Posted on by Alexander Case

The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings – Review

The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings is part of a series I bounced off of at first. I bounced off of the PC release of The Witcher for a variety of factors. Some of them were bugs – like one where the game would crash whenever I walked into a particular quest-giver’s hut. Some of them were because of the combat, and how the game handled the combat with rhythmic mouse clicks (more on this later). Some of this was due to the re-use of character models and portraits to enough of an extent that it made the game lifeless and hard to navigate.

What kept me hooked enough to finish experiencing the game through a Let’s Play was the story. The narrative was engrossing (though the rampant misogyny was grating). So, when I saw that The Witcher 2 fixed the control issues, was less buggy, was on sale on GoG (and later on Games with Gold), I decided it was time to play this game all the way through.

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Posted on by Alexander Case

Space Runaway Ideon: Anime Review

Yoshiyuki Tomino has something of a reputation as an anime director, for multiple reasons. Tomino has a reputation for being full of himself. His interviews about Brainpowerd in Animerica magazine demonstrate this. Anyone who has gone to an anime con and asked a Japanese guest who worked with him for a “Tomino story” can attest to this. Tomino also has a reputation for his absolute ruthlessness for killing off characters in his work. The normal examples of this are Zeta Gundam, the last half of ZZ Gundam, and Char’s Counterattack. However, the work that started Tomino down this road was Space Runaway Ideon. (Pronounced E-day-on).

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Posted on by Alexander Case

Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star – Video Game Review

One of my guilty pleasures is the Dynasty Warriors games. They’re fun, engaging, somewhat mindless hack-and-slash games. However, they are not without their faults. There comes a point where you’ve put the Yellow Turban Rebellion down enough times that you just can’t play through it anymore. Thus the appeal of the other takes on the concept from within Koei and without. Such is the case with Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star.

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Posted on by Alexander Case

Anime Review: The Magnificient Kotobuki

If you’d read my review of Area 88, you may recall that I gushed over the gorgeously depicted dogfights in that show. Since then I’ve been looking for something that scratched that itch. Not necessarily with the amount of grit that Area 88 did – but still, something that had exciting, tense fighter dogfights. The Winter 2018 anime season brought me the thing that I’d been waiting for. Specifically, it brought me The Magnificent Kotobuki, from the writer and director of Shirobako and Girls Und Panzer. Now, the series had some difficulty taking off for some fans because of the stylistic choices the director made. However, once it got airborne, in my view The Magnificent Kotobuki became a fantastic action anime.

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