Reviews for June 2024
Record Crash's Darkest Summer
I got COVID1 and video games2 halfway through this month, so this one might be a bit short. Beyond that, this might be my most negative post yet—I basically hated everything I read, with a few exceptions.3 So I’m not going to blame you if you skim this one.
But hey it’s good to know there’s a floor on this thing.
★: Hundreds of Beavers, Holes
*: Erfworld (Book 1), Hearts Aflutter
Also, I did release a highly positive review for r!Animorphs a couple weeks ago, so you have that:
Wait, it’s not positive? Oh noooooooooooo—
Hearts Aflutter*
You all know I’m a fan of weird crossovers. This one merges Worm and Yandere Simulator (top weird).
Yandere Simulator is a relic of some years ago. The developer is a massive weirdo who cannot deal with constructive criticism positively, and had frequent freakouts and overreactions in response. Besides that, he never got good at programming after years of work, so he’s one of those eternal lolcows that everyone loves to make fun of. This is the only reason the game was mildly relevant, and even then, only with an extremely young audience, the type that plays Baldi’s Basics.4
This fic is surprisingly late, releasing in 2020. I’m surprised anyone even remembers the game, or that they care enough to make a serious crossover. What is Yandere Simulator about? Well, the title: you play as a Japanese high school girl who’s romantically and violently obsessing over her senpai, to the point of murdering her romantic rivals, stealing mementos from his home, etc.
In this fic, the senpai isn’t a generic anime boy, it’s Taylor Hebert. What follows is a comedy of misunderstandings, as Taylor is completely clueless about her only defender and new friend being the serial killer threatening her school. There are also a couple interludes from the yandere’s perspective that are interestingly scary, especially her family life.
Very original, and funny. Also very dead. Might not be worth reading if you want something that goes anywhere.
I want to be A NEET but my Antgirl Little Sister Won’t Let Me
I found this after pressing a “Random Neocities Website” button. G-d himself told me to review this.
It’s a magical realism comic about an average 4channer getting his life together after he starts hallucinating the bugs in his house as anime girls. What a premise, like a less mean spirited Wilfred.
The humor comes almost exclusively from 90s stock anime scenes and the obvious mismatch between reality and fantasy. I also assume people that don’t have their lives together find it inspiring. It’s definitely got a “use this comic’s advice, 4channer who’s reading this, and you too can finally go outside” vibe to it.
That said, I’m not exactly the target audience, and it’s also very short so far (like “takes ten minutes to read” short) so I can’t truly recommend it.
Runs in the Family
This is a very frustrating review to write.
The idea is genius. Just read this: “Mercy Overwatch gets raised by Medic TF2”. Honestly, I’ve never played the former game (though I know some of the lore thanks to research for the highly superior fic The World As It Appears To Be), but even if I knew absolutely nothing about Overwatch, the Medic from Team Fortress 2 is one of the best characters ever.
But that’s the idea. The reality is that it’s lying to you, it’s clickbait. Mercy is briefly raised by the Medic, for like, three years, then he almost gets arrested and has to flee the country. Mercy gets adopted by other Overwatch characters and we just see the very, very slow development of her medical technology in what becomes your average bildungsroman.
Mercy has been affected by her short time with the Medic, sure. She definitely wants to kill Death dead, by adulthood she’s a full-on god-complex level utilitarian with some issues around patient consent (and this is a drama about that, with only minor comedic elements). But the Medic is barely in it! Come on! Use the strongest aspect of your fucking premise!
It has decent, if very slow paced, drawn out writing. I enjoyed reading it (I controversially agree with Mercy about death being bad), but it simultaneously pissed me off, so I cannot recommend it without that huge disclaimer.
Actually I’m just gonna rewatch Meet the Medic again. Here it is so you can do that too.
Holes★
We group watched this film in the Worth the Candle server because it stars Shia Labeouf (long story). It was supposed to be a meme movie. I only knew it existed because I heard Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure ripped it off wholesale at one point (it does).
Imagine my surprise when it’s actually good? It’s one of those “every single minute is either setting something up or paying it off” movies. Just high quality writing. It is made for all ages, so it’s a bit cartoonish, but not in an offputting fashion.
