDGE.
I SOMEHOW WAS NEVER SPOILED ON THERE BEING A ZACK SCENE??? i wasn't able to play intermission back when it dropped because i played viir on the ps4, so i was fine with picking up spoilers here and there. (i only became an insane purist about spoilers for rebirth lmao.) i heard about everything BUT ZACK??? HE GETS TO THE CHURCH. HE GOES IN. NO AERITH. I'M EATING MY HANDS.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR WILD RIDE, MR. NOMURA!!! let's go full kingdom hearts (the end of remake is sooooo end of kh2!!!) and compilation!!! IM SO EXCITED TO PLAY REBIRTH NOW AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
June 8, 2024. i guess i am playing this for now. ._.
this happened because i was gawking at the disasterous launch it had and that turned into a morbid fascination and then i tried it–and oh. it was surprisingly fun. i bounced off genshin early because after climbing that big statue in the first world area's city, i realized i was extremely bored and uninstalled the game. wuwa is…not having me bounce off? the exploration and battle system feel really fucking good to me. the movement for exploration is dynamic and speedy with wall running being such a delight. the combat is equally speedy and swapping between characters so that i can power up best girl danjin is really fun.
the story is…a mixed bag. what tipped my morbid fascination over into downloading the game was seeing the cbt1 version of the crownless fight versus the cbt2/release one. cbt1 was so much better, and i kind of weep for the good bits of cbt1 that were undoubtedly lost in kuro gutting the story. it definitely picks up towards the end in acts v and vi, but the beginning is so fucking rough. i was barely engaged until the villain who now has normal pants but once had a crotch zipper that made it look like he was rocking insane camel toe showed up and was entertainingly off his shits.
i'm likely to stick with the game until the next patch or whatever because jinhsi yesssss, but i don't really like gacha that are demanding of my time and i'm already feeling my interest wane now that i've finished the main story for now.
danjin best girl. danjin best combat. danjin best. maybe one day she will be in the story.
July 7, 2024. the leaks for ep 4 about aemond and aegon were true, so i'm just dumping the show before i even bother watching it. this season has been atrocious in terms of writing the greens, and alicent is my main motivation to watch, but she feels like a very different character compared to where she was left in s1. throw in some fucking moronic changes to the story (just no guards patrolling or on duty outside of jaehaerys' room!!! and now alicent feels responsible for her grandson's death for some fucking reason instead of b&c taking advantage of how regular her interactions with helaena and her kids were) and even dumber additions (septa rhaenyra………….christ alive……………………).
i'm done. i still love all of the greens, but i just have the s1 show canon mashed together with the book canon in my head. i love tom's aegon and phia's helaena, but the writing is not worth it. i'll enjoy gifs and making up a better story in my head.
i can't believe how steep the drop off has been lmao.
Aug. 16, 2024. i keep forgetting to do this… 💦💦💦
a rewatch that i meant to keep rolling into the other two films…but then i had a headache and it didn't happen that weekend. still excellent beyond excellent. hanekawa, my beloved. hanekawa/araragi, my train wreck ship beloved.
Aug. 16, 2024. another rewatch. a very dear and personal show to me. it still hits like a truck and is cathartic like very few things are. nothing understands anxiety for me like nhk.
Aug. 16, 2024. yet another rewatch.
THE ANIME OF ALL TIME!! extremely funny and extremely hype. nothing else has ever gotten me so emotional and invested in a girl giving herself a wedgie so hard it breaks her bikini bottom and rubbing her nipple to the point of it being erect so she can win this match of THE BEST SPORT KEIJO and her dad is watching and finally understanding her love for the sport. it's really just a delight.
Aug. 30, 2024. i go head empty for anything weird horror mystery scifi/fantasy. more so for anime, but i'll eat up live action, too. i can't in any way give a sane judgement on those types of shows because the bias appeal is too real. i liked from, though! it was fun. :) i'll be looking forward to s3.
Aug. 30, 2024. a replay!!! it actually plays pretty well on my laptop finally! i made xofi watch this playthrough so he can understand why sop is Good. there was much preemptive crying and general gushing over my beloved jack garland.
Aug. 30, 2024. i don't think it is at all bad (that was a strong first episode), but grim dystopian scifi doesn't tend to spark joy for me, so i don't feel like pushing through for a technically good show. i also looked up the conclusion to the source material, and eh…yeah, i just don't think it will spark joy.
Aug. 30, 2024. just let the head go empty, and i enjoyed it well enough. nice and solid and appeals well to my ravenous hunger for weird horror scifi/fantasy mystery series, especially ones set in enclosed locations in some way.
Sept. 3, 2024. not bothering with s2 since s1 was meant as a complete story. solidly enjoyable! i saw m night shymalan's name attached and got the solid shlock-ish horror i would hope for.
Sept. 5, 2024. really just increasingly lost me with how hard the handcam footage was to follow. i was totally out by the time it went generic horror exorcism. meh.
Sept. 15, 2024. ccs always has some charm even when not at its best, so clear card was never a slog…but it really feels like it could have been shorter to me. it's longer than the original manga! i like the new characters and seeing the returning cast (sakura and syaoran getting embarrassed interacting is precious, and since tsubasa was my first clamp manga, it always feels like getting to see the baby versions of my beloveds), but yeah…it's mostly just pleasant. ccs isn't my favorite clamp manga, so maybe i'd have a stronger judgement on clear card if it was. as is, it was cute enough with the usually lovely art from clamp.
now to cope and hope clamp will pick drug & drop back up…
Sept. 18, 2024. for years, this was the show with the really cool opening that i saw get passed around and really wanted to watch because wow cool opening!! i never expected that:
1. the second op would somehow be even better than the banger first
2. oh my god is this is such a frustrating show
it has all the ingredients to be brilliant. an intriguing original story, gorgeous animation, wonderful designs for both human and monster characters, clear thought put into its themes–even the execution is often perfect! but i think xam'd waited until far too late to finally give what feels like really vital exposition that contextualizes the major conflict, and that really hurts it. i spent more of the series than i would have liked wondering if i was supposed to be understanding more than i did lmao. in 2024 where an original show getting two cours feels like a miracle in anime, it feels beyond indulgent to say "i think xam'd really wanted to be 40-50 episodes long," but like…i think that would have done wonders for building the world in greater detail and fleshing out the characters.
you could have been amazing, xam'd!! it is soooo frustrating, but i still do like xam'd. studio bones was doing some really interesting shit between 2002-2010.
Nov. 12, 2024. a (temporary???) post-mortem since, while i did play more, i uninstalled it finally.
i've tried really hard to be fair to it, and i agree that it's a solid game on its own, but it's a hollow and disappointing dragon age sequel. i'm disappointed in a way that i wasn't even with inquistion where we made the jump from DEEPLY BELOVED FLAWED DA2. i'm just sort of sad about it. the pretty hair psychics keep me distracted, but i'm still just sad.
i'm stopping short of the weisshaupt stuff, which i've heard is pretty great, but playing the game feels like an obligation, and like…yeah. i'd rather go replay tokimemo gs3. ._.
Jan. 2, 2025. so, uh, my general way of finding new bl manga to read is to just scroll until i see art i like. it is not a very scientific way of ascertaining quality. this was an instance of me going "nice art" and reading blind. it uh……………..uh………………………….the main romance is between a guy who sexually abused a child while he was in high school and the now adult child coming back to town…and then assaulting molester guy and then it somehow turns into a blushy blushy requited romance ??? i was kind of thrown because you start with a serious depiction of csa and then just segue into a much more typical romance. it was bizarre.
Jan. 2, 2025. really interesting little manga about a scientist and his zombie guy being in love. the ending was ;_;. lovely art.
Jan. 2, 2025. never clicked for me. the humor got repetitive, and the cast felt too big for me to get invested in even by comedy shounen standards.
