Game of the Month: Dragon Quest Heroes II (Omega Force, 2017)

Here we are, with what might be the last one of these. No idea what's happening behind the scenes over on this here website but it sort of sounds vaguely apocalyptic from what I can hear, with much hoopla about "brand safety" and the various locales it can "fuck all the way off to". Whatever that might be about. Here, though? For as long as I avoid swearing in the intro, I think this'll pass muster and... ah, shit, I've already said fuck. Why, this brand isn't safe. It isn't safe at all.

What is safe is choosing Dragon Quest Heroes 2 as my Game of the Month, at least of those I played this month. (Others seem to be pulling for that Clair Obscur game, so that'll be something I'll have to peep into. Europe finally made a good RPG? What?) A musou game that expertly marries Omega Force's cerebral concept of "press Square and Triangle a lot until the big crowd of enemies goes away" with the more serious moral dilemmas of Dragon Quest, including "the slime has a big smile but you still have to kill it anyway". Built partially in the spirit of its Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors forebears with a few story missions where your goal is to rout the enemy army or escort a VIP ally, the vast majority of the time is spent simply exploring at your own pace while mowing down the Toriyama monstrosities in your path. That's best exemplified by this game's inclusion of "Wild Zones": open-world areas of unhurried butchery where you poke around the contours for chests and resource-gathering points on your way to whatever story mission is demanding your attention next.

Naturally, as a game Dragon Quest officials took very seriously given it coincided with the series' 30th anniversary, it gets almost the same level of quality treatment as the eleventh core entry—Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age—which released just a year and change later. You once again get a who's-who of popular DQ games past, including spin-off masters Torneko Taloon (DQIV's affably avuncular shopkeep, who headlined what would become Chunsoft's next biggest contribution to RPGs by way of the Mystery Dungeon series) and Terry (DQVI's irreverent rival of a swordsman, who headlined the first few games in DQ's attempt at a Pokémon killer—though with the caveat that DQ started the whole "keep monsters by your side to fight for you" conceit). DQIV is best represented as one of the more beloved games in the series—and the one most likely to get a HD-2D remake next if chronological order is as much of a factor as I perceive it to be—so it has the lion's share of cameo characters with a total of five, but you have a couple each from DQs VI, VII, and VIII as well (though no-one from IX—if I recall, that game was light on the story and heavier on the procgen dungeoneering). Either way, it's a crossover treat for long-time fans and maybe a window into some of those older games and their slightly less old remasters/remakes if there's a particular character you liked playing as in this one.

The rest of my DQH2 musings can be found in its official Dredge of Seventeen review over yonder. Suffice it to say, both that feature and my recurring Indie Game of the Week took up my entire gaming reserves for this month so I don't have some non-blogging game to highlight, alas. I did just download a few new games—owing mostly to the fact that I now have vastly superior internet and wanted to take a few test download runs, as it were—so I might find space for them in May. Or, more likely, I'll start a new May feature and that'll absorb all that gaming time instead. No idea where I'm going to post it though. Does Patreon mind if you just use their tools as a non-subscriber blogging platform? I kinda suspect they will?

Other Gaming Tomfoolery

Dredge of Seventeen Rising: Redredgence

As I've intimated (and made somewhat overt by the last month of blogging) much of my time lately has been spent on discovering more bangers from the quickly fading-into-distant-memory year of 2017: what I still propose as the greatest year for video games, at least of the 21st century. To make my case, I've long since ago built a Top 100 list of games from that year that I'm pretty satisfied with—to the extent that I'd still recommend whatever made 100th place on there, which after this month will be... Children of Zodiarcs? Yeah, that's a pretty sweet strategy RPG—and continue to occasionally supply it with stragglers. Whatever I can dredge up, as it were.

