Reviews for May 2026
Complete. Global. Valuation.
Wow, I don’t know where I found the time to read this much,1 let alone beat five video games. Most of them were Resident Evils, but still.
★: My Name is Beautiful | Resident Evil 4 (2023), Resident Evil 2 (2019), The Case of the Golden Idol, Carrot Kingdom!
*: The Long Journey Home, Hackerman, AITA for Trying to Get my Son’s Teacher Fired?, Best of Intentions
Previously, on Record Crash:
My Name is Beautiful★
This novel made me think I was reading the new Worm at points. It also almost made me drop it in disgust before the fourth chapter.
I really hate the adage “it gets good later”. Just spend a hundred hours until Effort Justification kicks in, and then you’ll be indoctrinated into a group of time wasters with lowered standards. But it’s true this time, I swear, and there’s an explanation.
My Name is Beautiful is fanfiction—ratfic, really—of a terrible, terrible American manhwa called UnOrdinary. The fic manages to somehow redeem this:
While I haven’t read canon, so take this description with a grain of salt, I have read enough reviews and comments. It features the most Young Adult Urban Fantasy premise ever: everyone is born with one of many known abilities, and after centuries of this, society has perfected the measurement of people’s “power levels”, from 0.0 to 10.0.
Over time, this has led to an insane degree of stratification and bigotry. Low-tiers are almost slaves to everyone above them, and high-tiers are insulated from consequences. You can only improve your power level through violence, and not even that much. You usually stay at your tier forever.
The comic takes place in a high school, revolving around a guy who was born with no powers, but got a broken one late in life. Instead of a happy-go-lucky approach to that premise like in My Hero Academia, John gets edgy. He revels in his new power, brutalizes his old bullies… He becomes a normal teen again when he moves to a new school and makes new friends, but it’s not long before he backslides into bad habits and tries to return to the top of the food chain.2 Most people drop the webtoon around that point, saying that they didn’t sign up to read a villain protagonist.
Anyway, John isn’t our protagonist, nor is anyone on that cover. The fic’s author chooses a self-insert into a random side character named Meili, who has the power to manifest phantom claws to stab people with. And she doesn’t meet any of the main characters for hundreds of thousands of words.
All the red flags, all of them. The early chapters feel like a terrible OC navigating a cliche world. You can understand why I almost dropped it.
Only, you start really getting to know Meili, and realize she’s one of the most interesting characters in web fiction:
The day before, wanting Alicia to understand exactly what I was getting her into, I'd made an attempt at explaining the full extent of my plans for John. Past, present, and future.
Previously, little nudges had been the extent of my actions. Briefly mentioning the possibility of transferring to Wellston as a non-violent solution to his problems at school, treating Alicia as a real human being with value so he'd feel awkward if he didn't do the same. Small, indirect things like that.
But that wasn't enough for me. I wanted no doubts. I wanted a hundred percent guarantee that he'd help me with ability-modifying research, and that he'd be just as motivated as I was, no less.
So I'd told him the truth, knowing full well what effect it would have on him. If my previous tactics were nudging, then this was a harsh shove (to stretch the metaphor), and successful shoving generally had a longer list of requirements.
First, a vast knowledge disparity with your target, such that you knew how to act to push them one way or another, while they couldn't recognize what was unnatural (manipulative) behavior from you. Even better if there was a gap in intelligence or maturity, like the gap between adult and child.
A sense of elevated importance or closeness in your target's life: the position of a family member, partner, close friend, role model… In other words, a place near to them from which you exercised your influence.
A monopolization of new information. Not all the information they ever got, but in relation to a particularly important subject to them, so you could use influential lies and portrayals that no one else could ever call out. Or even just the timing or order with which you gave them (completely true) information.
Finally, a large amount of time to work with, because rushing it and trying to influence someone every time you saw them was just an easy way to get caught and called out. Much more effective was an intentional exchange or gesture in one out of ten interactions, over the course of a few months…
Some of these points bled into each other. If you were the only source of knowledge about something they cared about, they'd likely want to spend time with you. Still, satisfying all four points was difficult; for example, the classic manipulative boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse archetype typically only hit three of them.
I had only reached two with John. We were reasonably familiar friends; he was grateful to me, admired me, we spoke a lot every day, I knew more than enough about him. But we weren't that close, after less than two months. And as he grew in strength and skill, the less he would need me, my training, my advice. (Which meant less time, ultimately, and fewer chances).
Meili is a uniquely (and very entertainingly) neurotic mess, with two sets of conflicting memories on how the world should work. After a few years in this society, she’s accepted that she can’t fix it with reactive virtue signaling and pointless self-sacrifice.3 She’ll have to own her agency, work within the system and manipulate even the good guys for any levers she can use, while hating herself every step of the way.
Obviously her fighting ability is worthless for that, and she’s taking the road of what I’d describe as “Dark Effective Altruism”. Talking to people, convincing them to help her, coercing them if that doesn’t work, and increasingly elaborate scientific trickery and heists as a last resort.
As with Time to Orbit: Unknown, it really feels like a Sociology student wrote this, and while that may sound bad to some, it’s exactly the discordant focus the source material needs. It takes a special type of author to consume a shonen manga for kids and turn it into a slow-paced, thoughtful story of political revolution. I constantly hear positive comparisons to Andor, and they seem fitting.
Don’t let me gush over this too much. Beyond the shitty first few chapters, there are some flaws to My Name is Beautiful.
All the information-gathering abilities to worry about, like Deception Detection and Ability Analyzer, had limited daily uses. What's more, they all required somebody to ask the right question: 'Can x ability do this?' Nobody important enough had thought to ask if Vision Sharing - the contact-based ability that never progressed beyond 2.3 - could be used for long-range spying.
Every once in a while, this kind of thing shatters my suspension of disbelief. Yeah, maybe no one expects the equivalent of an Untouchable to have a useful power after centuries of bigotry and propaganda, but the propaganda department would definitely still know what to cover up, and the government would have snapped everyone up. In fact, we later find out they’ve done this with every mind reader in the setting, kidnapped from their homes like the invisible children in Buffy.
But no, this remote sight ability is secretly broken so the protagonist can be the only one to figure it out, use it as an edge. She needs all the help she can get, but come on. This is not the only such stretch—another character, famous for being able to copy powers, invents a different, secret identity that can also copy them. Power-copying is an extremely rare ability, but everyone assumes the two identities cannot be related, because one is much stronger and less limited than the other… except this entire gimmick would be old hat for the society as written, not that it would be hard to figure out in our world either.
Beyond the bad first impression and these couple instances of poor worldbuilding, I have no complaints. It’s a real page turner, like if Wildbow finally got his groove back. The fact that the original setting is so terribly written only makes it more satisfying whenever this author hammers it into making sense. I’m not the only one to think this—even readers of the original webtoon constantly praise the improvements, so it must be doing something right.
It’s a shame that this is fanfic and as such unpublishable, even if you don’t need to read the original at all. You could make some nice low budget adaptations from this material. Maybe we’ll eventually find a book with names rewritten à la Alchemised.
