Franchises like Star Wars are an odd beast in how they accumulate a vast amount of spin-offs and tie-ins. Everyone knows the movie trilogies, but beyond lies the Expanded Universe spanning just about every form of storytelling with nowhere near the popularity of the source material, and what feels like too much material for any one person to take in. So I’ve found my personal Star Wars niche with the fictional history books.

The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire is written as a book that exists within the Star Wars universe, written shortly after the events of the sequel trilogy from the perspective of a historian who fought as part of the Resistance. Technically the in fiction author is a character who appears in The Rise of Skywalker, but in such a minor role I had no idea he wasn’t made just for this book until well after finishing it.

My favorite part of the book in general is that the real life author keeps the context in which the fictional author is writing in sight. The introduction to the book serves as a good breakdown of why the sequel trilogy is far more cynical than it frames itself as, asking what makes this happy ending any less likely to be overwritten than that of the original trilogy when it’s practically the same ending. So this book is the attempt of the author to prevent yet another repeat and break the cycle.

In essence the book is a broad recap of the three movie trilogies and expanded universe material, synthesized into one narrative about the Galactic Empire itself by placing the events in a wider historical context and analysis. The loss of high ranking and experienced officers like Grand Moff Tarkin on the Death Star is argued to have been worse for the Empire than the Death Star itself being destroyed, while the Battle of Hoth is presented as a pyrrhic victory for the Empire that destroyed morale in a way it never recovered from.

Attention is also paid to what exactly a random historian who happened to sometimes be around important people as their subordinate would know. The discovery of archives on Exegol, the planet at the end of Rise of Skywalker, is used to give our metafictional narrator access to plenty of information and confidence about the Force and those who use it, but it isn’t perfect. There are things that remain mysteries to him that readers can look up on Wookiepedia.

What I found most surprising was that the Crimson Dawn from Solo and its abandoned sequels were given an entire chapter, as those plot threads were resolved in other parts of the expanded universe and then folded into this narrative. I think that demonstrates the strength of this book, that even the plotline of a planned movie subseries shunted into less marketed material could be given a place. Part of my enjoyment of the chapter came from it being fully new material to me.

Though it makes me harder on Solo now knowing that Qi’ra’s role in the expanded universe is far more interesting than the movie she debuted in, they should have just jumped straight to her movie instead of explaining why Han’s last name is Solo, a question that has definitely been asked and was important to answer.

I also found some parts of the book a little comedic, sometimes in a morbid way. Vader’s habit of executing those who failed him is described as contributing to the Empire’s already present talent drain problem. Combined with how his actions at Hoth ruined morale, it makes Vader come off as unintentionally aiding the Rebellion as much as he hindered them. Turns out it’s hard to build up new talent when anyone good enough to work for Vader is one mistake away from a force choke.

When talking about the aftermath of the Rebellion’s victory the book also mentions a flood of post war memoirs from all sides of the war, including Kallus from Star Wars Rebels. It’s a detail so mundane and easy to imagine that it cracks me up. I also enjoy the mental image of various Star Wars characters reading each other’s memoirs and arguing over them and so didn’t like the direct confirmation Luke and Leia never engaged in that trend. Maybe if R2-D2 had written a memoir the New Republic could have been saved.

Returning to a serious note, the transition to the sequel trilogy was one I dreaded reaching in the book but ended up appreciating. This is the part of most importance and immediacy to the in fiction author and it comes through. More time is spent on the build up to The Force Awakens than the sequel trilogy itself, as The First Order isn’t the Empire. Like other works in the expanded universe The New Republic is portrayed as an overly complacent and bureaucratic government, in addition to the issues of the culture deliberately created by the Empire not vanishing overnight and a fear of plunging the galaxy back into war.

It’s an interesting bookends that after the first chapter discussed Palpatine as a person and his cult of personality the final chapter discusses how even in The First Order the new generation didn’t actually care much for Palpatine when he somehow returned. Like with the introduction I also read this as a critique of Rise of Skywalker, because it drives in how abrupt and forced the random revival of Palpatine was.

With the Star Wars franchise being an ever growing creature the book is already a bit out of date. You can tell it was written between the first and second seasons of Andor and it disappoints me a little when thinking of how the events of Andor’s second season could have contributed to the book, as both are more politically oriented takes on the Star Wars universe.

The book is as much about someone trying to make sense of how things went wrong as it is the Galactic Empire itself. All the faults and inconsistencies in other Star Wars media that the book ends up drawing attention to add to that sense of trying to find some meaning in events that just don’t seem logical. Even more than other expanded universe works, it’s about Star Wars itself, not just the movies but the whole beautiful mess that comes when a setting keeps getting new material decades later.

Martial Champion is somehow simultaneously unique and generic. With a single look you can tell it was a fighting game released in the post Street Fighter II boom, it looks so typical of that period it feels like something you’d see on the background of a TV show. There’s even a case of characters swapping names between regions like a simplified reference to Street Fighter II’s international name shuffling.

Yet if you look under the hood, Martial Champion is such a distinctive game that even now it’s hard to find something that closely matches how it plays. Which makes how generic the aesthetics are even worse, as it completely fails to convey anything other than ‘discount Street Fighter that can’t even get country flags right.’

When most people think of fighting games they think of combos, attacks happening one right after the other. Martial Champion has no combos, both players are exchanging single hits. So you don’t need to worry about being unable to get as much damage out as other players or watching lengthy combos play out while you can’t do anything.

The biggest feature though is the weapon and knockdown system. After receiving four hits a character will be knocked down, and weapon wielding characters have a chance to lose their weapon. If a character is disarmed their weapon will be right there on the ground waiting to be picked up, even by the opponent. The only thing having a weapon equipped changes is your attack range, which is enough to make possession of it a matter of winning or losing.

Characters who don’t come with a weapon will always want to steal a dropped weapon, even the ones who can’t actually use it, since it makes the opponent reclaiming it harder. But with weapon users it’s more complicated, because those with longer weapons don’t want a shorter one, nd picking up a new weapon requires dropping your own, where the opponent could eventually claim it. So instead the approach is to try and camp the weapon, exploiting the enemy’s now reduced range

One character has a unique way of interacting with this system. Goldor’s three part staff has the longest range in the game, but only when used by him, becoming the worst weapon when used by anyone else. So the other weapon users have a harder time keeping him disarmed, as picking up his dropped weapon makes them weaker and if he gets their original weapon he once again has superior range. Meanwhile the fist fighters are still at their usual range at the worst when stealing Goldor’s weapon.

As an arcade fighting game the only two modes are the usual player vs player battles or facing computer opponents with your fighter until you reach the absurdly powerful boss character, with your reward being a brief ending cutscene unique to each character. I did appreciate the use of a tournament bracket to show progression between fights, and having some opponents jump on stage at the end of a fight before doing the usual transition to the next one to show them interrupting the tournament.

It’s easy to see why Martial Champion didn’t catch on and was largely forgotten, poor presentation dragged down the whole package and practically went out of its way to obscure the many elements that set the game apart. Other fighting games have explored the idea of disarming opponents and/or picking up weapons to change your attacks, but in their own distinct way.

I don’t have any hope or even desire for a Martial Champion 2, those world warrior wannabes had their chance. But I would be onboard for a new original fighting game that takes what makes Martial Champion still somehow stand out and pairs it with a less generic presentation.

Shadow Ticket is a book I’m still trying to work out my feelings on, which makes it a good choice for a rambling part of this newsletter. When I first heard of the book through a friend sending a link to the blurb with no context I was interested, it took me a bit to realize I was hearing about it because it was a Thomas Pynchon novel. Despite disliking things praised as ‘literary’ as a general rule I decided to stick with my interest.

I will be diving into spoilers freely throughout this, just so you are properly warned. As I have only recently finished the book much of this is me still trying to work out how I feel about it, it may read like a review but it’s actually a ramble.

In the first third the book closely follows Hicks, a private detective trying to make it through depression era Milwaukee. There’s a strong sense of setting here, which Hicks does not want to leave. So around the second third he’s forced out of Milwaukee by his employer and sent to Hungary to work a case he has no interest in, getting Daphne, the heiress to a cheese fortune whom he has a history with, to come back to the states. This turns out to be a cover for the real mission of finding her father, the ‘Al Capone of cheese.’

Once Hicks is out of the states the book transitions into an ensemble piece, following a decently large cast that keeps running into each other no matter where they end up. This is where I feel my interest waned, not enough to stop reading, but I simply did not care about most of the characters who were now sharing the spotlight and found them rather forgettable. Their segments were enjoyable to read in the moment but did not linger with me.

Most of the characters also never came across as invested in their own story either, everyone was just so damn casual about everything. Moments of drama are brief and never seem to linger enough to lead to anything like lasting emotion. There was a sense of characters just being moved by circumstance like ping pong balls instead of moving on their own, constantly going ‘well that happened.’ Characters wanting things and being mad about being wronged felt like the exception.

A good deal of the humor in the book also did not land for me. There were a few standout moments that landed (which I immediately shared with friends), but for the most part it was so dry that I got no mirth from it. There isn’t much there to ponder, you can’t debate someone into laughing at a joke.

It feels a bit more like a sequence of connected anecdotes than a single plot in some ways, and I did enjoy it for that. But when it went from anecdotes about Hicks in Milwaukee to the wider ensemble it was easy to feel lost and like things were just spinning their wheels. Technically things were progressing, but there was no feeling of momentum or stakes.

The book is about exile and not subtle about it. And about living in a period of decline where things are only going further downhill, with World War II constantly hanging on the horizon for the European section of the book. I liked the final few chapters for really getting into that feeling, but I don’t think there was enough build up for them to truly evoke the feelings they were trying to evoke. Especially since the specific reason for Hicks not being able to go back to the States didn’t feel like it added up logically.

While actually in the progress of reading the book I never hesitated to pick it back up. For the most part I did enjoy the prose and was taking mental notes of specific elements of Pynchon’s style that I liked.

It’s always worth considering if the reason something isn’t done well by a book is because it was actually doing another thing entirely, that’s why I started by clarifying this is me trying to figure out my feelings. Looking around a bit online, it seems people who enjoy it liked the historical details and digging into the references it makes, elements I did not engage with or feel a desire to engage with.

This reads too much like a harsh review to me. I’m thankful I never bothered with any sort of rating system, because I’m not sure where I would even rank it, right now my feelings on Shadow Ticket break any scoring system. I both liked and didn’t like it, and still find it hard to accurately phrase the reasons why. But stepping outside my usual reading with this was a fruitful experience even if I never find a way to sum up how it made me feel.

Remember when going to different new websites rather than the same rotation of roughly five that everyone else goes to was something people actually did? Well there are still people on the internet doing that and making fun websites that aren’t social media or advertising, like with the website builder Neocities, which is where I came across I-land.

To me much of the magic was going in having no idea what to expect, so I’m giving you a chance now to go there and explore a little, you don’t even need to come back and read the rest really, if you get enraptured by it I’ve done my job here.

The best way for me to describe it right now is an aimless point and click adventure game, you simply wander around the drawn scenes and see what you can interact with, how far you can go and where. It’s about soaking in the atmosphere and exploring. From what I can tell the general website link appears to be random, anyone who clicked on the link above got a different starting point.