The three games that have since been added to the list, if not quite officially been given their exact placements just yet, include the above Dragon Quest Heroes II; the second big remake of the second Metroid game, which is itself the second time a Metroid has been officially remade, Metroid: Samus Returns for 3DS; and finally Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, a semi-expansion/semi-standalone sequel that definitively caps the Dunwall "trilogy" of tales about supernaturally-empowered assassins in a Moby Dick-inspired steampunk world of wealth disparity and extremely hungry rats. The rats even talk to you in this one: nice for them to finally get a speaking role in this series, given how integral they are to any high-chaos playthrough, and I'm happy they continued to find work after Dishonored wrapped up by scurrying over to the A Plague Tale series instead. After Vermintide irreparably damaged the rat brand they really have to take whatever crumbs (or corpses) they're offered; if only they had brand safety back in the middle ages, huh?.

Anyway, I greatly enjoyed playing those three games and writing up little addenda for some extra 2017 games waiting to be ranked, and I'm heartened to know that year will continue having surprises for me to discover. If I really focused I'd probably find a more recent year to do something similar with too—is it weird to get nostalgic for eight years ago? It kinda is, right?—but hey. You gotta have hobbies. Or hobbies within hobbies, in this case. Speaking of some atypical tastes in games:

Super Mario Eclipse!

I mentioned this total conversion fan mod of Super Mario Sunshine last month but was a little light on the details, beyond new mechanical additions like an interconnected world outside the Delfino Plaza hub and the introduction of the arrogant pint-sized racer Il Piantissimo as a playable character (Luigi's here too, and there's never a reason to not pick him). The manner in which Delfino Isle's regions are connected is especially robust: there are nine zones that exist only to bridge other areas together and are typically a lot more chill owing to the lack of enemies, with each containing one hidden Shine apiece. You also have four new full-sized courses including the mafia-owned Hotel Lacrima, the pirate ship bay of Warship Island, the circular Lighthouse Island, and the mountainside village of Erto Rock. There's another shorter course underneath Pianta Village, the Pianta Pit, full of piantas that fell down there and have become a little... strange, having been stranded in the dark undergrowth for too long.

After the main game's over, you then get access to a whopping eight extra courses, all a bit shorter and tougher than the previous. The first of these, Daisy Cruiser (returning from Double Dash!!), connects you to the rest. I have to admit, I wasn't too hot on most of these new courses because it's hard enough trying to match Nintendo with their 2D level design without adding an extra dimension and the concomitant struggles that come with it, like properly spacing everything out or balancing the difficulty or a thousand little QoL things like how in Red Lily City, a Noki town sitting on a tall mountain plateau, has a switch in the confusing sewer maze that opens the way to two Shines and you have to go down there at least twice to get both, since getting either resets the course. There's plenty of charm to these new locations, of course, and having Luigi available with his taller jumps made them far more palatable than they might be otherwise, but it still felt like slightly disappointing DLC after the main game's content. After all that it becomes Super Mario 64 for a while—Peach's Castle returns, filled with portraits to beta versions of Sunshine courses and plenty of other cameos, prototypes, and secrets. Again, it's better as a curiosity than it is genuinely trying to complete these half-finished beta courses with their various bugs and issues (and one in particular, False Block Nexus, is diabolically more difficult than anything else in the game requiring speedrunner-level skill to conquer).

As it stands, it's a mod that's never lacking for surprises and is extremely substantial—given the entire original game is still contained within—with its subtle QoL tweaks doing as much of the heavy-lifting for the sake of a recommendation as all the new maps to explore. Strikes me as a no-brainer if you already had a disk image of Sunshine lying around for RetroAchievement purposes, hypothetically speaking. (Oh, and I swept that achievement list too. Pretty pleased about that, though it really only had a handful of actually tough challenges.)

Not much else to report in terms of extracurricular gaming, since the Dredge soaked up most of that time, but I did get a bit further with Picross 2 for GB. I'm starting to get the urge to play more classic GB games for the achievements, in particular Super Mario Land 2 after Dan brought up the unexpectedly good time he had with it and obviously DK '94 since it's in the zeitgeist again, but we'll see once I've run out of picross.

