It’s time for my thoughts on video games and anime that I’ve played through the first half of this year. Keep in mind that I work on this post over these months and sometimes it causes the flow of the text to be very inconsistent.

Days Gone

Stop me if you’ve heard this premise before. An open-world zombie apocalypse survival game with crafting elements. And you have a motorcycle. That’s Days Gone in a nutshell.

When I first saw this game I was skeptical about the zombie stuff. A giant horde is cool and all, but I wondered what else it had going for it. Once it started getting reviews though, it seemed like reviewers were really disinterested with it, but the actual player response was mostly positive. It’s that latter aspect that got me interested in playing this once the PC version came out.

After a good few hours of it though, I just found myself in a similar place to the reviewers. The protagonist is pretty boring and not interesting to listen to at all. The NPCs are worse, and are constantly yapping at you on the radio. One particular character runs a radio show called “Freedom Radio” or something to that effect, and spend the time complaining about how the American government are a bunch of incompetent ass-hats who sell out the American people at every opportunity. Even if he isn’t wrong, it’s the preachiest bullshit I’ve heard. Thankfully you can skip every piece of radio dialogue.

The main story itself is about the protag and his buddy living in this post-apocalyptic world, and reminiscing about the old days. Specifically thinking about his supposedly dead wife. I haven’t gotten too far with the story, the game is such a drag.

The resource and fuel management in the game is just the complete antithesis of things I enjoy doing in open world exploration games. It limits how far I can go, constantly makes me micromanage and stop constantly so I can go search for fuel or ammo. Some people might enjoy this, but I find the whole thing a pain. Plus the shooting controls aren’t great, so wasting ammo becomes more of a problem than I’d like.

I am not very far into the game, but I’ve completely lost interest in it. It’s just tedious and boring.

A Plague Tale: Innocence

I originally heard of this game when journalists were praising it from the rooftops, and quickly assumed that it was some dumb walking simulator. Some time later, and after subbing to Game Pass, I saw that this game was on the list and decided to give it a go.

Surprisingly, it isn’t a walking simulator. It’s actually third-person stealth action game with crafting elements and a lot of escort segments.

It’s set during the plague era in France where the church was killing anyone who was diseased, burning the bodies, and attracting rats. Anyway, you play some girl whose family is attacked because her younger brother has some kind of special blood. I won’t spoil what makes him special, but it affects gameplay late in the game.

Main girl’s weapon of choice is a slingshot, and the previously mentioned crafting elements improve that by speeding up the time between shots and providing more ammo. There’s a lot of killing with that thing anyway, along with some light puzzle solving.

But the thing this game is absolutely full of is rats. A lot of fucking rats. It’s as technically impressive as it is terrifying. I’m not really that scared of rats in real life, but the damn horde of them in this game is quite unsettling. The overall graphic presentation is fairly impressive, although the game is very linear, so it doesn’t need to make the same compromises that massive open-world games do and can probably hide its blemishes well.

Last point I’d like to make is that I played the game with the French voices instead of the English. I did look into the English ones and saw that everyone had a really shit accent, so I think I made the right choice. That said, some things in the game require you to pay attention to the dialogue, and if you miss those points you may find yourself wondering what it is the game wants you to do. Thankfully, in my playthrough this only happened a couple of times. So keep that in mind.

I hope the sequel expands on the ideas here.

Windjammers 2

The original Windjammers is a brilliant competitive game that is still really fun today. Windjammers 2 iterates on that and adds a couple more mechanics on top.

It’s still a 4 button game for the most part. It plays super well. They even have rollback netcode.

The only problem is that it basically requires friends. But if you have those and they’re willing to play, then you’ll have a great time. Me though, I need better convincing skills.

Drakengard

Having Nier Replicant and Automata, I decided that I should finally check out the games that spawned them. And so I played Drakengard.

Jesus Christ this game is rough. Even by the standards of the time, the combat is pretty dreadful and slow. There’s a lot of very rigid, deliberate animation that you can get thrown out of very easily when attacked and can get stunlocked pretty badly. The game isn’t difficult, but you can get caught up unless you know how to counter it properly.

It’s not all bad news though, the Dragon combat (Although I would call Angelus a Wyvern based on their anatomy) is actually alright. There’s still some roughness with the controls and precision of movement, but it’s definitely more playable than the ground combat. The lock-on fire attack helps considerably. Unfortunately, when playing on maps with ground and air combat, which are most of them; Dragon combat often gets curbed frequently as ranged enemies can get you thrown off after only a couple of hits from either magic or arrows. The magic enemies are especially irritable.

