Defense Grid: The Awakening

 

I just played through Defense Grid: The Awakening. Out of the blue I felt like trying a tower defense game and after perusing the Steam list and doing a quick internet search this one looked like the one I would have the most fun with. There are so many tower defense games out there now but very few are strictly tower defense, usually they’re a mash of genres with stuff like resource gathering or base building and that sort of thing. Defense Grid wants nothing but to be a tower defense game and that’s what I was looking for.

The graphics have an alluring appeal to it, the towers and aliens have just the right amount of color, without becoming jarring or bleak. Music is OK, I didn’t pay much attention to it. Gameplay is very repetitive actually but in a relaxing sort of way which is a hard balance to achieve. I think the difficulty is a bit wonky though, where most of the stages (there are 20 of them) feel a little too easy and you can pretty much brute force your way to victory by spawning a huge amount of guns in the obviously right places. Then, by stage 17 or 18, the game sends wave after wave of very spongy enemies that can breeze through your defenses. The level called Waste Disposal took me about a dozen tries to get through and that’s when you begin to realize there’s very little room for error with this game. In fact your best bet is just spawning cannons, they’re relatively cheap and carry a heavy punch.

The most fun levels were the ones you get to shape the path the aliens take by placing towers in front of them in order to make a labyrinth to mow them down more effectively, but those are rather rare and far between. Most of the time the aliens are running through a predefined path and you just get to choose your weapon, usually the cannon or the meteor strike that is not that great but it has a great range, so it’s worth it. Enemy variety is minimal, but then again, you won’t be looking at them closely, it’s mostly a green crate looking thing with spiny legs attached to it. Some look like bugs and that’s about it.

I’m not sure how well I can judge Defense Grid given the only other tower defense game I’ve played is Plants VS Zombies but all in all I had a really good time with it. I know there’s a Defense Grid 2 so I guess I’ll be checking that one next.

Monsters Are My Business

 

I picked up Monsters Are My Business while perusing new stuff coming out. The cover struck me as the writers and artists have a fondness for the good old schlocky comic booky fun and I was right. It’s a comic that doesn’t take itself seriously, mixing some fun modern fantasy tropes and artwork that is giving me a sense of nostalgia for something I can’t quite pin it down. Perhaps the Comix Zone game for the Genesis, and also a smidgen of Metal Slug, I’m not sure.

This is a fast food type of comic, fast pacing, lots of action and likable characters. Not much to think about but super fun to go through. It does a very good job at establishing its characters right off the bat with minimal text, which I love. It’s the sign of a good comic book writer right there. The plot is simple and it’s piece together from well known tropes. Basically an evil cult in the best Lovecraftian tradition brings about some demonic rain that wrecks the planet and now you have all sorts of abominations walking around. The rich are all walled up somewhere but our hero, Tanner "Griz", his mute koala companion Cuddles and a necromancer named Hillary live in the Flooded Zone, helping people in need. If you ever watched the movie Cemetery Man and you like that sort of thing, this book will be a treat for you. It’s like that movie but without the eroticism and a lot more humor to it. I’m very happy to have picked this one up. It’s very refreshing in a way, which is weird because there’s nothing particularly new in this book. The art and the writing have this enthusiasm for the medium that is contagious in a way and I had more fun than I expected. Looking forward to the second issue.

Phantasy Star 3

 

Yesterday I finished Phantasy Star 3 with my brother. It’s funny, I had the impression this is by far the worst of the first 3 Phantasy Star titles but reading my reviews for Phantasy Star 1 and 2, it seems like they’re not too far apart. The third one for sure has the most scattered art direction for the monsters. They’re all over the place and most look rushed to meet the deadline. They have no uniformity whatsoever, some look like crappy Dune character clones, others like wind up toys. Music is generally good and the idea of playing through several generations of the same family is pretty interesting, despite the fact the game stays pretty much the same no matter who you’re playing as. Plot for this one is about this big bad that made his way into the spaceships the Palmians used to escape the destruction of their planet thousands of years ago. The ship you’re in has been drifting in space for who knows how long because there’s no one left that knows how to pilot the thing. A classic Star Trek tale. There’s also a cyborg revolt and family feuds, all told in a rather disjointed manner. There are so many monster encounters and MacGuffin hunting inside labyrinths even if you’re trying to follow the plot you’ll forget what you’re doing most times.

The game looks OK and sounds good. Combat is the same old same old, not really a problem. The real problem with Phantasy Star 3 is the backtracking and the layout of dungeons. The amount of backtrack is truly mind boggling. It feels like the game is trying to defeat both your characters with the monsters and you personally with constant backtracking, furiously testing your patience every time you have to go somewhere. To make you more likely to quit, the dungeons are built to force you to zigzag towards your target, and the correct path always turns out to be the longest one.

So anyways, we cheated. One hit kill and invulnerability. The thing is, those two cheats only solve the heal items maintenance (as in, you don’t need any), leaving the most frustrating part of the gameplay intact so you can experience it in all its glory. All that said, this game does have a lurid charm to it and there are several cut scenes that punctuate the milestones in the plot rather well. So you keep going. We also used maps and a FAQ. There’s enough going back and forth as it is and wandering around lost in those huge maps was out of the question.

It probably took around 10 to 12 hours to complete this thing. It was worth it in a completionism sort of way, having played the first 2. Now the fourth one is the last of the ‘classic’ Phantasy Star titles before the franchise became an mmorpg thingie. I heard good things about 4, I’ll guess we’ll see.

Baldur's Gate 3

 

 

Underwhelming. That’s the one word to describe my feelings after putting well over 100 hours in Baldur’s Gate 3. It started out good, carried out OK, just to have the whole thing come crashing down with one of the most underwhelming, shitty, rushed, patchy, lackluster, unsatisfying finales I’ve ever seen in a video game, and especially one so laser focused on story-telling. I seriously have seen better endings in Puyo Puyo games, and that is a Tetris game basically. Jesus Christ, it’s so crappy it kills my enthusiasm for a replay, which I was considering all the way up to the end (I was intentionally ignoring the wizard class during my playthrough in order to focus on it for a replay.) So there, that’s my paragraph summary for Baldur’s Gate 3. It hurts that the game sent me off with such disregard for its own story and characters. Now for the detailed review.

2 months ago my sibling got this game, played it for a couple of hours and then spent an entire weekend riffing it. He hated the narrator, hated the characters, found the atmosphere of the game phony and the exploration uninteresting. He disliked how the story is mostly told instead of shown and how nobody can ever shut the fuck up. Meanwhile, on the internet side of things, I’m reading how this game is pathetic, how you can be non-binary, how it focuses on romance and sex and it’s a disgrace to the Baldur’s Gate franchise altogether. After watching an official trailer and all it showed was monsters kissing  I decided I would not be playing the game despite enjoying the first Baldur’s Gate a lot. I thought the game was not for me and just forgot about it. Except I didn’t and a week later decided to give it a try, just to see how bad it was.

And the internet was once again wrong. Not entirely, just mostly wrong. Yes you can choose non-binary and give yourself a skin disease in character creation. You can see dicks and tits. This however has literally zero impact on the narrative or gameplay. The romance is there but again it’s not nearly as big as people were saying. There’s a whole lot of stuff to do here other than trying to fuck your companions. They all have their own lives and problems going on that you can explore and know about without the ‘fucking them’ part. In summary, I know why Larian focused so hard on these details of the game when promoting BG3. It was to get the dummies on twitter to talk about the game and make them purchase it. And it worked. They knew talking about how you can choose non-binary in character creation was going to generate social media clout for the dummies. And the internet, being the idiot it is, fell for it. Why would you talk about challenging turn-based combat (this game has it btw)? The Divinity and DnD geeks are going to purchase this game anyways, so why bother.