The plot takes us to the middle of the desert, to kind of a penal summer camp for teens to do community service: pointlessly digging big holes every day. Our main character is the innocent Shia Labeouf, who’s been fighting a family curse from birth. As the plot progresses, his family backstory and the camp’s turn out to be tied together as if by destiny.
I don’t want to spoil too much here. It’s charming, it’s funny, it’s interesting. I usually post a trailer here, but they’re all bad and give off the wrong impression. Just… go watch it.
Reincarnated to the Past
When the title is this original, you know the story’s got to be good.
Now seriously, this is only interesting in that “the Past” is the Bronze Age. Except… that’s kind of a lame time period? Not too many moving parts, the Sea Peoples are there and are appropriately mysterious I guess, but it’s still a forgettable time for Europe,5 where this takes place.
If that wasn’t bad enough, our main character is kind of a boring coward.
I looked up and saw the remaining warriors, a dozen of them, start going back to the other side of the river instead of pushing towards mine. I hesitated and then finally decided against shooting them, especially when they tried in vain to run.
I let out a sigh of relief and just collapsed on the spot right next to the dead raider.
"Well, that just happened," I muttered
He mostly hides and avoids fighting despite his powers (of course he has powers, come on). When he does fight, he’s the kind of person to sneak into camps and poison the water supply first. There’s also some bad romance, and I’m not fan of how the power differential between a modern age man and a bunch of bronze age “savages” is handled. It’s just not a good story, and I’ve talked about it long enough.
Troll in the Dungeon!
Middle-of-the-road Harry Potter self-insert. This is average and forgettable in almost every aspect but two: our main character is Blaise Zabini, a Slytherin minor character; and the self-insert focuses on divination magic, which is fully unexplored in canon.
I mean, personally I think HP is not meant to have divination magic beyond prophecies, or everyone would be using it at all times, but I guess I can accept this point of divergence, if it’s used in interesting ways.
But it isn’t. The thing is, the strongest spell he has at this point lets him predict like, the next three seconds. His real “future sight” comes from having read the books as a self-insert (as he smugly predicts events like the Remembrall thing to Draco, and yes, this means the fic is firmly following the stations of canon), so the magic aspect is tacked on and doesn’t influence the plot in any real way. Beyond that, as mentioned, it’s just average. It does nothing too wrong but it does nothing too right. The definition of skippable.
Strings
I’m a big fan of ShayneT’s former “Gamer Taylor Trilogy” (only I call it this, or pretend it’s a trilogy) of A Wand for Skitter, Kill Them All, and Intuition. They are silly action fics with an over the top Taylor Hebert escalating in absurd directions, usually until she’s munchkined a whole arsenal of powers together and is fighting conceptual beings.
So I was hyped when he turned his trilogy into a cycle by adding a fourth book.6 This one is a crossover with X-Men, and Taylor is related to a canon character. The crossover is nearly irrelevant here, what matters is that it gets her the ability to steal powers.
This is the classic set up for one of the iconic ShayneT fics… but no, fuck you. It’s so bad. For some reason, ShayneT has seemingly gotten massively worse at writing since Intuition, which already was the weakest of the trio. The entire fic is swarming with unearned The Reason You Suck speeches from Taylor, who is unlikably entitled to the point of unrelatability. There’s little plot, it’s mostly her fighting bureaucracy and the people trying to help her and being mad about it.
I just had to drop this fairly early on. It’s not good. This is the Worm equivalent of those Independent Harry + Manipulative Dumbledore fics from 2005. It feels as if ShayneT is Benjamin Button and has just reached his angsty teenager phase.
Hundreds of Beavers★
I’ve heard this described as “a silent era slapstick comedy ratfic”. It’s a valid description. Go watch it, now. It’s a crime this didn’t get all the awards.
(I had a section here where I explained its general deal, but it’s not a super deep film, and I’d only be ruining the surprises for you.)
Crimson
This is a novelization of Persona 5. I liked the previous game in the series a lot, but the most recent installment made me bounce off it hard. I think it’s just the themes and characters are more modern and generic, it just exposes nothing interesting to me.
I got this directly recommended, and I was like, sure, I probably won’t play the game so I won’t mind the spoilers.
Alas, if I didn’t like Persona 5’s plot, why would I like the novelization’s? Additionally, every game element is handled in a laughably melodramatic way. Rivers of blood whenever anyone discovers their Persona, hallucinations, edgy moments everywhere… It was just childish, and I wasn’t enjoying the real life moments that much, so I had to drop this.
