In continuing my burgoening tradition of watching something new every week, I finally gave in to the cultural zeitgeist (which makes it sound like I was resisting the cultural zeitgeist but, to be honest, I was just ignoring it like I was ignoring every TV show and movie for the last couple years) and watched Dandadan. It’s been on my radar for a while, even if all I really knew about it was “there’s a supposedly old lady with tall hair who carries a metal baseball bat?” based on some images I’ve seen on the internet, but one of my friends told me it was actually a really cute love story in addition to the slightly-more action-y episode-to-episode events and I was sold. Who doesn’t want to see a cute love story these days? So I watched it with that in the forefront of my mind, got swerved almost immediately, and then swerved more and more as the first season played out. It was a wild ride, but now I’m a diehard fan and dying on the inside because I’ve got to wait who even knows how long for Season 3 to come out. I suppose I’m lucky in that I only started watching it after the second season had been released so at least I didn’t have season 1’s horrific cliffhanger dangling over me for months and months while I waited. Which, if I had to levy a criticism at the show, it would be the way they’ve chosen to pace things. Not every episode has problems with it, but there’s enough that I kept feeling like I was being jostled around by the ending theme of the show, which is too bad because the opening and closing themes of both seasons are great and the sort of thing I chose to watch each time. It didn’t really impact the quality of the show for me, but I also can’t imagine this show coming out on a weekly schedule and would have been infuriated multiple times if I’d been watching it one episode a week.
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Dorohedoro Is The Weirdest Anime I’ve Ever Watched And Enjoyed
Lately, I’ve been making an effort to get into watching more stuff. Mostly because I bought a month of Netflix a few weeks back to watch Frieren with my siblings when they came to visit, but also because I need more variety in my life and watching something while doing a bunch of mindless crafting in Final Fantasy 14 makes the time pass better. It’s also kind of nice to not eat all my meals at my desk and instead eat some of them sitting on my couch, outside of my office, in a much more relaxed manner. Most of my meals at my desk are quickly consumed in order to get things out of the way so I can focus more completely on FF14, so being able to eat relatively laconicly while watching a TV show or something on my nice, 4K TV is refreshing. I haven’t had a Netflix subscription in a few months and I spent most of last year in a weird mood about watching things by myself, so I’ve been building up quite a list of things to watch on Netflix (a much larger list than I’d accumulate in a few months on account of not feeling like watching stuff for more than a year at this point). It took a bit to pick something since part of me wanted to dive back into the old familiar stuff, but I was brave (this is a joke) and pushed myself to watch something new, which is how I got started on the only (currently, at the time of writing this) available season of Dorohedoro. It’s a bit of an odd show, overall, and that weirdness starts with the show’s title card on Netflix. It claims to be about a guy trying to find the person who turned his head into a lizard’s head, and while that’s weird, it’s a pretty normal kind of weird. Once you start the show, though, it immediately ramps the weirdness up.
Continue readingI Finally Watched Frieren And I’ve Got A New Favorite Anime
Over my birthday weekend (a week and a half ago as I’m writing this), my friends introduced me to Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, an anime that I’d heard about a while back but never really gotten around to watching. I’m terrible at watching things by myself, I’ll freely admit, but I almost watched Frieren back when I first heard about it because the premise of it was incredibly compelling to me. Frieren is an Elven mage who saves the world with her adventuring party and then goes on a personal journey afterwards only to discover upon her return that her treasured companions are not as immune to the passage of time as she is. A mere fifty years of idle spell collection was a lifetime for her friends and now she has to cope with not only the regrets she feels but how to live amongst humans who live, grow, and pass in so very little time. The anime has it all: the unintended consequences of power vacuums, repeating the mistakes of the past because humans don’t live on the same time scale as the demons they’ve been fighting, an ancient being struggling to answer the impossible questions of (effective) immortality, and a constant dose of heart and connection to tie it all together. Exactly my shit in ways I couldn’t anticipate before watching it, to the degree that it has probably become my favorite anime, supplanting Delicious In Dungeon from just last year.
