Reviews for October 2025

More like Whizzard and Ass

Nov 01, 2025

I did it. I pushed that fucking boulder to the top. Wizard and Glass, which I legitimately consider the worst published book I’ve read in my life, is finally finished.1 I can allow myself to read real literature again, and I did so this month.2 Kind of. I’m still reading fanfiction, only released in the year of our Lord 1321.

★: Öoo, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Intercession, Hades II, Pokemon: Apocalypse

*: A Daring Synthesis, Dexter: Resurrection, Pokemon Legends Z-A, Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin, I’d Rather Be Playing Stellaris, Saw

Previously, on Record Crash:

Reviews for September 2025

Makin

October 1, 2025

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A Daring Synthesis*

“It’s some real FFII type shit, namsayin? That’s my life now, the grind. Imagine playing Runescape but it’s for real, and I put like five thousand hours into that shit so this’ll be a piece of cake. I’m basically my own Isekai protagonist, and really there aren’t enough animes like that I really like the Isekai genre.”

Imagine reading this and thinking that the main character is meant to be likable, that this story is a straightforward comedy.3

You’d be surprised how many people do and drop it instantly. Even forum mods drop it by permabanning the author. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

A Daring Synthesis is a pretense of a LitRPG taking place in the Worm universe. Greg Veder, annoying forum user, gets the power he definitely wished to have the most. In ironic Worm fashion, it’s the one that can maximally hurt him.

That’s because, while this story presents as The Gamer, it’s truly a spin on Flowers for Algernon, a story I’ve never read but I assume is also about a guy with video game powers raising his Wisdom stat too high. Greg does so, and starts realizing he’s always been a very annoying child. He realizes too late that you can’t walk back a terrible first impression, especially when you get social powers that make people distrust apologies as manipulation.

I raised a hand to brush well tears away. I hadn’t read Faust, but watching Madoka was close enough.

Yeah, while it’s filled with character development and poignant moments, A Daring Synthesis still has many moments of levity.

“You thought this was live and you still said all those things?!” she incredulously blurted.

“You said act natural!”

Her eyes bulged and she turned to furiously click to an earlier part of the video.

“-bby of mine is making crystal sculptures. Usually, I get a penny in an old ice cream container and then fill it with one part bleach and two parts ammonia, then I get a crazy straw and blow oxygen onto the penny to activate the iron base. In fact, you can do it at home, just remember to keep it under your bed-”

She paused the video. “You can’t go on national television and trick people into poisoning themselves with chlorine gas!”

So we have a masterful tragicomedy about uphill character development set in the world of the most popular web novel (on forums). How did this author get banned (on forums)?

His in-story seething gives us a hint:

Even so, it had guidelines. It would not say a single slur, not even in private to me. It would not, could not, have any of the problematic personality that so often got me in trouble with moderators on internet forums.

Greg is an annoying gamer. He says slurs out loud,4 which are transcribed fully uncensored. The writer (aptly named Ironypus) refused to compromise on this, and started “subtly” poking fun at the controversy, making the already pathetic SpaceBattles mods insecure. When his story became permalocked as a result, he moved it to Sufficient Velocity. When their palette-swapped mods deleted it there, he gave up and, instead of moving to QQ as was the style at the time, he put it up on AO3 and FFnet and called it a day.

That’s where the story stands currently. It’s a shame, because for a fic like this, the reactions of forum users are part of the fun. AO3 comments are not the same.

One mystery remains: why am I recommending this with an asterisk? Well, the story has two parts, one where Greg has a gaming power, and a soft reboot, A Glib Facsimile. After a short epilogue, Greg gets sent back to day 1 of his adventures, this time with Celestial Forge powers. No, that’s not the problem, I’m into that shit. The issue is retroactively foreshadowed by this recent quote:

“It’s not the same. I earned so much, there. Sure, I ‘started’ as less of a dipshit for everyone here, but… I liked it better, before.”
“The struggle made it worth it.”
“Exactly! And what’s my struggle here? Losing my life to something I have no control over?

A Daring Synthesis is about character development. By the time the writer got bored of the story, Greg was basically a normal person. Once that was over, what’s the point in continuing to read?

Glib Facsimile is an equally clever twist on Celestial Forge powers, sure. Whenever he gets a new power, his body gets taken over for an increasing amount of time. The invader, what Greg calls his “gay alien”, is sort of a gestalt of every annoying forum commenter in the Worm fandom.5 Obsessed with Taylor, negatively obsessed with Cauldron, and focused on building huge weapons to kill Scion with at the expense of everything else. He’s a bit like his past self, and definitely ruins his personal relationships as he becomes Greg’s personal Mr. Hyde.

