Xenogears was ahead of its time in a lot of ways. Its plan for long-form storytelling across multiple games is something we see everywhere in franchises now. The blending of action-based and RPG-style combat feels like a precursor to the “action-RPG” niche that handily outnumbers turn-based games in the genre nowadays.
Stock characters are, generally, delightful. The exception tends to be protagonists, and for all I love anime, it suffers a lot from lead characters being the flattest members of their casts.
It always kind of astounds me whenever someone says that they’re a fan of the Final Fantasy series. Not because any individual entry in the series is that bad. More because the series is so wildly inconsistent.
The kind of people who will read a media blog are, on the whole, the kind of people who consume a lot of stories to begin with. And once you take in enough of them (probably by the time you're in middle school, really), you start to see certain patterns keep showing up.
Digimon Adventure is available on Hulu. Digimon Adventure Tri is available on Crunchyroll. Neither service has them both – aren’t streaming rights fun? One of the worst things about anime is, funnily enough, also one of its greatest strengths: on a whole, the writing tends to wear its heart on its sleeve. It enables everything …
I’m a long-time fan of the Pokémon franchise, including one of the longest-running animated series still being produced. Now, the Pokémon anime looks to be lining up the TV-season equivalent of a Greatest Hits album.
Floor Kids is available on Steam, Switch, PS4, and Xbox One. Our priorities can shift a lot over time. Back when I was in school, I’d play the same video game cover-to-cover a dozen times because that’s what was on-hand and appealing. It’s how I could draw you a full map of the entire first …
Who doesn't love spitballing ideas? That's an avenue that anime knows how to walk rather well.
This is only the second time I've talked about a game before it's even released - and both times, it's been about the now-yearly release of a new main-line Pokémon title. I usually prefer to let something sit in my mind before I go back to it with properly-formed thoughts, but this franchise really gets …
Anime protagonists are, on the whole, kind of losers. That’s not a knock against them – there’s something appealing about watching a person stumble over their own shortcomings.
Sometimes games playing follow-the-leader actually turns out pretty well for us as consumers. That’s how you end up with something like Tokyo Xanadu, which is nothing if not borrowed ideas.
An awful lot of folks will point to "sympathetic" as the hallmark of a great fictional antagonist. Many stories even revolve around this angle explicitly, and few are so thorough about making this a central theme as A Silent Voice.
I may have technically been watching anime way before, but one of the first that grabbed me was the Kanon, and it’s the one that I still credit with getting me hooked on anime in the first place.
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.
Throughout the series, the greatest things that the Kansei running team have to overcome are always themselves and each other.
