Reviews for March 2025
Anthology of the Reviewer
Due to stupid mostly self imposed responsibilities that included a Homestuck reread,1 my plate was kind of full this month.
Homestuck is pretty brainy and long. The per-page word count rises over time, and the daily batches of the reread are based around page numbers, so more and more of my day is dedicated to it. Yesterday (uh, 3/18 as of writing this) I spent a good two hours catching up.
What I’m saying is this article is going to be low on high quality textual media, though I found two great video games.2 What little time I found to read actual prose, I spent on forum trash that demanded nothing from me, so it’s not a big surprise.
I’ll be free on almost every front after 4/13, so don’t worry, it’s not going to be a pattern.
★: The Roottrees are Dead, Anthology of the Killer, Star Trek: The Next Generation3
*: Rick and Morty, Dragon Ball
Previously, on Record Crash:
Polyhistor Academy
I read this a few months ago and gave up on continuing it recently. It’s a very long quest that has been running since 2014, with readers making plans on what they want the main character to do next. The plans all look like this:
We currently have 30 Willpower and 5 Stress. If we go to classes and then use Mental Fork to both cast Life's Forge Meditation and paint for the first action after class, we would have an average of 34.1 Willpower and 4 Stress. Alternatively we could use two actions instead of using Mental Fork for an average result of 41.1 Willpower (and 52.1 tomorrow morning). This is not that bad. Going to class is still somewhat risky, but we have more than enough Willpower to use GTFO. We can also bring the remaining Pick-me-up pill just in case.4
It’s not a quest for casuals. In fact, it’s infamous for being so unforgiving that the readers’ bad decisions once led to the main character getting sexually assaulted.
Based on the name and what I just said, you could imagine it’s a death school in the fashion of The Scholomance or all those stories about Lovecraft’s Miskatonic University. Or Tales of Mu, the briefly popular-in-ratfic-circles unfinished (of course) BDSMish (of course) fantasy novel. You would be right. There’s really not much more to the “plot” of the story than “magic murder school”. Slice-of-death or whatever the kids call it.
I mentioned the quest runner being too punishing, and that might sound like a problem, but the REAL one is the userbase. Their priorities:
Despite the main character being a sociopathic weirdo, he must spend as much time as possible protecting the forum’s waifu, a blind girl5 that paints and is pretty much useless at everything. The definition of liability.
Despite the year running out of days pretty fast, and death waiting for him at the end if he doesn’t study, he must instead spend his first few years exclusively researching anything that looks like Study Magic, use it to reach some kind of Nerd Singularity, then speedrun everything else. This research keeps stalling as the writer tries to signpost it’s not going to happen. The players refuse to give up.
Thanks to the previous two priorities, the main character is insanely weak compared to his peers, even though the combat is reasonably balanced. He has to hide and be sneaky most of the time and avoid every possibly interesting subplot just in case it’s dangerous.
The writer kept trying to get the character’s development back on rails, to the point of punitive sex, but the players still didn’t get the hint. I read up to the end of the first year and if anything they got worse, the sanest voices lost to the sea of “democracy”.
It’s just kind of a wash, and it’s all YOUR fault (hoping I catch a player with that one).
Rick and Morty*
There’s no way you don’t know what the cartoon is, so I’m not even bothering with a trailer.
Back in the day I watched most of Season 4, then dropped the show because it felt like Zombie Simpsons. During my server’s streams, we’ve instead only played the greatest hits up to the finale of Season 7, so I have some new favorites (Night Family, Analyze Piss and Fear No Mort among them).6
Obviously the writing took a dive after the third season. I hear Dan Harmon read one too many op-eds and decided to step back in order to promote some of the individual voices in the writing team, or something stupid like that. This means you’re rolling a die every time you watch an episode (will you land on a good writer or the least funny Redditor of all time????), but if you do what we did and only watch the good ones, the quality stays stable.
The voices for both and Rick and Morty changed in Season 7 after Justin Roiland was allegedly exposed as an alleged weird sex pervert. The glorified impersonator is pretty decent at copying Rick, but Morty is laughably off.7 The production of this show is generally such a fucking mess.
Anyway, if you haven’t started this show due to its annoying fanbase and all the drama around it, and if you’re aware of the caveats, do go for it, it’s more than worth the watch.