Alas, the quote stands, it’s just not fun to see a mildly likable protagonist helpless against the main villain. The story remains readable and interesting, but it’s not the same, and you might as well drop it at the first reset. The story could follow the rule of three and become a Chaos Gacha story to redeem itself, like how a thesis and antithesis can lead to something worthwhile, but I kind of doubt it. The ban mindbroke the author a bit, and ADS was the last purely great thing he wrote.

Wait, doesn’t that mean A Daring Synthesis should get a star and A Glib Facsimile the asterisk?6 Too late I’m already moving on to the next review and pulling out my emoji keyboard—

Öoo★

🧩🧠🎮 🤏7⏳🕑

🚫📝

🫵🪱💣💣➡️🗺️

🤫🔍📜 🧠✨🛠️👌

😐😴➡️🆕🔍💣📜🔓➡️🗺️🧭⬆️🙂

❌🐞 ❌💩 ✅🏆🤩

🔚➡️➡️🤫🗝️➕📜

❤️‍🔥👍 ➡️ 💵

Sneaking His Way into the Multiverse

The title is awkward in a way that makes you think the author really wanted to use “My”, and that exemplifies a big problem with the prose.

Jaune awoke, and beheld a bright light.

It surrounded his prone form, and was all that he could see. Beneath him was a soft and springy surface, but not quite a bed. He rather liked the odd texture.

There’s no sound in this strange space, nor any scents. And as recent memories flowed into his mind, reminding him of the ruined body that lay beyond saving, he noted with relief that there was a lack of pain, too. The afterlife wasn’t so bad, then. A bit boring, but that may just be the sort of opinion typical of someone who died following a series of unbelievable events.

One thing stood out of place in this picture. He seemed to be gripping an object in his left hand. Lightweight, compact, cool to the touch, with a slight curvature to smooth out the edges… hold one scroll and you’ve held them all, certain features have become a mainstay among the devices.

Now, why would a ghost have need of a scroll? Who’s he going to call?

He’d prefer not to imagine that the CCT service has expanded beyond the land of the living, because then there would truly be no escape from its terrible grasp.

All the problems. It’s awful in every way. Alternating ponderous with casual, fucking up the tenses, and generally wordy, very unlike this blog. The concept nonetheless hooked me like a fish presented with bait, if the bait is deconstructions.

There’s this guy, Jax Darkphenix, who isekais into the RWBY universe with the Waifu Catalog. He’s as much a psychopath as he sounds.

It had seemed like Season Three’s finale was averted. Everything was quiet up to and through the Vytal Tournament. He was about to win it all with his kickass Semblance that lets him ignore people’s Aura (i.e. the thing that made them marginally a threat), then would have swept Pyrrha into his arms with a totally cool line about how he was the only person strong enough for her before wowing her with his kissing prowess. The face on that Miles Luna Self-Insert when he steals his OTP girl would have been delicious.

But he’s not the main character. Jaune, the annoying sword-and-board blond from canon, is.8 He stumbles upon Jax murdering his friends, and gets a lucky hit in. Jax drops a tablet with the source of his powers.

Jaune’s “lucky hit” riddles him with bullets mid-execution, so he clicks the [Emergency Recall] function in the tablet, trapping him in Jax’s interdimensional apartment. And that’s how he Snuck His Way into the Multiverse.

He desperately bruteforces the tablet’s function to select new worlds to jump to, simply because there’s no food in Jax’s (obviously) Spartan apartment. He ends up in Worm, and through a series of misadventures “recruits” Tattletale. She’s now presented with the same challenge as Jaune: how do you survive when your only tool is the Waifu Catalog’s power system, if you refuse to be a psycho that sells women for points?

I almost want to say it becomes a traditional Jumpchain story here, but not quite:

The main objective isn’t really getting stronger. They need food and resources in order to survive in the interdimensional apartment, at least long enough to return to their original worlds.
Tattletale isn’t a Companion, she’s a full-fledged co-protagonist who has a pretty fun dynamic with Jaune.9
The jumps aren’t standard. They range from Dishonored to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
They can choose the jumps based on danger rating, and they often go for safer worlds after they figure this out, even if it takes longer.

The latter is a problem. It’s technically a staple of traditional Jumpchain fics that you choose your optimized path to godhood, but maybe the author is just more of a wuss than usual, or he can’t justify sane characters picking the challenging worlds.

Whatever the reason, it leads to wildly shifting quality. The Dark Souls jump is surprisingly amazing, I would have never thought that world would work for this. Even Dishonored, Saints Row and a second iteration of Worm contain fun mini-adventures. But with them come complete trash jumps like KonoSuba, Raildex,10 and Grand Blue, where the story becomes either painfully unengaging slice of life or just character-focused in a bad way. This writer is less funny than he thinks he is, and the Jaune/Lisa dynamic is the only engaging one, so interactions with NPCs can’t carry the fic when the stakes are lowered.

Despite the awful writing, I might have stuck with this were it not for this problem, which only becomes worse with time. The readership halves, so I don’t think it’s just me. It’s bad enough that giving the whole story a pass is advised.