The combat isn’t the only thing that’s terrible. The soundtrack is ear-bleedingly bad and often contains tracks that sound like the music is skipping due to a disc error. It’s a real headache to listen to, but at the same time, it makes sense considering the concept of the game.

Drakengard is not a happy game. The characters experience constant suffering and pain, and all their efforts to stop the events of the game from happening are futile more often than not. The basic story is that Caim makes a pact with a dragon to gain more power and loses his voice in the process. His sister is a “Goddess” who acts as a seal to some kind of ancient magic that could destroy the world. It takes quite a while before it starts making any sense, and only starts to come together once you go through the multiple story branches. Needless to say, it doesn’t end well in any of the 5 endings.

Ending A is fairly standard and the most normal. Re-sealing the magic and continuing on the world. All the endings after that though are completely insane. Including an ending where time itself is frozen, and of course Ending E that leads into the events that creates Nier.

Before I continue, I’m going to make it obvious that I’m trying not to spoil specific events in the game.

But I’ll just say one more thing about the story: GIANT BABIES THAT EAT PEOPLE.

Now before you can get to the final chapter of the game, the player needs to collect every single weapon in the game. All 65 of them. And you have to do it on normal difficulty, so don’t even think about changing it. The problem with this, is that the prerequisites for obtaining these weapons are obtuse to say the least.

Most weapons require the player to go to a specific part of the part, or defeat a certain enemy. Several of them require the player to beat a mission with a certain amount of health or within a specific timeframe. But there are more bizarre requirements, like following a specific path through a level, or touching particular items in the level in a certain order, or the most annoying; waiting 5-20 minutes for a chest or enemy to spawn. And there’s no in-game hints about any of this, so you have to rely on a walkthrough to know what you’re doing.

In relation to Nier, the game doesn’t really answer my questions with the series. I understand where the magic comes from in Nier now, but I still don’t know who the Watchers are, or the origins of the supposed “Red Eye” disease. Are the Watchers the people behind all the “Beyond the plane of existence” nonsense in Automata? Is there any relation at all with that?

Anyway, Drakengard is a terrible that’s very interesting. Should you play it? Depends on your tolerance for bullshit I suppose.

Tales Of Arise

I fell off Tales Of Berseria really hard. I disliked the characters and found the story to be really boring. I didn’t get very far with it either. Tales Of Arise is an improvement in the sense that I stuck around to the end of it.

I like the characters a little more in this, specifically the main two; Shinnone and Alphen.

Shinnone is a tsundere-type character. She’s described in game as a Renan, which are people that originally come from the bigger of the two planets that the game is set on. She does have a strange quirk though; touching her will cause extreme pain to the person doing the touching. To be more exact, she extrudes thorns when touched.

Alphen spends most of the game without his memories and unable to feel pain. And until the first Renan lord boss, his face is completely covered with a mask. As a counter to Shinnone, he is completely unable to feel pain.

The dynamic between these two is probably what kept me interested in what was going on. Their interactions were generally the most enjoyable part of the story. I don’t really want to spend this whole part of the post describing the other characters, so I’ll just say I don’t like them that much. Especially Law, he sucks.

The real-time combat the game is has is pretty good. You can switch out the move sets to give greater control over your combos. And combos really are the name of the game here, as most enemies have a limit bar attached and if you attack them enough in a sequence, you can perform a Break move on them for massive damage. It becomes doubly necessary when you get later into the game and it starts throwing enemies at you that are clearly under-levelled for.

I spent a lot of time in the game underleveled and it was as tedious as it sounds. Fights took much longer to get through, and sometimes you would fall into areas or encounters that could wipe your party in a few hits.

As for the story, well I hope you like fantasy racism, because it’s a lot of that. And honestly, it’s a bit too peachy for its own good. Most of the arguments in this game amount to dumb squabbles about classism or why slavery is bad. I’ll spare you the details because quite frankly, I don’t really want to go on about it.

It does do the JRPG thing where you think you’re nearing the end of the game, only for the game to turn around and throw a couple dozen more hours of gameplay at you. To add to this, the game adds another anime sequence showcasing what’s coming up in the 2nd half of the game, and also replaces the anime opening that plays when you start the game with this new one. And the second half is considerably different to the first half visually, going more into the sci-fi that it teases you with earlier.