After
I already found a mildly decent LOST fic, I don’t know why I keep doing this to myself. This one is maybe the most predictable approach to a sequel, just having the new man in charge (Hurley) slowly assemble a new team of islanders.
It’s a bit original in that he basically wants to open the island to the public as a kind of magical healing place, but I can’t write any more positive things about it. The writing and characterization are very flat, like video game NPC text, and the stakes are non existent and revolve around dry business dealings.
I was optimistic because the reviews were gushing, but in retrospect FFnet is not the most discerning of audiences.
Zero Requiem
The terrible title evokes Code Geass, sure, but it doesn’t really get across that it’s Lelouch in the ASOIAF universe, reborn as a Velaryon in the lost era before the Mad King and after House of the Dragon.
The choice to set it in an unexplored period makes it an interesting read, and I usually like the dialogue and character interactions, but Lelouch is a Gary Stu that gets away with virtually everything he plans, wins when it matters and loses when it doesn’t.
Even that might not have been that bad if the fic didn’t fall prey to the SpaceBattles curse. At some point it devolves into battle after battle, each longer and more detailed than the last. I really wish these writers actually signed up for their country’s militaries and got it all out of their system.
Kaiju Slaying For Death and Profit
This is the kind of fic that would be complete trash in any other setting, but I’ve always found the Evangelion story a prime target for self-insert fixfics. The floor for improvement is so low.
It’s not quality fiction, certainly, but this has some aspects that make it a good popcorn fic:
The main character is hilariously edgy and abrasive to everyone he meets except the writer’s waifu, Rei. The contrast with the original main character means the dynamics are completely different, every dialogue is fresh and often very funny.
He’s hypercompetent when it comes to actually piloting the robots, which means that despite everyone hating him, they can’t get rid of him. The toxicity starts causing a schism in NERV, with half the company convincing themselves that he’s a heroic tsundere and the saner half desperately trying to find any replacement for the guy.8
It’s very technically one of those Waifu Catalog fics, but the character refuses to do any of the sketchy shit. In fact, it’s a downright tame story.
The advertised Kaiju Slaying is unexpectedly well written (for the medium, anyway), and every fight is different, so it’s hard to lose interest.
Again, not a good story, caveat emptor, don’t read it and come back to ask me what the fuck I was thinking. I was just in the right mindset for a funny edgefest at the time. Are you?
Saving the school would have been easier as a cafeteria worker
One of those “viral RoyalRoad hits”, like Super Supportive. “Like Super Supportive” is unfortunately a very appropriate and hard hitting piece of critique here.
It takes place in a kitchen sink universe, with demon summonings and monsters and many types of magic. Our isekai’d9 guy has been hunting demons for the government for years now, and due to politics, he’s given a new mission: sneak into a rival country under a false identity, enroll as a student in their magic academy, and stop a mass demon summoning before it happens. If he fails, the rival country will blame his homeland and a big war will start.
All good so far.
Now, throw it all away, because it doesn’t matter. I don’t know why the writer did this, because he doesn’t take donations, but he decided to stretch the very thin “getting to know the school’s population” Act 1 forever. Nothing ever happens. I wouldn’t even call it slice of life, at least that may have relationship and character development.
This story stays in near permanent stasis, the demon summoning plot is mentioned at best every twenty chapters, usually followed by a “no progress so far”, and the average scene is zero-productivity hangouts with random students.
What’s worst is that he’s a competent author who’s able to write some funny twists and turns here and there.10 The story is eminently readable, but it always promises things “next chapter” that never come, because if they did, the story would be one step closer to the end. The Super Supportive formula.
I had to force myself to stop reading, because the fake cliffhangers really got me for a while, but at this point in my webfic reviewing “career” I’ve developed a pretty good mental antivirus for this kind of shit.
Dragon Ball*
The manga, not the anime. It was shorter and far more fun than I expected, read it all in under a month. Keep in mind that doesn’t include most popular parts, which are in the sequel manga Dragon Ball Z.
I was able to find the manga in full color and, while I’m not at all well-read in the medium, I can for now very safely slot Akira Toriyama as my favorite manga artist.
Sure, his anatomy and character designs are not on the level of JoJo’s Araki, but his default artstyle is extremely charming (even the way he draws inanimate objects), and he’s clearly mastered paneling and blocking such that I not once lost track of the action throughout the 311 or whatever chapters I read, which sounds like a low bar, but, well, I have bad experiences.
