The short answer is yes. If you trust me and my reviews, feel free to bounce right now and go enjoy yourself. If you still need convincing, then I’m sure I can manage that. The game doesn’t do a great job of selling itself unless you’re already on the Dragon Age train and looking for your next destination. After all, most trailers for it showcase grand, sweeping events that are mostly exciting as references to past games and older characters (and sometimes things that were specifically avoided in these past games). If you don’t already know who Solas and Varric are, you might not care much about seeing them in opposition. If you haven’t followed the Dragon Age games for their decade and a half run, you might not have a reason to care about the arrival of what might be some Elven gods. Sure, it’s all tons of pretty typical fantasy and RPG type stuff, but most of it doesn’t really make an impact without history or greater context (which I can provide for you). Still, it’s a pretty good video game, taken on its own merits, and absolutely worth your time on that front alone. If you’ve played other Dragon Age games and just aren’t sure you want to continue? Then it is worth your time even more so.
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The Most Delectable Anime I’ve Seen This Year
Spoiler Warning for the first season of the Delicious in Dungeon anime.
Continue readingStar Wars: The Acolyte Makes For Great Light Watching
I finished watching The Acolyte last week. Not the week I wrote this, but the week prior. Pretty much two weeks prior to the day this went up. I was watching it in chunks to match up with the Patreon episodes of A More Civilized Age, so I watched shortly after episode 5 came out and then the Friday after episode 8 came out. I’ll admit I struggled a bit with the show initially, but one of the things Austin Walker said in the first episode of AMCA’s covered of the show reframed the entire thing for me in a way that made it much easier to enjoy: The Acolyte is a YA show. Once I started treating it with the same level of seriousness and mindset as I treated most of the CW-type YA shows I’ve seen in my life (which is not many, to be honest), the whole thing felt way more enjoyable (which even applied in retrospect, given that I started listening to the podcast episode minutes after I finished episode 4 of The Acolyte). Once you stop expecting deep character motivations for every decision and can silence the voice in your head comparing the show to Andor, it’s actually quite enjoyable. I’d call it a good show, even, in the way that chips are a good food. It’s not the most substantive thing out there and you can easily find issues to pick at if you want to, but it’s mostly fun enough that none of that really matters. To once again paraphrase Austin Walker from multiple episodes of AMCA, there was enough interesting stuff going on most of the time that I didn’t really care about the stuff that didn’t work (with a few notable exceptions). All-in-all, I’d definitely recommend the show to anyone who likes Star Wars and especially to those interested in stories about how the Jedi (individually) aren’t always good people and how the institution as whole is pretty rotten.
Continue readingReturning To Mistborn At Least A Decade Later
I don’t remember exactly when I did it, but I read the Mistborn trilogy sometime around my move to my current city back in late 2013. I had enough going on then that I don’t remember the exact date, but I do think it was after my move. I didn’t really have the money for things like books before my move and I didn’t know who Brandon Sanderson was until mid-2013 anyway, since I only encountered his name as part of reading through the whole Wheel of Time series to help a friend out with his Master’s thesis. I really enjoyed the end of the series, the parts handled by Sanderson, which felt remarkable given how much I struggled with Robert Jordan’s portions of that series. I had to force myself to read Jordan’s books and genuinely only finished because the first of Sanderson’s was so much more enjoyable and pleasant to read than any of Jordan’s books. I mean, I’ll give Jordan points for creativity and plenty of respect for the world he brewed up–hell, I’ll event admit that most of the interesting plot work started with him–but I just did not enjoy Jordan’s writing for most of the series once he’d finished his original trilogy of books and started expanding them into a limitless and sprawling monstrosity of a fantasy series. Which is probably why Sanderson’s work stood out to me as much as it did. He was just as long-winded and overly detailed as Jordan was, but I enjoyed it. Sanderson seemed to have a knack for picking the right details and putting his words together in a way that lent to a more pleasant reading experience. So, when time and opportunity allowed, I followed the recommendation of my friend (the same one I go to for editing and pretty much all my book recommendations since she has unimpeachable taste and who might have given me the books as a gift–I unfortunately can’t remember, though, since it has been so long and she’s given me so many great books) and started working my way through the Mistborn trilogy.