The media focus on these parts of the game however gave me something very valuable when starting with a new game: ZERO EXPECTATIONS. Because of the whole buzz generated around BG3 and what people were talking about I had pretty much negative expectations for it. I didn’t even think there was going to be a game there, more like a woke walking simulator. Instead I found a game with solid, even challenging classic turn-based encounters. So challenging in fact I had to actually take the time to read the spells and potion ingredients. I realized there IS an actual video game in Baldur’s Gate 3! I was so damn happy about it, being a fan of the first games and a D&D player since AD&D days. I was elated when I actually suffered a TPK on the Goblin camp. It made me so happy I was being forced to play smart in order to survive.

But I wasn’t happy about all aspects of the games right away. Some things bothered me greatly and some things needed getting used to. First, my brother was correct. Characters in Baldur’s Gate 3 won’t shut the fuck up. Not for the first 10 hours at least. They quiet down a little bit after that. It was hard for me getting used to this. I don’t usually play games heavily focused on telling their stories through voice acting. Usually it’s just a block of text. And the narrator voicing the text you can read at the bottom of the screen for yourself was even harder to get used to. I’ve been reading video game fluff for over 30 years now, so you can imagine I can read these things in half a second. The narrator on the other hand is acting and reciting these lines like a troubadour. It took me a while to take a step back and let the narrator do her job. Once I got used to the pacing of a game that is focused on conversations for plot points, it was OK. In fact I even grew fond of the acting. In fact I have to say I’ve never seen such good voice acting all around. Not in cartoons, movies or games. They really went all in on this aspect of it. Even the random animals you can talk to using animal speak spells or potions have excellent voice actors. The cats and several birds in particular have very amusing and endearing one liners. Little by little this game won me over. They knew the voice acting is one of the better parts of their game and relied heavily on it. For example, I had to redo an entire session because of a crash and the same stretch that took me an hour I finished in about 25 minutes, doing everything the same way but skipping the dialogue. Turns out so much of the game itself is just you listening to people talking. I wouldn’t be surprised if my 120 hour run of BG3 has at least 40 or so of me just sitting there listening to people talking about stuff.

Some things I couldn’t get used to however. The first of these is the camera. It’s wonky as hell. It flips and jumps and makes sudden turns that make you click on things by accident. I can’t even begin to count how many times I accidentally clicked on Lae’zel while trying to see a threshold or passageway. The inventory windows are a little bit weird and they have a tendency to show up in inconvenient places and they’re even more inconvenient to drag around the screen. Again, can’t count how many times I accidentally clicked on something else while trying to drag a window around to compare items or whatever. The sellers are also a bit weird. Each character has to deal with the seller individually and it makes it a pain to check and compare for items across all characters. Those are minor issues though and it’s not a big deal. For myself at least.

The bugs did bother me though. And there are so many of them. I’m sure a lot of them must have been ironed out by now. There’s a whole area of the game in my version that is basically broken. Some helmets and things keep jumping from the characters’ heads and float above the character models instead. Several pieces of dialogue repeat themselves if you approach the characters from a less than obvious direction, or won’t play right. The game crashed over a dozen times and in one particular case I lost over an hour of progress. I tend to be quite forgiving towards technical issues like these, so whatever. I just need to download a newer version if I ever play this thing again.

As for the gameplay, it’s a turn-based RPG. For a game that is supposed to be some innovator within the RPG genre, I found the gameplay itself to be same old same old. Yes the animation is fancier now and the characters have one liners and the sound effects are cool but it’s the turn-based RPG we have been playing for decades now. I don’t have a problem with it but it surprised me how standard it is. Then again, this is just 5th edition D&D in video game format. I liked how you get to roll dice for ability checks, though I would think for people who are not into tabletop gaming this must look odd and out of place. Why have a long dice roll animation when we know the result can be had virtually as soon as you click your mouse? Still, being a tabletop gamer myself I approve of this. There are many situations where I just wish the game gave you nat 20s to use in difficult roles instead of rerolls (inspiration). There’s about 5 or 6 roles in BG3 that you need a crit and it pissed me off I had to resort to save scumming to get it. In this too BG3 feels very much like an old game like classic Fallout games and the first Baldur’s Gate where you pretty much had to save scum, get incredibly lucky or die.

Moving on to another aspect of the gameplay I want to talk about: exploration. This is where I’ll start to get into the plot and atmosphere side of things. So let me put a SPOILERS ALERT right here. If you want to experience this game for yourself then stop here. You’ve been warned.

Alright. The exploration of this game is also nothing new. In fact it’s pretty close to how exploration is done in the original Baldur’s Gate. The main thing about this though is the general atmosphere and mood of the places you explore. BG3 locations exist in the Faerûn continent, more specifically western of Faerûn, along the Sword Coast. This area is the most used for D&D games because of its potential for adventure. It’s a dangerous place too, except BG3 fails to really convey any sense of real danger or even a sense of wilderness. I never quite felt like I was exploring the wilderness and ancient temples, it felt more like exploring a mini golf course or a movie set. It’s the same feeling of exploration I get in Zelda games but in Zelda I have a sense it’s on purpose and in Baldur’s Gate 3 I feel like this is mostly an accident. I think the main factor behind this is because every single place you can explore, there lies some scripted event for you. Everywhere you go there are boulders and trees and rocks that block your way, even though you have teleport and fly and magically enhanced jumps. It makes no sense to be this restricted to open road but the game requires to railroad your exploration severely so you get these script events sitting there for, hopefully in order. So instead of getting the feeling of exploration, you get the feeling you’re looking for a particular store in the shopping mall. There’s very little sense of danger or mystery. It pretty much feels connect the dots.

There’s still fun to be had with the exploration but it quickly turns from “what’s out there?” to “what exposition dump is scripted for me at the end of this road?”. My sibling pretty much hated this and I’m guessing a number of people would be bothered by it as well. I was more prone to accept this for a few reasons. First, I’ve explored these areas in the past the way they were meant to be explored: the tabletop, classic RPG experience. I read the books and played lots of games in the Forgotten Realms setting so I was curious to know how a video game released in the current year would handle it. My brother on the other hand has no particular interest in D&D and was experiencing BG3 as a video game first and foremost. He compared it with the exploration in the Elden Ring which he says is infinitely better. Since I have a connection with these locations prior to this game it was fun for me to “explore” them. Also I didn’t play Elden Ring.

The graphics are another reason for this lack of grit. Everything feels too pristine, shiny, movie set props. Even the cobwebs look like cotton candy. The whole appearance of the game feels a little bit toothless and lacking in grit is what I’m saying. This is not a BG3 issue alone, I felt that way with video games like Pathfinder.