However, my problem with all of that is it just makes the game longer than I wanted it to be, and when I did finish it I was more glad it was over than being excited for anything to do with the end game, of which there are a handful of new quests and dungeons. Compared to something like Scarlet Nexus, where I’m looking forward to playing through Kasane’s campaign.

Good game, but a bit too long and preachy.

Taiko No Tatsujin: The Drum Master

This probably doesn’t need a full post on here, but I’m doing it anyway.

Taiko is one of the few rhythm games that I actually enjoy playing. There’s only two notes you need to hit, Don or Kan. Simple, right? Unfortunately not, the series is notorious for its difficulty and precision. Easy and Normal are fun enough, but once you get into Hard and Extreme, you basically need a drum controller to keep up.

There’s quite a few anime songs and video game tracks in there, and that’s kept my interest for the most part. The Namco originals are mostly great too. Playing the game daily and doing specific songs nets you some extra points for customisation items and additional songs, although it’s still very grindy.

That said, as much as I like the game, there are a number of technical issues. First of all, it drops inputs frequently. There’s a Unity wrapper working around the game, so that might be the culprit, but it could also be my keyboard. Or both.

The second, more troubling problem is the lack of high refresh-rate support. It’s locked to 60Hz. Playing a game at that speed on a 144Hz screen causes a lot of problems, most notably, blurry motion on screen. The notes can move so fast that it becomes near impossible to focus on them, and it causes eye strain on my part. I hope they add support for higher refresh rates in the future, but I’m not holding out hope here.

But to not end on a low note, here’s a picture of Don-chan as a food item.

Elden Ring

Oh Elden Ring, oh Elden Ring. What a pile of terrible ideas.

It reminds me of Dark Souls 2, in the worst way imaginable. It mostly aimless, (Yes, there is a main path through the game, but if you follow it exclusively, you will have a bad time) large swaths of land will emerge before you, but there’s often not as much to do there as you think. What content there is outside the mainline quests is often repetitive. Most of the underground dungeons even have the same visuals and enemies.

Once you get into the world a bit, there’s some interesting things out there. I found a tower with a mage at the top that I had to fight, I also found some dude boiling crabs in a pot. And then I found a dude that was a giant pot.

Combat is such a regression from Sekiro. Everything feels floatier and less in impactful. Also, enemies can attack you through walls, still. It’s been a problem since Demon’s Souls and they still haven’t bothered to fix it. Surely some raycasted prediction attached to the animation would fix that, no?

PC performance is terrible. It stutters like mad. Basically unplayable at times.

I only managed to put 15 hours into it as of the time I’m writing this, and I haven’t actually touched the game much since it came out. But I really haven’t enjoyed my time with it. I might keep it installed just to see if my friend wants to try the seamless co-op mod, maybe that would improve my view of things.

Wild Arms

I’ve yet to finish the game as of time of writing, so expect a follow up in the new year, hopefully finished.

I quite like the game though. It’s got a lot of quirkiness, Jack’s intro is especially fun with all the intro text playing over him running away from various things.

The battle system is simple but functional. Typical turn-based battles, each turn causes a power up for the characters which unlocks additional abilities for use, including a summon. Rudy is the only character that can use ARMs though, which are this game’s name for firearm type weapons. My gripes are that the animations and time between actions are really slow, and the random encounters happen a little too frequently.

The soundtrack has been pretty good so far, although I think their homages are little on the nose. Some of these themes sounds like downright plagiarism. They’re still pretty good though.

I have been using a walkthrough, albeit sparingly. A lot of the puzzles have their solutions revealed to you only if you talk to specific NPCs in specific towns, and sometimes only after getting specific items. But I also like making sure that I don’t miss anything major, which is something that can happen in old RPGs like this. That said, exploring would be more fun if the random encounters were less frequent.

Guardians Of The Galaxy

I’ll be quite frank, I’m sick to death of Marvel. Between the movies and all the nonsense that they’ve done to the comics; I cannot stand anything from that brand any more. So why did I play this? Well, everyone who played it kept praising it, and it was on Game Pass. So I figured it was worth at least looking at.

Think of it as a Mass Effect light, but without as much exploration and a much more linear story. There are choices to be made, but how big of an impact these choices have I don’t know. One of the early choices you make is whether or not you keep a Space Llama on board your ship. For the most part, the thing is a nuisance and the root cause of many issues for the characters, but late into the game, its shenanigans end up getting Starlord out of some tight spots.

