Among the new anime television series airing this season, my personal favorite of the bunch is the return os something fairly understated: how Yuru Camp△ exemplifies its exact niche beautifully.
Category: Full-length Essays
Content before Fall 2019, posted exclusively to This Thing is Neat
Arcade Paradise and Reduction
Arcade Paradise devoured my first weekend playing, but I've barely picked it up since. Time and time again, Arcade Paradise ends up deleting parts of its original self to achieve the dream of spending all day playing games on the clock.
Floor Kids and Density
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 …
Yatterman Night and Re-Interpretation
Who doesn't love spitballing ideas? That's an avenue that anime knows how to walk rather well.
Pokémon Sword & Shield and Concessions
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 …
Hitori Bocchi and Laughing With
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.
Tokyo Xanadu and Alternate Takes
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.
A Silent Voice and Sympathetic Antagonists
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.
Kanon and Sentimentality
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.
Fate/Grand Order and Franchise Faces
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.
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.
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