yeonchi

[yeonchi]

Koei Warriors Retrospective Part 31: Dynasty Warriors Origins

Dynasty Warriors Origins (真・三國無双 ORIGINS) Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PC Release date: 17 January 2025

Why is it so hard to find clean box art covers for games on Amazon? I used to get them there all the time for posts on EDGN, but now I can't find a good high-quality box art cover without having a box outline and a glossy edge crease on it.

Well everyone, we have finally come full circle. Back in 2022 when I got the idea to do this retrospective, SW5 and DW9E were the latest Warriors games to be released. A lot of things happened in the next two years that delayed things, but when I finally managed to start working on this retrospective series itself, Koei Tecmo announced the release of Dynasty Warriors Origins.

I've recounted this before as the origin story of this series, but after leaving the Koei Tecmo fanbase in 2018 following DW9's release, I just continued to play 6 Special, Multi Raid 2 and Vol. 2 on PPSSPP on my potato computer. When the pandemic happened, I decided to rekindle my love for the series and got back into the modern era with WOZ, DW8 and later DW7 on my laptop. I then got a job and later decided to build my own PC which I moved all my games into. Soon after that, I learnt that RPCS3 was a thing and that development had come a long way, so I realised that I had no excuse to not play the games I had shunned for not having an English dub or me not having a PS3.

And so we come to now, the conclusion of a year-long project 3 years in the making, celebrating 20 years of me playing the game series that defined my life, and 10 years of ranting about English dubbing and the Koei Tecmo New Normal Copium. It isn't over until we cross the finish line, so let's jump in.

This instalment follows on from my review of the demo in Part 16. A warning for spoilers after the break.

Dynasty Warriors Origins

Tomohiko Shō returns as producer for this game, the first mainline game with his involvement since the classic era and DW6. After Origins was announced, Shō began posting about his experiences developing the Warriors games for Omega Force on Twitter and I used some factoids from a few of them in the instalments for the classic series games.

Before development for this game began in the second half of 2021 (after DW9E's development), Omega Force was working on what would have become Dynasty Warriors 10, going back to how things were in 8. Shō believed that while their idea wasn't bad, the series needed to return to its roots instead of being just "another one". With the release of the PlayStation 5, he wanted to create the best Warriors game that could be made utilising the full potential of the console's specs, just as he did for DW6 on the PS3. As such, development of DW10 (I'd be surprised if they didn't end up calling it Dynasty Warriors/Shin Sangoku Musou X) was cancelled, or rather frozen, and all efforts went into the development of Origins, with the aim of creating a unique game with the tactical action that the classic series aimed for. The game also took in elements from previous games, making Origins a culmination of the entire Dynasty Warriors series up to that point, like how DW5 was a culmination of the classic era. Shō stated that Origins is not a spinoff or side game per se, but a mainline game on par with the other numbered titles, so it will be treated as such.

Shō has been wary of adding too many characters into the Warriors games, fearing that it would become more difficult to portray each character in depth and less energy could be devoted to other things. Hell, even he thought DW9 got too big. His belief was that it's not having a large amount of characters that matters, but rather how the gameplay and story deepens and evolves with each game. As such, it was decided to limit the scope of the game from the Yellow Turban Rebellion up to the Battle of Chibi, and the cast was cut to half of what it was in DW9, with only 47 characters featured in this game.

Like with SW5, the reduced scope of the story meant that some characters were redesigned to look younger than they had normally been depicted in the rest of the series, and a number of characters also had their seiyuus recast as a result (listed in bold):

Wei (Cao Cao Forces)

Xiahou Dun

Dian Wei

Xu Zhu

Cao Cao

Xiahou Yuan

Zhang Liao

Xu Huang

Zhang He

Zhenji

Jia Xu

Guo Jia

Yue Jin

Li Dian

Yu Jin

Xun Yu

Xun You

Wu (Sun Forces)

Zhou Yu

Taishi Ci

Sun Shangxiang

Sun Jian

Sun Quan

Lu Meng

Gan Ning

Huang Gai

Sun Ce

Zhou Tai

Ling Tong

Lu Su

Han Dang

Cheng Pu

Shu (Liu Bei Forces)

Zhao Yun

Guan Yu

Zhang Fei

Zhuge Liang

Liu Bei

Pang Tong

Yueying

Xu Shu

Zhou Cang

Other

Diaochan

Lu Bu

Dong Zhuo

Yuan Shao

Zhang Jiao

Chen Gong

Yuan Shu

Hua Xiong

Out of the list of 47, only 9 - and later 10 - characters are "playable" in this game, and by "playable" I mean they act as your bodyguards that you can do Extreme Musou Attacks with, then when their Swap Gauge is filled, you can switch to them for a total of 60 seconds, with the first 30 seconds being devoted to free actions and the last 30 seconds being devoted to Rage Mode. Each of the "playable" characters correspond to the weapons you can use in this game, or as Jim Sterling puts it, "they are, in fact, nothing but temporary reskins doing the exact same stuff you can do with a different character model":

Crescent Blade: Guan Yu

Lance (Pike): Zhang Fei

Spear: Zhao Yun

Pole: Zhou Yu

Wheels: Sun Shangxiang

Gauntlets: Huang Gai

Podao: Xiahou Dun

Twin Pikes (Axes): Zhang Liao

Sword: Guo Jia

Halberd: Lu Bu

As I've said in my review for the demo, there are also generic officers that use clubs, pikes and throwing knives, plus there are also officers using blades (dao), feather fans and shaman rods.

In this game, you play as an amnesiac Wanderer who you can name in the prologue, but almost immediately, we learn that he is a Guardian of Peace and in his first meeting with Cao Cao, he witnesses his prowess in battle and nicknames him Ziluan (紫鸞) after the sacred bird. And then we find out in flashbacks that his name is actually Ziluan and half the characters in this game address him as such half the time. Hey, Koei Tecmo, a little protip, don't give the Wanderer an actual name if you're going to let players name him but not customise him! Either the Wanderer is a nameable self-insert or he isn't. If you're going the visual novel route with this game, then you can't have both. There are gaps in the dialogue which take the place of the name you give the Wanderer and it's a bit awkward even if it feels seamless. I would forgive this if he wasn't addressed as Ziluan half the time.

In the first chapter, Ziluan seemingly has numerous encounters with Zhuhe and is plagued by voices and visions of a whitehaired boy, who in the flashbacks, is revealed to be Bailuan, the next chief of the village of the Guardians of Peace. The Guardians of Peace were founded by a hermit who helped Emperor Gaozu (Liu Bang) establish the Han Dynasty. The hermit's goal was to find those who possessed the right qualities and teach them to preserve peace in the land. Towards the end of the Han Dynasty, when the eunuchs held the balance of power in the imperial court, the Guardians were split over whether they should continue to support the Han or uphold their mission and help bring about a new age. As Ziluan joins the Han forces in fighting the Yellow Turbans, Zhang Jiao (who has now become a Donald Trump expy) understood that his followers lost their way, something he became disillusioned by, and came to accept his punishment at the hands of Ziluan, a Guardian of Peace.

In the second chapter, Ziluan is joined by Yuanhua (aka Hua Tuo), a young doctor who offers to help him regain his memories. Ziluan joins the elimination of the Ten Eunuchs and the coalition against Dong Zhuo, but the vision of Bailuan tells him that the land is too vast for a single individual to make a difference, which is why he must choose a hero who he can help create a new world with. By the time the coalition disbands after the Battle of Hulao Gate, there are three such candidates; Cao Cao, Liu Bei, and Sun Jian.

The third chapter is where Ziluan (aka you) makes his decision over which lord to serve. As you contribute more to a certain lord, you will be locked out of serving the other two lords. Sun Jian also dies in this chapter, passing everything to his son Sun Ce. Yuanhua also helps Ziluan regain his memories by getting him to gather certain herbs so he can recreate the incense that the Guardians of Peace used. Through Ziluan's flashbacks, we get some insights into his origin story; he was taken in by the village as a child after he lost his parents to war. The village gave Ziluan his name along with that of Bailuan and Zhuhe, and the three of them grew and trained together to become Guardians of Peace. After helping the Han deal with a rebellion in the south, the village took in another child.

The story and flashbacks continue in the fourth chapter. The village leaders discover that the child is related to the rebels that are still being hunted down by the Han and they plan to hand him over for the sake of the village. Ziluan stands up to them and when Bailuan hears of this, he reminds everyone of the Guardians' mission and offers to speak to the chief with them. It took some convincing, but the chief agreed with them, meaning that they would have to fool the Han and convince them that the child doesn't exist. Bailuan says that this is the start of their mission, to find the hero of the age that they can help create a new world. Soon after, the Han forces discover the child's existence thanks to an informant and they send out forces to invade the village. Zhuhe tells Ziluan to look after Bailuan, but Bailuan tells Ziluan to go after Zhuhe.

