Praising Anohana

Three.

I like my long and wordy reviews, where I try to go into detail with what limited knowledge I have of whatever medium I'm reviewing. Occasionally, there's something I want to write about that I really don't have much to say about. Usually, I've just avoided writing about it in those situations, but, for once, I'll actually write about it, because Anohana is just so damn good that I can't not praise it. As a

Anohana follows Jintam, a Japanese high schooler who one day wakes up to find his dead childhood friend Menma in his room. After finding out that she's back because she has a wish that she needs fulfilled, despite not remembering what it is, and that Jintam seems to be the only one able to see Menma, they proceed to almost inadvertently reunite the old gang, who have fallen out in the years following Menma's death.

It's a relatively simple premise executed near perfectly. Jintam, Menma and the gang are all extremely well rounded and interesting characters, and they felt *real* to me in a way I've very rarely experienced in anime outside of the phenomenal Grave of the Fireflies. These aren't larger than life superheroes or magical creatures like you'd find in the likes of A Certain Scientific Railgun. They're also not the superficially real-world characters of something like Free! who, despite clearly living in the real world, constantly act like they're characters in a show motivated by drama. Nor, finally, are they alike to the comically relatable but over-the-top characters of something like Kiniro Mosaic. They're much more similar to characters out of something like Breaking Bad, albeit without all the drugs, violence and obnoxious foreshadowing: They're people that we can identify as people we could realistically meet in a familiar environment.

Since Anohana is mainly focused on getting us to know and relate with these characters, this is a massive victory for it. It smashes the one thing it needed to get right out of the park, and just how incredibly right it gets this would warrant watching the show by itself. It being gorgeous, fantastically paced, and featuring one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard in anime is just topping on the already outrageously delicious cake.

Anohana's final episode made me cry. This happens incredibly rarely to me. It's not that I don't tear up. I tear up a lot. Amongst many other things, I've teared up at five different episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, four of Angel, half of Isao Takahata's films, Undertale, Dragonheart, Mass Effect 3, Non Non Biyori (embarrassingly) and Smosh the Movie, thought that last one was for different reasons. Counting Anohana, only three things have made adult me actually cry, as in "made uncomfortable amounts of tears go down my face for what felt like too many minutes".

This is because Anohana isn't just a brilliant character study. Anohana is an ode to an all too recent childhood. Instead of just providing sadness in its closing moments, Anohana transports you for a second to days gone by, when the world seemed smaller, simpler, and a hell of a lot easier. It gives these memories a final nod, and moves on, keeping and cherishing them, but looking firmly forward.

Anohana is absolutely brilliant. There's a few nitpicks and bearbugs I have here and there, but I honestly can't bring myself to discuss them. On a surface level it's an immensely moving story about some immensely likable and immensely interesting characters, and on a somewhat deeper level it's an immensely moving story about some immensely important things in every person's life.

This isn't a review, but Anohana definitely rates a 10/10. Perhaps not my favorite anime, but it's definitely competing for the spot.

Go watch Anohana.

On a lighter note, and in case people are interested: I also cried at the wheat field scene in Lilly's route of Katawa Shoujo and at the end of TellTale Games' first episodic The Walking Dead game. Also, Anjou is clearly best girl. Menma's great, but she just can't compete.

An Ode To Overwatch

I love video games. That is an undeniable fact. They can be meaningful in a variety of ways that no other medium can achieve. They have a very unique capability to tell stories and really touch lives. Serious games like Spec Ops: The Line, Gone Home, or Cibele are truly powerful experiences that leave their mark on you after you play them.

But let's face it, those games aren't the reason we're gamers, are they? Some of the older gamers out there would've been initiated into the medium with their Super Mario Bros. and their Sonic the Hedgehog. People my age were brought in by stuff like Advanced Mario Bros. 4, or the third generation of Pokémon. The newcomers would've got here via their Call of Duty and Minecraft. None of these games are particularly deep or challenging, but what they most definitely are is a whole bunch of fun.

At a very basic, very baseline level, gaming is about fun. No, this doesn't mean games that aren't fun are not good examples of the medium. I don't think there was a moment during The Banner Saga where I was genuinely having fun. It's a game that's heavy, dark and keeps just weighing down on you like a son of a bitch. It's unparalleled at creating a feeling of dread, of despair at this tired, dying world that you're scrambling to keep alive for a few more moments. It's an absolutely magnificent experience, masterfully crafted and one that I would recommend without a second of hesitation. Its very nature, however, means it's not fun.