Dexter: New Blood & Dexter: Resurrection*

There just isn’t a high quality trailer available for New Blood anywhere. You’d think execs would want people to watch their show. They don’t even need to care about bitrate if YouTube is hosting them!

Dexter, the original show, was pretty good. It’s about the son of a policeman who discovers his child is a murderous sociopath, so he trains him into a serial killer that only targets people who got away with murder. We follow Dexter as he’s grown up into a blood spatter analyst for the cops, exploiting his position to find more criminals to kill.

The problem, when you approach the premise as a serious adapter, is that it sounds more played-straight than it is. Dexter is a sarcastic guy in his internal monologue, making fun of the people who trust him, and the situations he finds himself in are increasingly ludicrous, constantly raising the stakes until you have the Surprise Motherfucker guy11 dying in a gas explosion set up by Dexter’s yandere goth girlfriend in a way that just so happens to allow Dexter to frame him for his murders. The show’s strength lies in threading the needle, leaning on the crazy elements when necessary and grounding them with funny characters. It’s very tongue in cheek. People compare it to The Punisher, and yeah, it’s also sort of capeshit.

New Blood… misses that point completely. It’s not that there are objective problems with quality. The budget is good enough, there are fun setpieces here and there, Michael C. Hall is still an amazing actor… but the tone is completely off, and it suffers from Streaming Disease, wherein all shows need five subplots to fill ten episodes while the main plot, the actually entertaining one, would have fit in three.

Dexter is in upstate New York, in a very cold town, and he’s retired from killing. He’s a boring outdoor equipment salesman trying to keep his head low and waiting to die. At least he’s dating a Native American sheriff12. His comfy epilogue is interrupted by his son Harrison, played by the least charismatic actor ever nepobabied into the bronze screen (I have no proof of this, but it has to be true). It’s also interrupted by slipping in anger and killing a guy, I guess.

The original show was born in that awkward era as serialization was finding its footing, so it alternated formulaic killers-of-the-week with seasonal plots. This loses the latter, replacing it with I guess two main plots? The first is Dexter covering up his crime, and the second is a serial killer that’s been killing women for years. One of the subplots is his son Harrison possibly being a Twisted Fucking Cycle Path, but the answer is no, he’s not. After Dexter solves the mystery and kills the serial killer,13 he realizes he himself is a monster (he realizes this every season) and he shouldn’t involve his son in his messes. He gets Harrison to shoot him in the heart, and New Blood ends.

You see, this was like Better Call Saul, except we’re only watching the black-and-white sections where it all leads to some form of redemption at the end. The point is that Dexter might have thought he’s great, but he’s evil14 and deserves to die after a boring shaggy-dog tale.15 It’s over…

The episode got terrible ratings, and is widely considered one of the worst endings of all time, alongside the one to Dexter Season 8.

Anyway, Dexter got better, and so did the show. Pull that up, Jamie.

Resurrection is a return to form. I don’t know if it’s as good as seasons 1-4 without rewatching those,16 but it sates The Urge.

The premise is batshit, as every Dexter fan wants. After killing Uber-driver-killer “The Dark Passenger” (in large part because that’s what Dexter calls17 his chuunibyou dark side and he doesn’t want “his” name stolen), he finds an invitation to some kind of Serial Killer club headed by billionaire Tyrion from Game of Thrones.

It’s funny how stacked the cast is with “golden age” TV legends. Barney from HIMYM, Cam from Modern Family, Jane from Breaking Bad, Dexter from Dexter, all share scenes with the guy who pulled up the ladder for dwarf actors everywhere.

Every good aspect of the original is back.18 Harry the cop is Dexter’s ghost advisor, Dexter tries to kill someone nearly every episode, his internal monologue is funny instead of self-flagellating, and the plot is twisty enough to stay entertaining throughout the entire season. Smash Mouth’s All Star plays during a serious scene.19

Unfortunately, Harrison. He’s back, played by the same actor. At least he’s not just a fun-killing obstacle (to the point of drug overdose/school shooting subplots? he really sucked in New Blood), and sets up some stuff for Dexter himself to engage with. I actually think he might be interesting next season, but he drags down this one slightly, with a couple subplots that must have been orders from executives with how irrelevant they ultimately are.

Dexter always had a few of those, even during the good years, so we can forgive that little flaw. Let’s just say that Resurrection is worth watching for every fan of the franchise, that I’m looking forward to more of it. New Blood is garbage but you might need to watch a recap of that for this, sorry.

A Chaotic Voyage

I’m going to let these quotes speak for themselves, with a couple notes at the end.

Wild suggestion, perhaps no more gacha?
Even the nerf didnt help much.
He has too many powers and way more than enough for ST....unless you wanna contend with Q or Q-lites, and what would be the point of doing anything then?
No.