Jan. 2, 2025. still reading as it publishes!
this was a very random pick up by me since for some reason discord's gif search has a gif that boldly states ruridragon is mid (it is not u_u) and that choujou is peak. thus, i felt compelled to read it. now it's my pet shounen gag manga, and i will cry if jump cancels it. it makes me laugh a ton, the art is super cute and bouncy, and i like the characters a ton. pls read it…
Jan. 2, 2025. nice balance of being tokimemo-lite, but with unique mechanics for being a messy bitch. i did full routes for the student council president guy and the teacher. fucking lost my shit when the kouhai love interest decided to confess dramatically to the mc on christmas day after she had just gotten back from a date with her teacher boyfriend…and it was also the day after teacher's birthday. maximum drama intended and achieved. o7
Jan. 2, 2025. cute! very pretty! ^_^
Jan. 2, 2025. starts off with an absolutely tragic bang and largely kept that momentum. i stupidly looked at the leaks and then had to go through it to process the reveals before i could actually watch. it was all definitely a lot better when not given via bullet points. such a long wait for s4…
Jan. 2, 2025. getting to watch utena with not one but two people who are somehow ignorant to rgu spoilers is a wonderful experience. it's extremely fun to be the person who Knows and has to just sit there giggling to yourself because they don't Know lmaoooo. anthy best girl and rgu still an anime of all time.
Jan. 2, 2025. vroom vroom, utena-sama. always a fun addendum to the tv series.
Jan. 2, 2025. s1 is mostly mid with some gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous shots of glaciers, but it was a slog to get through. i only continued onto s2 because the site i was watching on auto progressed to the next. turns out s2 and s3 are waaaaay better because they go off the rails in a really entertaining way. the good seasons of fortitude are the ones where someone has their dick chopped off. yes. it happens twice.
Jan. 2, 2025. i skipped the extras because i was told they were mostly about wangxian and i really couldn't give less of a shit about wangxian. ._. the official translation is really not good. the only way i really got through it is by reading while i was sick and my head felt like jello. i think i was happier living in the limbo of having seen s1 of the donghua and just reading chengxian fic based on that. my criticisms are unlikely to be fair, but i was deeply unhappy with how things unfolded. i kind of regret reading it all.
also jin guangyao did nothing wrong and nhs is the realest.
Jan. 2, 2025. an ova that balances intrigue with the viewer being clueless as all fuck because it just sort of tosses you in there, but ohh man, if i had watched this as a baby weeb, it would have eaten my brain whole. really neat and interesting with some gorgeous character designs. it's only six eps!! watch it!!
Here on Tumblr. The Twitter thread is incomplete as I abandoned Twitter partway through 2023. Below is an archive of the Tumblr version.
Jan. 6, 2023. framing devices in framing devices in framing devices. i'm doing one of those "we email you a part of a thing and you read it all across the year" for sherlock holmes short stories, and this was the first one. seriously, it was framing device-ception. watson is conveying holmes' words to him and holmes is conveying various things others said to him and a letter he read to his friend and--
Jan. 7, 2023. ohhh, i love me a good bookend. few things please me more, and i'm very much delighted to see tsukihime picked to do one! (nice to see aoko again, too! mahoyo soon…) tsukihime is as wildly uneven as its structure is between the near and far sides. but goddamn, when it hits (kohaku's confession at the end of hisui's route), it fucking hits. the soundtrack is impressively good for only 10 tracks, too! i totally get why this hypercharged early 2000s otaku brains. it's got a lot going on.
i think my final ranking of the routes is: hisui > arcueid > kohaku > ciel > akiha. i really liked all of the main girls! …with a bit less fondness for akiha, but she still had some great moments on routes that weren't her own!
btw, KOHAKU DID NOTHING WRONG.
Jan. 9, 2023. since the events in the gacha i play tend to be bulky and full of words, i'm counting them in my media thread whatsit for this year. u_u
> lot of arknights' events don't conclude well for me. they leave a lot of open questions--which is completely fine! hinting at future plot threads is good writing! but the way it's often written is that the event story just…feels like it's a big preamble to something coming eventually and ends up unsatisfying for me.
lingering echoes did not have that issue. i liked it so much that i exhausted literally all of my savings for sad horse uncle trying to pull for ebenholz.
bastard showed up on my desperate final pull. : |
Jan. 19, 2023. i am quite enjoying getting little doses of some nice mysteries every week! neat little case (even if i kept cringing at the use of g*ypsy)!
Jan. 19, 2023. totally forgot to record this one properly when i finished it the other week! not much to say other than it was an enjoyable little jaunt of a mystery.
Jan. 23, 2023. honestly, any event story following on the heels of lingering echoes was going to be a bit of a letdown because lingering echoes was good, but…eh. it didn't fully connect for me despite me liking a lot of the components--which is typical for me and arknights lmao. lappland meta dominance, though.
Jan. 25, 2023. an okay event. i don't mind the more episodic comedy type events, but boy did they cram kagekiyo in at the end. kiichi felt a bit underutilized, too, despite me liking her and enjoying her dynamic with ushiwakamaru.
shout out to the comedic legend castor, though. "farewell earthlings" made me crack the hell up. i always love when he's on his siscon bullshit.
Jan. 27, 2023. one more holmes short story for the pile. not as wacky as the whole "snake fed through a vent" reveal last week, but a nice read nonetheless. i do just enjoy shoving a solid mystery into my brain.
Jan. 28, 2023. if tomino wanted me to be normal about amuro, he wouldn't have had amuro. thank god, i've been watching gundam with poppy, and she can accept me objectifying amuro on main. gundam is super fun, and amuro's trauma is moe.
Jan. 28, 2023. SO MAD TO LEARN THAT IT WAS NOMINATED FOR A GOLDEN GLOBE AND YET DIDN'T GET IT. ahhh, inu-oh was astonishing on like every possible level. the writing, the structure, the animation, the style, the sound design, the music--it was so good, holy shit.
Jan. 29, 2023. so, i knew about lalah and was very excited to see her, and she totally was as great as i hoped, but i didn't know she died so soon! : ( but ahhh, fantastic conclusion. i'm going to watch the full tv series soon hopefully because og gundam slaps.
Feb. 2, 2023. watson is so accepting, albeit confused, of holmes paying for a nice dinner for five to be set up in their home. but a fun story! man…who marries a girl then runs off to make a fortune to be worthy of her… you already got married! just stay with your wife, man!
Feb. 4, 2023. SEASON 2 WHEN.
Feb. 6, 2023. well, i meant to finish slow damage back at the beginning of january, but it took me a whole extra month. i think my overall ranking of the routes would come down to: fujieda > taku & rei >>> madarame. the more i played of fujieda's route, the more madarame's just felt like an extended bad end to me. excluding bad ends, it really is the saddest possible outcome for towa for me. i do think madarame's route presented some important insight into towa's psyche, but the stagnation that madarame endorsed was by far worse for towa than him simply not confronting his past. because even when he doesn't remember in taku and rei's routes, towa is still taking steps forward beyond the hedonistic lethargy he approached life with, just waiting to die.
madarame's a slight hypocrite, too, because he fucking knew what was up with maya to some extent. "ohhh, that doctor man is lying to you, towa. you should come with me away from anyone else that cares about you and be in a forever fight club. if it wasn't for the cat petting cgs, madarame would be in the dumpster for me. i do not like this man. his smug aura mocks me.
i can't be that mad at taku's whole…everything either. yes, yes, towa should have the freedom to pursue his past, but jesus fuck, if i knew what he had endured, i also would not want to help towa remembering it. towa being functioning in the most basic sense is a victory with the trauma he's carrying around.
rei is still my personal favorite just because he is so darling! still hate the end of his character arc at the end of his route, though. the majority of the man's friend group is queer, and his closest friends are femme presenting, and i just : (. rei transcending feeling boxed in by societal definitions of gender only to go "guess i better stop having any feminine affectations" and apologizing for "acting girly" is so sad… rei deserves better…
FUJIEDA…MOE? man, his route fucked. in general, slow damage for me has been primarily about towa. the romances can be fun, and i enjoy the whole cast largely minus madarame, but slow damage is so compelling because it is an extended character study of towa. fujieda acts as a filter that lets towa finally begin parsing himself out more coherently as he dives into his past. that fujieda is never interrogated by towa and those gameplay portions are instead held by towa trying to push himself to confront and acknowledge his past is so fucking good. utterly fantastic climax to the whole game, and i cannot believe my grumpy yakuza lawyer is this moe.
but, god…i am still astonished at how unstable this release is. it partly took me so long to finish slow damage because i would get frustrated when it kept crashing. sometimes, i would have a play session that went off without a hitch, but more often than not, it was just a matter of time until the game went kaput. please let me check the backlog without having to quicksave before i do it… i am perennial backlog abuser, so that really interrupted the flow for me. the presentation, visually and musically, is absolutely gorgeous, though. some of the effects would slow down the game, but i can live with that…unlike the crashing.
still, i'm really glad i pushed through to the end! fujieda's route was fantastic. towa is easily my favorite nitro+chiral protagonist, and slow damage was completely worth the wait!
