Demon Slayer is a Cut Above the Rest

In my on-going quest to actually watch TV shows and movies on my own, rather than wait for the opportunity to watch them with someone, I did a full re-watch of the first two seasons of Demon Slayer and then watched season 3 (called the Swordsmith Village arc). The whole show is visually stunning, and not just in the quality of the animation (which is consistently high, a fact made possible by the lengthy time between each season or arc’s release). Every visual is gorgeous, from the various moves performed by the titular Demon Slayers to the flashy, powerful maneauvers of the more powerful demons. The whole series does a great job of balancing interesting, unique characters, absolutely killer fight scenes, and plot progression, even if the pacing of individual episodes frequently feels off to me. Specifically, some of the episodes hit their mid-episode break with a scene that I feel should have been the end of an episode and sometimes an episode ends at a point where I’d expect to find a quick commercial break. The beat-to-beat pacing is absolutely stellar, though, so I’m not sure there’s much they could do to fix the episode thing and I’m pretty sure it’s just me and my mind’s desire to find patterns in everything.

Continue reading

DOOMed to Enjoy This Franchise

In the recent years of my life, I’ve grown to appreciate the run’n’gun style of games. I suppose you could say that it began with Halo back in the day, but I don’t think I really appreciate the genre/style until I started playing DOOM (2016). DOOM’s simple mechanics, fast-paced combat, and loose approach to storytelling made it a very fun game to sit back and play when I was too stressed or tired to invest in a game. Most of the story was told through codex updates and the occasional speech you couldn’t walk away from, which means it was mostly there for you to find if you wanted to look for it while it stayed out of the way the rest of the time. Doom Guy even leans into it, punching screens and breaking things rather than listening to exposition or operating instructions.

Continue reading