Gameplay wise, it’s serviceable. It’s a 3rd Person Shooter with some AI direction mechanics. I’m not the biggest fan of it, much like I wasn’t a fan of it with Mass Effect. The weapon you use gets a handful of elemental effects, but with some enemies, they’ll often have a weakness that you can’t exploit because you don’t have the element unlocked yet. When that happens, those enemies essentially become bullet sponges and make the combat encounters much more tedious than they need to be.

I mentioned how this game doesn’t have a ton of exploration. Well to add to that, whenever you do go exploring, your teammates will often berate you saying how you’re wasting time or getting lost. It’s really annoying. That said if you do explore, you’ll be rewarded with materials for craft and even get new costumes for the characters.

Going back to the dialogue, I am getting rather sick of modern games feeling the need to have the characters constantly be talking. This game is no exception. The characters never shut up, and are often talking about extended universe stories that I have zero context for as I do not have even an ounce of knowledge of the source material. This complaint is more aimed towards modern games in general though. Talk less, say more.

To end of a good note with this game, the licensed soundtrack is pretty good. Although “We Built This City” should be removed from existence.

Drakengard 3

Drakengard 3 is a strange one. The first game was very dark. A lot of killing, monsters, betrayal, and even incestual undertones. And to complete that package a utterly horrendous soundtrack that makes you think the game’s audio is broken. But 3 is far more slapstick, especially early on.

Past the opening, one of the first scenes you’ll see is Zero’s dragon (It’s technically a Wyvern) companion rolling around in mud, and then pissing like a firehose. From there it gets weirder, and the 4th wall gets knocked down a few times in the process. It’s definite tonal shift.

It does improve some things from the first game though. The soundtrack is actually good now, it’s coherent and not a mess that sounds like your disc tray is broken. And includes remixes of some of the better songs from the first Drakengard as well as some songs from Nier.

The combat is the second improvement, although it’s still awful. Or rather, the only weapons you’d actually want to use are the light and medium swords and bracers. Spears take a lot of build up to use and are mostly piercing focused, and the chakrams are only really useful for distant enemies and occasionally groups of lesser enemies.

The performance is dreadful. Most of the game is 20FPS on PS3 if that. I think they were using a much earlier build of Unreal Engine 3 which exhibited many problems early on in the 7th gen. The art style isn’t great barring some of the character designs and the higher quality models used for the cutscenes.

Anyway, the story. Well Drakengard 3 is a prequel to Drakengard 1. Zero and her sisters are intoners. Their songs bring about magic. Zero is trying to stop them for reasons that are considered to be spoilers. However, after the first level, she loses one of her eyes and her arm, and they get replaced by a flower and prosthetic respectively. The flower is interesting though. If Zero is dealt a mortal wound (Albeit in the cutscene), the flower will grow and she’ll be rebirthed from it in a rather bloody manner.

The endings are certainly strange. They’re not good endings, but they feed into Drakengard 1 pretty well. Although they still don’t answer my previous questions about who The Watchers are. Although the Red Eye disease is somewhat explained as originating from the flower in Zero’s eye. This is also the very rare flower that blooms in Nier if you’re willing to put in all the work.

Speaking of work, getting the final ending requires getting all the weapons again. Thankfully this is a much less tedious process. Most of the levels have gold chests scattered about, some hidden, some less so. More often than not they just contain money, but a good amount have weapons in them. On top of that is Accord’s Requests. This is where the real tedium is.

Most of those missions are just battle arenas with massive waves of enemies trying to give you a hard time. The actual mission goals can vary though, sometimes you have to kill all the enemies in a set time, gather resources from chests, gather resources from killing enemies, and so on. But with the combat being as crap as it is, and these sequences usually having a time limit, frustration was a very prominent emotion during my time with them.

The final request was such a pain that I gave up on it in favour of finishing the game and upgrading all the weapons. Doing the latter rewarded me with an outfit for Zero that refills the Itoner gauge instantly and lets me go berserk on the enemies.

Weirdly, the game’s notorious ending isn’t as difficult as that last request. Don’t get me wrong though, it is hard, very hard; but not impossible. It took me about a week of continuous playing to get past the final part of the game, but I felt like I was making progress that whole time. The last request however just kept killing me in the same spot each time and often with the same cheap, undodgeable attack. Hell, even with the Infinite Itoner Gauge outfit, I get died to an attack in the last part of it.

The final thoughts on it; You should play it, but don’t be surprised if you hate everything about it.