For now, I still recommend reading this version. Hopefully it keeps escalating and sticks the landing, it’s only 13% of Worm’s word count so far.
The Left Hand of Darkness
I really don’t want to give up on Ursula Le Guin just because this book sucks. She’s always been just past my sphere of knowledge, since I read a LOT of pulp sci-fi when growing up. Even the entirety of Asimov’s Foundation series, that dry mess. I wanted her to redeem that hellish era.
Le Guin’s writing has also always been described as beautiful, and she as the Early Special Female Sci-fi Writer who’s not just a thinker, but a poet. Alas, if this book was meant to showcase that, it failed miserably.
The Left Hand of Darkness is about an alien trying to convince an old-timey-themed ice world4 to join a federation of planets. The alien arrived alone and defenseless in his ship, mostly so the authorities of the two countries on the planet5 don’t get scared. His only role is to be a persuasive Envoy.
This is complicated by two factors:
The planet’s inhabitants look human but are all non-binary. Instead of getting their period every month, they go into heat, upon which they acquire sexual characteristics of one of The Two Genders (more on this later) and the capacity to mate and produce children. Then they go back to their non-binary state.6 For some reason, the futuristic alien exposed to 80 different worlds’ cultures has a lot of trouble understanding and dealing with this.
While the planet is naturally peaceful because there are no Abominable Permanent Males (more on this later) and they have the Esoteric Oriental Concept of Face, a Trump-like figure emerges in one of the countries and decides to change this. The first war in their history might be sparked if the Envoy, Genly, doesn’t navigate things correctly.
Genly is not the only viewpoint into this world. There’s also the native Estraven, who, in his role as a pseudo-Vizier, massively fucked up the handling of the political situation while trying to help him, and is promptly exiled at the beginning of the book. We are also told a bunch of native myths across frequent interludes.
But I am burying the lede, hard. The sci-fi plot doesn’t really matter. The politics don’t really matter. This book really has two themes, Betrayal and Gender. The first is handled well, with an examination of the concept from multiple angles, and the core of the novel is a backstab that isn’t even real, only a result of cultural misunderstandings.
The second? Well. Let's put it this way: Le Guin died in 2018, but I am absolutely convinced that if she was ten years younger and still alive today, she would be a TERF. You know, like J. K. Rowling, spending all day on Twitter complaining about the trans ruining the sacred realm of womyn.
It’s genuinely insane that this book is hailed as a feminist masterpiece. After reading it, I don’t believe Le Guin was a feminist, certainly not at the time—I think she was a rare female sci-fi writer, and this made journalists naturally push her into the role, which she gladly accepted. The thing she seems to value the most is recognition, being taken seriously.7
I know these revelations might be hard to swallow. But bear with me, I have actually read this book, and most of you have, at best, read carefully manufactured essays about how it was a brave and radical meditation on gender, how it predicted transgender people. And I think that’s an Emperor’s New Clothes situation.
Perhaps it’s better to let her make her own defense. This is from an essay that she published in 1976 and revisited eleven years later, with the 1987 “corrections” between brackets:
Along about 1967, I began to feel a certain unease, a need to step on a little farther, perhaps, on my own. I began to want to define and understand the meaning of sexuality and the meaning of gender, in my life and in our society. Much had gathered in the unconscious—both personal and collective—which must either be brought up into consciousness or else turn destructive. It was that same need, I think, that had led Beauvoir to write The Second Sex, and Friedan to write The Feminine Mystique, and that was, at the same time, leading Kate Millett and others to write their books, and to create the new feminism. But I was not a theoretician, a political thinker or activist, or a sociologist. I was and am a fiction writer. The way I did my thinking was to write a novel. That novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, is the record of my consciousness, the process of my thinking.
Perhaps, now that we have all [well, quite a lot of us, anyhow] moved on to a plane of heightened consciousness about these matters, it might be of some interest to look back on the book, to see what it did, what it tried to do, and what it might have done, insofar as it is a “feminist” [strike the quotation marks, please] book. (Let me repeat that last qualification, once. The fact is that the real subject of the book is not feminism or sex or gender or anything of the sort; as far as I can see, it is a book about betrayal and fidelity. That is why one of its two dominant sets of symbols is an extended metaphor of winter, of ice, snow, cold: the winter journey. The rest of this discussion will concern only half, the lesser half, of the book.)
[This parenthesis is overstated; I was feeling defensive, and resentful that critics of the book insisted upon talking only about its “gender problems,” as if it were an essay not a novel. “The fact is that the real subject of the book is …” This is bluster. I had opened a can of worms and was trying hard to shut it. “The fact is,” however, that there are other aspects to the book, which are involved with its sex/gender aspects quite inextricably.]
I can give authors points for going back and admitting mistakes. But that’s not what this is. All Le Guin is doing here, through the whole edited essay, is renewing her Feminist card. Trying to recontextualize everything she did, as culture moves forward and it becomes increasingly obvious that she was not only wrong, but exactly as prejudiced as everyone at the time, if not more.
This may not be obvious in the quote above, but it is obvious in this one:
But the central failure in this area comes up in the frequent criticism I receive, that the Gethenians seem like men, instead of menwomen.8
This rises in part from the choice of pronoun. I call Gethenians “he” because I utterly refuse to mangle English by inventing a pronoun for “he/she.” [This “utter refusal” of 1968 restated in 1976 collapsed, utterly, within a couple of years more. I still dislike invented pronouns, but I now dislike them less than the so-called generic pronoun he/him/his, which does in fact exclude women from discourse; and which was an invention of male grammarians, …]
You’re seeing why I said she would be a TERF nowadays? This is not a writer that is beyond gender, she was born in it, molded by it. And we can throw away the essay now, and focus on what the novel actually says. Some choice quotes:
Prisoners who had been there for several years were psychologically and I believe to some extent physically adapted to this chemical castration. They were as sexless as steers. They were without shame and without desire, like the angels. But it is not human to be without shame and without desire.
They lacked, it seemed, the capacity to mobilize. They behaved like animals, in that respect; or like women. They did not behave like men, or ants.
Consider: A child has no psycho-sexual relationship to his mother and father. There is no myth of Oedipus on Winter
They do not see one another as men or women. This is almost impossible for our imagination to accept.
I really hate that this review is starting to read like a callout post. But I swear to god I am not pulling anything out of context.
The Left Hand of Darkness’ actual gender thesis is as such: “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. What a crazy world it would be if Men took on the Canonical Female Personality Traits or if Women did the opposite. It would never happen in a million years, though. Freud said so.”
Myopic bioessentialism, pure and simple. I’ve reviewed some indefensible trash over the years, and yet this is the first time I’ve felt repeatedly offended, made worse by the work’s reputation as subversive.
If I had to defend Le Guin, it’d be by saying she was somewhat brave in tackling the topic at all. But all she did was freeze her prejudice in time, and she didn’t come up with any truly progressive ideas. This might be one of the most sexist works of fiction I’ve read, and that includes those made hundreds of years ago—at least they were reflecting society instead of inventing brand new ways to be wrong.
