#I’m so fucking hype for this movie all the reviews love it

[mst3kproject]

Goncharov

Why the hell is an MST3K blog rising from the dead to review a forgotten Martin Scorcese film?  I'd never heard of this movie until it suddenly became a meme, but I had a day off work and I figured I might as well see what all the fuss was about.  Now I want to talk about what I saw, and this is the only movie blog I have, so I'm doing it here.

Ivan Goncharov is the biggest, baddest motherfucker east of the iron curtain, richer than a tsar and colder than a Siberian winter.  He's got a beef with Neapolitan mafioso Mario Giglioli, so he heads to sunny Italy to confront him in person. His closest confidante, Andrey, thinks it's suicide to do this on Giglioli's home turf but accompanies Goncharov anyway out of loyalty. What follows is a two-hour dick-measuring contest as Goncharov and Giglioli try to out-intimidate each other, culminating in an orgy of gunfire where only one will be left standing... and this is the kind of movie where you can't take it for granted that it'll be the guy whose name is the title.

That's the ostensible plot, anyway.  What makes Goncharov a far more interesting film than such an outline might imply is that the argument between the mobsters is just a backdrop.  Having set up Goncharov's hard as steel, cold as ice reputation in the first act, the movie then sets about deconstructing it.  Goncharov goes from a terrifying figure devoid of all morality to a tragic antihero, a man who has come to believe his own hype so completely that he can no longer let himself be human.

This is demonstrated mainly by watching the breakdown of his relationships over the course of the tense three days in Naples.  The most important person in Goncharov's life is Andrey, the only one he comes near being vulnerable with. Their relationship is depicted as very touchy-feely in a literal sort of way, with Andrey helping Goncharov with his coat and shoes, lighting cigarettes for him, and touching his shoulder or arm as Goncharov confides in him.  The framing emphasizes these touches in a very homoerotic way, and I don't think I've got my tumblr goggles on here.  These guys have fucked.

As Goncharov becomes more and more obsessed with being tougher and more ruthless than Giglioli, whom he sees as an effeminate softie, Andrey tries to persuade him that the other man is not worth this sort of obsession.  Whatever Giglioli did to insult Goncharov (we never find out), Andrey is of the opinion that they should just leave a dead horse in the asshole's bed and move on.  Goncharov's pride will not allow him to do that, and the less subtle Andrey is in his attempts to dissuade him, the more Goncharov pushes him away, finally abandoning him entirely.  The tragedy of the ending comes from the fact that Andrey refuses to abandon Goncharov in turn.

We also see Goncharov with his wife Katya.  He is frequently cruel to her, and she tolerates it because he gives her expensive gifts and because she is seeking a vicarious mending of her relationship with her abusive father - she was never able to earn his love, but perhaps she can earn Goncharov's.  This is doomed to failure, as much because of Goncharov as because Katya doesn't actually want it to succeed.  Nursing a black eye, Katya pours her heart out to a bartender, Sofia, who tries to help her escape... but this cannot work out, either.  As Katya herself says, she doesn't know who she is without her issues.

I am pleased to note, by the way, that every single major character in the movie is named and I can remember them all, which is a bit of a treat for me (I need to watch good movies more often).  The only exception is Goncharov himself.  The end credits list him as Ivan, but nobody ever calls him that, not even Andrey or Katya.  In a flashback scene with his parents, neither calls him by name.  This flashback, fascinatingly, is filmed in the first person, looking through Goncharov's own eyes.  We are not allowed to see him as a younger, softer man.  He refuses to show that side of himself even in the privacy of his memories.

These quieter moments contrast with scenes of ever-escalating brutality, as the Russians and Italians try to force each other to back down by the murder of underlings.  The fact that it is literally a contest, and that Goncharov is aware of this and describes it as such, makes the worsening violence ever more meaningless.  The death of Giglioli's confessor is particularly awful, and the way Goncharov's goons treat the chapel has to be ten times worse if you're Catholic (fun fact: this scene is apparently removed from the Italian version on Netflix, which must make what Andrey says while waiting for the train into a hell of a non sequitur).

At the climax, the two really can't do anything but kill each other, because it's the only place left to go.  Giglioli's priest and mistress are dead.  Goncharov's men are almost all dead or out of action, and Goncharov believes Andrey to be dead.  The initial insult, whatever it was, is no longer relevant.  They have pushed each other to a place where reconciliation is unthinkable.  Whoever blinks first loses, but both have already lost so much that victory means nothing.  Worse, each recognizes that the other is in the same position, and neither can acknowledge it.

This means Goncharov can also moonlight as an examination of violence in media.  Why do movies showcase violence, and why do we watch it?  The initial posturing serves a purpose - Goncharov wants Giglioli to know he's here to personally demand an apology, and Giglioli wants Goncharov to know he's outnumbered and should quit while he still can.  But once it becomes an exercise in one-up-manship, the 'messages’ vanish and the men are now killing for the sake of killing.  Violence in movies can often be gore for gore's sake, pulling out more and more stops in the effort to shock an audience that has been desensitized by years and years of this.  That is what Goncharov and Giglioli are doing to each other.  Truly distressing moments like the fate of the priest, or what Giuseppe "Icepick Joe" Cozzolino (dressed as a maid!) does to Sofia when he assumes she's Katya because she was in Katya's hotel room, make us wonder why we're watching this - and the mobsters wonder why they're doing it.

In the end, it's all just a blood-soaked version of the sunk cost fallacy.  Goncharov had come too far in his vendetta to stop now.  Andrey has followed him too far to turn back.  Katya has been married to him too long to leave.  Of course, any of them could quit at any time and escape from this terrible spiral, but they are unwilling to entertain the possibility.  Like Goncharov himself, Andrey and Katya are prisoners of the identities they have built for themselves, and because their identities are so tied to him, they have to go down with him.

One thing I haven't seen a lot of discussion of on tumblr is the way the film uses the contrast in climate.  Goncharov in Moscow is in his element.  When you see his breath in the wintry air it's as if he's breathing smoke like a dragon.  While other people huddle in the cold he stands up straight and tall.  In Naples, on the other hand, he is out of place.  He wears lighter clothing, but continues to choose long coats and upturned collars, while Giglioli goes around with his shirt unbuttoned.  This should serve to emphasize Giglioli's home field advantage and yet, as we see through Goncharov's eyes, they just make Giglioli look soft.  His apparent weakness makes Goncharov want to appear even stronger.

On a related note, it is interesting to me how sunlight is treated as something very unfriendly.  In Russia, it glitters on ice crystals in the air and lights up condensation, harsh and white and giving no warmth whatsoever.  In Italy it bakes and shimmers on stone and asphalt, casting harsh, black-edged shadows and emphasizing creased brows and frowning mouths.  Outdoor scenes are, as far as I can tell, always hostile interactions.  Even indoor scenes in natural light: the priest dies with harsh sunlight streaming in through the broken chapel window.  When characters are softer with each other, it is always under artificial illumination.  Sunlight is too bright, too revealing.  People like this need some shadows to hide in.

Did I like this movie?  That's a tough question.  It's not really the type of movie you 'like'.  It's definitely powerful and well-constructed, thoroughly absorbing and all that.  There's a taste of Greek tragedy in the inevitability of the ending and the way Goncharov is eaten alive by hubris.  But I wouldn't say I liked it.  The characters are all terrible people whose arcs involve them getting worse, and the whole thing feels deeply claustrophobic, as if I, too, am trapped in Goncharov's downward spiral.  When characters realize their mistakes, it is only when it's too late to correct them - but only in their own minds.  It's a very pessimistic story, about human beings who are overcome by the very worst parts of themselves.

Is Goncharov deserving of all those glowing reviews?  Yes.  Was it unfairly snubbed at the Oscars because the academy was turned off by the violence?  Probably.  Will I ever watch it again?  Fuck, no.

Excuse me, I have to go watch some Pixar movies if I ever want to smile again.

[nouies]

Annual Writing Self-Evaluation

thanks to @allwaswell16 for tagging me! i enjoyed reading your answers a lot! 1. List of works published this year:

ready for a war

Devoted

fuck around, find out

seven, seven

the embers are new

bet on it

Harmony

Cold Spring

two languages, one love

could start a cult

must be love

don’t let the fire die

2. Work you are most proud of (and why): i’m proud of all of them for different reasons, this is very hard to choose. i’m going to say Harmony bc it was the first time i made a collab with an artist.

3. Work you are least proud of (and why): not necessarily a work but i’m not proud that i couldn’t meet my writing goals set for this year (writing a fic longer than 20k words, finishing a wip i’ve had for three years).

4. A favorite excerpt of your writing: from fuck around, find out

“Everything looks lovely but please, call me Louis. What was your inspiration for the menu, Chef Styles?” Louis asks, beaming. Harry lets out a laugh, refocusing his gaze to the dining area. “I’ll call you Louis if you call me Harry, can we agree on that?” Once he gets a nod of confirmation, he continues. “When Oli mentioned you wanted to retribute to the people working for the movie, and that you wanted it to feel personal, it immediately made me think of the time I arrived in New York. I was a youngster, with no family in the city and only a promise of a job that I wasn’t sure I was talented enough to fulfill,” Harry tells, remembering the nerve-wracking feeling of accepting the sous chef position when he was so young and with not much expertise. “Uh, an old lady by the name of Vittoria welcomed me to her house. She was like a second mother to me, sharing with me not only her home but her culture as well. She came to the States with her parents when she was just a toddler but grew up surrounded by the Italian community. We used to have gatherings every weekend with all her family—and I mean all the family, children, grandchildren, neighbors…I learned a lot from her, from all of them. And I used that as an inspiration for today. You’ll see three courses of my version of some of the food I had the pleasure to share with Vittoria and her family. Just wait until you try the tiramisù…it’s to die for,” he ends with a sigh. When he looks back at Louis, he notices something on his face. Fondness, maybe?

5. Share or describe a favorite review you received: i love getting comments, and there are so many that i keep in my heart that it’s hard to choose. i love especially the ones under my rare pair fics bc it’s when ppl usually tell me that they don’t read rare pairs but they gave it a chance bc of me. it means more than words can express when someone trusts you like that.

6. A time when writing was really, really hard: when i was ill around july and i kept changing and changing my blff prompt. i was very close to drop out bc i thought i wouldn’t make it. fortunately i did and i finished my second fic on time.

7. A scene or character you wrote that surprised you: writing Pedro Pascal surprised me a lot lol like i’ve obviously read Louis/Pedro fics before but i had never entertained the idea of writing one myself and it was a nice surprise. also, writing Louis/OMC wasn’t on my plans either but i welcomed it.

8. How did you grow as a writer this year: i personally don’t see any growth.

9. How do you hope to grow next year: i just hope to finish the ideas that i have. i don’t expect for them to be masterpieces, i just need them to be finished.

10. Who was your greatest positive influence this year as a writer (could be another writer or beta or cheerleader or muse etc etc): definitely my friends, the ones that read pairings or tropes they don’t like only bc it’s me writing them, the ones that hype my fics even if they don’t know if the story is good yet, the ones that offer their help and their advice to help me improve.

thank you to Anitra @allwaswell16 for being so supportive all this year, for betaing my works and offering your advice, and for encouraging me to keep going.

thank you to Emma @alltheselights who always reads my fics and leaves gorgeous comments under them, your support means a lot to me.

there’s three fics that wouldn’t exist without Mar @sunbellylou so thank you so much, my love, for being an inspiration to write the filthiest things.

thank you to Kenny @luviebaybie for being the most supportive even when life gets busier and busier. thanks for taking the time to beta for me, i appreciate it a lot!

thank you to Andy @outropeace for inspiring me to write abt Louis and the bodyguard, and for teaching me how to write a smau.

thank you to @linhuine, @smittenwithlouis, @nooradeservedbetter, @lemelous, @punkpillowprincess, @voulezloux, @disgruntledkittenface, @tokyolou, for your constant support and your friendship.

11. Anything from your real life show up in your writing this year: fortunately nothing bc i write romantic stories, no sad stories 🤭

12. Any new wisdom you can share with other writers: joining fic fests is not only an opportunity for you to shine, it’s a chance to build community so pls support works from the other authors in the fest, that’s what a fest is about.

also, hide your stats from ao3. there’s a lot of freedom in not knowing if your fic has hits and kudos or if it doesn’t.

13. Any projects you’re looking forward to starting (or finishing) in the new year: YES! i’m only working on two projects and i’m so excited abt them. the first one it’s a collab between me and @lemelous so expect a lot of gorgeous art, and the second one is a Louis/SebStan wip i couldn’t finish this year.

14. Tag three writers whose answers you’d like to read. ;)@voulezloux, @nooradeservedbetter, @disgruntledkittenface if you haven’t done this already.

*All answers should be about works published in 2023

[waitmyturtles]

I feel like I haven’t given Utsukushii Kare/My Beautiful Man season 2 the kind of love and attention that it either deserves, or that I expected to give to it, simply because my brain is all in Thailand with Moonlight Chicken at the moment.

But that being said, I could NOT have asked for a better finale to this short and sweet season that will precede the release of My Beautiful Man: Eternal in April (which -- if my calculations are correct from last year’s theater-to-DVD release of Cherry Magic -- we’ll be able to see in November 2023). With that, thoughts on Utsukushii Kare/My Beautiful Man season 2, episode 4: 

You know how I’d frame Kiyoi’s perspective and demands on Hira? ACCOUNTABILITY. Kiyoi is holding Hira fucking ACCOUNTABLE, and I’m here for every single second of it.

I think Kiyoi was doing something incredibly mature throughout this episode. You know how Kiyoi says things like “gross” or “disgusting” if Hira says something that we, as the audience, think is sweet?

I think Kiyoi’s judgement on this is that he has a deeper read on Hira. Hira self-deprecates to SUCH A FAULT that it affects his personal life AND his professional life. (My god, he even tried to exit the conversation with Noguchi, the photographer!).

Hira RUNS AWAY. He’s a runner. I LOVE what Noguchi says about Hira’s work during their meeting: Noguchi says that Hira’s work is full of “great selfishness and a sense of stupidity.” Noguchi, you could not have nailed this better, and I think Kiyoi also gets at that with the “gross” and “disgusting” comments.

I wrote in my review of the first season of UK that Hira is just as much of a narcissist as Kiyoi. And I think, by way of Hira’s narcissism and addiction to self-deprecation and self-psychological-flagellation, that all of those qualities -- those behavioral CHECKBOXES that Hira THINKS he needs to mark -- render him unable to see exactly what’s happening in front of his eyes. He can’t see that Kiyoi is ready to meet at the same level, to have a leveled and equal relationship. Instead, Hira is kind of ADDICTED to the RELIEF of the self-deprecation. AND...

... my read on this is that I think that that self-deprecation, that pulling away from equal communication and perspective, could allow Hira to BE OKAY with NOT being in a relationship with Kiyoi IF it failed. He even says as much at the start of the episode. I think what he says at the very beginning of the episode is: what else could I have possibly expected, but for the relationship to fail?

To me: isn’t that a cop-out?

Whereas Kiyoi is like: no way, motherfucker. You’re not getting out of this so easily. And I’m going to hold you ACCOUNTABLE.

Kiyoi is looking for equality and equity in the relationship. He wants TO BE ABLE TO LOVE HIRA like the way Hira sucks up all the air in the relationship to be so slavishly devoted to Kiyoi. Kiyoi, when he comes out to Anna-san, says that he and Hira bicker a lot. But he’s happy to SO EASILY come out and talk about his boyfriend, and talk about living with his boyfriend.

Kiyoi wants to be out, and happy, with a boyfriend who loves him. Is that too much to ask?

Hira was making it too much to ask, with all of the deprecating hype he was adding to the relationship. And Kiyoi is like, I’m just not going to take it anymore, AND I’m going to communicate to you in a way that you can understand, AND I’m going to push you to be successful in your career, BECAUSE I know that will help with your self-esteem. You’re great, Hira -- you just need to prove it to yourself... and I’m going to be the boyfriend that helps you see that.

WHAT. AN. AWESOME. SEASON. I could NOT have asked for a better, sweeter growth story than this! And then there’s the movie, omg, where is it going to go? Hira becoming an ADULT! Kiyoi becoming more successful! I love these two. Hagiwara Riku and Yagi Yusei have reeeeediculous chemistry, and I really, really recommend following them and the UtsuKare accounts on IG, because their cute videos are too much (and @lollipopsub is subbing a lot of BTS videos, too!). 

I love this series -- that’s it, I love this series, it’s a perfect series, and we’re so lucky that we get more in the future!

[firephoenix23]

The Slugterra movie reviews

This has been in the drafts for a while so buckle up for a longerish post

Ghoul from Beyond

Ghoul from beyond was pretty cool and I liked the concept of the goon and the beginning of the Eastern caverns but the coolest part of the movie which is when Eli gets ghouled is way too short and it literally happens and is resolved in like ten minutes. But the movie for me is very nostalgic and it was a big deal when it first was advertised and when it first came out. Everyone was hyped the fuck up and I was too but watching it now it’s still fun but maybe not as exciting. Plus we get introduced to best boi Junjie. 7/10

Return of the Elementals

Okay lowkey I have a lot to say about this movie that I will try to fit in here. First off we have a new member of the team: Junjie. And the gang doesn’t immediately love him and they have to work together and figure out how to incorporate a fifth person in their group. There’s so many little details that I love from the movie. For example, Blakk doesn’t immediately kill Eli and the Goon is furious with Blakk and he brings it up constantly

Then there is the second time the gang tries to cure the ghouled elementals but the gang doesn’t know that the Goon took two of them, so when Kord finds this out he tells him tell Eli. Junjie clearly can’t get to Eli in time so he tries to stop Blakk himself. Obviously this doesn’t work and Pronto goes to tell Eli who is pissed. Normally, I would hate this misunderstanding trope because they happen so frequently in media and it’s just so annoying. But in ROTE the stakes are so high so when you see the Goon and Blakk switch the slugs and they try the plan again you’re like oh shit this is not gonna work. Plus Junjie not following orders again might make Eli question him again.

