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These Windblume events are a godsend (no pun intended) for the early Mondstadt cast, since for most - though not all - of them, they're the most characterization they ever get. The earliest (and I mean earliest - later Mondstadt characters don't generally have this problem) characters tend stay in a kind of bubble where they're still pretty one note anime-style character types without much more to them, with only some managing to continue on to have more to them, while the later characters are still character-typey but nearly all try to at least have a few things a story can do with them. Especially with recent stuff like the Anecdotes event, the difference in how the early cast is written is really noticeable. Venti's the standout exception from this crop who continues to have more to him, but the rest are struggling. Heck, for some of them (like Barbara and debatably Lisa) this particular event years ago is arguably the most characterization they've ever gotten.

Just watched the 1.4 event "Invitation of Windblume".

This is a pretty good limited-time event, in that it's interesting but missable. It's the story of Mondstadt's holiday Windblume which is basically Teyvat's Valentine's Day, with small stories featuring various Mondstadt characters. There's also a larger overarching mystery concerning the true nature of the titular "Windblume", a special flower in the mythos of the holiday but that no one really agrees on which flower it is.

Thoughts:

Tone-deaf bard lives up to his fucking name. Barbara's stalkers leave her traumatically threatening clickbait to force her out into the woods where she'll discover their stupid-ass present, and Venti takes their side and starts talking shit about how it's the gesture that counts.

She literally thought they killed her sister. Fuck those guys.

Bennett dumbasses himself into a new best friend. Not only does he misidentify the location we need to go to, but he still goes to the wrong place after the right location has been stated in the same conversation. But now he gets to hang out with Razor so that's cool.

No idea what Rosaria's deal is. Rosaria is a character who I've seen around a few times but have been waiting for the event where we properly meet her and find out what her deal is. The 1.4 update added her to the game so I thought this would be her formal introduction but nope, she's still flitting around the edges of the plot acting like we've known her all along.

Amber and Noelle have a Meet Cute. Venti's waxing poetic about Valentines relationships and shit and brings up chance encounters right as we see Amber nearly land on Noelle from a glide gone bad. You know what, I'm here for it. The Knights of Favonius proper don't appreciate Noelle. Let her become an Outrider.

Jean and Lisa hang out. Honestly, this is my favorite part of the event. We see very little of it but Jean and Lisa buddy up and trade barbs off each other and it's great.

Meanwhile Barbara's crying in the church thinking that her stalkers buried Jean in a shallow grave across the lake and her god's like "Yeah but have you thought about how much they must like you to do something like that?" I would tell Venti to go jump off a cliff but he'd do it and then soar away to freedom or some shit.

Kaeya pranks himself and I do not understand why. He smooth-talks Venti into accepting him as a poetry student with that "Ahahaha I am 47 moves ahead of you in this 4-D chess match you didn't even know we were playing" voice and then just does the assignment fair and square.

Um. Huh. I hope you got what you were looking for out of this? I dunno, maybe Kaeya just doesn't know how not to sound like he's engaging in spy shit. Maybe he was being entirely sincere, and Cryptic Fuck is just his default tone.

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This is goofy and I cannot stress enough that I have no gd idea what i was doing. But. Since I think iv abandoned this:

Turles and crew tryin to convince gohan to join them via musical number :]

(Song is 'professional pirate' from muppet treasure island)

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Turnabout Time Traveler: On Larry

I don't think there's a single character in this franchise that I have as much a swing opinion of than Larry Butz. I'm not especially fond of him in large doses, but I love him in small doses.

The way he's not just extremely unhelpful when he's trying to be helpful, but when he's trying to be unhelpful he's also extremely bad at that too, somehow making things worse for both us and him at once until Phoenix has to make the court suffer through Larry facing the music, can all be extremely funny. The guy can become force of chaos just from standing in a room doing nothing. He pairs especially well with Edgeworth, who could use a little chaos here and then.

I remember not liking him sometimes in the original trio of games, where he could feel a tad overused with diminishing impact returns. If he's appearing in multiple cases a game, the ways he derails the story can get tired quick, but in a situation like Time Traveler where we haven't seen him for a while and he just drops into Phoenix' life and goes and throws the whole thing into disarray is gold.

Phoenix and Edgeworth's shared understanding and resignation that Larry Butz' involvement means they are in for a frustrating and unfulfilling time is one of the best running "defense and prosecution on the same page" gags in the series (as is Edgeworth generally visceral reaction to realizing he's present), to boot. Like: Larry: Don't you believe me? Edgeworth: No. Larry: Niiiiick... Phoenix: Nope.