In the Battle of Baima and Yanjin, or the Battle of Mt. Xisai in the Sun family path, a mysterious stranger appears in support of the Wuhuan in the north or the Shanyue in the east, recognising Ziluan when they meet. After the battle, Ziluan sees some incense being used and follows it to the mysterious stranger, who is revealed to be an older Bailuan, but Ziluan doesn't remember him. Bailuan tells Ziluan that if he had his memories, he wouldn't have allied himself with Cao Cao, the usurper of the Han, or Sun Ce, the vassal of the Han (so is Bailuan supporting the Han or opposing them given that they burnt down the village? Pick one). He also reveals to Ziluan that Zhuhe is dead, and has been since the destruction of their village. Bailuan says to Ziluan that if he insists on following his path, then he will not hesitate to stand against him. He's basically the anti-colonialist/imperialist of this game, siding with the oppressed against the oppressors that are Cao Cao and Sun Ce.

After this, Ziluan and Yuanhua head to the village so the former can receive closure from what is now actually a vision of Zhuhe. With Yuanhua's work now done, he initially plans to part ways with Ziluan, but he decides to stay with him for a while longer.

Bailuan's actions in the fifth chapter change depending on who you decide to follow. In the Cao Cao story, he is surprised to see that Cao Cao survived the Battle of Guandu and is eradicating the rest of the Yuan family in Ye. He uses incense to summon phantom troops and cover Yuan Shang's escape, which catches Ziluan's attention and the two engage in battle. After Ziluan wins, Bailuan challenges him to a rematch in the north at Mt. Bailang, where he manages to buy some time and tire out Guo Jia, indirectly resulting in his death.

In the Sun family story, he was implied to be indirectly responsible for Sun Jian's death by creating phantoms of Huang Gai and Zhang Jiao to distract the former and Ziluan, allowing Huang Zu to ambush Sun Jian with boulders. After Bailuan makes himself known to Ziluan and other forces join the Shanyue in rebellion against Sun Ce, he lays a trap for Sun Ce by creating a fog of confusion in the forest, causing him to be killed by a stray arrow. As Sun Quan leads the Wu forces to fight Huang Zu, he receives a report that the Shanyue are rebelling again and is forced to return home. Bailuan appears at the end of the Subjugation of Kuaiji and prepares to go after Sun Quan when Ziluan faces off against him. Ziluan wins the duel and Bailuan tells Ziluan to kill him, but Sun Quan stops him, telling Bailuan to watch as he tries to win him and the Shanyue over and make them into heroes who fight for peace.

In the Liu Bei story, Bailuan appears in the Battle of Xinye to distract Zhang Liao's reinforcements in fog, proclaiming that he cannot lose Liu Bei for the take of defeating Cao Cao. After the battle, he learns that Ziluan has followed Liu Bei and informs him that he must be protected. Later on, before the Battle of Changban, Bailuan makes contact with Ziluan again and questions him why Liu Bei is taking so many commoners with him as he flees for Jiangxia, risking their lives and slowing him down in the process. Just before Liu Bei reaches the escape point, Bailuan decides that he must be stopped, but Ziluan recognises the fog and fights Bailuan.

So yeah, this is a tl;dr of Bailuan's attitudes towards the three heroes:

Cao Cao: "I hate imperialism"

Sun family: "I hate colonialism"

Liu Bei: "liU beI is RiSKing ThE LIveS Of thE pEoPLE! tHey're ONLY SlOwINg HIM Down!"

Anyway, after winning against Bailuan for the final time, he admits that he doesn't have the strength to defeat Cao Cao or Liu Bei, or that Sun Quan managed to win even him over. In any case, he makes it clear that he will not stand with Ziluan, and that if his chosen hero strays from their path, he will not hesitate to fulfil his duty as a Guardian of Peace and bring him to ruin. As Bailuan leaves, the vision of young Bailuan greets Ziluan for the final time, saying that this is the new way of the Guardians of Peace, with Ziluan championing the heroes and Bailuan keeping them true to their path from the shadows. When Ziluan asks the vision who he really is, the vision just says that the founders of their order were ageless mystical beings who had the faces of children with hair as white as snow, and eyes as blue as the surface of a frozen lake (so, not that blue then).

The story continues from there, but each faction also has an alternate route that leads to their True Ending. It works more like the hypothetical conditions of 4 rather than the what-if routes of 8 because the stories are the same for the most part; it's just some cutscenes that are different. Cao Cao has three forking points, the Sun family has two and Liu Bei only has one. When you achieve the conditions at the forking points, the words "Fate Altered" (天命変化) will appear on the screen.

For Cao Cao's story, you need to save Dian Wei at Wan Castle, Guo Jia at Mt. Bailang, then prevent the fire attack at Chibi. To save Dian Wei, you need to get into the castle quickly when the ladders go up, then defeat Hu Che'er as fast as you can before clearing out the other enemy officers inside Wan Castle. At Mt. Bailang, you need to encounter and defeat Bailuan within 5 minutes, occupying all bases and defeating all officers on the way (I recommend you do this on easier difficulties because enemy officers will be going after Cao Cao from the eastern paths). After Guo Jia survives, he will step down as a strategist and either become a regular officer if Dian Wei is alive, or retire if he isn't. At Chibi, you need to head to the altar and defeat Zhuge Liang, then head back to the ships and wait for Huang Gai to come down as the winds change. Once you confront him, Huang Gai will reveal himself to be a traitor, then you will need to defeat him quickly or else the fire attack will happen anyway. After this, you can complete the battle and the story will end without moving onto the Battle of Huarong Path.

For the Sun family story, you need to save Sun Jian in Xiangyang and Sun Ce in Wu. To save Sun Jian, you need to get to the southwestern area quickly (whether through the normal path to the south or by turning around and heading through the north, which is how I did it somehow) and defeat the Zhang Jiao phantom. Upon reaching Sun Jian, the boulder event will still happen, but Ziluan throws him out of the way and saves him. Sun Jian will ask for him and Huang Gai to help him back before he requests that they not reveal his survival to the rest of his family and army so as to prevent Yuan Shao from going after the Imperial Seal and to make his children step up and lead his army in his place. To save Sun Ce, you need to go into the forest as he disappears within it, then find and defeat Bailuan quickly. He will still be struck by a stray arrow, but Ziluan manages to find him in time and bring him to Yuanhua. Yuanhua, out of concern that Sun Ce's nature will lead him to death once again, suggests that they fake his death like they did with Sun Jian earlier.

Before the Battle of Chibi, Bailuan will approach Ziluan again, saying that while Cao Cao is fighting Sun Quan, he will sneak into Xuchang with the Wuhuan and Shanyue to liberate the Emperor and cripple Cao Cao's influence in the capital. He asks Ziluan if there is anyone he knows who can be a commander to those armies and he brings him to Sun Jian and Sun Ce. After Cao Cao's defeat, Ziluan reveals the truth to everyone and after the Emperor is rescued, Sun Jian and Sun Ce remain in Xuchang to guard him, leaving Sun Quan to rule over Wu.

For Liu Bei's story, you just need to defeat Cao Cao when he arrives at Changban. Cao Cao's army will retreat upon their defeat, then you'll defeat Bailuan as normal. Aside from a different cutscene at the end, there's really nothing much to it. I honestly think they should have added another forking point to Shu's story for Xu Shu, but that's about it.

If you've maxed out the Peace levels in all provinces and you play a True Ending, you'll get some extra cutscenes after the credits. You'll head back to the village and meet Bailuan again; he initially thought that Ziluan had abandoned his mission, but it turns out that they were walking different paths toward the same goal. On top of that, you'll also unlock a Dream Battle, where you'll fight all the Other forces alongside Cao Cao, Sun Jian and Liu Bei.

The open world from 9 returns in the form of the world map, except it only covers the equivalent of 60% of the entirety of Han Dynasty China and it's a tenth the size of what it was in 9. You'll travel around to different castles and towns to fight in battles, stock up on supplies and interact with officers. You can also ride around on a horse or use the Eyes of the Sacred Bird to find out where you need to go.

In the first inn you go to in the township of Ji (薊), the innkeeper there says that he'll keep your mail for you, but you can also access it in different towns. Oh my God, the Chinese invented email. Anyway, through this and playing through the story, you can raise bonds with characters and unlock interactions with them. Each character will have five bond levels, with each level unlocking a bond event, a set of three training missions or a request mission which is either a mini-battle or just going to get something from a hermit elder to take back to the officer.

Speaking of bond events, I know Ziluan's a main character and I'm sure I'm not the only person who has noticed, but the dialogue from the officers in the bond events seems rather (homo)erotic. You've got Guan Yu saying he wants to etch the features of your face into his memory, Yueying wanting to take your measurements to build a life-size doll, Zhenji wanting to have a secret fling with you, Huang Gai just barging into your room to talk, and even Lu Bu wants to top you (in strength) and make you his. Tomohiko Shō has stated that these yaoi/BL elements were unexpected as he left the writing to other writers, but honestly, I found it amusing because, and say it with me now, BECAUSE DAMN IT EVERYTHING IS GAY ABOUT THIS!

Aside from the story battles, you can also participate in small-scale skirmishes to increase peace in a province, or medium-scale mission battles to obtain items and additional guards. Liang Province is honestly a bitch to increase peace because it's like one small corner of the map and you have to run in and out to get a skirmish to spawn. You'd have an easier time if you cleared all the stories and gotten all the endings first.