Also Will comes back!! And we get the most heart wrenching scene of Eli running up to the hole that his dad jump in literally screaming for his father only to be pulled away literally seconds before he jumps in. Also can’t forget Blakk’s darkbane form and the reveal of his new form is literally so fucking cool. Also the dialogue is great like when Kord screaming “does it look like I know slug fu” 10/10

Slug fu Showdown

Honestly four points go to high Eli alone 😅 Which I literally made a post about. But anyway on a serious note I’m so disappointed about this movie. Literally it has the coolest premise which is Eli learning slug fu which is what everyone wanted him to learn the first time we saw Junjie do it. And don’t get me wrong Junjie teaching Eli slug fu is the best part of the movie. I also love that not only is Eli learning from Junjie, but Junjie is learning from Eli like how he learns to name his slug because of him. I love the dynamic that the two of them have. And it’s a constant thing for Eli and Junjie to learn and grow from each other. That literally sounds so queer but it’s true 😅

But other than the the rest of the gang really have nothing to do. Instead they are going around chasing the elementals around because every villian and their mom knows about the elementals and wants their power or something like that. And I know it’s so stupid that they figured it out because Pronto was on like national television but I think it’s funny that Pronto was the one they interviewed and not like literally anyone else in the gang. It is nice to see Sedo and the Hooligang again they’re pretty cool villains 

Speaking of villains I have to talk about the villains in this movie. I honestly can’t remember his name and I’m too lazy to look it up but his plan to use the elementals to like destroy Slugterra because they would hit like the fault lines?? Like I don’t get it and it’s clear he was just added so Eli can just learn slug fu. I do think it’s really funny how the only way for Eli to learn slug fu is like under pressure because he’s like really resourceful. Like boy literally had to learn when the world was at stake and all of his friends are just standing around like staring at him. Like it just all felt way too fast. I know we watched him struggle but it just happened so fast. And I love Eli but this is a common theme with him in the later seasons. He kinda becomes a gary stu but you didn’t hear it from me 😅 5/10

Eastern Caverns

So I honestly didn’t know that the next two were considered movies but according to the Wikipedia they are so I’m going to count them. Next up is Eastern Caverns. I would definitely say it’s probably closer to 4 episodes that connected to each other than a movie but whatever. The concept of the Eastern Caverns is so cool but initially I was a little worried they would be like a little racist because I’m pretty sure most of the writers for Slugterra were white but they weren’t. The bar is so low 😅

I mean some of the stuff I was like a little 😬 like Pronto clearly dressing up in drag for shits and giggles and them talking about Chi but it’s stuff that I feel has been seen in Western media before. Plus this came out in like 2015 almost a whole decade ago 👀

But anyway most of the movie is them trying to get their slugs back and trying to gain the trust of the people of the Eastern Caverns after Junjie destroyed it for 20 years!! Which 20 years is just crazy. Like how old is Junjie technically supposed to be then like 35!!

But anyway they finally get into the place which is definitely the coolest part of the movie but then my one problem comes into play which is mostly a problem with Eli for me in the Eastern Caverns story line. They just make him so beefed up. Not literally but he has like so many skills under his belt like trick shots, fusion shots, slug fu, whatever the fuck he does with Burpy and they just write it off as well he’s so connected to the slugs that’s why which is just so dumb and lazy. And he just figures out slug fu because slug fu is connected to chi and chi is like the slinger code???? Like Eli I have never heard of this code you are talking about. But honestly deep down I don’t really care because I love Eli too much 😂

Also like I am so disappointed they used so many old models from the old 99 caverns but it’s Slugterra what are you gonna do. Like they couldn’t put a little bit of budget into making new background characters. And don’t even get me started on the Dai Fu. Overall I would give it a 7/10

The Emperor’s Revenge

Another “movie” despite me not remembering it as one when it came out. Maybe it was considered one later on for marketing who knows. What I do know is that is has the coolest fucking intro I have ever seen with all the Shane gang walking out of the hideout looking all badass and then introducing the voice actors with the statue of the emperor in the back is so freaking cool

I will say that the word movie is kinda a loose term here as like with the last “movie” since it’s very obvious it’s just 4 episodes combined into one which I don’t know why they did that in the first place but whatever. So bizarre

First off the first episode err I mean part is about how Junjie became the dark slinger and the background of Yang vs the Emperor. It’s a great episode and it has really pretty drawing to go with the story.

The second part is great too with Pronto acting brave because of the emperor’s sword and the creation on an iron warrior which the gang can’t defeat so they have to retreat which like never happens in the show. I actually liked brave Pronto it reminded me of when they made Shaggy brave from the Legend of the Phantosaur.

Also the iron warrior was created to be powered by life essence and we see the Dai Fu take Underlord Holt’s life essence on screen which seems kinda dark for this show

Then in the third part her life force is taken away by the emperor, who is back, to power up two other unstoppable warriors. I think the unstoppable warriors have a cool design and I understand why they had to reuse so many models from the old show.

But honestly the coolest thing was the reuse of the Thugglet slug which hasn’t been seen since The New Kid episodes. It’s like one of the coolest slugs in the show and they never use it

And honestly the final episode with the battle against the emperor was pretty cool. Unlike the battle against Blakk which was just the Shane gang and the shadow clan, this battle involved all the friends I guess that they met in the eastern caverns and it was pretty cool.

Plus the emperor was actually smart when following Eli and Junjie back to the hole of the deep caverns. He brought one of his unstoppable warriors with him. Also the like traumatic moment when Junjie jumps into the hole to stop the emperor from coming back up and they frame it how Will jumped in after Blakk like why you gotta do that to me Slugterra writers 😩

Overall I didn’t remember this movie at all until I watched it a couple of weeks ago but I actually really liked it. I just felt like the stakes were higher and the way they defeated the emperor was fun and creative.

The one problem I do have is about the elementals like how do the shane gang get back to the 99 without them, why did Eli even learn slug fu if he’s not gonna use the elementals to save his dad. I mean in the end the show didn’t get an ending so it’s doesn’t really matter that much 😢 Plus this was the last we see of Junjie and they never like hug him goodbye or anything but I wouldn’t except that from a boy’s cartoon anyway. No sentimentality allowed 😂 8/10 for the revenge

Into the shadows

I honestly thought I was gonna hate this movie because everyone else hated it when it came out in 2016. I know it was all because of Tad and how many plot holes he brings but (please don’t kill me) I like him. 

Sure he’s pulls the exact same thing as twist (rip a real one) but what makes me like him is that he’s from the surface and Eli clearly bonds with him over that especially since it’s revealed that Eli had such a horrible life on the surface after his dad went MIA and that Tad did too. Kinda interesting that they both escaped their horrible realities to live in a fantasy world but I digress. And don’t even get me started on the scene of Will wishing Eli a happy birthday. I’m still crying 😭 

But yeah the vibe I got from Tad and Eli was that they were like brothers. I mean Tad literally said surface bros. With Twist his betrayal was worst but I feel like we really didn’t see him and Eli bond personally. Twist was kinda just like Eli’s yes man. Just constantly hyping him up and just being like yeah I totally name my slugs and if Eli thinks it’s good than I think it’s good. Literally sucking his d*ck. What who said that!? 

It was also pretty cool seeing how much Eli has grown from the show from newbie to teaching someone of slugterra himself. Also how excited he gets when he goes “I know right” clearly happy that he found something to relate to. Maybe I’ll make a long post on tad and how he’s not as bad as people thought he was as a character. 8/10 only one point higher than Ghoul from Beyond because of that beautiful fucking animation. Everything has this like gold tinge to it and I really like it. It makes everything just pop. But again 8/10 sorry everyone who hated it 😅

Final List

Return of the Elementals

Into the Shadows (pls don’t kill me 😅)

Emperor’s Revenge

Ghoul from Beyond/Eastern Cavern

Slug Fu Showdown

[doctor-orbagels]

ONE SENTENCE REVIEW FOR EVERY GUNDAM PROPERTY I HAVE EXPERIENCED

Like i said in a previous post, it’s basically everything that you can watch on a screen from 0079 up to IBO. A few manga here and there and one light novel.

NOTE: Don’t take this too seriously, most of these are meme answers. Most of my strong negativity is said in jest. (My positivity is genuine tho)

Starting with UC:

•0079

Absolute classic but i prefer The Origin manga

•Zeta

Well done dark tone but kinda boring at times

•ZZ

Fuck you, the goofball stuff was great and a welcome change of pace

•08th MS Team

Probably the best down-to-earth mecha war story ever

•0080: War in the Pocket

*weeps profusely*

•Sentinel

Really compelling with a great cast, plus the idea of “other ways to emulate being a newtype” is still kinda unexplored both at the time this was written and to this day

•0083: Stardust Memory

Pretty damn good all things considered

•IgLoo

Zudah was a cool idea, too bad the tallgeese did it first and everything else about the show is boring af

•IgLoo Apocalypse

The best of the IgLoo trilogy but still around a 6.5/10

•IgLoo 2

Shinigami are canon to the universal century, 0/10

•Thunderbolt

Amazing in almost every way, plus the most effective usage of a sociopathic fed vs a well meaning zeon

•Twilight Axis

Meh

•Char’s Counterattack

The Resurrection F of UC

•Unicorn

Best anime i’ve ever watched

•Narrative

I just like that Unicorn got a direct sequel goddamn it

•F91

I so badly wish this was a series and not a movie

•Crossbone

Completely validates my opinion on F91

•Victory

Phenomenal use of character death, and I remember nothing else

•Reconguista in G

My favorite anime that i cannot recommend to anyone else on earth

Now for pre-2000’s au timelines:

•G Fighter

You cannot get more funny-bad in the entire Gundam franchise, it’s awesome

•Wing

I didn’t get the hype, but i still had a great time at points

•Endless Waltz

Much better mecha, slightly cooler plot

•X

I’m so sad this was rushed bc it’s by far my fave 90’s Gundam

Post 2000’s au timelines:

•SEED

Very cool pseudo-shounen remake of 0079

•SEED Destiny

Something good almost could have happened here, but no

•SEED Astray/R

Love all these goobers, really good

•Astray X

Worst official localization for any manga i’ve ever read, but there was still some cool stuff

•SEED Stargazer

*weeps profusely, but in the Cosmic Era this time*

•00

Behind the fujoshi bait is one of the smartest and well done mecha stories this side of Code Geass

•00 Awakening of the Trailblazer

… why aliens?

•AGE

I know that it’s my fault but I couldn’t even bring myself to get past the first generation

•Iron Blooded Orphans

I have never cried this many times or this hard over anime characters dying

•Build Fighters

Legit a 5Ds tier Toy Battle anime

•Build Fighters Try

A bit generic but still palatable

•Build Divers

Didn’t go far enough

•Build Divers: Re;Rise

Went way too far in the best way possible

And if it wasn’t clear already, Unicorn is by far my favorite Gundam and favorite anime overall, while IgLoo 2 is both my least favorite Gundam and my least favorite anime i’ve ever seen.

[docholligay]

As a Children’s Story for Children: Wolfwalkers

Age I was told midge should be: 7ish

Quick review: Not unenjoyable, but ultimately a bit more bland and Irish Ferngully than I was wanting and looking for. I think I expected too much of it, honestly. Not bad, though! Loved the art style.

Longer review:

I had such a hard time watching this as a seven year old because, I don’t use my phone when I watch things, which I do recommend because you notice things and gravitate toward, I think, better things, but unfortunately I have just enough grasp of the history of the area to sit there the entire time and go, “Lord Protector? Wait is this guy supposed to actually be Oliver fucking Cromwell? Did they use Lord Protector otherwise? Cromwell was a complete dick to everyone who had exactly one good idea (and it was a great one)  so I would be unsurprised. Is the year right? I feel like it is but now I don’t trust myself.” But not enough grasp of the history to actually resolve that in my mind up until the end when he was being weird and religious while dangling off a cliff and I was like, “Yeah, I’m almost sure that’s supposed to be Oliver Cromwell”*

Love the animation on this one! I would like to broadly see more diversity in styles of animation, and that’s not me particularly hating on other styles (though I do hate the bean mouth big eye rounded thing that’s so fucking popular now, even if I love the show itself) but it feels like you have three choices right now. But this I REALLY liked, and I loved how in some parts you coil.d even see the sketches underlaying the finished character. 

The story is not bad! But it’s VERY common. I mean, this has a different skin on it, and this is not me saying Cromwell’s time in Ireland wasn’t a garbage shitshow nightmare, but this is a very common kids’ story. I used Ferngully, but you see the motif of “person is part of the oppressor and learns to identify with the oppressed” come up over and over again. This is not to say that it is BAD. I am not saying that. But I am saying that Wolfwalkers did not, story wise, blow my mind and break new ground. Pretty much all of it hit the exact story beats I was expecting. 

One thing I did GENUINELY like, was showing that Robyn and her father are also victims of an absoltuely fucking insane government. And that her father could be a dick genuinely because he loves Robyn, and is afraid for her. I loved that it could make her father INTENSELY frustrating while refusing to coindemn him, and I think that is, storywise, its real master stroke. It walks that line REALLY beautifully. 

I laughed at her name literally being Robyn Goodfellow, I know as a kid I would not pick up on that but an amazing touch, especially since we know there’s no way in hell she’s not going to Learn A Vaulable Lesson about the value of the forests and the wolves and all that. 

Interesting to watch it and know that the wolves are going to be wiped out in less than 100 years, too, I’m fairly certain. So in Robyn and Mebh’s lifetime, they’ll basically see their entire pack killed, assuming they aren’t killed themselves. And if Jewlet turned to me and asked, ‘Id be like, “No they did in fact kill every single wolf in Ireland.” 

More than being interested in this story in itself, this movie made me open to the idea of watching Secret of Kells, which I’ve heard is very good but unfortunately was much hyped by one of the most annoying people I’d ever known so I skipped the fuck out of it, and perhaps I am now ready for reconciliation and healing. 

In all: Perfectly acceptable and enjoyable with a neat art style, but ulatimately a very standard kid’s story with an Irish coat of paint. Which could be neat if your kids have a lot of Irish heritage--God knows I would be singing the praises of This Exact Same Story But Jewish Tho as if it were the most remarkable tale on earth--but being have only what is statistically mandated by being a Montana Mutt, that’s not enough for it to be a must see for Jewlet. 

*I broke down and googled it the next morning. Definitely supposed to be Cromwell.

[r-manoff]

Just like last year, my MCU review of the year :)

Moon Knight (9,5/10)

2022 started off with a bang for the mcu. After the three months break, this was a delight in every way possible. This show was so much fun, both because of Moon Knight’s character in general and because of Oscar Isaac. The Egyptian mythology was so much fun and an amazing addition to the mcu. I CANT WAIT TO SEE MORE OF LAYLA. Girlie needs to drop her curly hair routine, thanks 🫶🏻

Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness (6/10)

I’ve already given a lengthy review of this movie when it came out, but I’ll say it again in short here: this movie was disappointing at best. With all the hype that came with this movie, we weren’t given what we came for. Powerful female character sacrificing herself at the end for the ‘greater good’? I’ll pass. All of Wanda’s character development in WandaVision was for naught. It was all thrown down the drain and what a waste. The first Dr Strange movie isn’t a favorite of mine either, but the concept of the multiverse in this movie gave me hope, but it was misplaced.

Ms. Marvel (8/10)

The visuals in this series, the opening logo alone!!!! Beautiful representation, such a fun character, and relatable. I found myself in Kamala’s character as a child of strict parents. That part of the story was very accurately told and I loved to see it :)

Thor: Love and Thunder (4/10)

Dear Lord, the fuck was this movie?

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (5/10)

They tried to make a feminist project again, but failed. I HATE it when projects like these focus so damn hard on the female representation and emphasize it to the point where it feels like it’s being forced upon you. You make stories with great representation by treating that represented group like you would privileged communities. Representation does not mean that you have an immediate great story. Far from it. She-Hulk is one of the most fun characters in the comics. They turned her into a sex-deprived, failed lawyer who isn’t even as bulky as she is in the comics (a huge fucking miss). And don’t even get me started on the CGI.

Werewolf by Night (7,5/10)

A quick, fun watch. Elsa Bloodline, I’m waiting for you queen. You can shoot me with that crossbow😍😮‍💨✨ I can’t wait to see how this story will play out in the mcu

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (10/10)

I wasn’t convinced marvel could outdo such an emotional opening scene like the one in Black Widow. But they did with Wakanda Forever. This movie is the most beautiful tribute they could’ve made for Chadwick. He was present in every second of this movie. I genuinely do not understand how people don’t like this movie. Yes, Chadwick was in a way the body and soul of Black Panther, but there is so much more to this character/story. The lore of Wakandan culture… it was so beautifully woven into this new movie. Shuri’s journey of grieving her brother is so powerful and very personal and relatable to me. The story of white colonizers put into perspective for younger generations was dealt with beautifully. The soundtrack (once again), the visuals, everything was stunning about this movie. It brought me to tears multiple tears. Not just because of Chadwick, but also because of the meaning of this story.