And finally we have the story itself. It’s a game pretty much focused on telling a story. So is it any good? Sorta. The main plot, again, for a game said to be revolutionary, is pretty milquetoast when you really look for what it is: A big baddie trying to take over the world. Not exactly brilliant, is it? Are there some interesting plot twists here and there? Yes, there are interesting moments in there, but it’s not revolutionary in any shape or form. But then again, BG3 doesn’t seem to care all that much about its main plot (something that really fucks up the ending, but more of that later), but instead is focus on the personal stories of your companions and here’s where I have problems with the story. It’s virtually THE SAME STORY for every.single.companion. To the point I was laughing out loud how ridiculous it got.

So we have Shadowheart. She’s rebelling against her Goddess. We have Lae’zel. She’s rebelling against her Goddess. We have Gale. He’s rebelling against her Goddess. We have Astarion. He’s rebelling against his soon-to-become-a-god vampire master. We have the Emperor. He’s rebelling against his basically-a-God Netherbrain. We have Halsin. He’s trying to rebuild his grove. Oh. OK. Halsin gets a pass I guess. It was hilarious to see the same story unfolding over and over and over again. Seriously? A story driven game and they couldn’t come up with something a little different for each of the main characters? It had to be the same fucking story for everybody? Fucking LOL man.

There’s this anti-god agenda that REALLY, REALLY trumps everything else in the story. It’s like the writers completely forgot the Gods in D&D are an actual thing that exists with actual powers and stuff. Instead we get these toothless, sleazy Gods made in order for the characters to appear “cool” and “rebels breaking free from tyranny and oppression”. Yeah, don’t make me laugh, BG3. These are lvl 4 characters, they’re not breaking free of SHIT. If I was DMing this I would make sure to show the players just how out of touch this plotline is with the actual tabletop game, but whatever. For one all the magic would be basically gone. All clerics would lose their powers, all paladins would become mere fighters. This is what you would get for fucking with Gods in an actual D&D game, but these milquetoast Gods is all the writers could come up with so we’re rolling with it I guess. And when you get a good, helpful Goddess in the game (Selune) she’s severely handwaved and ignored, despite being a major aspect for Shadowrun down the line. Again, fucking whatever, I just went with it.

Since all the characters’ plotlines are basically the same and the major plotline is “kill the big baddie” there’s not all that much to talk about, instead I want to mention a few things the game did get right in my opinion in regards to the flavor of these stories at least. First the plotline with Astarion, easily the best one. Not only is the actor probably the best one in an already excellent cast, the game nailed for me the general atmosphere of vampiric decadence and how gay vampires are in general. This is an impression I always had about vampires since reading Dracula and Anne Rice novels like Interview with a Vampire. They’re just incredibly gay and decadent. And I don’t mean necessarily sexual, Dracula has 3 wives after all, but their lust for human blood really puts them in this “sensual area” of interaction where they need to basically give you the kiss of death in order to feed, and they’re usually very urban libertine types, prone to unusual almost-sexual and straight up sexual behavior. I gotta say this game really got it and I was happy to witness I’m not the only one that feels vampires should have that atmosphere about them. Astarion is a character that nailed these particular aspects of vampires for me and it made me quite happy to watch it unfold, however cliched and predictable his plotline is. When we finally get to Cazador there’s one of the gayest, most vampiric scenes I’ve ever witnessed in a video game and it was great, just perfect.

As for Lae’zel I mostly liked how she’s very much how I imagine Githyankis to sound and behave (when they’re not outright fucked up and evil) and it was nice we got a more noble character from a race that is basically a bunch of raiders. It’s cool they saw that potential there but at the same time this has been done before so, meh. Meh also goes for every other character. Didn’t care at all about Gale (a lvl1 nobody character that happens to be the lover of the Goddess of Magic? lolnope). He’s mostly there so Elminster can be inserted here and there in the story but the whole thing including Elminster himself are pretty much shoehorned in there without any narrative grace or taste. It’s mostly pointless, it goes nowhere and the guy playing Elminster is trying too hard to sound like Gandalf. I know Elminster is just a clone of Gandalf but come on. They have an Aasimar there too but the necromancer keeping her in captivity is way more interesting than her (and you have to kill him, which sucks.)

There’s plenty of side characters with better stories than the main ones, because at least their plot is different from the ‘rebel against the gods’ thing. The whole Tiefling situation there is cool, I mostly enjoyed anything related to Raphael and Hope as well. Barcus has a really nice friendship story that is better than the main romances that you can engage with the main characters. Then you have Shadowheart and the only thing that caught my attention there was how her head model is one of the most attractive 3D models I’ve ever seen in a video game. She looks stunning, especially with the dark hair. As far as her story goes however it’s pretty run-of-the-mill. There’s also a dog you find in act I with a very endearing little tale, again, better than some of the stuff written for the main characters. I mostly enjoyed the depiction of the Goblinoids and most monsters. I’ve been looking at illustrations for these creatures since the second edition and it didn’t disappoint.

Be that as it may, despite all the lack of grit, the predictable plot line, the lack of variation, I was enjoying myself. D&D is part of my childhood, everything has an endearing air to me, even when I disagree with what they’re doing. So I kept playing. It’s not a bad game. Main encounters are challenging, there are tons of weapons, scrolls, objects, potions, ingredients, food and wine and gadgets to collect, read about and use. So after over a 100 hours of this and over two months bonding with the characters and locations, you reach the end. And the ending for Baldur’s Gate 3 is really god damned awful. The worst part of the game hands down.

It’s about 30 seconds long, the main characters get a single line or none at all, no epilogue, barely any closing or care. Rushed out the door with complete disregard for the story, the very effort that went in the rest of the game and the player himself. It’s so bad it’s obviously a scheduling thing. It’s crystal clear they had no time to finish this game properly. Several stories that seem to be pointing to a certain culmination and having their loose ties resolved never happen. No epilogue, nothing. You spend the whole game politicking and solving people’s problems in order to make them your allies and none of them show up and it doesn’t really matter after all.  “Thanks to you the whole continent of Faerun is safe, good bye now” THE END. Wow. It almost made me sad. I would be happier with a block of text with a little bit more enthusiasm than this poorly made 30 seconds of pointless small talk. It really undermines the rest of the game when the ending is this fucking bad.

To add to that ending there’s also the problem of how boring the last few hours of gameplay got leading to it. They tried to make epic looking battles in turn-based combat. The mistake was putting a lot of enemies to fight against you in order to give a sense of menace. And you know what happens when you have 20+ enemies in a turn-based combat game? You move your guys and then are forced to watch as the game plays with itself, moving 20+ fucking units around the field for 5 minutes at a time. What a terrible idea that is. I almost gave up and switched to easy just to make things quicker but persevered because I felt like I wanted to “deserve” the ending. Then the ending rolls and it’s a disgrace. Then 2 hours of credit rolls.

So yeah despite all these problems, all in all I enjoyed it. I think it’s harder to enjoy this if you don’t have a previous connection to the D&D franchise and Forgotten Realms, if you don’t know who Elminster is or what an Illithid is. Sure the game will explain all those things to you but you don’t have any previous attachment to any of that, so it won’t be as important or endearing to you.

The Legend of Zelda

 

Finished The Legend of Zelda for the NES. The first Zelda game, released in 1986. I've played plenty of older games like this and the first thing that impressed me about this title is how merciful it is for a game of the 80s. You can save your progress, if you die you get to keep your items and money and if you die inside a dungeon you get to restart on the first room instead of having to walk all your way back inside. This encourages you to explore far and wide since you're not afraid to die in each step. Which is good because you'll die a lot, or at least I did.