The Eyes of the Sacred Bird mechanic is utilised in the story quite often. It's mostly used for detecting sorcery and incense, but in the Ten Eunuchs' Rebellion, you use it to find the secret passages within Luoyang. Time slows to a halt when you press L2, so if you're doing a time-limited mission and there's a lot of battle dialogue going on that may affect the next event to be triggered, you can slow down time to let the dialogue pass.

At the Battle of Sishui Gate, you start off with 10 guards accompanying you. Completing the mission battles will give you another 28 guards, then the Ultimate Warrior Challenges will give you 12 more for a total of 50. If your guards die, then they will respawn if you go into an allied base. Tactics can also be triggered with nearby allied troops and sometimes, you can ambush enemies with them and achieve a Dramatic Success, which will also lower their Courage.

When dealing with strong archers atop of towers, base doors or siege weapons, you can't open or destroy them yourself like you could do in previous games; you have to command your guards/nearby allied troops to do it if someone isn't doing it already. If you're alone on the inside of a gate or a door, you can pull away the bar and open it yourself, but that's the only time you can do it. Entering castles during sieges requires you to at least wait until ladders or siege towers are put up like in 6, so you can't just grapple hook your way up like you could do in 9.

I said in the demo that there are two types of assaults, which are the Storm Rush assault or the Mighty Strike assault. Apparently, it turns out that there's two of the latter. From what I could see, the difference in which version is performed depends on how much life an enemy officer has left before and after an assault. If the damage value of the potential assault is lower than the enemy's health after it, the Storm Rush assault will be triggered. If the damage value is higher and the enemy has more than 10% health left, the medium-range Mighty Strike assault will be triggered. If the enemy has less than 10% health or when you win the tug-of-war in a duel, the close-range Mighty Strike assault will be triggered. There is also something I noticed in regards to the Storm Rush assault; when I apply a damage multiplier in the trainer (from FLiNG Trainers), the assault never finishes off the officer I'm attacking, but it can finish off other officers who are caught up in it, meaning that if their health drops close to zero, it will just keep dealing zero damage and I have to finish them off with another attack. I suppose this is another way of making the game a bit more harder so it's not a complete wash like the modern era.

In the demo, I said that the weapon movesets were a mix of play styles from previous games and it still applies here. I did mention how the wheels use the Flow/Trigger Attack system from 9, but after playing with all the weapons, I've seen how the system is applied here; the system isn't based on what state the enemy in front of you is in, it's based on the state that you are in when you perform a Charge Attack. Charge Attacks are different based on whether you press the button by itself, in the middle of a Normal Attack string, when you're in the air, when you're guarding or when you're evading. Holding the button can also trigger something different as well depending on the weapon. Some weapons will also have on-screen prompts to help players utilise their respective gimmicks.

The weapons in this game are also good candidates for me to do a Weapon Moveset Power Rankings series on, so that'll probably be a future plan down the line alongside the weapons for SW5.

Your character's rank level is based on the proficiencies of all your weapons added up. Increasing weapon proficiency unlocks additional special attacks and Battle Arts. Each increase in weapon proficiency increases your rank level and with it your stats. At certain points, you will receive a promotion in rank and unlock new skill panels.

Skills are unlocked using Skill Points. 3 Skill Points are unlocked every 100 KOs and each training task from an officer rewards 15 Skill Points upon completion. Skills can increase stats, unlock common Battle Arts (which can be used regardless of weapon) and unlock special abilities, including the ability to perform Extreme Musou Attacks with your companion or even enter Musou Rage and perform Ultimate Musou Attacks as you would when swapping to your companion, the latter of which is unlocked after you gain closure with Zhuhe.

There are five gems that you can choose from and power-up to give you different effects in battle. Powering up gems uses Pyroxene (輝石), which can be found all over the world map. You contribute an amount of Pyroxene per attempt and the amount and type of gems created varies, with bonus gems being created occasionally. Sometimes, your Eyes of the Sacred Bird will allow you to see a light in the Pyroxene and predict what gem types will be created, or you can use a Moongrass to induce a bright light and directly induce a prediction. Gems can be upgraded to a maximum level of 30.

Chapter 2 unlocks the Shui Jing Retreat, which would be run by Shui Jing/Sima Hui's apprentice Pang Tong from Chapter 3 onwards. You can find out the status of your bonds with other officers and also who can be interacted with for bond events or tasks. You'll also collect 500 Old Coins in this game, the equivalent to Hunting Points from 8, and obtain rewards like items, gold and pyroxene based on how many Old Coins you've collected so far. When you've obtained all the Old Coins you can in battle, the last few are scattered on the world map, so you have to go into every nook and cranny to find every last one. A March 2025 update added another feature in New Game+ where you can trade Skill Points for Panacea, Musou Bonds and gold, which is a good use for them after all your skills are unlocked.

In battle, you'll have a cache of 4-6 meat buns and you can take up to another three items into battle. Each item you take can only be used once per battle, like in the modern Samurai Warriors games. Depending on the setting, the meat buns you pick up can be used automatically to replenish your health before they refill your cache for later use. Entering War God's Rage also enables you to refill your health with each attack.

Like in the demo, you can summon and mount onto your horse by pressing L3. While playing the game, I've found a lot of times that I can accidentally press L3 and end up interrupting my attack; updates have made it so I can remap it to the down button and swap it with the function to zoom in the minimap, or I can make it so that the L3 button needs to be held down to summon the horse, which does help a bit.

Sometimes, enemy officers can enter Musou Rage and perform Ultimate Musou Attacks, especially on higher difficulties or when a large enemy army employs this as a Grand Tactic. This can be prevented by depleting the enemy's Fortitude Gauge.

An update in April 2025 added Photo Mode for those who are interested. There are less features in this compared to 9's Photo Mode, but I'm sure it'll be sufficient for most players.

After clearing the game once and entering New Game+, you'll unlock the Ultimate Warrior difficulty, which is this game's equivalent of Chaos/Ultimate difficulty. On Hero difficulty, enemies will become more aggressive, blocking attacks (or being attacked) drains your Bravery and enemies will not drop meat buns, but you'll earn more gold and Skill Points in return. Ultimate Warrior difficulty reduces the windows for Parries and Perfect Evades, but you'll be able to complete challenges that will reward you with gold, old coins, pyroxene, items, guards, special horses, Battle Arts, Grade 7 weapons and Grade 8 Luan weapons.

You can also start the story again from the beginning of a chapter or a restart point, particularly if you want to play a different faction's story or retry for the True Ending. You don't have to play all the way from Chapter 1 if you don't want to.

New Game+ also gives you the ability to merge weapons by reforging them, whether to boost a weapon's attack power or transfer traits from one weapon to another. You can only reforge weapons of the same type and grade.

Once again, there's not a lot of DLC in this game because everything is part of the pre-order bonuses. The only piece of DLC available for this game is the Original Soundtrack, which contains 20 original tracks from older games that received a new arrangement for this game, and the Official Book, which is something that I'd expect to see in a Treasure Box release and wouldn't you know it, it exists and it's in there. They are also available in the Digital Deluxe Edition as well, where the book can be viewed in the game. The only catch is that the Official Book is only in Japanese.

Koei Tecmo released the Official Book for international fans and it's only available in Japanese.

There's not even a Chinese version of it either. I don't know about other languages, but I wouldn't mind if they only translated an English version of the book for the West. Like, you go out of your way to send the Official Book out to as many people as you can, and you can't even get it translated to the languages that a great deal of your fans understand.

Players who preordered the game physically or bought the Treasure Box also four four additional Garb of the Flying Bird variants in blue, red, green and purple, while players who preordered the game digitally would receive the Nameless Warrior Garb from Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty- wait. They released variants of Ziluan's initial costume and yet they couldn't release variants of his Wing Uniform when he joined a faction? The Photo Mode update also added the Lion Dragon Armor based on Zhao Yun's costume in 3.

Up to 30 January, there was also a free Early Works Soundtrack Collection DLC containing 191 BGMs from the classic era. What about the modern era BGMs, huh? Also, in February, a free tie-in DLC was released in collaboration with Ichiran, which is another health-recovering item. Yay?

The Digital Deluxe Edition includes 10,000 gold and 30 pyroxene which is obtained through letters that will be available in-game. Additionally, players who preordered the Digital Deluxe Edition or the Treasure Box could also get access to the game 72 hours early, and the early access was unlocked on 14 January whereas everyone else had to wait until 17 January.

Jim Sterling made a video on how gaming companies are using early access incentives to prey on the FOMO of players and extract extra money out of them instead of making actual content, and when you look at what's available in the Digital Deluxe Edition and the DLC (which there barely is any), they're not wrong. The base game costs USD$70 and the Original Soundtrack/Official Book DLC costs USD$20. Guess how much the Digital Deluxe Edition costs. Yep, USD$90, and for that price, you also got to play the game 3 days early with some bonus in-game currency, except the game's already been out so all you're really getting is free currency you could still get if you played a few battles or sold a few weapons. If the Official Book was also available in English and Chinese, if the Deluxe Edition included the Early Works Soundtrack Collection and the pre-order costumes, then maybe the Deluxe Edition would be justified at that price point. But now, the Deluxe Edition is no better than buying the base game and DLC separately, especially with no Season Pass to recycle content with (unless it's on sale, at which point it's partially justifiable).