Oh, on that note I checked out the Club Nintendo Picross games for 3DS as well since I'd already had it lying around for that Metroid: Samus Returns run, both of which are also pretty slick and a natural accompaniment to Jupiter's Picross e series. Like with Picross 2, the highlights are the "Micross" (which are the giant ones made up of many smaller puzzles) tableaux to gradually poke away at.

The "Indie Game of the Week" of the Month: Dredge (Black Salt Games, 2023)

While much of my focus was on a dredge of a different kind, I did play several fine Indies this month as well though I'd argue I walked away from half of them slightly disappointed given their preceding reputations. One Indie that didn't disappoint me, and thus takes the coveted Best Indie of the Week of the Month prize for April, is the sinister fishing life-sim Dredge (#414). Though you spend most of your time pulling up normal looking fish and a few aberrant monsters you'd be better off throwing back, there's a chilling survival horror aspect once the sun goes down and your tired mind starts playing tricks on you. I also really liked its slow-burn of a story, one that fits the already slow loop of the leisurely fishing sim genre waters that Dredge paddles around in by tossing around clues like chum and letting you ruminate on them as you perform your daily routine, and I'm of half-a-tortured-mind to go back and complete that fish bestiary or possibly even its DLCs some day.

Our runners-up include two—count 'em, two!—exploration platformers by way of Robson Paiva's Redo! (#415) and Hello Penguin's Vernal Edge (#417). I appreciated the former more than the latter, as it went for a curious combination of explormer and survival horror (which I dubbed an "explorror" in the review as befits my typically casual disregard for my readers and my native language alike) and offered something relatively distinct, even if most explormers of the past had already sprang forth (like a scary closet skeleton) from a place of horror between Metroid's ominous alien environs and Castlevania's preponderance of draculas and wolf men. Vernal Edge did have its positive sides, even if I grew weary of its repetitive and oddly punitive combat encounters, and actually offered a level of atmosphere on a similar tier to its horror-themed rival due to an exceptional ambient soundtrack. Finally, we have the cute, noir-ish detective adventure game parody Later Alligator (#416) which largely existed as a vehicle to tell gator puns and make references to all sorts of popular and less popular games. I respect its reptilian moxie but a few too many fundamental flaws pushed me away from fully appreciating its silly charms.

Hints for next month's Indies? Well, it's going to look uncommonly contemporary, with three games from just last year including one that has very well acclaimed in certain circles. The other two older games include a playthrough I've delayed long enough—it was one I had to punt into the future because my old system struggled to run it—while the other is a sequel to an all-timer in the first-person puzzle genre and therefore one I've been fixing to play for a while now. Should be a strong assortment, though hopefully they won't pull me away from squeezing in my usual May Marathoning itinerary. Lot of prioritizing my time next month, I'm sure.

Mastering the Master System (Part Four)

Something else I'll have to earmark a few hours of time for next month is another batch of these Master System games. I was pretty pleased with this month's trio: not the best the system had to offer but absolutely some simple, arcade-y types that made for a nice change of pace. At its best, 8-bit gaming tends to offer some bite-sized playthroughs that might not have a whole lot to challenge you in the mental department but can still be very demanding on your reflexes. I'm far from pro-gamer level though, so trying to keep up with this lofty goal of maintaining a 64% grade point average on RetroAchievements continues to be a struggle; especially as so many of those achievements task you with going above and beyond what is required to simply beat the games in question.

Even so, with this extra level of investment it's had me paying more attention to these games and their quirks, their secrets, and their roadblocks than I might've been able to muster otherwise. Feels like I have a better appreciation of their strengths (and weaknesses) as a result, and what more could you ask from an achievement set? Besides constant validation and dopamine hits as they continue to ping away at the top corner? Why, I'm almost making this hobby sound psychologically unhealthy. I'd best go unwind by threatening game developers with a hacksaw on Twitter again.