Very soon you realize how fragile Link is. He is faster than most monsters in this land but boy his reach is awful when he's not in full health. While you are in full health, your sword shoots little sword bolts, giving you a ranged weapon as soon as you start the game. This is fine and well but once you get hit, you'll be dependent on Link's arms reach and he can only hit things that are an inch away from touching his nose. So if you get hit once you lose your ranged weapon and that means you'll be getting hit constantly from then on and die. Like I said this is not really a problem since you don't lose any money or items. And you get better as the game goes on, so it's all good.

Exploring is a major part of the game and it's a fun process. There's a little bit of trial and error in some dungeon locations but I wouldn't call it unintuitive. A couple of secret locations however I would call unintuitive. It's literally just random places you have to bomb to open a passage. The items you find there are optional but I would like to be able to find them without having to place bombs in every square of the overworld map. I ended up using a guide.

The meat of the game is exploring the overworld to find items and health containers, finding a dungeon entrance and proceeding to kill the monster inside and fetch a piece of the triforce. Here's the whole plot for this game, 2 lines you can read when you turn the game on but don't push start: "Many years ago prince darkness Ganon stole one of the triforce with power. Princess Zelda had one of the triforce with wisdom. She divided it into 8 units to hide it from Ganon before she was captured. Go find the 8 units Link to save her." And that's it. I don't think you need more than that, really.

The dungeons themselves are engaging, fun to run around and, again, they're quite merciful. I only had difficulty in about 5 or 6 rooms throughout all the 9 dungeons in this game. The only one that is really hard is the last one. And I only beat it in a reasonable amount of time thanks to save scumming, something you can do without but then you'll be replaying this dungeon for days before you either get good at it or get lucky. But that's not the only problem. You see, you can only carry 8 bombs at a time and in this dungeon you have to blow up holes in many, many walls. Which walls you should use a bomb on is a matter of guessing most of the time. That means you'll be running out of bombs to use constantly and will have to go outside the dungeon, fetch more bombs, return, kill all the monsters again and try different walls. It starts to feel like busy work fast. Usually I don't mind this type of thing but here I did. Still, for a RPG released in 1986, this is nothing. Try playing Faery Tale Adventure. It's insane how brutal and outright punishing games from this era can be.

There's 3 tracks for this game. Overworld music, a tune I'm certain you'll recognize, the dungeon track and the last dungeon track. All of them are excellent. They're all 10 second loops but I don't mind that at all. In fact I find repetitive music very soothing. And most importantly, it's all square waves and triangle waves, none of that generic symphony so many RPGs use these days.

Graphics are pretty good. Especially in the overworld map they managed to convey different biomes across the land which is quite nice. I find pixel art from this era endearing to look at. There is solid art direction here but I feel like Castlevania spoiled me forever on graphics for this particular console. Nothing looks as cool as that.

I would also like to quickly talk about the monsters here. If you ever played a Zelda game before, you'll be surprised how you'll find most monsters you come across in later games are already on the very first Zelda title. Famous ones like Stalfos, Octoroks, bats, mummies, those flying things called peahats, spider-like Tectikes, they're all already here in their beautiful 8-bit appearance. Even Dodongo, a boss monster you find in Ocarina of Time is already here as well, except he looks more like a triceratops in this one. But you kill him in the same way; feeding him bombs. What a terrible way to go.

So all in all, soothing music, nice graphics, good monster variety, nice enough map to explore, fun dungeons. Yeah I can see why this game was a hit when it came out, so much so that Zelda became one of the bread and butter franchises for Nintendo. I say it's well deserved.

Shiren the Wanderer 2: Oni Invasion! Shiren Castle!

 

This is a classic dungeon crawl game with the ‘you move they move’ type of system. It’s a basic one at that but it works. Along the way you’ll collect herbs, scrolls, staffs, food, weapons and building materials, but more of that later. Weapons come in a huge variety since you can combine their magical properties, the seals, using a special item called synthesis pot. The weapons you have are the most enduring aspect of your character since everything else you carry are consumables. Even your levels reset at the end of each run. That’s how it works in this game; there are 16 floors with one stop at the middle of the path. Once you enter the dungeon you can only return to the village with your stuff if you beat all the floors. You can choose to go back before that but you’ll lose your items by doing so. At the end of the run your level resets to 1 again, making your weapons particularly important and valuable.

 There are over 160 types of monsters lurking the corridors and rooms of Shiren’s world and they really make the crawling varied and interesting. They go from your basic slime that in this game kinda looks like a cat, all the way up to magic users, demons and heavily armored spiders. They can also evolve and gain levels and even the slime can become pretty tough if you find them in their more powerful forms. The monsters are not the only thing you have to worry about while adventuring. Often you’ll find traps on the ground and here’s my only complaint about this game.

 

Traps are plentiful, interesting and some have very cool animations. The problem is you’ll have to step on them, even if you can clearly see where they are. This game happens in a grid and sometimes you’ll have a trap right inside a corridor with no way of walking around it. Shiren can’t jump tiles and the only way to deactivate traps is by destroying them, but you need a particular weapon for that, a mallet, and you only run into those very, very, very late into the game. To add salt to injury, they eventually break, so even mallets are not a permanent solution to this. Basically you’ll be walking right into traps that you can clearly see and that always makes me a little annoyed. The other problem I have with the traps game is how to detect them: you swing your sword in front of you and if there’s a trap there, it will show up. Sounds simple enough, but swinging your sword takes a move. That means the game gets twice as slow if you’re swinging your weapon after every step you take, making trap detection a very dull, time consuming chore. There are some spells that reveal the location of traps but I felt those spells are rare to come by. Best solution is to just walk right into them and take the damage. Only a few traps are truly dangerous so you’ll be able to deal with the damage 99% of the time.

To help you on your quest you’ll find companions along the way and they add some interest to the gameplay, but their main function in the game, I believe, is how they’re involved in the story. You’ll find a total of 5 buddies to join you as you progress to the game. Some of them have their own special abilities, some are pretty much like you and you can even give them equipment. The only really useful one in my opinion is the walking drawer that can help you with carrying items. This is a major aspect of Shiren 2: what to carry and what to leave behind. To talk about your inventory I have to explain to you the plot a little bit.

 

So you’re Shiren, a type of wanderer warrior that goes around helping people. One day you and your friend Koppa, a talking weasel, end up in a village at the foot of a mountain. You go in for a nice bowl of udon and while you’re enjoying your meal demons attack. Apparently this is going on for a while and after a little bit of talking to the local prophetess and the mayor, Shiren receives the task of building a castle to protect the villagers from the attacks. Due to plot convenience, at the summit of the mountain there lives a group of castle builders… bear with me here. Those guys can make really good castle parts, but they need building materials, more specifically, 5 of them, that would be soil, water, wood, rock and iron sand. And, you guessed it, you can find that stuff by going inside the mountain where the dungeons are, and collect all that stuff as you go up the mountain. That’s how the story justifies the gameplay and it’s done rather well. Not that you needed a particular excuse. It gives you enough reason to keep going inside those dangerous places and it’s satisfying to reach the end with lots of building materials for the castle. You give them to the master builder, he builds the castle parts you need and toss it downstream back to the village, where a nice spot is ready to do some castle building.