Any braveness is undone by the revisionism,9 the many essays both from Le Guin and others—my copy features, at the end, a glowing, longform review from a trans author that honestly reads like my middle school homework—10 that claim it’s a feminist masterpiece. No. It fucking isn’t. Even Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game is more feminist than this is, at least that gives the Canonical Female Trait of Compassion to a protagonist without implying you need eugenics to make it happen.
Did I enjoy the book, despite all this? Somewhat, else I would not have been able to easily finish it in two or three sittings.11 The book throws away the political intrigue around the middle,12 drifting into an extended (potentially over 30k words?) survival arc about traversing an icy landscape, which sounds worrying, but it’s handled well. The planet’s worldbuilding is a bit quaint in scope, but she tried her best to make it unique. And the prose is pretty decent, even if she constantly plays with contrasts at a specific cadence that’s been ruined by ChatGPT.13 She does like going on mildly related tangents too much, throwing out individual sentences that stop the natural flow of the narrative. But the biggest issue related to the prose is, for sure…
Overall, it’s just not worth it. If you want feminist sci-fi, you’re better served by picking up ANY famous series, it’s baked-in by now. Or better, watch the far, far superior Star Trek TNG take on non-binary people.
I have never felt more like Nostalgia Critic, reading it so you don’t have to.
AITA for Trying to Get my Son’s Teacher Fired?*
Do you vaguely know what /r/AmITheAsshole is? Have you read/watched Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets? Do you like alt-format crackfics?
To the Venn intersection of these groups, I can guarantee that you’ll enjoy this fic. It doesn’t do anything crazy, and it’s 3k words long, but it understood the mission statement, and ends up pretty funny.
Star Trek: Academy
No one can say I don’t give things a chance, even when they look really, really bad.
Ultimately, it was bad, but not as godawful as the premise and this screenshot make it look (what were they thinking?):
The acting is okay. I like the dynamic between the main character and his captain stepmom. I like the Klingon guy. The Doctor is stuck in comedic relief mode, but is recognizably his Voyager self. I appreciate that one of the first episodes is about a philosophical/political debate instead of ship battles, explosions and crying, producer Alex Kurtzman’s calling cards.
But there’s just nothing all that interesting or great about it. It may be a rare concept that would suck even with perfect execution—Star Trek is competence porn, and we have Lower Decks for incompetence porn, so “a bunch of demographic-covering students get into angsty drama14 and the occasional sci-fi adventure” is an awkward middle ground where no audience is satisfied. Even the kids didn’t like it. Who the hell would pick up Star Trek this way?
I only did the iconic three-episode test, but considering the show was almost instantly cancelled due to low viewership and reviews,15 I doubt I’m missing much.
Systematic Shinobi
I thought I’d never understand the people who say “it doesn’t matter that Primal Hunter is stubbed, you can just pick it up at chapter 485”…
I think I did read Systematic Shinobi a million years ago, before I started reviewing everything I consume. I did review its “Multiverse Mayhem” spinoff. But I can’t say those memories did much here, when I jumped straight into the middle of it. It’s just an immediately understandable, shameless power fantasy, using the Naruto setting as rails.
I once theorized that Jordinio16 might eventually get good enough at writing. It’s certainly not happening here, but he’s getting close to something, I swear. Definitely not to writing the next Moby Dick, but maybe the webfic equivalent of Jujutsu Kaisen?
There’s questionable potential here, buried in the slop… here’s an excerpt where the Sage of the Six Paths—the closest thing to a benevolent God—offers the protagonist the chance to be his successor, and the protagonist refuses, because he’s already the Hokage—the closest thing to a President of Protagonist Town:
"…The Hokage?" Hagoromo stared at him in disbelief, "I realise of course, you take a lot of pride in being the Hokage at your age. I have saw17 as such. And the Hokage that have come before you, have been great and powerful men. But they do not come close to my strength, not even Hashirama Senju. Do you believe, being the Hokage makes you more powerful than me? I confess, I am truly baffled."
"It's not about power, or strength or experience or any of that crap," Daiki tilted his chin defiantly and smirked, "If you and I fought right now, do you know what would happen?"
"A one sided contest of strength." Hagoromo replied easily, chuckling lightly.
"Yes, it's good you agree," Daiki nodded, "I'd win."
"No…I'm fairly certain you would not…" Hagoromo trailed off, looking oddly shocked and disturbed at Daiki's reply.
Yes, he was sure such a thing would confuse the man. Or God. Either or, it did not matter.
"I would." Daiki repeated firmly, fully confident.
The man did not say it. He did not need to. To be ones successor, meant inheriting everything. Perhaps, he was fine with Daiki's view of peace over his own in choosing him, but the caveat would always be that the power came with Hagoromo's influence to some degree.
The man existed beyond life and death. He would not simply leave just because he gifted Daiki his power.
He would not allow anyone, not even the Sage of Six Paths to hover over his shoulder and question what he did or did not do.
The Hokage was just not the ultimate guardian of the Leaf Village, an undefeatable sentinel of might. The worlds greatest warrior.
The Hokage, was also the worlds greatest dictator.
"…Where does such supreme confidence come from?" Hagoromo stared at him in disbelief, "With a single swing of my arm, I could rend this planet from existence. With a clap of my hands, I can create dimensions and breathe life into stars. I can see every move you make, minutes before you even make them. With a thought, no attack you make could harm me, with a blink time itself will stop. Creation itself bows before me, and you believe you could defeat me if we did battle?"
"Not a single doubt," Daiki shrugged and smirked, uncrossing his arms and pointing at the God before him, "A mere God could never hope to defeat the Hokage."
To even consider such a possibility, would be to say he could not protect Konoha from any threat. But, as Hokage, there was no threat he could not defeat.
That was the existence he'd become ever since that fateful walk down those winding stairs into the Hokage training ground, and took the Sandaime's words to heart, to soul.
He truly didn't know the full scope of Hagoromo's power. But, he did know, if it came down it. If he was willing to sacrifice his life and burn out like a star, like the Hokage before him, then he had the ability to defeat Six Paths Madara.
And there were ways around even when his life burned out.
He refused to believe he could not defeat the God standing before him.
"I see…this is not merely a differing in view point," Hagoromo narrowed his eyes, staring deep into Daiki's eyes, searching, "This…is a difference in our realities. How, dreadful. Is that the weight that comes with becoming Hokage? If so, I truly have underestimated it. What a sad place my world has become, for a child to gain such a burden upon his shoulders. How lamentable."
He sighed, "You are too bright, blinding even, I see that now," God shook his head mournfully, "In the face of such shining resolve, I can only look away."
He turned his head, and the inner world faded away, replaced once more by reality, finding himself once more standing in his office, staring at his door.
Daiki stared at his door blankly for a few moments, "It's not yours any more old man," he said softly, shaking his head. He lifted his hand, palm towards the ceiling, "This world, is in the palm of my hand now."
If he sounds megalomaniacal to you, you’re not wrong. I could swear this was a regular OP self-insert fic before. What Systematic Shinobi has become by now is a bizarrely entertaining fantasy about becoming a dictator.