Air Rescue

• Type: Selected
• Developer: SIMS
• Release Year: 1992

Sega's Air Rescue first debuted in arcades in 1992 and used the Sega System 32 board, which had 32-bit capabilities that allowed for superlative super-scaling even in a first-person cockpit view. Inspired by Dan Gorlin's Choplifter!, first developed for home computers in 1982 by Broderbund and later adapted for the arcades by Sega, Air Rescue requires that you quickly pin down the location of those needing air-lifting out of a hostile environment while simultaneously shooting down any foes that might obstruct your egress. It saw a PAL-only Master System port the same year, though for obvious technical reasons it drops the whole 3D first-person aspect and reverts to a traditional Choplifter 2D side-scrolling perspective. This port comes to us courtesy of SIMS again, the Sega subsidiary that was also behind last month's Castlevania "doppelfanger" Master of Darkness. Air Rescue's one of a handful of games I've chosen to cover here primarily because I grew up with it (along with Sonic, Master of Darkness, and Castle of Illusion, though the randomizer got to the last before I could) and was curious to see how it'd held up and if I'd retained enough airlifting skills to handle its achievements. I knew even back then what Choplifter was and that it had its many pale imitators, but even acknowledging its source I'd always found Air Rescue to be a fine game given its juxtaposition between a strict level of precision and yet was still breezy enough that you could quickly jump in and be done with a playthrough even if you had little time spare. A single playthrough typically takes about thirty minutes if you know what you're doing and don't die too often, so even after beating it the first time Air Rescue was something I'd come back to every few months to see how much of my muscle memory had persevered.

Suffice it to say, after some thirty-odd years there wasn't a whole lot I still remembered about the game but I knew if my grade-school self could complete it I'm sure an older and wiser version could also, atrophying reaction speeds be damned. Standard loop is to explore a 2D side-scrolling stage filled with enemies and hazards to locate eight survivors—some stages have more, and there's in-game bonuses and external achievements for saving the full set—and ferry them back to base. If playing on Normal difficulty you can grab four rescuees at once but on Hard you only have room for three; necessitating at least three trips on the latter. You have a choice of weapons and can freely switch while parked at your home base: your main two are a horizontal-firing minigun and a shotgun that instead fires at a downwards trajectory, both having their conditional uses depending on the enemy placements, and there's also a water grenade for the levels where putting out fires is necessary. With only five stages it doesn't take long to memorize the layouts for the optimum routes, though the Lunar Lander-esque awkwardness of quickly maneuvering a wide sprite with momentum still remains a challenge throughout.

As has become typical for achievement sets for these shorter games, we have a bunch of mutually exclusive goals to pursue for each of its five stages. These include basic progress achievements for completing these stages under any conditions, one each for completing them within a certain time frame, one each for saving the maximum amount of rescuees, and one each for completing them without firing a shot. Not shooting anything adds a considerable amount of difficulty owing to how you can be brought down with a single bullet from any source—it's usually smart to eliminate troublesome enemies before you enter their range—while recovering the maximum number of people to save means being fully aware of the level layout. You also have to achieve all of these on Hard mode, which reduces the number of rescuees you can carry at once and the amount of time you're given (and fewer lives/continues too, I believe, though it's still pretty generous). A tough set but the only really nasty achievements are the pacifist ones for stages 4 and 5 (huge enemy presence in both), the full rescue for 5 (hope you like navigating narrow tunnels), the time trials for 4 and 5, and an achievement for beating the game without losing more than three lives total. I could probably pull all of that off eventually but I chose to quit while I was ahead—I had plenty to do this month.