Your inventory has very limited space, so you’ll be constantly struggling with it. Should you take a risk and toss that herb or food in order to bring one more iron sand? That’s the type of decision you’ll be making all the time and it adds some difficulty to the whole thing. It doesn’t end there. Building materials are not all made equal. Each of the 5 materials come in 3 varying degrees of quality: regular, good and perfect. This is important because the demons will be constantly attacking your castle and the quality of the materials you use have an impact on how sturdy the construction is. Only parts built entirely of perfect materials will be indestructible.

 

 

When going up the mountain you can choose what trail to take. Easy, mid or hard. The easy trail will only have normal quality materials, mid will have good and sometimes perfect and hard has more perfect and good materials. So you have the monsters, the traps, different items that you can combine, trail difficulties, the companions and different types of materials you should find and bring up to the top to the builders. All of this makes for a very entertaining dungeon crawl experience.

To add to the experience you have the plot itself that helps to give you a sense of progress. As you build this castle, you get to know more about this village, your companions and the demons themselves. It’s nothing extraordinary but the little stories that play out as you interact with the villagers are really nice and dare I say, quite endearing sometimes. It’s all done in this optimistic, lighthearted, whimsical manner that makes for a very soothing game. Speaking of soothing, the graphics are charming and add to the atmosphere perfectly. The characters have this blend of 2D and 3D aspects to them. It works. The music is truly excellent and it shows the producers knew the grinding of going up and down the dungeons works best with relaxing tunes.

Each individual aspect of Shiren 2 is nothing really new and maybe not done inventively or extremely well but when you put everything together it makes for a very excellent game. It took me about 17 hours to complete and I very much enjoyed all of it. It just felt very nice to traverse the dungeons with your friends, specially the walking drawing Mamo, while you gather some building materials, deal with colorful and varied monsters, step right into clearly there traps and at the end of the day, build decorous fortifications against not-really-evil-but-clearly-misguided demons. It’s optimistic, lighthearted and a perfect game to spend the afternoons with.

As it turns out, once you complete the game, a whole new gameplay becomes available. One of the villagers wants to create a monster zoo, so a new dungeon opens up where you can find a special item known as monster pots. Basically they are pokeballs and now you can go on in these monster capture runs and use your captured monsters to fight for you. They gain levels and everything and it plays very differently from the main game, since inside this dungeon you can’t use any weapons. That was a very nice surprise and it gives a lot of replayability. This is a game I would play once a year even without that part.

 

 

 

On a personal note, it took me a long time to play this one. I knew of its existence for years and the visuals always attracted me but forgot all about it for years at a time, for some reason or another never getting in the right mood to play it. Now that I have it’s one of my favorite Nintendo 64 titles. I quite enjoy games with this mood and atmosphere and a dungeon crawl game where you can grind on in a relaxed and lighthearted environment is right up my alley, though it gives me an intense sense of waste and depression when I step out of the game and realize sooner or later, you have to come back to reality, and reality looks particularly uglier and cruel when you step out of the world of Shiren the Wanderer 2: Oni Invasion! Shiren Castle! I even had nightmares the night after I finished the game, which was odd. I can’t remember what they were about other than they were nightmares. This is all particular to my own psyche of course and I very much recommend this game.

Now, on the technical side of things, make sure your video drive is vulkan if you’re using retroarch. I have the original hardware and can compare it side by side when it comes to n64 games. The other drivers give you a very crisp image and for n64 in particular that’s not how you want, since you’ll be looking at the “seams” of the graphics in many parts of the game. The way it looks on CRT with the original console is better since it makes the perfect amount of blending, giving a more uniform look. Maybe if you never played the original stuff you’ll be fine with that very sharp look but since I got so used to how they look in old TVs that it really bothers me when it’s sharp and crisp.

All that said, I still don’t feel I was able to capture how nice of an experience it was for me to play this game. Shiren 2 is filled with quiet moments where you just stop there for a moment and enjoy the fact you're in a quiet place and that is all there is to it. It's a colorful, immersive little world and I've grown very fond of it. I guess the only way to find out if you'll like this is to try it out for yourself.
 

 

Maptroid Worlds

 

 

Just finished Maptroid Worlds. It's one of those games that makes me feel in control, and I mean that in the most fundamental sense. Maptroid feels very compact and clean, its gaming concepts and visuals are stripped down to very fundamental levels. So here you are exploring this tiny "golf course galaxy", it's devoid of life and you're the only one there, exploring these little planets, collecting equipment and keycards so you can explore some more. You pick up disks along the way to read some very basic lore about the place. Music is really, really good. And then, about an hour later you explored everything. 100% done, little credits role, you're back to the title screen.

And that's it, really, a bite-size experience. It's very relieving in a way to experience Maptroid. Just you, a nice tune on the background and running around for ruined disks in thick forests, underwater and rocky deserts. It's not a nostalgic feeling exactly, but if you're kinda old by now and your infancy games were all 2D and much simpler than they're today, this might hit just right for you. I thinking about people that grew up with GB, GBC and Nes in particular.

のんのびより (Non Non Biyori)

 

 

Non Non Biyori follow the idyllic lives of Hotaru, Komari, Natsumi, and Renge, a group of friends aged 7 to 14 and their little adventures in the rural paradise of Asahigaoka. The show is very episodic in nature and you can pretty much watch in any order you like. I think it’s very hard to add anything new when talking about this, for two reasons. First, everybody already watched this. Second, there’s not that much to talk about. It’s a very well established formula at this point. A group of sweet, endearing characters living the best time of their lives in the Japanese countryside. Non Non is just better than most at it. The plots are not what makes this special though. You’ll go through all the same stuff; fireworks, melon and a hot summer, a beach episode, a school festival episode and so forth. What makes it better than most are the characters, they felt more unique and realized than most entities populating Iyashikeis and CGDCT I’ve seen.

I particularly liked two characters. First would be Komari, one of the Koshigaya sisters. I enjoyed how she encapsulated the ideas children have about being a grown up. Liking bitter foods, reading fashion magazines, liking certain types of music and dressing up. The funny part is she’s actually going through the process of becoming an actual adult through the conflicts with her slacker sister. She finds herself in a position of responsibility at her home, having to perform domestic tasks and helping her sister to not get too unhinged and mediating between her and their mother. It’s interesting how she never realizes those things are what is turning her into an adult, perhaps the most adult, responsible person in her group but since she has an idealized idea of what’s about she gets lost in things like having a phone or using a certain type of clothing. The way the internal conflict of this character is handled is one of the best parts of this show in my opinion and what I enjoyed the most in it.

The other character I enjoyed following around is Kaede, the candy shop owner. Now, this is a character more or less on the fringe of this whole thing. First, she’s the only one who has financial problems, not exactly an iyashikei thing to have in there. It’s a bit of a mystery how she manages to have any money at all. The town is obviously dying, there’s simply not enough kids in there to sustain her business. At one point she agrees to close shop for an entire day for 30 bucks, so times are certainly dire. She also has very little business sense since we can safely infer the families living there need to go to the next town to get basic supplies. She could definitely make more things available at her shop so townsfolk would stop having to do groceries in another town. It seems this candy shop is a very well established business and it’s been there since forever. I think she’s living on some inheritance or something, and is keeping this shop out of some nostalgia or filial piety, that’s the conclusion I got after watching two seasons of this show. The other thing I like about her is her position as observer, this is basically a trope you usually have when the show is centered around children growing up. You’ll have adults around whose life gets a little bit sweeter by watching the whole process and Kaede is pretty much one of those. It helps to see the impact the main characters have on the people around them, which in turn makes them more interesting to watch.