I had the impression (from Dragon Quest, mostly) that he tended towards sameface, but that problem was completely absent from at least this work.
The plot is about Son Goku, a young martial artist. It starts off as a kind of lame gag comic, with this kid (who was raised by a martial artist in the woods) meeting his first couple city people. Lots of cultural clashes ensue, like our main character not understanding sexual taboos, or being unable to tell men and women apart.
Don’t get me wrong, Goku is as pure hearted as it gets, you always root for him, he’s not one of those pervert anime characters. That’d be Master Roshi. I vaguely knew the guy from cultural osmosis, and after Ranma I was dreading another Happosai-style creep. However, he surprised me with a layered personality: he’s faking his idiocy most of the time, and whenever we see his inner thoughts, we find a terrified old man whose only priority is his students’ personal development. This is also where more serious elements start coming in.
Roshi joins a tournament under a secret identity simply so Goku doesn’t win it. You see, if Goku happens to be naturally powerful enough to beat every challenge in front of him (like happening to win a world tournament with brute force the first time he enrolls) he will become overconfident and stop training. He needs to understand there’s always someone stronger, and Roshi is willing to manipulate things to impart that lesson.
The titular Dragon Balls drive the plot, as our cast goes on trips to recover them to either prevent bad guys from using them, or resurrecting people that died. Goku is the only real main character. Though there are many important supporting characters like Bulma and Krillin,11 they don’t show up in every arc, the manga artist (Toriyama) makes sure to rotate the cast to keep the dynamics from becoming boring.12
From Dragon Ball Z-related media you may be under the impression that the action would be boring, just drivel about power levels and yelling loudly. The humble beginnings have action that is firmly aimed at young boys, but it’s as smart as it gets within those limits.
At least at the start. It’s not like the shift to the sequel makes everything worse, it’s a gradual drop in action quality. We start with clever twists and targeting people’s novel weaknesses, and by the end of the manga we’re firmly in “He’s going to use that” and “H-HE’S FAST” territory, as fights start being purely decided on being able to tank arbitrary attacks. Power levels, to put it another way.
Okay, so the action is weak, what’s the big deal? Well, action also becomes more and more common. The comedy and character interactions fall by the wayside so you can get more offscreen training into tournament arcs.
Do I recommend it? Kind of. I think the first half is as good as a manga targeted to the Shonen demographic gets, and it starts slowly dropping off after that until it just becomes dumb. It never gets as annoying as Ranma even by then, and I gladly continued into Dragon Ball Z for further cultural enrichment. But I do think you need to either be into action manga (I’m not) or fun characters and comedy (yep this is me).
A Young Girl's War Between the Stars
I talked about Lelouch-in-ASOIAF, this is Tanya-in-Star Wars. The two fics take very similar approaches to straight crossovers and you can easily approximate the entire plot in your head.
That’s bad, btw, I like being surprised.
I do like some aspects of this one, like painstakingly detailed scenes of ship sabotage, but the genericity sinks it. The writer also shoots himself in the foot by having Tanya reveal her nature to several of her allies. Tanya fics work the best when elaborate farces and misunderstandings are involved. Just look at A Young Woman's Inevitable Dance of the Dragons, after a quarter million words the jokes haven’t gotten old somehow.
This one did the job in keeping me entertained for a couple days, but it’s ultimately forgettable and I don’t really recommend it.
The Roottrees are Dead★
This is all I’ve ever wanted. Obra Dinn is roughly my type of game, but I didn’t like the boring naval theme and the graphics hurt my eyes. This is Obra Dinn, but set in 1998, and you can use the early Internet to solve the mysteries!
The game has a free itch.io version with less content. I instead bought and played the Steam one after enough recommendations. I didn’t regret it one bit.
I made the mistake in reading Alexander Wales’ review before writing this, and now I’m afraid of rehashing the same points. I guess I don’t really want to spoil too much anyway.
It’s a puzzle game about slowly filling a family tree of rich people through news articles, books and online searches. There’s a good, Outer Wilds-ish progress-tracking system that lets you know when something is a dead end or when you’ve used all its clues. During research, you get funny abridged summaries of what you found instead of the website or books themselves, which lets the developer put a LOT of content in the game without wasting his life making fake websites.