I’ve said this before, but the gacha is a reward for me the writer. I could have written a star trek fic without it all this time, and I need only look at the thirty plus false starts where I tried exactly that and just couldn’t keep the motivation up.

Achievements working the way I’ve been using them is canonical to how the creator of the Chaos Gacha uses them. Even with that in mind, I’ve been avoiding doing rewards for every little thing to focus on the story I want to tell. Unfortunately for comments like this, the story I want to tell includes getting random powers that then make the path of the story unpredictable.

[…]
I have vague goals that can only be reached by doing nothing over time, so why not fill the time with things. Everything that exists within the story- all the character interactions and developments, all have hinged on the MC rolling rewards in the Chaos Gacha. Without it, I the Author, would never have written any of this.

I understand that to many people here, what has brought them is that this is a Star Trek story- a property that doesn’t get a lot in the way of actually good, star trek focused fanfiction. Most stories that seem good end up as crossovers that focus way too hard on the other property, and I’ll admit that was a big consideration for me the Author in which world to pick for this story. At the end of the day, I write the story I want to have been able to read- disassociating between myself the Author and myself the reader.

…

Enhanced thought speed and perfect memory- overclocking might be a cheat, but I already live in my own head too much. This strikes me as... dangerous. Too easy to live in that fantasy of a world, become disconnected and disassociated from the real- and especially from all the people I love.
And then of course on the other side of the coin, Inner Isle is... well appropriate to me. You know it’s actually an ability that I submitted to the Chaos Gacha’s admin in my other life? Yeah, it was me who made this. I’d named it ‘Inner World’ mind you, but it was the same thing- a world inside of you that you can travel to via gates.

…

[REDACTED, EXTENDED WESLEY CRUSHER SEX]

This writer is a character, even for Questionable Questing. At one point he’s lamenting how he’s too old and fat to be a femboy, so he had to write his self-insert as a happy pansexual imp.

This sexual aspect is endless20 and obnoxious, again even for the forum the story is found on. Despite enjoying some of the munchkinry21 and the Star Trek storyline, which is fairly unique,22 I couldn’t help but drop it when he started going after fucking Wesley. I guess it’s easier to let those things go when it’s anime characters instead of a real-life 15 year old Wil Wheaton???

Pokemon Legends: Z-A*

Z-A isn’t as good as the previous spinoff, Legends: Arceus, for example the plot (a mostly straight sequel of Pokemon X-Y) fucking sucks, and it refuses to commit to its own climb-the-leaderboard gimmick. But it’s got something to elevate it above mainline entries: the combat system.

The active battles are deep, somehow. No longer turn-based, and there’s a skill ceiling so high that I didn’t get that good at it throughout the twenty hours it took me to beat the game. Attacks now have positioning aspects (moves-close-to-far, far-to-close, lock-in, area, short range) that you need to keep track of in addition to types and all that other bullshit. You don’t control your Pokemon’s position directly either, it follows you, and you get hurt if any moves (other Pokemon or your own’s) hit you.

I also like the focus on mega-evolutions, even when almost all the new ones are really dumb. It’s a good excuse for boss fights that don’t follow the formulaic gym leader pattern, and having a team that’s less munchkined than usual—as long as it can mega-evolve, your shitmon can hold its own.

Note that, again, the plot is terrible, so you should probably ignore it. It’s like they left mechanics to the Arceus team and everything else to the mainline one. It still gives me hope for future games,23 they just need to keep heading in this direction.

Inferno (yes, that one)

This is the first of The Divine Comedy’s three parts, which is already a very, very long poem. I’d always heard about The First Work of Fan-fiction, and it’s just as advertised.

I tried around ten translations, rhyming, non-rhyming, almost-rhyming, modern, arcaic, free as in libre, free as in gratis, free as in non-iambic, “standard”, different final languages, the works. In the end I settled for the free verse Hollander translation, partly because I could understand what was going on24, partly because the footnotes were actually useful—most others come with incredibly interesting annotations like “this is the first time Dante uses the word ‘the’ in the last twenty verses”.

No, the Hollanders focus on explaining the historical context, and the RPF aspect of the work. The history is too boring to recount in full here, but I’ll give you a summary: Dante was exiled from his city-state because he was on the wrong side of a Popes25 vs Holy Roman Emperor war.

Although he’s remembered as a poet, he was a politician with a strong sense of justice. In his eyes, everyone was corrupt, even people who would call him friend. He wasn’t even exiled by the Emperor’s supporters, he was stabbed in the back by a splinter group of his own pro-Pope faction.

So like any highly malding fanfiction writer who’s recently lost his job, he started writing Real Person Fiction about his enemies burning in hell. It turned out a True Work of Art (even if you don’t speak Italian, you can tell), so his meltdown was recorded for all eternity.