• Achievements: 19 (of 21) / 90% / RR: x1.88

Tangram

• Type: Selected (Homebrew)
• Developer: Overplay
• Release Year: 2008

Tangram is a semi-not-really-official SMS game from Brazilian developers and manufacturers TecToy, a business that almost singlehandedly kept that console alive in its native country when the rest of the world had long since moved onto the Mega Drive and beyond. Brazil's definitely a blindspot for me with regards to its video game history—as well as mostly everything else about it if I'm being honest; I know the capital's called Brasilia and they speak a version of Portuguese, if that alone is enough to pass a middle-school geography quiz on the subject—but I am familiar with how long the Master System continued to thrive there, after an already generous post-discontinuation life here in Europe. Tangram is actually one of several games made for and built into the bootleg "Mega Drive 4" console: one that even purported to have a passable Guitar Hero clone included, such was the late era in which it was released. That made for an interesting process to extract and play, though fortunately Brazil has just as many game historian nerds as anywhere else working tirelessly to dig this kinda stuff up and disseminate it to the masses. I've downloaded the entire dump of this bootleg system in case I find the urge to play anything else on there, though I'll admit my Portuguese is a bit rusty.

If you're not familiar with tangram puzzles, they involve taking a fixed set of shapes—usually a square, a parallelogram, and several triangles—and assembling them in new configurations to create pictures resembling, somewhat, various objects and animals. It's a puzzle type that tests your spatial awareness and judgement, determining the placement of the more awkward blocks first (like the two large triangles, as they're the biggest pieces) and building the rest of the image around them using the outline provided. Neves, a DS game, was where I first learned to appreciate this puzzle format and there's a pretty decent Indie approximation called Tangrams Deluxe available on Steam (having just checked, there's also a recent game called Tangram Collection which is completely free—can't speak for its quality but you can't beat that price).

This version of Tangram has fifteen puzzles total with an achievement doled out for every three, roughly speaking. There's also a sixth achievement for completing any of the puzzles within twenty seconds, which is tougher than it sounds because quickly moving pieces into the right spaces with the inexact D-pad controls wasn't a walk in the park. Still, though, with its dearth of content I was able to blast through this thing in a little over ten minutes. One could insinuate that I may have included a ringer in here to boost my overall percentage for the trials to come but I genuinely do enjoy tangrams and was pretty happy to see a legally dubious SMS adaptation in the list of games supported by RA, much like I was for Picross. Unlicensed SMS games in general are kinda intriguing to me too, given all the more popular platforms out there for which you could be making dubious bootleg games featuring Snoopy and Mario duking it out and then maybe later kissing. It's a good thing I don't have a sense of pride coming into this feature: Can you imagine how much tougher it would be if I only kept to legitimate carts?

• Achievements: 6 (of 6) / 100% / RR: x1.00

Time Soldiers

• Type: Random
• Developer: Alpha Denshi
• Release Year: 1989

Time Soldiers is a 1987 arcade top-down shooter originally developed by Alpha Denshi (a.k.a. ADK) and published by SNK, which later saw this 1989 Master System port along with conversions to various European home computers. I guess you could call it a cross between Sega's Gain Ground and SNK's own Ikari Warriors, as you take to the field to gun down goons in different time periods all the while rescuing teammates that have been stranded in those eras. It also has a bit of an open-world aspect to it as you can choose whether or not to take the time portals after appear every mid-boss; walking past instead keeps you in the same era for a bit longer, and you'll often start in different time zones whenever you boot up a new run for a slightly different intro.

A 1987 arcade game is firmly in the 16-bit era given the heightened technological capabilities of that arena over its home console cousins so you'll naturally see quite the downgrade for 8-bit systems, but Time Soldiers in particular seems to have really been hit hard by the downscaling. Enemies don't so much come at you in discrete waves as much as they spawn endlessly until you walk past wherever they're coming from. Once you have a power-up (or ideally three of the same one, since they upgrade) you're best off just walking past most enemy units that aren't directly in your path rather than mess around and risk getting hit, since they're only a serious threat if you just stand around and let them become one. The whole "jump into the time portal or don't" strategic mechanic seems heavily weighted towards using them whenever possible because the one time I decided to see what would happen if I skipped it had me strolling through five different iterations of the stages/time eras before I met the first of the big bosses holding one of my guys hostage. The first two runs, where I never skipped a portal, I was at the boss after three such instances in every case. The game's kind enough to dedicate a different button (the SMS just has the two, like NES) to the special weapons so you can keep those in reserve for bosses, where you'll need them, so once you have a stack of these finite beauties it really behooves you to just march past everything and get to said bosses quick.