Also, releasing a game 3 days earlier for people who pre-ordered is still releasing a game, it's just that everyone else can't play it for 3 days. The scene groups managed to crack the game and make it available as soon as they were able to get the game 3 days before everybody else. You're not fooling anyone. Early access is a scam if you get your head out of your FOMO-blueballed ass and think about it.

Onto localisation now. This game is available with voices in Japanese, Mandarin Chinese and English, plus texts in Japanese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and in a later update, Arabic. What, no Portuguese translation? You did it for 9.

Most PlayStation 5 releases outside of Asia, including Japan and the West, do not have support for Chinese texts or voices. Conversely, within Asia, there is a separate version that only has support for Japanese and Chinese texts and voices. Xbox Series and Steam releases have all language options intact. What the hell, Sony.

The Mandarin Chinese dub for this game was produced by another Beijing-based studio, 8082Audio, who also produced the Chinese dub for Black Myth: Wukong. Olivia Tong Xinzhu (佟心竹/C小调), who voiced Diaochan in 9 and also reprises her role in this game, served as the main voice recording director in this game after transferring to 8082Audio from TrioPen Studio. While a number of characters have been recast, a lot of the voice actors from 9's Mandarin Chinese dub return in this game, whether to reprise their roles or voice new ones, so kudos on that.

Initially, I predicted that the English dub would be produced by the New York-based 3Beep (who produced the dub for Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty), but I was proven wrong. The English dub for this game was produced by the LA-based Rocket Sound and Dave & Dave Recording Studios, who have worked on both union and non-union projects alike with union and non-union actors. When I first listened to the English announcement trailer, I thought that David Lodge, who voiced Fu Xi in WO2 and Ling Tong in DW6-8, was the narrator in it and therefore, would be the narrator for this game (I was on my way home from a holiday at the time and I was watching on my phone over tea). I was wrong on those fronts, but I unintentionally predicted that he would have a role in this game's dub. The narrator in the trailer turned out to be Guan Yu's voice actor William C. Stephens and the narrator in the game turned out to be the older Bailuan, voiced by John-Henry Kurtz.

As is obvious, the English dub was recast by Rocket Sound, but interestingly, three voice actors from DW8 (out of 57) were cast in Origins. Kyle Herbert, who voiced Sima Yi, Xu Huang, Zhou Tai, and Ding Feng, was cast as Lu Bu; Kaiji Tang, who voiced Sima Zhao, was cast as Chen Gong and Gan Ning; and David Lodge, who voiced Ling Tong, was cast as Cheng Pu. The voice cast was gradually revealed on social media during the leadup to the game's release; the main voice actors (for Ziluan and the nine companion characters) were the first to be revealed when the game's website was launched, plus they are credited in the game's opening credits sequence, a first for the series.

Unfortunately, for an English voice cast that's full of DEI (there's quite a number of minority and LGBTQIA+/non-binary voice actors in the mix), they sure can't pronounce a lot of Chinese names properly or consistently. Some examples include "Xi" for "Xu", "Zuluan" for "Ziluan", "Su(a)n Sua" for "Sun Ce", and the most egregious examples, "Kong Zong" for "Kong Rong" (it's not Vietnamese) and "Lui/Louie/Looey" for any name that uses the umlaut "Lü", like "Lui Meng" for "Lu Meng" or "Louie Bu" for "Lu Bu" (it's not Cantonese). And like in 9, they still managed to pronounce Cao Cao's name as "Tsao Tsao" and not "Cow Cow". In a world where the entertainment industry is overtly left-wing liberal and #StopAsianHate crybabies get so anal-retentive over how non-Asians pronounce Asian names, this comes off as unintentionally funny at best and wilfully ignorant at worst. I'm surprised the 3 voice actors from DW8 weren't consulted on how to pronounce certain names properly. Say what you will about the Voicegroup dubs, at least they were consistent with their pronunciations in each game even if they were technically incorrect, with some pronunciations being changed in later games.

There are also points in the game where the line said in the voice track is incorrect, but the subtitle for it is correct. A couple of examples can be found with Cheng Pu in the Chapter 4 event Nemesis and the Chapter 5 event True Loyalty. I swear at one point I thought Taishi Ci said a line that was totally different than the subtitle, but maybe I remembered wrong or the line was corrected in an update.

The English localisation was once again headed by Digital Hearts and dear Lord, some of the lines use some pretty big or weird words. It's like they ran the script through a thesaurus or something. When officers (even Ziluan) order archers to fire their arrows, they say "Loose!" instead of "Fire!" After looking into it though, "loose" is technically a more accurate term since "firing" is usually associated with firearms.

The quality of the Rocket Sound/Dave & Dave English dub is way better than Voxx Studios' dub of 9, but in my opinion, and maybe it's my (toxic) nostalgia talking here, they could never reach the pinnacle of quality that was Voicegroup's dubs of 4-8.

Also, to the dub haters and opinion-neutrals who like to say "just read the subtitles" when dub fans complain about games not being dubbed, I dare you to play this game with Japanese/Chinese voices and try reading the battle dialogue when you've got enemies attacking you every which way and you're trying to concentrate on your character. Yes, I know battle messages can pause the game briefly depending on your settings. Oh, and you're not allowed to hold down L2 while the battle dialogue's on the screen because that would be cheating.

Dynasty Warriors Origins is an amazing game, easily the peak of the postmodern era. By combining elements from all three eras, Omega Force continued the postmodern era by taking what made the modern era great and giving them some classic era touches to add some real punch.

Like the modern era games, you're bound to rack up 2000-3000 KOs in battle, but the game makes you put in the effort so it doesn't feel too easy and become a complete wash. There's a degree of challenge like in the early classic era with enemies attacking more aggressively, plus the large army battles and castle sieges add depths of immersion that hasn't been seen in previous games.

Some parts of this game won't appeal to everyone, like the limited history scope, the lack of character customisation or the game's hyperfocus on an original protagonist that everyone gushes over. This game isn't going to be perfect for everyone and that's okay. There have been fans who would have liked to see an actual Dynasty Warriors 10 that went back to how things were in 8, like the original plan for this game. I can't deny that I'm one of those people, but maybe this reboot is the kick in the pants that the Warriors series desperately needed, which brings us to the rant for this game.

Rant: A Reality Check (The Current State of Koei Tecmo)

At the time of publishing this retrospective, Dynasty Warriors Origins has been out for 5 months now. It's been rated highly by reviewers and critics, beating DW4 on Metacritic as the highest-rated mainline Warriors game, sold 1 million units worldwide in the month after its release, and before its release, won an award from the Future Division of the Japan Game Awards at TGS 2024. So what's next for Koei Tecmo and Omega Force and what direction would they take the Warriors games toward?

After reaching its first peak in the classic era with DW4/5 and SW1/2, Dynasty Warriors and Koei Warriors games as a whole began to experience a decline at the tail end of the classic era that persisted throughout the modern era and came to a head in the postmodern era.

The first two Warriors Orochi games featured a dream crossover between the Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors series, but the features were lacking, the stories were disparate despite efforts to connect them, and the culmination of those games in the form of Z failed to reach the West presumably due to SCEA's vetoing of a localised release.

DW6 was Tomohiko Shō's attempt at creating the best Warriors game that utilised the PS3's specs to its fullest potential, but characters and Musou Modes were cut and most characters that remained had shared weapon movesets, not to mention the Renbu system homogenising the Charge Attack system that had been a staple of previous games.

SW3 attempted to modernise Samurai Warriors like DW6 did for its series, but the Nintendo Wii exclusivity hampered the game's performance and in turn, its reception, which resulted in the Xtreme Legends expansion and Empires spinoff remaining Japan-exclusive and the beginning of the end for English dubs in Samurai Warriors games or English dubs for Koei Warriors games in general produced by Voicegroup.

DW7 celebrated 10 years of Dynasty Warriors, began a modern era peak and allowed Omega Force to regain the respect it lost with 6, but weapon clones remained and not every character was given their chance to shine in the vanilla game's Story Mode, not to mention the reused assets in costumes and DLCs marking the series' biggest example of autoerotic assetflipsiation.

WO3 concluded the crossover story of the first two games and brought in characters from Koei Tecmo's other IPs, but the lack of an English dub, a physical release in the US or proper scrutiny in the translation hampered the awesome potential of the game that was only partially regained a decade after its original release with the release of the PC port.

DW8 improved on its predecessor by literally building on from its foundations, but it cheapened the 1 vs 1000 experience by making the game too easy on lower difficulties or too hard on higher difficulties, continued its predecessor's autoerotic assetflipsiation and the spinoffs began to show that Omega Force was beginning to burn out after releasing numerous games, expansions, ports and spinoffs year after year.