I have to admit, in these past couple years, I fell prey to one of the things that I hate the most about some game critics: I became snobbish about fun. Sure, games that are fun were to be commended for it, but that wasn't enough. I needed the clever commentary about how narrative affects gameplay of a Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, the smart messing about with the player/character boundary of a 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors. If not that, I at least needed the relatively substanceless narrative focus of a BioShock: Infinite. I needed something there to justify playing games other than that stupid, childish "fun" thing. I'm an adult now, I can't play games just for fun like some kind of 14 year old.

Then there was this Overwatch thing Blizzard was putting out. I'd never really liked Blizzard, but I started playing the stupidly addictive card battler Hearthstone a couple years ago and its grip is still holding me. It's got tonnes of strategy: Figuring out what the meta-game is like, and what deck counters it best. You have to figure out what your opponent is playing as soon as possible, figure out how to scramble your strategy into place with the disparate parts of your game plan you've drawn so you can defeat them, and adapt to unexpected situations borne from odd card combinations, unconventional deck-building, or random factors baked into the cards themselves. I guess it also has that "fun" thing. I'd heard nothing but good about this Overwatch thing, and it was coming out in a couple days, so why not, fuck it, I'll pre-order it on a whim at 4 AM, exams just finished and I deserve a reward of some kind for studying so hard.

I, of course, knew that Overwatch was just an online shooter, but my tired self at 4 AM never really parsed what that meant. It looked colorful, was made by a company that has made one of my top 10 games of all time, and it had a talking gorilla named Winston in it.

So, a couple days pass, and when my Internet connection is finally good enough to let me play online shooters, I fire up Overwatch. A quick tutorial and a few bot matches later, I'm jumping into the quick-play mode proper. I pick up the hero who seemed the coolest from the little experimenting I did in the practice range, and I start pointing and clicking at things until their health is gone.

This... this is fun.

And that's it. That's all that Overwatch is at the level I'm playing it at. It's just a lot of fun. Let me rephrase that: It's a lot of fun. There's no place for a "just" there.

I feel like a child again.

I just... I just want to play this game, man.

It feels good. I like shooting people. I like flying around as Pharah. Zipping around as Tracer. Throwing bombs around as Junkrat. Failing at doing anything useful as Genji. Pulling big Resurrections as Mercy. Just creating two fucking dragons out of nowhere as Hanzo. Engaging in GLORIOUS COMBAT as Reinhardt.

Overwatch reminded me why I'm a gamer in the first place. All the games I mentioned before? They're all great. They're fantastic, beautiful pieces of art, all unique and worthwhile in their own ways. I've got nothing but respect for them and the mad geniuses who created them.

Overwatch is just relentlessly, unflappably fun. It controls so well!  The heroes are all so enjoyable to play! It's a truly beautiful, really masterfully designed piece of art. It works like absolute clockwork. It's just so tightly constructed in every way. And for what purpose? To say something about video games? To convey a message about the human condition? Tell a personal story?

No. Fuck that. You're going to have fun. That's all you need, and that's exactly what you're going to get, in an absolutely masterful and ridiculously polished way.

Ultimately, I play games to have fun. Yes, there's games like The Banner Saga that aren't fun at all, but are fantastic experiences in their own right. I won't knock them for not being fun, and I'll keep looking for those kinds of experiences. I love those experiences. But when I first fired up Advanced Super Mario Bros. 4 I wasn't looking for that. I wasn't looking for a significant challenge, brilliant atmosphere, or something significant to think about. I just wanted to have fun making the funny little man jump. I did, and it brought about a passion that hasn't just informed what I do in my free time, it's fundamentally changed me as a person through the experiences I've had through gaming.

Overwatch is an absolutely brilliant game. It's most definitely among the 5 best games I've ever played, and it's revived my love for gaming. I'll keep looking forward to games like Analogue: A Hate Story and Always Sometimes Monsters, that are there to provide a deep and meaningful experience, filled with rich themes, but I'll make sure to not forget that something like Overwatch that exists solely to provide joy is just as valuable, important, and impressive.

Thanks, Overwatch.

Always Sometimes Monsters - Now This Is Videogaming!

