Last year, I played through and reviewed Marvel’s Spider-Man for the PlayStation 4. It was a fun game that played very well, but had some narrative issues – some of which were iffy at the time of the game’s initial release, and had aged even worse by the time George Floyd had been murdered by a police officer. So, we now have a new expansion for the game, focusing on Miles Morales, who had developed his powers at the end of the last game, and centering him in the story. The question is, can it also address some of the main game’s narrative hiccups?

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It’s been a long time since the last Log Horizon series came out. That series ended with several mysteries still in play, and several new plot hooks set up, like Krusty having been teleported to the Chinese server, and the introduction of Geniuses – more powerful monsters with their own weird, metagame logic sent by whoever on the moon server had brought them to this world in the first place. This season doesn’t resolve those issues particularly, but it does push some plot developments forward in that regard, particularly related to the characters’ plot development.

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1917 is a movie that is two things at once. It’s a movie that is a bleak and striking depiction of the horrors of ground warfare in the First World War, and presents those horrors in a way that respects what  the people who fought in that war went through, and without glamorizing those horrors. It’s also an intricately done magic trick, presenting the illusion of this story being told in one (mostly) unbroken take. This review will contain some spoilers.

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It’s interesting looking at Knights of Sidonia’s ending on context of the endings of Blame and Biomega, and the tones of those series overall. Blame and Biomega were stories with a generally small cast. Blame with one person, later 3 people. Biomega with 3 people. Those stories were also generally travelogues, with the protagonists traveling the Megastructure or the World (respectively) to find a solution. Knights of Sidonia on the other hand, has the story more (generally) locked down to a location, and has a much larger cast. So, the question becomes how does the ending pan out. There will be spoilers in this post.

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Normally, I do a review of the video games that I’ve beaten once I beat them, on top of whatever I’m doing for Nintendo Power Retrospectives or other works. Cyberpunk 2077 puts me in a weird spot, because due to how spectacularly high-profile it was and how high profile its failings were, it’s a game that has been picked apart by hordes of other critics, like starlings attacking a freshly restocked suet bird feeder. So, on the one hand, what do I say that other people haven’t said while picking this game apart? On the other, it would be somewhat negligent if I didn’t say anything. So, here goes.

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It’s been a long time since Mamoru Oshii did any anime, with the short film Je T’aime from 2010. It’s been even longer since he did comedy, with the last clear-cut comedy he did having been several episodes of Patlabor: The Mobile Police New Files in 1990. Over a decade since the last time he did anime, and over 30 years since he’s done comedy anime. There are fans who have only know his creative output as not only a director of serious anime, but a director of deadly serious anime. So, it was a surprise this past year to see Oshii returning not only to anime, but to comedy anime, and as a series instead of a short or a film, with Vlad Love.

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Inuyasha was a show based on Rumiko Takahashi’s works that I fell off of back in the day before it completed. A combination of heavy filler on a more conventional shonen action series, combined with the show’s very long length made it tricky for me to keep up with the show. When I learned that there was a sequel series due to come out, that was an anime original show, and was following the daughters of the first series protagonists, I was intrigued, and decided to try to keep up with the show this time. That show was Yashahime.

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