SW4 was Samurai Warriors' turn to celebrate 10 years of their series, but Capcom's lawsuits towards Koei Tecmo likely derailed their plans for its Xtreme Legends expansion leading to it becoming a repetitive retread of its main game, not to mention the lack of English dub or certain characters not being prominently featured dampening the anniversary hype.

WAS, DW9 and WO4 were all in development at the same time so resources were being stretched across these three projects among others, leading to them suffering from being unpolished in the final products, particularly DW9 as it aimed to be "ambitious" with an open-world format and a deconstructed combat system only for it to be an absolute dumpster fire, with WO4 acting as damage control.

SW5 was Omega Force's first step in a new direction as the scope was only centred around a specific period and group of people in Sengoku era Japan, cutting out characters that were extraneous to it. DWOrigins continued this with an original story intertwined with a fleshed-out scope covering the first part of Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Recently, DenFaminicoGamer published a gargantuan interview with producer Tomohiko Shō about Dynasty Warriors Origins and the series in general. Towards the end of it, the topic shifts to game development and how things have changed in entertainment since the PS2 era.

In the West, the volume of content is what matters these days; the gaming industry there has essentially become another Hollywood over the past 10 years. The scale of development has noticeably expanded as well, as companies are investing lots of money in the hope that their teams can create high quality content (YMMV).

There wasn't much choice for entertainment back in the PS2 days compared to today, so Koei Tecmo releasing a new Warriors game every year was somewhat reasonable. But eventually, people will get tired at some point - even though Japanese fans, who love the Three Kingdoms era, were willing to play the Yellow Turban Rebellion again by the time 5 came out, Shō thought that they were starting to get tired of it.

Nowadays, it's impossible to expect a new game in a series every year, hence why sequels tend to be released every 2-3 years. Even small indie games require a lot of energy and time from the people making them and a new employee at a gaming company going into a new project will only see it completed and released to the public in 3-4 years. According to Shō, university graduates will aim to join gaming companies because they love games, but most of them have never even experienced the mindset of a creator. He also states that for better or worse, there have been more talented people in the gaming industry and less passionate people in recent times.

Take two of Koei Tecmo's mainline simulation franchises, Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Nobunaga's Ambition. ROTK is going to be the more successful franchise because there is a large market in China and the original novel covers a large time period and a massive amount of people and events. Nobunaga's Ambition, on the other hand, is inevitably still going to be a niche franchise outside of Japan because there's not many fans who are interested in it, and also because, in my view, there is no one book that has covered the entire Sengoku period or romanticised it like ROTK. Plus, ROTK came to Japan during the Edo period. Romanticised foreign history vs. violent recent domestic history - you make the call.

Action games inevitably cost more to develop than simulation games. Reflect that onto Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors and you can see why the former has more advantages, more fans and more sales, especially overseas.

During the modern era, we saw how both series became too big and too broad while lacking in innovation or excessively overdoing it, making each game shallower and shallower with each release. Remember what Shō said about how having more characters makes it harder to portray them all in depth and devote energy to other things like gameplay or story.

So this is my reality check for the fanbase. We should not expect every new game to be bigger than the last one. We should not expect things to go back to how they were in DW8/SW4. We should not expect more and more characters and battlefields in a game covering such broad periods of history that are as bloated as they are already. We should not expect characters to all have individualised weapons with individualised movesets and gimmicks. And most of all, we should not expect every game to be translated or dubbed into every goddamn language in the world.

Instead, we should look forward to how the series will continue to evolve, what features would be implemented, what new mechanics will be invented, what characters and battles will receive focus, and most importantly, how these things will be received by everyone, in and out of the fanbase.

Do you want a series with sequels that get better with each release, or do you just want each new game to be "another one"?

Admittedly, I'm in the latter camp and I'm okay with it, but working on the Koei Warriors Retrospective and seeing all these insights from people inside and outside of Koei Tecmo made me realise that I want to look forward to how the Warriors series continues to evolve. I've been negative, angry, even entitled, over some of Koei Tecmo and Omega Force's decisions in the past, but I've realised that this isn't the classic era where every game can get an English dub or the modern era where I can play with 94 characters and weapons. This is the postmodern era where we don't know what era will come after this one, but we can look forward to deeper gameplay and storytelling. And while it may be hard for someone like me, who isn't into a diverse set of franchises and fanbases, to imagine how the Koei Warriors series can evolve, I know that I'm not the only fan capable of imagining, so hopefully I'll remain optimistic for what comes next after Origins, even if it takes years to be realised.

Well, it's been fun working on the Koei Warriors Retrospective for the past year. I hope you enjoyed reading these instalments, long-winded though they may be, just as I enjoyed writing them, and-

OH, GODDAMN IT.

[yeonchi]

Koei Warriors Retrospective Part 30: Samurai Warriors 5

Samurai Warriors 5 (戦国無双5) Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch Release dates: Japan: 24 June 2021 (PS4/Xbox One/Switch)/27 July 2021 (PC) USA/Europe: 27 July 2021

Samurai Warriors Basara-ified.

Omega Force's first attempt at revamping the Warriors series for the postmodern era was a failure. Their attempt at damage control, which was actually in development at the same time, did help a bit but it fell flat in some areas. The character lineups were bloated and the time periods covered were becoming very broad. Koei Tecmo couldn't rely on modern era nostalgia and doing the same thing forever; for the first time in over 15 years, it was decided that like Dynasty Warriors before it, Samurai Warriors needed a makeover.

After much discussion and development, the first new Warriors instalment came out in 2021 with Samurai Warriors 5 - during a pandemic no less. Let's look at how Omega Force managed to revive Samurai Warriors in the midst of a pandemic.

Samurai Warriors 5

In the seven years since SW4's release, there were many discussions at Omega Force over how they would go about a sequel. Various ideas and plans were floated and projects were started, only for them to be stopped or cancelled. They ended up getting stuck in the prototype stage because they were using the same characters and settings from 4, but in the end, they decided that they had to start from scratch instead of just making "another one". The game was announced in the February 2021 Nintendo Direct and released in July that year.

SW1 focused on Nobunaga's era. SW2 added the Toyotomi's unification of the land and the Battle of Sekigahara. SW3 split the story into three eras, covering the Kantō Three Kingdoms rivalry (between the Uesugi, Takeda and Hōjō), the Three Unifiers of the Sengoku era (Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, Ieyasu) and the young warriors of Sekigahara (Mitsunari, Kanetsugu, Yukimura, Kiyomasa, Masanori). SW4 was a celebratory festival, a culmination of the series like DW5 was for classic era Dynasty Warriors. With SW5, Omega Force went back to the first game's roots of Nobunaga Oda's era, but they expanded it and put more focus on the bromance between him and Mitsuhide Akechi, the two being key figures of the climax battle that was the Honnōji Incident, because damn it, everything is gay about this.

With the focus of the game being centred around the Oda, only 20 of the 56 characters from SW4 return in this game. On top of that, 8 of those characters have had their seiyuus recast (listed in bold), mostly due to the characters being depicted younger (or older) than they were in previous games, given the timeframe being covered. Trust me, given the design changes for some of the other characters, you won't believe that they're still voiced by the same seiyuus.

Nobunaga Oda

Mitsuhide Akechi

Kenshin Uesugi

Oichi

Magoichi Saika

Shingen Takeda

Nō

Hanzō Hattori

Hideyoshi Hashiba

Yoshimoto Imagawa

Tadakatsu Honda

Ieyasu Tokugawa

Nagamasa Azai

Toshiie Maeda

Katsuie Shibata

Kanbei Kuroda

Hanbei Takenaka

Motonari Mōri

Hisahide Matsunaga

Takakage Kobayakawa

Luckily the cut characters weren't reintroduced as generics or else it would have made Koei Tecmo look cheap.

Of course, there are new characters being introduced as well:

Mitsuki

Toshimitsu Saitō

Shikanosuke Yamanaka

Kazuuji Nakamura

Sena

Sandayū Momochi

Yasuke

And finally, we have some "generic" characters that are also playable. This honestly feels like a take on the playable generic officers of 4 (or the unique NPCs of previous games), except they are given unique designs to make them look like actual playable characters so it doesn't work. 4 Empires upgraded a number of generic officers using CAW parts and it works better than this. The only difference between them and the actual playable characters is that while these characters are playable, they use the same Musou/Frenzy Finishers based on the weapon they have and they have no unique/EX attacks or Ultimate Skills.

Nobuyuki Oda

Motonobu Okabe

Katsuyori Takeda (returning from Spirit of Sanada)

Motoharu Kikkawa

Terumoto Mōri

Dōsan Saitō

Yoshitatsu Saitō

Yoshikage Asakura

Yoshiaki Ashikaga

Fujihide Mitsubuchi

All in all, there are 39 characters in this game.

Like Spirit of Sanada, there are also older versions of Nobunaga and Mitsuhide that are available from Chapter 5 of Story Mode, with different Musou and Frenzy Finishers from their young counterparts. As such, the two characters have two EX weapons, Nobunaga's being the ōdachi and katana and Mitsuhide's being the katana and the Blade and Matchlock. Nobunaga's second EX weapon is available from early on in the story (because Mitsuhide uses it too obviously), but I didn't get Mitsuhide's second EX weapon until I unlocked his older counterpart.