Where it really blew my mind was when it linked to other things. I explored the ocean floor and was linked to a page for helping fish pass through underwater gates during migration season (which was down at the time due to it not being migration season for them). If you explore I-land enough you’ll come across other fun and cool internet things you didn’t know about before, like videos taking you on walks.

If you can find the computer, that lets you get to a lot of the cool stuff fast, and also lets you see some things only found there. You can play whole emulated video games on the website computer instead of exploring outside just like in real life.

Website features that don’t depend on links include activities like dressing up dolls or writing letters for everyone to see, and a chatroom was recently added to one room.

It’s also clear to me that there is plenty more on the website I still don’t know about and thus can’t detail here, because there is a tracker of all the things to interact with on the website and I’m still a good ways off from having found everything even without the fact the website is still being updated. Making the number go up works well as an initial motivation before you get a feel for what’s really going on.

Coming across this inspired me to add somewhat of a visual component to a website I’ve been working on when usually I’m hesitant to use visuals in mediums that don’t demand it (like posting writing online). And it inspires me to try and find the more playful parts of the internet.

For those of you who also explored this website I’d appreciate hearing in the comments where you started and what you found?

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Nintendo hardware generally launches with a title meant to showcase what the system can do, the most famous example of course being Wii Sports. But I’m writing this to talk about the one on the unfairly maligned Wii U system, Nintendo Land, an excellent demonstration of the console’s gamepad controller, Nintendo history, and an overall great time.

The titular themepark is home to twelve attractions themed around different Nintendo games, too big to be minigames, too small to be full games. Six of these attractions are focused around multiplayer while the other six are meant to be played on your own. The multiplayer ones stand out for using the gamepad for some fun asynchronous multiplayer that no other console can do locally.

While you can navigate the game using menus, you can also walk through the theme park to reach each attraction with your Mii character. The park is laid out in a ring, so finding the attractions is not difficult. And as you play attractions you earn currency that can be spent on a pachinko game in the central tower to unlock decorations that are automatically added to the park, filling it up and making it more lively.

Back when the servers were up you could also see the Miis of other players around the park accompanied with their posts on Nintendo’s now defunct social media Miiverse. This concept of a hub area with social posts would later be copied by the Splatoon games even after the shutdown of Miiverse.

Guiding you through the park and its attractions is Monita, a floating monitor with a single robotic arm. She’ll sometimes play a role directly in the attraction itself, like playing the part of her evil doppelganger Dark Monita or the damsel in distress Princess Monita.

And the theme park aesthetic carries over to the attractions themselves, where all characters are either Miis in costumes or animatronics and the environments have that theme park fakeness to them. You don’t play as Mario, Link, or Samus, you play as Miis dressed up like them.

As a fan of lesser known Nintendo series I also appreciate some of the choices of what to theme attractions on, which include the usual suspects and the likes of The Mysterious Murasame Castle. It’s always nice to get a reminder Nintendo still cares enough about Takamaru and his game to give it the occasional nod here and there.

While there’s no linear progression to the game, each attraction has five stamps you can earn by fulfilling certain conditions and a star next to the name for either getting all the way to the end or just playing it a lot. And some of these attractions can be a little difficult to get full completion on.

Of the twelve attractions, my favorite of the whole batch would have to be either Luigi’s Ghost Mansion or Donkey Kong Crash Course.

Luigi’s Ghost Mansion is one of the multiplayer attractions where the player on the gamepad is on their own and the other players using the TV and wiimotes are on a team against them. Here the gamepad player is a ghost and the wiimote players are ghost hunters.

Both teams in this attraction have the same zoomed out view of the playing field, but the ghost can only be seen on the gamepad screen. The ghost hunters have to pay attention to wiimote vibrations to know when the ghost is near and zap it with their flashlights before it grabs them. The game ends if the ghost has grabbed and knocked out all hunters or if the ghost hunters have depleted the ghost’s health with their flashlights.

It’s simple enough for people to quickly join in after just the short in game tutorial, but there’s some solid depth to it that can come out once you’ve been playing with the same group for a while. Which made it one of the highlights of Thanksgiving for quite a few years.

The other multiplayer attractions follow a similar model where the gamepad player having their own screen is vital to the game working and there are multiple maps to play on. For example in Metroid Blast the gamepad player controls a replica of Samus’s gunship and flies around the map while the wiimote players dress up like Samus and fight on the ground.

Donkey Kong Crash Course is themed around the original Donkey Kong and has you move a cart through an obstacle course with the gamepad’s gyro sensor. Sometimes you need to be going at the right speed to make things work, and there are parts of the course you can manipulate with a button press. It’s simple, but difficult and very rewarding to finally best. Especially once you work out how to skip certain parts.

It’s definitely the multiplayer attractions that make the strongest argument for the gamepad, but having one of the best parts of a game be the gyro control part is an impressive feat. I spent a good amount of time mastering that attraction and earning all of the stamps and star for it.

One of the reasons I like Nintendo hardware is that it tends to be distinct and playful, and Nintendo Land put this strength on full display. Most consoles have games that can easily be replicated elsewhere, but the Wii U and some other Nintendo systems provide games that can only really work on that hardware.

Now I think it’s time I went and paid Monita a visit.

The Super Smash Bros series features a wide range of signature items with their own charm, especially those from the first three games: the charge and release of a Super Scope, the hunt for a Smash Ball, the terror when someone picks up a hammer and its song overrides whatever was previously playing.

Among the many items is Lip’s Stick, a flower shaped rod which can plant a flower on opponents that deals continuous damage. I assumed it was an original item to the series, the name a random pun on lipstick. In truth, this was just one case in a long sequence of Nintendo all stars stealing from Lip.

Panel de Pon is a puzzle game for the Super Famicom released during a time where it was a trend in Japan to make puzzle games cute. So the game’s roster mostly consists of fairy girls, with the main character being Lip, the tomboyish fairy of flowers. Though you can pick which character to play as, all it changes is whose portrait you see, there is no mechanical difference.

The playing field looks like Tetris and other falling block puzzles, but rather than placing falling blocks you are swapping blocks that rise from beneath the playing field, you can only swap adjacent blocks horizontally, with the goal of matching at least three of the same color vertically or horizontally.

Rows of blocks are constantly rising, and it’s game over if they hit the ceiling. But if you make a match of four or more, or set up a chain reaction of matches, they’ll briefly stop, giving you time to catch your breath and look for the next match to make.

I am terrible at Tetris, Puyo Puyo, and other falling block type puzzle games. Any time I do work out a plan I get denied the pieces needed for it. But in Panel de Pon and others like it where I’m rearranging the board rather than making it I know how to set up combos and strategize. It turns out I’m not bad at puzzle games as a whole, just the most popular two.

Endless and Time Attack are what they sound like, play until you lose or time runs out. Puzzle mode gives you set layouts of blocks and tasks you with finding out how to clear all of them in the amount of swaps given. Stage Clear tasks you to keep clearing blocks until you’re under the clear line, which will take its time to appear. In single player, VS mode serves as the story mode with computer opponents.

Like other VS puzzle games the way players (or the player and computer) fight each other is by sending large immovable garbage blocks to the opponent’s field, once again achieved with chain reactions or single matches of four or more. Cleared garbage blocks turn into normal blocks, and if you set up a match for them before they’re done transforming it counts as a combo, which helps with making a comeback.

While it’s possible to make a match by sliding a block into position to match with the blocks falling from the prior normal match, the blocks fall so fast it’s difficult to pull off even with planning. But I like that it’s a mechanic, when it works it feels rewarding, though it’s safer to get the match set up beforehand if you can.

There’s a chance this game may sound a little familiar even if the name doesn’t. That’s because for release in the United States, it was determined that gamers there would never touch such a girly looking game. So they got permission to name it ‘Tetris Attack’ and then reskinned it as a Mario spin-off starring Yoshi.

Yoshi wasn’t the only character to steal Lip’s entire game. The Pokémon Puzzle League games are a Pokémon themed variant on the game that made ‘Puzzle League’ into the series new U.S name. Animal Crossing New Leaf eventually had a Puzzle League side mode added to it. There was a Puzzle League game for the DS that opted to have no characters at all, even though if there were a Nintendo system to finally let a game dismissed as ‘too girly’ reach the States unmolested it would be the DS.

Panel de Pon did a get a Japan only sequel that never got reskinned however, because it was part of Nintendo Puzzle Collection for the Gamecube, where it was included alongside ports of Doctor Mario 64 and Yoshi’s Cookie. Panel de Pon is not allowed to escape the Mario universe and Yoshi specifically sticking their thumb in apparently.

The original game finally get an official English release unmodified through Nintendo Switch Online, which like other international debuts on the service is so unmodified that none of the text has been translated, making menu navigation a bit of a hassle. The unofficial translation thus provides a better experience than the official release.

Nintendo’s other crossover game, the Japan only Captain Rainbow, also featured Lip as a character. Captain Rainbow is a game about forgotten Nintendo characters, so Lip being there is sadly on point.

This is why Lip is among the characters I hope to one day see become a fighter in Smash Bros, because there are a good number of Nintendo all stars who it would make sense to have Lip fight, and you can’t discuss the history of Panel de Pon without getting into several other video game franchises.

But most of all, it would be great if we could get a new Panel de Pon game that keeps the fairy theme and doesn’t get other Nintendo characters plastered over it.

One day my interest in learning to make video games led me to a series of articles about how to make a fighting game, going over the basic facts such as which engines to use and fundamentals like states and the practical differences in 2d and 3d animation. I observed the author had a fighting game of his own available for free on Steam, called Schwarzerblitz, and tried it out.

As a quick disclaimer for the rest of this article, I have conversed with the maker of Schwarzerblitz many times since then, as discovering his articles and game were what helped me discover the wider indie fighting game scene.

What’s most remarkable about Schwarzerblitz isn’t the faux retro PSOne style graphics or that it’s a solo developer indie fighting game, it’s that it is an indie 3D fighting game, a subgenre rarely done by indies and big studios alike. For a good period of time Tekken was effectively the sole survivor in the big budget space, in terms of new releases.

To answer a question those versed in 3D fighters may be asking, yes, Schwarzerblitz lets you win by sending your opponent out of the ring in addition to winning by KO, no you can’t accidentally step out of the ring yourself. Some stages have walls that prevent ring outs entirely.

Mechanically what sets the game apart is the trigger mechanic. You start each fight with a set number of bullet counters that can be used by holding down the trigger button and another button for powerful actions such as breaking out of an opponent’s attack or launching the opponent. You only get more bullets at the start of the next round, with the loser of the prior one gaining three and the winner only getting one. Once they’re gone, they’re gone, so use them wisely.

Unlike most modern fighting games, there is no online mode, just local play. So the game focuses on single player content, with the story mode as the headline feature and the typical arcade and trial modes. Those who do wish to play online can make use of Steam remote play or clients like Parsec.

The game is set in the future of an alternate timeline, where after making first contact with aliens most of the Earth runs on distortion energy, a power source drawing on other microscopic dimensions. However, one year prior to the game, an unexplained incident with a distortion power plant led to the destruction of an entire city, which came to be known as the Black Lightning Disaster.