There’s one flaw that I have to point out. The game is a bit too easy, and you can figure out the “main twist” one hour in (I took six hours to beat it). This is not a popular opinion, though, and it seems like if you have poor doxxing skills you might bash your head against the game forever and need hints to progress.
The hint system is allegedly good, but I never used it. I’m not bragging, it’s just I archive Internet things as a hobby, and I very often have to effectively doxx people to merge artist listings in a music wiki I volunteer for. This was kind of a “Forklift Driver playing Forklift Simulator” situation for me.
I’ve seen Roottrees compared to The Case of the Golden Idol, so I guess I have to play that eventually. Hopefully if you recognize any of the games mentioned in this article you’ll feel like checking this one out. For me, the Steam version actually comes with a whole second game inside it, so I’m currently playing that (it’s mostly a harder version of the base game, but the “story” is weaker).
Is it Wrong to Put Skyrim in Danmachi
Yes.
It’s a Danmachi fic, when are those even good? Danmachi is that one dungeon-crawling-city anime with a broken main character, who’s thankfully absent in the plot so far. And yes, “so far”, somehow I got to the current end of this piece of trash. It’s been a hard month.
The main character has Skyrim powers. This means that when he has two separate LitRPG systems, the one from the anime (extremely slow but fast when you’re challenged) and the one from Skyrim (just grind forever for free gains, bro). Ultimately I don’t think the crossover adds anything to the story, there isn’t really a synergy and you could make the MC strong in other ways without the baggage of stealth archer memes every chapter.
The dialogue is fairly annoying, as this writer has chosen to faithfully transcribe how people talk in animes (i.e. annoyingly):
"Ehehe... You're so reliable Elric-kun!" She giggled happily. "Oooh what do you want to do first? Tell each other our likes and dislikes? Uwah, I just really want to get to know my new child!"
Beyond that, it does nothing unique. You read one Danmachi fic and you’ve read most of them. You read one Danmachi fic review…
Claude Plays Pokemon
I guess I wasted some time watching this this month, so it technically counts as reviewable? I’ve reviewed youtubers before, surely this is more Media than that.
Claude Plays Pokemon is easy enough to understand if you know what the fuck Claude is. If you don’t, it’s basically a rival company’s ChatGPT. One of the company’s employees always tests their newest chatbots to see if they can play Pokemon Red with zero13 help.
With version 3.7, that paid off. The model can “think step-by-step” (the scrolling text in the video above), and this makes it able to plan its actions and execute them well enough to progress past the first badge.
The employee decided to stream a new, public run of his experiment. The first one got stuck in Mt. Moon, earlier than anticipated.14 The second one, currently ongoing, got further into the game over its first week or so, but has been walking in circles and doing anything but getting to the fourth gym for twice as long.
Footage is sped up in the video for a reason: thinking models take longer to return final actions. That part would be fine on its own. Sadly, like all ChatGPT-likes, Claude has a short memory and a tendency to fall into repetitive patterns. This makes the stream painful to watch for longer than five minutes at a time, but I kept tuning in often whenever someone told me progress was finally being made.15 That experience is pretty much like the original Twitch Plays Pokemon.
Another problem, and one that may be stream-killing, is Claude’s fucking terrible vision and inability to spatially reason. It laser focuses on irrelevant ladders, can’t tell apart a cuttable tree from a regular one, and can’t build a consistent map in its “head” to allow it to properly explore the many mazes of Pokemon Red.
At this point, I think the experiment is over. Claude cannot beat the game. I hope the dev gives up and just adds some new tools that make up for its shitty vision. Even though that wouldn’t be a proper experiment of general AI capabilities, it is very fun to see an AI’s stupid thoughts in real time, especially when he keeps reaching all the wrong conclusions.
Star Trek: The Next Generation★
I could write a full review of this show, and I did once, in fact.
If you scroll back enough in this blog, there are three very old reviews from before I moved to Substack. Why did I move to Substack, you ask? Because my previous self hosted blogging system crashed and lost my 10k word review contrasting Star Trek: The Original Series to this show.
Anyway, losing that review puts a damper on things, so a very short summary will have to do here. Star Trek differentiates itself from most other sci-fi by being stupidly optimistic. Humanity got its shit together and (with other aliens) leads the galaxy by example, interpersonal conflict is rare, there’s good communication, money is abolished, etc. etc.