Here’s some setup to the travelogue that’s Inferno: Dante’s self-insert ends up near the gates of hell by accident26 and meets Virgil—another famous poet, who wrote The Aeneid, the agitprop version of The Odyssey. Dante fanboys over meeting his hero, and Virgil says he’s there at the behest of Dante’s dead waifu Beatrice,27 who wants him escorted through hell and to the outside world again.

From there on, it’s a very repetitive structure. Virgil explains each circle of hell like a tourist guide as they walk through it (Boromir was wrong), pointing out people Dante knew in life.28 Before I read Inferno, I had the impression the references to Dante’s real-life enemies were somewhat subtle, but nope. Barring a few, you can expect real names and long elaborate histories of how they hurt Dante’s feelings. It gets far more psychopathic than I expected, this is how he reacts to someone whose worst crime was slapping him once:29

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

And I: “O master, I am very eager
to see that spirit soused within this broth
before we’ve made our way across the lake.”

And he to me: “Before the other shore
comes into view, you shall be satisfied;
to gratify so fine a wish is right.”

Soon after I had heard these words, I saw
the muddy sinners so dismember him
that even now I praise and thank God for it.

They all were shouting: “At Filippo Argenti!”
At this, the Florentine, gone wild with spleen,
began to turn his teeth against himself.

The fact that it’s a poem makes it easy to miss the content for the shape, but I think I’d argue this is more than the first fanfic,30 it’s a bona fide piece of rational fiction. Dante is taking three different source materials that ran on vibes:

Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Virgil’s The Aeneid
G-d’s The Bible

and combining them into a full-fledged cosmology, which is overexplained31 to the point I was reminded of shit like To The Stars. We learn what each circle is for, how they’re arranged, who’s in charge of each, what punishments are in store for you-who-don’t-believe, and even get some totally non-biased examples of who fits in each. It’s almost spreadsheet fiction.

The protagonists are more down-to-earth (ironic) than I expected. Dante writes himself as a coward constantly looking for excuses to let his hero walk ahead and solve his problems, and Virgil wants to present an image of untouchability that often falls apart. When he’s turned away at the gates of Dis, Dante remembers, and later writes himself making fun of Virgil for it:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

The dance of wretched hands was never done;
now here, now there, they tried to beat aside
the fresh flames as they fell. And I began

to speak: “My master, you who can defeat
all things except for those tenacious demons
who tried to block us at the entryway,

This is a full six cantos (chapters) after the event. The sheer pettiness is a realistic human trait that you don’t really see in these classic religious tales that often. Most of the perceived melodrama comes from the poetry, not the actual events as they totally happened.32

There are some upsets here and there (for example, some evil demons in the lower circles betray them without giving a shit about Dante’s Guaranteed Safe Passage, and the two MCs have to run away), but most of the time Virgil just says “hey, God said it’s fine to let us pass”, and they do so without incident. It’s very uneventful, and if the story has a function beyond the beauty of the verses, it’s to tell you “Dante’s enemies will33 burn in hell, also Dante is religious so he wants you to know if you sin you’ll burn in hell with them, especially if you’re gay, because this is the 14th century”.

This “message” means I enjoyed the footnotes vastly more than I did the story itself. I’m glad to have read Inferno for the context, but it’s inscrutable even if you know Italian, dry if you don’t, and a nothingburger on the narrative front.

Dante exits Hell by climbing Satan himself. He returns in Purgatorio and Paradiso, two additional poems that I didn’t read because the universal consensus is they suck in comparison, and they’ve failed to affect popular culture all that much.

I wonder if I should read Paradise Lost next… I’m this close to being able to write the book on the history of the medium. No, not poetry, the “uncool” one.

Avatar: The Last Airbender★

This won a long tournament for “best animated show of all time” on Tumblr, those hallowed halls. Despite that, it’s really good, and even on a rewatch it holds up. You should watch it, with two caveats:

You know when execs force something into a piece of media for marketability? The occasional terrible skits heralded by “laugh here” music are those, and you should bear with them, they become less frequent as the show grows a beard.
In general, the first season has a lot of weak, seemingly fillerish episodes, but these showrunners are really good at bringing everything back 40 episodes later, justifying their original inclusion.

The trailer already spells out the plot, so I won’t belabor that. I loved ATLA both watches, and this time I noticed a lot of foreshadowing (like a couple mentions of the Lion Turtle) that proved they had even the bad ideas planned well in advance.

Unless you really hate animation, or are ashamed to watch something originally marketed to children, this is a great way to spend a couple weeks.

Now, Legend of Korra, and every piece of Avatar media that came after, those aren’t. Even the upcoming new show worries me.

Worm 88

I’m going to be banned from SpaceBattles for even alluding to this fic.34 There’s this nazi faction in Worm, the Empire 88. In canon, they get written out since RNG accidentally killed their leader too early (this isn’t a metaphor, don’t ask). In fanfic, they exist to be early-game punching bags for main characters, at best traumatizing our Greg Veders.