The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday special (6/10)

Meh. I don’t see the need of this special. I genuinely don’t. As far as I can tell, it adds nothing to the mcu. Drax and Mantis bothered me to no extent for some reason. Mantis admitting to Peter that they’re siblings was kinda cute, but I found myself skipping 30% of this lol

Though there were some exceptions, the quality of the mcu has noticeably gone down. I’ve noticed my excitement/interest disappear for the mcu this year. And it’s because they’re pushing out these projects like the capitalist that disney is. Disappointing.

[djservo]

this is so late of me oopsie got a bit carried away almost forgot the date. well here we are, december 31st 2022. already touched on your top books of the year, so for this months wrapped lets also get into: books that let you down, books you're anticipating in 2023, and your reading goals! <3

REPORTING TO YOU LIVE FROM THE FINAL HOURS, THE VERY DREGS OF 2022!!! 🎤 i answered this in spurts throughout the day bc I didn’t want to have any hungover 2022 obligations/thoughts seep into 2023 so Apologies if things sound tonally discombobulated (as if I’ve ever been coherent in one of these before) 🫗 i read 9 this month and i willed myself to ramble about them all as a treat HERE WE GO

december reads

Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to "Oldies" on TV by Boyd McDonald

so fun, funny, and unapologetically horny - the perfect trifecta! we need more horny writing/critiques like this! sometimes I’ll write reviews (for my eyes only ofc) for movies that really affect me, but this made me want to get better into the habit of writing them more consistently, even if just glib observations. fine tune my thoughts (horny or not) rather than let them scramble and dissipate into nothingness 💭 starting next year (tomorrow) 🤞

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Stephen Adly Guirgis

I feel like most of this play’s clout is attributed to the “Why didn’t you make me good enough so that you could’ve loved me” line alone (deserved!) but this is also just so funny and creative as a philosophical unpacking of by-the-book religion/christianity + the conundrums/hypocrisies that sustain it

My Life in France by Julia Child

I read this on a train that ended up at a standstill for hours & they handed out these puny bags of chex mix as consolation (I texted my friend “it’s like I’m living Triangle of Sadness rn” lmfao) and had I not been so charmed by Julia’s rosy outlook and dreamy accounts of food and travel and Love, I likely wouldn’t have appreciated the irony of munching on stale pretzels whilst reading indulgent paragraphs of food porn. luckily her charm radiates from her words so my heart was full the entire time and the fact that she didn’t properly learn how to cook (nor had she found True Love™️) until her 30s makes me want to cry/throw up/etc!! moral of the story: it’s literally never too late for anything!!! also PACK SNACKS ON THE TRAIN ALWAYS!!!

Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

I wanted to be more annoyed with this bc the most annoying people are like THIS IS A MASTERCLASS IN STORYTELLING.... GENIUS.... but ugh fine this was really enthralling, I unfortunately do get the hype!! in between each chapter/issue were extra tidbits of like (fictional/story-related) police files, news articles, etc that made the world-building that much richer blah blah blah I Appreciate the Details -_- I’m also so fucking glad I read this before watching the movie bc Zack Snyder wouldn’t know subtlety if it spit in his face so all the meticulous detail and backstory from the novel would’ve been completely lost on me </3 big win for the book-before-movie purists

Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire

The gift and curse of being an emotionally evolved adult actively processing/grappling with your childhood trauma(s)! so much weight in sentences that don’t rely on pumped-up purple prose or weighty cliché phrases, both of which I wouldn’t have found surprising for a poet of the instagram age. there’s this casual wave-of-the-hand/and-so-it-goes quality, which I think makes it the reckoning that much more heartbreaking

From Drowning in Dawson’s Creek: “When I was twelve or thirteen and mad / with loneliness, I dreamt of white boys and / ladders leading to bedroom windows. / I dreamt all night of their scurrying, climbing in and out of me. / For Pacey Witter I would hitchhike Capeside. / For his plaid embrace, / I was willing to disown myself.”

My Wicked Wicked Ways by Sandra Cisneros

despite my 4 years of public school spanish language classes, I’ve somehow evaded reading The House on Mango Street (which I feel like was a staple in my school district’s curriculum), but I’m kinda glad since this was a treat of an intro to her style. I love how she keeps this kind of youthful, almost childishly petulant tone even when talking about adult things, walking this fine line of bouncy charm and heartbreak

From Drought: “Because of pride / I do not phone. / Not me. / On the contrary / I place the telephone / over there. / Against the wall. / At the far end of the room. / And stare at it for days like cigarettes.”

Is the Rectum a Grave? (and Other Essays) by Leo Bersani

I don’t read nearly as much theory as I wish to so it’s always a feat when I manage to finish a book in its entirety without rage quitting out of brain-fry self-consciousness LOL but this was amazing - strangely right on the nose for a few films I watched this month too (It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (1971) - perfect companion piece) by no means was this an easy read. had to reread pages a few times, mull over sentences, look up words, etc, but when it did click, it was so rewarding and ultimately worth the brain farts and struggle, which I think is maybe just the theory experience™️

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

this was another book (along with I Love Dick) that I’ve had on my TBR list for ages, both of which I might’ve even heard of through the #ArtGirl side of tumblr years ago lmao but the difference is I adored this one Wow!! there’s a threshold I can stand before a book feels Too reliant on its outside references and thus a little pretentious/void, but everything mentioned here felt more like enriching supplementation rather than unnecessary padding. so honest and empathetic and refreshingly optimistic about motherhood and partnership and the inner-transformations/frames of thinking required for both.... real tears were shed, that’s how u know!

Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance by John Waters

I just saw his live christmas show a couple weeks ago & snagged a signed copy so this was an especially special read! as I read it, I was trying to think of who - if anyone - I’d recommend this to aside from john waters fans. then I thought, would I even like this if I wasn’t a john waters fan, privy to his works and in on his jokes? if I wasn’t able to hear these chapters in his voice, or imagine these scenes shot in his style? but luckily we don’t live in that evil timeline so I had a twisted little blast with this, perfect book to end this chaotic year filled with so very many john-waters-like predicaments!

let downs

initially I had so many more titles but they were mostly just books I felt "meh" about which didn't seem fair so now I'm interpreting this as books I initially had high hopes for but ultimately didn't rise to my expectations

I Love Dick by Chris Kraus, The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay, Sigh, Gone by Phuc Tran, In the Miso Soup by Ryū Murakami, Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

anticipations/goals

I'm a pretty bad #reader in that I don't really keep up with new/upcoming releases unless it's an author I adore/have read several books by there's not much in mind - maybe Elliot Page’s memoir? as for goals, you already know I just got a kindle which has opened this door of possibility as I mostly rely on my library BUT when my library doesn't have a title I’m looking for (which is often), I'll find a PDF/epub online and read either on my phone or laptop which isn't preferable for me SO!! LONG STORY SHORT!! this newfound ease has reignited my motivation to dig into meatier reads that’ve been collecting dust on my TBR list 🥩 I’ve already downloaded a few I’ve been unable to find at the library (& don’t wanna spend a small fortune on) so next year I anticipate reading more theory 📍 one of my movie-watching goals is to delve more thoroughly into filmographies of filmmakers I like, so ideally I’ll do something similar with reading and complete the written works of more authors I enjoy, but IDK I also think a lot my joy of reading comes from the rabbit holes I get led down/thru - this memoir leading me to that fiction leading me to that theory etc etc. we’ll see what kinda discipline I can conjure up 🧘 I'd also like to track down some vintage pulp/erotica, expand my horizons in that realm. last time I was at the used bookshop I came across this 2000s (not vintage ik) gay vampire parody of Fight Club called ‘Bite Club’ which I thought was amazing genius hilarious etc but I haven’t read Fight Club yet so those 2 are like top of my list LMAO

ok jesus christ this is stupid long but i figured i’d indulge for the end of the year, really brain-spew these final ‘22 inner-ramblings and opinions <3 AND HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

[thescrapbookingscientist]

Biweekly Media Roundup

- Avatar: The Way of the Water (Movie) - My brother was hyped to see this so I went with him in my first theater going experience in a while. I’m not really qualified to talk about the problematic politics of the film, so personally my pros were stunning visual effects and environments, interesting alien designs and lore, and some fun whale bonding, while my cons were the dragged out length (especially in the extended whale hunting and ending action scene), mostly flat characterization, and some weird character decisions regarding the character “Spider” and the way people interact with him. I do think this was a bit better than the first one since the focus was on the alien characters and the Ocean tribe was a bit more interesting than the forest one, so I’m glad I saw it, though it’s more of a spectacle than a lasting experience. So uh in short I don’t care much for the story but I’d love to see the concept art designs.

- Glass Onion (Movie) - I’m not really sure what I expected from this but I liked it quite a bit. It kept me guessing on the mystery, I liked the protagonist, there's some fun dialogue, and who doesn’t appreciate a “fuck the rich” message. You don’t have to see the first one to watch it so if you’re in the mood for a fun mystery check it out. I don’t say this about most things but I’d be cool with this becoming a franchise, just Blanc solving various mystery’s and humiliating rich assholes in his funky little outfits.

- Chainsaw Man (Anime) - It’s so good to finally find another show that fits in with the flavor of weirdo casts as JJBA, Golden Kamuy, Dorohedoro and the like. I genuinely don’t know where the plot is going next which makes for a great watching experience, and so far I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I like each new freak they introduce to the main cast. Makima still has my heart as the gaslight gatekeep girlboss that she is, and the Devil designs are really cool, I can’t wait for the season finale tonight. 

- Spy X Family (Anime) - Definitely one of my favorite anime this year, super wholesome, lovable characters, great comedy and reaction faces, stunning animation, this show’s got it all. My one complaint is that some of the more over the top side characters really overstayed their welcome but for the most part the cast was very solid and I could definitely see myself doing a rewatch in the near future for some easy catharsis. 

- Mob Psycho 100 (Anime) - The end of an Era, Mob is definitely one of my fave animes of all time and some of the best messaging and best written child characters I’ve ever seen, I’m going to miss it but I’m glad it stayed strong to the end and wrapped up in a thematically cohesive way. Cheesy as it is I believe that the excellent execution of Mob’s “deep rooted message of self acceptance and self worth that tears down the ideology that only ‘naturally talented’ people have a place in society and instead gives worth to everyone regardless of who they are because it is our impact on our fellow people and our ability to be a good person that truly matters” (as the Shrek meme says) has made me a happier person. 10/10 essential watching for all anime fans.

- Project Eden’s Garden (Video Game) - Several youtubers I like put out reviews and or/ playthroughs of this fanmade Danganronpa game, so I did a watch through of the prologue. It’s intriguing so far, I like a lot of the character designs and had fun trying to figure out their animal influences, and thought the writing was pretty solid for a setup. I’ll defenitely watch more when it comes out, Danganronpa isn’t for everyone but I always have fun trying to predict each cases victim/killer and I doubt this’ll change that.

- The S Classes That I Raised (TV) - Trying to resist the urge to just read the webnovel given how much joy I find in the weekly updates but I’m pretty into this one right now, very excited to see what new little creatures Han Yoojin will befriend. 

- Sense8 (TV) - Started this old supernatural drama about 8 people living all over the world whose minds become psychically linked. It is very interesting to see the diverse stories set across various cultures and with 8 separate plots happening there’s always something interesting in each episode. I do wish there were less sex, like I’m not sex negative or anything but uh I’m here for the plot and there's just a lot of sex scenes that make watching it with my sibling a little awkward. My favorite stories so far are Nomis, Suns, and Capheus while Rileys and Wolfgangs are a little eh. 

- Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint (Webnovel) - I would fit right into the world of ORV because much like all the characters in it I cannot stop thinking about Kim Dokja and how badly I simultaneously want to punch him in the face and give him a hug. Stupid little rat boy.

I also watched Hook (movie), Predestination (movie), Groundhog Day (Movie), along with my normal amount of various youtube videos.

Listening to: Holy Water by Michael Ray, Hell’s Coming With Me by Poor Man’s Poison, Red Flags by Tom Cardy, Rasen by jon-YAKITORY, Waiting On A Miracle (Encanto OST), Soon You’ll Get Better, New Romantics, and Anti-Hero by Taylor Swift, I Really Wish I Hated You by Blink 182, Fallout by Marianas Trench, Shoutout to My Ex by Little Mix, Lent by Autoheart, Therefore You and Me by si-o, History Hates Lovers by Oublaire, Tot Musica by Ado

[icyschreviews]

A Review of Need for Speed Heat

Back to the Streets

EA, are you trying to become my favorite evil corpo? Come on, don’t be shy. Just admit it. You’ve stopped the production of live-service games, you’re releasing rich single-player experiences, you haven’t laid off an entire studio in a while. Wait, don’t tell me. Do you have a crush on me?

Why, EA, I am flattered. Truly. But I must say, I’m not much into the whole corporate type. All those fancy business suits and trunks full of cash aren’t really my thing. I’m more of an indie sort of girl. So while I do appreciate your efforts, I think I’ll have to turn you do—

Hold on, what was that sound? Is that an engine revving up? Did I just hear police sirens in the distance? Whoa, where are all these neon lights coming from? And the smell of burning tires, good lord! Is it? Could it be? No. Oh, no.

Fuck me.

I’m a millennial, alright? However I grew up in a household without any gaming consoles and our first PC came in sometime in the early 00s. Need for Speed: Underground was one of the first games I laid my hands on (not counting Flipper). I’m pretty sure my dumb ass didn’t know what Lil Jon was rapping about, but it sure sounded cool! And the cars, they go vroom vroom!

You know where this is going. The Fast and the Furious movies were just coming out and the hype around street racing was at its peek. Underground laid the foundation for my love of the series and by the time Carbon came out I was an outright zealot. I was in love with tacky decals and the flare of nitrous long before I learned how to drive. Long before I realized I was a bad driver!

However as the 00s neared their end, my adoration slowly died down. EA being EA thought it would be a grand idea to keep releasing one Need for Speed game per year, while continuously molesting its studios. What bugged me even more than the sameness of it all was the direction they decided to take the series in.

In 2010 Hot Pursuit came out. An homage to the series’ roots, the game was praised by both fans and critics alike. It bored me out of my fucking mind. Someone has to sit me down one day and try to explain the appeal of this game. A multitude of sequels followed in its wake, but I just couldn’t be bothered.

I know what you’re going to say. Trends change and franchises need to grow. Need for Speed can’t just be about street racing. Even I would have eventually grown bored with it. However, dear reader, change is not what I’m advocating against. Case in point, Pro Street. That game didn’t have open worlds or cop chases, and it didn’t need to. What it did have was crisp controls, colorful tracks, diverse challenges, an insane customization system, and all of that spray-painted with graffiti and in tune to some electro-pop. What I’m saying is that it had character, a concept none of its successors really understood.

So, yes, Hot Pursuit was boring. No, the constant showering of high-performance cars does not turn me on. No, I don’t want to keep driving along the same generic mountain roads. I need a sense of place, a context! I need a game that has it’s own identity, not just photo-realistic graphics. I need a progression system that’s palpable, not a conveyor belt of super cars that all handle the same.

With as many NFS games as it was churning out, EA didn’t really care about preserving the older titles, as long as you were buying the new ones. Underground, Most Wanted (2005), Carbon, all fell to the wayside. I hung up the keys of my Toyota Supra and looked into buying a public transport card. Long gone were my street racing days, occasionally coming back to mind like flashes of neon glimpsed from the corner of the eye.

Until…

I’m getting to Heat in a moment, I swear.

Behold, a new challenger steps on to the scene! After half-bludgeoning its studios to death, EA decided to groom the upcoming Ghost Games as its main Need for Speed studio. Some middling games (and years full of torture) later, Ghost Games revealed its new NFS game in 2019. But this wasn’t going to be just another NFS game. No, no, we’re going back to the streets, for real this time. Back to being an aspiring nobody behind the wheel of some battered Civic looking to score it with the big league. Yes, street racing is making its long-awaited comeback to the series!

At least that’s what they were saying. Oh, believe me, I was skeptical. It’s been so long since EA did Need for Speed right that I took every announcement with a pound of salt. But beggars can’t be choosers, and since we certainly aren’t getting any re-releases of the old games, I might as well give Heat a try. So I did.

I’ll give Heat one point straight away - it knows its target audience. It does just about everything it can during its 10 minute intro to milk your nostalgia to the last drop. You start the game behind the wheel of some overpowered monster of a car, one whose likeness you won’t be seeing again till late game. The race goes awry (as it always does), the cops bust the average Joe you were playing as, leaving him to limp back to town with his pride shattered. It’s all pre-rendered footage, but what we can’t have in FMVs, we can make up later in stupidity, right Heat?

Then the game cuts and you’re in some garage inhabiting the floating body of an FPS camera. You turn around to meet papi— I mean, Lucas the owner, and then bam! Heat hits you with a character selection screen. Come on, champ, you didn’t seriously think you were playing as Joe?

Heat lets you pick from a roster of 12 characters which is diverse enough, I guess. I certainly wasn’t expecting EA to license MetaHuman just for Need for Speed. I’m here to customize cars, not people, however I was still pleasantly surprised by the addition. Seeing your character interact with others on screen feels more natural than viewing everything from the lenses of your bobbing camera body.

Then I spent the next 20 minutes picking out bucket hats. Unashamedly. No, Ghost Games didn’t have time to develop a character creator, but an outfit picker? Man, we gotta have that! It’s a silly little indulgence, probably there just for EA to strike some deals with clothing brands, but one I liked none the less. Any game that lets me make my character look like a complete idiot gets points from me.