Daiki’s goal is taking over the entire world and making it part of his Land of Fire. Not in any peaceful way. He starts out by giving a populist (and honestly pretty racist) speech to the village after he becomes Hokage, screaming that he’ll be demanding reparations from other villages for past crimes, and if they refuse, he’ll conquer them himself. The whole fic is made out of scenes like that now, videoconferences with other Kages, plans to turn the Land of Wind into a paradise so there’s an excuse to annex it…
I’ve never read Cerebus, but it reminded me of this summary in one article I liked:
In the first 100 chapters, Cerebus follows the traditional trajectory of patriarchal stranger-kings like Conan the Barbarian, albeit subverted, losing more agency the closer he gets to the centre of power and degenerating into a tyrant.
Yet this fic is a true power fantasy,18 so when this protagonist is stuck in a managerial soft power role, he only briefly whines about it. He can clone himself, teleport and take on armies on his own by now, so his life doesn’t have to change at all. This is really something you could only see in degenerate19 fanfic.
Before I write an essay, let’s not forget I have other shit to review this month. Systematic Shinobi is pretty trashy, and you shouldn’t read it unless you’re a student of Jordinio’s work (why?).
The Resident Evil Zone
The remake of the first game opened the floodgates. I played three games and read three fics based on the franchise this month, and you’ve arrived at the exclusion zone for those. I can call myself a Resident Evil fan now, and regret not getting into it earlier.
Resident Evil 2 (2019)★
What whiplash, going from the contemplative, fixed camera angles of Resident Evil 1 to the far newer 2 remake. It’s such a modern AAA third-person shooter, including the quips, your character telling you how scared they are, and the yellow paint splashed all over the place.
But, like with Control, the game is good enough that I don’t give a shit. You play the game twice, once as Claire Redfield and once as Leon Kennedy, with different weapons and slightly varied campaigns which have occasional unique rooms, areas, or even full interludes—and you will want to play the game twice! These remakes upgrade the stories, dialogue and voice acting, taking them from laughably campy to actually pretty good. It’s kind of baffling the RE movie coming out isn’t just adapting this, because it would work just fine.
And the gameplay… I’ve seen people unironically say “Resident Evil is about backtracking, if you remove that it’s not RE”, and yeah, kinda, but you can do it wrong, and I think the first game (and presumably all original-style games) did. The brunt of this game takes place in a Museum-turned-Police-Station, which looks great and you’ll love learning to navigate, even struggling with that limited inventory. Which you can upgrade now. Thank fucking god.
Ultimately, the perfect modernization of the franchise. Besides the fucking yellow paint, but we’re stuck with that forever.
Resident Evil 3 (2020)
Uh-oh. They took only one year to make this? Maybe they made both games simultaneously—nope, it’s shit.
On its face this is just the RE2make treatment applied to RE3, which should have worked… but they cheaped out in every possible way. I haven’t played the original, which already isn’t many people’s favorite, but this feels lazy even to me. My playtimes for each game’s full campaign are:
REmake: 12.9 hours
RE2make: 18 hours
RE3make: 5.8 hours
RE4make: 19.1 hours
You shouldn’t be surprised that “this should have been a DLC” is a common quote.
They cut areas, reused assets, and took every shortcut. You’re in downtown Raccoon City, which is populated by four zombies and seems to feature three streets total. In the mandatory sewer level, there’s a common, giant monster who opens its mouth for two full seconds after it gets close to you, then you click on its gaping weak point with a grenade launcher and it dies in one shot. To replace the Mr. X chases, you fight the same scripted Nemesis boss a million times, including a fight that forces you to use a specific weapon to deal damage, like this is DmC. The final area is the TPS equivalent of a teleporter maze. I was praying for this game to be over soon, and I guess they heard me and made it only six hours long.
For positives, I hear that fans praise the glow-up that co-protagonist Carlos got, but all I can say is he’s inoffensively forgettable. There’s a “holdout” section where you stay in one place and defend yourself from infinitely spawning zombies until you can detonate a bomb, which was at least unique. Beyond the very last cutscene, the story is nothing to write about, just Jill bouncing from setpiece to setpiece without a strong drive or personality, the opposite of Claire. It really needed more years in the oven.
Resident Evil 4 (2023)★
If RE2 gave me whiplash, this obliterated me in the best of ways.
It’s not just the continuation of the transition into a full-on action game, with Leon doing backflips to dodge zombie attacks, Metal Gear Solid 3-esque bosses, and shooting gallery minigames. It’s not that the story is no longer really related to Raccoon City, Umbrella or even zombies (this is closer to a hivemind situation).
It’s that it worked so well, all the disparate, videogamey shit meshing together somehow. There’s a recurrent shopkeeper with a Cockney accent and his face covered, who shows up in a million locations, like he’s Nurse Joy; you fight the Loch Ness monster with infinite harpoons; you rob the villains and combine their treasure with gems to sell it for a higher markup; you keep hearing the same 20 Spanish lines telling you to look behind you—and you’re still engaged in the awesome story.20
I have pretty high standards, I think. For those, RE2 was an 8, and this was a true 10. I don’t understand how the developers managed it. You know how rare it is that after I beat a 19-hour third-person shooter, I just want to do it all over again? I had to force myself to uninstall it so I could move on with my life instead of playing this forever.
Some of it is the remake—people complained about the gimmicky quick-time events of the original, and they’re all but gone here, except in combat, and that’s just Dark Souls dodges and parries with subtle onscreen prompts. But it’s just refining something that was already high quality. RE4 has been in many a gamer’s top 10 list, and I didn’t use to trust them. It’s in mine now.21 It’s simply… really good, guys. The difficulty is just right, letting you start out with the RE2 shooting crutches, but forcing you to master each new feature until you’re reenacting an action movie by the end of the game.
Maybe it loses a bit of steam in the final island section, after the cool castle, sure. For some reason I couldn’t help but think of Ground Zeroes, what with all the stealth the game implies you should use… but then it turns out you can in fact kill everyone, and a helicopter shows up to help you do just that. Similarly, Ashley is not what I used to see described as “intentionally annoying”, she’s been turned into a good character, even if we sadly lose the iconic final cutscene with Leon’s totally canonical slur usage.
I feel bad writing this review, because I’m not doing this masterpiece justice. Just play it already, even if you think it may not be your thing. I’ll put a small spoilery warning in a footnote, though.22
Auuuugh I really want to replay it. Why did I start a review blog that requires me to consume new stuff instead of spinning my wheels? The things I do for no money.
Here are my winscreens for the nerds. I’m a saver, Jerry, I save.
My future plans for Resident Evil? When it goes on sale, that one RE4 Separate Ways DLC, because I heard it was pretty good, and it features Wesker, who barely showed up so far despite being the main villain. I also want to play the latest RE9UIEM or however it’s stylized. I heard 5 and 6 are godawful, and the remaining games are either spinoffs or things that will probably get a better remake eventually, so that should be it for the foreseeable future.
I do enjoy having a lot of potential shit to play, so I probably should try ancient-but-active franchises more often. Monster Hunter, maybe? Or is that too multiplayer and story-light?