Tales of Aresology
« People think death farms are a relic of the past, but they're still very much active. »
The Imperial Commission for Oversight of Ethical Undead Production publically released its first report today and it is scathing.
The report is an 18-tablet-long overview of modern industrial practices. It examines the supply chains of factories both private and Imperial, and catalogues a mind-boggling amount of Imperial regulation violations, most of them by the Empire's own institutions.
Most shockingly, the report raises serious doubts as to the feasibility of ethical undead production, breaking a taboo as old as the Empire itself. Its conclusion cannot be understated: « Now, and in the foreseeable future, the vast majority of undead labor will always come from death farms ».
This “story” is a lot of this. Think SCP, but we’re reading government reports and other assorted materials about an interdimensional Fantasy empire, who is regrettably competent in addition to the classical authoritarian evil (with a socialist bent. It’s complicated).
I don’t have much to say about it. It’s competent at what it’s trying to do, but it’s missing an “It” factor somewhere, maybe it’s played too straight. I found myself bored more often than not, and I recall almost nothing after only a month.
Limitless (the TV show)
This is technically a sequel to the good movie Limitless, about a guy who discovers a slightly stronger version of Adderall and immediately takes over the country.
Despite the trailer, and the original movie, which the first episode strongly apes, this quickly turns into… one of those “eccentric autistic guy solves crimes while token normies struggle with his quirks” procedural comedy crime shows, except his autism is drugs.
It’s mediocre. I gave it the three episode test, and the only thing I learned is that Person of Interest was far more competent than I thought. The procedural format of Limitless was already getting old three episodes in. THREE.
I guess the gimmick of this show is that unlike other procedural crime shows, it’s funny and lighthearted. Not an uncommon gimmick, given Psych, Monk… so let’s look at the true original element, the drug.
Well, the drug makes him TV Smart, and gives him perfect memories, perfect control over his body… but he still goes through the classic House M.D. cycle of “wrong once, wrong twice, luckily right near the end”.7 He’s not actually smart most of the time, he doesn’t optimize, he’s knowledgeable. You never feel like you’re watching even a bumbling master, you just think about the Yudkowsky post on Sherlock Holmes.
And if I wanted to watch something with a main character that gets random flashes of insight, I’d watch Chuck, which had more original and likable characters and far better action. Maybe that’s why this got cancelled after a single season.
God, if it makes me look back fondly at fucking Chuck you know this show was a stinker.
Taskmaster VR
I reviewed the TV show Taskmaster back in November. I won’t describe it again here, but this is as faithful of an adaptation as you can make for a single player game. I like the writing, the task design, the sound, the vibes, that’s all done excellently. I would easily call this the best Fanservice-Video-Game I’ve ever played. You really feel like you’re in the show, and have fun completing the tasks… when you can.
Sadly, the game is riddled with technical issues. It’s Cyberpunk 2077 “they really should have opened a beta” tier.8
Worst resolution I’ve ever seen in a VR game. Almost everything is pixelated, but as you see in the trailer, things are meant to look smooth (it is invisible in recorded gameplay footage).
Framerate issues all over the place. I’m thankfully not affected by motion sickness, but the game is unplayable for many people.
Bad body and element tracking. Many tasks rely on your use of containers, but items will often fall through their floors as you’re running.
Many oversights/hardcoded elements to tasks that betray a lack of extensive testing. Very often I had the perfect solution for a task and I just wasn’t allowed to execute it because the developers didn’t realize it.
For example, one of the tasks involves driving a man-sized robot through a ridiculous course. The robot has a glass of peas stapled to the top, so you need to be a perfect driver as the obstacles try to knock them off. Anyone that has seen the show knows that as long as the task text doesn’t explicitly disallow it, you can stack the deck in your favor. I put a pot over the glass of peas so they wouldn’t spill as much, and then I picked up the robot with my arms and moved it around the course with higher dexterity. The only issue here is that the second exploit wasn’t foreseen by the devs. You can only “pick the robot up” by fighting the physics engine one-to-one, manually putting your arms under it and walking very very slowly. I managed in the end, though, and got 5/5 points, which felt pretty good.The price is ridiculously high for what can be as low as two hours of content. There are fifteen tasks in total, some longer than others, and five of them are comparatively simple, physics based “studio tasks”.