In this story, they’re the faction the writer’s self-insert willingly joins. The main character (who allegedly only wants to avoid the conspirators, the rape gangers and the drug addicts) is definitely not a nazi, nor the writer… but I’m suspicious about the many, many plausibly deniable racist allusions he makes, no matter how well disguised they are as humor.

It is a crack fic, if close to the other side of plausibility. It exists mainly as a vehicle for funny Taylor/SI interactions, as the former is forced to befriend the latter to escape her bullying, having butterflied (no pun intended) all her other options away.

I think I’m making Worm 88 sound better than it is. I haven’t even mentioned its incredibly lowkey Gamer system that is never properly explained outside ANs I just learned about. The story’s still pretty short, and yet it’s already getting old. I guess I highly recommend it to all the nazis out there…

Intercession★

Worm/Harry Potter sounds like the most boring crossover ever. We all know there’s a popular fic where Contessa goes to Hogwarts and has adventures that have nothing to do with her character or Worm at all.

In fact it may seem as if that popular fic’s crossover aspect was clickbait to make fans of the series read a regular HP fic. Many such cases.

Intercession is nothing like that. The main viewpoint is Taylor after the events of her own book, and she doesn’t get de-aged and go to school. Instead she arrives in 1981 and becomes a single mother, raising baby Harry, who becomes unrecognizable by virtue of following parenting guides. Mysteries and the fun kind of heists ensue as they discover the magical world and clash with a seemingly Manipulative Chessmaster Dumbledore (also many such cases).

There are some critiques of this fic like “the writing is very awkward”, or “these plotlines are ludicrous and poorly justified” and they’re mostly fair, I just don’t care. The author is a magician who works tirelessly to set up these absurd and very original plotlines, then uses sleight of hand to make you ignore the aspects that don’t quite make sense.

The finished product (yes, it’s complete) is chef’s-kiss good.35 Calling it popcorn would imply a degree of slopness that isn’t here. I find it closer to outsider art, could have been written by someone who’s never read a HP fic in their life.

Hades II★

HADES II’s ending is complete anti-thematic, lazy garbage, on the level of Game of Thrones, but the developers just released a patch that allegedly fixes most of it. A patch I haven’t played yet and have no time to before the article goes out. So, for fairness, let’s just pretend this is still Early access and it has no ending yet.

It still walks circles around the first game on pretty much every level. It’s maybe better to point out the original’s flaws in contrast with the sequel:

Samey gameplay: base weapons are now a bit more varied. There are new systems like Tarot Cards that let you choose which stats to strengthen per build, as opposed to raising every stat permanently. Your “super attack” is now optional and you can skip it and its upgrades in favor of regular boons. It’s no longer spamming dash and one button.
Too little enemy/environment variety: the sequel doubles it all. I find there are barely any annoying enemies, which used to be a real problem.
Unbalanced gods: barring Poseidon’s resource boons breaking the game’s economy, it’s hard to put them into tiers, almost every god has memorable and balanced build styles, as well as synergies with everyone else. Duo boons were a thing in the original, but they felt weaker and far more half-assed than here. If I’m using a close-range weapon I know which gods to go with, and I don’t always have to go for Athena’s broken shield perks.
Repetitive final boss battles: not only is the game longer per run, the number of repeated runs required is split in half, there are far more events to spice them up, and there’s a gimmick I don’t want to spoil for you that means you can take a rest once in a while. There’s some grinding, but it’s no longer almost a deal-breaker.
Limited interactions when reviving: more characters, more lines, and there’s always something to do at camp, like planting, buying and ordering.
Great music (not a flaw): it’s even better now, and there’s more variety.36 Jesus,37 just listen to this entire track here:

There are still some places where the original ekes out a win (Zagreus is a better character than Melinoë,38 and the artstyle is different in a way that could alienate people who care about that), and you could say a lot of my claimed improvements are “just add more”…. yes, unironically, quantity is a quality of its own, especially in a roguelite where every run is meant to be different.

I guess I still like Binding of Isaac better, but it’s close, to the point I had to force myself to uninstall this on two occasions so I could move on to other games. The first game is fine even if obnoxiously repetitive, so I’d play that first, because it won’t get any easier after playing this.

In Naruto with an Achievement System

I know I post this image very often, but let me do it one more time.

I confess I only picked this up because it uses the Celestial Dojo, a system I hadn’t seen before, or at least one I don’t remember very well. It’s possible that this is because it leads to incredibly forgettable stories with weak protagonists that don’t amount to much.

At first glance, this was a relatively useless perk in the short term. It didn’t make me faster or stronger right now. But, in the long run?

Imagine reading that line five thousand times. It’s probably the closest to a conceptual opposite of the Chaos Gacha fic I reviewed earlier, actually. It’s not like I want to read Overpowered Main Character Story-tagged fanfics exclusively. But if your story’s title revolves around a single random mechanic, you need to actually use it, take your story in batshit directions!