Once I finished RE4, the last widely played game of the series, it was time to check out the fanfic scene. Sadly, there isn’t much, despite the insane amounts of “lore” to work with. The remakes have somewhat reignited the embers, but I still was only able to find three fics of any length and/or quality. Let’s start with the lowest quality and go up from there.
This Time, It has to Be Different
I decided to christen the Resident Evil franchise knowledge boat with this fic. I’d previously discovered that it was incredibly popular in QQ, and not due to horny reasons. Getting to read this was a small motivation for getting through the franchise faster, even.
That was never going to end well. A bit into the second chapter, I realized that the fic’s writing was AI-assisted. Checking the author’s history all but confirms it, his “Poseidon SI” actually featured in this article as one of the most obvious examples:
Now, at least it’s not fully AI-written, or not in the usual way. His last story was unreadable, but he’s gotten better at either harnessing the technology or using it only to cover for his flaws as a writer, as it’s internally consistent, and the progression of events makes sense.23 Potentially, he’s writing the story manually, then telling AI to spice up each paragraph after the fact. I’m unsure if this is a good or bad sign for the medium. What the fuck am I saying it’s definitely bad.
The fanfic ends up a somewhat enjoyable action romp through the plot of the RE2 remake, with some crossover into the simultaneous RE3. Leon Kennedy has future knowledge, and he’s using it not only to save more people, but to speedrun the hell of the adventure. Breaking locks, baiting giant zombies into punching through closed doors so he can get a gun without its key…
Surprisingly for a popular power fantasy, Leon isn’t a perfect protagonist who never loses. He constantly (though believably) screws up, either by doing things out of order or beating the mutating, “adaptive” bosses too hard, to the point they evolve early and present a bigger challenge than they originally did.
But don’t get excited, I am being too nice. For one, this is definitely inside baseball for RE2make fans and no one else. And I think that, just like those final bosses, reading a million words of AI writing has made me adapt to its poison, know when to skim and when to read. I’m assuming normal people reading the review won’t be able to stand the least-edited parts, where the AI starts spamming triplet sentences and “not X, Y” constructions.
A Young Girl’s Multicolour Umbrella
Spacebattles has a little-known rule. If there’s a franchise featuring an evil corporation, a Tanya crossover fic will manifest from the æther.
It opens with a flashforward that doesn’t tell us much, beyond implying Tanya ends up in Raccoon City during the events of the games, some form of high-ranked Umbrella executive. This is a weird choice, but I guess it was needed for the target audience, who might not have read the actual beginning otherwise.
Especially since this isn’t a story about zombie survival, it’s just a Bildungsrowoman. We follow Tanya from early childhood as she’s placed in one of the Wesker eugenics programs which created the main villain of the series. With her adult knowledge, she impresses her masters, and this gives her power to unwittingly mess with Umbrella’s plans.
It’s slow burn, almost slice-of-life, heavy with character interactions, a comfortable read. This is one of those out-of-character Tanyas who keeps the hypercompetence and un-self-awareness, but throws away the psychopathy.
Why am I not recommending it? Well, it’s VERY slow burn. And then the childhood arc ends, and we move on to a “company building” arc in Russia. No longer is she interacting with known elements of the franchise, she’s doing hostile takeovers, talking with suppliers, and showing that the author did his research in the field of Boring Shit No One Wants To Read About.24
To make things worse, the updates slow to a crawl. I can confidently say it will die before it makes it anywhere close to the time of the flashforward. I’m not mad, just disappointed.
Best of Intentions*
This was but a reread, now that I have the proper knowledge to understand all of it. My original review was here, and I stand by what I said, but I have two new things to add:
Franchise knowledge really makes it better, and it was already high-quality. There are so many ironic jokes that emerge from the protagonist only having played the third game, and not just from thinking the movies are canon.
The “coda arc”, after the climax in Raccoon City, is as disappointing as I’d heard. I hadn’t read it, because it didn’t exist when I originally caught up. Our MC builds a flying base and goes to tackle the Code: Veronica and a mishmash of the Resident Evil 7/8 plots in quick succession. It’s both rushed and bloated. It includes a five-year timeskip where neither characters nor relationships develop, and it kills the story in its tracks. The “final battle” is alright, I guess, but I think the author was too tired to properly write the connective tissue linking the main arc to it.
I still recommend it, both to non-fans and fans (it probably led to me playing Resident Evil in the first place), but do keep in mind that you should stop reading after they leave the city.
Birthright
I saw this recommended on /r/rational, where I usually see higher quality fiction. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have bothered mentioning it here.
This isn’t a review—it’s a callout post.
This was June 2025, so maybe people had an excuse not to recognize the AI slop.25 The worst part is that they liked the writing of this Worm/Invincible crossover so much that the writer got reader awards for it, which cost money. The action keeps being praised in the replies, even though I’m pretty sure it’s the fight scenes where the writer abused ChatGPT the hardest.
Beyond the AI use, it’s just the Invincible stations-of-canon, which I can recognize after my storied experience of reading another Invincible fic. This guy wasn’t even trying.
Let’s leave it there. I just read It has to be Different and Systematic Shinobi and my glass house is looking particularly fragile right now.
Hackerman*
I don’t know anything about Armored Core VI, but this made me download the game, so you know it’s gotta be good.
Early on, I did get flashbacks to the universally terrible BattleTech SIs. This is a story about a guy eventually starting a mech company and captaining a ship, sure. But this proves that the premise isn’t the problem. It’s probably the franchise, or its selecting for the most boring authors in the world.
Technically this is an “Inspired Inventor” fic, and if you don’t know what it is, I’m sorry but I’ve already spent way too long looking for a higher resolution version of the Worm CYOA image:
I’m not going to kill your eyes, don’t bother reading that. I said technically. He needs to “earn it” first, get twenty “sparks” from genuine experimentation and research before he gets the actual power.26
Doesn’t this mean that he’s basically just an actual engineer? Yeah, and I’m guessing this is why the fic is actually pretty decent.
I don’t know much about AC even after some wiki crawling and comment reading—I get the feeling neither does From Software, who keeps rebooting canon, and that any lore is more a bonus than the point. I think characters don’t even have canonical appearances, we just see their emblem and the giant robots they own? If my hunch is correct, Hackerman really goes above and beyond in expanding it into a Cyberpunkish world that feels lived-in, with very likable characters and a good sense of progression.
Does this protagonist spend too long designing weapons and not enough time talking to people? Yes, as expected from Inspired Inventors. But it’s not to an absurd degree, and I want to see where the plot goes. He’s actually siding with the AI with the most evil sounding plan in the world, who I’m pretty sure is one of the game’s villains. He can probably fix her, he has the technology.
All in all, I recommend this if you can bear with the flaws I’ve mentioned. It might not be for everyone.
In Orario with Great Sage
The title already foreshadows garbage. I definitely wouldn’t have clicked on it if I had known it was a mirror of a WebNovel fic that looks like this:
It’s better than it seems, but that’s damning it with faint praise.
“Great Sage” is a skill from that Reincarnated as a Slime anime I haven’t watched, but even with that context you’d assume it’s about a studious nerd using information to win the day, or something like that?