Lucas lets you pick from 3 cars, and of course there’s one American muscle, one Japanese import and one European classic. Oh, I can feel the Carbon tingles come over me again! I must say, I was tempted by the BMW, but just couldn’t resist the Mustang. One paint job and two white strips along the center of the car later, and we were ready to go!

This is peak fashion right here.

This is where I really start to judge Heat - the moment those wheels hit the tarmac and the game lets me loose behind the steering wheel. The world is something that can make or break a Need for Speed game and Palm City certainly had a lot to prove. Thankfully it did.

This is a superbly crafted map. I like just about everything it has to offer. Palm City itself is more than just a mesh of copy-pasted buildings. It feels like an actual place people could live in, with its sprawling boulevards, long overpasses connecting the beach to the glistening downtown, seaside walkways and quiet suburbs hidden in between.

Although at the beginning the game only generates races in Palm City itself, the map extends much further than that. Heat doesn’t wall off parts of the world behind progression. All of it is available to you at once, so you are free to ditch the campaign and go cruise around the countryside by yourself. However if you do decide to follow the breadcrumbs laid out for you, Heat will slowly introduce you to Palm City before it starts fanning out. It’s a seamless way to get you accustomed to the game without caging you in, and there’s a lot to discover once you do get going. There’s a huge raceway behind your safe house, a space shuttle launch site, a forest recently devastated by a fire, an abandoned quarry, etc.

What’s equally important is the size of the map. Modern triple-A games have developed a wearisome habit of stretching their maps into oblivion, but Heat got the balance right. There’s not too much content if you want to make it into a 20h experience, but more than enough if you’re eager to dig in. There’s a huge quantity of events and together they make use of just about every tight corner, every mountain slope, every bare piece of highway the map has to offer. The variety is excellent and Heat makes sure you get to experience all of it.

Just your average view of Palm City.

And of course it’s pretty. I feel that statement might be redundant at this point. EA’s studios have been polishing the franchise’s graphics for years now. However it’s not the graphics, but the different weather effects that give the world a whole new level of depth. Port Murphy feels a lot different when you come up to it on a sunny morning than on a murky afternoon. Likewise, are you climbing up Cloudbank on a dry midday or is the pouring rain making your night ride even more treacherous? Couple this with the choice to switch between night and day and all of a sudden each location has multiple facets for you to experience.

This is what Need for Speed games are all about for me - pulling up my BMW in front of the safe house on a bright summer day, as sea gulls coast in the distance and “Tu Manera” fires up the radio. I relished exploring every bit of this world. Instead of fast traveling, I’d take my time driving from one race to another. That’s how I fell in love with Carbon in the first place, slowly learning different parts of the world and eventually being able to find my way without the assistance of the mini-map. I could still navigate parts of Palmount City to this day. There’s nothing more satisfying in these games than realizing you recognize a street corner and knowing exactly where to go from there.

If there’s one aspect of the exploration I must criticize, it’s the mini-map. As much of an expert on Palm City as you might become, you’re still clueless at the beginning of the game and need the mini-map to guide you to your destination. This is one of the essential features of these games. What bothers me is that the mini-map is the only thing you can rely on for navigation. If you want to know where to go, you have to keep glancing at that bottom-left corner of the screen. This is an awful way to play the game. Instead of having both your eyes on the road and savoring the world around you, you’re forced to avert your gaze from the content that actually matters.

The game sort of offers an alternative. Quest markers and manual waypoints exist as permanent banners that float in the sky. You can make your way to them, in theory, by driving long enough in their general direction. However they are fundamentally inaccurate and can have you driving in circles, not to mention that Ana’s face looming in the distance is nothing short of terrifying.

What I would have liked is something that doesn’t break your immersion and is equally reliable. How about an arrow at the center of the screen which points to where you need to go according to the route computed by the mini-map? Or anything else you can come up with. Keep the mini-map by all means, it still needs to be there to resolve ambiguities, but give me more natural way-finders that don’t take me out of the experience.

A perfect day to fire up the engine.

Heat fills its world with an ample amount of events to keep you busy. There are more or less 4 types of events for you to engage with: race, drift, off-road and time trials. Races are your standard affair - fight your way up a pack of 8 and finish in 1st place. They come in two varieties: circuit and sprint. None of this is new, but I do find it interesting how these races are distributed. Circuit races are almost exclusive to the day, while sprints make up most of your night events.

It took me a while to truly appreciate this detail. In the context of the game, day races are legal and sponsored events attended by professionals. If you want to win, you have to master every corner, and that’s when the nature of the race comes into place. Of course it’s a circuit race, the game is giving you more than one chance to learn and overcome the track.

On the other hand, night races are illegal. You don’t have the luxury of barricades; a pickup truck could come at you from any corner. Also, you’ll probably have the police breathing down your neck, so it doesn’t make sense to race in a circuit. Everyone involved just wants to rush to the finish line and disappear around the nearest street corner. These races aren’t about mastery. They are about survival.

All together races make up close to 70% of the game’s overall events. This is an absurd ratio considering that Heat had more variety at its disposal, so it’s good that plain old racing never gets old. One of the reasons for this is car handling. Being the billionth NFS entry, Heat boasts some nuance in this regard. None of the cars I drove felt quite the same on the road. I would charge my Mustang into corners and slam the handbrake to slide through the competition, where my BMW would require more gracious handling to squeeze its way through.

The second reason has to do with difficulty and, boy, does this game have some crazy difficulty spikes. I started the game on hard and had no troubles until I hit performance rating 200. That’s when things started getting out of hand. Before if I botched a corner, I could always count on catching up with the competition on the next straight. You can forget about that after rating 200. If you’re not driving pitch perfect corners, every corner, then you’re not driving to win. I’d have to enter a race with a rating 30 above the minimum requirement just to have a chance, and still feel like the opponents’ cars were the ones 30 ratings above mine.

This caught me off guard at first, however I have to admit I grew to love it later on. I’m not playing Need for Speed games for realistic driving mechanics, but I do love me some challenge. Some of my favorite tracks in the entire game are the once I had to attempt over and over again, until I finally got to experience the triumph of finishing in 1st place.

The problem that eventually becomes apparent is that the difficulty is far from well-balanced. As you fight your way up to performance rating 300, you’ll notice the difficulty slowly receding to what it was at the start of the game. You’ll occasionally run into a couple more teeth-grinders, but not much more than that. What’s worse is that two races with the same performance rating often present different levels of challenge. You never know what you’re up against. Even more bizarrely, this difficulty phenomenon only applies to race events. I would regularly enter drift and off-road events under-leveled and get out on top without feeling I was overreaching.

Out of my way!

Time trial events are exactly what they appear to be. You have to complete a course in a set amount of time to earn bank. You race alone with a ghost car following behind you, re-enacting the time you have to beat. However what makes these events truly special is that the tracks are insane. The courses are narrow, winding, demanding your full concentration and meticulous braking. None of the standard race events test your ability to control a car as much as these do. Some time trials, like “Up Up and Away”, made me fear for my car’s suspension.

Off-road events are the awkward newcomer to the series. Quite evidently, Heat isn’t a Colin McRae game, so I was curious what it had in store. The answer is not much. Don’t expect to find a self-contained version of Dirt in here. The physics simulations are no where near a true rally game. The cars fly over the terrain without much obstruction, and you have a higher chance of losing control of your standard racer driving down wet tarmac than of your jeep sliding through mud.

Still… As much of a gimmick as they are, off-road events can be loads of fun. They are few and far between, enough to be considered a palette cleanser. Driving off-road in Heat made me feel like I was given the cheat codes for the game. I’d send my Subaru storming down paths that would make all my other vehicles crawl to a halt and laugh as a madman as the scenery flew by.

Moreover, off-road events are some of the more inspired ones. The game has you racing across beaches, under bridges going through wetland, down forest paths you didn’t even know were there, all while intersecting bits and pieces of tarmac just so you could remember what civilization looks like. Lots of collectibles and additional activities are only accessible off-road giving you even more of an incentive to snoop around. The mini-map also handles itself beautifully. While in other vehicles it will never lead you off road, but switch over to your designated mud collector and all of a sudden it’s guiding you across hills and meadows.

If I were to complain about one thing, it’s that off-road events are way too easy. Admittedly, this is one of the reasons why they work so well for unwinding, but I wish Heat twisted my arm just a little. I would sometimes finish a race with the next person being 1-2 km behind me. I got so used to beefing up my car for race events that I’d enter off-road ones obliviously over-leveled. It’s only when I intentionally started skipping engine upgrades that I felt the competition slowly catching up with me.

Even though I enjoyed them, I don’t know if off-road events have much of a place in the series. They seem like an awful lot of effort for what is ultimately a bite-sized piece of entertainment. I have no idea how much the physics engine would need to be revamped to support more nuance, nor how that would impact the arcade-style handling that makes up the rest of the game. Then again, if Forza can do it…

Aw, I didn’t bring my swimsuit.

Unlike off-road, drift events feel right at home in the series. Although not present in every installment, they have still undergone a significant journey from where they started off in Underground. I can’t say I was much of a fan of those earlier renditions, but my mind was thoroughly changed by Pro Street. That was the first game in the series to introduce a more realistic drifting model and I loved it to pieces. Thankfully Heat continues exactly where Pro Street left off.

I admit, that introductory tutorial was quite rough for me. It took me some time to get back into the groove of things, but afterwards I found Heat’s drifting to be some of the most satisfying I’ve had the pleasure to engage with. To pull off a continuous drift, especially around those long U corners, requires meticulous handling of the both the gas and the steering. There’s more technique on display here than on all of the other events combined.

So after the tutorial ended, I gleefully hopped over to the dealership and got myself an RX7 (like the basic bitch that I am). I equipped it with drifting gear back at the safe house, rolled it out of the garage and set it out on the streets… Only to find out I could barely get a hold of it. It had none of the restraint of the tutorial car and it kept miserably over-steering in each corner. That other RX7 performed just fine, so it must be me, right? I went online to search for help.

Turns out you shouldn’t equip your drift car with drift gear. No, no, instead you should put on showcase gear. What’s showcase gear, you ask? Well, it’s somewhere in between your pure race and pure drift gear. How are you supposed to know that? Beats me! This all terribly reminds me of wheelies in Pro Street. To get any lift out of your car, you had to go into the advance settings and tweak your suspension accordingly. Did the game indicate that you needed to do this in any way? Of course not, fuck you.

Unfortunately, Heat’s bullshit doesn’t end there. God forbid, next you have to exit the garage and open up the special numpad menu. I repeat, the special numpad menu. Inside there are additional car tuning options which are not available in the garage. What the actual fuck, Heat? Why are these particular options only available once you’re in the open world? Was this menu patched in later? Sure enough, when you make your way through the very intuitive n u m p a d m e n u and tune your steering sensitivity and down force, you’ll be able to drift. Hooray!

Thank you internet, imagine if I had to sit there and figure out what the different suspension and tire kits were for. Like what the hell is speedcross? Or what’s the actual difference between race and on-road gear? Or why would I ever equip drag— Drag? Wait a minute, Heat, do I smell cut content?

Whenever you preview an event from the map, you’ll be presented with a quartered rectangle indicating the type of car you should bring along: race, drift, off-road and, yes, the ill-fated drag. This is only one of the many signs pointing to Heat’s unfinished state. I’ve no idea why drag events were cut, but you can see their ghostly remnants all over the game, from the unused gear to the long stretches of road begging to be burned upon. Considering the race events’ unquestionable dominance, I would have appreciated one more event type to play around with.

It’s like I’m in the canyons again.

Heat has a simple, yet effective progression system tying into its events - two currencies and a day and night cycle. During the day participating in events earns you cash which you can use to buy everything from cars, to upgrades, to those illustrious bucket hats. On the other hand, racing during night grants you reputation or, as the game likes to call it, rep. It works the same as XP, unlocking higher level events, more powerful parts and meaner cars.

I understand Ghost Games did something similar in Most Wanted (2015) where rep was gained by performing special activities and used to unlock additional car parts. This works so much better in Heat. The day and night cycle feed back into each other, with both currencies essential for your progression, and that’s not mentioning how perfectly they fit within the larger context of game.

Up until the end of the main quest, which comes at you around rep level 30, I had absolutely no need to grind. If you follow newly generated events as they appear on the map, you’ll slowly rise through the ranks as intended. However Heat does take the possibility of grinding into account. At some point I started noticing exclamation marks over events I already completed. Turns out you can compete in them again with a higher performance rating, granting a higher reward to go along. This is a pretty good fail-safe if you don’t want to be bothered with some of the nutcracker races I mentioned before.

Once you approach rep level 40 and start tackling end-game content, you’ll do have to engage with some amount of grinding. On one hand, it seems the devs didn’t bother putting that much content into later parts of the game. On the other hand, your super car spendings won’t cover themselves. Thankfully those exclamation marks are there to save the day and cause of the overall abundance of events, I didn’t mind jumping into old ones. As you repeat an event more and more, Heat does gradually decrease the winnings, meaning you can’t theoretically grind your way into infinity. This is alright as you’ll never need to go that far, and cash and rep are plenty even if you get busted a lot. Speaking of which…

Suck it, losers.

As I mentioned earlier, there are a couple of differences between day and night events. Most importantly, night events are illegal, meaning there are no barricades blocking you off from the traffic. Passers-by become bowling pins and ambulance cars start looking like bull's eyes, so of courses those polite officers eventually come after your ass. I laughed when I saw my first cop in Heat. Look at that precious thing in its tiny patrol car! Let’s see what sound it makes when I give it a little crack. Except I was the one to receive all the cracking.

I’ll tell you, dear reader, the shock was immeasurable. I got so used to smashing cops in Carbon like empty beer cans that I just couldn’t get my head around what was going on. What do you mean I’m not doing any damage to them? Did they steel those patrol cars against concrete walls before they came after me? What do you mean my car’s at critical health already? There’s no way I’m getting busted, I just got started. Wait, don’t push me into that building. Wait, where did that other cop come from? No, don’t you box me in, you mother fu—

Yeah, I got my ass handed to me by the cops. Multiple times. It became a regular occurrence, to be frank. Heat instilled the fear of law and order into me. It was something I was actively worried about in the beginning. I couldn’t just go rampaging around town willy-nilly. I had to keep peeking around every corner for any sign of those rotating lights. And you know what? That’s how it should be. You should have the fear of the cops etched deep into your bones. They shouldn’t be laughable piñata dolls. They should be the force of reckoning raining down upon you. And my god, in Heat, do they.

Eventually I learned how to handle them. No, you can’t face off with a cop, you idiot. Fold your tail between your legs and run! Managing cops in Heat is a game of crowd control. You have to be aware of how many there are around you and how many are about to pop around the next corner. You have to be smart about how you evade them. Don’t smash into them, don’t let them make you smash into something else, don’t let yourself be boxed in. Keep a lookout on your surroundings. Jump pads are your best friend. Go where the cops can’t follow you. If your car is fast enough, try to ditch them on the highway. And know your nearest gas station, for the love of god!

Get chased enough times and you’ll eventually start noticing the patterns. That doesn’t mean that heat 5 chases start being any less vicious, they always are, but you will be able to predict your way out of some predicaments. E.g. right after you’ve evaded them, the game will spawn columns of cops patrolling around your last known location. It’s easy to spot their trajectory on the map and slip by undetected in the opposite direction. Likewise, cops are polite enough to announce when they’re going to ram you, so you can use that to pull off a sharp turn or hit the breaks as hard as you can.

The algorithm can be annoying at times. After heat level 4, the game just keeps throwing them at you. Sometimes this is called for. You can farm heat by buzzing back and forth the same speed trap, but the game doesn’t let you enjoy exploits like that for long. You’ll eventually aggravate the operator, making her use her otherworldly powers to conjure up a patrol car right in front you. However at other times this happens at random, spawning cops out of the blue and forcing you to swerve off the road into the nearest ditch just to avoid being spotted.

Some nights you win…

High heat events are a beast of their own. You’re not really meant to engage with them early on. Heat 3 cops and higher are not to be trifled with and best avoided by your low rating vehicle. Enter late game though and you’ll need to get your hands dirty if you want to top off your super car. Building up heat level 3 is sure enough, but heat level 5 is not so easily achieved and requires a considerable time investment. Things don’t get easy once you’re there as the events match your current performance rating and the cops are at your throat the moment you launch.

When it comes to the best gear I don’t mind that the game walls off the cream of the crop, but high heat events are nothing if not unforgivable. As I said, you need to grind heat just to get a chance to compete, but you can’t simply crash through cops to do so. You need to conserve your health and items for the big event, meaning that grinding needs to be conducted slowly and methodically further increasing the downtime. The events themselves are ruthless, both from the perspective of your unwavering opponents and the merciless cops. If you lose or get caught, you have to repeat the entire process all over again. What’s worse, you’re not allowed to restart the event even when you’re not being chased, as you can with all others in the game. Come on, Heat, give me a break!

The only time I considered the cops to be a nightmare, and not an excellently crafted challenge, is during nightly drift events. Heat, this is not ok. As I said, the best tactic against the cops is to run, but you can’t do that while drifting. Performing a successful drift means pulling off a continuous uninterrupted slide around a curve. Sliding is not akin to running away, not in the least. You won’t be loosing anyone at that speed. What’s worse, a lucky cop (or more likely two) will be able to trail behind you at ease and keep knocking at your rear, breaking your drift combo over and over again.