I've got this notion about video games as a medium. You see, every single artistic medium has something exclusive to it that makes it worthwhile and valuable. Writing allows you to create literally anything, film allows you an insane measure of fine control over the story you're putting out, music allows you to transmit emotion without the need of words or visuals, and so on. Obviously, what gaming has that no other medium has is interactivity. It allows for all types of interactions, be it simply expecting the player to guide their character through obstacles, or actually expecting them to choose who their character is and how they act. As such, the most accomplished and unique games are those that play to those precise strengths. The best games are those that either base themselves on strong, satisfying gameplay experiences or on storytelling that is very choice-based. As such, it is no surprise that my top 5 games of all time are all this way.

Always Sometimes Monsters is a game that is all about choices. Both at a mechanical and a story level, what defines Always Sometimes Monsters is its choice. In a way, Always Sometimes Monsters is truly unprecedented. It's the first game that I'd say is truly equivalent to a modern-day realistic drama. Whilst I love games like Persona 4 and  The Walking Dead to bits, they both rely on fantasy in their story and some very gamey elements in the gameplay. Persona 4 is still a JRPG with combat, and The Walking Dead still has big action setpieces and puzzle elements that are very traditionally gamey. Always Sometimes Monsters has none of this. It's firmly based in reality at all times in its aesthetic, and it revolves exclusively around walking around and talking to people, with very rare breaks for short minigames representing an action one would believably take in the real world.

In Always Sometimes Monsters you take the role of a once promising writer who's completely failed to deliver. Your landlord is cracking down on you and demanding rent money that you simply do not have. To make things worse, you receive an invitation to the love of your life's wedding at the other side of the country. It's happening in 30 days, and it's up to you to scrounge up enough money to keep hopping from town to town in hopes of making it in time.

Beyond that, almost literally anything is your choice. Are you male or female? Straight, gay, bi? Are you a good person? Do you think you're a good person? Are you going to the wedding to be there for someone you hold dear, or in hopes of gaining them back? Will you do honest odd jobs to get there, or try to profiteer off of those vulnerable enough? How good is your work ethic? Do you do drugs? What are your political leanings? What are your religious leanings? What do you like to eat?

This is just the very surface level of all the choices you get to make. The game is truly replete with choices, many of which are genuinely tough. You are strapped for cash, and you could make a lot of money by screwing people over. On the other hand, you can really screw people over. But then some of them deserve to be screwed over, don't they?

The amount of choices is truly staggering, and a good amount of them are tough. Some are very obviously telegraphed, others are not. It really does make the game feel alive and like a real place, even through a lot of the very weird (if, for me, effective) humor put in there.

The thing that the game does best, however, is that it never judges you for your choices. It simply presents you the consequences of said choices, and allows you to feel guilty or not, to try to justify your choice or not. Everything in this game is a choice, even things that aren't in the game itself.

All of this would fall over if the story the game told wasn't good. Luckily, the rather simple story is immensely effective. The structure the game ends up taking is as follows: You're in a town. You meet a few characters, with one of them allowing you to stay with them. You get given a goal you need to reach to get to the next town, and a lead as to how to accomplish said goal. You can choose to follow the lead, or find your own way. It's very effective, with each town feeling distinct, real, and interesting. There's also occasional flashbacks to your past, your relationship with the person to whose wedding you're heading. They're done genuinely well. The romance is believable, even if you only see select moments of it, and you can also see how it falls apart through some pretty heart-breaking scenes.

Always Sometimes Monsters is, to a very real degree, the simplest distillation of what a story-based game should be. This could not work as a movie, a book, a painting, or a piece of music. Always Sometimes Monsters is an experience and a story that works only in game form. It's about the decisions we have to make on a day-to-day basis, about how we make them, what they mean, and how they reflect on who we are. It's truly brilliant, and strongly recommended to all. It's pretty cheap on Steam, go get it.

Presentation: 9/10
The only thing that lets it down is some shaky art from time to time. Otherwise, it sounds brilliant, and its story is brilliantly told.

Gameplay: 9/10
Its gameplay is mainly its choices. There's no real flaw with its choices, but a lot of the minigames on the periphery are rather shaky.

Overall: 9.5/10
Brilliant. Go get it. I may not like it more than Persona 4 or The Walking Dead, but there's something here that I respect to the very deepest level. It's ballsy, clever, genuine, and full of charm.

A Zero Escape retrospective.