Compared to other fighting games, the story leans more in a cyberpunk sort of direction, not in aesthetic, but in that most of the cast is trying to make do in the wake of powerful corporations running rampant. One of the biggest causes of misery in the setting is a company called RealLifeAnime, which makes mutants for its TV shows and then dumps them on the street once the show’s over (assuming they weren’t killed during filming). Some of those mutants in turn ended up forming a powerful crime syndicate.

To be clear it isn’t some grim dark depressing game, there’s actually a lot of humor in it, even just in the choice of sound effects around some characters (like Shaz’s loud screams of OW). Just because the world is messed up doesn’t mean there can’t be humor and love.

For the most part story mode follows three groups of characters, at times giving you a choice of what order to experience different chapters in.

Mystery Johnson is an amnesiac man whose face is constantly changing between all possible faces (represented in game by making his body a featureless shadow), on the hunt for hints about his past. Shaz is a drunkard shark mutant trying to survive after betraying his former gang. Delta Team is a UN task force led by the mutant Tiger, investigating the serial killer known as the Night Assassin.

Each fighter has their own motives and secrets that they’d prefer to keep close to their chest. Schwarzerblitz understands that fighting games are about the conflict between the main ensemble, even characters that don’t get as much screentime still have their own goals that put them into conflict with others.

In particular I want to highlight Krave, who is one of my favorite fighting game villains. He’s a killer robot who delights in causing suffering and death while making anime references, he has some nuance but at the end of the day is an unapologetic sadist who’s funny to watch and satisfying to see get taken down a peg.

It isn’t until the final fight against Krave where you’re able to bring his health all the way down to zero, letting him be one of the most frequent story mode opponents without losing credibility or giving you a cutscene of losing as a reward for winning. He isn’t the main antagonist, but he’s one that makes an impact.

Once you reach a certain point in story mode, you need to play arcade mode to unlock the next chapter, with some bonus chapters being locked behind clearing it with certain characters. I enjoyed how this part played with the traditional fighting game format, especially in how it hides some details in plain sight through genre conventions.

You can in theory play arcade mode before story mode, but things won’t make much sense. And it’s easier to find characters you want to play through story mode where you get to know more about them and try out most of the cast. I didn’t have a character I especially wanted to play until after going through story mode, which made me interested in playing as Kiyoko and Blade.

Clearing arcade with the same characters repeatedly is also how you unlock the many alternate outfits in the game. A few bonus characters are unlocked through arcade mode as well, assuming you didn’t accept the prompt on initial boot up to unlock all characters immediately like a loser. There are also some characters who don’t have their own slot on the roster, but can be played as the ‘costume’ for another and have their own arcade endings (and dialogue in VS mode).

On top of that there are also a handful of variants of arcade mode to play around with, such as time attack and a mode where all it takes is one hit to kill or be killed.

The game features a mutual crossover with fellow indie fighting game Duels of Fortune, with Sir Rattlebone from Duels of Fortune appearing in Schwarzerblitz as a guest fighter and Mystery Johnson appearing in Duels of Fortune as a guest fighter (with an attack where he throws Shaz at the opponent).

While not designed as a beginner fighting game, I think it works as a good entry point for more story oriented players who got pushed out of the genre when releases started just being local versus and online. If story or arcade mode proves too difficult you can go into the settings to change the difficulty, or reduce the number of rounds in arcade mode (which also helps with seeing everyone’s endings).

There is a piece of paid DLC, Tales from the Epilogue, which comes with a PDF and epub file of short stories mostly set after story mode and in game costumes that reference them, effectively ‘backporting’ some characters introduced in the short stories.

A whole saga of prose fiction set after the game, Tales from Schwarzerblitz and its own sequel Beyond Schwarzerblitz can be found on the author’s website, starting with the earlier version of stories featured in Tales from the Epilogue and continuing much further from there. And like the game they are available for free.

In addition to showing how the main characters are doing after the game, it also gives more space to those who didn’t have as much spotlight in story mode, like Wally and Mr. Daevka. Even General Boost, who existed entirely off-screen in Schwarzerblitz itself, gets his own perspective explored in Tales. And as mentioned earlier, plenty of new characters appear as well to further expand the world.

For video game sequels, Exploding Judo Federation is a more comical fighting game follow up, where the gameplay premise is that only grabs can defeat your opponent, since that’s what triggers the mines on the battlefield. Drinking Shark Rhapsody is a VA-11 Hall-A style game set in a bar after the events of Schwarzerblitz and is difficult to describe without some heavy spoilers. Eight Color Star Guardians is an RPG not set in the same universe, but its second act has some cameos and crossovers.

All of the above have at least some overlap with the epilogue stories, for example I.N.A.B.A from Exploding Judo Federation also appears in Tales from Schwarzerblitz, which goes into the exact nature of her connection to a certain character from Schwarzerblitz.

Schwarzerblitz on its own is a full experience even without the expanded universe. I’d still recommend it if it cost money, as it fills several niches major studios have left mostly empty. There’s no reason not to give it a try if you have any sort of interest.

Despite how highly it is regarded, opera is mostly secluded to its own cultural space. It isn’t difficult to know little about opera let alone avoid seeing one. Thus when the chance to watch an opera for the first time came, I was curious and took it. The opera in question was The Magic Flute, featuring music composed by Mozart, and I enjoyed it enough to be interested in watching more opera.

The Magic Flute is about a prince named Tamino who washes ashore in a strange land and is told by the Queen of Night to rescue her daughter Pamina from a man named Sarastro, though the situation turns out to more complicated in the second act.

If you want a story that makes literal sense, look elsewhere. This is a mythic story that focuses more on the dream like aspect of myths, the depth comes from the different ways it can be taken symbolically. Egyptian mythology is explicitly invoked with the presence of a mystery cult dedicated to Isis and Osiris, but those names are the only real presence of anything Egyptian in the opera.

What surprised me was how comedic The Magic Flute is, it’s as comic as it is mythic. Most of this comes from the crowd favorite character Papageno, a birdcatcher who joins Tamino as a traveling companion. He is a silly mess of a man there to add a comedic counterpoint to the more distant archetypical characters, he gets the audience laughing and can get away with throwing in a quick Godfather reference in English. The stuffy uptight image of opera falls apart before his antics.

Pamina also takes more of an active role than would be expected with the classic set up of rescuing the princess, as shortly after the quest to save her is begun there is a scene of her after a failed escape attempt.

Discussing any sort of staged performance has the difficulty of being filtered through what each individual staging chooses to do. For example the one I went to kept to the original language, with screens in the seats providing a translation, but I later learned the translation was purposefully unfaithful in some ways.

Monostatos is an ineffective minor antagonist who tries to force himself on Pamina. In the production I watched he merely seeemed like a self absorbed member of Sarastro’s mystery cult. That was because all the racial elements of his character were scrubbed out, as originally presented Monostatos is described as a Moor, and is a blatantly racist stereotype. All lines referencing Monostatos’s race were changed, and the casting alone negated the ‘black man lusting for white woman’ trope in the original.

Learning about all this made me feel tricked in a way, since I had an understanding of a character whose reception has been defined by his race that had nothing to do with race. The problem of Monostatos is a difficult one, I wouldn’t be keen to include a song whose lyrics boil down to ‘I’m ugly because I’m black and I want to fuck a white woman’ either, and different productions changing things is to be expected. But I do wish the playbill at least had some mention of the unpleasant history around Monostatos and the conversations modern productions are having about it.

In contrast the ways the production tried to mitigate the sexism of The Magic Flute felt more upfront about the sexism being present. I was puzzled to learn that most productions apparently cut lines for time that have important exposition about the history between the Queen of Night and Sarastro, and my reading of Pamina relies heavily on that information, so I’m thankful it was kept in the one I saw.

It disappointed me a little that the costuming went for a modern approach, Sarastro and his fellow priests all look like normal business men for example. The fancy costumes were a part of the typical image of the opera that I was looking forward to. I did like how the Queen of Night and Papageno were costumed however, they even gave Papageno a stepladder to carry around with him.

The staging had some elements I appreciated. At the center of the stage there was a platform held up by ropes that could be rotated and moved, letting it serve as every prop needed. One scene it is tilted and serving as the uneven terrain the cast are on, in another it is a table everyone has gathered around, and then it hovers over characters to show them secretly meeting in a dark corner.

All together I came away enjoying my time at the opera, it was like a pleasant dream you only question later. While dated in some ways, it’s also easy to see why The Magic Flute is represented on the Voyager probe through the Queen of Night’s second aria. I hope to experience more opera in the future.

Romhacks and fan games are massive works of labor, it takes dedication to pour effort into something that by definition cannot make any money and has a chance of putting you at risk. Yet from that scene comes many games of high quality, such as Super Mariomon, a romhack of Pokémon Emerald featuring Mario characters. You can find the patch to play it on your dumped Pokémon Emerald cartridge here, do not trust any other websites, those are scams designed to appear before the genuine article on google search.

Super Mariomon is more than a Pokémon game with Mario sprites, its a whole new game where the Mario elements are built into the design of the game, such as the region being broken up into distinct worlds you travel to from a central hub. Even if you have no interest in the Mario world, it’s worth playing just for how fresh it feels as a Pokémon game.

The story of the game is lighthearted, with Princess Peach hosting a special ‘capture challenge’ that everyone is taking part in, which is structured like a Pokémon game with needing to travel to defeat eight ‘star leaders’ before taking on the elite four. Various Mario enemies take on the role of captures, which are this game’s equivalent to Pokémon. Professor E. Gadd is naturally the one who take the role of the game’s professor, introducing the game, the starters to pick from (Blooper, Bob-Omb, and Piranha Plant), and handing Mario a Tattledex to fill out.

Luigi takes the role of the rival, with Bowser filling both the secondary rival and evil team leader role. Even without being some of gaming’s most well known characters, Luigi and Bowser bring new things to the Pokémon role they play in Mariomon. Mario and Luigi being brothers gives them an entirely different dynamic from the typical player character and rival in Pokémon, and Luigi nicknames all of his captures. Bowser meanwhile concludes each of his fights by fighting you directly. While the stakes don’t get too high or intense, the ending of the game was charming. I enjoy the way Mario and Luigi’s relationship is written.

The roster of captures spans across all of the franchise’s long history. It makes better use of the Mario world than most actual official Mario spin-offs. Games like the RPGs are well represented in Mariomon while the average official spin-off avoids any mention of them. It made me appreciate just how many different enemies there are in the mainline games alone.

This variety helps the game, as you never quite know what you’ll see next. Entering a new area feels exciting with the anticipation of seeing which Mario enemies will appear as captures, whether your reaction is shock based on knowing them or shock at not knowing what is about to be sent at you.

Each world also has its own distinct features, it’s not just a rinse and repeat of going to the next city and walking over to the star leader. My favorite was world 5, where you team up with Captain Toad for double battles and puzzle solving as you explore DK Island and can build a whole separate team for Captain Toad. In contrast world 4 is oriented around a casino and has its own currency you need to earn to progress.