The advertised “creative mode” implies that you can make tasks for your friends, but what they mean is that you can set up a playground Garry’s Mod-style, then hand your headset to your friends one by one and score them yourself in real life. There’s no online sharing, multiplayer or anything like that. It’s in beta, but…
So I’m pretty split. If you’re a big fan of Taskmaster, own VR, and never suffer of VR motion sickness, go for it? But I might be the only person on Earth who fits that demographic.
The developers have repeatedly promised they will fix all these issues over the last two weeks, so this game could redeem itself and become one of the best VR games, especially with enough official and fan content. If so, make sure to remind me to come back and edit this in with a *. As it stands, I can’t recommend it in good conscience (do watch the show though).
Erfworld (Book 1)*
Erfworld as a whole is unreadable. Virtually every reader agrees. At one point, this team of artists and writer gets tired of arting, and just let the writer take over most of the time, so you get a bizarre 50/50 split of bad prose and undercooked comic pages. Beyond that, the story is now cancelled and unfinished, because the lead writer got into some serious real-life shit that I can only address in a footnote.9
Book 1 (The Battle for Gobwin Knob) is fully comicked, though, barring a short epilogue. This is what I was recommended. Keep in mind this is a 2006 story, so the plot I’m about to explain is less generic and more influential.
Parson Gotti is your stereotypical morbidly obese dungeon master. He’s so obsessed with worldbuilding and designing games that his players have started worrying about him. Right before he starts a session he’s been working on for months, he gets transported to a fantasy world.
This fantasy world is Erfworld, a (remember this is 2006), for lack of a better words, Internet-inspired medieval fantasy world. Dragons are called dwagons, all characters are hobbit-sized chibis, some spells are based on ancient internet memes, etc.
There’s currently a world war against a single megalomaniacal tool, Stanley, who’s pissed off and united every single faction that usually is fine hating each other. Stuck in the volcano fortress of Gobwin Knob, and in desperation, he gets his head magic user Wanda (a “croakamancer”, the Erfworld version of necromancers) to use a unique spellbook to summon the Greatest Warlord, so that he can fight his losing war for him.
Parson, who has been thinking about this type of siege scenario for months, and is physically the greatest, gets summoned instead. And now he’s stuck in a meme game world. Some rules apply to him, some don’t. The entire universe is turn based, interestingly enough, with units simply refusing to attack out of step, cities producing people as adults, etc.
Our hero will have to help the bad guys against the entire world, somehow. Time to exploit some mechanics with out of context logic.
The plot is a bit more elaborate than my twenty seconds summary, sure. There’s a weird love triangle that includes two Good characters and the Evil Wanda, and there’s some surprisingly serious drama concerning how Parson wrestles with his new responsibilities… some of you are already figuring out what could go wrong here, I’m sure.
It’s classic: Cerebus Syndrome. This is 90% a comedy comic with 10% drama, but near the end of the first book, the split was already leaning towards a 60/40 ratio. The writer started taking the mostly generic in-game plot a bit too seriously, with way too much angst and melodrama,10 leading me to stop caring instantly. It was good that I was already told to drop it there.
But most of this book is actually great. It works as a meta-period-piece, a time capsule for the 2006 internet, as there’s no way this story could be made today, not so earnestly. There’s a lot of love for tabletop gaming here, and even though memes are involved, the worldbuilding is pretty watertight and the strategies used to win battles are something a clever reader could figure out. Proto-rational fiction, I’d call it, and a dose of sincerity that’ll be refreshing to anyone stuck in the postpostpostmodern world of today.
The Ghost of Privet Drive
This fic is just too much.
First things first. The house I'm in is of fairly recent construction by English standards - I'm guessing Home Counties somewhere from the kid's accent. Houses built as entire estates, several streets at a time to a handful of standardised designs, were a thing that came in in the late sixties - I grew up in a house much like this in the early seventies. Fashions came and went in them and this one, if I'm any judge, is a mid to late seventies model. Still got its original storage heaters and bloody awful obscured-glass front door. I can see that it's still light out, looks like a late summer evening, and the street-lights will be coming on soon.