There are six chapters in Story Mode (which is actually called Musou Mode in this game) and two stories for Nobunaga and Mitsuhide. The way the stories are unlocked is that you play the first two chapters of Nobunaga's story, then the first two chapters of Mitsuhide's story will be unlocked and so forth. There are also side stages and flip-side stages for battles tangentially related to the story or just to show a battle from the enemy's POV. The storytelling isn't just a simple retelling of history, there is a deeper story within it that we haven't seen in previous DW or SW games, kind of like a WO game.

Nobunaga's story follows his glory days as "the fool of Owari", with this fact taken in mind in the design of his character. In the midst of resisting the Imagawa's march to the capital, he ends up fighting his wife's clan and his little brother, the latter rebelling in an effort to inspire his brother to end the chaos. Following this, Nobunaga is successful in killing Yoshimoto and toppling the Saitō before making an alliance with the Azai.

With the death of the previous shōgun Yoshiteru, his successor Yoshiaki Ashikaga's retainer Fujihide Mitsubuchi is introduced to Nobunaga by Mitsuhide in an effort to seek his support to reclaim the capital from the Miyoshi and Rokkaku clans that overthrew him. Nobunaga's efforts are successful thanks to Hisahide Mitsunaga and the two clans are eliminated. At the same time, a Kōga ninja named Mitsuki joins the Oda as well, mistaking Nobunaga for her father; he ordered Toshiie Maeda to take care of her after her birth father, Nobuyuki, died when she was a baby, but he left her with the Kōga instead of killing her. Nobunaga denies being Mitsuki's father but doesn't reveal the truth to her at this point.

Nobunaga turns against Yoshikage Asakura when he ignores his request to visit the capital. He attacks Yoshikage at Kanegasaki, but when his friends bring up Nagamasa and Oichi, Nobunaga foolishly thinks, "Nah, he's not gonna betray me, we're besties lol." Nagamasa arrives, sees Kanegasaki Castle occupied and joins the battle on the side of the Asakura. Cue Curb Your Enthusiasm credits. Oichi becomes Nobunaga's enemy as well and so does Katsuie Shibata (guy sounds more like Mitsunari lmao and yes, I know, same seiyuu) because the story ends before Shizugatake, so why don't we have a love triangle between them and Nagamasa? Nobunaga is forced to escape the battlefield, but when someone (Magoichi Saika) tries to snipe him, Nō takes the bullet and dies in her husband's arms.

This hardens Nobunaga's heart and drives him to destroy the Azai, the Asakura, the monks of Mt. Hiei and the Saika Renegades. Nobunaga also learns that the shōgunate, specifically Yoshiaki's retainer Mitsubuchi, was the one who hired the Saika to assassinate Nobunaga. With the help of Sandayū Momochi, Nobunaga crushes the shōgunate forces, sparing Yoshiaki (who had been handed to the Oda forces by Magoichi) but forcing Fujihide to commit seppuku.

Years later, the now older Nobunaga and Mitsuhide assist Ieyasu Tokugawa against the Takeda at Nagashino, where they also learn that their head, Shingen, was long dead and had been impersonated by a kagemusha in the battle. Hisahide, persuaded by Sandayū, rebels against Nobunaga before he commits suicide following his defeat. When one of his allies defects to the Mōri, Nobunaga calls all his troops away from Kōzuki Castle, leaving Shikanosuke and his lord at the mercy of the Mōri. He then finishes off what remains of the Imagawa and Takeda before finding himself betrayed by Mitsuhide at Honnōji. In spite of Sandayū's interjection, Nobunaga and Mitsuhide fight for the last time before he decides to perish within Honnōji.

Mitsuhide's story shows him becoming a ronin after his lord is killed and his clan is slaughtered. Accompanied by Toshimitsu Saitō, they travel the land and meet various lords and warriors, including Yoshikage Asakura, Shikanosuke Yamanaka and Kenshin Uesugi, the latter of the three whom he fights for against the Takeda at Kawanakajima.

Mitsuhide (fully) joins with Nobunaga from Kanegasaki onward, gradually becoming as cruel as him over the years. When Hisahide offers him a place in his rebellion, Mitsuhide refuses, then upon learning of his suicide, wonders why he would stand against them when their goals were similar, but Nobunaga warns him to not be led astray by unnecessary thoughts. By this point, Mitsuhide is suspecting that someone is scheming against the Oda and asks Toshimitsu to investigate. When his efforts meet a dead end, Toshimitsu suggests that they seek assistance from Hanzō Hattori.

Shikanosuke's death leads Mitsuki to approach Sandayū, who had informed her earlier about the truth regarding her birth father, and join his revolt against the Oda. Mitsuhide is sent out to assist Ieyasu against the revolt in Iga, after which he steels his resolve to rebel against Nobunaga. Following this, Mitsuhide faces off against Hideyoshi at Yamazaki and is defeated, flashing back to happier times as he dies.

SW5 has a different approach to Honnōji as it introduces a true villain in the name of Sandayū Momochi. They took the psychosis from SW4 Hisahide and gave it to Sandayū, leaving the former looking like a TikTok boomer who does finger hearts at the end of his Frenzy Finisher. Having Sandayū appear at Honnōji kind of robs Mitsuhide of his agency, something that Xaldin007 might agree with given what he wrote in the description of his playthrough. And there's no followup with Sandayū after that in both the main stories, given how he was manipulating some of the rebellions in the story. This may feel a bit unsatisfying, but the hypothetical route does give a little bit of satisfaction, even if it's not much.

The Secret History Reverie Chapter consists of 9 stages that are unlocked after clearing the main story (for both Nobunaga and Mitsuhide) and achieving an S rank on certain battles. Through the chapter's bottom route, the deaths of Nō, Nagamasa and Shikanosuke are averted and Hanzō exposes Sandayū's treachery before Honnōji, resulting in Sandayū being the one to rebel instead of Mitsuhide. He starts by summoning illusions of Yoshimoto, Shingen and Kenshin and their armies against him. Mitsuhide and Hisahide arrive to assist Nobunaga before Mitsuki exposes the trickery and forces Sandayū to reveal himself.

After Sandayū retreats following his defeat, Yasuke brings news that Hideyoshi is being attacked by the Mōri alongside Yoshiaki, who had turned to them after being exiled from the capital. Nobunaga and Mitsuhide head to Yamazaki in an effort to assist Hideyoshi and eliminate the shōgunate for good. The Saika Renegades are there as well and of course Sandayū is there as well. Hisahide arrives as well, but he sets a trap for the Oda and sides with Sandayū in an effort to achieve his perfect world only to be slain. In the end, Yoshiaki, Sandayū and the Mōri are slain, allowing the Oda to rule the land in peace.

There is no separate Free Mode in the menu, but rather you can pick whether to play a stage in Musou Mode with all the story events or Free Mode with any characters you like. As such, you can play with young Nobunaga and old Mitsuhide or old Nobunaga and young Mitsuhide. You can even play as their opposite-age counterparts in stages where their younger or older counterpart would usually appear. However, some characters are restricted on some stages in Free Mode and there is a fixed partner character on three stages (Okehazama, Echizen, Tanba) in Musou Mode, mostly because they become your partner midway through the battle.

Citadel Mode is the alternate mode for this game, and it's simplistically straightforward. All stages are 5 minutes long and your objective is to defend the base from the enemies trying to invade it until all of them are defeated or the time limit elapses. If enough enemies enter your base, it will fall and you will lose the battle. Instead of items, you can choose up to three unit types (that can be levelled up) to deploy and they can perform either one of two attacks (shield and artillery squadrons only have one attack). You will earn materials upon clearing stages, plus additional rewards depending on the rank you achieve. By playing as characters with specific relationships, you can increase the bonds between them and unlock a special event between them when you max out your friendship.

Both Story and Citadel Modes bring you to your castle, which serves as the camp for this game. Your castle can rank up after clearing 4, 6 and 9 chapters respectively. With each rank, each facility can be upgraded a level to a maximum of 5 at max rank. To upgrade each facility, you need gold along with all three types of materials, namely lumber, minerals and fabrics.

The Dojo is where you can level up your characters and change their equipment, something that can also be done before battle. You can only level up a character's level or Weapon Mastery to the next level as long as you have enough points for it; this game doesn't let you do partial measures. You can also use Skill Points to unlock skills similar to 4-II, including your character's unique Ultimate Skill. It's a more straightforward system than what it was back then. Some skills can also be switched on or off as you wish.

At the Blacksmith, you can upgrade your weapons and dismantle them for gold and Skill Gems. It works like it does in WO4 but it's easier to manage in this game. You can also transfer your weapons to other types by crafting them, but unlike 4 you can only craft them once.

In the Shop, you can purchase weapons and Skill Gems (categorised under accessories), materials and scrolls for weapon mastery and skill points. They can also be sold back for gold as well.

And finally, in the Stables you can purchase horses and sacrifice them to level up a horse or grant them new skills. You can also set the same horse to every character, which saves you time having to do it individually.