This ends up as your average Naruto SI fic with its only saving grace being the prequel-era timeline, which dodges all stations of canon. That is admittedly handled really well, but not good enough to recommend the story as a whole.

Pokemon: Apocalypse★

There’s a funny backstory that comes with this. I picked up this only because I misread the synopsis of the next review’s fic:

Shoved directly into a Pokemon Apocalypse. The MC has to deal with surviving mutated, disfigured creatures, getting enough food and water to not die, and people directly watching everything he does.

I read this as “shoved directly into Pokemon Apocalypse”, searched that, and was like, huh, cool, recursive fic isn’t very common these days, the original must be really good, let me read this right now.

It actually turned out to be great, but it couldn’t be more different from its false referent.

Pokemon: Apocalypse is one of those System Apocalypse™ stories, but without the system. This sounds incredibly stupid, but it means something. Dungeons show up in the real world, filled with Pokemon and some basic items to get the Pokemon World set up, like berries, Pokeballs, and so on. You’d expect this to quickly become indistinguishable from the actual game’s world, but nah.

This transition gets aborted pretty fast by simultaneous nuclear war. Modern society completely falls apart and Pokemon aren’t domesticated fast enough, and most of them become very dangerous wild animals. It’s not like they’re evil edgy versions, they are smart beings, but they’re competing with humans for the limited resources. This makes it very hard to restore the status quo, let alone get enough people together to run dungeons, which have very few known survivors.

Without surviving a dungeon, you don’t get aura and the ability to “naturally” befriend Pokemon, and no one knows how to actually make new Pokeballs, so 99% of people are forced to rawdog the process of domesticating wild lions if they want the experience of being a trainer. Nearly no one bothers. People who played the games know what moves each dangerous animal gets, what they evolve into, but the actual useful information is the morsels in Pokedex descriptions, when it exists.

This leads us to our main character, an ex-player of competitive Pokemon who has recently gained a very uneasy understanding with a Zigzagoon, as they collaborate and hunt to survive like a stranded man would with a wolf. And this is a survival story, a really good one, going into incredible levels of detail, and incorporating the video game only when it makes the story better. There are almost no LitRPG elements, no blue screens, it’s all analogue.

This pokino is unfortunately showing some cracks as of the latest few chapters. I think the supporting characters aren’t deep enough to support the social storylines being written, to the point you wish a disaster forced the MC into the wilderness again.

We can only hope the author gets his shit together. He’s the guy who previously wrote some mediocre fics like Troll in the Dungeon and When is a Spoon a Sword, so he definitely has the capacity for improvement. I still strongly recommend reading what’s out, though.

Chat. Am I cooked?

This fic seems to be part of a growing (?) genre (?) of “streamer lit” (patent pending). The protagonist is in the middle of some crazy nonsense like fighting zombies, while Twitch chatters watch him, comment on his adventures, send him donation items Dungeon Crawler Carl-style, otherwise unable to help him in any real way.

This was initially intriguing enough for me, but… he actually, literally fights zombies.

[HexyGirl24: At least this one looks normal…]

[GardenKeeper: I know that he just got out of a life-and-death situation… but can we take some time to appreciate how CUTE this little one is? It’s dancing!]

[OfficialHoarder: So we are just going to ignore the walking corpse of a Pinsir trying to maul a young trainer unprovoked? What even WAS that? I shouldn’t have been able to move in the first place…]

[SynisTea: I ALREADY said that it’s fake... Still wondering what the mods are doing. What if a little kid just stumbled upon this??]

The actual storyline is one of the laziest and most generic I’ve seen, and the interactions with the Twitch chat (not literally, the Pokeworld version) don’t really go anywhere. It’s mostly an excuse to spam interludes of people’s reactions, which is already the lowest form of fanfiction, the worst thing Worm brought into this world.

I can’t believe I still read the whole thing while enjoying none of it, but at least it wasn’t that long. I’m noticing now it’s 69k words, below my usual 70k threshold. This was Webfic God trying to save me, and I missed his signs.

I’d Rather Be Playing Stellaris*

A rare Steven Universe fic, and not at all what you’d expect. This is about an alternate timeline where an additional Diamond was created after Yellow: Green Diamond, who has “organic memories” and weird priorities as a result.

It’s very technically a self-insert, but not in execution, not once we hear a single fact about whoever he got the memories from. It’s a weird subgenre of uplift, where Green tries to optimize for morals and stability instead of higher technology (though that too, sure). It’s enough of a change to the way the Diamonds ran their society in canon that it quickly becomes unrecognizable.

From there on out it becomes more faithful to the title, and it’s an empire’s-eye view of contact with the many expy alien races in the universe, from Star Trek’s Klingons to Farscape’s Delvians. There are a couple of wars across the 137 chapters out so far (guy updates almost every day), but the focus is more societal than the usual Battletech self-insert garbage.