Not only can’t you win the event at pace, you have to lose the police afterwards as well. Do you know what it’s like to lose cops in a drift car, Heat? It’s a fucking nightmare! It’s a drift car, it slides! It slides if the wind blows against it a little harder, not to mention if some asshole is ramming into it. You can’t even reliably retry the event with a bruised ego. The game always spawns patrol cars along particular curves, meaning some events are doomed from the start. If the track goes by a gas station, be sure a cop will be waiting for you to show up. Why aren’t there any off-road races during nights? I’d love to see those mother fucking Corvettes try to chase me through the forest.

…some nights you lose.

It’s good that the gameplay throws such a strong emphasis on the cops as they also present the main conflict of the story. We’re introduced to our antagonists right from the start, lieutenant Frank Mercer and his ruthless squad of deputies, keen on abusing all their might to rid the streets of those pesky—

Hold on, Heat, what are we doing? I know police violence is a serious issue in the States and I’m certainly not here to defend the cops. However, Heat, is this really the hill you want to die on? Oh no, the honest tax-paying street racer is getting harassed by the police again! Will these fascist pigs ever let me enjoy my fundamental rights to crash through everything that isn’t a solid wall? Most of you probably don’t think that police violence is a laughing matter, and I’m with you 100%. That’s why I find it particularly troubling that Heat tries to look at it from the moral high-ground of street racing.

Look, Need for Speed just isn’t the franchise to tackle this topic. You simply cannot make a case for street racing in real life. If this were the real world, my MC would have had her driver’s license revoked the first time she got busted. The only thing she would have been allowed to drive afterwards is a tricycle. This is why the franchise has always been camp as hell, with dumb story lines that never took themselves too seriously. Street racing is something that’s only allowed to exist and look cool in fantasy land. So bringing in the sensitive matter of police brutality into it… Ugh.

Ok, at least it’s not saying anything that I fundamentally disagree with. Cops equal bad, alright, let’s move on. Heat, what else do you have in store for me? Who is this character I’m supposed to be building up a crew with? Ana? You cool, Ana? She’s not cool, she’s not!

The Rivera siblings hold the emotional core of the story: Ana, the racer who appears in the intro, and Lucas, the mechanic who treats you to your first car. Ana is all fired up about making it into the big league, while Lucas is done with his reckless past and would just like to grease his hands on my a— on some cylinders. Naturally the game couples you with Ana, her being the like-minded street racer who’ll help you tear up the town.

Tear up my brain cells more likely. Dear lord, this woman is a car crash. She pulls you into her street racing scheme without so much a second thought and continues to batter you with her ludicrous ideas to get acclaimed. She constantly calls you up to whine about whatnot. She harasses you even while you’re trying to save her from the cops. At one point she makes a grand speech about making something of her life with street racing. I was waiting for her to divulge how we’re going to save this town using the power of street racing and friendship, but alas. Seriously, what hellish mind thought up this woman? Why can’t we hang out with Lucas more? Is he single? Did I ask that already?

What’s up for tonight, Ana? Breaking the law, you don’t say.

When you think about it, it’s weird how your MC doesn’t really have any emotional ties to the Riveras. You’re just an outsider to all of their drama, an accidental tag-along that occasionally comes up with vague encouragements. I should have minded the disconnect, but strangely I didn’t. There’s something about the female voice actress, Jamie Gray Hyder, that clicked with me. To my ears she managed to perfectly convey the barely concealed sarcasm of someone who deals with idiots on a daily basis, all while wearing sunglasses and a bucket hat indoors. What’s worse, I’m not even sure I’m imagining it.

There were times where I was honest to god convinced the MC was low-key making fun of Ana. E.g. there’s a piece of banter that becomes available after you’ve beaten the main quest. Ana calls you up to tell you how she triumphantly humiliated her ex, only for the conversation to reveal that the aforementioned humiliation consisted of one text message and that she dropped and broke her phone afterwards. Your MC patiently nods along and cheers her up as if talking to a child. I couldn’t help but laugh my ass off.

On another occasion you get to hear all about her chicken burger induced diarrhea. The writers must have been having a laugh, right? Then again, even Lucas catches the idiot disease eventually. He starts off as a former hotshot, now a sensible and restrained mechanic, only to give in to Ana’s bullshit. By the end he’s the goofy guy who can’t drive a car no more, so he calls you up hoping you’ll distribute fliers for his shop to your cool new big league friends (who you never get to meet btw).

Look at these three geniuses.

The game throws in some side characters to give you a break from the Riveras, with middling results. Dex is the first from the bunch and the only thing you can make out about him is his undeniable crush for sexy garage man. Lucas and Lucas’ daddy issues are all Dex ever talks about, so much so that even me, another one of Lucas’ fangirls, couldn’t take it any more. That said, I was surprisingly pleased to see him pop up again after the last story mission. Proximity breeds familiarity, I guess, and I found the last couple of races he organized with the Riveras to be absolutely adorable. Although it would have been nice if the three of them didn’t always fight for last place, but maybe I’m asking too much.

The drift guy (whose name I can’t remember, so let’s just call him that) goes by remarkably fast. He comes off quite likeable after that initial drifting tutorial and continues to be so even as you destroy all of his high scores. Following Dex’s reappearance, I was waiting for drift guy to make a comeback as well, but to no avail. It’s a shame, considering he’s the most down-to-earth of the entire cast and someone I’d actually want to grab a beer with. I mean, imagine sitting over a drink with Ana, Jesus.

That just leaves me with one more guest driver to cover. By the time the elusive hacker chick rolled up in her pickup truck, I was already used to the game’s feeble attempts to portray more believable characters. I was certainly not ready for FBI cross-country dodgery. My girl looks like she never got out her Matrix phase, and sadly I can relate. If this were any other NFS game, her kind of buffoonery would fit right in. Unfortunately as a follow up to drift guy, she sticks out like a clown at a funeral. In some other game I would have loved listening to her signature deadpan and watching her evade the Feds using her mythical off-road powers.

I’m not sure the cop characters deserve much recognition. Shaw’s your stereotypical psycho cop, there to laugh maniacally and do all of the worst shit you expect of him. Torres might have been a good secret villain if the plot made any (less) sense. Frank Mercer though, I’ll never forget. At the climax of the final mission you have to chase the man down in his stolen M3. Yes, it’s that M3. A bit of a weird place for a cameo, but maybe I’m missing the larger context of the franchise’s ongoing story (if there is such a thing). Anyway, in a moment of utter madness, Mercer launched the M3 up a ramp from the top of a hill and flew over a valley like Icarus taking his very last breaths. What’s worse, I’m not even sure it was scripted. We were just racing down the mountain when the poor bastard decided his best chance of losing me was skydiving.

Hold on, Captain Niobe, while I put on my Trinity cosplay.

Although I’m critical of it, Heat’s story ended sooner than I would have wanted. The game tried to emphasize the Riveras’ crusade against the cops, but all I could see hanging was the juicy carrot of racing with the big league. Say Ana, what are these crews I keep hearing about? When are we going up against them? Can we form our own crew, minus you of course? Then it unceremoniously ends and all that’s left of “the big league” are glowing arrows pointing towards the multiplayer. Oh, ok…

To the game’s credit, there’s quite a bit of content after the final story mission. For starters, there are those Dex + Rivera races I already mentioned. Hacker chick comes back for one last race before she escapes the Feds into the underbrush. There’s a series of so-called Discovery events which take you along the outskirts of the map and those heat 5 events only make sense once you’ve gotten your hands on a super car. The banter is also surprisingly good, with characters no longer barraging you with quest reminders, but actually checking in with sometimes hilarious pieces of dialogue.

What stole the show, to my surprise, were activities and collectibles. It’s been a while sine I played a game that handles these so well as Heat does. Usually when you reach the point where you have to collect an X amount of Y to get an achievement, the game becomes a slog. Thankfully Heat found a way to avoid that. Instead of making them available all at once, the game slowly unlocks new activities/collectibles as you level up. Although this is meant to prevent you from feeling overwhelmed, I still did at first glancing at all the markers muddling the map. Relief came in when I actually started poking around the world. You’ll clear most of them just by driving from race to race and encountering them alongside the road. When you get to mopping them up in late game, the leftovers are significantly less formidable.

Both activities and collectibles come in 3 varieties, the former consisting of speed traps, drift zone and long jumps, while the latter is made up of billboards, flamingos and street art. There’s some culling to be made here, for sure. The only one I’d call objectively shit content are the flamingos, being nothing more than purposeless pick-ups. Graffiti might seem like the same thing, but I beg to differ. Not only do they exist as actual pieces of art inside the world, but upon being found, they are unlocked and added to your decals repertoire. They are all beautiful and unique pieces of art you would gladly put up on your car. Billboards and long jumps are, again, kind of the same thing, billboards providing the mindless satisfaction of pure destruction, with long jumps requiring some more thought and build-up to a perfect lift-off.

The ones I enjoyed the most were drift zones and speed traps. Drift zones make up for a lack of actual drift events, with a staggering 35 to 16 ratio. Each zone encompasses a couple of curves which is nowhere near a full-on event, but what they lack in quantity they make up for in challenge. To get 3 stars on some of these you need to spend time perfecting your corners, figuring out the best ways in and out of a curve and learning how to drift close to edges for that sweet proximity bonus.

Speed traps sound basic in theory, but check the global achievements chart and you’ll see that they are the ones people struggle with the most. For starters, yes, 3-starring them requires the investment of a super car, but that’s only the beginning. Not only do you need to develop ridiculous speeds, but the lead-up to some of these is particularly tricky. A 120 degree corner doesn’t seem all that intimidating if you’re going into it driving 200 km/h, but bump that speed up above 300 km/h, and all of a sudden every twitch of the steering wheel could send you flying off the road.

What is that? A bird?

Now all of those drift zones and speed traps would have been fine and dandy if it weren’t for one thing - the fucking traffic. Oh, I understand why it needs to be there. First, from a believably perspective, you can’t be driving around a ghost town. Second, you need a couple of wild cards to spice things up. Racing around night wouldn’t be nearly as exciting if there weren’t any occasional passers-by to look out for. However we’re not talking about a couple of vehicles here and there. The streets are littered with these vermin.

If you’re trying to 3-star some of the more difficult activities, you’ll get all too familiar with the spawning algorithm. I’ve had some of the nastiest car crashes doing speed traps. A good chuck of them are nigh impossible when the game consistently keeps generating 5 vehicles on the same stretch of road. How can I hit 338 km/h if my passage is essentially blocked?

Driving in the opposite lane is generally a recipe for disaster. Over-passing even a single car can be a gambler’s game. Dead angles, sharp corners, elevation differences - these are all instances where you can expect someone to pop up from the opposite direction, as they most often do. I flew over inclines and slammed straight into lorries, I got knocked over by incoming traffic, I watched helplessly as my car drifted sideways into unsuspecting vans. No wonder there are so many ambulance cars driving around - someone needs to mop up after your street racing brethren!

Intersections are your worst enemy. Not only do cars come at you out of nowhere, they also stop in the middle of an intersection like a deer caught by headlights. What are you doing, friend? You don’t just block intersections like that! Am I missing something? Is this an American thing? Did the same driving school also teach you to suddenly switch lanes when someone’s approaching from behind? Bitch, do you ever check your review mirrors? Who’s issuing driver’s licenses to these people? And I thought I was the hooligan.

Son of a—

After some time with the game, I realized none of the activities and collectibles were initially visible on the map. No, a DLC came out a couple months after launch allowing you to reveal their locations. I’m sorry, but how exactly did people live without this feature? Did those poor pioneers have to check behind every fence in the game in search of flamingos?

Speaking of DLC, Heat offers two so called Black Market DLCs. One gives you an Aston Martin DB11, while the other a McLaren F1. You have to complete 6 contracts with each car, each contract consisting of 2 series, and each series of multiple challenges and events. The events can be race or drift, while the challenges usually involve completing certain activities with certain requirements. Later contracts even make use of high heat races, meaning you’ll have loads more content on your hands.

I got the DB11 as part of a discount I was buying the game at, which would be considered a pretty generous offer if it weren’t for the fact that the DB11 is a shit car. Aston Martin, I sure hope this model handles better in real life, cause in the game it’s stiffer than my grandmother’s back! I had to equip drift tires just so I could get a little slide out of the corners.

Considering Black Market events are so varied, you’ll often have to re-spec that DB11, which is a bit tedious, if not a considerable money spender. What bothered me more is that Heat genuinely expects you to be able to drift in this goddamn car. Remember how I told you I had to tone down my RX7 so it wouldn’t over-steer? Well, for the DB11 it’s quite the opposite. Either you’re maxing out those drifting configurations or you’re not drifting at all. For me, the hardest drifting event in the entire game was with the Aston through the shipping yard. As if it weren’t hard enough tightly squeezing the DB11’s fat ass between piles of containers and not scratching a single one, the event also demanded a ludicrous score in order to complete it. Afterwards, I spent restless nights wondering if the game would try to make me tune the car for off-road as well.

I ended up not getting the McLaren F1 DLC, as I concluded I already milked more out of the game than was intended, though maybe that was a mistake considering they named the DLC “The Greatest Car in the World”. That might be so, but I have to wonder if these people ever drove the Ford GT. Watching the GT’s precious little spoiler go up and down on its own invigorates my soul more than baby seal videos. Does the F1 have an automatic spoiler? No? Didn’t think so.

I like to think Aston Martin paid for this endorsement.

Heat boasts around 127 cars for you to call your own. While the number feels more than sufficient, the initial choice between a muscle, a tuner and an exotic might give you a false impression of variety. If you were wondering who the main sponsors were, there are 14 BMWs, 13 Porsches, 11 Lamborghinis and 8 Ferraris in this game. Unless you’re a car aficionado, you won’t know, nor care about the nuances between the many different BMW M-whatnots and Porsche 911-who-gives-a-fuck. They’ll just appear as copy-pastes taking up space in the dealership. I did register a fair choice of old-school muscle cars, but the Japanese selection is quite meager, with the exception of Nissan’s strong 14 car line-up.

Before buying a car the game lets you know how much you’ll be able to customize it on a scale of 1 to 10, from a vanity point of view. I appreciate this kind of upfront information. A car with a higher score will have loads of spoilers and bumpers and side skirts at its disposable, while ones with a lower score will only allow limited tinkering. For those looking for more detailed customization options, there’s no such thing as body sculpting, but the game does offer additional quirks like neon lights, coloring tire smoke, adjusting the sound of the exhaust, etc.

The one editor which reigns supreme above all others is the decals editor. We’re talking Pro Street levels of depth here. The editor divides your car into regions: front, hood, roof, sides and rear. You can slam an insane amount of decals on each region, scale them, rotate them, move them around, adjust layers. If you’ve got the imagination, the sky’s the limit. It’s only tricky if you want your design to span more than one region, but even that’s manageable. Trust me, I’ve sprinkled a galaxy’s worth of stars across my BMW.

The best aspect of the decals editor are the community wraps. Each time you edit decals on your car, the game bundles and saves those changes into a so-called wrap. All wraps created by all users are automatically visible to the entire community. You can browse through them and apply any one on your car. This is an amazing feature, especially if you don’t feel like doing your own paint job or you saw a particularly cool design online. What’s more, the game can be modded to replace existing decals with whatever image you desire. This can be a daunting task, requiring the use of both Photoshop and the Frosty Editor. Luckily, modded decals get saved into wraps as well, meaning you can apply someone else’s unabashed anime homage (and defile your car for all eternity).

Performance parts could have been a simple affair, but Heat decided to throw in some curve balls. Most parts are easy enough to pick, but you’ll have to make up your mind regarding other ones. Suspensions, tires and differentials are the ones that lean your car towards a specific handling profile, but you don’t have to invest all 3 in the same category, rather construct whatever hybrid suits you best. Swapping a turbo makes your car feel noticeably different, and there’s even some nuance to picking a gearbox if you’re interested in fine-tuning your acceleration and top speed.

The one addition I found confusing were the engine swaps. There’s a ton of videos online comparing different engine models, but generally you just want to buy the most expensive one. I say the addition is confusing because it seemingly only exists as a money sink. Performance parts for one engine model don’t match another, so you have to equip your car anew each time you swap an engine.

Besides that, there are 2 slots for auxiliary items divided into actives and passives. Most of these are cop related: take less damage from cops, do more damage to cops, etc. Repair kits were a must have for me, as well as the radar disruptor which I found to be absolutely OP. It severely limits the detection range of the police’s radar, meaning you’ll not only be harder to detect, but will also be able to slip away more easily. Pair that with a fast enough car and, heat 5, you’re on!

Some of the auxiliary items are related to nitrous and, I have to ask, does nitrous serve any purpose in this game? It certainly didn’t feel so at the beginning. The starter packs are miserably useless, and not just objectively. Whenever you hit that nitrous switch, the camera zooms out, making it seem like you’re lagging even more behind your opponents. Nitrous only starts being handy ones you’ve unlocked the ultimate parts. The 5 x 3lb tanks are plentiful enough to be abused and switching on the 15lb big boy made me fear for my life.

Come on, Cupcake, smile for mama.

I wouldn’t have much more to say about the customization options if it weren’t for one thing tripping them over - the UI. My god, is it a mess. The key bindings are an arrangement of oddities you’ll get all too familiar with. I know I’m approaching this critique from a keyboard perspective, but still! Ghost Games, at least some of your staff must have played games with a mouse and keyboard before. They must have, right?