Worth a watch if you like the genre. Art and music are of high quality and add a lot to the show.

ハッピードリームシンドローム

 

It's that time again I come here and tell you this is a beautiful game. You might start to assume I will praise any game I play but that's not true. What happens is I play through several VNs before committing to one. I would have played maybe 10 to 20 min of 4 or 5 titles before finding one I feel like reading all the way to the end and of course I'll review only those that I actually read all the way through. This is the latest one, Happy Dream Syndrome. This is the type of game that makes me wonder why nobody played it and most importantly, why there are so many boring plots for anime each season when they have stories like this lying around the internet. I don't get it. The other 4 guys who played this on yt all loved it and it's 5 stars on novelgame.

The art for this is pretty good. It has its own style going for it and it makes the characters very memorable. It doesn't look like a VN backed by a professional studio of course, but it is still pretty good and it has more charm and strength than a lot of generic 'highly professional' illustrations I see out there on VNs. The music is composed of 3 piano medleys. Not the best but they really work for this game. I had some problems with the gameplay though. Game has a couple of bugs and at least for me it's broken on Firefox. About 2 hours in there's a small animation scene and it doesn't matter what I try, I can't make the clip to load and run on firefox. Had to switch to Chrome and redo a huge portion of the game to get where I was. About 15 minutes of skipping. Free games though, you can't really complain. Lots of routes to take here. In fact I ended up cheating and looking up how to get one of the endings, then I regretted doing it because it was really obvious and the only thing I hadn't tried, despite being obvious.

The story begins with a trope I really like and I think everyone who played a lot of rpgmaker games back in its heyday have a soft spot for it as well. The protagonist wakes up with no idea who he is or where he's at. He lost all memory of his past and it's on the same level of wisdom about the world he's in as we the players starting this game for the first time. Protagonist memory loss must be the single most popular trope for RPG Maker games for the first decade of the 2000s for sure and here we have it, too.

This guy wakes up in a hospital bed full of bruises everywhere. He has no idea what happened. Hospital seems empty so he decides to wander around until finding a nurse sleeping in another room. She explains he was found in the woods nearby and this is a psychiatric sort of hospital. Sort of, because this takes a lot of turns. As you interact with the other patients, things begin to make less sense until it begins to make more sense and then it becomes a matter of who to trust and the it goes all over the place. It's really good. This game also introduced me to something I really like but didn't know until now and that is female characters too old to care for stuffed animals but still have a strong attachment to them for some tragic reason. It hits some really specific commiseration trigger in my brain, hard to explain.

I guess I'll try to give you a not nearly complete run of the whole mystery, in a single paragraph. Spoilers, don't read this if you plan to play this game for yourself.

Toi-kun wakes up in a hospital with memory loss. He wanders around, and finds the hospital only has 3 patients. Asahi, Aki and Leo, a nurse named Meru and a doctor named... Doctor. They're all really, REALLY damaged people mentally though of course you don't know this from the start. Asahi is the first patient you meet and 'solve'. She lost her one and only friend, a stuffed animal toy shark named Garo. I won't go through all her story but basically her problem is she's a complete anti-social individual incapable of being close to anyone but her toy Garo. You find the toy on the same day she's leaving the hospital. You part ways promising to be friends. She lets go of Garo before leaving, which is very weird, it's almost like she is brainwashed. Then you meet another damaged patient, Aki. Aki is only there for the money as he's taking part in the happy pill experiment... but not really, he's just a 'regularly' super damaged person and is coping by pretending he's there by his own volition. I won't go through his story but it involves being poor and having to work from a very young age to support his siblings, tragic stuff. He also ends up being released. Lastly you have Leo, a really nice guy you find in the library. He seems very smart and calm but in reality he has bouts of violent behavior and ends up killing a cat close to the mid-end of the game to great dramatic effect. All these people suspect each other and the actual goals of the treatment they're receiving, and they also suspect the medical staff, and are investigating the hospital by snooping around, so you get caught up not knowing who to trust or not to trust. On top of all this, you're trying to figure it out what is going on with your memory and trying to make sense of what happened and who you're and the staff doesn't seem to care or be able to help. The choices available to you reflect this and it makes for very interesting unraveling. I'm skipping hours of dialogue, but the whole thing makes for a great mystery. Leo's story is one of domestic violence. He and his sister ran away from home but he soon realizes he's just as violent and dangerous as his dad and several things leads him to end up in this hospital. So when you go through all these stories and several flashbacks that you end up connecting by the end, you get to go outside (you were forbidden to do so) and the truth is revealed. As far as your memory wipe, the fact is you killed your mother during one of her psychotic episodes. She is obsessed with her son and won't allow him to do anything because she's afraid he'll leave her too, just like dad did. It's a really sick relationship that ends up with Toi stabbing her in the stomach. Then through some more shenanigans you end up in the hospital that turns out it's not a hospital at all. This is actually a religious cult funded on some weird idea about a God that grants hypnotic powers to a chosen few. These powers are real but it's really hard to find the right people that can open the third eye, so they're basically kidnapping youngsters to test their potential. This is all a secret of course, so they basically have to dispose of everyone who doesn't make it, which means all the other patients you met are probably dead. If you make all the right choices and manage to survive all this crazy rodeo, you find out Meru is conducting all these under orders and she has those hypnotic power herself. You convince her she can leave all this behind and come with you. The end. Also Doctor gets hit at the back of the head and is probably left to bleed to death in the woods. There are really no happy endings here, this is all really tragic but it's also really good and you should play it if you can.

https://novelgame.jp/games/show/4922?fes=1

You can watch someone else playing it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvPXLuwG5UM&list=PL0DEAPIYMmKG1396U8wJU4C06Dnby0yFo

約束の赤い折り紙を

 

As far as I'm aware Yakusoku no Akai Origami is the very first game by Hitotokinoyume, a team of 3 guys. They also released this mostly same game for mobile with room escape elements. I played the PC, VN version. I'm very impressed with their first attempt. Everything is solid and the story is pretty good. There are also some player friendly choices with the design I would love to see in all VNs, like highlighting the routes I already took so I don't have to reload when making a mistake, and showing me the paths I didn't take to reach a particular ending. Not many free stuff out there that will take the trouble to implement those things, it helps a lot. Everything else other than the plot is average though. Average art, average music. The characters do look a little bit uninspired but the backgrounds held my interest as they look like from an old point and click game but in a Japanese setting, it was interesting.

The plot is the main reason why you would play this. Religion plays a major part in the story. It's interesting to see a more 'religious-centric' view on Japanese spirituality. Usually in games and anime you have a very fantastic, mythological approach where you actually see the Gods and all the mythological creatures roaming around and interacting with humans. In such cases, there's no room for an exploration of religious behavior or religious belief, because there's no room for skepticism or thinking critically about religion. The Gods are right there! The Kappas roam the mountains. If a miku is doing something wrong, she just needs to ask the God she's serving and he or she is right there to respond, problem solved. When Mythology is a given like this, it's almost not a religion as a belief system, it's right in front of you. There are no doubts about it. Here though we have a more realistic view. Lots of conflict about belief and rituals and whatnot. It would be interesting to see more games taking this approach, I think it's a fairly unexplored territory, especially if you compare it with the more fantasy-based approach to Shinto and Japanese mythology that is absolutely everywhere in JP media.