Trek To Yomi

This game might end up being my most disappointing game of the year. The visual style and atmosphere are mostly spot-on. They’re going for that Kurosawa vibe, and it hits the mark fairly well.

Unfortunately, everything else about the game is dreadful. The story is about a man who starts off the game as a boy fighting to save his village from bandits, and watches his master get killed. Following a time skip, he’s now helping defend the village as an adult, and gets led out into an ambush that doubles up as a diversion to get troops out of the town so the bandits can attack easier. Just to add to it, there’s also a love interest involved.

An interesting idea the game tries is killing the player, and then having them spend a large chunk of the game in the afterlife. However, this idea is hampered by the sheer awfulness of the game and just a very underwhelming execution.

So what’s so bad about it? Well the controls for one thing. They’re very unresponsive. Even blocking is a toss up as it to whether or not it wants to work properly, and parrying only works half the time on top of that. The timing for it is also sporadic. It presents a large variety of combos and moves, but they’re so difficult to perform consistently that the basic Square, Square, Triangle combo is what I ended up using for most of my playthrough.

It’s very repetitive on top of that, there’s some enemy variation, but the whole game is just a slog and just keeps going on and on, even though in reality it’s about 4-5 hours long. Adding to that, the difficulty is all over the place. Most of the game is a cakewalk, but occasionally there are sequences that I had to replay over and over because I was getting killed very quickly. As I got towards the end, it got worse. Near the end of the game, I switched the difficulty down from normal to easy just because I was sick of the damn thing and wanted to move on.

And on a final note, there’s a bunch of collectables in the game, and they’re worthless crap. No real rewards for getting them. Glad I played it via Game Pass instead of paying for it outright.

Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga

I haven’t played a Lego Star Wars game since the release of the Complete Saga on PS3. I love those original two games to bits, so I was looking forward to this.

The first problem comes with Rey being front and centre everytime you start the game. I hate Rey, she’s a terrible character and doesn’t need to exist. And that little intro in unskippable. After that though, you get into the episode selection and you’re presented with little dioramas of all the different movies, and that’s great. So that’s a good point.

I’ve been playing this game with my friend via Steam’s Remote Play Together feature. There’s no online co-op so local multiplayer is the only option. Unfortunately, that takes the form of vertical split-screen, and absolutely no option to change it. Performance also takes a hit during this mode, although performance overall is fairly underwhelming. I’ve had multiple glitches, soft-locks, and many crashes to desktops. It’s a pretty big stain on my experience.

That’s a shame, because the environments are quite large and filled with collectables and quests. Even better is that you can fudge your way through a lot of puzzles if you’re clever enough. There’s a collectible Brick in Episode II that’s floating above a part of the city and would usually require the player to use a savagener type character and finish the tutorial for that type of character (Which you only get in Episode VI and VII, which if you’re playing from Episode I is a VERY long way into the game) and use the glider. My friend and I came up with an alternative solution of stacking a bunch of boxes on top of each other and exploiting some of the janky collision boxes on parts of the environment, and then I force lifted my friend to the brick for him to collect it.

On the note of the scavenger classes, once we did unlock their potential, my friend and I back-tracked through all the previous stuff we’d done and mopped up all the missing collectables and quests that were now fully available to us. There’s quite a lot to go back to as well, plenty of new ships and characters to get.

Overall, I am enjoying it (Still haven’t finished it, on Episode VII) but the technical issues and problems are a pain. I think I prefer the charm of the originals, but it’s not bad.

Other Stuff I Played:

Ridge Racer Type 4

I’ve wanting to play this game for a while now purely for the soundtrack. The car handling is a little rough these days, but it’s still quite fun. But Goddamn if the soundtrack isn’t one of the best.

Ridge Racer 2 (PSP)

Another Ridge Racer game I wanted to play, but this time it was from my experience with a demo from when I originally got a PSP. I never got around to buying it back then, but I can play it now. And it still plays great and is absolutely filled with content and a really jam packed soundtrack selection.

Voice Of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden

I really enjoyed the first Voice Of Cards game, but I’m really struggling to get through this one. The story isn’t gripping me at all, and going back to the starting area after each chapter hurts the pacing a bit, because I don’t feel like I’m progressing as much. Exploring the areas is still rewarding, but getting money is tedious, and battles are varied in terms of difficulty. I’m near the end of it, but I’m lacking the motivation to finish it.

Baba Is You

Fun little puzzle game. It’s more difficult than you think, and scales up very quickly. Baba is cute though.