Before we begin with the spoiler-filled bit, here's a quick primer on the Zero Escape series for all of you who have not had the pleasure of playing them thus far. It's a series of visual novels with escape-the-room adventure elements, in which you and 8 other people are put in an almost, but not quite, SAW-style death game by a mysterious masked entity calling themselves Zero. So far, there's been two games in the series: 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (Later re-released and rebranded as Zero Escape: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors) and Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward (Released in Japan under what I think is the much better name Zero Escape: Good People Die) They're shrouded in mystery and reveals, all stemming from one central question: why are you in this sadistic game? All the time there's new pieces added to the puzzle, and you keep uncovering answers that open up even more questions.

The games delight in two major things: long, very drawn out discussions on pseudo-science and messing with the barrier between player and game. Basically anything else would be a spoiler, but let it be said that I very much recommend both games, the first one in particular. They manage to strike a great balance between being unrelentingly silly and self-serious, taking these prolonged discussions about Ice 9, conspiracy theories about the Titanic and other such nonsense deadly serious. The result is a genuinely endearing product where it's surprisingly easy to get immersed in all these immensely silly topics. Yes, a lot of the conversations that go on are stupid, but the characters take them so completely serious, without a hint of irony, that you can't help but go with it and love every second of it. The writing is also completely solid: these writers know how to build a story.

The games are also genuinely great at messing with your expectations regarding the characters. A lot of the obvious archetypes you're presented with are subverted, inverted, or played with in a variety of fascinating ways. This is not to say characters act like real people. They're all surprisingly chill at being in death games, and seem to enjoy standing about and discussing the Ship of Theseus problem even when under a strict time limit with the threat of death. But this is taken so unblinkingly by the game that it's very easy to go along with, and doesn't as much bring you out of the action as create a weird dissonant tone that works pretty well with the fairly surreal events going on around you.

The final element is the choice-making. Both games have a variety of different routes that are very different in the events that take place, based entirely on your decisions. These are most often just based on what rooms you choose to go through throughout the game, though Virtue's Last Reward throws in an extra twist on top of this. I'll just say that the way the choices work is incredibly well done, in order to avoid spoilers by the way of specifics.

In short, they're both great (if immensely silly at times) visual novels. 999 is a bit more horror-ish in a way that I very much enjoy and, I personally thought, more clever with its twists, whilst Virtue's Last Reward is a deeper story with more strands to discover, and considerably better puzzle sections, as well as a massive quality of life improvement in the form of the flowchart that lets you instantly go to any decision point. They're both highly recommended, but start with 999. Not only do I like it more, but Virtue's Last Reward will make more sense (and have more intriguing mysteries) if you've played 999 first.

This is where I'm giving myself free reign to spoil things. I'm going to very directly compare both games, including major plot-points. These are games that you absolutely do not want spoiled: they rely very heavily on the mystery of the whole situation. Half the joy comes from those "Eureka!" moments when you figure out how a few weird plot strands connect. I doubt they'd stand up on a second play-through when you know everything. Seriously, leave now if you have the slightest intention to play these things, I'm going to very thoroughly spoil both games.

OK, are the unspoiled people gone now? I think they're gone. Good. Didn't like them anyway.

As I've mentioned previously in this little piece, I like 999 more than Virtue's Last Reward. There's a few reasons for this: I thought the version of the Nonary Game in 999 simply works a lot better than it does in Virtue's Last Reward. The bombs are a much better way to end people, I thought, since it really does make for some truly gruesome parts. Walking through the remnants of the Ninth Man in Room 5, or finding Not-Snake blown up in Room 3 were both really disgusting experiences, and the descriptions of both situations were on-point. It really helped the atmosphere become oppressive in a way that Virtue's Last Reward really never became.

Another such reason is Ace. I fucking love Ace. In 999, you're really led to believe Ace is the trustworthy one. He makes a selfless sacrifice (by taking a very risky move) for the group early on, he acts as the voice of reason in a lot of situations, trying to keep the team together, is kind and understanding, and a pleasure to talk to. Of course, Ace ends up being the one who's been killing off other members of the group to try and protect himself, with every good action he takes being a cover up for a crime, and is revealed to have been a completely evil motherfucker even before the events of the Nonary Game. If anything, he's more the true villain of 999 than even June (AKA Zero) is, since she's only really having to act this way because of what Ace did to her. It's an event that really hurts, and one that I really didn't see coming. He's a really brilliant villain.