Even the captures that are clearly designed to fit a familiar Pokémon role tend to have something that lets them stand apart. Yoshi is set up as the game’s equivalent to Eevee, but unlike Eevee is a three stage line, starting as Baby Yoshi and becoming Yoshi, with four different possible evolutions after that. One of the Yoshi evolutions is acquired simply by reaching level 50, and that evolution is Mariomon’s own pseudo legendary.

A feature I especially enjoyed was the optional Toadette battles in her battle school. These are a step up in difficulty from the ones in the main story, taking advantage of the more technical Pokémon mechanics. Beating them unlocks access to move tutors and special items, including ones that can change a capture’s nature or ability.

There are many convenient features veteran Pokémon players will appreciate. Key items are used in place of the HM system like modern entries, moves can be relearned at any time, and you can swap captures in and out of your party from anywhere once you get an early item. Naturally there’s also only one version with the complete roster and no evolutions that require trading.

For those into playing with nuzlocke rules, there’s even a built in nuzlocke mode you can turn on. There’s also an option to enforce a level cap based on your current progression and immediately bring all captures up to it, completely eliminating any need to level up via battle. Beating the game normally also unlocks an item that raises captures to around the level of your strongest ones. I didn’t need to do any grinding to beat the game normally, but the level cap item was useful in post game for playing around with new teams and filling out my tattledex.

At the same time there are a few tedious things that bothered me, such as the oddly high number of move tutors spread throughout the game that can be difficult to keep track of. And healing items are thrown into the same part of your bag as the various held items, making it annoying to dig them out at times.

One notable sour spot for me is The Pit. This is an optional challenge area where you travel through seven large dimly lit rooms with a team of rental captures. Many of these captures have terrible movesets focused on mechanics that only matter in a six vs six battle while being used in a format that’s one on one. It’s better to avoid fighting as much as you can between the limited resources and weak captures.

If you want the full Tattledex you have to engage with The Pit, because a legendary is locked behind doing three successful runs of it, and you used to need to do them consecutively until a patch mercifully changed that. Once I finally got said legendary I ran out and didn’t look back. Not the mode for me.

That annoyance doesn’t take away from how much I enjoyed everything else about the game. I was messaging some friends of mine non-stop as I was playing because of how exciting I found it, regularly sending pictures of new encounters. I’m even considering another playthrough with various challenges, like only using captures who debuted on the Gamecube. It’s a game I’m eager to fiddle with.

As of this writing the game still has at least one more updated slated, 2.0, which is set to add even more captures among other things. I’m as excited for it as I used to be for official Pokémon games.

I knew nothing about Maybe Happy Ending when my family had the fortune to see it on Broadway, only who one of the actors was, not even what role they played. So it was a pleasant surprise when it quickly became one of my favorite theater musicals. I felt a need to seek out discussion on it, but found my usual avenues did not produce much, fortunately this column is a perfect outlet for all that I need to express when I get this captivated by something.

Set in a somewhat distant future South Korea, Maybe Happy Ending follows two Helperbots, humanoid robot assistants, named Oliver and Claire. Except these aren’t current Helperbots, Oliver and Claire live in what is essentially a retirement home for robots, with Oliver and Claire belonging to discontinued lines.

Oliver stays in his room waiting for his owner to come back for him, but has his isolated waiting disrupted when Claire knocks on his door requesting to use his charger, as her own has broken. That is the catalyst that sets off the entire plot, as the stagnant world within Oliver’s room finally begins to change.

What stands out about the Broadway production right away is the staging. The Helperbot rooms are indeed small boxes, ones that move back and forth across the stage as needed. Which makes the difference feel immediate when there are scenes that use the whole stage instead of a small part of it.

Above the main stage are screens that play pre-recorded footage as needed, like phone calls or flashbacks. There’s also another piece of upper stage used for a jazz performer who is not actually part of the story, but provides several numbers. You never know which part of the stage the next scene will direct your eyes to.

Oliver inherited a love for old jazz music from his owner, and that is reflected in the above mentioned jazz numbers. You get the expected Broadway style songs and then some classic jazz, helping the music feel varied, an important part of a musical. The two styles never feel like they clash, since the jazz is tied in through characterization and theme.

The romance between Oliver and Claire felt authentic, with their somewhat hostile first meeting building into a natural chemistry with each other. It’s all about them, with other characters only appearing briefly and mainly in flashbacks.

For a focused one act musical, it also has some remarkable world building, where the implications of a few lines do much to paint a picture of the wider world these characters exist in. It wasn’t necessary, but the implications about the setting fascinate me, even as I feel some guilt for fixating on things that don’t matter to the core arc of the story.

There is one warning I’ll give before moving on to the spoilers, this is a deeply emotional musical. I have to be careful with which songs I listen to, some still have the power to make me cry. It doesn’t fixate on overwrought misery and random tragedy, it means every word of the title, including ‘happy.’ And that makes it all the more devastating to me.

The spoiler filled part that assumes you either watched the musical or don’t mind spoilers

Something that sticks with me is that Oliver and Claire turn out to have similar reasons for being retired, someone loved them too much. In Oliver’s case James’s son resented Oliver for being a ‘fake perfect son’ for James. Meanwhile Claire was retired for her owner’s husband falling in love with her. Both were punished for being loved, which makes the love they come to feel for each other more significant.

And I want to talk more about the implications with Claire’s backstory. When she’s being retired her owner says she isn’t getting a replacement Helperbot, which is followed by giving Claire her admin password and restoring her memories, while assuring her that it isn’t her fault. Yet the reason for not getting a replacement Helperbot is easy to imagine.

Being the designated owner of the Helperbot is a form of power in the family. Oliver is so fixated on James that he doesn’t recognize James’s son or the tension he caused within the family. The husband of Claire’s owner tries to erase Claire’s memory in a panic after being rejected, but Claire’s owner is the only one with the authority to do so, reinforcing the husband’s feeling of being an outsider.

To me this feels like the most realistic part of the future depicted, the replacement of human relationships with obedient fakes who can be easily discarded once tired of. There’s already signs of it with pets and the current state of AI, which in hindsight is a progression of asking questions, one of the most basic human interactions, being looked down with the response of ‘just google it.’

When we see the early interactions between Claire’s owner and her husband, there’s also a line indicating that Helperbots are considered common at a certain level of wealth, with the husband being pitied for not being used to Helperbots due to his lower class background. It’s shocking how much is implied about class in a single minor character with two total scenes.

After the show concluded, I immediately asked my family what they thought of the ending, as I was trying to gather my own thoughts. Why did Oliver keep his memories after their erasure being such a key plot point.

I see it as somewhat of a trick. What really mattered was that Claire believed Oliver would forget, so she’d trust that Oliver wouldn’t suffer the pain of outliving her.

From the start Claire is resolved in the face of death, she interacts with other Helperbots and so has had plenty of time to accept her mortality. It felt immediately obvious that her intent with going to see the fireflies was dying in a beautiful place, hence her lack of concern for when Oliver questions how she’ll return from Jegu without his charger. The moment seeing the fireflies came up, I fully expected the closing scene of the play to be the two of them dying under the light of the fireflies together.

Instead the fireflies were a mere turning point. Claire was fine with the idea of dying on Jegu, but only because she already knew her battery was decaying. She only had the idea because Oliver was the one who planned on going to Jegu. It wasn’t a plan for suicide, just a dying person making plans. She doesn’t need the fireflies to face death.

Oliver on the other hand grew past his ignorance and obliviousness to everything outside his room, coming to terms with the fact that he was indeed retired and James is dead. So we see that he did keep his memories, he kept the way he changed after meeting Claire, because a reversion back to the version of him who was patiently waiting for James, who is blind to mortality, would be too tragic. And from James we’ve already seen Oliver feels hope from memories of others, he was given a choice and chose to remember James.

Except, maybe Claire also didn’t erase her memories. I didn’t consider the possibility until seeing others raise it, but I see the room for it. Claire was also shown to have already made the choice to keep painful memories, her owner outright stated the password was given to her if she wanted to erase the memory of the husband’s love confession, which Claire kept. It wouldn’t be out of character for her to once again choose to keep the painful memories.

Either way the ending still works, as both are resolved and able to live out their final days in peace and acceptance. It’s not a tragedy, it may be the only happy ending there can be.

Nine people awaken to find themselves trapped in an unknown location. The one responsible introduces themselves as Zero, and forces the others to play a game of life and death. This is the basic premise of each game in the Zero Escape trilogy: 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors, Virtue’s Last Reward, and Zero Time Dilemma.

While each title has some differences in how they play, generally they are broken up into segments focused on the story, either told visual novel style in the first two or through cutscenes in the third, and escape room sections. The escape sections are classic point and click type gameplay, looking around the room and finding items in order to solve puzzles, and tapping other random things for amusing dialogue.

The escape sections you do and in what order are variable however, because in each game you’ll make choices that determine the path of the narrative and which ending you’ll get. It’s also impossible to see the true ending of any of the games without first experiencing at least one other ending, so you need to explore the different branches of the story to discover the truth.

Despite each game being set within a death game, the tone of the series isn’t oppressively bleak. There are morbid and frightening scenes, but also amusing banter when the characters are solving puzzles.

Characters will also often stop to discuss interesting factoids or pieces of intriguing pseudoscience that usually turn out to be either thematically related or directly plot relevant. You will learn quite a few interesting things from the many tangents the cast like to go on, it’s a series that enjoys taking the time to contemplate things.

What I also like about the trilogy is how the story is done in a way that takes advantage of the medium, these are unarguably video game stories rather than stories told in a video game. Even porting 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors to a system other than the DS loses something vital to how the game was written, especially noticeable in the climax. Please try to play the DS version if you can.

The story of each game is somewhat stand alone, covering a different death game and set of characters, but naturally has the most impact if you play the prior titles. 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors is the most standalone since it wasn’t originally conceived of as a trilogy, and as the conclusion Zero Time Dilemma offers a clear resolved ending. Virtue’s Last Reward on the other hand was made to be the middle title of a trilogy, so it is the least stand alone in both assuming you’ve played the prior game and the ending setting up the next one.

Because of each title’s distinct qualities, I’d like to take the time to discuss each individually.

999

9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors follows the protagonist Junpei as he is forced to play the Nonary Game with eight others onboard a sinking replica of the Titanic. The objective is simple, find the door marked with a 9 in order to escape before 9 hours pass and the ship sinks.

However, which door someone can go through is determined by a bracelet they are forced to wear, each one marked with a different number from 1 to 9. Only three to five people may go through a door, and the numbers on their bracelets must sum to a digital root equal to the number on the door.

At different points in the game the characters are faced with multiple doors, and the player must choose which one Junpei (who has the five bracelet) goes through. Due to the digital root system each door gives you a different set of partners to puzzle with. And the choice of doors determine which ending you’ll get, with the true ending requiring at minimum two playthroughs to access.

A major pain point is having to replay the entire game from the beginning to try out different possibilities. You can skip repeat lines, but not the escape sections, so prepare to speedrun the first one. Counting the introductory tutorial escape, a typical playthrough consists of four escape sections. Later releases backported the flowchart feature from later games to let you jump directly to decision points, but it comes at the cost of key elements that only work on the DS. You have to pick between convenience and purity.