This is made more interesting by how weird Gems are as a race when you stop to think for longer than five minutes. They don’t need to eat food, they’re born to do one specific task, but still love pageantry… I love stories about alien mindsets, and this has that in spades.

Still, it’s a story written by the author of Factory Isolation, the famous Factorio fanfic, and it shows in how lonely some chapters get. If you can’t stand long spans without any significant character interactions, this is not the fic for you.

Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin*

I’m in an awkward scenario where I perfectly understand why many outlets gave this game a 6 outta 10, yet I still want to recommend it.

First of all, if you’re not a Psychonauts fan, don’t bother, and if you are, this is probably best played after the first game. Not just because that’s where this fits in the timeline, but because you’re going to get filtered by the jankiness without knowing that it’s worth pushing past.

Let me get that out of the way first. This is a very early VR puzzle game, and it REALLY shows:

The game has no movement whatsoever. You’re always sitting on a chair (despite the game being designed for standing VR) and can only change the camera position by mindjacking people and animals39 with your Clairvoyance power, seeing what they see. This is admittedly a very fun way to deal with the tech limitation, and there are some hilarious daisy chains, but it got boring and annoying after a while.

Seeing a fat rat (one of this blog’s patron animals) from a flea’s point of view.

Half-Life Alyx’s gravity gloves are a great implementation of telekinesis, requiring only wrist movements. Rhombus of Ruin’s has two joysticks and two buttons involved in the process of moving an item. It’s not even precise, it’s the jankiest shit ever.
Wait, I forgot something. It gets worse, you also need to move your head. Yeah, your head movement determines where the “pointer” is aimed at. As opposed to your pointing device that you’re holding in your hand like a gun, which famously point at things.
There are a myriad of miscellaneous technical issues. Some are easily fixable, but the shitty telekinesis physics are not. I got tired of having to wait for five minutes before a character moved enough to “free” an item that had gotten stuck between them and a table.
Presumably because people hadn’t figured out “VR legs” are a thing, and that people can get used to longer play sessions, the game can be beaten in two hours. It’s also a bit too easy.

Taking those issues into account, it’s still a really great Psychonauts game. You know, I’ve always mainly known Tim Schafer as a conman or a high-level project lead who’s so incompetent he keeps having them taken over by the soulless corporate… but it turns out that Portal’s Erik Wolpaw, who I thought wrote the first game, only did so alongside him. Psychonauts 2, a remarkably funny and charming game, was all Schafer’s work, and so is this. So I guess he’s redeemed himself in my eyes as an actually competent writer.

Ultimately, the game’s story, puzzles, and individual jokes really are worthy of a mainline sequel, which is something I’d say applies only to Alyx and this out of every single franchise that’s dabbled in VR. It’s a shame the game’s story is designed around the “can’t move” aspect to the point you couldn’t remaster it for modern locomotion, so you’ll have to bear with the issues.

I enjoyed the overall experience to the point that my headset ran out of battery and I sat down and waited for it to charge, picking it up again afterwards. This sounds silly when I type it out, but if you’ve ever played virtual reality games, you’ll get it.

Saw* + Saw II

I was very pleasantly surprised by the first film. The acting is fucking terrible, some scene transitions are right out of Speed Racer, and the plot40 doesn’t make too much sense, but I can easily forgive that (you may not be able to). It’s just a very well made thriller, with not remotely as much gore as I expected, some nice twists and turns here and there, a great soundtrack and a good ending.

It’s all in the pacing, I think. Throughout its 100+ minute runtime you never once feel bored, with new elements cropping up constantly. There’s an almost anthology feel to it as you keep getting flashbacks about Jigsaw’s previous crimes, all of them at least mildly interesting. A bit like with Dexter above, James Wan knows exactly what the mission parameters are, and is not ashamed to fulfill them.

The sequel is complete trash, however. SAW II is apparently an original horror movie script that was repurposed into a sequel, and it kind of shows. It’s fun to see Jigsaw talk about his ideals and how he did nothing wrong and never murdered anyone (asterisk), and there are some cool traps in the abstract… but it’s too gory and jumpscary in practice, filled with characters you don’t care about, and with a big lull in the middle that destroys your investment.

I recommend the first film as its own thing, but fuck the franchise.

That’s it for this month. 1 Over X (by the author of Modern Cannibals and Fargo) should have been released by the time I send out this post, not early enough for me to read and review it here, but I’ll be doing that ASAP. Maybe it’ll get their own article to itself?41

One last thing: I rarely do this, but even though I’m not reviewing it yet, I recommend buying the Telltale-style game Dispatch while you can. The time-sensitive episodic discussion aspect is possibly even better than the actual game, and I’m loving that too.

Barring those, my backlog is looking dangerously thin once again, so leave a comment with your recommendations.42

Record Crash

Reviews for September 2025

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