Continue readingFriends At The Table Has Another New (And Delightful) Podcast: Side Story!
Once again, I am here to tell you about a brand new Friends at the Table podcast! I’ve written about Friends at the Table as a whole, with a focus on their tabletop gaming, and the second podcast they started in 2024, Media Club Plus, as it covers the 2011 anime Hunter x Hunter, but they just started somethig brand new a couple weeks ago (episode two came out the week this was posted). It’s a video game discussion podcast called “Side Story” and it is exactly what it sounds like. Austin Walker, noted video game journalist of quite a few places (perhaps most notably Waypoint back in the day), has apparently been getting requests from people for years to go back to talking about video games the way he used to before the career change that brought him to the now-closed Possibility Space video game studio. Now that he’s choosing to focus his time and energy on Friends at the Table, rather than continuing to keep it as a side project, he’s started this video game discussion podcast with a cast made up of other Friend at the Table folks. So far, he’s only had two other people join him for both of the podcast’s first two episodes (Jack de Quidt and Janine Hawkins, both people who have written for video games in the past), but Austin has been clear that he intends to have the rest of the Friends at the Table cast on at some point. Given that the whole premise of this particular video game podcast is to just talk about the games they have been playing, rather than seeking to provide stringent reviews or high-concept disucssions, it’s perfect for someone looking for a relaxing discussion of video games of all types (recent, older, indie, big-budget, etc) that ranges from the light “this was fun” to the critical “I played this but found the experience strange and possibly unpleasant” and even the hopeful “this game is promising a lot and seems to be actually delivering during its early access phase.”
Continue readingPlaying The Beginner’s Guide For An Introduction To Critical Analysis
Yesterday, while writing about The Stanley Parable, I kind of did a small lie-by-omission type thing. I left out that I’d just recently played through Davey Wreden’s other game, The Beginner’s Guide, and that playing that game gave me a lot to think about in regards to the first game. I’ll be straight with you: this post is going to contain “spoilers” for The Beginner’s Guide, but that’s also a bit of a weird game, so the word “spoilers” feels like it implies more than it does. After all, while undeniably a game, The Beginner’s Guide doesn’t really have the sort of narrative play or inversion that The Stanley Parable did. It’s basically just a straight-forward story that you’re walking your way through a bit at a time. Except it’s not really straight-forward. There’s a bit of a twist to the story you’re being told. Your first hints of it arrive pretty early on. There’s only a scattered few, but with the rise of social media discourse being what it has been, I feel like modern audiences are maybe a bit more keyed into what’s going on underneath the narrator’s story. The rest, though, arrive in a torrent later on and fully reveal the twist if you haven’t figured it out already. It’s an interesting story to hear through the layers, from hearing what the in-game “Davey Wreden” says to you, to reading what the object of the “Davey Wreden’s” parasocial affection is writing to “Davey,” to thinking about what all of this might have meant to the out-of-game Davey Wreden, to finally thinking about what it means to me as a person who played Davey’s games and really likes to dig into this stuff with a critical and analytical lens.
Continue readingThe Stanley Parable: An Exercise In Video Game Storytelling
A few months ago, back around the winter holidays, I played through The Stanley Parable for the first time. It was one of those games that I’d had on my Steam wishlist for a very long time and just never got around to actually buying or playing it. In fact, my general interest in the game is what led me to be so interested in one of my most anticipated games of 2025, Wanderstop. Sure, the trailer was great, but I’d been intrigued by the premises of the games that the creator of Wanderstop’s studio, Davey Wreden, had already made and so took a closer look at Wanderstop. Without that, I might have written off the bits I’d seen of the Wanderstop trailer as just another cozy game and ignored it, given how much I both love and hate cozy games these days (love chore-based games but hate the aesthetic that often gets stuff labeled “cozy” these days). But, despite my intrigue, it still took me a while to actually sit down and play the game since I’d heard that it’s a game best experienced all at once and I just didn’t have it in me to stay engaged with anything like that (other than Dragon Age, anyway) until just about the start of the new year. So, thanks to the rest I’d been getting and the need for something to do that didn’t take a lot of manual dexterity (I wasn’t able to do much with my left hand thanks to the burns I’d gotten while making my Christmas dinner), I booted the game up and spent a good few hours playing through it.