Another aspect of this is that you can miss some information that while not vital, does help flesh out the cast and add more context to everything. But it requires going down the path to an ending that isn’t needed to see the true one, adding another playthrough to your experience.

Being an intended standalone title, this is the most focused and small scale of the trilogy, the one with the clearest sense of identity and purpose. The codename of Zero for the mastermind has the most relevance here with the heavy emphasis on numbers. If you pay attention to the math and know some rules of digital roots you can deduce certain things about the plot based on that alone. There are also subtle clues for which options to pick or avoid to find the true ending you won’t properly recognize until after getting it.

Looking back on it as the start of a trilogy, it does a good job of establishing the core ideas and recurring elements that define its identity as a whole. One example of this is my favorite character, who I can’t properly get into discussing because it is impossible to do so without giving away key plot twists for multiple games.

VLR

In Virtue’s Last Reward the player character is a man named Sigma forced to play the Nonary Game: Ambidex Edition. Instead of the digital root system of the prior Nonary Game, it now revolves around the prisoner’s dilemma. After clearing each escape room, the characters are forced to play the AB game, where they vote ‘ally’ or ‘betray.’

Being the prisoner’s dilemma, mutual alliance has no downsides, mutual betrayal has no benefit, and betraying someone who allies is the biggest benefit to yourself while giving the betrayed nothing.

What the characters are voting for are points. Each character’s bracelet displays their number of points in the Nonary Game, if you reach nine points, you can escape and everyone else is trapped, if you hit zero points, you die. To even reach the point of voting, they must first clear an escape room with the people they will vote against, which adds to the issue of trust. Are they genuinely nice, or are they luring you into voting ally while they vote betray?

To further complicate things, this new Nonary Game uses a system that sorts three sets of two players into pairs who must enter the same door and vote as one, even when their points aren’t equal. After each voting round the assigned pairs are shuffled, but there will always be six paired braclets and three solo bracelets.

Furthermore, in 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors it was only speculation by the cast that Zero could be among them. Here it is stated outright by the AI administrator of the game, Zero III, that the true mastermind of the game, Zero Senior, is one of the participants. This naturally makes it harder for the cast to trust each other when the other person voting may be Zero Senior.

This leads to a large increase in the number of ways the story can branch, so to make it easy to keep track of, the game uses a flow chart system where you can freely jump to any section of the game you’ve played. You can explore different possibilities without needing to replay any escape sections.

To match this, the game now also regularly puts up roadblocks that will force you to use the flowchart system to try a different branch of the story before letting you progress further down that particular path. And the number of different endings you must reach to find the true ending has also increased, with a much greater number of complete dead ends as well. This greater number of endings means each character gets their time to be focused on, instead of only having critical information about themselves revealed in an optional dead end.

While tensions amongst the cast run much higher here compared to the previous entry, most of it is concentrated around the AB game, so the puzzle sections tend to be more humorous. In particular Sigma can get a touch irritating at times with his dirty mind and equally dirty humor during those segments. The overall tension of the game ends up a little lower than the persistent dread of 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors, but it still has moments of dead seriousness, especially on certain branches of the story.

Another tonal departure is how up front the fantastical elements of the setting are compared to the first game, going from a mostly grounded and realistic game to one run by a snarky AI, with other clearly science fiction elements soon appearing as well.

At first Virtue’s Last Reward seems to be mostly its own thing story wise aside from one returing character. Then it becomes clear the connections run much deeper and certain developments in the plot will be most impactful if you played the prior game. This is where it becomes clear the series going forward is direct sequels, not thematic similarities and a few references.

Due to being less linear than its predecessor there’s more room to come away with a different experience of the plot compared to others, since there are less scenes shared between all story branches. The ally and betray system especially can color your impression of a character depending on how you progress.

In terms of puzzles, Virtue’s Last Reward sets itself apart from both its precessor and successor by having the most standardized escape sections. The goal of every room is to uncover the code to unlock a safe with the keycards needed to play the AB game, and if you do a more obscure puzzle in the same room you get a different code for the safe that gives you some extra material to review about the game, nothing urgent, but something nice to try and get.

ZTD

Zero Time Dilemma closes out the trilogy with a huge shake up to the format of the first two. Instead of the Nonary Game, it now follows the Decision Game, with the cast of nine now split into three teams of three in different wards of the same building, unable to directly interact with each other. This time the way to escape is to open the X door, which requires six passwords to open, a password being revealed upon the death of each participant.

The risk of death for participants comes after they complete an escape room, where they are forced to make a decision that has life or death consequences for themselves or others. As a further complication, after a certain amount of time elapses the bracelet on each character injects them with a drug that knocks them out and erases their memory of what they just experienced.

Instead of following events in a linear order, the player picks out different fragments to play, covering periods where the characters are awake, and each of the three teams having their own fragments. This means you’re just as clueless as the characters about what point of the game they’re at, creating a near constant sense of uncertainty around who is still alive. If you encounter a fragment where a character is already dead, you know it must happen in one of the other fragments. And your only clue for the status of other teams is the amount of passwords revealed.

Each team has its own viewpoint character to play as. C team fragments have you play as Carlos, whose partners are Junpei and Akane from 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors. D team’s focus character is Diana, partnered with Sigma and Phi from Virtue’s Last Reward. Q team’s central character is an amnesiac child named Q, partnered with fellow new characters Eric and Mira.

In other words, the teams are themed around a different entry of the trilogy, with Q team representing Zero Time Dilemma itself. But while the team system helps give each set of three their own fleshed out dynamic, it is a little disappointing to have no room for them to interact with each other. There could have been interesting interactions between the casts of the prior two games and new characters, but they are sealed off from each other.

The other big change is abandoning the visual novel sections for cutscenes. This has the issue of the models and animations being where the game most shows its handheld system origins and limited budget due to just barely getting made in the first place. Personally it didn’t disrupt my immersion, but if you have a lower tolerance for this sort of clunkiness it could become an issue. And regardless the models and animations are far from praise worthy.

Being the least linear of the trilogy it’s the most variable in how you experience it. One part of the plot that others described as a boringly obvious twist didn’t even register as a twist to me due to being featured in one of the first fragments I played. What was obvious telegraphing to others became exposition and dramatic irony in my playthrough.

It’s also the most brutal of the trilogy. For all the clunk brought on by the shift to cutscenes, seeing the many possible deaths of the cast play out in real time rather than prose and static images does amplify the terror. The Nonary Games only had the threat of death, the Decision Game is explicitly about causing death.

On the whole I enjoyed the game and its storyline, but some plot twists felt more aimed at the player than the characters in the story. There has always been a meta element to the trilogy, but some twists felt like a step too far. There is also a surprising amount of inconsistency with Virtue’s Last Reward on the exact details Virtue’s Last Reward was clearly setting up to be expanded on in a sequel, or that set up simply not being explored or used.

Despite all of its imperfections, I do like where Zero Time Dilemma leaves the series. What 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors introduced and Virtue’s Last Reward expanded on, Zero Time Dilemma instead openly challenges.

Sum

This has gone on for longer than most issues of this feature due to discussing three games at once, but they do all form together in one larger narrative, talking about them separately wouldn’t feel right.

Zero Escape is not a perfectly cohesive trilogy, each game comes across as running by slightly different rules of how the setting works, but still fits as one overarching story. And that story is the sort I sometimes think about long after having played the games.

UFO 50 is much more than just a compilation. Each game is given three objectives of increasing difficulty for you to potentially aim for, garden gift, gold disk, and cherry disk.

Gold is generally just for beating the game and gives the game a gold frame in the menu. Cherry is an extra bonus challenge like reaching a certain score or 100% completion, that gives the game a cherry colored frame.

Garden gifts are the lowest rung of difficulty but have the most interesting reward. The garden is a litle display with a pig man and his house, which starts out quite empty. As you collect garden gifts the house and yard gain the items in question, and the pig man will interact with them. It’s a simple virtual pet like set up.

Since the garden gifts are comparatively easy to get, they incentivize trying out each game. Maybe the gold is too hard or you don’t like the game enough to get it, but the garden gift won’t ask as much. But they can put up a bit of a challenge too depending on the game, letting them serve as end goals if you wish.

I wish more game compilations would take this approach, it makes the collection itself feel like a game and encourages you to give things a proper chance instead of bouncing off them after a few game overs. Companies like Nintendo and Sega should start taking notes from UFO Soft on how to present their back catalog.

With 50 games it’s hard to talk about specific ones. The variety of UFO Soft’s games is incredible, their drive to experiment so great even sequels feel meaningfully distinct mechanically, not just straight upgrades or more of the same.

Many UFO Soft games laid the foundations for games that would codify entire genres. Party House and Rock On! Island are a prototype deckbuilder and tower defense respectively, the latter coming about because the developers couldn’t get the units in their strategy game to move right, so they simply removed it outright.

For me playing Grimstone and Kick Club were taste expanding experiences, the appeal of old directionless RPGs and single screen arcade games clicked when I played them. By the time I finally beat Kick Club my score was high enough that I got the cherry disc.

It’s a buffet, so it’s up to you to pick what and how you play. You may be content with just a handful of games. But if you want to dig deep, UFO 50 itself has secrets.

There is a terminal option in the pause menu that lets you inputs codes, and one that is hidden in plain sight will send you on a scavenger hunt across the entire collection. Each clue requires going to part of a game and opening the terminal, which displays the next clue. Eventually this hunt produces a new code that takes you to game 51, the story of UFO Soft itself.

I wasn’t able to reach the preservation team responsible for the game’s long awaited release or the developer of UFO 50 itself, but another UFO Soft alum, Thorson Petter, whose game began the company’s focus on video games, agreed to a brief interview over email, which I have edited for brevity.

Will: Thank you again for agreeing to speak to me. Let’s start at the beginning with your solo project Barbuta, what inspired you to start developing it?

Thorson: A bit of boredom to be honest. My work on the LX System wasn’t always easy, but it was usually boring. So I started programming a game when nobody was looking and nothing was on fire, at first just because I could. I didn’t add any sound because I was worried someone might hear me. Then I got so wrapped up in working on it that I got caught.

And as the commonly repeated story goes, you nearly got fired, but instead it inspired them to pivot to becoming a full on video game company. How exactly did that happen?

Naturally the bosses didn’t like that I had been working on a whole video game instead of my job, so I panicked and made up a story about how I thought it would be a fun bonus for customers, and it made the co-founders decide they wanted to go all in on gaming. To this day I don’t know how I pulled it off.

To jump ahead a little, Mooncat was reportedly designed as a sequel to Barbuta before becoming its own thing. What inspired you to attempt a Barbuta 2? How did it become Mooncat?

As my first game it was a little rough around the edges, and even in just a few years my understanding of how to design games had gotten deeper.

One of the biggest, and fairest in my opinion, complaints people have about Barbuta is that the movement is slow and boring when there aren’t obstacles or enemies. So I started with how to make moving more interesting, and I like games that don’t explain themselves and force you to figure things out.