I already mentioned the insanity of the numpad menu. Other than additional configuration options, it also holds a list of on-going quests. This is the only place in the UI where you can find this information. Heat, couldn’t you have put it like anywhere else? I swear, some chief creative director must have gotten a full sized keyboard for the first time in his life and been blown out of his mind with it. Who the fuck else would think the numpad menu to be intuitive?

I also talked about the exclamation marks which pop up above old races when they become available for higher performance ratings. When this first happened, I had no idea what was going on. No, Heat, I don’t keep track of all of the event markers on the map. When I see an event standing out like that, my first assumption is that it’s a special kind of encounter and not an old one I already completed. Maybe I could have figured it out hadn’t my mind completely glossed over the goddamn N U M P A D prompts instructing you to cycle through the different variations of the event.

But why am I holding myself back? Let me bring out my mighty friend, the bullet list:

The first time I wanted to pause the game, I kept smashing the Esc key, just like any other sane person. Except, no, if you want to bring up the menu, you need to press Tab. Tab? The fuck?

There are absolutely no options for sorting or filtering. Each time you want to look through clothes, cars, rims, graffiti, etc. you’ll be forced to go down the same elongated lists, over and over again.

The game keeps track of how many specific performance parts you own. Whenever you want to equip one, it asks you if you want to buy a new or re-equip an existing one. However, it never tells you from which car it’s stealing the performance part from, nor does it give you any convenient shortcuts for swapping entire suits of gear from one car to another.

The same applies for vanity parts. I.e. you don’t have to buy new parts, just equip old ones. However, the interface is completely different. Not only does the game not tell you if you already own a vanity part, it also lets you buy a duplicate that you’ve already got equipped at the moment! If you want to check which vanity items you’ve got on you, you need to press Q and then X to remove any given item. Very intuitive, yes.

Some cosmetic changes, like neon lights, aren’t displayed during customization, but only once you’ve exited the garage.

When tuning the sound of the exhaust, you’re able to rev up the engine to hear the results. However, holding the arrow up key also moves your cursor in the customization list. Every. Single. Time.

Keyboard shortcuts make the otherwise excellent decals editor into a frightening experience. The bottom bar shows a dizzying array of commands at all times. It’s incredibly easy to mistake controls and do something unintended. Thank god Ctrl + Z works. If only holding down Ctrl wouldn’t also pan the camera within the editor…

The X key is the placebo for everything. You press X to remove vanity items. You press X to add new decals. You press X to exit the game from the main menu. You press X to scratch that itch deep up your ass. No, Ghost Games, the X key on the keyboard is not equivalent to the A/Cross button on the gamepad.

Press X to pay re— no, wait, to add decals.

When stripped of the incomprehensible UI, there are parts of this game’s presentation that are worth applauding. The loading screen, for example, is one of the best I’ve ever seen in a game. Each time you exit the garage, your car is seamlessly transported to a dark room with lights pulsing along the walls and the ceiling. The music you were listening to a moment ago kicks in even harder. The camera pans around your car showing off your design under the changing lights. Then, right as its about to end, the camera centers behind your car. The mirage of the loading screen pops like a bubble, and all of a sudden you’re parked in front of the garage in the open world. It never gets old.

Similarly, while you’re out in the world, you’re able to switch from day to night on the click of a button. When you do that, the camera pulls back and rolls around your car, transporting you back to the imaginary room with the throbbing neon lights. It doesn’t linger there for long before rolling one more time and putting you back where you were, changing the time of day in the process. Whenever you end the night, either by returning safely to the garage or getting caught by the cops, the transition is accompanied by equally elaborate sequences. Either you have the pleasure of watching your rep fill up with your earnings or you’re forced to swallow the bitter pill of being escorted by a cop away from your wrecked vehicle.

No less important to the overall feel of the game is the soundtrack. If there’s one thing EA has a good reputation for, it’s their taste in music. Whoever’s been working in their music licensing department for all these years needs another raise. I love Need for Speed soundtracks, I play them all the time. They’re filled with music I wouldn’t usually listen to, but that inevitably grows on me over the course of the game.

Even before Carbon cemented things, earlier games unofficially divided their cars into 3 categories: tuners, muscles and exotics. Along with these 3 types of cars there were also 3 music genres accompanying them: rap, rock and electronic. Pro Street started muddling the water a bit, and after that, it’s a blank slate for me. I was curious what Heat had in store after all these years. The initial car selection made me think we were going back to Carbon’s way of things, but, boy, was I wrong. Rap and electronic are still there, but rock has been swapped out by latin music. Imagine my surprise at hearing Inna out of people! Now, my knowledge of Spanish starts and ends with por favor, meaning I’m not much of a fan of latin music. However, this is Need for Speed, so it didn’t take long for me to start acquiring some new tastes.

Instead of dividing songs by car types, Heat divides them according to the time of day. The daily playlist is filled up by most of the latin music, meaning it’s fervently upbeat, while the nightly one is more gloomy and aggressive, matching the constant threat of the police. There’s also a playlist for the garage, which is laid-back and soothing, helping you wind down from the pressure. Each playlist perfectly accentuates the mood their respective setting is striving for. Besides that, there are tons of tracks to get hooked on. During the day I’d patiently wait for that one Cardie B verse, while the night had me chanting to Machine Gun Kelly out of all people.

Now, I know what most of you are going to say. Who listens to Need for Speed soundtracks when you can just play Spotify? How long is this game anyway? You’re not going to keep listening to the same 50 songs, are you? I get what you’re saying, however I find the soundtrack to be an essential part of a game’s identity. If you’re gonna swap out the music, you might as well do that with the entire art style. I don’t mind the repetition, besides, you loose a lot of the little touches when you forgo the in-game music. There’s no automatic volume change when hopping in and out of menus. There’s no switching of tracks when you enter an event, start being chased by cops or go back to the garage. All of this makes the music diegetic, firmly grounding you within Heat’s world.

Now this speaks class.

Gee, I’m so glad EA has gotten a hold of itself. Finally, we can receive high quality games that aren’t infected by any of the plagues of modern monetization. Sure, Heat is rough around the edges. It has gaping holes were content should have been, but we can fix that. What’s important is that we’ve found the right formula and know where to go from there.

Right, Ghost Games? You did so well, EA might even give you more leeway with the next Need for Speed. Imagine that! Ghost Games? Your there? Where have they run off to? They must be busy working on the next game, those rascals. Let’s see what Google says. Ghost Games studios…

Disbanded!? EA! No! We said we wouldn’t do that any more. Bad, EA! Bad! What do you mean you couldn’t find enough talent to build a studio in Sweden? Don’t you bullshit me, EA, all of the kids want to make games nowadays. You just can’t be pleased, can you? Make a good game, disband a studio, make a bad game, disband a studio. What’s that? I shouldn’t be worried because Criterion will continue working on the franchise? Sure, EA, go ahead and let Criterion parade Ghost Games’ limp body across the streets. That’ll make things better.

Oh, I feel so filthy now. Why did I indulge in your flattery even for a little? That’s it, down you go. You heard me, down to the bottom of the list of existing game publishers. Yes, even bellow Ubisoft. Ok, maybe not bellow Activision-Blizzard, but don’t you take that as a compliment! No, I won’t be bought with an anime Need for Speed. Why don’t you pump that cell-shaded tire smoke up your ass! Now if you’ll excuse me, I feel the need to wash myself.

Rum-dum-dum…

[coredrill]

gridman universe spoilers BUT LIKE FOR REAL THIS TIME LMAO

i just. oh my god. oh my GOD. how is this movie everything i wanted since learning of its existence AND everything i didn’t even KNOW i wanted??? i cried reading it in TEXT FORM god only knows how much more it’s gonna hit with ANIMATION and MUSIC and VOICE ACTING UGH.

[redacted] in the [redacted] UGHHHHHH this makes me tear up every time i think about it!!!!! they put his ass in middle school…………AND FUCKING. EXPIRATION DATES I CALLED IT I KNEW IT WAS SOMETHING DUMB I LOVE HIM SO MUCH

EVERYTHING WITH ANTI…………………..wails

how is gauma MORE slutty with MORE clothes on. i love his goofy ass sosososo much 💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖 knowing i have more of him to look forward to bring me genuinely a HUGE amount of joy

hearing that yomogi cries when they reunite……….YEOWCH!!! me the fuck too yomo!!!

i was hesitant abt them bringing akane back but literally everything she does sounds like it was handled absolutely beautifully and omg she absolutely deserves it 😭

GRIDMANS FINAL FORM……………also geez i am SO HYPED for the 2d anim. like ssss/trigger uses 3d so so well i always look forward to that too but also NO WONDER they brought all the lagann-hen animators back!!!!!! amemiya was correct, that oscar is his for the taking LMAO

imagine being that japantimes reviewer saying “it was contrived” when that’s literally the last thing that matters 💀 could not be me!!!

AUUUUUGHHHHHHHHH ANYWAYS. my soul has been healed but also i’m like ten gridillion times more antsy to see the fuckin thing now LMAO. PLEASE………….US RELEASE………..SOON

[popculturebuffet]

Sonic Month!: Patreon Triple Feature!: Unfair Ball/Hooked On Sonics/Battle of the Boy Bands (Sonic X, SATAM, Sonic Boom), Patreon Review for Emma Fici

Hello all you happy hedgehog! I’m Jake, I review stuff and today is a day i’ve been waiting for as we start SONIC MONTH. Once a week for all of march i’m doing a review starring everyone’s faviorite blue blur in celebration of the release of Sonic the Hedgehog 2! Yes with hype for my faviorite blue dude with attitude, sorry dewey, at an all time high and with something like this only coming every other year, I thought it’d be fun to do this and got the help of my good friend Emma Fici, who previous via a comissoin an da patreon review had me cover the sonic undreground 3 part pilot and sonic christmas blast. We both have a deep lifelong love of sonic, it’s super fast highs, it’s too slow lows, and it’s utterly weird variety of ways to interpret the fastest thing alive from the freedom fighters of SATAM, Archie and Fleetway, to the post adventure worlds of the modern games, idw comics and Sonic X, to post modern world of sonic boom , there’s just so much to do an dti’s all fucking great

So naturally to kick us off i’m closing the gap and reviewing the OTHER threre sonic cartoons. See my patreons get one review a month so emma’s using both hers from last month (as you can opt out ot save it for later or to save up three tv reviews to cash in for a movie), and this month.. and being a good friend and not wanting to cover underground TWICE before i’d covered the show it’s basically riping off once, I asked her to pick a satam free of charge. 

So grab a chilli dog, a sonic themed energy drink and some heavily expired spagettos  as I cover two very weird hedgehog tales with diffrent approaches to being batshit insane and one of SATAM’s best as we celebrate the fastest thing alive!

Sonic X: Unfair Ball/Fierce Fight! Sonic Baseball Team!

Starting us off we have Sonic X. Like all the sonic shows it’s unique, and in this case for a variety of reasons: it was the first produced post adventure, the only one made in japan and thus not only had to be dubbed but said dub’s cast went on to be the offical cast for a while with Mike Pollock being retained to this day. More on him later obviously.  It’s also at the time of this writing the only one to outright adapt any of the games with adventure, adventure 2 and battle all getting adaptations, with Sonic Heroes likely only not getting one because it came out around the same time the season was airing and season 3 went in a massively diffrent direction. 

So naturally this is a unique creature. It’s also the only one I saw first ruN: I was like.. four when satam and adventures came out (I saw them in reruns instead), Underground wans’t on any channel I was aware of as a kid, and I didn’t have cable by the time boom came out. X on the other hand aired thanks to good old 4kids on their fox box lineup. 

I fucking loved the fox box and rightfully so. While 4kids is remembered more nowadays for weirdly trying to ignore the fact the shows it dubbed were made in japan or censoring adult content with invisible guns and lolly pops, it’s worth remembering that a lot of the time.. they were actually good at their job. Sure part of it’s nostalgia since they were a staple of my childhood via pokemon, yugioh, ultimate muscle and TONS of other dubs as well as their only western work with TMNT 2003, and are a large reason why I’m still a fan of pokemon, yugioh and tmnt to this day by getting me hooked on them back then.. but they had a talented stable of actors, got the feel of their works more often than not and while they went to hilarious lengths with the censorship, a lot of that stems from the standards for children’s cartoons at the time: censors probablyw eren’t cool with having a cardgame to decide whose legs get sawed off or dies falling thorugh a buliding, so they had to do the best they could even if it was usually just “the shadow realm with you”. I’m not saying they were all okay: their refusal to release uncut versions like Funimation or even include the originals on dvds was very not okay, while I prefer dubs myself I get people preferring subs and want them to have that option legally, and their half assed dubbing of one piece because they didn’t care about getting it (Toei, who has their OWN long record of bad desciions forced it on them apparently) is appaling, especially since the equally family unfriendly yuyu haksho had been succesfully cut for toonami... and I love dit a sa kid despite still being pretty fucking dark, just less bloody, so they have no excuse for how it went. 4kids was far from a perfect company, but it got a lot of kids like me into anime, made it more accesible, and helped , alongside the us version of shonen jump, get more kids into it. So I have some fondness for them if tempered with incredibly stupid descioins.. kind of like how I treat disney in present day. Love some of the things they made, question the hell out of a lot of the things they do. 

Anyways getting back on track, while I did see the show while it was airing I didn’t see much of it. My best guess is I liked something that was on at the same time on kids wb more or that it was simply on too early, as emma remembers it being on at like 6 in the morning. Though what I saw of it was mostly monster of the week stuff that didn’t work as well as what Kirby was doing on the same network, as well as some annoying little kid and as an adult I really havne’t rechecked it out like satam or adventures because I just heard bad things.  I am seriously considering giving the series a full review at some point, season by season, along with giving every sonic series the same treatment (Though for ones like adventures or underground that are one long blob I’m going to chonk it up. ) If you’d be intrested in that let me know in the comments or simply like this post. Point is I dont’ have a through knowledge of this show going in or a huge attachment to it, but I gave it a fair shake, especailly since the episode I was being handed was one of it’s dumber outings.

As a quick primer for those not at all familliar with the show: Sonic X has Sonic and Friends, after a battle with robotnik “Stranded in a new location without any explinaton”: Earth

Sonic ends up drowning in a pool, oddly for the time not set to drowning pool but 4kids is working on a budget of 4 paperclips and some string as it is so I can’t blame them, and is saved by Chris Throndyke..

Yeah Chris is a precocious 10 year old boy who the entire fandom wants to punt into the sun. I remember not really liking him and honestly he feels redundant. He’s also likely one of the reasons, among many people were trepedatious about the first sonic movie: Sonic being pals with a human didn’t work out the last time. Thankfully Tom is actually useful, enjoyable to be around, and i’m glad he’s in the sequel, while Chris is mostly forgotten because he was a kid sidekick to a guy who already had the position filled. 

So he invites sonic to live with him, his grandpa chuck (the irony is not lost on me), and his butler whose name I forgot but is voiced by darren dustan aka maximillion pegasus aka Geovanni in a pokemon stage show that one time...

It’s weird. Amy, Cream and Tails are also living there apparently while Knuckles fucked off to the woods so he can be mysterious and solo and stuff.. you know like he was before the series slowly drained the relevance and dignity from his body. Hopefully being given the second sexiest voice in human history will fix that.. 

Anyways onto this VERY silly episode. And i’m not judging the series by it: a lot of series have weaker or downright insane episodes. It’d be like judging miraculous ladybug by that time a bunch of grown men had a no girls allowed party in a teenagers bedroom till a disco stalker showed up and had to be subdued by a monkey man. It’s just not fair. I am however not going to hold back on this episode. if your looking for so bad it’s good sonic content, this one is is pure crush 40 carrot gold. 

So the plot kicks off thanks to tails just sorta flying around in his plane:

Sadly instead of his dope plan from sonic adventure 2, or his also dope plane from sonic adventure 2.. we get.. this thing

Like... this is apparently an UPGRADE but looks like any old jet and just has a sad white and yellow paint job. Which is a colorscheme that could work but just does not here. It’s just so boring and it shoudln’t be. Making your own plane for tails is fine but when both of his in the games at this point are dope as hell and iconic in their own right, why would you half ass it?

Anyways the chaos emeralds natural pull for one another, something I and the games forgot about but X faithfully adapts, causes Tails to have to land in a stadium where he befriends the groundskeeper after he mistook him for the gremlin who steals his shoe at night. The guy is bummed because the stadium is being shut down for one with artifical turf after spending years as a baseball groundskeeper man. He soon turns out to have the light blue chaos emerald, with the stadium being named diamond stadium after it because eh why not. 

This attracts the Eggman, and he’s got the masterplan.. to.. challenge sonic and friends to a game of baseball. 

We’ll unpack that after the theme song, which no matter the language fucking slaps. The one I heard, the 4kids theme rocks. Which isn’t a huge suprise: one of 4kids best weapons was making catchy as hell themes. And while I wished they and more anime back then used dubs of the original themes, because anime themes fucking slap, they still managed to equal the original with goofy gusto and 4kids was the king of that. Sonic X is fun, incredibly fast, and introduced the whole gotta go fast catchphrase which perfectly fits sonic and is on par with others like “gotta juice” or “That’s no good”. I’m waiiiiting can burn in hell where it belongs. I love jaleel but god damn that’s annoying. 

Anyway, the original japanese theme is also a banger, Sonic Drive, a fucking fuck energetic number sung by the same guy who sung the japanese dragon ball z theme chala head chala. So overall no matter if your watching dubs or subs, your in for a good time and no matter the country, sonic gives you a great theme song guaranteed. 

