The original Ni No Kuni fell very much into the “flawed, but fantastic” category for me. The sequel looks like it will also fall into that category, but it looks to be flawed and fantastic in very different ways than the original.

calling the original TMNT comics “satirical” is a bit of a stretch. In spite of the inherent silliness of the titular characters, they were paying a very sincere homage to Frank Miller in that first issue (and to Jack Kirby in subsequent arcs)

Raphael was arguably the star of the movie (Even if he spent a good chunk of it unconscious) but the only person who would call him the leader was the guy doing the Turtle Power song

D&D Update

Last week, after the Secret of Mana remake enraged me with its thicket of murder-Chobins, I did a quick playthrough of Mass Effect. I’m going to go back to Secret of Mana before carrying on with Mass Effect 2. But if SoM pisses me off again, I’ll take a breather with a familiar RPG like Final Fantasy VIII or IX.

One of the writer/artists on Steven Universe quit Twitter after she was harassed by some fans for failing to indulge their preferred romantic pairing. And there was another incident where a fan-artist who was bullied on Tumblr attempted suicide.

Her Muppet Show episode was absolutely fantastic. She was probably the first special guest to really gel with the Muppets.

It’s funny how Nintendo tries these neat little gimmicky concepts, but then hardly ever iterates on them (unless they end up being extremely huge.)

A lot of the “leave outs” make sense because they don’t really signify the era. A novelty song like “Macarena” or “Cotton Eyed Joe” doesn’t necessarily scream “mid-90s.” If you were to hear either song for the first time today, and asked to date them, you might guess any time from the late 80s to the early 2000s. The…

Are these young-ish people (i.e. born after 1987 or so) who think grunge was dominant in the 90s, or are they people who just kinda lived in a grunge bubble?

Nothing says “early 90s” better than “Two Princes”.

His look reminds me of Squall from Final Fantasy VIII.

One of many things I liked about Shape of Water was that it didn’t have a typical “early ‘60s movie” soundtrack.

It’s a shame that the game was released at a time when there wasn’t a whole lot of deep and thoughtful video game writing out there. Much like Final Fantasy VIII or Majora’s Mask, a lot of people dismissed the game at the time because it was too different than its predecessor. But unlike FF8 and MM, Legend of Mana hasn…

Surely dessert will get its own column.

As I was re-watching Steven Universe last week (the season 1 DVD is finally out! everybody buy it!) I realized that that show basically invented Golf Story. I wonder if Golf Story has a secret ending...

That’s a very apt description. Without the Mana Tree , the people are preoccupied with such mundane concerns.

I only played the new SoM for a half-hour last night, but I can already see that it’s going to be trouble. They changed the way the sprites move, but not the fundamentals of the battle system. It’s a lot easier to miss when you swing your sword, and you still have to pause for a few seconds after every swing.

I’m playing Legend of Mana right now. It’s a delightfully weird game. Rather than tell a single large story, the game is broken down into 67 shorter quests. About half these quests are part of one of the game’s three major questlines, while the rest are mostly stand-alone stories. There’s a great deal of flexibility…

This has me thinking about some of my favorite disasters in open-world game design, when there’s a critical flaw in the way the systems interact, or in one of the key parameters of the system.