Inside, the decor's wildly out of date. Flocked vinyl wallpaper, magnolia-gloss woodwork and I haven't seen carpet that vile since about 1990. In the borderline-condemned student digs in Oxford that my favourite weed dealer lived in. Brown with orange highlights and a repeating geometric pattern of interlocking diamond shapes. It's all fastidiously clean and surprisingly well-maintained for its age, though.
The walls are adorned with framed photos. I'm able to identify lard-arse and lard-arse junior which means the scrawny bint with the hairdo she's clearly been overcharged for is the dieting aunt. The kid under the stairs isn't included, which fits with him being the abused orphaned poor relation. I can't tell by looking which side of the family he's nephew to these two on; none of them look like blood relations. There's something else off about the pictures, though I can't put my finger on quite what. The rest of what's hanging on the walls is the kind of tat people put up to try and crack on they're of refined sensibility. Cheap prints in gaudy frames. The usual suspects of Constable, Turner and Clayton Adams (which is to say all of their dullest, most unchallenging work, even the greatest of artists phone it in on occasion) are in evidence, and what I suspect are a couple of Preraphaelites, not that I could ever tell the buggers apart. And, of course, Monarch of the Glen, because what collection of tedious biscuit-tin-and-jigsaw-puzzle art would be complete without bloody Landseer. Still, I'm not here to be an art snob.
It lives and dies on the protagonist narrator, a middle aged lawyer ghost who has to help Harry Potter as he goes through muggle childhood. He’s got a unique, very British style of speaking.
One issue with the story is that he never stops. I was very entertained at the start, but I wanted to punch him by chapter 10. This writer loves to hear himself talk, I’m sure, and I just want to get him to stop going on old man tangents and get to the bloody point.
Beyond that, this is not actually a Harry Potter story, as he’s 5 and barely recognizable. This is a story about Ghost Dad raising a random kid, eating his horcrux scar and developing magical powers, which he uses to become all-powerful. By the middle of the fic, he was corresponding with alchemists to make himself a young body he can use to attend Hogwarts with Harry.
The pacing is so slow the fic ends before that can happen, by the way. We are stuck in Privet Drive for those 235k words, not that I made it to the end.
But I digress. If that wasn’t bad already, there are some moral issues with the protagonist’s actions. Our ghost dad can hijack bodies, which he uses to live in Vernon’s body for like, a year. He mildly justifies it to himself and the audience as “well, I’m exercising, raising his children better than he did, and improving his life for when I leave his body”, but I’m just repulsed by the idea, and he’s not sufficiently called out by the characters whose lives he’s taking over.
So in summary, weirdo author and main character, snail speed pacing, uninteresting focus. Please avoid this.
From
I wanted to open the mystery box behind this show, but uh, I have to go.
From wants to be Stephen King’s LOST *so* badly, to the point of sharing one of the actors and having similarly shaped titles, but it’s missing so many little things that made the former what it was.
LOST uses the Abrams formula of constantly setting up more mysteries than it can answer, keeping the audience artificially engaged that way, for sure. But it also makes fucking sure that it adds “normal” problems and storylines episode to episode. For example, Charlie is a junkie trying to kick off the habit after he’s down to their last heroin bag, and Locke has to help him. This has absolutely nothing to do with the main mysteries of the show, but makes for a decent episode and fleshes out both Charlie and Locke.
From, however, is a cascade of mystery after mystery, with nothing to contrast that. The characters are lame and static. When something happens to change the status quo, say, a minor character dying, it’s like an event in a JRPG town. The NPCs just go back to repetition after they spend all their new lines. They all have some gimmick or trauma to them, but they don’t grow.
Maybe I should explain what it’s about a bit, if you don’t wanna watch the trailer. From is a horror/mystery show about a cursed American town where a bunch of people end up after driving down the wrong road. Once you’re there, you cannot escape, all roads wrap around to send you back. At night, monsters shaped like people attack the town, but they cannot enter a home unless invited.
You might think the show is about everyone teaming up together and figuring out solutions, but instead most episodes are about all the crazy factions and personalities crab bucketing each other so there’s no forward progress, as nothing new is learned about their circumstances.
The horror element is solid. The show is properly creepy and scary, the designs and imagery work in its favor, I like the Pixies song in the opening… but that’s all it’s got, and I’m not a big horror fan. I gave the show four episodes, which might have been too little, but I’ve talked to other viewers. It’s not just an impression, the show’s premise is like its main dynamic: it goes nowhere.