We’re following a starship filled with those heroic people as they meet aliens and investigate science mysteries. The original show had a brash (though not incompetent or horny like people think) captain named Kirk, this one has the Ultimate Diplomat, a bald guy named Picard. Other important characters include android Data, disappointing Klingon Worf and insufferable human child genius Wesley.
People call Star Trek influential, but I really wish I saw more of its utopian, professional competence-porny approach in other media. Even within the franchise, TNG is the last entry where these waters are unmuddied. Deep Space 9, though a great show, starts ruining things by bringing in Section 31, a secret agency that kills people and topples governments to keep the Federation’s hands clean. By 2025, we have a show with a drug addict who lives in a trailer and complains about rich people. In a society with no money.16 TNG? The closest thing to a military is still trying to talk evil genocidal aliens down with pure diplomacy.
Beyond that thematic backdrop, it’s an episodic show with some continuity but no real overarching plot. Lots of really good episodic science-fiction (it invented the Borg!), lots of talking, but never boring talking, and little action. It’s still one of the greats for a reason, and you should definitely give it a try. Just follow an episode guide, because Season 1 is famously weak17 and will put you off.
Peak Elf Performance
One of the recent darlings of Spacebattles, the setting is like one of those fantasy animes with the slutty and smug-yet-useless elves,18 except our protagonist is a more traditional Tolkien-ish elf who wants to be heroic and beat people up with a sword.19 He escapes his home, happens to save a dwarf, and goes on random adventures from there.
It’s okay. I’m a bit offended at how unambitious it is. The author loves worldbuilding, even though this is a comedy story, and the plot goes into tortuous digressions about how dwarves actually turn into trolls and then giants as they age, things like that. What the plot fails to go into is like… interesting events? I was occasionally amused but mostly bored.
It’s not even that poorly written, but if I wanted what are effectively transcribed D&D campaigns I’d reread Dragonlance, at least that’s more fun to complain about.
The Voyage Within
Yet another “Dragon in Star Trek” entry (Always Be Yourself…, Considerations of Flight, The Voyage Without, and now this).
Not much to write about, you always know what to expect from the author, Hiver, and you definitely know what to expect from the series. A taciturn dragon dealing with the tiny spaces of a spaceship as he solves space engineering problems.
I complained last time that he was getting way too edgy, and The Voyage Within fixes that. Sadly it’s pretty late into the book, but I also thought the monster-of-the-week problems in this novel were more interesting, so I’d roughly place it 1>2>4>3.
Instead of immediately moving onto the next sequel as usual, Hiver has started a new unrelated story. Though he claims he’ll come back to the series, I’ve seen similar situations before and they don’t end well. We’ll have to see.
Anthology of the Killer★
I’m writing this before reading the definitely better Wadapan review.20 Hopefully I won’t retread too much ground, especially because I didn’t understand what the writer was going for at all.
Anthology of the Killer is a collection of 9 horror/comedy games by Stephen Gillmurphy, who you definitely don’t know from Goblet Grotto and Space Funeral. You know those two games if you’re a nerd, though.
The nine entries are walking simulators. For a game that gets a star here, you’d think I’d add “(non-derogatory)”, but no, it’s derogatory, let us talk about the flaws first. I liked the game in spite of the walking. Most of the time I was just thinking that Stephen would rather be making a webcomic (but no one reads those anymore) or a cartoon (but no one funds those anymore).
The game doesn’t have a free camera. Most of the time it stays on you from a fixed spot, generating shots a bit like Resident Evil’s, except the camera moves as you do, keeping BB (our pink-haired main character) in the center of the frame. Cinematographers might be seeing the issue already. When you have to walk towards and under the camera, which is often, things become a spinny mess. Not just that, controls are relative to the point of view, so you’ll have to switch to pressing the up arrow instead of the down arrow…
Just trust me that it’s bad.
But why was this awful decision made? Well, I mentioned cinematography, and that’s half of it. Stephen wanted nearly full control over how the players see the environments. In my opinion, the game does look pretty good, using a very simple style21 and heavy amounts of mixed-media. That works fine for both comedy and horror, and I’m sure it helps that it’s fast to produce. But in any case, at least four of the screenshots I shared make my point.