Feb. 7, 2023. in part a rewatch, in part a new watch…for seasons after s10 iirc. bob's burgers is very warm and sweet, and i'm very content to just have it on as background noise. : )
Feb. 20, 2023. accidentally fell behind on my short story reading due to binging the fuck out of baldr sky, so my memory is less than ideal here since i'm only now reading the conclusion after like two weeks. @_@
Feb. 20, 2023. poor watson. 😔 he just wants his friend to have a restful vacation in the country, but i guess nothing reinvigorates a burnt-out sherlock holmes like a murder.
Feb. 21, 2023. oh, baldr sky. what a whirlwind two weeks we had with me being desperate to not take another month to finish a long vn. we did it, though, and the real true world we ascended to along the way was full of headaches.
what a ride. baldr sky is a visual novel huffing some jrpg-isms and can only be described as a baby concocted from the dna of evangelion, xenosaga, and fsn--and that baby is the death stranding baby who hates sex because flesh reviles it. it's bonkers at times and admirably ambitious. that it feels structurally sound and sticks the landing so well on its final route is a real testament to it. it's an eroge, and i can't be mad at it for all the eroge elements in it that weren't totally my speed; i'm not gonna complain about an eroge eroge-ing.
there's like…so much i could say about it. baldr sky has a fuckton going on. i have to give a special shout out to the aki route for going so utterly ham on being the incest route. she's the protagonist's second cousin and they treat each other as siblings, but then it turns out she's also a clone of the protagonist's mom--but no! it goes deeper than that! aki is a clone made from the dna of his mom, their aunt, and their grandfather, and their aunt thinks of aki as her child with her sister (the protagonist's mother). it's insane.
it was a fun time! long, but fun.
edit because i forgot to do a quick route ranking: sora > rain & aki > chinatsu & makoto > nanoha.
Feb. 22, 2023. i kind of can't believe i just read the final chapter. i've been into the series since i watched a few episodes of then airing anime of donten ni warau back in 2014. it was one of those cases where the anime interested me enough that i ditched it to just read the source material, and then i read the gaiden manga, and then i started rengoku (which is a prequel to donten but also a standalone story in its own right). the scanlators working on rengoku dropped it around chapter 13 iirc, and i waited years in the hopes of another group picking it up or it being licensed. if i had been able to find a decent source of raws, i was prepared to make amanda translate and to typeset myself!
so, if there is one good thing the pandemic brought me, it's that someone wonderful began scanlating rengoku again due to quarantine. i'm so thankful that it has been completely scanlated now because it's such a great series. the art is gorgeously detailed and expressive. the story is much longer and more expansive in scope than donten's. and the characters! ugh, i love sakichi, baren, and okuni so much. it's not every day you get an ot3 so real that they ceremonially swear to one another so closely that they adopt a singular name between them. i'm really so happy. i want to reread it all! i can't believe it's done!!
Feb. 22, 2023. totally forgot to note this when i finished reading the story stuff the other day lmao. caren sure was on a roll. cute and compact, per usual for a valentine's day event!
Feb. 22, 2023. it took until the end to really register for me just how much i did enjoy watching this. it felt almost like it was treading water at times until then with biwa being a more passive character, but it thematically comes together in a devastating statement about the endurance of memory. gorgeously animated and directed. really fantastic.
Feb. 23, 2023. not including maximum here since while it's a direct continuation (from what i understand), it is under a different title due to copyright, so i'm also going to categorize it separately.
i don't want to be too tough on the manga since it clearly continues on, but for what part of trigun these first twenty or so chapters represent, i…am really glad i saw the madhouse anime first! the manga zooms along the greatest hits of the anime's plot in a way that doesn't quite do it for me. there is absolutely charm present, but my attachment to the characters is largely thanks to the anime spending more time with them. the basic beats of each is here in the manga for vash, millie, and meryl, but, again, i feel like so little time is spent with them before legato pops up and it's knives time.
iirc, i believe nightow worked on the madhouse anime as a consultant, but i don't know the extent of his influence in shaping it. the pre-maximum manga reads almost like a blueprint that the anime successfully expanded on. (it could be terribly hit or miss, but i do yearn for when anime adaptations had more leeway to diverge from their source material.)
so, ahh, it's a bit hard for me to really judge what i've read when the anime is sitting there in the back of my mind. love & peace, i guess!
Feb. 26, 2023. or how sherlock holmes learned to be a little less sexist because one woman outdid him so now he's not making merry over the cleverness of women nearly as often.
Feb. 27, 2023. THE ASS…IS LIKE OUTER SPACE. this line will live forevermore in my brain. very cute dynamic with delightful character designs that look like they rolled out of a sports manga.
Mar. 6, 2023. my long awaited date arc.
the funniest part of me playing was how much i kept remarking to xofi that i liked how generally professional and competent date was. he was a bit of a nutjob in his head, and there was the porno mag running gag, but he was otherwise a fully formed character that also had horny bolted on. date was very charming as a protagonist. he's aiba's soaking wet poor little meow meow, and she loves him… if date/aiba isn't real, then why game???
aiba's actual best girl (i was ready to disown the true end if she stayed dead), and boss is my wife, and the receptionist is hysterical (let's go to atami!). overall, i quite dug the cast! except ota. i do not like ota. the simp act got tiresome, and yes! i'm still salty about how he lied to his mother (who has dementia) that an eighteen-year-old girl he has a parasocial fixation on is his girlfriend. that did not warm my heart. why did ota even have a route and ending.
i think i found mizuki's route and ending the most satisfying. it would have been nice to have seen more of how date did care for her before that final somnium and to have mizuki be more involved outside of her route, but it still worked for me.
but, oh, mizuki… love her, and while the visual of her lifting weights is hysterical, i do not care for her having the strength and acrobatic ability of a shounen protagonist. watching a sixth grader run up to armed adults actively firing at her at close range so she can club them with a metal pipe stretched my suspension of disbelief too far. the game otherwise didn't have a setting that allowed it; mizuki was an anomaly…for some reason.
my biggest gripes have to be the inconsistent tone and structure. the former would hit with jarring instances of comedy or absurd action sequences that were too predicated on the world's strongest twelve year old. the latter is probably a more personal quibble (i mean, this is all just me rambling out my thoughts), but my first run at the game ended with me on the annihilation route where i was locked out of more once i hit a cliffhanger. not even a bad end! just booted from the route until later. then it happened again when i branched into the true route before iris'. the game clearly didn't want me to access key exposition yet; i would have preferred it if branching onto both routes was barred until ota, mizuki, and iris' routes were complete.
anyway, let's all look forward to the aiba and date marriage! i can't wait to see who boss blackmails so date can legally wed his eyeball. and then we all go to atami.
(but, seriously! i liked hitomi, but her relationship with date…did nothing for me romantically. iris, sweetie, you need to accept that aiba is your uncle's waifu for laifu.)
Mar. 14, 2023. while i'd definitely say my opinion definitely tends toward the positive, i am frankly a bit mixed on kagetsu tohya. the structure for the main story is on the experimental end, and i can always respect that, but ahhhh, i wish i had just used a guide to begin with! trying to ensure i saw everything and got the plot stuff with len to trigger was a slog after a certain point! the slice of life stuff was cute, and len is a very cute design with a decent story attached.
i think i liked a few of the side stories more than the main one tbh. crimson moon, imogirisou, and the tohno family con game were my favorites of the ten. the last one in particular was tremendously charming and fun, and it will sit as a treasure in my mind despite not being written by nasu. crimson moon has such a cool cg, too, with arcueid imprisoned. in general, the cgs were a step up from tsukihime! i looove that arcueid one… (a quick shoutout to nanako-chan sos where i did not really care about the horse girl that lives in ciel's catholic gun, but i did like the history of shiki and arihiko's friendship! loved that. horse girl was sort of just there…with her hooves.)
so, uh, largely a fun fandisc! i just wish the slice of life stuff could have involved less "girls bickering over shiki" moments.
Mar. 15, 2023. totally blanked on playing this before kagetsu tohya! now i understand the references to some murderer that looks like shiki running around in another town properly! the story with akira was short and fun, and oh god, there's another shiki i didn't know existed. the shiki population refuses to stop growing.