I want to say this takes place at the beginning of the Meiji era based on some objects you can see around, but it might be a little later than that since the entire thing happens in a very tiny, isolated village. You have a very influential family, the Utsumi, having to deal with the task of giving thanks to the God protector of the place. Right away there's all sorts of weird things happening. You follow a girl called Tada, as she's trying to figure out all the weird things that start to happen to her on her 16th birthday. Voices whispering in the night, visions of a little girl inside the temple strangling an old man and little pieces of origami paper she keeps finding in the oddest places. As she goes back and forth asking people around about the past of the village and the upcoming festival, the plot unravels.

There's also point and click elements to find clues and objects that unlock more of the story. I'm not fond of that type of stuff in the middle of a VN but all those sections are simple enough and nicely spaced so it never gets annoying. It's a rather long one for a free title but it's worth a read.

https://novelgame.jp/games/show/6509
You can also watch it, some fairly talkative guy played it in 4 parts. Fair warning though, he's very enthusiastic about his own voice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7mk813n2hg

Konohana Kitan (このはな綺譚)

It's been a while since I saw an anime that hides its gold so deep. First 3 episodes of Konohana Kitan feel like a patience challenge. Reminds me of some Buddhist stories where a monk would let the aspiring student stand outside the temple for a couple weeks in the cold and heavy rain in order to test his resolve. Except here you have to endure the first 3 episodes that are guaranteed to push a lot of people away. Especially if you have something else to do. Characters just kinda fuss about with no plot and acting terribly generic. It gives every possible sign this is going to be completely forgetable. The first 3 episodes are trying to tell you it's a group of cute fox girls working at an inn for the gods. Just one more excuse to look at cute characters, please move on. Well, too bad, Ms. Tsubaki, I stood there and you had to let me in.

Then it gets good. The fourth episode really gives you the opportunity to look under the sweetness of these charming foxes. And if you sit there and connect some dots at leisure, it gets really interesting. So, these fantastic creatures are pretty much playing around with human emotions. They live so long that to them, human lives feel like a short dream, and they see no problem deluding humans because they have a hard time even seeing the difference. It makes sense. They must feel like it's OK to give people a nice dream instead of reality, after all, a human lasts as long as a soap bubble to them. Of course this idea of fantasy as a tool is what iyashikei itself is about in many ways.

Each episode we get a person in need to escape reality. An abandoned child, an workaholic, a suicidal. All darkness of reality must be destroyed. There's a very funny and profoundly revealing moment in the 8th episode where Yuzu meets a compulsive liar who ends up isolated from people. She lies because she finds life crushingly insipid. Yuzu, being a fox, can't understand what she's talking about, so to cheer the liar up she responds that her fox life is actually great! I had to pause right there and give a hollow laugh. There's such a gap between these creatures and humans it's almost a cruelty to be able to converse with them. It's like talking to a demi-god able to do all these amazing things and being close to one makes you more aware of your shortcomings. The story ends with the girl disappearing and going back to her own world. Her problems, to Yuzu, was nothing but a short walk on the beach. The second part of the episode deals with people who don't want to go back to reality. Again, hard not to make a connection of yourself watching Konohana.

Like I said, all darkness must be destroyed and this includes the complete destruction of my second favorite character (first being Sakura of course), Okiku. See, Okiku is a curse doll but she doesn't look like one. She looks pretty much like an Ichimatsu doll with the beautiful red kimono and the long black hair. I really like those dolls and here there is one, but not for long. They find her look too bleak and decide to mutilate her into a maid with silly purple hair. I suppose it could be worse. Then Sakura spent a good chunk of her time making Okiku fear for her life. Why is it that Yuzu doesn't pay more attention to this particular situation? That wasn't fair.

Everything I said is not really on the surface of the show but if you think too much about these I think you'll end up seeing it, too. Still, very emotional, cute stories all around with kindhearted characters and bittersweet endings. I feel like the manga must be a lot more interesting because it can deal with creepy cute effects of a gods' inn. It did show up here and there in the anime and it's probably coming from the manga. Also the author herself escapes to her own fantasy all the time. She's everywhere, wearing a fox mask. She knows what's up. She really does.

Hoozuki no Reitetsu (鬼灯の冷徹)

 

It's possible you might have talked to someone like Ms. Eguchi before. A person who has two or three very specific interests and is very knowledgeable about them. You might know a thing or two about those things as well, but not at all like that person. You end up doing all the listening. She goes on talking about the things she likes and it might be a little hermetic at first, you might even consider coming up with an excuse to leave, but soon you get caught up in her web and things get so interesting you end up completely immersed in it. Then, when you realize it, hours have passed and you were having a great time listening to that person, even though you didn't think much of it at first.

That's how I feel about Ms. Eguchi's title, Hoozuki no Reitetsu. She has a fascination for ink wash and traditional Chinese and Japanese painting, especially landscapes. But that's just the beginning, because she also knows a lot about Chinese and Japanese mythology and folklore, particularly things related to the other worlds. Hells and Heavens. Naturally she knows her Buddhism as well. When talking about these fantastic matters, she organizes everything around the type of men she likes. You can see this is going to get very interesting. Ms. Eguchi is a fascinating person, but you have to give her time to really enjoy where she's going.

Enter her main character, Hoozuki. He's a demon working in Hell for none other than Great King Enma, the ruler and supreme judge of the underworld. Hoozuki is handsome, quiet, self-contained, strong, level-headed, master of several arts, from gardening to cooking and medicine. He's reliant, chaste, organized, focused and can hold his liquor. Ms. Eguchi loves to talk about how cool he is and of course we agree, Hoozuki is a pretty amazing demon, he's awesome.

Ms. Eguchi is also very interested in language and her characters talk in a very literary manner. They don't talk in an old style, in fact their dialogues are very modern, contemporary business-like style, but they tend to use literary words, usually with very clear Chinese roots that nobody else uses. She'll make lots of jokes about it, too, so you'll have to watch it more than once… maybe thrice to really get them all.

She loves to think about folklore heroes and mythological creatures as entities who screwed up at some point and she loves to see their ugly side. It's hard to tell if she likes to drag those characters through the mud for its own sake, or if she does it so Hoozuki can fix them up, making him ever cooler and more attractive in the process. Probably a little bit of both. I'm not complaining, it's actually quite entertaining.

As you can imagine by what I've said so far, Ms. Eguchi's humor is rather peculiar and it doesn't always work outside her own head, but the atmosphere and the world where the jokes happen are so interesting you don't even mind. Also, her characters' designs are adorable when it needs to be and grotesque when it needs to be, everything works very well. They look good, endearing and cute. Not many people can draw traditional clothing like she does. Quick but elegant. Her art really stands out, though the anime may not convey it at all times.

Hoozuki no Reitetsu is a fascinating work and I'm really happy to find out she still has lots of ideas she wants to express. Soon after finishing Hoozuki, she began another title, Dekin no Mogura. Let's hope it's as good as this one.

Kaidan Restaurant (怪談レストラン)

 

Kaidan Restaurant is based on a series of horror short story books collection for children that ran from the mid 90s to 2010, when the last book got released, reaching 50 volumes. MAL says it's picture books but it's actually short story collections, each story goes for about 10 to 12 pages and every other story has an illustration to go along with it. I've personally read about 10 or so of these books and I feel like the anime does a very good job translating the material to animation.