The pre-battle introductions for the first battle of each chapter is a pre-rendered movie that also introduces the chapter. This is likely a stylistic decision, but in the English localisation, the character names and battle names in the introductions (and loading screens) remain in Japanese and are accompanied by English subtitles, unlike previous games where they would only be in English.

The loading times in this game are honestly long as hell despite the game only being 15 GB large and me having it on an NVME SSD. Also, I can't skip pre-battle introductions until the next bit has loaded. If I try to do it, a progress bar comes up in the corner and that pisses me off because in older games, I could skip the introduction instantly. Even if I quickly skip through the introduction narration, it doesn't say the name of the battle until the loading is complete.

The character designs and visuals appear more anime-like compared to older games. It kind of reminds me of Sengoku Basara even though I've never played it (as of yet) because it's the only other Sengoku era hack-and-slash game I know that also isn't from Koei Tecmo. The attempt to blend in the anime-like design of the characters with realistically-designed visuals leaves the characters looking like they have thin outlines around them, especially in pre-rendered cutscenes. They look like interdimensional beings trying to imprint themselves in the universe, kind of like the Cybermen in the Doctor Who Series 2 finale.

Looking at the battle mechanics now and this game continues to use the classic combo system seen in most other Koei Warriors games, which is a welcome change from DW9 even though it's been a staple for over 20 years because let's face it, anything is better than DW9.

The weapon system is similar to that of DW7-9 except there is no weapon switching and you can't change weapons during battle. There are 15 types of weapons in this game and up to 20 weapons of each type can be kept for a total of 300. That number doesn't include the basic variant of each weapon (lowest level with no upgradability), rare weapons, DLC weapons and special weapons that are available with the Deluxe Edition.

Weapon movesets are no longer defined by categories like in older games. The charge attacks are a mix of both Normal and Charge Attack movesets, with some weapons also having variations in mounted attacks and some even having Aerial (Jump) Attack strings. Dash Attacks make a return and so do Hyper Attacks, but the Hyper Charge Attacks have been removed; instead, Hyper Attacks can be connected to Normal Attacks at any time.

Shared movesets are also a thing in this game, with only 4 of 15 weapon types having one EX user. EX Attacks work differently in this game than in DW7/8; playable characters have two EX Attacks on their EX weapon and instead of them having the same Charge Attack that leads into their unique EX, EX Charge Attacks are actually different to the character. Nō, Mitsuki, Sena, Kazuuji, Hanzō and Takakage have their Jump Charge as their EX Attack while Katsuie has one of his EX Attacks only activatable on horseback. Playable generics do not have EX Attacks.

The number of attacks you can perform depend on your level, and the types of weapons you can use depend on your Weapon Mastery Level. As you add attributes to your weapons, your weapon's class can rise with it, meaning that if the resulting class is higher than your Weapon Mastery Level, you won't be able to use that weapon. Raising your Weapon Mastery Level also unlocks the Ultimate Skills for that weapon.

Musou Attacks continue to work similar to how they did in 4, with the Musou kanji appearing at the start like in older games instead of just before the finisher. The Musou loop can be different depending on the weapon you have, but the finisher is the same one that is unique to your character. The Musou Frenzy Attack starts with the Musou Finisher then the Frenzy Finisher follows after it before your character poses for the camera with a rendered portrait flashed at the end (if your character is positioned weirdly for the camera, such as next to a wall or cliff face, you'll still see your character model posing for the portrait even though you won't see it).

The Double Musou Attack only uses one bar of your Musou and consists of the first bit of your Musou finisher and your Musou loop (always using your EX weapon) before immediately transitioning to the Frenzy Finisher. You also only see the normal Musou kanjis for both characters instead of the True or both Musou kanjis for the character you're playing. Why couldn't they just link the normal Musou and the Musou finisher to the Frenzy Finisher and make it an Ultimate Musou Attack like in 3? There's a bit of a disconnect when you do the Double Musou Attack that way. The only character that comes close to this is Mitsuki because of how her Frenzy Finisher works, but there are other characters whose Frenzy Finisher has them jump into the air for it and yet that bit gets skipped for them in the Double Musou Attack.

The Rage Gauge is now a singular gauge akin to DW8 instead of the magatama-like Spirit gauge from SW3/4. The gauge fill rate is as slow as in the Empires games, such to the point that in most occasions (usually with Spirit + at level 3), you won't be able to activate Rage Mode until you get 1000 KOs. There have been occasions when I come close to filling the gauge just before I break 1000 KOs, meaning I still only get one use of Rage Mode when I could have had two uses. The Arcane Scroll, which normally maxes out your Spirit/Rage Gauge for up to 45 seconds, is now changed so it stops the gauge from running out for that duration during Rage Mode. It doesn't max out your gauge nor does it make it so you can use Rage Mode right after a Frenzy Finisher because activating it burns 5% of the gauge and you have to fill it up before you can use it again. You can also press R3 again to exit Rage Mode, not that you'd want to do that because you would then need to fill it up again.

Wait, Rage Mode is activated with R2? Then how the hell do you change maps or lock on? L3: Change maps R3: Lock-on Goddamn it, Koei Tecmo. Thank God you let us remap the controls otherwise we would have had a serious problem.

Ultimate Skills (閃技) are the staple postmodern era R1 button gimmick for this game. There are four basic skills that boost a stat or recover a portion of your Musou and a common skill (Pulse) that makes you charge forward through enemies. Each weapon has three skills and each character has a unique skill that is exclusive to them and uses their EX weapon. Different Ultimate Skills have different effectiveness against different types of enemy troops and each skill has a cooldown time before they can be used again.

In battle, some enemies may have an additional life, which they use to recover their health after you deplete it. Notably at Honnōji, Nobunaga and Mitsuhide have two additional lives in the final confrontation, but the battle ends once they're depleted and they have one life left, which kind of feels a bit unsatisfying.

Rare weapons are also available; to unlock them, you need to play two specific stages with specific main characters on Hard or Nightmare difficulty (either Musou or Free Mode is fine), obtain all S rank rewards for that stage with that character (you don't have to do them all in one go) and achieve an S rank rating with the same conditions.

A trial version of this game is available, consisting of the first two stages of Nobunaga's story. After playing those stages as Nobunaga in Musou Mode, you can play them in Free Mode with Hideyoshi, Ieyasu, Nō and Toshiie, with fixed abilities and weapons. Save data from the trial version can be carried over to the full version.

DLCs for this game include six additional scenarios with accompanying BGMs along with weapon and horse packs. The Season Pass includes all the DLCs and the Deluxe Edition includes the Season Pass plus four special weapons and a horse along with some Skill Gems, points and gold. There is also a horse pack consisting of Nobunaga and Mitsuhide's favourite horses inspired by the 2020 NHK Taiga Drama Awaiting Kirin (麒麟がくる) which coincidentally features the two characters, but it was only available for console players in Japan.

Very few characters get DLC costumes in this game; Nobunaga and Mitsuhide had special and deluxe costumes for both their young and older counterparts as a pre-order bonus on Steam, plus their costumes from Samurai Warriors 1 were available free of charge for a couple of weeks after the game released in the West, and holy shit they look weird in them with their current designs. Console players in Japan also got their Awaiting Kirin costumes as a pre-order bonus, plus the deluxe costumes for Nobunaga, Mitsuhide, Nō and Ieyasu were also available as bonuses at certain retailers. Switch players in Japan could also obtain a deluxe costume for Hideyoshi with the Seven Mile Program from 7-Eleven. Man, I live in Australia. Why couldn't I get some bonus DLC with my meat pie and Slurpee?

Apparently, the official sites for this game said that the aforementioned costume DLC "may be sold separately at a later date". It's been four years now, where the hell is my costume DLC? Oh, you don't have it? Maybe you never had any plans on selling the DLC separately in the first place. Ha ha ha ha ha! Anyway, thank God for the piracy scene.

Par for the course with Samurai Warriors, this game was localised without an English dub, but unlike previous games, the translation and localisation of this game was handled by Digital Hearts, who would go on to localise DW9E and future Warriors games to this day. I've mostly played this game in Japanese so I haven't really scrutinised the English translation, but from what I've seen so far, they haven't been as atrocious as Rubicon Solutions.

The ending theme song for this game is One Nation by EXILE. Nah, it should have been I Don't Like It! by Pauline Pantsdown.

Development for this game started before the announcement of the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series consoles in 2019, so there were no plans to release on those consoles. However, thanks to backwards compatibility, this game can be played on those consoles with faster loading times and 4K upscaling.

The PC port finally implements interchangeable keyboard and controller prompts after mouse controls were implemented in Warriors All-Stars. Future Koei Tecmo releases on PC, including WO3U and SW4DX, but not DW9E because it was delayed from an early 2021 release, would continue to implement this.

Also in late 2021, Koei Tecmo released some guidelines regarding the uploading or streaming of their games on social media. For this game in particular, they state that the only content from this game that is restricted includes everything from Honnōji onwards. Fuck you, Koei Tecmo, you can't tell us what to do. This is the Internet. Learn about fair use and stop living in the copyright dark ages like the rest of Japan.