Apr. 13, 2023. okay, i technically finished ruina yesterday, but i had a killer headache last night that has continued into today, so i'm typing this out now. please forgive any incoherence.
project moon really looked in the mirror one day and said they were going to do angela every justice possible. the complete empathy she is treated with for her pain while not being merely reduced to it is a perfectly struck balance. she is my poor little toxic meow meow. the way she is forced to confront that she is emulating ayin and tries to justify it as being all she knows--chef's kiss.
the need for mutual forgiveness between her and roland in the end was excellent. that they both resemble the person the other loved most is deeply funny and moving as they manage to break away from the cycle of suffering and revenge. that final title change for roland to "friend" was perfection. i also lost it pretty hard at ayin apologizing and telling angela that she did a good job.
if i have any complaints, it's that apparently an annoying section of fans bullied project moon into removing images during the credits that showed the sephirot were doing just fine??? i was like "this is very nice, but where are my sephirot" during the end, so major l for the fans that made this happen. i also apparently blipped over a lot of subtext about carmen and had to reference the fanwiki. i am…not sure how i feel about her as the voice of the distortions. i guess i can accept it if she has been twisted by exposure to it all, but…mmm.
still! i have no regrets cutting out the grinding with a mod and then caving to a more broken one by the end. i cruised through the final fights and very much enjoyed the resolution. i love thematic cohesion and parallels, so i ate like the king of kings here!
ruina is great! just play lobcorp first.
Apr. 13, 2023. completely forgot to log this when i finished reading the event. it was very cute! i love phantom thief bullshit, so it was quite enjoyable. voyager best little brother… 🥺🥺🥺
Apr. 13, 2023. another event i forgot to log. it was pretty forgettable tbh.
but, man, galatea's chonky pants are hilarious and the best part of her design.
Apr. 13, 2023. another gacha thing i forgot to log because i had decided that since this was the initial chunk of main story released, i might as well record it. kromer was a fucking bitch to beat even if she was a true sinclair-simping icon (my comrade), and i think canto 3 was the strongest of the chapters. i definitely liked them all, but much as i will laud projmoon for how tight their writing generally is, i wish canto 1 and 2 had gotten the longer lengths of canto 3, too.
i'm excited for whenever canto 4 is gonna drop.
Apr. 13, 2023. SOMEBODY ONCE TOLD ME that my german friend alex was shrek-deprived, so i had to rectify that by showing him the first shrek and the best shrek after. this was also something i meant to record a bit ago, but i was lazy.
it isn't as good as shrek 2, but i am fond of shrek 1!
Apr. 13, 2023. THERE IS NO SHRED OF IRONY IN ME WHEN I CALL THIS A MASTERPIECE. I LOVE THIS FILM.
Apr. 22, 2023. man, i took my sweet time getting back to yttd after i first started it a few years ago! i only got partway into chapter 2 (i never hit the final attraction), and i managed to stop playing, like, right before shit really hit the fan! yttd absolutely nails a lot of the pivotal emotional moments that lets it hit home with the characters and plot beats for me. the keiji and sara relationship is also so good; the game cannot stop teasing them! i'm very excited for any other mini-episodes that drop and for whenever we get the last half of chapter 3!
Apr. 27, 2023. since i am not going to be grinding out every reward in the event (takes too long for too little and can't be automated), i'll keep idly working on it in hopes i get enough for the don ego, but eh… i started late on grinding since i was distracted by grail live in fgo. 🥲i rolled both the sinclair ego (aka the most important thing in the entire event bc he's a little soup boy!!) and ryoshu's identity, so i'm pretty content regardless.
the story itself was delightful. extremely good sinclair bulli content, and just…whatever the fuck yi sang is on. spoiled milk does a number on a guy… dondon was adorable (a potato! cut in the shape of a star!). meursault and outis are officially the only sinners i trust to cook. and special shout out to outis for actually netting a win from dante with her endless (and often a bit confused despite her spirit) simping!
absolutely precious!!🥺🥺🥺
May 1, 2023. ahhh, i keep forgetting to log things… orz but an extremely cute event! like, a lot better than i expected considered the reaction the waltz collab got when it debuted on jp, but it was very sweet. miss crane… 🥺🥺🥺
May 26, 2023. finished it last night, so brief revival to log it whilst my thoughts are still clear.
okay, i don't want to lean that hard into comparisons with three houses, but damn, engage was distinctly different from fe16 in such a good way. while there could be some insane clipping (SOMBRON, PLEASE!! THE ENDS OF YOUR HORNS ARE IN YOUR CHEST MORE OFTEN THAN NOT!!), the models were much cleaner and crisper than fe16's. the static backgrounds used in cutscenes also felt correct in regards to perspective. (i still don't understand what happened with that in fe16! the static backgrounds were consistently warped at the wrong angle and looked wrong.) the gameplay was much sharper and with better variety. and alear bepis--i actually like bepis! renaming them as "bepis" had me giggling at the Divine Dragon Bepis all the way to the end, but i grew fond of them. i really prefer when fe does a proper, albeit very typical, character for a protagonist instead of the weird hybrid character/self-insert thing byleth got. i like shipping bepis whereas i recoil from byleth ships.
the gameplay in general…chef's kiss! it had great fe game feel. units felt individual while still being heavily customizable. i really enjoyed the new mechanics like engaging and the break system. the maps were nicely varied, and nothing ever felt like a slog in the way replaying fe16 four times for every route did. i played on normal classic (per usual!), but i might do hard classic on a replay due to how fun and balanced the game felt to me.
engage is definitely more ambitious in the gameplay department than in the story department. fe16…tried to do something more political and involved, but sort of fell flat on its face due to the wonky world building for me. blue lions/azure moon was a borderline euphoric high for me when i played! but it can't carry the rest of the game when it's a more contained narrative about dimitri and isn't as reliant on the mysteries and world building hitting home. so, i'd definitely put bl/am above engage, i would also put engage above fe16 as a whole. i'm leaving engage feeling much warmer about it than i did towards fe16 by the end.
that last chapter was such a delightful cheesefest! i wish it had leaned into that more at times and developed the main royals and bepis' group dynamic more, but the cheese really worked for me. engage's story has all the subtlety of a shounen friendship speech being thrown as a brick at your face, and it goes whole fucking hog into that. bepis gives so many friendship speeches! it's great. not at all perfect, but i had way more of a blast than i expected.
sommie, my beloved. hortensia, my best girl. and goldmary…the unit i decided to feed every permanent stat-boosting item to once i realized Boob Big and who became a nigh-unkillable tank for me.
edit because oh my god, i have to mention lumera. she managed like maybe two scenes that weren't dripping in incest subtext between her and bepis. i didn't expect to ship them as much as i do lmao.
June 7, 2023. watched with a friend. minato's characterization in these films is like he's an aroace austistic warhammer 40k fan that has zero interest in girls and just wants to play his tabletop pls. (so we spent the entire movie just joking about this.)
June 7, 2023. i'm very bitter at the quality of the translation. the same person also did the official translation for tgcf, which most certainly doesn't read like the smoothest prose ever but is quite a bit more even than what we got for mdzs. i'm extremely particular about prose, so unless i'm deep enough in a hole that i will stomach just about anything so long as it's a semi-coherent english translation of something i want to consume, i will be a whiny, nitpicky baby as i slog my way through eh-quality prose. this barely even hits that level. i couldn't get too far into the exr translation either because of my pickiness, but at least that translation has the excuse of being done for free by a teenager. that this is a product i'm paying for and also ruined the chances of anyone doing a better translation just really sucks. (i read part of the fanyiyi translation, and it had far superior flow and diction.)
the interior illustrations were absolutely gorgeous, though. incredibly stunning. i have nothing but praise for those.
June 7, 2023. okay, it takes until the 2.5d stage arc to slap, but once you hit that arc, my god, does that arc slap. the absolute homoerotic rival intensity between arima and akane is palpable. my absolute favorite stuff in the story thus far. the initial superbaby stuff is…easily my least favorite, and while i think the story peaked with that 2.5d stage arc (IT WAS SO GOOD. ARIMA/AKANE HATEFUCK FIC WHEREEEEE), it stays firmly entertaining after it. i really don't care about the romance between aqua, arima, and akane, but akane is at least mcfucking hilarious about it because she will go full unhinged for you, aqua. just let her do it. let her be your equal murder revenge buddy. she's so there for it!!
arima's my bitchy meow meow, and i love her.