Continue readingNot Another D&D Podcast Is Worth Your Time
Of all the people I’ve ever talked to who got into the various tabletop gaming shows and podcasts created by ex-College Humor people (Such as Dimension 20 and Not Another D&D Podcast), I’m the only one who has followed my particular path. I’m sure there’s other people who have followed the same route given that there’s billions of other humans and millions of other people who fit into the same broad media categories that I do, but I’ve yet to find any despite keeping my eyes peeled. After all, most probably followed the various comedians or College Humor itself as it began to fracture in the collapse of the online advertising marketing (fomented, of course, by Facebook’s outright lies about video views), which makes sense! A lot of the modern Actual Play shows that quickly rose to prominence did so as a result of bringing an existing audience with them (one need not look further than Worlds Beyond Number for recent proof of this). I wasn’t really into the type of humor that College Humor relied on, though, and wasn’t really into internet comedians in general (and I’m still not, to be honest). They’re just not my thing. So I only discovered NADDPod (and through them the rest of the now DropoutTV network) three years ago, when they were about halfway through their second full campaign and I happened to stumble across a song from the finale of their first campaign on my Spotify Discover Weekly playlist.
Continue readingMedia Club Plus Is The Best Hunter x Hunter Analysis I’ve Ever Heard
I’ve mentioned this multiple times now, over the last year or so, but I started putting an effort into expanding my podcast selection from just Actual Play podcasts to include some of my other interests. The ones I mostly settled on, thanks to them being adjacent to my favorite podcast (Friends at the Table) in some way or another, both wound up being media analysis podcasts. I studied English literature and literary criticism in college and found them both incredibly fun, so it makes sense to me that I’d enjoy podcasts that basically do that same thing but with movies or TV shows. Which is how I landed on listening to A More Civilized Age and the subject of today’s post: Media Club Plus. I technically started Media Club Plus first, since I’ve been listening not only since the day the first episode dropped, but from the day they streamed episode 0 as a proof-of-concept in order to get people to drive up their Patreon subscriptions to the tier that would see them spin off the Media Club Patreon episodes into their own podcast. The selling point of the show was that the main cast would feature a few long-time fans of the anime Hunter x Hunter and one person who had not only watched very little anime at all but had never watched Hunter x Hunter and had only expressed an interest in it after listening to their friends talk about it all the time. The stream was an instant hit and while it took a few months to get the show off the ground, it funded in less than a month after the stream, thanks in part to a large number of people increasing their pledges (myself included) to help push the group toward their goal. Since then, not only have they put out twenty episodes of the main podcast (an episode every other week), but they’ve also published three Patreon specials with one more imminently on the horizon [which released between writing this and it getting posted], covering a selection of Dragon Ball and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure episodes. It has been a genuine delight to listen to the podcast go from a rough concept on a Twitch stream to the absolutely stellar analysis and insight that I make sure to never miss when it drops every other week, time allowing.
Continue readingThe Rising Stakes In Star Wars: Rebels Season 2
Last night, a few episodes ahead of where I’m at in the podcast A More Civilized Age, I finished Season 2 of Star Wars: Rebels. At this point, I’ve finally caught up to the latest episode of AMCA and will now need to slow down my watching speed to match the podcast’s pace. Which is incredibly tough given where Season 2 ends and how badly I want to immediately stop writing this blog post so I can watch another few episodes at least. Maybe a whole season. Wouldn’t be the first time I sat down to dip my toe into something and wound up watching the whole season instead. I can’t really afford to do that, in terms of my need for sleep and mental, emotional, and physical rest, so it’s probably a good thing that I have something preventing me from diving into season 3. Even though I really want to just turn the show on and keep watching until I’m out of seasons to watch. Honestly, I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to stay strong and pace myself alongside AMCA like I originally planned to. I haven’t been this invested in a show in ages, not with the same level of emotional investment and burning curiosity, anyway. I mean, I’ve watched plenty of anime over the last couple years by sitting down each week to watch the newest episodes as each of them was released, but I was mostly just enjoying the ride. This time, with Star Wars: Rebels, I’m dying to know what happens next. Waiting is a genuine struggle and that’s saying something because I rarely struggle with impatience.