There's some other elements I was unable to figure out. Like the warps. I haven't seen any trace of how these things work or what hoops you need to leap through to make them appear either in-game, in its documentation, or anywhere on the internet except for instructions for the very first one (which sends you to the first big boss, a blue minotaur that looked more like a ram) which I was able to find on my own completely by accident anyway. Of course, there's achievements for finding all five of them—would've been a nice way to get back to the tougher bosses towards the end, which are all either in the Sengoku era or the Future Age era—but I'd no idea where I'd need to start looking. As for the achievements, it's a pretty simple set: there's one each for the game's fifteen mid-bosses, one each for the six big bosses, twenty-one total for defeating each of those bosses without dying, and a couple extra for beating the game without continues and with a surplus of extra lives. (Regarding continues: you activate them by continuing to hammer the shoot button, like you might if you were frustrated about dying so suddenly. Kinda makes sense?) Without knowing how the warps work I've little motivation to keep pushing through the first three sets of stages and bosses over and over—after three runs, I did get almost all the no-death boss achievements for them at least—and I tend to run out of lives once I hit medieval Japan anyway, given the sheer number of kappas and komusos they start throwing at you by that point. It's not a terrible game and it's actually surprisingly fair given the usual challenge level of these '80s arcade shooters but it does simplify its gameplay mechanics too much by half (while overly complicating others, like the time-travel portals) which makes it something I'm less likely to want to revisit too often. Still, for a random pick it could've been a whole lot worse. Let's see what that accursed number generator spits up for May, shall we?

• Achievements: 28 (of 54) / 51% / RR: x7.92

Current Overall Achievement Completion: 74.25%

The Weeb Weeview

Barrage of brief first impressions! Exclamation marks out the wazoo! Ikuzo!