London
This is a Fargoverse fic. I reviewed Fargo back in October, but the one line summary is that it’s a sequel to the anime Madoka set in the United States, about magical girls fighting for territory and eventually getting drawn into the main conflict of Madoka’s Rebellion movie.
For whatever reason, a scene is cropping up around the original fanfic, nine years after it came out. Three different writers decided to write their own spin on the premise:
Leavenworth, set in Kansas, curiously written by someone I’ve talked about before. Haven’t read it yet because the title makes me think of a butler.
Savannah, set in Georgia.11 Commenters seemingly praise it only for its copy of Fargo’s writing style, which was often the most annoying part of it, so I’ve avoided it so far.
??????, set in ????, written by the same person as Savannah. We know nothing but that it was written by hand, and that it’s one million words long, currently being transcribed to a computer. Very hyped for this one just based on that description.
And this one, set in the United Kingdom. It concerns the titular city, which has long been taken over by a loose association of violent magical girls that refuse to allow anyone else to move in or be contracted, simply killing them when that happens, to the point contracts temporarily stopped. An extremely naive and innocent child is secretly contracted by Kyubey months into the situation, and she has to survive as her mere existence breaks everything apart.
It’s alright. Its main problem is that it’s only 46k words long, so it hasn’t had time for too many twists and turns. The writing is competent, the characters are likable (if way too many, with everyone oversharing their powers and wishes, a problem even ““canon”” had to contend with), and London is a very interesting setting used effectively. Horrible tourist destination, though, never go there.
I’m not sure if I’d recommend it yet. It’s not bad, but not too much has happened so far.
Wandering Prince
I keep waiting for Avatar: The Last Airbender fics to reach their Cenotaph moment and step outside of their comfort zone. For Worm it was alt-power fics, for ATLA it’s clearly fire nation self-inserts. Like come the fuck on, do ANYTHING else. How many have I reviewed, like ten so far?
This one is marginally better than usual, or at least more novel. There’s no rising through the ranks. We get the mandatory training sequences out of the way with a few timeskips, after which our Zuko SI pisses off Ozai, almost gets killed and decides to go on a pilgrimage to improve his bending.
I say better but there are glaring issues, Gary Stu-sized ones. He just happens to meet the lion turtle and unlock spirit bending, he figures out how to heal using fire…12 just baffling anti-thematic choices. It’s also bogged down by the usual fanfic writer horniness, but that almost goes without saying.
It’s more original than usual, I’ll give it that. But I can feel myself getting Stockholmed by the fact all other fics do the bare minimum. I give this an “eh, readable to me” out of ten.
Sakura Haruno The Gaming Addict, and Her Gamified Life
Long-time readers will ask me, what were you thinking? When has a story with this type of title ever been good?
But if that logic could stop me, I’d be reading real books and being yet another boring Goodreads reviewer who rates Moby Dick 4/5 (too many whales). So you better accept I take these titles as a personal challenge.
Anyway, I thought this might be like A Daring Synthesis, the excellent Worm fic with a gamer Greg. The premise is similar, our hero Sakura has a horrifying level of social awkwardness, and everyone hates her. But she doesn’t realize this until she develops a game system that raises her mental and social stats. Tragicomedy ensues.
Unfortunately, this premise aping can’t save it. A bad writer is behind this story, one who relies on stations of canon, and whose dialogue could have been written by an alien.
"What'd I say about seven?" Kakashi asks her at the training ground. "Did you oversleep?"
"I was training my dexterity and performing self care." Sakura explains while standing rigid. "Please do not hit me."
"Why do you think I'm - oh right I said that didn't I." She can almost see a laugh, not that the mask shows much. "You know what, I am going to hit you."
She flinches instinctively, drawing her sword to deflect or block or maybe just not get hit in the face.
"With your teammates." Kakashi explains. "I'm going to hit you with your teammates. You're sparring before today's mission. Here." She finds a wooden sword suddenly appearing in her hands.
No, that's not accurate. It's more like she catches it out of nowhere without even knowing it was there. "And I'll take that." Kakashi uses the moment and her shock to take her crappy sword from her. "I'm going to go return this, since you clearly forgot. When I return in an hour with an actual sword, you better be worn out from your teammates' punches."