June 7, 2023. i am on my hands and knees begging the lord of bethesda todd howard to give a nice loving studio a chance at remastering morrowind!!!!!!! please!!!!!!! i have no issues with the parts of it that show its age or how it looks! (i sincerely think it looks better than oblivion! it has a really solid aesthetic and atmosphere! the faces don't unnerve me like oblivion's do.) i just want the damn thing to not be an absolute roller coaster to troubleshoot into playing on my laptop even with the patches and mods recced by the community to stabilize it.
i got up to doing main story quests in balmora and was really enjoying it. : ( but it's just decided to be crash happy currently, and i lack the brain power (and patience) to troubleshoot it, so i will come back in the future… i really like morrowind!! i just would also like it to get the love it deserves and be optimized so running it isn't a partial nightmare if it decides that nah it doesn't like something.
June 7, 2023. by far my biggest issue with trigun maximum, i think, is that the action can be so hard to decipher. nightow can compose some very compelling panels and striking imagery, but i found his action to be difficult to follow. so that kept me out of a lot of the action…of which there is quite a bit in maximum. the whole middle of the story where vash and wolfwood are hoofing it to clean up knives' cronies is kind of a haze for me because i just wasn't that immersed in it. lots of fights that i couldn't really parse against enemies that were…there. while i understand why vash was doing what he did, the necessity of getting every coin half felt…weakly conveyed to me? idk.
i'm not crazy about the ending either, but i did like a lot of maximum. vash as a character gets a lot of fondness for me, and i really enjoyed following his journey. the '98 anime remains my favorite version of trigun! i hope to get to stampede soon!
June 7, 2023. everyone, please stop bullying koyanskaya! she's my comfort war criminal, and it makes me uncomfortable to see others be mean to her! :((((((((
but in all seriousness, i'm extremely excited to play the next two parts. i knew the major spoilers, but i avoided reading everything in detail for the past two years because i like to be able to play it (and the na team generally puts out such a nice, smooth localization). lots of good set up and lots of great moments. i'm always happy to see tristan get some attention! 🥺
outside of forced deployments, i had fun knocking through battles with morgan, himiko, and merlin.
June 22, 2023. i am so fucking glad limbus had canto 4 wrapped up before lb6 went into full swing on na because, squirtle, i'm dying. even knowing the general plot outline from osmosis did not prep me for how much of a gut punch lb6 hit me with. and there's still another part to go.
every day, i curse fgo for being a gacha because it is, unfortunately, home to some of my favorite writing.
June 26, 2023. keep forgetting to log a few things. finished this a bit ago. quite liked it! gwitch is an excellent gundam, and suletta sunday is a weekly international holiday. any more detailed thoughts are best reserved for when the second cour wraps up this weekend.
June 26, 2023. i liked it…but i feel bad that i don't like it more. projmoon's writing generally lands pretty damn well with me (lobcorp and ruina have utterly stunning finales to their stories that resonated deeply with me), but limbus is structured differently than either prior game, and i find it can be…a little more uneven. cantos 1 and 2 were good, but also would have benefited from an increased length and more time to linger and contemplate gregor and rodya's characters. canto 3 is still the peak for me, and i swear it isn't just my insane sinclair bias; its execution just worked and dug into sinclair meatily. canto 4 is…odd. my biggest gripe would be that i don't think it needs to be as long as it is. a lot of nodes end up with repetitive battles with very little story between them. the actual story content was intriguing, but…maybe i just missed things because i found it to be difficult to parse at points.
i'm going to reread it at some point because not having a bunch of similar-feeling fights between short scenes might help me piece it all together more coherently lmao. 🫠
June 26, 2023. a random purchase i made when buying vns in bulk during a sale last year. pretty middle of the road, but i enjoyed my time with it. the cast was quite charming, and the mc was a character i liked following. i did lose it on one route when suddenly there was a cgi kaiju-sized flaming red skeleton towering over tokyo and animated in a looping om nom nom movement. good times.
June 26, 2023. another vn i picked up while on sale last year.
holy fuck, though. no one told me taisho x alice is so horny. borderline unhinged horny!! like:
i'm absolutely going to pick up the rest of series at some point. cinderella's route was my favorite of the two in ep 1, but i found everyone to be very charming. the mc is also fantastic. i love an otoge heroine who is so forward and direct!! you get that fairy tale d, girl!!!
June 26, 2023. sorry, jjk, but i'm dropping you. the culling game arc has been full of Choices, and i'm at a point where even maki can't keep me trucking. catching up is just a burden, so it's clear that we must part ways. may you strangely pace yourself to the end, jjk. 🫡
June 26, 2023. ah, the conclusion of my trade with amanda where i made her watch 11 hours of ffx cutscenes with me in exchange for severance and ted lasso s1-2. i love, love, love this game so dearly, and it is a favorite. the emotional throughline and just…palpable pathos to x is ridiculous. it's really just so exquisitely structured on every level. yuna is my darling girl, and now i kind of want to replay x-2 of all things.
June 27, 2023. my god. that eternal end is uh…okay, i'll come back to that and just speak about the rest of the game first.
i feel a bit complicatedly about hanachirasu. i understand that akane as a character is ruthlessly focused on a single pursuit (igarasu) so his lack of shits given to any woman is expected…but itsurin is maybe the one woman who isn't portrayed as pitiful? yumi left me the most disgruntled in large part due to the end where akane can return to save her and…he calls her fat and then she refuses to leave because she can't die knowing akane thought she was fat, and ugh. i genuinely found the h-scenes to be almost jarring and a bit contractual feeling. akane is…going to rape this woman now! itsurin is…going to come onto akane now! maybe it was just that they didn't do much for me, but they just felt oddly placed to me.
the actual meat of hanachirasu is clearly in the central rivalry and the immense detail of the fights. those excel. the final duel between akane and igarasu had me rapt and was deeply satisfying to see play out after all the build up. the eternal end is fucking batshit tbh, but i'm extremely into the mutual love confession between akane and igarasu. it feels oddly natural in a way that "oh, now akane is having sex with itsurin" doesn't. i'm pretty curious to check out kaigen's ambition. making a whole spinoff game from a borderline joke ending is the type of commitment i admire.
definitely an interesting vn, though. very glad i picked it up. i'm looking forward to whenever i get to full metal daemon muramasa now.
June 29, 2023. an experimental reuse of assets from hanachirasu. not really fun to play, but interesting, and honestly…it gave me the best ending aka the one that properly canonizes akane/igarasu. i can admire its existence.
July 5, 2023. okay, i think i've sort of got a sense on my feelings on gwitch post-finale. because, uh…man. i really don't want to call the ending a disappointment, but i think it was a disappointment. i'm quite content on the arcs for the major cast; where suletta and miorine and guel and (mostly) shaddiq went, i'm pretty happy. i'm also content that (minus shaddiq) it was a happy ending! i would have loved a sulemio kiss or to see even a snippet of the wedding, but i'm still very happy that suletta and miorine got married.
i think what loses me with gwitch, though, is…i can't really find the thematic throughline. the world building got hazier and hazier as the show went on, and it wasn't until the end that i realized how many plot threads weren't going to be followed through on. the original elan, especially. he just resigns while the peil grannies are livid and then…starts working under guel? what was even the point of all the other elans? and speaking of the other elans, i can accept that permet is able to dissolve into space dust or whatever, but did i seriously miss something about there being an afterlife for gundam pilots (or anyone that worked on gundam) in the data storm? eri being part of the data storm i follow without issue; she linked up to it and then had her consciousness uploaded into a mobile suit. i don't understand why prospera's dead husband and coworkers and el4n and norea are in the data storm. norea at least died piloting a gundam, i guess. el4n was just fried with a laser.
i think my opinion on gwitch is still largely positive because it didn't start to lose it until the last fourth of the show or so, and s1 was super tightly composed. i liked the cast enough that the show can have a fair few bumps and i'll forgive it.
and, okay…like…i'm really just disappointed on the outcome for earth and the general similarities drawn between miorine and shaddiq. i'm pretty disappointed shaddiq's fate seemed to be volunteering to be tried for prospera's crimes. (his girl gang being miorine's bodyguards was very cute, though!) i do like that things weren't just resolved on earth, but gwitch…didn't seem to come to any sort of conclusion? shaddiq and miorine were both naive idealists to an extent. shaddiq went more extreme in his methods because he understood you couldn't gently unfuck a system as corrupt as this all, but he was still a young man thinking he had a plan that could change things on a massive scale. miorine tried a much gentler hand in empathizing and negotiating with protestors on earth. shit goes sideway for them both, and each ends up sitting across from the other like "our hands are stained with blood despite our good intentions."
so, miorine dismantles the group at the end. the show bluntly states that its unlikely spacians won't simply snap up all the freed assets again, and miorine is continuing along with her more empathetic methodology. okay. cool. i just don't know what conclusion this is reaching. there is no answer i can find beyond a shrug that maybe one day we can break the cycle of abusive bullshit, i guess? a lack of an answer can definitely be an answer, but that's not a reading i'm getting from gwitch.
gwitch just…kind of doesn't have a conclusion. smile because your faves are happy (minus shaddiq), and uh…yay! : )
July 24, 2023. just two bros, one undead and the other a scientist who is maybe a bit mad, and their thus far strangely functional relationship (of some sort). looking forward to reading the rest when they're translated.
