Media franchises are bound to shift and change over time. Sometimes, this sneaks in more gradually though a series of slow deviations. And out of this, you get things like Fate/Grand Order.
Category: Full-length Essays
Content before Fall 2019, posted exclusively to This Thing is Neat
Run With the Wind and Internal Victories
Throughout the series, the greatest things that the Kansei running team have to overcome are always themselves and each other.
Subsurface Circular and Solvable Games
The idea of a “solvable game” is usually reserved for competitive games, particularly board games. But then there are adventure games and Subsurface Circular.
Shaman King and Gecko Endings
Anime adaptations of light novels and especially manga have a nasty inherent problem to them. Most are made with the intention of promoting sales of their source material – usually a still-ongoing series – which will inevitably have a slower release cycle than the week-to-week release of a TV show. Naturally, this is a tricky business.
Gris and Gaminess
It’s hard to deny that Gris is nothing short of a fantastic game – and I don’t mean that in a “review-score” way, but more in the traditional way; that it’s gorgeous, poignant, and transportative. Unfortunately, its myriad positive points in that field can feel compromised at times by Gris’ seemingly-obligatory affordances to its format.
I Want to Eat Your Pancreas and Heroine Narratives
You don’t need to be overly-familiar with anime or manga to know that they tend to fawn over their female characters. For better or for worse, modern stories have an observable habit of leveraging "damaged" characters - typically girls and women - rather than letting them speak for themselves, and even stories that make a run at deconstructing this structure can still hit pitfalls.
Play-By-Post Games and Formative Play
As my post history should make fairly apparent, I love role-playing games, and the more role-playing-y, the better. Naturally, this extends well past just video games – probably my longest and deepest exposure to general role-playing is in the form of play-by-post forum RPGs.