The books and the anime are actually a sort of modern take on several classic horror, folktale stories and more modern urban legends. Most have Japanese sources but there are a good number of European stories as well. If you have any interest in Japanese literature, especially related to the weird, folk tales and horror, then you'll recognize a lot of these. Some of the stories are based on sources as old as the Konjaku Monogatarishu and Ugetsu Monogatari compilations. Some are based on very modern urban legends related to technology, like being able to talk to the dead through a cell phone, creatures from the Beyond being able to use TV signals to cross dimensions, etc.

Although it's a show written for children, you would be surprised how it doesn't shun away from a lot of things a show like this in the West would do. Children actually die in tragic ways here. This is not a spoiler, just a warning. It's also very well written, setting a good precedent; it's not because it's for children that it needs to be lazy, uninteresting and avoid exploring themes like death, loss, pain, tragedy and the like. Just remember, it is a show for kids first, so it won't wallow in depressing themes, but it uses well to tell the stories it wants to tell. It explores all these things very well and in a very Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai-ish way. That's how it usually starts; the 3 main characters, Shou, Ako and Reiko get together, usually after seeing something weird. Shou remembers a story relating to that event and tells it to the other characters. Sometimes the characters themselves go investigate whatever weird thing that happened in their town or in their school. Most episodes are divided into 3 stories, sometimes 2 and a couple of episodes have a single story.

This show was extremely popular in Japan in its demographic and it's easy to see why. For adults however, it might require a little bit of persistence. Some stories are rather mild and an episode here and there can be a little dull, but if you keep going, there are very good tales to go through, some quite tragic and emotionally charged. Each story is self contained so you can skip the ones you don't like, just make sure to watch the last episode. It's a very nice one and it gives some development to one of the main characters.

Each episode gets a little intro by Garcon, the ghost who runs the Kaidan Restaurant. In the books he serves the same purpose, welcoming  the main character of each story as he or she enters the restaurant to tell or be told a horror story. Here however, he just introduces the stories with the help of other supernatural creatures, but they happen in other places. He's also played by Mr. Hirata Hiroaki, one of the most charming male voices in the industry today.

Going with this show's premise of introducing each story as dishes, I think this anime is a good palate cleanser. If you watched something very somber or depressing, or if you just watched something too cute and excessively sweet or silly, then I think you'll enjoy going through this, especially if you're into horror. There's also a movie out there but what this really deserves is a second season. All in all, it's a very satisfying show to go through.

Lovely★Complex (ラブ★コン )

If you have been watching anime for a long time and are willing to explore several genres, Lovely Complex will end up crossing your path sooner or later. It's one of the big shoujo romantic comedies out there and a staple of its kind. It doesn't try to do anything new, instead it focuses on being a safe show that manages to pull all the regular tropes in a very entertaining manner. The story follows the highschool years of Risa and Ootani as their relationship evolves from friendship to romance.

Risa is the main character and it's mainly through her eyes we'll be following the story. She's way taller than her love interest Ootani and that's one of the main elements for the comedy part to happen, usually slapstick and hilarious facial expressions. Their height difference is a source of insecurity from both parties and a hindrance they have to overcome to be together. It also makes them a very memorable couple and part why people still remember this show fondly after all these years.

Their road to romance is what you would expect of a shoujo romantic comedy. Filled with misunderstandings, melodramatic moments and all sorts of badly handled emotions by Ootani and Risa that makes them getting together a lot more tempestuous and difficult than it should be, but that's a romcom anime for you. I feel like this is a very good show for people interested in having a clear picture of how a romantic comedy is put together. Being upfront about the tropes really works in this show's favor.

Expect them all: a dense character that can't take a hint. Characters witnessing an innocent scene and assuming it's something else, characters being dropped in the plot only as a hindrance for the pairing of the main couple to happen, characters not expressing their feelings or expressing them in confusing ways, etc.

Now, Lovely Complex does get repetitive here and there and if you're just watching to see the couple getting together in the end it might bother you it's taking so long, but if you're interested in how the author reworks the same tropes in different flavors and how the story progresses using the same basic conflict, then you'll have a lot of fun. It's a one-on-one romcom after all. I feel like Lovely Complex is a very good standart to the genre and after you watch it you'll have a good idea of the elements you don't like and the stuff you do want to see more of it.

夜は猫といっしょ (Yoru wa Neko to Issho)

There's a fair amount of manga about cats out there and in 2020 an artist going by the handle Kyuryu Z on Twitter began publishing his own observations and interactions with his pet cat named Kyuruga (a pun on the fact his sister's mobile phone tried to read the cat like a QR Code). Yoru wa Neko to Issho have since amassed over 700k followers on Twitter. Kadokawa picked it up for publication (the third volume came out in April 2022) and an anime adaptation was announced as well for the season of Summer 2022.

Unlike something like Ojisama to Neko that focus on the emotional attachment between pet and owner or Chi's Sweet Home that uses anthropomorphic cats for comedy, this title is centered around careful observation of cat behavior. If you ever owned a cat, most pages here will depict things very familiar to you. The fascination cats have for boxes, how they love to get in the way when you're staring at your screen monitor, pushing things off tables and so on. The author is very careful in his observations and the interest and comedy contained here flow in a very natural, peaceful, non-scripted manner. The author is obviously not forcing the jokes to happen and any funny moment comes from pure cat observation. It's pretty much a diary relating funny and amusing things cats do and how it can brighten someone's day. Kyuruga the cat is the main and only star here, at least for now. The other two characters, Fuuta and his sister are just there to observe and play with the pet and the rest of their lives are not explored in any capacity. It's all about the pet cat.

It's a SOL for sure and the art is rather unique. Doesn't seem like Kyuryu Z had any pretentions with his manga, it just grew organically and the art shows his concern to depict cat behavior and movement in an accurate manner but also as fast as possible. I'm really curious how the anime adaptation is going to look like.

I highly recommend you check it out if you enjoy cats (it will be an endless source of 'my cat does that too!' moments) and also because you can actually read all this interesting stuff for free! The author keeps a blog with all the stories archived. I spent a lazy afternoon going through every story and it was an afternoon decently spent. Head to his Twitter, you can find all the links from there.

Himouto! Umaru-chan R (干物妹！うまるちゃんR )

 The second season is a lot better than the first. We're finally past the focus on the paradisiacal and gimmicky otaku life of Umaru and her dual personality. The focus now is the development of the characters' friendship and their daily life together. A lot more time is dedicated to the other girls and their problems and concerns, which actually makes Umaru more relevant and interesting as a character since this time around she can be more than something for her older brother to bare and clean up after it. We get a chance to see her more of her behavior as a friend and how she tries to improve the lives of the people around her… except her brother's life that is, she is still a toy hoarder and can't clean up after herself.

Now that Umaru, Kirie, Tachibana and Ebina is officially a group of friends, that's where the series goes; There's a getting together for christmas episode, getting together to go to the poll episode, going to the amusement park together, getting together to see some fireworks, going to the beach together, the works. The interactions are more varied and have a better pace, but don't expect too much. It's a very episodic anime. Like before, all problems the characters have are superficial, it’s either there for a joke or to be easily overcome. Everyone has a kind heart and everything works out in the end. It's good escapism and it doesn't want to be anything else.