August 20, 2023. 100+ hours later, and i survived baldur's gate 3. it partly took me so goddamn long to finish because i got to the end of act 2 on my first character…only to find out it wasn't just me and that minthara is likely bugged (or has an insane amount of cut content, but i'm on hopium here). so i decided to restart on a second character as the dark urge to complete the story on whilst i await a minthara fix.
so, yeah. that was a choice i made! 🫠
to preface, however, while bg3 isn't a game i'm keeling over in sheer love for or a new favorite for me, i had a fucking blast playing it. any flaws or personal issues with the game aside, it is genuinely a ton of fun and full of shit to do.
long, scattered thoughts below the cut.
Feb. 5, 2024. oh god, it's been months now because i just stopped remembering to update my little log for awhile there. but yeah, the finale to lb6 did slap, and castoria might very seriously be my favorite version of artoria. lb5.1 still takes the cake for my favorite story chapter in fgo, but lb6 is sitting smug in second place. atlantis just did things to my brain.
Feb. 5, 2024.(this is a confused few paragraphs i wrote partly right after finishing the game for the first time in september 2023 and then futzed with and wrote more right after finishing the game a second time in january 2024, so it is probably kind of incoherent! and this is an informal record of my thoughts, so i cannot be motivated to make it less incoherent.)
in a lot of ways, playing this directly after finishing bg3 was a terrible idea. bg3 has preferable gameplay for me (the scale and density of its open world was actual crack cocaine for me, and the turn-based battle system was positively lovely), but the writing has been…increasingly…eh for me. the choice by larian to soften the characters is one that especially stands out to me after playing wotr. i genuinely don't think bg3 would have given me a character like camellia. the quality of roleplay opportunities for if you're playing as "evil" is also stupidly better in wotr. i definitely don't like the gameplay in wotr as much as bg3, however. the crusade mechanic is…not my friend!! (unlike camellia who is my very good friend as she repeatedly tells me!!)
i reaaaaaally like wotr. in fact, i may even love wotr. it gave me the greatest crpg character of all time: nenio. she rolls up to a group of cultists like greeting fellow worshipers of a demon lord and then unintentionally crushes their confidence to the point one cultist quits because nenio quizzed them on their knowledge of their chosen demon lord in an experiment to measure precisely that variable. and then she adopts you as her research assistant and calls you "boy" or "girl" because remembering your name is irrelevant information and nenio brain space is prime real estate your name can't afford. her ability to instantaneously forget anything, including being drunk so she immediately sobers up, is truly iconic. she even forgot her own species. she just reaaaally wants to publish a comprehensive encyclopedia and will introduce herself as the future head of, like, every academic institution. she is my strange and funny fox friend (sometimes friends copulate!!) who does a lot of comic relief, but the end of her questline also made me cry and i legitimately adore her in all her goofiness that comes together as a character that is an actual character. i love nenio. you love nenio. we all love nenio.
there's seriously so much more i could babble on about, but i took so damn long to write this out that i just finished my second playthrough of wotr. ._. but man, aeon…i'm really glad i picked that path for my first run. i was pretty immediately taken in by the atmosphere the dying aeon had in kenabres, and the alien, otherworldly vibes truly carried through. banishing a ton of the soldiers in drezen for a minor crime was so simple but bonkers in how empty everything felt afterwards. absolutely adored it, and the aeon-exclusive ending is definitely the canon one in my brain for the character i had been playing.
i just love wotr so much. ❤️
Feb. 5, 2024. they jarred douman. they actually fucking cum-jarred douman.
wild.
i think the rest was cute, but the jarring of douman obliterated my memory of all else.
Feb. 5, 2024. a cute way to frame running through all three original elly events again. finally having a complete elly collection feels good after all these years.
Feb. 5, 2024. i, unfortunately, fell prey to the soggy frenchwoman's charms. while her design doesn't do a ton for me (and i am not a fan of how the artist tends to draw breasts as, like, shelves), she's kind of moron and is an absolutely drenched meow meow.
Feb. 5, 2024. a yearly october rewatch with amanda! always very good…always very good…
Feb. 5, 2024. a rewatch because amanda and i planned to watch aliens right after. i really like alien. the sets, the atmosphere, the fact the cat is safe--excellent scifi horror.
Feb. 5, 2024. if it wasn't for how distinctly ungendered alien felt, i don't think i would have been as bothered by how gendered aliens felt. there's so much more focus put on ripley being a woman and here is a child character because she is also a mother and ugh. i do like newt, but ehhh…even the alien queen was more gender because now it's mommy-on-mommy violence. james cameron can certainly direct a very watchable action film, but i don't find aliens to be nearly as compelling as alien.
very glad the orange kitty is still doing well, though, and looked a little chonky. you deserve it, king. an orange hero inspiring other oranges everywhere…
Feb. 5, 2024. hello, i am an american who needed subtitles to be able to consistently understand this man's accent. the american south is a wild west for accents. i am also dubious if mr. lasso will ever learn how the sport of non-american football works, and this weirdly bothers me even though i don't like sports movies/tv shows or irl sports so the lack of focus on the ball kicking is fine but also do you know how to play this sport you are coaching mr. ted lasso.
rebecca is 10/10, and i love and support her even she is making less-than-stellar decisions because i want her to know what it feels like to have power over her shitty ex-husband.
also, sounds of confusion and bafflement as amanda looks at me as i increasingly invest myself in ted/jamie of all ships. if not real, then why does ted talk about jamie's body so much, hmmm????
Feb. 5, 2024. i'm still a little disappointed two years later that the more callous ryouma i heard about from jp players didn't turn out to be summonable. we might get his design with lancer ryouma, but not the personality. :(
Feb. 5, 2024. a replay! …of the exact same decisions i made the first time around because i wanted to refresh myself and also i just like the independent tiers route. the worldbuilding is so goddamn good, and i'd kill to see something else, if not a direct sequel, in this setting. idk what was up with obsidian around this time and putting out crpgs with worldbuilding packed full of era appeal. (poe1 also really worked for me in this department.)
sirin is best girl and my favorite, and she gets whatever she wants because she's had a rough go of it and all of life will be giving her compensation. she belongs in the "associated with a traumatic birth" crpg character club, too, which was a lovely surprise i had somehow forgotten.
Feb. 5, 2024. i am almost ripshit at just how fucking good ghost of tsushima is. i only picked it up because i was told the uncle/nephew is meaty and delicious--and by god was it ever!!--but shit fuck crap damn balls it is such a good game. i expected to blitz through the game and only care about the main story. AAA open-world games are pretty often stuffed with busywork, right? that good ol' ubisoft formula? tsushima slapped me across the face and made even the tasks populating its world varied and interesting. finding a hot springs for jin to soak in, sitting him down to write a haiku, chasing after a fox to pray at a shrine and then pet its cute head… just the way tsushima thinks through everything to make a coherent vision. there's no always on screen arrow pointing you to your next objective; you swipe up on the touchpad to spur a wind that blows in the right direction. it's so subtle and wonderful and keeps your eyes on the gorgeous world. i am not usually all that enthralled with Big Realism Graphics, but tsushima uses it all to its benefit with excellent direction and gorgeous use of color. there were points where i stopped dead just to watch the scenery.
tsushima is just so incredible… it plays well. it's artistically stunning. the story broke my heart with that final duel, and augh, man.
i'm so mad. it's so good!!! it's so fucking good!!!!!
Here on Twitter. Below is an archived copy of it.