• Apothecary Diaries Season 2 Cour 2: Tiny Asian Girl-Columbo is still delightful! The overarching plot about Jinshi and Suirei hasn't quite picked up again yet but it almost doesn't matter with a procedural show like this! Keep solving those botany-adjacent crimes, Maomao!
• I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years Season 2: Cute as a button! We need a word for a cozy, asexual harem anime! Maybe "h-awwww-em"!
• Wind Breaker Season 2: Any season that starts with a massive warehouse brawl with ominous thugs in sick dragon skull hoodies is already on the right track! It's like River City Ransom if the River's being produced by your own tears!
• The Beginning After the End: They did not give this thing the Solo Leveling treatment after all! More like the "solo amount of people working on it" treatment! Sticking with it anyway, maybe things improve once we're past the beginning of the Beginning of the End!
• From Old Country Bumpkin to Master Swordsman: As an old guy surrounded by youths on this website I identify too much with this show's protag! Except for the part where he's really skilled at what he does and said youths respect him! (Sadly, the show has been quite a bit worse than the manga. They really nerfed the cool fight between the OCB and his former student, the high-ranked adventurer, as well as the other battles for the sake of focusing on character work over flashy (and no doubt expensive) animation. It's such a badass moment in the manga when he disarms her with his total focus, catches the dispossessed sword out of thin air without looking, and traps her on the ground with her own weapon. OK, aside over, now I shall resume "the bit".)
• I'm the Evil Lord of an Intergalactic Empire: We haven't really explored too much of the manga's comedic side yet but I'm sure it's coming after these first few awkward table-setting episodes! I want to see my guy gleefully slicing space pirate mechs in half while improving living conditions on his homeworld completely by accident!
• The Unaware Atelier Meister: This show's already pretty funny with how rapidly the unassuming protagonist is defying expectations but it's yet to really justify its own existence given a number of similar shows (like I Parry Everything from last season but one or Kid from the Last Dungeon Boonies going further back)! Hopefully it finds more of a personality of its own in the episodes to come!
• To Be Hero X: Chinese-Japanese superhero shounen collaboration that hops between CG and some dynamic 2D in much the same vein as the Spider-Verse movies! And like those movies it's just a visual treat from start to finish! The whole package is pretty slick also, since the story's been doing some intriguing stuff by connecting one's fame (or infamy) to their actual superpowers! Looking forward to meeting all the other weirdos from the opening soon!
• Apocalypse Hotel: It's like WALL-E but an anime maido robot instead! Just a fancy hotel full of cute robots! Pretty and occasionally funny but also achingly sad: a big departure for the post-apocalypse genre! Yes I'm being ironic but it's also really nice to look at, like a super downbeat Ghibli! Except in Pom Poko the tanukis didn't mark their territory with giant piles of shit! They do in this show, if that wasn't clear!
• Lazarus: Humanity's dead, parkour! Apocalypse Hotel had us getting wiped out by a virus and Lazarus has us on the cusp of being wiped out by a virus (manmade this time)! I guess Covid19 and the millions it killed is no longer deemed "too soon"! Real sharp ticking-clock thriller so far from the Cowboy Bebop guy! You'll know it's from him after five seconds of that intro!
• The Dinner Table Detective: Some funny Ace Attorney energy to this madcap detective procedural about a rich heiress slumming it as a homicide detective and her super-competent butler who solves all the crimes long before she can! I could see this turning into anime Moonlighting real fast!
• Can a Boy and Girl Friendship Hold Up?: I dunno, can it?! Probably not! Saved you four hours of HS romance cuteness!
• The Too-Perfect Saint: Powerful holy magic-user with communication issues is forced to sling her hook! We somehow have three shows about underappreciated dogsbodies this season! Still, this one's already doing something divergent with the "perfect little sister" character, normally an antagonist in stories like these, who instead has gone full revenge mode for the sake of her betrayed older sibling! She's probably going to destroy the kingdom and its jerk nobles that spurned her onee-chan before the monsters do!
• Go! Go! Loser Ranger! Season 2: Though I sound much more muted here be assured that I'm still enjoying this Super Sentai satire's cat-and-mouse style of thriller plotting. It's just that the title already bogarted all the exclamation points. Dang it. Dang it all to heck.

I'll isolate a few of these for deeper dives later; for now, they're all about three or four episodes in so it's hard to say anything too definitive. It's shaping up to be a real strong season though, and with no big headliners like Solo Leveling or Demon Slayer sucking up all the oxygen in the room (unless you count Gundam Goosefuck, or however you're meant to pronounce that) I imagine the anime react/review scene is going to be pretty varied for the next few months. Did you know Dan started watching Hajime no Ippo? In addition to embracing Ys? What a world we live in.

I'm not hopeful I'll see you again on here but, well, as long as no-one locks the doors to this place I'll keep finding my way back in to post my usual chickenscratches. (Though in case it all does go south in a hurry, you can find me on BlueSky via the gbmento.bsky.social handle if I end up having to pick up sticks and move elsewhere.) Stay Brand Safe, folks, and I'll see you when I see you.

Too Long, Do Relinks

• Indie Game of the Week 414: Dredge
• Indie Game of the Week 415: Redo!
• Indie Game of the Week 416: Later Alligator
• Indie Game of the Week 417: Vernal Edge
• The Dredge of Seventeen Rising: Redredgence (Part One)
• The Dredge of Seventeen Rising: Redredgence (Part Two)
• The Dredge of Seventeen Rising: Redredgence (Part Three)