Of course, I didn't expect Virtue's Last Reward to pull an Ace again. Playing the same trick twice would've been lame and predictable. I did keep an especially close eye on Luna, since she seemed to be nice enough - and a different enough flavor of nice at that - to be a serious candidate for "the Ace", but she turned out alright on the end. Instead we got Dio being the secretly evil one. Except... well, Dio acts like Santa from the first game. He's loud, brash, and makes it very clear that he's out to save his own skin first and foremost. It's not exactly a surprise when the one character who's openly unlikable and hostile turns out to be the villain. As for the other characters... Well, Luna's a robot, and that was a plot point that was kinda cool, I guess? Alice is a secret agent person... Clover's still Clover... Quark's just there to get ill a lot... K's your clone/son, but that's not actually plot relevant... Tenmyouji's actually Junpei from the first game, which is a really cool twist, but it's also more of a side thing than a proper plot twist... and Phi's really important to the plot, but there's no real twist to her story other than being an esper like you.

What I'm saying is that, whilst most of these characters are either very likable (Tenmyouji and Luna are the absolute best) or - usually - appropriately unlikable (fuck Dio, though I feel like I really shouldn't dislike Alice as much as I do), they're simply not played with the way the characters in the first game were. You're told information about who these people are. You discover the Tenmyouji's Junpei, or that Luna's a robot, but their personalities don't change. The first thing I remember about Clover in the first game isn't who she was (A girl from the first Nonary Game), but how she would change under pressure (Going chillingly ax-crazy when Snake disappeared). It's cool and all that Luna's a robot, and the Luna ending absolutely broke my little heart, but knowing that Luna's a robot doesn't really change my perception of the character all that much. It's not like discovering that Ace was actually completely terrible all along, or that Santa is actually like best, most devoted, brother ever to an actually pretty fucked up extent. It's an added character trait, not a complete surprise rewriting of the whole character.

And, the final thing to bring up before I starting heaping praise on Virtue's Last Reward (because that game deserves praise damnit) is the Twist. Not one of the twists, I'm talking capital-T Twist here. You've actually been playing as Akane on the bottom screen, not as Junpei on the top screen. Junpei's communicating his perceptions back in time to a person in the same game he is, 9 years ago, in order to save them, and all the timelines and choices you made happened and were simply different universes and versions of the Nonary Game Akane was exploring trying to survive. It's brilliant on a bunch of different levels. All your games that you re-loaded from? All canon and plot relevant. The character you thought you were playing? Not actually the character you were playing. Heck, you weren't playing the game you thought you were playing. It's genuinely clever, even if the in-universe explanation is silly in a very Zero Escape-y way.

In Virtue's Last Reward the equivalent Twist is that all the timelines you play are canon... and they're all plot relevant. That's it. It's not just a watered down version of the Twist from 999, it's actually just the twist from 999, with a bit of it removed. That's honestly just lame, and whilst this does make for a good mechanic both in terms of storytelling and gameplay I'm just kind of upset at it. I was hoping for another clever exploration of the divide between player and game, and we just get the exact same thing again. It's well done, but it's already been done by the only other game in the series, which just makes it be very limp.

And finally, I get to heap praise on Virtue's Last Reward. I'm not going to compare it as directly to 999 in praising it, but that's just because the only ways it disappointed me directly relate to it being a sequel to 999, and not doing as well as its predecessor in certain aspects. Taken as a standalone game it's very good, and the fields on which it expands on what 999 did are all very well done.

One thing I particularly enjoyed was the Ambidex Game. On a player level, it's a great and tense series of choices. Playing Prisonner's Dilemma with the other players of the Nonary Game is full of doubts and indecisions. I trust this person... but if they pick Betray I'll be in a bad spot, or they'll be in too good a spot. I should pick Betray to defend myself, but if they pick Ally I'll screw them over in a way I don't want to, and jeopardize the chances of people picking Ally against me in future rounds. Of course, you know you'll eventually go back and re-do the choice, but the first time through it's hard not to hesitate a lot before picking. Betraying someone who trusted you feels awful, and being betrayed by someone you trusted really makes you feel hurt, stupid, and worried about how behind you are in the Nonary Game.