So the final product is barely readable, and boring when it is. Fully skippable.
Isekai Speedrun
This is only technically not fanfic.
The backstory of this Royal Road™ web serial is a bit complicated. In this story’s world:
There’s this anime named Mu-Ur Quincunx. It was edgy and with a bad ending, most fans hate it.
The author scammed investors to make a hyperrealistic VR adaptation of it, despite the backlash. It’s impossible to make a happy ending happen regardless, so most fans hate it too. It still has a speedrunning scene, as bad games do.
The top speedrunner, our protagonist, gets isekai’d into a world that looks exactly like the VR game, a couple years before the plot starts.
This main character quickly starts trying out exploits that players have figured out over the years, and some work, the most video-gamey ones don’t. This is kind of a cool premise if you squint. But there’s a big, big problem. Two, even.
Let’s get the easy one out of the way, what the fuck is this formatting?
“You coming from the north, brother?” (scout boy)
“Yeah. Stray Dog City.”
“You know Fetcher?” (scout boy)
“He's the man of the gate.”
“Ou, he's still at it!” (scout boy)
But let’s ignore the ““““cosmetic”””” issues, even though, come on, how could this story be any good after this? The bigger problem is, and I need bigger letters for this,
THE READER HAS NOT WATCHED MU-UR QUINCUNX.
The entire novel is about the protagonist fixing a story we know nothing about. This means every single scene needs walls and walls of exposition, which is not particularly well delivered:
Rainwoman and Sorry Man, then. They are still at the Bone Dune Station, the secret research facility in Reignland. I should probably free them first, and then free Mirim, but that's more easily said than done. I know the location of the station, but I need serious firepower to help them out of there. Rain and Sorry are required flags; I can't get inside the Starfish Mansion without Sorry Man and I really need to make sure that Rainwoman doesn't get addicted to battle drugs like in the anime. She is violent, vengeful and short-tempered even without drugs, but I should be able to manipulate her using her two obsessions: hate for Caliph Tze and love for Sorry Man.
Then, to get that firepower: Crystal Pencil and Dragon Kimono. They should be relatively close here in the south coast of Ur, probably starting their weapon dealing business. Are they already at Crumbling Shores, the next big city southward? They were there in the flashback episode, but it's hard to pin down where that episode lands in the timeline... Crys and Kimono are required flags as well, and since they are closest in time and space, I should find them first and somehow convince them to travel to the Mu continent to free Rainwoman and Sorry Man...
90% of the word count is shit like this. You are not missing any context, this is the first appearance of any of these concepts and characters.
Maybe it could be excused if the “speedrunning tricks” were funny or cracky or entertaining or something, but they amount to the protagonist knowing where resource caches are, or knowing what to say to faction leaders so they let him pass.
This story had surprisingly been recommended to me multiple times. I don’t know why, I think it’s honestly the worst thing I’ve read in a long time, and, come on. Imagine I’m pointing to the rest of this blog post.
The Dungeon is the perfect place for a Psycho
Adam Smasher, the Cyberpunk 2077 guy who looks like this:
Gets isekai’d to the Danmachi anime that looks like this:
Hilarity ensues.
He’s back in his pre-cyborg body, but his asshole personality is still firmly locked in, and he aims to cut off his limbs as soon as inhumanly possible. The concept is good, as he’s almost perfectly designed for crawling the dungeon at the core of Danmachi, but he’s not at all designed for dealing with the tone and characters.
Unfortunately, while this is a comedy generator early on, helped along by a good understanding of Adam’s character and his history, I think the writer should have quit while he was ahead. The premise gets old and the fic fails to evolve, worse, it starts taking itself seriously.
This puts me in an odd position because I would have recommended this if only ten chapters were out, but definitely not thirty-two.
Lelouch of the Reincarnation
By this point in the month I was desperate. You know Lelouch from Code Geass, that chess-themed mind control mecha anime that was popular in 2007.
What you may not know is the other half of this crossover, High School DxD, because it was a super generic never-popular shonen-ecchi anime. I don’t know why it’s gotten so many fics lately, but the sheer amount of them made me bite the bullet out of curiosity, and this made it onto my backlog.13
I’ve never watched DxD and never will, but I understand that it’s about devils, who are in charge of fighting random monsters that attack the human world once in a while. The mandatory generic horny protagonist is recruited into an attractive female devil’s group, and he lucks into an extremely strong power that only humans can get, allowing him to push above his weight class.