Anyways yeah.. that’s literally eggman’s plan this time. He made robot baseball players and sends his messenger gremlin bokun to go formally challenge sonic and them. As for why he didn’t just.. you know.. take it take it go robotnik, ultimate power just isn’t as satisfying if you aren’t stealing it from a bunch of furries and some ten year old who they live with. 

But yes he challenges them and Chris made shoos him out of there

So sonic speeds over there, with amy following since she’s almost as fast and.. oh nope they just.. pile inot chris’ van I guess because they also take him, his butler, and his grandpa chuck. The last one will be their downfall.

Thankfully knuckles decided to live in the woods instead of a sweet ass rich kid mansion because doing so would mean having to live with chris and the other comic relief human characters, which already makes him the one carrying the braincell for this series even before we get to him being the only one in this plot not to have been hit on the head 75 million times. So while Eggman gets there and has to fight tails... who is suddenly scared depsite having fought this guy ten times before coming here, in several episodes since arriving, and having also fought a witch and an empire of birds. more on them soon. 

This is a problem with some versions of the character: they make tails helpless, forgetting he’s not only a genius since adventure, but also a scrappy fighter. He’s more in the mid range sure, not as fast as sonic or strong as knuckles, but he can fly, and he can still move almost as fast as sonic, which combined gives him great agility. And most modern games and apparently this cartoon just reduce him to sonic’s easily breakable genius friend which annoys me. Tails is more than this, and deserves more. It’s why i’m greatful for Ian Flynn as he never forgot how good tails could be in archie or in idw currently, to the point that in one arc of archie the two, after some emotoinal stuff drove a wedge in them, had it out. and while sonic was holding back because you know, he didn’t actually want to fight his best friend while tails had a lot of resintment towards his best bud to unpack, once he stopped tails still kept up and the fight was only resolved by sonic apologizing for making out iwth the girl tails had a crush on. And yes that’s really what happened. It’s actually geninely heartfelt shockingly enough. 

And it was also cleaning up some crap from the previous run to boot... which I don’t have time to get into. Someday. My point is Ian actually cares what tails feels and remembers he can fight, and thankfully he wrote the next game so hopefully even if Tails isn’t playable (Seriously stop making only sonic playable. This isn’t mario. Cut that shit out), he still won’t be entirely useless.

Thankfully the next person who knock knocks at the stadium door is knuckles, the blow blower, the magical emerald holder who gives the robot the coldest shoulder. Everyone else shows up soon after with Eggman revealing he was 100% sincere about that baseball thing.. and before Sonic can go with the more resonable plan of...

Chuck chimes in and... i’m going to need to get text loud for this pardon me... 

GENINELY ACCEPTS HIS OFFER OF PLAYING A GAME OF BASEBALL FOR THE TWO CHAOS EMERALDS, ONE OF WHICH IS THERES AND THEY HAVE NO REASON TO WAGER. 

I.. I don’t even need to point out why this is stupid. And it’s not a strategy thing.. Chuck literally says “Playing baseball sounds like fun”. He is gambling the fate of the world on a baseball game for shits and giggles! I’ve seen people bet their legs on a card game, seen people be their mother’s soul on also a card game when bluffing, and this.. this is still more insane because both of those were out of necsity. Yugi kinda had no chocie and Jotaro was fully planning to scare his opponent into folding. Chuck just wants to play some baseball and is willing to wager his friends chance of getting home, the world’s safety and his grandsons future.. TO PLAY BASEBALL. Against a team of robots! I mean I get he has a bunch of super furries on his team, I do, but the team also includes himself, an elderly man if one in good health, his butler and his 10 year old grandson. This may be one of the dumbest thigns in sonic history and that’s a hall of fame that includes thinking a four player co op game was something fans wanted, nerbs, chaos knuckles, sonic 20 years later, knuckles convoluted history, 80 dozen lost family members,  knuckles as a resitance leader, cyborg tails, sonic blast, and robonik’s weird breakdown in front of the world as he pissed on the moon. And this is a strongest contender for dumbest one there is! 

See EVERYONE GOES ALONG WITH THIS. Sonic questions it for about a second before agreeing, amy and cream are all “This will be fun! Tee hee! We’re horribly underwritten in this series! and Tails is ONLY mad for a second because those dang kids are going to ruin his friends lawn! And that’s only until the guys like “chill man that’s what it’s for”  after that he’s all for “Operation: We’re Really Doing This huh”

Knuckles is the one carrying the braincell this ep, outright saying this is idotic to start and then rightfully pointing out how horribly half assed this plan is. Everyone else’s response?

Yes really. They all pray on his ego to get him to go along with the dumbest game ever played. 

I’m not against an episode being goofy. You can have utterly werid comedy episodes in a show if the tone fits it and sonic x’s seems to be perfectly fine for that. There’s another episode I saw listed on netflix that has eggman make an evil robot teacher to infiltrate chris’ school. This is , at least at this point in it’s history, not the most serious show. 

The problem is this the show isn’t so zany that the plot works on a serious level: they are betting the two chaos emeralds they know about.. because they think it’d be fun. Other shows in more recent times like OK Ko and rise of the tmnt got that. Rise didn’t tie in the demon shredder plot to that episode where they ended up trapped in an 80s montage while ok ko ballanced humor and comedy well, cutting down the comedy whe needed but sometimes managing to have utterly rediculous stuff in plot important eps, like the big reveal behind Professor Venemous’ backstory.... having his partner in both sense Lord Boxman tell him he thought they were going to wait a season. But the episode just.. fully buys into this stupid premise with way too high stakes. It’s hilaroius sure.. but not for the right reasons. 

So the rest of the episode is just goofy baseball shenanigans with impossibly high stakes. Also just to prove our heroes CAN sink lower, they don’t use their powers at first to play fair. 

I apologize that a LOT of this review is just me ranting at how batshit this is but I mean.. how do I even top this. Our heroes are playing fair in a fight for the one thing that can get them home that they entered because an old man wanted to play baseball. I’m a pretty good comedian, been at this three years now, but.. I can’t top that. I just can’t. I’m person enough to admit my limits. 

Now I will give credit where it’s do: the actual antics.. are pretty entertaining. Sonic catches a ball with super speed but it’s out of bounds, knuckles just.. htis straight homers with his super strength, and amy just shoves the head of her hammer onto a baseball bat. These are great gags. I had to pause to laugh multiple times both because of legit good gags.. and insane ones, like Chuck randomly subbing butler man as a fielder.. for cheese. This episode is entertaning as it is stupid.

The one gag that dosen’t work.. is Cream who tells the robot to go easy on her it’s her first time playnig baseball which creepily sounds like flirting and is animated as such.. because in the original japanese SHE WAS. she said she loved the robot. Helpful reminder: CREAM IS 6

Also if your wondering how groundskeeper man factors into it, the local 80′s april o neil reports about the game live so tons of people come to see.. which is fair it’s a bunch of super powered furries fighting a bunch of robots> It’s the reason people love this franchise, his boss later comes in and none of this really matters because it’s in an episode about sonic and friends playing baseball for a world conqueringly powerful gem they didn’t have to ante up but did anyway. 

So our heroes do win... the game. But in one final hilarously insane move.. Eggman just.. takes off with them. Yes they let HIM hold the emeralds

But chuck says we’ll get them next time blah blah blah trying to blatantly paper over the fact this is all his fault before knuckles realizes this and commits some elder abuse with his bat

Final Thoughts on Baseball Episode:

This episode was dumb and I loved it. I sit frustrating... well yes obviously, but it’s just so gloriously stupid you can’t help but enjoy it. Granted I love a good baseball ep from the various x-men baseball games, to jujustu kaizen, to steven universe, to peanuts to bloom county... observe

So I may be a touch biased despite never playing nor watching the sport, as it’s the funnest to watch other people play in media, but even without that this is just a batshit piece of media even by sonic standards and I commend you to check it out. The series is currently on netflix and hulu at the time of this article so S-O-N-I-C GO!.. watch it. 

SATAM: Hooked on Sonics

Okay so onto SATAM. If your curious why ti’s called that its because the shows actual title is sonic the hedgehog... and given that was confusing even before we got another game called that and a feature film named that, it was the right call. 

SATAM is often held up as the gold standard of sonic cartoons and it’s easy to see why: SATAM swung for the fences, putting sonic in a darker world that he’d seen conquered by robotnik, with only a small band of freedom fighters, all fellow teens, to help him. The Freedom Fighters themselves are awesome characters, only made better by the comics, ian flynn’s runs in paticular, fleshing them out into throughly intresting three dimensional characters who could keep up with sonic. You had Sally, Sonic’s love intrest and tactical genius as well as the resitance’s actual leader (Sonic was the muscle and deputy leader), rotor a tech genius walrus since that wasn’t part of tails character yet, and Bunnie a cyborg southren belle and basically rogue from the x-men as a rabbit complete with tons of angst. There were also Tails, who was religated to kid sidekick in this continuity and early archie and Anotine, a cowardly asshole who was sonic’s rival for sally.. on paper. in practice he had zero chance. Thankfully archie , unlike satam, gave him character devleopment so not only did he move past sally and onto bunnie, aka one of my faviorite ships and something we’ll be getting more into very soon, but became an expert and incredibly brave swordsman. So yeah you might’ve guessed I like these guys, paticuarlly both archie versions, but the satam ones laid the ground work.

As for the cartoon itself it just works. Season 2 from what little i’ve seen of it drops slightly in quality but the atmosphere, voice acting and storytelling are top notch for the time. While it is still very much a 90′s cartoon, there isn’t anything resembling an arc till next season and there’s no real character progression, it’s still one that holds up well and again served as the foundation for my faviorite version of sonic. 

It also, as is custom, has a kickass theme song. And if you’ve never heard it.. welll... 

This is the best of the intros. And none of them are outright bad. But in both visuals  commuinmcating the shows story PERFECTLY, and the utterly great song that perfectly fits our hero, boastful as hell but he can back. it. UP, it’s the best of the sonic themes and again, the others aren’t slouches with X and Sonic Drive in paticular being damn close. But ultimately you just can’t beat this one. 

This ep sticks out from our other two in that it’s not utterly insane, and instead is just a really well written ep with a decent conflict. Robotnik is draining the life from the trees in the forest using a new machine because he’s a captain planet villian in this series.... wait I take that back he actually has a reason to do this as the great forest, where our heroes live, hides their village of knothole. So destroying it as he often tries to do means they’d have nowhere to hide. It’s things like this WHY the show still holds up: in most cartoons of the time the villian wouldn’t all out assault the rebels because the show would end. Here they have something protecting them that’s logical to the setting and fits it’s environmental themes. 

So sonic wins, of course, and brags to his public. Sally even cheek kisses him and I love their dynamic. Look smartass and more repsonsible person isn’t new, i get that but no matter the medium the two just play off each other well, with jalell and kath sourcie really having good chemistry especailly. The way he says it’s not half bad and then shows her what great is, and she slyly plays it off. it’s what I like to see in a couple.  

Antoine is also used well here: Satam could ping pong between loveable egotist and resentful ass whose mad Sally dosen’t like him, something the comics wisely instead dencostufcted showing that his futile efforts only made him more insecure and he truly got happier and more confident when he gave up chasing someone who simply didn’t see him that way and never would. You know a HEALTHY message about that sort of thing. What a concept. 

Here it works because it decounstructs his resintment as he does his usual trying to brush off sonic’s heroics thing.. before being incredibly sad down by the lake of rings, the magical lake they get the rings from which in this adaptation give the user power. Granted only sonic can use them and that geninely bugs me as they never explain WHY that is in this or the comics (which at least use them to power stuff as well as sonic), but it’s still a neat way to recontextualize them. It’s also not over powered: they only get one a day so sonic gets one shot with them and that’s it. If he looses it while on the mission or uses it too quickly, that’s on him. 

Back to antoine, his resentintment is really just envy.  The girl he likes likes someone whose cooler, more useful and more loved by everyone while he’s just some guy they keep around for reasons even he’s not sure of. It’ ssomething I can relate to: not knowing how to be as up front with your feelings and watching someone else better than you and sometims a dick to you get the girl because you can’t do nothing but pine. It’s not healthy, and he needs to grow out of it and again, he did in the comics to great effect, but it’s relatable. 

So Rotor makes the mistake of instead of trying to be emapthetic, telling him sally might like him if he captured robotnik.. forgetting anotine dosne’t get jokes often and takes the idea seriously, stealing the power ring to use as bait

It also shows that as much as he tends to  be the useless one of the group... antoine CAN think when eh can. Sure bringing the ring as bait is an entirely stupid plan and he shoudlv’e talked to someone else.. but the episode dosen’t treat it like anything else. He made a bad call for bad reasons and it ends badly.  But he does try: he lures robotnik out, makes sure he not one of his bots comes to get it (which he does) and even has a pit trap ready. And honestly ti’s not bad: in most incarnatoins robotnik isn’t that much of a threat out of his mechs or what not, so it’s resonable to assume once captured he’d be easy to get or at least easy to keep long enough for the others to get to him. 

But he both picked an easy trap.. and the wrong robotnik as Satam robotnik gets one of his most iconic moments to show just how pants crappingly terrifying he is, using jet boots to easily fly out of the trap. I will also say Jim Cummings is tied with Mike Pollock for my faviorite robotnik. POllock fits him as he is now being able to be goofy as hell btu also menaccing and was kept over form the 4kids day for good reason while Jim fits THIS robotnik perfectly, being utterly meancing and nightmarish , a cruel dictator with no remorse, no hope of swaing him or tricking him. Just pure evil. 

So the rest of the gang soon finds out what Antoine done did, with Rotor kicking himself for helping set this off and Sally convinces sonic to save him.. both because it’s the right thign and because if anyone can use the ring it’ srobotnik. And sure enough he was not only working on a new model of the life draining thing but adapts it for the ring. giving it ulmited power. Thanks antoine! He also plans to roboticze him. 

And Robotnik being awesome dosen’t stop there: his weapon for the ep, his other weapon anyay is ingenous, a lighting that hones in on sonic’s speed and is almost as fast as he is. So while he CAN dodge it it’s only just barely and it does hit him once or twice while he’s fighting. It forces sonic to move at normal speed lest he get hit and is a great way to turn his greatest advantage and most iconic feature against him. 

Sonic saves ant, who is sympathetic in part because he apologizes for what an idiot he was and Sonic shows that while he may not like the guy.. he’s not a dick, assuring him they’ll fix this together. Awww. How sonic beats both machines is also great, simply using the machine’s tracking him against it to take out the earth machine thing and get the ring back .. and since robotnik attaached th elaser to that sonic wins, antoine gets a momen tint he son and this episode is really good. it’s simple, sure, but it’s good great pacing, uses it’s three principals incredibly well and shows off why these incrnations of sonic and robotnik are so loved: sonic is a cocky but geninely clever hero who while he will needle a guy won’t kick him while he’ sdown, while robotnik is utterly evil but is clever enough to back that evil up and explain why the heroes can’t just knock his ass out in five minutes. This show is remembered for good reason and i’ll certainly be coming back to it. 

Sonic Boom; Battle of the Boy bands

So we end this long boy with Sonic Boom, the latest sonic animated show at the time of this writing and the first in over a decade when it dropped. And this one.... was not welcomed on arrival. Boom was, as I mentioned earlier, part of a failed attempt at a new branch of the sonic franchise.. which amounted to “sonic is on an island now, everyone has new outfits, there’s a badger, and Knuckles skipped leg day”. Shockingly this didn’t go well: the game side of it failed on arrival with the infamous shattered crystal and the cartoon didn’t have the best receptoin at first. This can be chocked up to a lot of things: Shattered Crystal being 06 levels of bad, people not digging the redesigns, personally I think all of them but knuckles which objectively looks weird are fine and my only complaint deisgns wide is the weird amount of grip tape because Sagat was Boom’s character designer I guess, instead of gloves, and the series turning out to be a meta character based humor show ala animanics instead of the serious epic many were hoping for.. me included. I didn’t bash the show without watching but after waiting a decade for a new sonic series, and the main games at the time and present day not being great, it was a bit of  alet down to find instead of lore or anythign we were getting shenanigans.

That said i’ve come around to it: You can’t blame a show for not being what YOU personally wanted and on their budget, even if the show looks great, it was probably easier to do a wacky comedy. And frankly given just how bad shattered crystal turned out, it ended up being a strength, allowing this version to distance itself and be it’s own thing. It also isn’t somethnig sonic had done , just go fully comedy, since Adventures, so it was a nice throwback while still being it’s own thing, relying more on clever dialouge than slapstick. The result is a pretty good show: not the best, but still entertaning and unique. 

And this episode is a PERFECT one to show that off. Like X it has a really bonkers premise.. but unlike X it’s not only not taking the premise remotely seriously, but uses it for a purpose: to take pot shots at pop muisc. Granted it can be uneven, a lot of the critisim comes across as paatronizing to pop music even if a lot of it is more packaging than content, but some jokes do really hit hard and the shows fast pacing means we’re onto the next joke before a bad one can really stink up. 

As for the plot music sensation Justin Beaver is in town. And if I have one complaint it’s not using beiber, while he’s been a punching bag for decades he’s not only been relevant for that long, but has THROUGHLY brought it on himself after puberty with his hilariously broey apperance, some choicley terrible songs and somehow not having gone away. It’s that they base him on pre-bro beiber...several years AFTRE he radically changed his appearnce and demeanor, making that part of it come off outdated> I get they needed a pop star but they coudl’ve used one direction (still dated but not as dated) instead of parodying an act that not only had been parodied to death, but had changed entirely. 