It's also clever from a game design and writing perspective. It allows for clear and easy branch points without you having to design a whole new puzzle room around them, as well as helping subtly speak about how relationships are progressing within the group, by providing an easy representation of who trusts who. It gives you easy catalysts for conflict and/or trust, and it gives a nice and easy physical representation of the weird way you've decided to implement the Schrodinger's Cat Paradox into your story.

I also love love love the whole A-plot. Whilst I think the characters aren't as interesting as the previous games, having a lot less hidden dimensions, they're still a very different bunch of very distinct and well-defined personalities. They're great to interact with, and watch interact. Perhaps the biggest surprise was Sigma himself, who I found a surprising amount more likable than Junpei from the previous game (and he was a pretty good character in his own right!).

I really like the mystery. There's a phenomenon I've observed where everyone seems to think that the way they played through all the routes ended up being the best way to play through all the routes, with the information revealed in the best order. This really speaks to the quality of the writing. I'm no different: I started with the Magenta door plotlines, then went through Yellow and then through Cyan, and I thought the order the information was presented to me was brilliant. Magenta presents a mysterious series of murders that makes you paranoid about a killer, and it really gets you to suspect absolutely everyone, but in Yellow you discover that this is all because of the suicide-inducing effects of Radical-6. Then Cyan introduces an actual killer, but Yellow's managed to get your guard down. Dio's revealed early, which is good, since it would've been insulting to my intelligence to pretend he wasn't obviously evil any longer.

At any rate, it's a real pleasure going through all the paths, slowly collecting pieces of information and piecing the whole puzzle together. It's spread out just enough you really feel like you're doing detective work, but it's given to you at a regular enough basis that there's always something there for you to work on fitting into the puzzle, yet the puzzle's large enough that you won't be able to build it completely by yourself.

I liked the Twist - not the lame Twist about dimension hopping that we already did in 999 - but the whole "we're in the future, working on reverting the apocalypse and also Sigma's old" twist. It really fit all the pieces of the puzzle nicely into place, and was appropriately insane and silly. All the time we spent worrying about Radical-6, lunar eclipses, antimatter, cold sleep the Chinese room and the Turing test felt justified and tied together in a way so simple and elegant that I can't help but respect it.

Also I guess I liked the puzzle rooms more in Virtue's Last Reward, but I honestly don't care about those that much. I'm here for the story.

I'll bring this long, rambling, piece of writing to a quick and sudden end. I'm writing this early in the morning of June 25th, 2016. It's the day after the world found out the UK is going to leave the EU, two days after the Brexit referendum, an event that's probably going to be important for decades to come. I'm not going to bring my political views on this into this piece, - they have no place on a videogame blog, and I'm not good enough at talking politics - but I thought it was important that I don't allow myself to be wrapped up in looking at and thinking about just the big stuff. I've got to keep the small stuff, like these obscure visual novels from Japan, in view. After all, it's this type of small, oddly specific, stuff that I enjoy most in life. Zero Escape III: Zero Time Dilemma, the final game in the series, is coming out in three days. I only finished Virtue's Last Reward a couple days ago, and I'm incredibly excited for Zero Time Dilemma. The Zero Escape series is one I really do love, from the bottom of my heart. I wanted to praise it, criticize it, and leave this article confident that, whilst I recognize these games have flaws, I have a good reason for loving them as much as I do.

I'm now pretty sure that I do. Now to kill time for three days until I can get my hands on a copy of the next in the rambling about pseudo-science whilst in a death game simulators that I love so much. I really can't wait.

As Zero III would say, have a nice traitor!

The Best of Things

What follows is a list of the best ones of the medias. This list is definitely true.

The Best Film:
2001: An Oddysey of Space

It's real pretty, and it says things about humans. Humans are interesting, and prettiness is nice, so this film is really good. It also has classical music and is deep.

The Best Book:
Star Apprentice, by the Strugatskii Brothers

It's by good writers, Russian, and obscure, which makes it better than something by bad writers, not Russian, and well known. That is most books. Also this book has a sad bit in it, which makes it deep. Deep things are better than things which are not deep. So this book is by good writers, Russian, obscure, and deep, which no other book is, and those are the best things for books to by.