The other half is the Horror element. Almost every chapter of Anthology follows the same structure:
BB is mildly annoyed by something.
BB enters a new environment to investigate what’s going on.
Lots of exploration of this environment and dry-funny commentary from BB ensue.
Oh no, there was a horror explanation for the annoyance!
One-to-five chase scenes as you walk away from the monster-of-the-chapter.
BB escapes or beats the monster in a funny way.
BB returns to comfort, not having changed in the slightest.22
The chase scenes are only made remotely scary by the fact you’re often walking towards a point you can see. You also know you’ll have to make a snap decision on which arrows to press after you cross the “blind spot” of the camera. I guess this adds a bit of an “action” element to the scenes, and justify the drawbacks? I guess? There are way too many chases though, I was a bit tired by the end of the 9 games.
Any non-gameplay issues? I guess one weakness is that the first game is a lame and confusingly arranged “office work is boring” story. Almost more of a tech demo for the engine than anything else.
Anyway, that’s about everything I can complain about.
Anthology of the Killer is so unique (at least to me, since I haven’t read Roberto Bolaño and all the other highbrow shit that inspired it). Whatever the cause, at no point could I predict where the story was going next. Yes, the rough structural beats are universal. But the anthology as a whole goes so many places, from swimming pools to the New Wave musical23 scene to museums of morality. It’s hard to even say what the story is about. And that’s such a strange thing to say about a story that is largely composed of many funny bits.
I’m not proud to say I don’t think I got it. My snap take is that it’s yet another story about capitalism being bad and only existing because we ignore the suffering involved, leftism being good and flawless because it addresses the True History, and conservatives wanting to bring back a whitewashed violent past they don’t actually understand. But the author of this game is so clearly intelligent I doubt it’s so simple. I’m still trying to figure it out a week later. I guess I’ll check out Wadapan’s review for the hot deets?24
I could go into more detail, but this review is already long enough. The game is great, extremely cheap, and the individual chapters are playable for free on itch.io. I still recommend buying the Steam version, since it has a pretty fun bonus room and a playable loader that really add to the experience.
One last thought. I mentioned the author probably wanted to make something like a cartoon instead of a glorified RPG Maker indie horror game. I very strongly suspect something bigger will come from this guy eventually. I have a hunch this is an Earthbound Halloween Hack leading into Undertale situation. This much raw talent and creativity cannot stay contained in such small packages for long.
That’s it for the month. I’m currently pretty deep into Dragon Ball Z, just met the first two Androids, and I’m a bit tired of it. It’s almost inevitable I’ll drop it before I get to the end, or at least skim hard for the character introductions in the final few arcs.
Here’s a question, though. I’ve found this kind of shonen manga ideal as a way to get some productive cultural education off the lazy spans of time I’d otherwise spend reinstalling, 100%ing and uninstalling Balatro. Which one should I read next, Hunter x Hunter, or the highly dangerous One Piece? I guess Bleach is also relatively popular recently for some reason, but I think that one has no redeemable qualities.
You tell me, weeb commenters.
Pulling the curtain back a little, I had to:
Daily: catch up with a batch of the Homestuck group reread, make a funny batch-related animated server logo edit for the day (no one asked me to do this), ping people at the right time, write down my thoughts on the batch…
Saturday and Sunday: set up the two-hour streams of R&M+TNG+funny videos for my server, then watch them
Multiple other Homestuck projects because we’re nearing a meme date (census survey, event asset release + archival, fanmusic album…)
Upgrade my server’s Discord bot to the latest API specifications because the old one can’t see into threads and was impossible to maintain in general (no one asked me to do this)
Write this article
Write most of THIS article:
All this in addition to my actual day job, which was extraordinarily busy
I still need to read the next Dark Tower book, but I’m already reading one endless metatextual work and have no room for more.
Oh yeah, I reviewed Severance last month obviously, and mentioned S2 was a bit worse than the first one. As of the finale, this is still true, but the last episode really stuck the landing and redeemed a lot of the seemingly filler episodes, so my recommendation 100% stands.
“Haha what an over the top silly example that was picked as a joke”. No, it’s legitimately all like this.
Kind of. She keeps her eyes closed because opening them would make horrible eldritch things happen, if I remember correctly, but this comes into play so little I probably don’t.