Not quite, because he also gets the skill “Predator”. He can consume anything and use the materials to create anything he understands, which, due to the synergy, is everything. You might conclude that this overpowered protagonist will beat the dungeon by himself in about a couple days?
Also not quite. This is somehow a slow-paced slice-of-life fic about dating the girl on the left and opening a clothing store.
The story features many “wow you’re so cool!” moments, but it’s always his new friends who say it, and almost never about combat ability. Dungeon crawls occur, but the fic hates dwelling on them beyond how much he enjoys them, and how much money they make him. Did I mention he has a third skill that makes him a sociopath? Yeah that gets brought up often and doesn’t impact the story in any way. He sure loves hanging around people and making them happy.27
The best I can say about this fic is that it’s inoffensive, but you can certainly do better with your time.
Swordmaster Girlfailure
>looking for a new fic >ask recommender if their fic is ergodic or a copout >she doesn't understand >pull out furry rantsona video essay explaining what's ergodic and what's a copout that abandons its original greentext format for regular dialogue three chapters in >she laughs and says "its a good fic sir" >start reading it >its a copout
The Boys (Season 5)
The season is pure garbage. The final episode is alright.
I have in my notes a comparison to Stranger Things. There are a lot of similarities, including how in retrospect they aren’t worth watching past the first season (previously reviewed here) , and how you can skip straight to the finale and not miss that much.
But there’s one key difference. The final Stranger Things episode spent a trillion dollars on its CGI, even if it came out looking like a Linkin Park music video. You could tell they wanted to make it look like an actual movie, and they tried their best to step it up compared to not just the final season, but the entire show. Beyond the CGI, they used wide open spaces, big casts…
The Boys finale looks cheaper than the first episode of the show. The climactic confrontation takes place inside a tiny room, with only two powers on display, and is over incredibly soon.
I’m not a Marvel fan, I’m not saying a good finale has to have epic fights or whatever. But if you are choosing to make them a centerpiece, they shouldn’t look cheap. The marketing looked like this:
That’s the expectation that was set. Nothing remotely like that happens. We never see Homelander kill anyone in public, or cause a single explosion. We barely even see the world, with the reactions to Homelander’s fall coming from yet another small room filled with “focus audience” extras. It’s like a COVID season.
Like Stranger Things, it does satisfyingly conclude the themes and character arcs set at the very beginning, so I can’t say I hated it,28 but surely your show is successful if you’re making two spinoffs. Where did the money go? Why not use it to avoid these distractions? Why the fuck is Seth-Rogen-as-Seth-Rogen a supporting character of an entire episode? I seriously hope he worked for free.
Maybe Vought Rising will be better, spend all the cash they saved in this? Even if I don’t like period pieces too much, it does keep one of the two good actors in the show.29
Chaos on the Hellmouth
As the title implies, it’s a Buffy The Vampire Slayer fic featuring the Chaos Gacha, and not a particularly creative implementation of either.
The longer Gothic continues to shit these stories out, the less horny and solipsistic they get. He could become a good writer one of these days?
"Right," I muttered to myself, "I can do this, climb the seven thousand steps, do the pilgrimage and find the talking dragon. Because that is somehow my life now"
[…]
"Few joor would seek out this place. Fewer still climb the mountain when easier paths exist," said Paarthurnax.
It took me a moment to find my voice, and when I did, I found myself feeling compelled to explain myself as if I was in the presence of a teacher I respected, which I actually was, I soon realised.
"Yes, I know I could have summoned you when I was on the beach," I admitted.
Or even brought him to Sunnydale, but I doubted even the people of that town would ignore the presence of a dragon flying around over their town.
"Yet you did not," said the dragon.
I had my reasons, as I told myself several times.
"Aside from wanting to climb the Seven Thousand, it seems wrong to call you up like you are a dog, not unless it was an emergency," I replied.
If the Hellmouth opened and massive tentacle monsters appeared, then I would summon Paarthurnax to fight them, and while that would be horrible as well as very dangerous, I couldn't help thinking it would also be freaking epic.
"Wisdom often begins when one walks the longer road willingly," the dragon mumbled.
That absolutely sounded like something Paarthurnax would say.
"Also," I admitted, "I found some loot, so the trip was profitable."30
Maybe not. Let’s just look at the fic list on his forum signature:
The Void, MMM, TTT, The Sellsword, Wiki Warrior, BEH, Always Bet, I Am No Jedi, Chaos on the Hellmouth, The Abyssal Grimoire, Multiverse Explorer, A Little Chaos, The Tinker, The Price of Life, Luck of the Draw, Runesmith, The Kiss of New Life, Rogue Trader, Rogue Trader (rewrite), Scrolls & Sorcery, Summoned, Celestial Effect, A Wizard’s Grimoire, How Not To Mando, Celestial Scrolls, Pokegirl, Paint it Black, Rise of the Dragon 1, Rise of the Dragon 2, The Black Wolf, Fought The Vought, Welcome to the Hellmouth, Star Wars: Imperium Chimera, Hunter, Amazing Relics, Celestial Reliquary, Warlock 2, Warlock, A Kind of Magic, Forged In Fire, Battle Path, Seth, Trials of Terror, Torn Cape, Retirement Plan, Apocalypse Tales, Sheogorath, Strange Summons, Interstellar Odyssey, Team Builder, Omega Lords, Waifu Catalog, The Traveller, Harem Adventures, Odds And Ends.
Someone make a chart, trace this progression. The heat death of the universe might come faster.
Carrot Kingdom!★
Remember Öoo? It’s that kind of awesome minimalist puzzle game, but only 15 minutes long, and free! It even comes with a little storyline.
I think this was made for a game jam, so we might get a Steam version eventually? The concept has ears.
Fate/Invade Phantom
A new type of sysfic! I’m clearly not getting tired of the existing ones, but diversity is our strength.
The story mainly takes place in the Fate universe, which gives me pause when rating it. I don’t know whether this is truly boring or I just need more setting knowledge before I can enjoy it.
Whatever the answer, talking about “Beat ‘em Up” is probably more worth our time:
[Beat 'em up]
You have the ability to gain powers through your own effort. All you have to do is defeat a character from an established IP.
Once a week, you can choose a fictional character and be teleported into their universe to fight them in order to obtain their powers and abilities (including knowledge, skills, and so on). You will appear no more than 20 meters away from them, and you can bring items with you.
You will never be summoned into their universe at a moment when they are already in another fight, or in a situation where they cannot defend themselves, such as being asleep, unconscious, incapacitated, etc. However, there is no time limit. Once you are summoned into their world, you can spend as much time as you want as a drop-in. You can end the challenge and return to your own world at any time, or defeat the character and return with their powers and abilities.
So he lives in the FSN world, but he can choose to invade other worlds, Dark Souls style. If he manages to beat a character at their full strength, he gets their power.
This seems pretty hard, even with prep time. How is a regular human with a gun meant to defeat Goku? But the cleverness of this system is that it forces the protagonist to follow a natural progression of escalation. Start very small, and go up from there.