It’s your average terrible shonen, basically. The anime was adapted from a light novel that’s marginally more complex, though, and a few of these Questionable Questing fics are focusing on an underexplored aspect found in it,14 some Game of Thrones-esque power dynamics between all the old devil families.
Anything with intrigue and aristocracy is good crossover material for Lelouch, obviously. This fic comparatively shines when it’s about Lelouch navigating this world of diplomacy and favors to get his new family into a better position. He also starts discovering that characters from Code Geass have equivalents here: for example, this world’s Kallen is a Welsh soldier instead of a rebel fighter.
The fic has a lot of talking, drama, and little action. It’s not really a shonen like either of the source materials. That’d usually be good, but this writer is barely mediocre at writing engaging dialogue and intrigue. I was at the verge of dropping it from minute one, and it crossed the threshold when it became romance slop, something it had avoided for ages despite its source material.
I do think there was potential in the premise, but this fic never finds it, a metaphor for this month to be sure.
Like No One Ever Was
A Pokemon self-insert fic, made unique by the region. It’s Paldea, the most recent one, and the author is inserted into the body of Nemona, the main character’s rival. It’s mostly your average journey fic, if headed by someone who knows competitive tactics, and front loaded with training scenes as usual.
This endless training tapers off towards the end of what’s currently written, but this raises new issues. Nemona decides to join a beginner’s tournament with a single Dunsparce. Obviously she’ll win because she’s been training it for a long time and she’s an adult in the body of a rich child. In fact, it’s almost unfair for her to join and take the prize away from a poor kid.
She’s completely clueless she’s doing this, though, and the author might be too. She gets disqualified after winning, due to her opponent being related to one of the judges, and she gets really mad about this. You’re mad about nepotism while you’re the most privileged child in this world on multiple levels? You were throwing around Earthquakes and Terastallizations while most of the tournament kids were using level one Rattatas.
Anyway, this isn’t exactly a deal breaker for me. I just think it shows a weakness with the main character that is wrecking the rest of the fic. I’ll probably keep reading it for a while and see if it improves.
That’s it for this post. I’m currently reading something that’s actually turning out to be way better than I expected, but that’ll have to wait for next month. Thanks for reading, and see you then!
HERE’S MY COVID REVIEW—
I didn’t get to play the Elden Ring DLC for long enough to review it, though it was hellishly hard.
I also read a few Celestial-type stories this month, which I will review when I eventually make that one article about the genre. They were The Brink and Back, I Cast Fist, and Wizard Beyond the Wall (the latter of which was actually alright???).
Quick non-zoomer Baldi’s Basics review: it’s exactly what you expect in a good way. I wish we could bring simple flash games back.
I’m most definitely not a history person, please don’t kill me if I get anything wrong and Blorbo the Third was a super amazing historical figure I’m skipping over.
After Bartimaeus and Eragon I really should have known better. Well okay, the Ptolemy book wasn’t bad, just pointless.
I understand why shows do this, don’t get me wrong. But at least have something good to add on top.
I hear the resolution and FPS issues are better on the Steam version, but I played this on my Quest 2 (3 has issues too).
Don’t quote me on this third-hand knowledge, but I believe his son committed suicide after he was publicly caught being a pedophile (I don’t think the writer did anything wrong himself, which is the natural next question to ask). This was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back on top of other unspecified tragedies, I’m told.
I was convinced the writer had to be a teenager or at least young, but I just looked it up and he was 37 when he started. No clue what happened, then.
After writing this I decided to look it up just in case, and yep, Korra had some borderline healing fire bender in it. Well, if Korra did it, you know it’s a bad move.
This and I Cast Fist, which I mention in an earlier footnote.
Or so Google tells me. I have no idea if this is true and don’t care that much.
I also didn't like most of the fics I read this month. I think I recommended it on AWcord, but have you read this: https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/the-unconquerable-transubstantiation-cyoa-multicross.16353/
I think you will enjoy it.
Apologies for asking a non-sequitur, but I loved your takes on nostalgebraist and Bavirz, and was wondering if you had any visual novel recommendations? Again, sorry for asking out of left field! Hope that’s okay :)