The Lab & Aperture Desk Job

A couple of small games from Valve. The Lab is a fun little VR toy box. Bunch of small games and experiences to check out. Unfortunately, the Robot Repair Station game causes the game to crash for me, so I never got to check that out.

Desk Job is supposed to be a thing to check out the capabilities of the Steam Deck, but you can play it on PC with a controller. It’s a pretty neat thing that explores the lore of a very iconic character of the Portal games. It’s pretty funny and worth checking out.

Pistol Whip

Ever wanted to be John Wick in VR with some banging tunes? Well this is pretty close. Also pretty tiring. I do like the customizability of the weapons and playstyles. There’s a good few mutators that let you make it more or less difficult. I turned off dodging obstacles personally just so I didn’t knacker myself at as much. That said, as much as I like it, don’t pay full price for it.

Neptunia X Senran Kagura: Ninja Wars

I actually finished this, but it’s not worth a long winded paragraph. It’s disappointing, and mostly mundane and uninteresting cutscenes. The gameplay isn’t bad conceptually, but gets repetitive quite quickly, and the difficulty spikes for no discernable reason at points. As a fan of Senran Kagura, I can’t recommend this. At the same time, I can only hope buying it renews some hope that we’ll get SK7 that was teased years ago. But I’m not holding my breath at this point.

Eiyuden Chronicles: Rising

Played through a good chunk of the opening, found it to be really damn boring. I hope it gets more fun later, but the first impression is bad. I played it on Game Pass, not sure if I’d buy it.

Drainus

This was a birthday gift from a friend. It’s made by the same guys that made the Lodoss War Metroidvania. I got through the first 3 or so levels. I like it quite a bit, but I’m not great at Shmups. The lack of ability to freely shoot stuff behind you kinda sucks, and it’s something I’ve always hated about the genre. You can get a ship upgrade that fixes that, but said upgrades are tiered based on your performance. I’ll try and finish this one.

Vagrant Story

I started this on stream. It’s full of weird and very poorly explained systems, especially the additional attack timings that’s ask you to press the attack button again after attacking to perform an additional attack, but the timing for it is based on a on-screen prompt that appears for about a millisecond. The combat is some odd mix of real time and turn based, possibly even some weird ATB system under the hood. The cutscene direction is certainly punching above its weight, using a lot of close ups and advanced camera work, but because it’s a PS1 game, it all looks pixelated as fuck. I’ll get back to this once I’m through with Wild Arms.

Vermintide 2

Left 4 Dead, but Warhammer, but also Destiny-style loot and convoluted menus. I played a couple of levels of it with my friend and was turned off from it. There’s a whole lot of equipment leveling nonsense and microtransactions. I don’t want to deal with that kind of crap anymore.

Anime I Watched:

Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru

Perverted gyaru that wants to get into cosplay meets a dude that makes traditional Japanese dolls and then has him make outfits for her. And then there’s a buttload of romantic comedy shenanigans on top. It’s hard not to like Marin, she’s great. She ends up being cute without needing to be a generic moeblob. And then outfits, level her up a bit. Great show, enjoyed it greatly.

Shenmue The Animation

Surprisingly, not a terrible adaptation. It covers the first two games pretty well, although it does skip over or change a few things for the sake of pacing and not taking too much time on things. There’s also some extra scenes that give some much needed backstory to Ryo’s character. The fight scenes are decently animated as well. They did skip some moments from Shenmue II, particularly some events at the end of the game, but it can’t be helped due to time constraints.

Birdy Wing: Golf Girls’ Story

I was expecting a golf anime, instead I got a battle shounen crossed with a underground mafia ring, crazy characters, and a good amount of sexual tension. It’s getting a second season early next year and I’m wondering where the Hell it’s going to end up.

Spy X Family – Part 1

Much like everyone else, I watched and enjoyed this show. Drunk Yor is a miracle of the universe, and the dynamics of all the characters is fun to watch. I do think it focuses too much on Anya though, you don’t get to see Yor do her assassination jobs at all past the first episode. Loid’s stuff is fun, but only gets a few select episodes. I hope the second season addresses those issues.

___

Alright, that’s it. This took a little longer to finish writing due to various things. But it’s also one of the longest posts I’ve ever done as well. I’m looking to rename this style of blog post as well. “The Den” doesn’t really have a good ring to it any more. I’ll rethink it.

Anyway, the next time you see a post like this will be in the new year with my GOTY views and such. See you then.

ADMAN