Continue readingStar Wars Rebels Is Exceeding My Expectations
As part of my on-going quest to listen to all of A More Civilized Age, I finally started watching Star Wars Rebels and I gotta say that I’m hooked. I’ve actually been watching episodes of the show to unwind in the evenings rather than just to keep ahead of where I’m at in the podcast. I’ve still got my problems with the show, sure, but it currently sounds a lot more fun to me than more endlessly working through repetitive open-world stuff in Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. Which isn’t saying much because that stuff is so boring that I fell asleep five minutes into trying to play through the open-world portions of the ninth chapter and haven’t been able to convince myself to go back since then. I know my runway is just about to disappear since AMCA only made it through the first season before they shifted to playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic so they would stay compliant with the various union rules about struck productions, companies, and media from last year. I’ve got the three-part season finale left to watch and I’m probably going to watch it tonight since I’m way too tired to force myself to work through more boring desert-y open world junk in Rebirth. I’d just immediately fall asleep if I tried that and I need to make it until at least ten or eleven tonight before I give up on staying awake.
Continue readingSolo: A Star Wars Story Was A Fine Romp
After a few years of avoiding it because I heard it wasn’t very good, I finally saw Solo: A Star Wars Story. To be completely honest, part of me was avoiding it because I didn’t care for the name of the movie and I was worried that seeing Donald Glover in it would impact my feelings about Community. I set all of that aside, though, because good old A More Civilized Age watched it between wrapping up the Post-Season 6 But Pre-Season 7 Clone Wars material and starting Star Wars Rebels and I wanted to be able to follow their massive episode. Plus, it’s not like I’d heard Solo was bad, just that it wasn’t actually good. So I watched and listened to AMCA talk about it and, you know, I think it was actually pretty alright. It might be the fact that I watched it between watching Dune Part 1 and Dune Part 2, so almost anything would seem good in comparison to those two movies, but I did genuinely enjoy my time watching it. It was a fun romp, even if it lasted way longer than it should have and maybe had a little too much going on, so much so that I got an hour in and just kept checking the time remaining after that because I had literally no sense of how far along the movie was, in terms of time or plot. Still, all of those too-many parts were at least a little fun and while there’s definitely some problems with the movie, none of them were bad enough to really take me out of it.
Continue readingThe Dune Movies Would Be Better If They Were Shorter
I do not normally consider time wasted so long as it didn’t have a negative impact on my life. Sure, doing my taxes isn’t fun and is usually very stressful because I get a clear picture of how much debt I still have, but it’s not a waste of my time. Cleaning my apartment isn’t a waste of my time. Commuting isn’t a waste of my time. Writing detailed notes to myself about things I’ll definitely remember isn’t even a waste of my time. The two Dune movies, though, are definitely a waste of my time. I didn’t dislike them so much that I consider all five and a half hours I’ve spent watching them both a full waste of my time, but it’s difficult to feel like they were anything but that when each of them was at least an hour too long. I think they could have trimmed at least that much out and wound up with a pair of movies that would have been better for it. I mean, there were definitely some enjoyable bits in both of those movies (way more than in the books, my review of which is going to take a while longer to write since I don’t feel particularly motivated to write more about it than I already have even if I feel like it would do me some good to get the thoughts out of my head and written down somewhere) but as I only slightly jokingly told a coworker today, Zendaya can’t carry a movie that big all on her own.
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