Eventually this got me to make the controls themselves a sort of puzzle, people were getting better at video games in general, so I wanted something that’d recapture the feeling of not even knowing how to move. And what I had was so different from Barbuta it didn’t make sense to call it Barbuta 2 anymore, I needed a player character who looked weird enough to control weirdly, so the knight had to go.

Most of your directed games tend to have vague stories. Do you have a full picture of each game’s story yourself, like the implied connection with Barbuta in one of Mooncat’s endings?

I think it’s more interesting when there isn’t a set answer to find out, so I didn’t worry about making one. Part of the fun for me with a lot of early games is having the space to expand on it with my own imagination, things had to be implied so there was more room for interpretation.

There’s been a lot of talk about the recent release of UFO 50 and its secrets. How did you feel when you heard the news about it and the scavenger hunt in it?

I still keep in touch with some of the people from UFO Soft, but it felt unreal to have all of our old work suddenly put in the lime light again. It got all of us reminiscing a little about how much has changed since then, and how strange things got in the last few years of UFO Soft. That all feels like another lifetime.

I’m actually happy Greg used some of my games for the little scavenger hunt he made, it gives them another layer of mystery. As for the game it unlocks, well it got a lot of us from UFO Soft talking to and about each other again, I’ll say that. I’d rather put all the past company drama behind me.

UFO Soft never existed, Thorson Petter is a fictional character. That ‘interview’ was a work of fanfiction I just tricked some of you into reading.

In reality UFO Soft is a modern game pairing modern design with a faux retro aesthetic and frame narrative, one that captures the spirit of exploration and discovery with old games rather than mindlessly repeating or imitating nostalgic symbols.

It’s like a video game equivalent to the Decameron, each game works as its own individual game and can be analyzed in the context of the wider collection to reveal the characterization of the fictional game developers.

Only the hidden game gives a ‘direct’ look at the developers, which is quite clearly GREG-MILK’s caricatures of them, it’s how he views them, so it has to be taken with a grain of salt, which makes them all the more fascinating.

For me UFO 50 was the game of the year for 2024. A work so well crafted it incites my own creative impulse. I drank deeply, quickly deciding I wanted to write this, but knowing that even after 100 hours I needed to experience more.

There are still games in UFO 50 calling my name, but my goal of completing the garden and game 51 (which has a name, but I’ll leave it to you to discover) was fulfilled. It’s rare to see such a flexible game, others could have fulfilling experiences without ever learning of the 51^st game. UFO 50 is about play itself, you get out what you put in.

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I have a problem of browsing youtube too much, but sometimes it leads me to good things, like when I saw the trailer for a puppet show and subscribed so I could watch it as it uploaded. That puppet show is Northern Tails, a mockumentary where a crew of arctic ground squirrels work to make an educational show about the Canadian Boreal Forest and the animals that live in it, as well as the challenges they are facing due to climate change.

Each episode opens with the host Scout Perry talking to her crew about the featured character for the day’s episode, then follows a day in the life of said subject, with Scout narrating a short animated educational segment and another segment where a fox interviews humans to see what they know about the animal of the episode.

While the characters are shown using technology like social media, it does not shy away from the matter of some of them being prey and others being predators. Instead it mines that as a source of dark humor, like the running gag of a squirrel in Scout’s crew getting snatched up by an eagle.

Its hard to think of any recent media using actual puppets that have no connection to Jim Henson, so that was part of what drew my interest to Northern Tails. While you can’t see the pupeeters, you can see the connecting lines used to move the puppets, espeically on the arms. I didn’t find that jarring however, I accepted it as part of the show’s visual style.

All of the major characters have somewhat anthropomorphic designs, they all stand on two legs and walk like humans, but are clearly animals. Other minor characters are less anthropomorphized and simply the animal without any extra touches. My favorite of the puppets in the show is definitely Michael Jay (a fox), he’s cute.

The episodes are all short, watching the entire first season only takes a little over an hour. Which makes sense for a show being broadcast on youtube. The episode titles and thumbnails also play into the mockumentary format, coming off as though they were created by Scout’s film crew.

My biggest complaint is that we don’t get to see the main characters interact with each other much, but part of that is owed to the faithfulness towards animal behavior. I can think of a very good reason why Isabelle (a caribou influencer) doesn’t share any scenes with the wolf family.

Still, with the animals that don’t actively try to eat each other I wish they had more time to interact. But the approach the show takes is more dedicating an episode to one character with their own small supporting cast. So this is more a matter of inaccurate expectations compared to what the show was actually doing.

With how short and sweet the whole thing is I definitely suggest at least watching the first episode. It’s fun, and educational, but not in the way where it is talking down to you. I’m thankful I came upon it.

The problem with trying things that are genuinely new is the lack of prior examples to build off of, to be experimental is to accept a bit of clunk and roughness as a trade off.

This came to mind when playing The Crush House, a video game where you play as the camerawoman/producer for the titular reality TV show about four people spending a week in the same house. You pick the cast from a pool of twelve candidates, spend the day walking around the house filming them, set things up for the next day at night, and continue until next season gives you a new cast.

The difficulty of the game comes from its audience and ad system. Each day has its own random group of audience demographics you must please by filming what they want, which ranges from the expected like drama lovers to people who want you to focus on water features or landscaping. Once you get enough points for an audience, they are considered sated for the day, and you need to sate enough audiences each day to progress.

On top of that you also need gaps in filming to air ads, which will let you earn money to buy props for the house that make pleasing the myriad audiences easier. Buying props is your main way to strategize for how to handle the upcoming days, and they carry over between seasons thankfully.

But this isn’t just pure reality TV simulation, there’s a plot that is progressed by clearing sidequests for the cast, which require you to film or not film certain things. For example one character wants you to avoid filming them smoking for a day and film them working out to set a good image for their parents,. After enough sidequests you’ll begin to uncover the truth behind the show.

It’s a rather distinctive game, I can’t easily compare it to others I have played. Generally it’s about running around the house to get the best shots possible, trying to keep track of where each cast member is to avoid missing out on something potentially juicy. It rewards awareness of your enviornment.

However, due to how absurd some of the audiences are and the randomization of which ones you have for the day, it’s incredibly easy to get a set up that penalizes actually trying to film the cast. At one point I was stuck, unable to please enough audiences to progress, until I abandoned the idea of actually trying to include the cast in my footage and just filmed different spots in the house, which let me finally progress.

Even if the audience doesn’t, I would like to see what drama the cast of the show is getting into, especially since the narrative wants you to care about them to some extent. But instead I’m stuck filming the lighthouses because experience has taught me anything else will make me redo the entire day. The optimal strategy is at odds with how it feels the game should play with its premise, and not using it has too much risk.

I played the game on the normal difficulty setting as the game stated it was the intended experience, but I wonder if it might be better on the easier difficulty where you don’t need to please audiences to progress. The challenge of lining up the right shots for the set of audiences was nice, but took away from the fantasy of the game a little too often.

Thankfully the cast member sidequests generally force you to maintain awareness of the cast so you know if you’ll have a chance to fulfill it even when your audience for the day are plumbers, landscaping enthuisasts, art lovers, and pyromaniacs.

And quenching the specficic audiences thirsts can sometimes be a bit of interesting puzzle to solve. It took me until around the final day of the game to notice something that had been in the background the entire time that was key to pleasing certain demographics, finally observing it was a standout moment. That felt like a clever piece of design.

I also had a nice moment of irony when a character discussed how they left their modeling career due to being oversexualized while my camera was fully zoomed in on their ass because I needed to please the butt lover demographic. That was another highlight of my playthrough

And once it got going I was hooked on the plot of the game, especially when the reveal I saw coming was done in a way that I especially liked. It had me excited to see where things were going. Then the ending came with a choice to make, and after seeing both outcomes I immediately reloaded to figure out what I needed to do to see the true ending. Only a little bit in did it occur to me to google if there was a third ending, and it turned out there wasn’t.

Normally video games commonly accused of having bad endings actually don’t, people are just mad it wasn’t a feel good ending. The Crush House’s endings disappointed me because they felt incomplete, lacking in catharsis. It’s not even the actual sequence of events that disappoint me, its the abruptness of it, how rushed it felt. A moment I had been eagerly anticpating simply came and went.

So if you’re willing to accept the roughness that comes with venturing off the beaten path, I would recommend The Crush House. It’s flawed in a way where I still consider it more valuable and worthy of discussion than yet another paint by numbers member of a well established genre.

This year marks the 70^th anniversary White Christmas, a well established member of my family’s canon of seasonal movies. So with the combination of month and year it’s only fitting that I write about it.

The musical follows a duo of entertainers/producers, Phil and Bob, and a pair of performing sisters, Betty and Judy. After some mishaps and manipulation they all arrive at a small struggling inn, which turns out to be run by Phil and Bob’s former general from World War II, General Waverly. Seeing the dire straits of the inn, partially as a result of there not being any snow, our cast of entertainers take it upon themselves to help out by putting on a show.

This isn’t a movie where the plot matters that much however, the real draw is the music, with the plot existing to go from one song to the next. You will not remember most character names after watching the movie. I had to look them up for this post, mostly you’ll identify them via phrases like ‘Bing Crosby’s character.’

I did like the contrast of Phil being a little awkward socially while also being the biggest manipulator in the cast. If you put him on the spot he’ll stutter, but also he launched his entertainment career via faking an injury and guilt tripping, he’s a natural liar. It’s a fun mix of traits.

In terms of tone the move is mostly light and breezy, it’s the kind that regularly makes call backs to its own songs, not as ironic fourth wall leaning meta humor but as the characters having fun by repeating bits of the song, like people who have just seen a musical. And the songs are indeed that fun.

One song in particular, ‘Sisters,’ has become such a running joke within my own family that if I didn’t specifically mention it somewhere in this post I know I would be approached about it. I know all the words to it by heart and not by choice. Help.

Naturally with a movie that’s now seventy years old, it has some dated moments. The movie works off a very specific moment in time, since it’s about the relationships forged serving in World War II well after the war has ended. Also at one point a character being in Alaska is described as being out of the country.

Most of the random songs with no plot importance tend to be about nostalgia for specific things, like complaining about the current state of the theater. Which brings me to an aside that I know will repulse some people from the movie and so should be brought up now.

One of the nostalgia songs is about minstrel shows. It’s a sanitized recollection that doesn’t even mention blackface, or anything racial, a deep whitewashing in both senses of the word. If you’re watching casually enough to miss or not pay attention to the lyrics (like some in my family) it’s easy to miss that it’s about minstrel shows at all if you don’t have knowledge of them beyond ‘that racist old thing with blackface.’

Thankfully the song has no plot relevance since it’s just one of several random numbers included with the excuse of being rehearsal (despite not appearing in the actual show at the film’s climax), so it’s easy to skip past if you don’t want to view it. It’s a jarring speed bump in a movie that otherwise holds up well.

On a lighter note, something that occurred to me on my latest viewing was that in one way the movie was somewhat prescient. The conflict in the latter half of the movie revolves around someone proposing that the boys televise their show for the general and make a show out of ‘playing Santa’ for him to promote themselves, which is rejected, but due to enragingly selective eavesdropping is mistakenly assumed to be the intent by others.