Jan. 4, 2022. THE BEST ONE. okay, i've only played the first three layton games, but this was all the batshit-wrapped-in-a-charming-english package that the prior two games were with an additional hit of emotion. i really, really liked it.
Jan. 6, 2022. i got it last march and got past the third gym before...i just unintentionally put it down for awhile lol. it was cute! i really like the stadium setting for gyms, and hop as a rival was legit very charming. pokemon is always very cozy for me.
Jan. 11, 2022. my best friend has had me (re)watching spiderman films with her, and this uh...was just way more boring and generic than the raimi films. love gwen stacy, though. super well cast and actually has stuff going on. otherwise, eh, it exists...?
Jan. 15, 2022. i regret to inform you that the league of legends show is painfully good. it should not be this gorgeously married in universal quality, but it is. 10/10. vicait fake. vijinx real.
Jan. 15, 2022. um. well. that was a movie. a very, very, very confused film. it was not very good. gwen stacy was still good, though.
Jan. 15, 2022. a rewatch. rachel towerofgod rachel towerofgod rachel towerofgod rachel towerofgod rachel towerofgod rachel towerofgod rachel towerofgod rachel towerofgod rachel towerofgod rachel towerofgod rachel towerofgod rachel towerofgod rachel towerofgod rachel t
Feb. 6, 2022. wow, that took me forever to complete, but yaaay, my second playthrough of extra is done! just got tamamo left, and i'll have done the full extra. i'm very fond of this strange game.
Feb. 12, 2022. what a frustrating show. it lives and dies by its incredible direction (and holy shit am i going to be keeping an eye on the director in the future). everything else is kind of...ehh. man, that direction, though...
Feb. 13, 2022. i think my brain broke watching this. a lot happened. i'm pretty sure i liked it? diversity win????
Feb. 13, 2022. a rewatch. still wonderful! such an understanding adaptation! its amaya is more subdued, but the film retains integral emotional beats. it's still wonderful to see after reading the manga. read kamisama.
Feb. 20, 2022. emiya kiritsugu sure had a wacky vacation as a masked sniper hanging out with some lesbians!
Feb. 20, 2022. i watched memory snow forever ago and yet somehow forget to get to this one!! super sweet and cute. 😭
Feb. 27, 2022. i'm going to need to process this one a bit more because what a strange, interesting, and just unique show. a lot happens! i'm surprisingly hung up on what a sad ending sochie got, even though YES DIANNA/LORAN CANON. really...just what a show tbh.
Feb. 28, 2022. only watched half or so back when it was airing, so this was half-rewatch, half-watch. extremely glad i finally got around to this! really just tragic a show this lovely and sweet got saddled with such a terrible fandom.
the pacing goes down much better when you're not thirsty for plot nuggets in-between the more slice-of-life stuff (which i like!). really, my only criticism is that i would have wanted a few more episodes of yellow and blue with steven to smooth out that turn around.
other than that? pearl is still my absolute fave, i love rose's morally ambiguous ass, and blue diamond is wonderfully unsettling. su deserves to be right up there beside atla and otgw as wonderfully enjoyable cartoons.
closing it out on this shot of all things was the absolute sweetest. i'm extremely excited to watch the movie and future!
Mar. 1, 2022. so this is the spinel that became a tumblr sexyman. holy shit was the animation smooth, though. the show itself was generally quite nice, but this was SMOOOOOTH. the diamonds as overbearing aunts is also adorable.
Mar. 2, 2022. yeah...yeah...this was kind of the absolute perfect way to close out the series. i love this half-human, half-space rock child and his three space rock moms.
Mar. 2, 2022. i...totally forgot i started this and had a few episodes left. it's fine. cute. i just watched it for subaru tbh.
Mar. 12, 2022. completely slipped my mind to post this when i watched it last week! super delightful and cute!!! i've had its music stuck in my head.
Mar. 13, 2022. a rewatch!
always good! in spite of what the anime cuts, i really love s1 as this lovely bookended personal journey for subaru. :')
Mar. 16, 2022. a very random rewatch i did. it is...a ride of a show.
Mar. 24, 2022. i forgot i watched this last weekend. it wasn't very good. it was an underbaked bleh...even more so than a lot of the mcu films are. raimi spiderman remains the best spiderman.
Mar. 27, 2022. PARK CHAN-WOOK REFUSES TO MISS. HIS DIRECTION IS AS IMPECCABLE AS ALWAYS. AH. HE HAS SUCH AN INCREDIBLE EYE AND TALENT FOR DRAWING OUT GORGEOUS PERFORMANCES.
Mar. 27, 2022. one of my absolute favorite films. no matter how many times i see it, it holds me utterly rapt. gorgeous filmmaking on every level.
Apr. 2, 2022. honestly pretty entertaining in a bonkers way until the underwhelming end! and surprisingly homoerotic.
i could not give less of a fuck about cramming in mcu connections, though. please god free me from franchise bullshit like this.
Apr. 3, 2022. actually very glad i saw this! definitely the most interesting and daring of the mcu spiderman films. still no raimi spiderman, but i largely quite enjoyed it, and it made some intriguing choices.
tobey-peter/norman otp...
Apr. 24, 2022. i was rewatching sbfp lps of other david cage games, and it made me remember the one actual good thing i like from his games, so i wasted my weekend replaying this for some reason because HANK GO UP. i murdered humans and HANK WENT UP.
i really don't recommend playing it btw. just watch a comp of connor's scenes. there's some wonderfully talented actors in the game, but only connor's stuff limped away with okay writing (and hank). the rest is a trashfire that will make you varying degrees of ripshit.
Apr. 30, 2022. i love this selina kyle. i love her. i love her a lot. i'm officially a little sad i haven't heard zip about her.
also wow the riddler is real horny for rpattz!batman. pattinson totally kills it. fantastic film. my only complaint would be that the movie didn't end with the girl being uplifted. i DO like the scene with the riddler (+ joker) and then selina and bruce, but thematically, those weren't needed, and this was SOOOOOO tight otherwise. god, i love bookends.
May 1, 2022. amuro moe. amuro's trauma moe. amuro's angst moe.
also haro is god.
May 14, 2022. oh, i loved you at first sight, memes and all. now i've finished you, and i'm full of such sorrow...
loved it to bits. incredibly fun to play, and god, when the story starts to hit at the end, it Hits. i love you, jack garland.
June 2, 2022. it took me nearly three years or so, but i have finally finished with extra after playing through it thrice. extra is mechanically janky and structurally repetitive, and it's so utterly cohesive in its themes in all aspects that i can't hold its flaws against it. extra is the type of flawed but compelling i adore. i love how its entire structure communicates the growth birthed by violent conflict and the growth nurtured by compassion. i love how distinct and wonderful nero, nameless, and tamamo are. i love how rani mirrors hakuno and twice and is the surest proof of how compassion and empathy stimulate growth on her route. i love how rin parallels and challenges twice's ideology and affirms hakuno's conclusion. i love how extra contextualizes everything. i love the music. i love the aesthetic of rising from the digital seafloor to breaking through to the risen sun in its dungeons. i love the cyclical rhythm of the moon cell's grail war structure and how it echoes the repetitions of history.
extra is so many things i love packaged together with things i may not love, but i do admire for their thematic inclusion. i really love extra, and i love all the time i've spent with it!
June 11, 2022. read as a translated transcript with some additional videos of the ccc/true route.
i think i've exhausted what i could find translated of ccc. i'll leave more detailed thoughts for when i get to play the eng patch!
i'm really looking forward to the patch when it releases! thank you so much to the translators and editors who have worked on it for what i have read and what i will get to read!
as is, ccc is a really lovely companion story for extra. i'm so excited to see more of it!!
June 18, 2022. so, if someone ever tells you the only good part of berserk is the golden age arc, they should be ignored as complete fools. i have some quibbles, but they're easy to ignore. berserk is really good. it's really fucking good. to sum up my feelings is sort of impossible for me right now. i'm sort of just.
June 23, 2022. read an lp of it.
i...i cannot explain why i remember that this game exists? and then sought out an lp of it? it's not even remotely a good game, but i vaguely recall playing it when i was really young and didn't realize that running causes you to lose hp is kind of a bad mechanic. i never finished it, and it made like nil impact on me considering i remember tremendously little about it, but uh...i sure read that lp.
June 23, 2022. and uhh, well, i never really established guidelines for what qualifies for me to shove on this list, but i started reading this new manga and plan to stick with it! i love it's low-key vibe and cute premise and art!