The other issue before I get to the good stuff is sexism: it assumes ONLY girls like boybands forgettnig boys of all sexualiteis can enjoy them too. I loved back stret boys as a kid and liked nsync kinda. I gladly watcched the high school musicals in high school... i’m not proud of that but it did give me the greatest musical number ever commited to film so it worked out

I swear if I could get away with it i’d refrence this thing EVERY review. It’s just sexist to assume it dosen’t work on men and it should honestly work on knuckles. It’s equally condsending to pop fans, saying rock is better. ANd rock is better but there is some great pop.. and some really terrible pop but still. 

But it’s flaws are patched up by some things: While some of it’s critcisim is pretty surfacy, it’s in a show that’s not taking itself seroiusly, so it’s clearly just taking it to the broadest point and it DOES make actual points: how manufactured some of these acts are, the stupid names, the sparkly jackets.. seriously EVERY boy band has a sparkly jacket. It does enough right to counter what it gets wrong. It’s also just really funny so again, the bad takes are drowned out by our heroes being hilarious. The first few minutes alone had me wanting to go back and get tons of reactoin images because their just stuffed with great jokes, from the local reporter ranting about his daughter prefering justin beiber to him (”We’ll just see who pays for your private school instead of those golf clubs he really wanted”), to knuckles declaring his music the soundtrack to his nightmares, to knuckles dooting on a horn he literally pulled out of his ass to try and convince the backstage guy their in the music industry.

We also get plenty of fun with the guys boy band, dreamboat express who again have the sparkly jackets, moves and montages. We also get a great bit of sonci leading them somewhere else to finish his thought in cutaway, with tails wondering why that was necessary.. only to do it himself later and admit it’s fun.  The episodes far from perfect but it’s so spot on in places and so damn funny for most of it, the villians also just happen to explain their plans which is lampshaded to hell and back, and with a perfect punchline for justin, this ep didn’t give me a lot to say but it is good. I recommend checking it out fi your curious about the series and it’s pairing ep tails crush, as tails trie sto woo a lady and robotnik tries to pick up a package. Good stuff. 

So that was the review. Three fun episodes: one insane, one raelly good and one unabashidly silly. All fun.

Next: Knock knock i’ts knuckles.. and he has kind of a weenie voice.But he also has a werid ass dinosaur so it ballances out it’s sonic undergrounnnnnnddd and knuckles only animated apperance in the classic era with a one off intro and a three part epic. 

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[sems-diarie]

hii can u post a review of the new jjk movie when u watch it? i watched it and ITS SO GOOD i wanna see what u think abt it:)))

jjk 0 spoilers (obvi)

buckle up bc once i start talking, i don’t stop

the opening sequence felt cinematic. and i love how they used music to structure it like an anime op. god i love it here.

i ADOREDDDDD how we got to see yuuta function as the mc to his own story versus just adding him to yuuji’s story, because it helps establish the world of jjk and how it’s existed before yuuji was apart of the bigger picture. fantastic world building. i’m so jealous of akutami and isayama as writers ☹️

jjk 0 also made me realize the difference between a backstory and an origin story. like i’d say yuuta’s backstory was rika, but his origin story elaborates on to the final parts of the movie—when he fights getou and sets rika free after actualizing his goals as a character. and the goal-identifying part is what’s significant for establishing an origin story.

s’like in the mcu, how spider-man has three movies and they all work to establish his origin story? yuuta’s backstory had multiple components to it; the movie didn’t just show us his tragic past, but it also showed us how he comes to be yuuta okkotsu, the legend.

also!! i really liked the scene when maki is pressuring yuuta into identifying what his goals are as a character. there’s something addictive ab the line “i want to make sure no one else gets hurt” (or a variant of that, i can’t remember the whole line, but it occurs after he and maki get trapped in the curse belly.)

that dialogue tag, specifically, really set the movie on fire and added so much to yuuta’s character—yuuta isn’t just a sorcerer because of rika, or because of some blood debt he feels he owes her. he isn’t just a sorcerer because he has this melancholic view of the world and wants to use jujutsu to brood over it. he’s a sorcerer because he wants to protect everyone else from experiencing that kind of pain ever again. his learned optimism is his greatest strength i love him :(

i also LOVE that we got that little flash forward to the present <333 i need to know what he’s been up to, and what he has to do w the narrative now. i saw that one manga panel of yuuta dragging yuuji out of ?? SOMEHWERE by his scruff and i’ve had an eye on yuuta since. so it’s nice to have a personality for a face i’ve been seeing for a year now 😭

speaking of character depth, it was wonderful to see getou’s actual personality LOL?? i feel like s1 gave us absolutely nothing so knowing getou’s motivations as the villain helps me understand s1 better.

that being said, his philosophy is GARBAGE LMAOOOO the most obvious flaw in his plan is that jujutsu sorcery is a naturally-occurring phenomenon. anyone can encounter curses, and just like that they’d go from being a “monkey” to a sorcerer. yuuji and yuuta, for example. i’m kinda disappointed bc i thought getou’s motivations were a little more calculated than this but i don’t particularly care for him enough to be super angry ab it

THAT being said, gojo’s relationship with getou will forever stay with me. even after all this time, gojo STILL TRUSTS HIM?? “he was my best friend! the only one i ever had.” my fucking stomach hurts. and the way gojo sounded so happy to call getou his best friend?? i know he might be keeping up appearances but there was sumn genuine in that fr. sumn wistful.

ALSO WHAT DID GOJO SAY?? WHEN HE SQUATTED DOWN TO TALK TO GETOU WHEN BRO WAS BEAT UP IN THE ALLEY WAY???

the fight scenes were fucking spectacular. maki and yuuta’s sparring session was so clean. also—they hyped maki up so MUCH in this movie!!!! i just fucking adore how everyone looks up to her 😭 she’s so influential and she doesn’t even know it. been that bitch, still that bitch LOLLL

gojo beat that poor man’s ass 😕 AND NO THEY DIDNT GIVE THE BLACK MAN A WHIP TO FIGHT WITH 😭😒

inumaki’s look in this movie is the superior look. panda was goofy as always <333

RIKAAA MY BELOVED!!!! she was the star of the show. when yuuta let her out and she tore that fucking curse apart ???? THE RAINING BLOOD??? i forget how easily jjk switches between child-friendly and… not. the gruesome scenes never disappointed, too.

anyways, back to rika—there was this one part where the screen goes black and then all you hear is rika’s, “it’s a promise!” i don’t know what facet of story telling / movie making that is, but the visual and auditory structuring of her narrative was fucking insane. I GOT CHILLS.

and she, herself, was amazing. i cherished every bit of screen time she had. her and yuuta’s relationship was very sweet. childhood-friends-gone-wrong is always a beautiful trope to display the corrruption of innocence.

i do have to say that rika’s face didn’t look babyish to me??? like it felt like they drew a grown woman’s face into a little girl’s body and that was so uncomfortable 😭😭 they might have done that to prep us for when she’s finally set free at the end of the movie, and looks to be older than she was when she died. but maybe i’m just tripping.

the yuuta obsession was also very much felt 😭 one thing ab rika? she gon go to war for hers! i did get so sad though, when yuuta snapped at her to put maki down and she was begging him not to hate her. i’m glad she’s set free from that bc it seemed like such a burden to be tied to someone so feverishly. exhausting for the spirit.

is there anything i missed 😭

NANAMI OMG. i moaned when he came on screen i’m not sorry ab it either. and that one scene w gojo switching from his glasses to his bandages. the kitty was purring.

lastly, my favorite scene is definitely getou calling yuuta a womanizer LMAOOO getou said verbatim what i was thinking, but it’s ok bc like yuuta said—“it’s true love!” he’s so annoying omg. i miss him i need to go see the movie again.

[pair-annoyed]

Anime I Watched This Summer

Summer 2020 has officially come to a close. It’s fall in Animal Crossing and the trees are beginning to turn. Much like quarantine, I spent a lot of my free time watching anime when I wasn’t stressing over starting college. Now that the school year has begun, I thought it would be nice to reflect on everything I’ve watched! 

These Anime were seen between 6/14 - 8/31 (my Birthday!) and are listed in chronological order.

They will be rated on a 1-10 scale; 1 meaning complete garbage, 10 meaning masterpiece. I will offer my thoughts on what I did/didn't like about each show!

1. Bakemono no Ko - 8/10

This was such a great way to start out the summer! I love the dynamic between Kumatetsu and Ren. Overall its a little cliche, but it’s also very wholesome. It’s by the same studio that made Wolf Children (which I loved!). so I knew it was going to be good. My favorite aspect of this movie was its backgrounds and world building! 

2. Wan Sheng Jie - 9/10

Oh my gosh! I know that this is technically a donghua, but its on MAL, so it counts. This show quickly became my favorite slice of life of all time. I adore the art style and all of the characters. The comedy, plot, and design blends so well together. Everything in Wan Sheng Jie feels warm and comfy. It’s also confirmed for a second season! After seeing its cliff hanger ending, I’m so anxious for what comes next! 

3. Dororo - 7/10

I’ll be honest, I’m a sucker for studio MAPPA. I really liked the historical aspects of Dororo. From the outfits to the ways characters behave, its grounded in the constraints of feudal Japan. I would have given this show a higher score if it was a little more grounded in science. I feel like more time should’ve been given to the demons and antagonists of the show. Our MC was so over powered, which made the final fights of the series more lack-luster. I think its less of the anime’s fault and more because the original source material is from the 60s. That being said, I loved this show! It was cute and action packed. Though it isn’t perfect, it holds its own.

4. Bungou Stray Dogs - 5/10

The concepts and action are misconstrued in Bungou Stary Dogs. This is one of those shows that I chose to watch because it was all over Tumblr. The powers themselves are cool, but I can’t understand why this series is so praised. At it’s core its predictable and basic. The fights seemed low stakes and low energy. None of the humor really felt like it belonged. It tried too hard to be something it isn’t. I don’t think I’ll watch beyond this first season. 

5. Kami no Tou - 4.5/10

First off, fuck Rachel, me and my homies hate Rachel. I really really had high hopes for Tower of God. It paves the way for Webtoon adaptations in the future. Its such a shame that this adaptation SUCKED. I have not read the source material, I’m going solely based on the anime. It wasn’t good? It was horrible. I hate Bam, I hate Rachel. I think all the characters expect Rak were awful. Please don’t make a season 2. Please. If you’re interesting in Tower of God, just read the webtoon. 

6. Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun - 7/10

Shoujo anime is my guilty pleasure. I especially liked the way Gekkan Shoujo tackled Sakura and Nozaki’s relationship. Besides just the main characters, even the side characters were enjoyable! It was a fun and creative show. My only complaint is how dense Nozaki is, but I also absolutely love that part of him.

7. Jojo no Kimyou no Bouken (Parts 1-2) - 6.5/10

Jojo is not the saving grace of shounen anime. It isn’t something super revolutionary and it certainly will never be a 10/10. Part 1 was so slow and boring. Jonathan was just mediocre at best. I definitely liked Joseph a LOT more than Jonathan. Part 2 overall was much easier to watch than part 1. The fights are good, but there’s just something about Jojo that I can’t get behind. Although I’m completely bashing this series, I’m going to keep watching it. At this point, I wanna know what a stand is. 

8. Clannad - 5.5/10

I was expecting Clannad to be sad, but instead I got a cute, slice of life, romance. It wasn’t unenjoyable, but it was also a pretty slow-burning show. I loved watching Nagisa and Okazaki slowly fall in love with each other. It was funny at times and sad at other points. I am currently watching Clannad: After Story (which I’ve heard is heartbreaking), so I’m hoping to get some catharsis out of that. 

9. Otome Game no Hametsu Flag shika Nai...  - 6/10

This show is only 12 episodes, and yet it still has filler episodes for some reason? I’m a person who doesn’t typically watch isekai because the genre is so over done. However, when it’s done in a very specific way it’s really fun to watch! This show was definitely a lot of fun, it’s also cute and has so many interesting character-character interactions. The ending is painfully cliche, but I think it adds to this shows charm. 

10. Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai: Tensai-tachi no Renai Zunousen  - 8/10

I loved Love is War so much! I love their weird romantic dynamic. I love the characters, and I love the animation. It’s over the top and executes it humor masterfully. The entire show fills you with anticipation for the two main characters. Kaguya is my favorite character. Although I haven’t seen season two yet, I most certainly will! I’m so upset I hadn’t seen this show sooner.

11. Great Pretender - 8.5/10

This show is so colorful and bubbly. The animation is so smooth and they are able to tackle so many different kinds of things given its plot. The whole show itself just feels like summertime. It came out not to long ago, so some people may not be familiar with it. On top of the show itself, the music is great, with a Jazzy OP and and ED that features Freddie Mercury

12. Steins;Gate 0 - 8/10

 I loved the original Stein;Gate so much! So it’s no surprise how much I liked the second season. It builds significantly off the first season in a sort of “off shot” OVA kind of way. The events of Steins;Gate 0 don’t actually happen, but that doesn’t stop it from being meaningful. The big “twist” was predictable and a bit of a let down, but I still enjoyed this. Granted, I’m bias. 

13. Seishun Buta Yarou wa Yumemiru Shoujo no Yume wo Minai - 9.5/10

I sobbed. So much. This movie was phenomenal, it was such a trip. Having watched the original series, this tore my heart apart. It gets a high score for being able to take the characters I love and creating a wonderfully emotional experience. If you haven’t seen Bunny Girl Senpai, please watch it, and then watch this movie. You won’t regret it! 

14. Hotaru no Haka - 6/10

Grave of the Fireflies made me stop watching anime for a while. Studio Ghibli created something grim, something that leaves the viewers feeling hollow. Its a movie about WWII from Japan’s perspective. As an American, all I could feel while watching this was immense guilt. I will say though, that some of the movies main plot could have easily been prevented if the main character had swallowed his pride. His younger sister was also my least favorite character. I get that she’s a kid and that kids are fussy, but you would think that during wartime, she’d be more understanding and at least try to eat the things she dislikes. 

15. Yagate Kimi ni Naru - 9/10

This was a great way to end the summer. This is more that just GL romance, its a love story. Its about growing up and learning to understand your feelings. I related to Yuu so much, which made this more emotional than I expected. It’s really unlike another romance anime I’ve seen. I hope it gets confirmed for a second season. If not, I’ll be reading the manga. 

Seasonal Shows: (Things that are still airing as of 9/5/2020)

1. The God of High School  7.5/10

Another thing done by studio MAPPA. Are you surprised? I absolutely love the action in GoH. The plot however, is all over the place. The story seems fragmented and hard to follow. Like Tower of God, it was poorly adapted. I’m giving it such a high score, because it’s SO much more enjoyable then Tower of God. 

2. Enen no Shouboutai: Ni no Shou - 4/10

My thoughts on season 2 are about the same as my thoughts on season 1. The only difference is that this season has more Jojo references. I’ve rated it lower because its so repetitive. I’m so sick of watching it, but I’ve got to see it through the bitter end.   

3. Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu 2nd Season - 8.5/10 

All I’m going to say about Re:Zero is that I love it. I can’t give an accurate review of it because I’ve been hyping this season since it was announced. If you’re into non-typical isekai, watch Re:Zero, its so enjoyable!

[cxsmicmyeon]

BRAND NEW THAT WAS SO COOL!!!! IT WAS SO CLUB MUSIC YAASSSS MINNIE IM SO PROUD OF U ANGEL

also that mv... LOVED IT AAAAA mailman minseok come to my house i have special deliveries... (;

i really liked the air conditioner thing lmaodisfmdjnfj and heavy coat minnie aaaa

u sir are a bias wrecker im drowningggggg

okay amazing mv rest of album thoughts under the cut :D

(by the way im running on 3 hours of sleep and anxiety so if its reduced review pls dont mind)

brand new: there is no reason for this song to go this fucking hard im gonna yell also the instrumental part reminds me of alien boy by oliver tree (1:58) and it’s so awesome

feedback: this is 100% reminding me of a magic song lmao. the beginning almost turned me off but once u get past that oh banger!  I WANNA DANCE WITH U ALL NIGHT KIM MINSEOK DONT EVEN TEST ME  lmao the ‘oh my god’ almost got me dying i cant tho bc my roommate is still asleep LMAO HE SAID ‘CANT FIGHT THE FEELING’ CALLBACK

how we do: okay we got slower I SEE U MINNIE! that yeah OH? standard solid song that’s just about it! still bumps af their voices go together very well :D mark’s rap was cool! lol the way they sang ‘this is how we do’ reminded me of this is how we do it montell jordan ahahah but overlal solid!

love letter: oh we going SLOW slow! which is amazing bc i rly like minseok’s slower songs (’: this is a song i can see myself listening to when i’m anxious and need to calm down also jongdae would sing this well WHERE IS A XIUCHEN DUET. anyway ugh his voice is so wonderful i love this

serenity: okay i really liked the small part of this song when he performed it on sm town and WOW the studio version rules!! i can see this being in a romantic movie/drama when the characters/love interests are kissing for the first time or going on a date montage i love itttt :D probably my fav besides brand new

overall: this was a long time coming and he did not disappoint im so proud and so happy for u rn minseokkie u deserve this so much/10

(also i really liked similarly to grey suit how there were hype fast songs and slower more chill songs although this was more the reverse since there were more fast songs in brand new lol. irrelevant detail but wanted to point it out hehe) (same thing can be applied to empathy) (overall each of the member’s solo debuts brings smthn new to the table and i fucking am here for it each time)