The first character he “defeats” is a little girl from the Fire Punch world, and he does this by offering her drugged food at a time when she’s hungry, sweet talking his way around her protective brother. So trickery counts for the system, which also works in the story’s benefit, since it’s naturally more interesting than the alternative.
It’s reminiscent of Duellist, which has a great concept but a hard-to-swallow execution. Here, the problem is not so much that his power leads to constant pointless fight scenes, in fact, he doesn’t use it that often and spends a long time in his “home” world—it’s that he chooses worlds from manga I haven’t read.
The only exception is Steel Ball Run, and this author isn’t very good at writing those characters.31 Worse, he initially fails to defeat the target, so he’s stuck in that world for a week. I cringed out of the story pretty fast after that.
Hopefully, better authors start using Beat ‘em Up, it’s got potential. This particular implementation, I can only recommend if you’re a webfic historian.
The Case of the Golden Idol★
I dropped Obra Dinn because of its artstyle. Not just because it was incredibly ugly and offputting—something it shares with this game—but because the lo-fi dot matrix bullshit of it was giving me a headache.
Since Golden Idol doesn’t literally cause me physical pain, I can ignore the quality of the pictures and enjoy the murder mystery investigations.
We’re shown a bunch of related deaths, moments frozen in time, and from those alone (well, you can hear a single line of dialogue from any character, and examine their items in detail) you have to figure out whodunnit, how and why.
Initially, the murders don’t seem all that related, beyond featuring the titular Idol, but as the chapters progress, they build up to a pretty cool climax, smoothly evolving from realistic colonialism to Weird Fantasy.
I don’t want to spoil this further for you, but I was pleasantly and constantly surprised, a rare game that gets much, much better as it goes on. I admit some disappointment when I played the first couple chapters, was this what people were raving about? No, it wasn’t, and the game ends up earning its accolades, short as it is.
Unless you really hate the entirety of the mystery genre, you owe it to yourself to play this. Golden Idol isn’t even that hard, if that’s a worry.32
Gotham Goon Gacha
No, this is a SpaceBattles fic, it’s not that kind of goon.
I don’t know if any of you know THE TECHNO QUEEN, a Worm crackfic wherein Taylor becomes the campiest villain in history. I’m strongly reminded of that when reading Gotham Goon Gacha.
Most sysfic writers these days33 have learned to restrain themselves, to really respect the standards for Achievements, to be stingy and deal with the fact Bronze tickets are all your character will realistically get for the first ten chapters.
This guy decided to go the opposite way and play it for comedy. A random villain goon gets broken luck powers and uses them to start a union for his peers. A goonion. He then takes over Gotham City by storm, defeating and trolling what are now lesser villains through increasingly contrived circumstances.
Like THE TECHNO QUEEN teaches us, these romps will get old pretty fast. I was going to say that hasn’t happened yet, but the story has doubled in size since I last caught up, so I can’t guarantee that anymore. All I can say is that I enjoyed the popcorn and laughed a couple times.
Mobile Suit Gundam I
Remember my review last month, that one Jujutsu Kaisen fic made by the biggest giant robot fan in the world? Her love for Gundam made me decide to check out the franchise, she really made it sound interesting. Some research revealed a bunch of recommendations for this film, a summary movie of the first part of the anime.
I’m sad to report I’m still not a Gundam fan. I’ll give it something, it’s far better than Legend of the Galactic Heroes. I was reminded of Evangelion more than anything else, because the protagonist was a teen constantly crying and PTSDing his way through battles. The deconstructions for the genre came pretty fast, huh.34
It just didn’t click for me. The plot concerns a war between rebel planets of the solar system and Earth, including the orbital colonies around it. One of these colonies isn’t properly defended, and the chain of command is decimated in an attack, forcing a genius engineer kid to step up and pilot an experimental giant robot to defend it. This sounds cliche, but it’s not like anyone pats him on the back for it, it’s fairly well handled.
From there, the colony evacuates in a ship, and they’re doggedly pursued by the villain faction, leading to more fights. There really isn’t anything more to those 137 minutes.
The robot battles are kind of lame. Their machine guns or vulcans or whatever they call them are weightless, they are constantly running out of ammo, and while there ARE tactics, the guy with the better machine usually wins. The exception is Char Aznable, a guy you’ve definitely seen before, and the main villain of this particular canon. He always manages to survive the protagonist’s Special Weapons.
Unlike with LotGH, no one feels too stupid or smart. In fact, beyond the ridiculous names (the love interest is named Fraw Bow???) and giant robots, there’s a weird realistic quality to everything. Makes me wonder if the creator has some experience with war.
A passing grade isn’t enough for me to recommend it, let alone continue with the series. It was just alright. I liked having a look at very early, almost cheap-looking animation techniques, and I now know who that guy I sat next to was, but it was a miss. At least Code Geass took swings, brainless as they were.
The Long Journey Home*
I love mixed-media stories like this. I also love Project Hail Mary and, after the movie, reading a sequel fic felt even more appealing.
Those two factors are doing a lot of work here. It’s not a science adventure like its predecessor. It’s more of a grounded “first contact” story, and the writing gets really, really bad at times.
“You’ve had trouble sleeping.”
He froze.
“How did you know?”
“The bags under your eyes,” she said, pointing her pen towards his face. “You’ve yawned at least four times since we started this session ten minutes ago, and I know you’ve had coffee.” Her pen went to the empty cup next to him. Another pause. “I am also in conversation with Dr. Mullins.”
Okay, she was better than he thought.
Occasionally, I can almost swear the writer is resorting to ChatGPT for inspiration. Especially whenever the OC Stratt-substitute has a viewpoint chapter. Rocky is also out-of-character, which is a bizarre thing to type about an inhuman alien.
Buuuut it’s still a fun read, especially with the presentational gimmicks. Grace is back. You get to see the regular human’s reaction to the Project, which is something missing from the original novel. There are some pandery moments of fanservice that I’m unfortunately weak to. If you’re a PHM fan, read it and tell me if you disagree.
I called Ursula Le Guin a TERF this month and yet I feel this is what’s going to tank my reviewer cred.
That’s that. As I’m now part of a Discord Uncs Book Club, I can already spoil that I’ll be reviewing Borges’ Ficciones next month in addition to all the webfic slop. If you enjoy literature, you’re going to be eating so well from now on.35
And if you want to join, let me know in the comments and I’ll send you a link.
I’ve actually had to cut two reviews, partially because I’m running out of time to write them and partially because this is already 11k words long.
It’s also technically a superhero story, involving rebel groups that fight the system, but no one talks about that, so it’s hard to tell how that goes.
I compare this to Worm, but she’s the opposite of Taylor. Taylor has no self-awareness and deludes herself constantly, Meili is hyper-aware of her flaws and hypocrisies almost to the point of self-harm. You almost feel like her next move after fixing society will be to kill herself to stop herself from ruining it.
They have monarchies and witches but also radios.
Technically there are more than two countries, but they don’t matter. It’s kind of a Cold War situation, both figuratively and literally.
I say non-binary but “agender” or “neutral” works better, I guess. They’re fully non-sexual during this period. I use non-binary to make it more obvious that Le Guin could not speculate her way out of a paper bag where it comes to this.