June 29, 2022. read as an lp.
silver star is such a funny little game. for 1992, i'm REALLY impressed by the clear passion both the devs and localizers had for the project. i'm really looking forward to checking out the remake and how the creators refined the story.
the story structure is bizarrely meandering at points and plain obtuse at others. it's sort of an interesting blueprint i hope to see expanded in the saturn/ps1 remake! the remake came only four-ish years after the original, so i think the creators really wanted to put to work their gained experience and the newer tech. i'm weird about remakes, but this is a pretty interesting circumstance for one that i feel positive about lol.
i looove the change in the localization to need to play the harp before advancing up to luna! such a lovely end. :')
July 6, 2022. you can absolutely tell fujimoto wrote this just by the fact the girl the guy likes bullies him.
July 6, 2022. i should be asleep rn, but i abruptly was like what if i read fujimoto's other oneshots instead.
fujimoto has such talent. big talent man.
July 7, 2022. it mostly just served as background noise for me. episode 4 was perhaps one of the best the show has ever done, though. max had a killer arc this season.
July 10, 2022. jason todd is both INCREDIBLY funny and sad. he's got such serious daddy issues, and someone needs to stop letting bruce from adopting children bc they keep getting anxiety and brain damage.
July 13, 2022. even the good route has major yandere vibes lmao. fun little vn for a quick play!!
July 23, 2022. rewatch!
always a delight. this show has such comfort food energy. i love it no matter how many times i've seen it.
July 26, 2022. finally finished a playthrough i started when i got the legendary edition last year because it kept nagging at me that i had something left undone. me2 is always fun, though. i've def come to dislike the paragon/renegade system, but me2 has a fantastic cast.
Aug. 1, 2022. and this is a story of how i stumbled across this manga and later realized it was by the creator of go for it nakamura-kun with its memetic cover! quite enjoyed this. excellent horror with such a wonderfully fucked up central pair and intense art.
Aug. 5, 2022. read as an lp.
so wonderful and so very charming. i still can't believe this came out in 94. the leap game arts made in presentation and narrative in only two years is insane. eternal blue is absolutely wonderful.
i have a few quibbles about some odd plot developments (WHERE DID LEO GET ZOPHAR'S BLOOD TO FEED MAURI???), but my only real complaint is hiro being a mostly mute protagonist. it's just...a weird choice. but eternal blue is WONDERFUL. absolutely wonderful.
Aug. 6, 2022. i heard that this was written by shigema kei and clarified some points of the game's story, so i wanted to check it out. super breezy read with some lovely shoujo art! i am kind of curious about the finer points of what created deities...
Aug. 14, 2022. SEASON 2 WHEN???? this was a rewatch. one of many. it is a modern classic. i love this show. it never fails to crack me the fuck up. a Perfect Anime.
Aug. 19, 2022. a rewatch up through s12-ish and then it was all new to me! the gang is absolutely awful, and i love them.
Sept. 3, 2022. finished this off finally with my best friend. definitely a better adaptation than zero is, but hhh, i am just not super crazy about ufotable's adaptations, i guess lmao. 🫠 their direction style isn't always my favorite.
good shirou whump, though, and that's always important.
Sept. 8, 2022. played through say 40, read lp in full.
WELL. I WAS NOT LIED TO ABOUT THE GAME BEING VERY DIFFICULT. but, man, i have a fondness for flawed but interesting things, and lobcorp is an absolute gem of one. pure earnestness wrapped up in loving jank in a wonderfully cohesive vision. i admire everything about it from a creative standpoint.
but. oh. o h. ohhhh. to see its lovely ending capped off with the best of all payoff? i had a feeling angela would be my favorite from the beginning, and she is absolutely my favorite. i think angela deserves to do whatever she wants with the world. i support her and her future crimes. i bet angela is divisive in the fanbase. i looooove her. ❤️❤️❤️❤️
Oct. 8, 2022. it was more cohesive than the zero anime, but ehh...i'm just not overall huge on ufotable's style. even past the adaptational hurdles of adapting a text-heavy visual novel, their direction doesn't land as compellingly to me.
...nobody said the full and proper ubw chant either. : ( i kept waiting for my "so i pray" and i never got it.
Oct. 16, 2022. baby does first war crime. happy birthday.
Oct. 18, 2022. finally bothered to finish this. the direction alone continues to be utterly stellar and elevates a very meh story and characters. frederica was an incredibly annoying addition, and i missed lena a lot.
s1e10 is still amazing, though.
Oct. 21, 2022. holy fuck, they compressed the plot. some nice visuals mostly borrowed from the game's aesthetic. i was pretty underwhelmed with how...segmented the battles felt. i know the game is turn based, but... 🥲
Oct. 24, 2022. very cute and charming! the guy who made the hit album "you are the baby" sure also made a game that is Very Normal.
Oct. 28, 2022. i rather dug it into the last episode. episode 6 was when the very obvious marvel formula started, and i was pretty zoned out when the giant lizard and bird were wrestling.
what a cool strangers of paradise reference, though! : )
Oct. 28, 2022. yearly rewatch! it's always wonderfully charming and just such a great watch. real gem of american animation!
i rec it wholeheartedly if you haven't seen it! it's 10 eps at about 11 minutes per ep and is delightfully funny and haunting.
Nov. 1, 2022. i got a VERY gooD grade in kim. but, hm, i'm having a hard time pinning down how i feel exactly about disco elysium. it's a game about the transition period between being hurt and being healed. it can be a terribly long process, and it's a pain all on its own. it feels a bit hard to have a definitive feeling on disco elysium when that is what it is.
i really enjoyed my time with it.
Nov. 5, 2022. watched per my best friend's request.
it was okay. that's about the sum of my thoughts.
Nov. 5, 2022. rewatched with my best friend! still a fantastic film. it is still utterly surreal to me as a film made pre-columbine.
Nov. 18, 2022. holy shit was that some jank-ass pacing. fucking all over the place and never really permitting any breathing room or character development. it was pretty mid.
except for alicent. she is my babygirl. she has never done anything wrong. 🥰
Dec. 6, 2022. i watched a comp of cutscenes and all dialogue, and man, i did not expect halo to do a war film so well. it's legit like the length of one and really solid.
Dec. 6, 2022. SO MAD I ONLY GOT INTO DRAGALIA RIGHT AS IT WAS ENDING. supremely charming, and what a wonderful localization. it read beautifully and with so much personality. hats off to everyone who worked on it!
Dec. 6, 2022. up through the cathedral. because that's when i went "oh i am not having fun..." i like the super earnest, full anime bullshit vibe, but the writing wasn't enough to keep me interested. soulslike gameplay simply is not for me!
Dec. 6, 2022. xie lian is my cute grandpa, and everyone better be nice to him!!! idk if it's just the translation, though, but i personally find the prose insanely bland in a way that sort of takes me out of it. but i love my grandpa.
Dec. 6, 2022. it took me so long to finish this!! i was stalled out in the dark tournament arc for awhile despite adoring it! chapter black saga was largely great too, and i did like the three kings arc despite its issues.
the final ep was incredibly sweet. kuwabara is my ABSOLUTE favorite, and i love him so much. for all its weird pacing and whatnot, i would have been softer on the three kings arc if kuwabara showed up for more of it lmao.
Dec. 8, 2022. i'm legit bummed this version of miho is exclusive to this anime lmao. she's not a deep character or anything, but she was a delight. decent-enough adaptation of the early manga was some bonkers changes (kaiba's cyborg butler...) i had fun!
Dec. 9, 2022. grandpa still needs prayers badly.
Dec. 13, 2022. somehow managed the good ending. bawled my eyes out. omori is really good. that last third really fucking hit.
Dec. 21, 2022. pray for my grandpa. but only for things he can actually help with pls. he's a good, helpful grandpa.
Dec. 22, 2022. pray for my grandpa. do it. pray for him. he's very nice. 🗿🗿🗿
Dec. 28, 2022. smoking hoshimaru is real and is also me after that ending.
Dec. 31, 2022. not a show i've ever particularly liked, but i watched it because s3 ended with some good viren/claudia crumbs. claudia getting a boyfriend who makes frequent fart jokes was annoying, but claudia still good. 'tis a mid show for background noise.
Dec. 31, 2022. my usual yearly rewatch with amanda since we didn't get to it closer to christmas! always a fun watch.