Continue readingI Slayed The Princess And All I Got Was This Collection Of Neutral Thoughts
This review spoils some of the details of the mild-to-moderate horror game Slay The Princess, a game best-played with as little information as possible for your first time, and features non-descriptive discussions of violence and bodily harm.
Continue readingA Blast From The Past: I Started Rereading Cucumber Quest
One of my favorite webcomics from back in the day was the webcomic Cucumber Quest. I say “back in the day” because it’s one of the first webcomics I started following, once I found out about webcomics, and I followed it right up until it stopped updating in 2019. The creator has posted some additional information about it on their patreon since then, but they’ve not worked on it in a long time (due to burnout) and I am not expecting it to ever continue. I won’t say that it will never continue or that I don’t think it ever will, only that I’m not expecting it to. Sometimes things are good and fun and you love them, but the circumstances of life prevent them from ever being brought to a satisfying conclusion. Sometimes all you get, in the end, is A conclusion. Which is kind of fitting, given the general themes of the story and all. It might seem counterintuitive to recommend a webcomic that stopped updating almost six years ago, but it is still a story near and dear to my heart and easily worth your time even if you will have to eventually cope with the lack of a “proper” resolution. I’d even go so far as to argue that maybe thinking about the story and sitting with the feelings of it ending before the story wrapped up might be the sort of thing that triggers some important introspection. Regardless, it is lovely, it is well-drawn, it is moving, and it does my favorite thing a story can do with a fantasy setting: stand it on its end and make you think about the standard heroic fable tropes you went into it expecting.
Continue readingThere Are Too Many Mechanics In My Baldur’s Gate 3 Storytime
I finally passed one hundred hours in my save file of Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m really not sure how much time I’d have logged to the game if I could somehow account for the lost progress due to crashes or the hours lost to reverting back a couple or more save files because a choice without sufficient context was going to ruin my experience with the game. I don’t mind reverting in these cases, given how what sometimes feels like a flippant or jokey answer in a dialogue tree can wind up being taken very seriously and sometimes there’s a mismatch between what the game suggests will happen and what actually happens (which seems to be cranked up to eleven as a Dark Urge character). Overall though, as I’ve looked back at my one hundred recorded hours, I realized that a huge amount of that time was spent incredibly focused on the mechanical aspects of the game rather than the roleplaying and inter-character aspects of it. Sure, the ratio is probably much more balanced than most similar games I’ve played, but it feels odd at first blush to realized that it is closer to a standard video game RPG than to my experiences with the tabletop rolepalying game this CRPG was inspired by. As I’ve thought about it more, especially as I played last night, I noticed that, despite only doing one major fight last night, I spent about eighty percent of my play time focused entirely on mechanics. A couple percent of the remainder goes to puzzle solving and logistics and then the rest goes to watching dialogue play out and doing my best to roleplay my player character.
Continue readingChained Echoes Is More Fun Than I’ve Had In Ages
Over the past week and a half, I’ve spent what limited evening video game time I’ve got playing Chained Echoes on my Switch. I only heard about the game because a podcaster I follow (Austin Walker of the wonderful Friends at the Table) tweeted about appearing on an episode of another podcast (specifically the Jan 16th, 2023 episode of Axe of the Blood God: An RPG Podcast). Since I’m really into RPGs and I trust Austin’s opinions on games, I decided to give it a listen. Wound up getting myself a new RPG to enjoy and a new podcast to check out at the same time. Unfortunately, for a while there, I was too stressed out to consider trying anything new, especially after the new thing I was most excited for wound up being incredibly underwhelming. Between that and just being generally busy, I didn’t start playing Chained Echoes until last week.
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