Hey everyone! Welcome back to my monthly report of things I finished/am currently going through. I'm gonna try to make this a monthly thing so be sure to check back every month for my impressions of Things, in general, maybe. Anyway, let's get this started:

Games

Fate/Grand Order

It's so funny how the moment I wrote my last post FGO decided to shit itself all over to such a degree I cannot actually believe this is the game I fell in love with back in 2017. I'm not gonna spoil it for the non-Japanese fans in my (very small) audience, but suffice it to say that I'm really angry at it and at Nasu for letting it happen. Maybe those are the dangers of writing for a live service product, who knows. I'm just too pissy to really write about it.

The NOexistenceN of you AND me

Pretty solid and short philosophy essay on the appeal of moe and our relationships with fictional characters as they relate back to the love put into them and the love we receive. I didn't think it was anything super ground-breaking but I thought it worked really well for what it wanted to say. I'm probably gonna play that newly released RPG spinoff too at some point in the year.

Fate/stay night (As of Heaven's Feel Day 10)

Fate is one of the hallmark works of otaku media that thoroughly changed my entire life since I watched the UBW anime in 2017, but the game itself has always phased me for one reason or another. Not because it's a visual novel or anything, but the circumstances never really aligned for me to really dig my heels into it and fully digest it as it deserved to be. That changed last month, as I leveraged my seething towards the FGO finale into something a lot more productive of my time. Needless to say, I think F/SN is one of the best games ever made. Nasu's masterful usage of perspective and his complete grip on character-writing has made this game the best 135 hours I've spent that really feels like 50. It really is that special of a game. I'm definitely gonna hop on Hollow Ataraxia when I finish it, mainly because that's my main blindspot with regards to Fate.

Gakuen Idolm@ster

The Idolm@ster (shortened to Imas hereon) was, alongside Love Live, one of my main blind spots in my knowledge of the idol subgenre within contemporary anime. I personally got into the idol craze with BanG Dream! back in 2018 (if you namesearch me on google you can probably find an old review I made of the mobile game that I cringe at but refuse to take down), which then turned into Umamusume fanatism in 2021 with the second season of the show. However, I always felt like I should approach Imas eventually as it's basically the grandfather of idol media as we know it. It started it, Love Live more or less refined it into its own identity, but Imas has had a grip on the culture in one way or another for the last 20 years.

Back when it released, Gakuen Idolmaster (shortened to Gakumas hereron), the newest branch of the series, kinda scared me. The Slay The Spire-inspired gameplay was cool, but also kinda weird, and my Japanese was not up to par to play a game that, while not super complex in terms of dialog, still required a certain degree of basic, non-mouseover dictionary skill to fully appreciate. So I put it down; and one-and-a-half years later I came back to it mainly because I kept seeing Kotone art on my Twitter timeline and really loved her vibe.

But more than that, returning to Gakumas after watching the original 2011 show, Cinderella Girls, the movie and talking to my hyper fan of a friend really got me to see its own appeal and how it really plays into appealing modern audiences without sacrificing the core of the series. Every character has their gimmick, but are so lovingly written and displayed that you can't help but root for them. The main trio of Saki, Temari and Kotone are all outrageously funny, deeply moving and incredibly affecting characters whose personalities shine through the myriad of events, both main story and their individual ones.

I personally came into it loving Hiro Shinosawa, the kinda masochistic genius child prodigy who decides to join the idol high school "Hatsuboshi Gakuen" because she thought she'd be really bad at it; and Kotone Fujita, the money-loving opportunistic idol who's in it for the cash (because she doesn't want to keep working part time jobs to support herself and her family forever). But Temari Tsukimura's story of betrayal, expectations, broken friendships, misused talent and the desire to still want to grow past the past and into a new "you" really, really moved me. Temari really lit a fire in me that I haven't felt from an Idol franchise in years, and after I read her first batch of story, I really came out of it understanding why idol media makes people feel this type of passion, especially passion for singular characters, firsthand, after I thought I'd forgotten about it years ago.

I truly hope Bandai Namco stop being idiots and localize this game. Especially coming off of the Umamusume craze, there's zero reason not to introduce the world to this wonderful cast of characters.

Severed Steel

Cool combat, cool levels, cool gunplay. I think it relies a bit too much on the slowmo to work but I liked it anyway. Thumbs up.

Anime and Movies

The Idolm@ster, Cinderella Girls, and Beyond the Brilliant Future!

Gonna keep this brief because the Gakumas section more or less covered what I wanted to say broadly.

• Imas 2011 is an incredibly funny and heartfelt story about the small-time idols of 765 Productions (its a joke cuz it's pronounced "Namco" like the developer) hitting it big, and ends with a conclusion about what it means to hit it big. It's very romantic about its subject matter, but I think that's what makes the franchise work as well as it does. I love Haruka and Miki.

• Cinderella Girls is also a very heartfelt story about idols stuck in a corporatized bureocracy that wants to extract their individual talents for profit while ignoring what makes the girls work as individuals and a group. It's less funny than Imas 2011 but I think Uzuki's character arc works better as the throughline since it's a bit more serialized than its "prequel." I don't really think the Cinderella Project girls as a group work as well as 765 Productions, but characters like Miku and Kirari really stood out to me. I love Rin, Kirari and Miku.

• The Imas movie is a sequel to the 2011 show and I thought it was very cute! its drama is more centered on a new cast of characters than the 765 girls as a group, but Kana's emotional turmoil really worked for me. It also has Serika, the cutest idol of all time. I liked it!

28 Years Later

I didn't expect it to be a family drama like that. I didn't really know what it was going into it aside from the zombie thing, but I really really loved the drama with the main trio and how fucked up Britain becomes after the outbreak. It also has some really funny killshots and the ending was incredible.

Bugonia

Emma Stone is genuinely incredible in this. Just go watch it.

100 Meters

PLEASE JUST WATCH 100 METERS RIGHT THIS SECOND. TRUST ME. TRUST ME!!!!!!!

WWE Unreal (season 2)

It's incredible how up its own ass this company is. The amount of self-importance and fart-sniffer attitude every writer and producer here has for its own middling bullshit is actually embarrassing to watch.

Marty Supreme

By the end of this movie I felt like I had just run a marathon. It truly is one of a kind. Chalamet is right in gassing this shit up forever.

Send Help

Sam Raimi makes another one of Those except it feels even gorier and grosser. I loved it.

Cosmic Princess Kaguya

I'm gonna be the party pooper here because I thought this movie was really bad. It starts off really strong, has an incredible intro and a really funny 40 minute stretch where the Vtuber/Vocaloid/VRChat world really made me long for the type of technology it pines for, and that romantic ideal of the internet is something I can never break away from. However, a really, genuinely terrible action setpiece about a fake MOBA utterly ruins the pacing of the movie and it never recovers from it. It starts meandering from scene to scene with no real sense of stakes until the end of act 2, where a really bizarre plot twist recontextualizes the entire plot for act 3 and then it just...ends. Now, I don't really have an issue with the act 3 twist, but I don't think it works as well as it could have because...honestly that fucking MOBA really just ruins everything. Cut that out and you have a pretty ok 7/10 with really good visuals, otherwise its a mess that left me more frustrated than pleased. Go give it a watch though, maybe you'll like it.