That sort of conversation is arguably even more relevant today. I think modern audiences can probably appreciate Bob’s refusal to turn the show for Waverly into content out of respect for him even more than contemporary audiences did. The cast are performers, but their act of kindness towards Waverly is not performative. That part is already relevant for the social media age without any sort of modern reimagining.

For me the highlight of the movie is the performance at the end, a fun sequence of three songs that wrap up the plot, beginning with Waverly seeing his former regiment gathered to cheer him up and concluding with the titular song as it finally begins to snow.

This movie is style over substance and doesn’t pretend to be something else. Which makes it difficult to say much more about it beyond discussing how certain aspects have aged. It’s simple light hearted fun, and that’s enough.

It is common to look for reflections of one’s own self in ancient sources, common enough to often be a cause of people creating and spreading falsehoods about the past. For me one of the works where I felt the most seen, the most understood, was a fragmented Ancient Egyptian poem. I discovered it through the book Ancient Egyptian Literature An Anthology, translated by John L. Foster, there titled The Debate Between a Man Tired of Life and His Soul.

Talking about this poem individually in a non-academic context isn’t the easiest task, it’s fragmented, notoriously difficult to translate, and open to varying interpretations in a translation shaping way. I will start by discussing it as I first read it when I was much younger, then I will discuss some developments with how the poem is understood today.

As I read it

If I had to compile a list of works that were fundamental to shaping me, The Debate would be an essential inclusion. Usually writing about something for the newsletter prompts me to revisit it, this was the other way around. I picked up the book again to reread that one poem, then decided that I wanted to write about it.

As the title indicates, the poem consists of a single heated conversation between a man and his ba, his own soul. The man despairs over the state of the world and longs for the afterlife while his ba seeks to convince him to live, which offers an interesting angle on Ancient Egyptian views of what makes up a person. Notably the two insult each other over the course of their argument, it is not a harmonious relationship.

When I read the poem, I recognized my own words in the man’s speech. Even divided by culture and time, the feelings expressed were mine. My impression was that only someone who experienced suicidal ideation could have possibly written it. This ancient author understood me at a time when school surrounded me with adults who didn’t have any interest in understanding me or what they did to me.

The timelessness of the poem also became another source of despair in itself. It swept any notion of ‘it gets better’ aside and confirmed my belief that the sentiment was a lie, because it clearly hasn’t, not since the time of the pharaohs. Despair is immortal. Human civilization will always have it, and civilization is too important not to have, especially for someone like me who depends on modern technology to stay alive.

Yet the poem made me feel less alone in a time where my existence felt solitary. It proved that my feelings were real when there are many determined to deny that teenagers can feel anything real. It was a revelation.

One section that stands out to me coming back to the poem years later is the refrain of “who is there to talk to today,” which conveys the sense of isolation well.

“Who is there to talk to today? / No man of satisfied mind; / One to walk quietly with does not exist.

Who is there to talk to today? / I am bowed too low with my misery / lacking someone to share the thoughts in my heart.

Who is there to talk to today? / Wrongdoing beats on the earth, / and of it there is no end.”

Since I’ve spoken much of the poem’s timelessness, I want to balance that by making a note that the Ancient Egyptian afterlife is also important for understanding this poem. Both in the very premise of the man arguing with his ba, with each referring to the other as a brother, and how the man speaks of his expected afterlife, wanting to fight for the gods and make offerings. In that way it like many other works is an interesting snapshot of a specific culture.

Newer developments

While the poem remains incomplete, more fragments have been found, specifically concerning the beginning of the poem, as recorded by Marina Escolano-Poveda in the article New Fragments of Papyrus Berlin 3024: The Missing Beginning of the Debate between a Man and his Ba and the Continuation of the Tale of the Herdsman (P. Mallorca I and II).

With these new fragments much context is added to The Debate Between a Man Tired of Life and His Soul, where it is now known to have a frame narrative featuring a woman and a sick man, who may be the same man whose discourse with his ba comprises the rest of the poem.

Interestingly the woman is named Ankhet, which is the name of a goddess, but said goddess has only been attested in sources younger than the poem, which with other limited context of the fragment indicates she is a human.

That the central character of the poem is a sick man offers a potentially major piece of context for his despair, he is terminally ill. This illness is not named or specified in any recovered piece of the poem, and it is noted by Escolano-Poveda that the Ancient Egyptians believed psychological stress could lead to physical illness, so it’s possible the illness itself is despair, but it’s also not certain.

There are interpretations of the poem that do not involve suicide, but I feel I can still find room for my own reading regarding suicide within this expanded context.

Escolano-Poveda also notes that other Ancient Egyptian literature will sometimes end without returning to the frame story that introduced it. She offers the possibility that the central debate may have been within the sick man’s dream, and that it ends where it does because the man being present in the beginning to describe his dream shows that he did listen to the words of his ba. 

Truthfully, I am not one who should be consulted on academic readings of this poem. My own reading is too personal, I have too much emotional attachment to it. And this poem has been a subject of debate for over one hundred years.

My own feelings are not relevant to any academic discourse or analysis of additional fragments that may be found in the future. I don’t want to distort research to get the result I want. But art is about connection, and I feel connected to this poem, which is important in its own way.

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The titular location is a dream world that the player insert character arrives in one day. Once a prosperous place filled with Disney characters, an event known as The Forgetting caused the residents to lose their memories and the valley to be overrun with thorns, leading to many fleeing the valley. Thankfully the player character has the abilities needed to restore the valley.

Once you get the valley past its initial completely ruined state, the plot becomes less immediately urgent. You strike a balance of farming/resource gathering, spending time with marketable Disney friends, and progressing the plot by unlocking new areas of the valley and completing their respective questline.

Each new area of the valley is blocked off by thorns that require a Dreamlight resource to dispel. Dreamlight is earned by completing various tasks, like increasing your friendship with characters or harvesting a certain amount of crops. You have no choice but to take things slow rather than rush, which actually feels fitting for the game’s tone.

It’s a casual game where you can decorate a little village and your home, not an intensive quest. At the same time there’s also more clear cut and lengthy progression than something like Animal Crossing. Paths will be barred until you get the right upgrade, and shops have clearly labeled upgrade costs instead of coming whenever you spend enough money at it. And there’s an actual story that doesn’t vanish after the tutorial.

For the most part the game isn’t too story heavy, then the final area of the valley ramps up the focus and led to an ending that resonated with me. There’s even a content warning in one late game quest, which I felt was a bit excessive, but shows that the game is about to go deeper than just making you get x amount of y item that suddenly refuses to appear.

Being a Disney crossover, your fellow villagers are the main appeal. Merlin is the go to explainer for anything plot related, Mickey Mouse is obviously one of the first characters you meet, Scrooge McDuck and Goofy are the main shopkeepers, and the roster expands from there. New villagers are found either in the sealed off parts of the valley, or separate realms that also take Dreamlight to reach.

Despite being a mostly peaceful game, several villains end up as part of your local community. There is an option to get rid of villagers you don’t like, but I’ve found that the villains fit better than expected. They add bits of conflict to the day to day life of the village.

Each character comes with their own series of side quests that unlock as you increase your friendship with them, some of which are required to unlock other characters. These are where you get to see a wide range of fun interactions between Disney characters, like Mushu appointing himself the Beast’s therapist, or Ariel and Wall-E trading items from their respective collections.

The fastest way to level up a character’s friendship is to hang out with them, where they’ll accompany you and help with certain actions. You almost always want a friend by your side, both for the friendship points and the increased yields when fishing, mining, gardening, or foraging. Which fits with the core appeal of the game, having Disney characters around, so I think it was a smart design decision.

I like that the developers were willing to embrace the quirks of the cast, small characters like Remy and Mushu are allowed to be small, while Ariel and Ursula keep to the water. Though you’re unable to hang out with Ariel or Ursula unless either is in human form, which makes leveling up their friendship difficult. And Ariel’s human form is one of several things you can only get after completing Ursula’s questline, which requires reaching the maximum friendship level with Ursula.

Of the various characters I think Scar has the most interesting portrayal. He has some fondness for the player avatar, but is ultimately still his same scheming self, both of these come out well in the last act of the main quest. I also liked Merlin taking an almost parental role with the player character, which again came across most strongly in the last act.

Inventory and storage was my main pain point while playing the game. There are so many items to gather and collect, and inventory space is limited. Even the chests you can build will quickly fill up, unless you use Dreamlight, you know the currency needed to get new characters and progress the game, to craft larger chests that will still fill up but more slowly.

You’ll want to stockpile items too. At first I sold all the gems I got from mining, then kept running into quests that required gems as items, which took an annoying amount of time to complete due to not having them on hand. Sorry Donald, the nearby mining spots aren’t coughing up any emeralds all of a sudden so you’ll have to stay in the weird dark dimension for a little longer.

Most of my house in the game is just chests to store my items. And I’m still struggling for inventory space. I don’t care much for the decoration aspect of the game, but I felt locked out of it for a while by my need for storage space. Apparently even the developers have joked about being scared of people’s storage solutions, to which my response is give us better storage then.

For a more severe issue, despite being a game with an up front price tag, the game has some free to play elements. In the game’s menu you can access a store using a currency acquired either in packs of fifty per day, or by spending real money. For sale are various in game items and new outfits for some villagers. And the game has its own version of the ‘battlepass’ system found in multiplayer games these days, referred to as ‘starpaths’ due to a lack of battles.

I found it easy to ignore the in game shop, but the fact that it exists at all is not good. And as mentioned earlier one of the premium items is Ursula’s human form, which does in fact change the gameplay by making her friendship easier to level up. Use your free currency on that, it will make things far more convenient. But then try to forget about the shop if you’re the type to be suckered into spending a ton on ‘free’ games.

On a less negative note, this game is still getting updates, and despite the presence of a paid expansion with another being teased, there are still new characters getting added to the base game alongside other new features and refinements. While I have yet to get the current expansion (A Rift In Time), the base game has been such a fun experience that I do aim to eventually get it.

Also to close this off, and in the classic spirit of talking about any crossover game, there’s one character in particular I hope gets added.

Where the fuck is Lilo? The movie is Lilo and Stitch, stop separating them and only adding Stitch while we have pretty much the entire main Frozen and Lion King cast and also Nala. Lilo would fit right in both thematically with the game’s narrative about forgotten memories and in terms of fun character interactions.

Regardless of how future updates turn out (rant above aside), I’ve already had a good experience with Disney Dreamlight Valley that felt complete. And I like its more laid back approach to a crossover game. Not every video game crossover needs to involve competition or fighting, and I’m glad to see some big name experimentation in that department.

I’m not the only one and nowhere near the first to make a fake video game project. In fact I found an entire video on the subject of media taking the form of fake video games, and Apple Quest Monsters DX was among those featured. Written as a guidebook for a fake monster collector RPG on the Gameboy Color, it tells its story almost entirely through the flavor text of monsters.

Because of this format you don’t get to directly see any scenes, almost all the dialogue can be found in the book’s brief intermission section, and there’s no information given on the player character who clearly does exist. You’re reading a guidebook for a game you don’t own, this is a secondhand experience of the narrative.