I already mentioned Rowling, and one of the few facts I knew about Le Guin is that they have a one-sided feud, from what I can tell because Le Guin is mad the Harry Potter writer is more popular than she is. I’m sorry to say I enjoyed even the kid books more than this novel.
One of the most common pieces of revisionism is that Genly (member of a Federation of eighty planets with their own cultures) is meant to be a hardcore misogynist, and that he somehow forces the God’s Eye Narration to lie about how woke Le Guin truly is. The reviewers often go on to mention how Genly finally understands gender by the end.
This plainly doesn’t happen. Neither Genly nor Estraven change their views on gender from the first page to the last. They understand each other better, but in an alien-to-alien way, not in a man-to-non-binary way. As I said earlier, it’s a novel about misunderstandings and betrayal, and that’s the focus of the character arcs, not Genly’s suspiciously Le Guin-shaped prejudices.
I think she might just be bad at literary analysis as opposed to an intentional revisionist.
On the other hand, I only read this because of a book club in my server, so maybe that helped too.
Yes, even that aspect is half-assed.
To be fair, we can’t say we weren’t warned, one of the main characters is literally named Gen AI.
The main character was separated from his morally ambiguous space pirate mom by the Federation, and finding her is the “main plot”. Way lower stakes than all the other Alex Kurtzman nightmares, but it takes place in that future timeline after a single whining child broke every starship in the galaxy (long story), so it’s never in a “comfy TNG” spot.
In a timeline where more attractive actors were chosen and the show wasn’t cancelled, I think this show would have become a fanfiction farm. Not because it’s good, just for the same reasons as RWBY.
A/N: Atlas swallowed a fucking sock and I had to get him an emergency vet appointment at 3:30am that cost me £300. Then, got a call not even 12 hours later to let me know my cousin was found dead in his jail cell. Luckily I got 1 part of Jord Version wrote though last night,
This fucking guy.
One thing Jordinio is for sure not getting better at is proofreading. I sometimes weep for the native English speakers who can’t tank these typos. Many probably weep for me.
I didn’t even get to mention the AI art the author posts of his parody-level-muscular character banging non-Naruto anime characters at the end of every chapter.
Not in that way, but also in that way.
I guess for those really interested, I can summarize each game’s plot:
Resident Evil 1: supercop group S.T.A.R.S. go investigate a mansion that turns out to be Umbrella’s secret zombie virus laboratory.
Resident Evil 2: two young adults try to escape Raccoon City as it’s taken over by zombies, but keep being dragged into the family drama of two Umbrella researchers (one of whom has been turned into The Thing) and their daughter.
Resident Evil 3: the girl from the first game tries to save Raccoon City as it’s taken over by zombies. She doesn’t do a very good job, despite finding a vaccine. She clashes with Umbrella’s “peacekeeping” forces—who are pretty nice barring one guy—and a giant Nemesis superzombie who is obsessed with her.
Resident Evil 4: you are Leon Kennedy. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the President’s daughter from crazy Spanish villagers? Also, unrelated, but have you watched Jurassic Park?
Did you think I would put my top 10 in a footnote instead of saving it for a future hacky Cracked-style article? How little you know me.
I almost got into RE a decade ago, with the original RE4. I stopped because it was way too hard for me, not just the unfamiliar controls, but a specific section at the beginning of the game, where it seemed like I couldn’t possibly beat all these swarming villagers, with very limited ammo and all roads of escape locked. I assumed I was just too much of a fucking casual, and never thought about the franchise again.
Turns out that both in the original and remake, you are not supposed to beat this sequence. You can technically make it end early if you’re a veteran, but there’s a hidden timer for story reasons, and the villagers will eventually leave you alone if you survive long enough.
I dropped RE4 because I didn’t realize this. It nearly happened again with the remake, except this time I trusted the franchise, so I just googled the sequence. I’m not a huge fan of this trick, but… it IS a horror franchise, and surely scaring me into uninstalling counts as ludonarrative harmony.
These are my standards now. It makes sense…
The last chapter features a 10k-word internal monologue about logistics.
I wrote a helpful article about this, but I discovered many, many more signs during the Unslop fiction prize contest award challenge, so maybe wait for the follow-up?
136k words in, this still hasn’t happened, though he’s getting pretty close. The low-hanging fruit is gone, and he needs to find increasingly esoteric pieces of the lore.
I think out of the many, MANY fics with a sociopathic protagonist, only 5% end up sticking to that. This implies something good about humanity (and something bad about amateur writers).
It could have been a bit less predictable, though. I prefer unpredictable 6/10s to predictable 8/10s.
I don’t think Jack Quaid is a bad person, but he’s not even a top 10 RedLetterMedia guest.
I feel like this entire sequence is meant to be hilarious, but his comedic timing is all wrong. I’m not sure Gothic has ever made me laugh.
It’s possible this applies to every single setting in the fic and I just can’t tell.
Yes, I know about The Forgotten City. I will play eventually. What I probably won’t play is the DLC for this game, because I hear the final one is terrible, and it’s part of a shared storyline…
Or at least the popular ones, the veterans, uh, that sounds a bit too cool for them.
In fact, my estimation of Evangelion as an original story just plummeted. Was Mazinger Z the only stupid giant robot series, and are all others repetitive deconstructions of it?
Cool to see you mention Golden Idol since I coincidentally played both games this month too! (you didn't mention the second game though?) Regarding DLC, I also don't think they stood out as much as the base game, but I don't think they're a bad time. They don't retroactively ruin the main storyline or anything like a lot of prequel content is wont to do, they're just a bit lower quality in comparison.
Sad that you couldn't get into Obra Dinn, i remember there were some accessibility options you could try, or maybe the high resolution mod which seems to reduce the effect.
Broke down and made an account to finally comment on your posts. It's cool to see someone put so much time into reviewing a side of the internet I really care about.
Glad to see you enjoyed the RE series. It's a classic for a reason, and RE4 has a huge influence on the industry for better and worse. May I recommend its sibling series: Silent Hill? The first three are easy recommends, with a tentative recommendation for the fourth and the recently released "f" if you want more. Ideally, emulate the first three and use "Silent Hill 2 Enhanced Edition" which is a fan made patch for the second one, but the remake is good enough if you don't want the hassle of patching the PC port (which is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain legally).
It's a shame to see so many authors online (especially fanfic authors) using AI to create stuff. I assumed that a community writing stories about stuff they're passionate for would do it purely for "the love of the game," but I guess I misjudged the SB/SV crowd. I tend to drop AI written stories even if I don't figure out they're made that way because they lack a certain "sauce" more amateur but authentic stories do. Or maybe I'm just subconsciously noticing it? Raw output cannot compensate for a meandering story that doesn't go anywhere.
Your note about Gundam/Evangelion was pretty funny because it's a bit of a meme in the mecha community to describe a new series with "This one isn't just about giant robots, but mental trauma and the horrors of war!" as if the foundational material wasn't built on those themes.
Thanks for posting. I eagerly await the first of every month to read your posts.