The Best Show:
Buffy, Slayer of Vampires (Largely by Josh Wheaton)

It's a long-running show about characters who grow. No one likes short people, so growing is interesting. There's a dude named Xander in it, but he's actually called Alexander, and Xander is a cooler shortening of it than Alex. The fact that Alex is more common grates my cheese, which is a funny thing Xander says once. It also has a cool vampire called Spike, and he's a cool vampire. It also has a girl called Willow who likes to kiss other girls and this is when girls kissing girls was invented, so it's important for equality for girls, because men used to get to kiss girls but not girls and now girls can do it too.

So the characters aren't short, it has characters, it invented girls, and all of it is written by famous meninist Josh Wheatley, who also did the Revengers which is a good film, but not better than Oddysey of Space, and Log House in the Forest, which is also not better than Oddysey of Space.

The Best Blog:
Rariowscorner

Because it has the best list of the best things, so it's better than the other blogs.

Anime Reviews: The Seven Deadly Sins - Colorful

It's been a while since I did one of these. I finally got around to watching a new animu. This time it's The Seven Deadly Sins, a Netflix original.

The Seven Deadly Sins is set in the nation of Britannia, and takes a certain amount of inspiration from Arthurian legends. The kingdom is watched over by the Holy Knights, a powerful and exclusive order of magical knights that have a very much "Paladin" aesthetic. They tend to have over-the-top classic anime style magical powers: one of them controls lightning, another can create explosions at will, and so on.

We're told that the most powerful group of Holy Knights are the titular Seven Deadly Sins, all loosely (and I do mean very loosely) themed after one deadly sin or another. Ten years ago, they betrayed the Holy Knights and slaughtered a whole bunch of them, along with their current grand master.

As our story begins, Elizabeth, the third princess of Britannia wanders into an inn in search of the Seven Deadly Sins, as it turns out the Holy Knights have secretly overthrown the King, and are running the Kingdom. She soon stumbles into their captain Meliodas, who swears to help her with her quest to free the Kingdom again.

What follows is a fairly disjointed but charming collection of events that I hesitate to call a story. The group typically shows up somewhere, meets a few new characters, fights for a few episodes, and leaves, sometimes having gained a new member. These little stories are entertaining, and don't tend to drag on too long. I can't say the action or the characters are particularly special. Fights are pretty standard anime fare: big explosions that throw people into cliffs creating massive dust clouds, a lot of speaking about "His power" and "At this rate, we'll...", a lot of people miraculously recovering from massive wounds because the power of friendship and so on.

The character roster is similarly good but not great. The main cast are all endearing, with the exception of Elizabeth who I found ridiculously boring, each having their own little fun quirks that come up enough to be distinctive but not enough to be annoying. A surprise favorite of mine is Hawk, the over-excitable comic relief talking pig who I thought would be insufferable.

Side characters are usually more like vignettes than proper characters. There's a small amount of characterization, a few motivation, an emotional moment at some point, and then we move on. This worked surprisingly well for me, especially considering that I'm definitely a character-based guy when it comes to my entertainment. The exception comes in the main characters (for obvious reasons) and the main antagonists, who do get a bit more depth. I found the antagonist pretty cookie-cutter. They did their job, but they didn't really stand out, and I can't say I particularly cared.

The result of this is a show with a tonne of variety. The things that the characters are physically doing are constantly different. They'll be breaking into a prison, and soon having a fighting tournament, or reminiscing about old times. On the way, there's a bunch of colorful characters who will entertain you well enough. The show feels constantly fresh and exciting, and thanks to the sheer amount of fighting styles and locales to fight in, the action never gets stale, even if it never is that fantastic. There's also just enough humor there to get the occasional chuckle without being overbearing with constant forced laughs.

Character and World Building: 7/10
This very much focuses on variety rather than depth. This means that there's no particularly fascinating characters, but you're constantly in the process of meeting a new one, which keeps the show really fresh throughout.

Story: 5/10
I can't say the story is good or bad. It's very much just present. We go around, fight a dude, fight another dude for some other reason, and blah blah blah. I don't really care. Can I see the talking pig again?

Presentation: 4.5/5
I really like the music, and I actually adore both Hawk's voice and sound effects. The sound effects for battles are fine too. The visuals are pretty top-notch with plenty of cool looking magic things in fights. Character faces do tend to look somewhat weird though.

Enjoyment: 13/15
This is a show feels like it's constantly on the move, yet is never quite overwhelming. Instead of feeling like it's fast paced, The Seven Deadly Sins manages to constantly harvest that honeymoon period where you're meeting what seems to be a cool new character for the first time. Whilst they never evolve past that, they manage to stay at least somewhat entertaining in the finale, and the result is a show that constantly feels shiny new. and is entertaining throughout.