Don’t mistake the indirect delivery of story for the absence of one however, the goal of reaching the Holy Orchard is made quite clear. The habitats of the monsters and boss battle help visualize the different sections of the game.

Though I am finding the unusual format makes it a little difficult to discuss the overall story without immediately giving certain things away. There is one detail I only noticed on a second read that added greatly to my understanding of what was going on.

What’s easier to talk about is how funny the book is. The monster designs are often comedic, like a beetle rolling a snowball. And the descriptions will usually get out a sensible chuckle or two. Each monster takes up just one page, so the pace goes smoothly, each turn of the page letting you see a new fun monster.

And as a monster collector, you can make a team of the monsters you encounter. The guide gives the basic rules for constructing a team, but then points out that since the game isn’t real you could just ignore it. I played along with the rules, my end game team for my latest playthrough was Green Lion, Snowman Beetle, and Frog Stack.

Fake game projects like this are also fun to me when you take some time to really play along with imagining the game. Yes the game doesn’t exist but Boogie Church’s boss battle theme is a stand out on the OST and I kept listening to it on Youtube for days after finishing the game, absolutely true story you can listen to it here.

As a side note: the creator, splendidland, was responsible for designing several characters in Deltarune Chapter 2, and starting off the ‘don’t talk to me or my son ever again’ meme. That’s quite the resume.

For those interested, you can buy a PDF of the book on itch.io at this link. Physical copies are sadly not available at this time. When they do become available I’d certainly like to get one, if I can create the space in my bookshelves for it.

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The Story

This game’s story is just outright absurd in a really fun way. Fish do not exist in the world of Sushi Striker, instead sushi is made by magical Sushi Sprites, compete with plates. The Empire and the Republic had a war called the Sushi Struggles over if sushi should be shared freely or kept to only a select few despite being a literal infinite resource conjured from thin air. Naturally since this is backstory the empire won. The titular Sushi Strikers are people who fight by eating sushi, which seems to be the only form of combat in this world.

At the start the player character, an orphan in the now occupied Republic, hates sushi because their parents died in the Sushi Struggles. After getting one bite they become obsessed with sushi. Unfortunately the wandering Sushi Striker who gave them sushi gets captured by the Empire, so the player character forms a pact with a Sushi Sprite to fight back against the Empire and share sushi with the whole world.

It’s the sort of story where even at moments where the plot gets a little dramatic it tends to still be hilarious due to the premise. The blatant Char/Darth Vader clone fights the same way as anyone else, by eating sushi. One boss is given the title of ‘Sushi Heretic’ with complete seriousness after the horrifying reveal that he throws away the rice that comes with his sushi. Prisoners are tortured by being force fed wasabi nonstop. It loops around to being even funnier because it’s taken seriously.

Of course most of the time the game is in full comedy mode. One of the Empire’s generals is an adult fully grown woman who calls herself ‘pwincess,’ accompanied by a simp butler army that goes along with it. Most of the time the player character is playing the straight man to comical one off enemies.

This is a game that is deeply silly and owns it, keeping up the sushi theming all the way no matter how absurd it gets. My main complaint is that some questions in the plot are rather clearly left unanswered in the end, where what I thought was building up to something led to nothing. It feels like they were leaving things open for a sequel, but in a way where things could end there and it’d mostly be fine aside from still wondering what the fuck was up with that weird guy.

The basics of gameplay

In terms of gameplay, Sushi Striker is a puzzle game about eating sushi by lining up plates of the same color and then throwing the empty plates at your opponent until their health reaches zero. The sushi comes across the screen on three rows of constantly moving conveyor belts, so you have to eat and stack before they pass by. Thankfully on most stages the central lane goes in the opposite direction of the top and bottom, which will lead to same colored plates lining up.

Stacks of plates are thrown automatically once you have more than five ready, but you can also throw them manually. Throwing stacks of the same color one after the other will make a combo, with more damage if taller stacks start the combo, so you want to use manual throws to optimize damage. There’s also a ranking of plate colors by strength and rarity, with less frequently appearing colors being more powerful.

The speed of the conveyor belts can be increased by selecting a plate and staying still. With increased speed it can become harder to stack up the plates, but you also have the potential for larger stacks by jumping back and forth between lanes.

Once you’ve eaten enough sushi, a Sushi Bonanza will start. While it lasts plates come in at least pairs of the same color, plates of higher quality start appearing, and stacks you throw will inflict more damage. This is when you want to go all out, but with the limited time you need to balance making stacks of more powerful plates versus throwing all your stacks while they get the damage boost.

However, your opponent will also be eating sushi from their own lanes and throwing plates at you. When enemy plates hit, they can knock some plates off of your own prepared stacks. They have their own Sushi Bonanza gauge as well.

There’s also another interaction with your enemy. You actually have access to four lanes, the fourth being the shared lane that both you and your opponent can use. Using the shared lane to build up a stack can be risky if your opponent grabs the plate of sushi you were counting on first, but you can just as easily deny them openings to use it.

If you get a stack of seven more plates a glowing plate that can go with any other plate will appear. You can’t use it to change colors mid stack, but any stacks, including a glowing plate won’t be lessened by enemy attacks. And when thrown a glowing stack will combo with whatever comes before and after it. You want to make and get glowing plates whenever you can, there’s no downside to them.

On the 3DS your lanes and the shared lane are on the bottom screen, while your opponent and their lanes are on the top screen. You can tell the game was made with the 3DS in mind with how naturally things divide between the screens. Lining up the sushi with a stylus also gives the game a more intuitive feel. That’s why I suggest playing the 3DS version rather than the Switch, even if the 3DS version no longer has online multiplayer.

Surprise it’s also a monster collector

Where the game creates a lot of variety is with the Sushi Sprites. These are creatures you can equip up to three of before a stage who let you use their skill during a stage once you eat enough sushi. Some skills create sweets that heal you, others put obstacles in enemy lanes, and a large list of other effects. And enemies can use these Sushi Sprites as well.

Most importantly, Sushi Sprites contribute their stats to yours. There are only two stats, health and attack, whose functions are rather self explanatory.

As you use a Sushi Sprite it will level up, letting you use higher tiers of plates and eventually transforming into a stronger form. By the end of the game the upper tiers of plates become a regular part of your strategy while at the start they were impossible to get.

Getting new Sushi Sprites can be annoying however. You can get new ones by doing well on stages where they appear on the enemy team, but it comes down to chance both in even getting one and then which one joins you. And having multiple of a Sushi Sprite join you is how you make their skills stronger. I did not bother with the skill increase grind and just used items for boosting skills instead.

You go from one stage to the next by moving to it on the world map. While stages are unlocked in a linear order, you’re free to go back and replay past stages, upgrade your Sushi Sprites, or play optional bonus stages if you unlocked them, before taking on the next one.

Bonus stages are unlocked by completing enough of the three optional objectives in each stage. Some optional objectives are about clearing quickly or making a tall enough stack, but others require you to use a certain Sushi Sprite or withhold from using a certain mechanic.

The bonus stages are naturally much harder than what precedes them. At times I had to put doing them on hold until I got further in the game and had leveled up more. Completing them however rewards you with a unique Sushi Sprite that has a powerful ability, like being able to stack plates that have obstacles between them.

I’d suggest playing the game in short bursts, since it’s the same core gameplay throughout and easy to pick up and put down between stages. But, I got so into it that it wasn’t how I played.

In general Sushi Striker caught me off guard with how much I liked it. Nintendo has no shortage of hidden gems once you look past the familiar franchise labels, and this is one of them.

The central joke of the story goes as follows: the evil king has kidnapped the hero’s love interest and is forcing her to marry him. The hero arrives and makes a grand speech about offering her love over wealth. The love interest chooses wealth and marries the king.

Everything about Galavant is essentially an expansion of that joke, which is the very start of the show. The titular hero abandoned the knight in shining armor business after he was rejected. Meanwhile Richard and Madalena, the evil king and damsel in distress, have an awful loveless marriage where not even Richard taking over another kingdom because Madalena wants a jewel is enough to make her like him.

Our real story begins when Isabella, princess of said occupied country, arrives with the jewel at Galavant’s doorstep seeking help. Galavant is out of shape and uninterested, only spurred to action upon discovering that King Richard is the one occupying it, and that Madalena has come to regret her decision.

Except Isabella made that detail about Madalena up, because she was actually coerced into working for King Richard to lead Galavant into a trap. Richard wants to kill Galavant due to constantly being compared unfavorably to Galavant, as he sings about in his villain song in the first episode.

And from this starting point we get an adventure full of even more catchy songs and laughs. Both of which are hard to convey in a textual format oh no. To sum up the style of humor, it mainly comes from characters bantering and light fourth wall breaks. The entire cast regularly does things like argue over who was supposed to get the big finish in a song or point out when something is actually pretty progressive for the middle ages.

I’d also describe it as ‘Disney but characters can swear and mention sex’ but worry that might paint an inaccurate picture of the show. Galavant doesn’t go overboard with the ability to make jokes not suited for younger audiences, as in they’re actually funny and not just a string of curses, as you can see from the linked song. And it still has to deal with TV standards that censor some swears, or maybe the bleeps are part of the joke, or both.

At its core Galavant is genuinely a story about knights and love, just one that likes having fun in the process of telling it. The subversive opening of the first episode simply sets the stage for the actual story the show wants to tell. Galavant and Isabella’s romance is incredibly telegraphed and far from revolutionary, but it has more weight from the opening with Madalena. And Richard is clearly bothered by the lack of love in his relationship with Madalena, ultimately proving Galavant right.

Speaking of Madalena, she is my favorite character from the show without a doubt. I could write a whole other post just about her and how she’s the axis on which the entire show revolves, both a simple love to hate figure and one of the more nuanced members of the cast.

The songs also carry the range of fourth wall breaking comedy and real emotion. Most have a strong comedic element for obvious reasons, but there are a few songs that get to stand out as mostly serious. It passes the test of me listening to its music on repeat after finishing the show.

In the first season screentime is mainly divided between Galavant’s near constantly bickering group and King Richard trying to really win Madalena’s affection, with attempts ranging from trying to act more manly to doing a stand up comedy routine. If you like comedic, incompetent to the point of sympathy villains, you’ll love King Richard and his antics. As the show goes on he arguably becomes more compelling than Galavant.

The second season essentially reshuffles the cast, breaking up the established dynamics between characters in order to explore new ones. Because of this it ends up having to split its time between more plotlines, which doesn’t favor everyone equally. Even in the first season I felt some aspects suffered from a runtime too short to be delved into, and that’s more of a problem here with more going on and only two more episodes of runtime.

This is less of a surprise when you see that by two more episodes I mean there were ten instead of eight. And I mean actual TV sized episodes, not hour long mini movies. With the need for multiple songs per episode it makes sense they couldn’t stretch it out too much, but again it does result in some parts of the plot being clearly rushed. The end of the first season felt like less of an ending and more of a scramble to set up the pitch for a second season.

While there’s plenty of fan demand for a third season, I actually felt that season two did provide a natural and satisfying end for the show. There’s room for more adventures from some characters, but others have too well done of an ending to take away from. It feels like a complete story, one I advise experiencing.