Keep being Larry, Larry.

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Turnabout Time Traveler: On Flowers

Phoenix: "Let it go, Edgeworth. You clearly don't know much about flowers. It's not like you have anyone you'd actually give them to, after all."

Damn, Phoenix! And I just got finished talking about how Apollo was meaner than you are!

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Turnabout Revolution: Go Apollo!

"The plaintiff will sit down and be quiet!", says Apollo, to Phoenix!

Holy crap.

Between this and Apollo giving Nahyuta the business for having the gall to claim the moral high ground while continuing to try to condemn a child despite it being increasingly obvious at that point that she wasn't guilty, Apollo's comeback game is on point.

Both Phoenix and Athena get some good comebacks and barbs over the last few games, but I swear Apollo can get meaner than either of them and has some edge to him they don't.

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During Turnabout Revolution...

Welp, we have another contender for "most traumatized kid in Spirit of Justice." Which is proving to be a surprisingly populated category. Sarge / Armie Buff developing crippling agoraphobia, pyrophobia and regressing into a fantasy, then legit having a massive panic attack in court after losing both of her parents and having to relive the memory of her father to the point that Athena has to coach her back to lucidity and remind her who she's speaking to) is really something.

The bonus dialogue you get when you present the photo of Apollo's father to her a second time, where she breaks character and timidly asks Apollo to come visit her from time to time, is one of the sweetest, saddest dialogues in the entire franchise imo. Is there some way the next game could have Phoenix adopt both Ahlbi and Armie, somehow? If Blackquill can set a hawk on people during trial, surely the defense could have a drone or two.

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On Nahyuta...

I may have to made a ranking list of Ace Attorney's opposing prosecutors, going over their strengths and weaknesses both as characters and as antagonists and how they all come together, because I may feel the need to explain why I wasn't especially fond of Simon Blackquill, and why I - currently almost finished with of The Rite of Turnabout - so far might be liking Nahyuta even less.

I thought we left this sort of "anti-logic guy just says whatever and refuses to budge" antagonist writing behind after the second game. I'm sure he'll grow into a better adversary eventually, but I do hope it's during the game and not at some point after it like what happened with Edgeworth.

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More Spirit of Justice Thoughts

Ahlbi Ur'gaid is fast becoming my favorite new character in this game. C'mon, Phoenix adopts a lot of kids, what's one more? All he needs to do is find some weird superpower Ahlbi has that has some vague application towards lawyering, puzzle minigames, and long-winded generational family drama. The Wright Anything Agency is basically the "Traumatized Kids With Superpowers" law firm, after all.

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Next Contender For Best "Joke" In Spirit of Justice

Phoenix saying "in my country, suspects are innocent until proven guilty." Look Phoenix, I love you, you're a virtuous idealist who fights tirelessly for justice and all, but I just got finished playing through a ton of your games and that definitely ain't true. If it was, your life would be a whole lot easier.

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"The defense would like to contend that it was magic."

Welp, found the best joke in Spirit of Justice already. That was fast.

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Spirit of Justice - A First Thought I Couldn't Ignore

For the last few weeks I've been playing through the Apollo Justice Trilogy. I've been slowly playing through the Ace Attorney Collections the last year and a half or so, as the only game I'd played when I was younger was the very first. Now Spirit of Justice will be the last of the regular games for me to play (I did TGAA way back, far before the Apollo collection), though I do still have the Investigations series left after this. As a huge mystery fan and a person who loves series with wide endearing casts, it's been a delight (albeit with some hiccups). Maybe I'll post an overview of my opinions on the series (with photos!), which both differ and fall in line with stuff you might have already heard here and there, depending. But anywho, I'm here because of my first two reactions to Spirit of Justice: First, this game is visually delightful. I liked the 3D visuals of Dual Destinies well enough, but I played it after the Great Ace Attorney, whose visuals were a clear improvement, and Spirit's visuals are even better than that. Second, the vaguely foreign setting is going to allow for some truly wonderful puns, isn't it? Ahlbi Urgaid? Holy, frick. It's going to be, like, Aladdin: The Series levels of punnery, isn't it?

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Meanwhile, In Genshin's Story...

Aaaand, we're adding Mausau / Xbalanque to my list of NPCs I'd like to see someday become playable characters, alongside Ruu, Nechca, Jeht, Timmie and Rana. Make him a hero version of Chris from KOF.