Overall:                29.5/40
A Bit Under         7.5/10

While by no means a masterpiece, The Seven Deadly Sins is a bunch of fun, and I deeply enjoyed my time with it. It's not that it has a lot of flaws, it's simply that its strengths are rather superficial. I'm not going to go round recommending it, but I think most people would not regret giving this one a watch.

The Best Thing I Played In 2015

Dragon Age: Inquisition

You know when a studio seems to be chasing a certain ideal, and never quite nails it? You love what their games promise, what they try to accomplish, and they get close enough that you're very much satisfied with their results, to the point where they're some of your favorite games anyway?

That's, to me, what BioWare has been doing since KotOR. Their games have always been trying to achieve a certain something, and I think that most people misconstrue what BioWare games are about. "They're great, in-depth RPGs" people say, but that really hasn't been true. KotOR was pretty complicated, but it was pretty much a port of DnD in terms of combat. Something similar is true about Neverwinter Nights After that, every BioWare game has actually been pretty simple, with not many stats to dump points in. They're not really about being in-depth RPGs.

"They've got great stories", people say. Once again, I beg to differ. KotOR and Jade Empire had memorable, great twists, and that's about it. Everything else was pretty cookie-cutter. Hell, even KotOR and Jade Empire were a simple McGuffin hunt and a quest for revenge, respectively. And, as much as I like the Mass Effect series, if you look at its story with even a tiny bit of skepticism, everything falls apart massively a couple minutes into the second game and keeps crumbling on and on.

What keeps people coming back to BioWare are two things: the worlds they set up, which are usually full of interesting lore and fascinating conflicts, and the main cast of characters, who are there as much to provide interesting arcs as an inside (and often different) perspective on this great world.

KotOR didn't nail it. I love Star Wars, and have read too many of the novels to be comfortable quoting a number, but it's not a universe that holds up when explored. Characters were also somewhat too one-note to really be that interesting. I still fail to remember a moment when I found Juhani anything but dull.

Jade Empire felt too short to nail it. This was an interesting world, with the best story BioWare had done since Baldur's Gate, and a fantastic (by BioWare standards) combat system, but it didn't feel like I had the time to really explore it before the game was over. A cast of blandish characters, and a weird reluctance to return to the universe sealed the coffin on it.

The Mass Effect series was probably the closest the studio had come. The first game had a really good story, unfortunately ruined by the following two entries. They were set in a sci-fi universe that was absolutely fascinating, with its past reflecting on modern-day politics and even events in the story. The cast of characters was definitely the best BioWare had done. They were endearing, fun to be around, and usually provided great perspectives on the world that you wouldn't really understand without them around. Unfortunately, the weak story in the later two games, as well as just clunky, not particularly fun gameplay the entire way through weakens the series, and the ending... well, that was definitely a massive clusterfuck.

The Dragon Age series was cool. Pretty good combat, and a world rivaling Tolkien in detail and just weird little details, but considerably more interesting. The stories in the two first games were pretty cool, with plenty of political intrigue in the first one, and an unusually personal, small-scale story in the second. Both games were also blessed with great casts of characters: people who were more than they seemed, people with unique perspectives, funny people, scary people... But still, something felt like it was missing. After all, Dragon Age II ended on a weird sort of cliffhanger, and the tension between Mages and Templars that both games had expertly built up was never really satisfactorily addressed.

Dragon Age: Inquisition is not only the perfect culmination to that storyline, but also the best individual game in that series. It's fun to play, and explores the world much more in-depth than the previous installments, looking at the existent lore from  new perspectives and adding interesting new tidbits here and there. Most importantly, it's got the best damn cast of party members that any BioWare game has had. It is, in every sense of the word, a masterpiece. This is the game that I feel BioWare has been trying to make for over a decade, and they finally succeeded. Dragon Age: Inquisistion has me ecstatic every time I play it, every time a new conflict of opinions comes up, with no clear correct answer, every time I have a philosophical conversation about whether one of my decisions was right or wrong with one of my friends, and every time I sneak around my fortress with my weirdo of a girlfriend planting buckets of water on top of doors to important dignitaries offices.

Dragon Age: Inquisition is a game I've wanted to play since I've been into videogames. You can play it right now.