I don’t like the “Lore” at all. I think people wrongly think they like the History of Evil Morty when they actually liked the good script of the two episodes where he first appeared, which was purely coincidence. A lot of the highest rated scripts in the later seasons are only rated highly because they ““advance”” the ““““plot”””” with more tacked on backstory bullshit. Be warned.
I’m doubtful Roiland was responsible for any good writing ideas after the first season, so no effect there.
This reminds me of something, not sure what.
The main character is technically from our universe, but this is completely irrelevant to the plot. Honestly, if the writer actually took donations you could easily explain everything away as “he’s targeting the median RR reader to extract capital”, but I guess we’ll never know for sure. Is it really worth it to sacrifice your writing skills on the altar of one-more-chapter just for attention?
In the middle of an unrelated adventure, the main character easily disposes of a man everyone was scared of, the bodyguard of a scumbag he wanted to kill, and feels very smug about it. Later, cops investigate the scumbag’s murder, go looking for our main character. He asks the headmaster if he can get rid of the investigation so he can keep his secret mission going. The headmaster tells him to just blame it on the Professional Fall Guy that they usually use. The Professional Fall Guy was the bodyguard he killed ten chapters ago.
I’m sure you read this blog for explanations of comedy in stories you have no context for. You’re welcome.
I’m using a weird fan translation (these full color manga releases aren’t all released in the US yet, I think, so I have no other choice if I want stability) that uses names like Kuririn for many characters, but I think these are the “accepted” ones in the fandom.
It avoids so many of Ranma’s pitfalls despite releasing earlier…
It’s not given any hints on how to progress, but it does have an overlay on the screen that lets it know which tiles are navigable, and the AI can trigger a tool to automatically navigate to a chosen coordinate. The first is needed because Claude’s vision frankly sucks, and the second is needed because it already takes like 10 seconds per action, imagine if it had to input 20 D-pad actions manually.
The developer restarted it to make it a “clean” experiment when he added a supposedly better way of handling long-term memory, short text files that the bot can load, edit and save. In practice, I think this tool is poorly designed and the bot is about as competent as it was before, we just got luckier.
i.e. not at all after the post-Surge loop.
People claim this is about Society itself, the optimism of the 60s fading away with time until we’re all doomscrolling, but I’m not convinced. People are still writing things like This Used to be About Dungeons.
If you’ve ever heard the expression “growing the beard”, it comes from here. Riker was beardless in Season 1, and grew one just as the show got good.
I say this but I have actually not watched any. I’m probably missing some elements of the parody.
This is yet another pointless backstory-isekai-with-no-effect-on-the-plot story btw. I’m starting to notice a pattern.
Did that, went back to read his review, and he basically addressed the same things I did, even some mildly spoilery thoughts (e.g. BB dolls) I had but didn’t want to write down, or which were too bloggy (e.g. its making me want to make games again)*. I just can’t win.
*footnote footnote: I used to make a lot of RPG Maker games when I was 12-15 or so. I kept switching computers afterwards, safe in the knowledge Megaupload would keep them archived forever…
The artstyle strongly reminded me of early It Hurts!!, and its sense of humor is so similar I thought it had to be an inspiration, but Um Jammer Lammy could be it, of all things? There’s a list in the bonus room:
I haven’t checked all of them, but none look anything like Anthology of the Killer, and at one point the game references MilkCan, the band of a game that happens to look like this:
It is true that not everything has to be inspired by something.
Let us call this Nopenomyth “The Millennial’s Journey”.
The soundtrack is very much “just weird shit” à la LISA, but it does the job. I do find it pretty funny that the catchiest track is supposed to be horrible in-story.
He also didn’t know.
You may be interested in the developer's notes on Anthology of the Killer: http://harmonyzone.org/text/killernotes/autopsypile.html
Can't say I would recommend Bleach. The first 2 arcs are very good shounen but after the Soul Society arc it just falls apart completely.
The fanfiction scene for Bleach has been completely dead for over a decade now and the recent revival of the anime for the final arc did not breathe any life into it. Probably because the final arc is god awful.
I'm new to this website, only recently finding it after a friend recommended it so I don't know what your stance is on recommendations but I would suggest Deku The Hunter: Support Hero.
A complete fic written back in 2018, the only MHA fic I can see myself recommending to others.