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Sonic 3!

Saw it just the other day. Deeply enjoyed, maybe not as much as the second film (the pacing is weird) but it's one of my favorite films in of the year.

Shadow is straight up - and by far - the most engaging character of the film series, which is saying something given that I've always been kind of meh on Game! Shadow even back when playing SA2 Battle as a kid. It helps that we actually see more of his range and personality in the movie vs how the games tend to portray him.

Loving that this film uses more of the games' soundtrack in its score. Not as noticeably as the Mario movie does, of course, but I caught the Modern Eggman theme as the theme of the ARK, or Live and Learn as Shadow's theme, plus the few cameo tracks like E.G.G.M.A.N. and the stage clear theme popping up for a few seconds. Hoping that continues into Movie 4, since - no spoilers - the game it seems to be intending to pull from has one (two, to be real) of the best soundtracks in the franchise's history.

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Raise Your Hands If You Were Expecting The Latest Genshin Event Minigame to Be...

Literal Psychonauts. Mostly just said that for the running gag. It was legit the thing I instantly thought of when they explained the minigame, though. Also, can we have the Traveler's Sabzeruz Festival drip as an alternate costume, pretty please?

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Sparring Partner

It's Knuckles (and Amy) appreciation week now.

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Wait a second, am I tripping balls?

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Okay, so I finally got around to watching Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero the other day, brought to you by the same people who came up with the name Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan.

Bulma's shameless, confident vanity continues to reinforce why she's the best character in Dragon Ball.

I need everyone to understand that this might actually be the funniest moment in the whole franchise. It's silly on its surface, but it's also steeped in Dragon Ball history. You can feel Piccolo dying inside, and there's a reason for that that goes much deeper than third-party embarrassment over Bulma's shallownness.

Bulma's cosmic butt-lift is a continuation of a gag from Broly (the good version). In that film, it was established that Bulma routinely uses the Dragon Balls to knock a few years off her age, for the sake of vanity. This was contrasted against Frieza's desire to use the Dragon Balls to add a couple inches to his height, for the sake of vanity.

Both of which are resurrections of the gag from the Red Ribbon Army arc, where Commander Red brought militant warlord violence to all corners of the world to claim the Dragon Balls for himself... so he could make himself taller. Using limitless cosmic power for petty and shallow reasons is a funny joke that Toriyama's fond of.

But this isn't just about the shallowness. It's about Piccolo. Or, more specifically, the other half of Piccolo that is Kami-sama. Dragon Ball is steeped in religious and mythological imagery, primarily Buddhist. A fantasy spin on it with a lot of fictional elements added, but there is a lot of genuine Japanese spirituality in there. Which is why God Almighty is now walking around as one half of Piccolo, with a substitute God ruling from his Temple in Heaven in his place.

During his reign, God gifted the Dragon Balls to mankind so that they would have a cosmic miracle they could turn to in times of great need. Shenron was meant as a great gesture of benevolence; The difficulty in summoning him is to serve as a particularly grueling trial, one that only the most determined and most worthy could fulfill.

However, that didn't exactly go to plan. Rather than a source of hope for the world, the Dragon Balls became objects of lust for its greediest and most corrupt. Near-limitless reality-shaping power to grant any miracle one could ask for, wasted on petty ambitions and selfish desires. God regretted ever making this cursed things.

When Piccolo killed Shenron and destroyed the Dragon Balls, God's response was basically, "Good riddance." The Dragon Balls were a mistake he could now take back. He had no intention of ever remaking them.

But then Goku defeated Piccolo. Goku ascended into Heaven to implore God to return the Dragon Balls to earth. Goku's pure innocence, his kindness, and his strength of character convinced God that there was good in the Dragon Balls. That they were worth remaking and returning to the mortal world below.

And now. Here he stands.

With this woman. The woman who utterly trivialized his great heavenly trial by inventing a handheld radar that beep-beeps all of the Dragon Balls' locations for you, allowing them to be easily collected in the span of a weekend excursion.

Watching her call upon his great reality-shaping miracle, so that she can get a butt-lift and slightly longer eyelashes.

While strongly insinuating that she does this every time the Dragon Balls regenerate. This is the legacy of his cosmic miracle.

Bulma is the greatest heretic in the history of fiction. That is why Piccolo is dying inside. This joke killed me. Almost as hard as Piccolo visibly wants to kill Bulma right now.