Throughout this retrospective, I'm sure you've noticed that there is a certain Oda character missing from this game, which brings us to our rant for this game:

Rant: The Problem with Yasuke and Ranmaru

Samurai Warriors 5 introduced Yasuke, an African man who served as a retainer for Nobunaga for at least a year before the Honnōji Incident. Popular culture likes to make him out as the first black samurai, but there is debate over whether he actually was a samurai, particularly with the recent release of the game Assassin's Creed Shadows.

Yasuke was brought to Japan as Jesuit missionary Alessandro Valignano in 1579 before being brought to Nobunaga in 1581. It was said that Nobunaga was curious to see a black man and that there was a riot among the people who wanted to catch a glimpse of Yasuke. Nobunaga initially refused to believe that Yasuke's black skin was real so he had him undressed and washed, only to find that it didn't come off. Nobunaga would allow Yasuke to serve under him as his weapon-bearer or page, giving him his name and keeping him by his side as his bodyguard. He was also given a stipend and a private residence, something that was usually afforded to samurai, implying that Yasuke was essentially treated like a samurai even if he wasn't explicitly named as one. His main claim to fame was the Honnōji Incident, where it was said that following the battle, he was captured by the Akechi forces and sent back to the Jesuits, sparing his life because he wasn't Japanese. What happened to him afterwards is unknown.

A lot of the insistence that Yasuke was a samurai seems to come from Thomas Lockley, an English historian residing in Japan (great, the usual suspects), who wrote some books about Yasuke that were either mixed with fiction or not peer-reviewed. He had also been editing the Wikipedia page for Yasuke since 2012, publishing edits using sources from his own papers or books before they were actually released or published. And yet Ubisoft claims to maintain a degree of historical accuracy for educational value despite them adapting history to fit their narrative. Just admit you're romanticising history for entertainment and embrace that fact instead of insisting on historical accuracy and realism. Nobody (or rather, less people) would care and there would be less controversy that way.

This is the problem with people taking historical observations as fact without sufficient sources and peer review instead of speculation. But my problem with Yasuke's inclusion in SW5 isn't whether he actually was a samurai or not, it's that he was included in place of Ranmaru Mori and he only appears in the final chapter of Story Mode (where at least he starts off at level 27). I hate to say it, but in my opinion, Yasuke's inclusion in SW5 was out of diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI).

"But Azuma, Ranmaru's main claim to fame was the Honnōji Incident as well!"

Ranmaru is also the better known retainer of Nobunaga between him and Yasuke, and in Samurai Warriors, he was shown in battles as far back as Mt. Inaba Castle, a battle that would have taken place when he was two years old. It has been said in Edo-period LGBT literature (and I'm not making this up, the words used here are nanshoku 男色) that Nobunaga and Ranmaru had a sexual relationship with each other, something that is rather problematic considering Ranmaru was 16-17 years old when he died. Hence, this is likely why Ranmaru has been depicted androgynously in popular culture and also the reason why Ranmaru was omitted in this game with his role being given to Yasuke and his appearance being given to Ieyasu. Seeing as this game is only one character off from 40, there's no reason why Ranmaru couldn't have been included in this game. I wouldn't have seen Yasuke's inclusion as DEI so much if Ranmaru wasn't cut. Push Nobuyuki Oda down one spot so the ten playable "generics" get their own section.

Yasuke is not shown at Yamazaki, having become a rōnin carrying the Samonji with him or given it to Mitsuhide per Nobunaga's final instructions. If the next Samurai Warriors game goes back to covering the whole Sengoku era and Yasuke is featured in it, I could see Yasuke fighting at Yamazaki, whether with Mitsuhide to honour Nobunaga's legacy or with Hideyoshi to avenge him, then joining with the Toyotomi up to Sekigahara. Koei Warriors games don't need to be historically accurate as long as they're fun to play.

I'm not emotionally invested in the Yasuke samurai debate so I don't know if anything I've said is inaccurate. Frankly, the bigger problem is that Yasuke is voiced by a white man, Paddy Ryan, when he was voiced by a black man, Richie Campbell, in Nioh. Nah, I'm kidding. If you have a problem with this voice actor casting you are part of the problem.

This isn't the first time Koei Tecmo have fallen to the SJW agenda of DEI either. In August 2015, Koei Tecmo announced the release of Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, but only for Japan and Asia. That November, KT's social media implied that the game would not be receiving a Western release because of sexism towards females in the gaming industry and that if people really wanted it, they could import the sub-only Asian English version from PlayAsia (which is all well and good because the PS4 isn't region-locked, but a bit of an issue for those interested in DLC). They soon released an official statement saying that those comments only reflected the individual's opinion and confirmed again that the game would only be released in Japan and Asia. Ten years on, subsequent releases of the DOAXtreme series have not seen Western releases, with PC ports on Steam being region-locked to Asia.

Japan has always been late to the party when it comes to accepting anything foreign, and in recent years it seems that they've been starting to accept SJW agendas and wokeness. Much as I hate Japan's attitude towards foreign tourists, this might be for the best as Asia seems to be the last bastion against the woke revolution from the West.

For a pandemic project, Samurai Warriors 5 is a good game, decent enough when you look at the series as a whole. It's okay at what it does even if it is a bit lackluster.

There are no expansions or spinoffs for this game; the lack of an Empires spinoff is understandable because the story only takes place in central and western Honshū. I got this game at the start of 2022 and played it before DW9 because I saw tmma1869 (an old fan of mine) gushing about it on Twitter, plus I'd gotten the idea to do the Koei Warriors Retrospective and I knew I'd have to play it sooner or later. I hope to do a Weapon Moveset Power Rankings for weapons in this game at some point down the line, but it's something I'll have to look into at a later date.

DW9E would be the next Warriors game to be released, then after a couple more modern era PC ports, Dynasty Warriors Origins would be the next mainline Warriors game after this one. I'm proud of myself for getting this far, but this isn't the finish line yet. Until then I say.

[yeonchi]

The Toon Time YouTube channel is posting episodes of Sea Princesses. The channel uploads episodes practically daily, but they also alternate with Tracey McBean and Sumo Mouse. Unlike when the Mr Bean and Friends channel was doing it, they're putting up all the episodes with the opening titles and closing credits just as it should have been all along. I guess Banijay's finally gotten around to it after they announced their acquisition of Endemol Shine Group back in 2018.

In case you didn't know, here's how the distribution rights to the series changed over the years:

Southern Star > (rebranded to) Endemol Australia > (merged to) Endemol Shine Australia > (parent company acquired by) Banijay Entertainment

(fun fact, Endemol Shine Australia's parent company was owned by 21st Century Fox, then Disney before it was sold to Banijay)

The big problem I have with these uploads is that the names and episode numbers are all wrong. The actual upload order is correct, but the naming of the episodes starts from The Trick and not Lost. Also, they end up skipping some numbers in the episode numbering because some older numbers get repeated. And yet this issue didn't happen for Tracey McBean and Sumo Mouse. How the hell could this happen?

The episodes are available in 1080p quality, but we all know the series was made before HDTV became a real thing in Australia from late-2007, so it remains in standard definition. I'm downloading the episodes in 1080p because the 480p version would look compressed otherwise, not that the episodes on my OneDrive don't look compressed already. Yeah, don't expect me to update my OneDrive with these episodes. There's not much benefit in me doing it, plus the timestamps on the wiki are based off of those episodes. They might be off by a couple seconds on the odd episodes or by 15 seconds on the even episodes, but does anyone really care at this point?

[yeonchi]

Doctor Who Series 15 Recap Review Part 2

Before I continue with my review of the Series 15 finale, I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to Shinichirō Shirakura and Shōji Yonemura. You are no longer the worst producer and writer I've ever encountered thanks to this series.

My expectations for this series were low given the record of the RTD2 era, but holy fuck. Let's just get this over with. Spoilers after the break.

Episode 7: Wish World

In 1865 Bavaria, the Rani approaches the Zufall family, the father being the seventh son of a seventh son with a seventh son just born. She takes the baby and by kissing it, she turns the mother into violets, the other children into ducks and the father into an owl.

In 2025 London, the Doctor, known as John Smith, and Belinda have a daughter named Poppy. Yeah, Poppy is the same baby from Space Babies, who also appeared to Belinda in The Story and the Engine for some reason. As Belinda turns on the TV, they see Conrad wishing everyone a happy morning.

Yeah, the entire world has become a wish world wished up by Conrad, and it's basically a 60's aesthetic police state of toxic positivity where no one is allowed to have doubts. According to RTD in Unleashed, this is a partly-remembered and partly-invented world desperately invented by Conrad, so it's full of very simple templates and everyone is shipped into couples with some who don't quite fit. Considering how Conrad was RTD's expy of right-wing grifters, the wish world is basically what RTD thinks right-wingers want the world to be, meaning that yes, this is another leftist projection episode!

On the day before 24 May, John is heading out to work when reincarnated Lincoln Loud Ruby is at the door, wondering if she knows him for some reason and doubting everything she sees, horrifying John and Belinda and making the latter call the police for expressing doubt. As Ruby runs off, we see that Mel is John's neighbour and John works with Kate, Colonel Ibrahim and Susan Triad at the Unified National Insurance Team (UNIT).

At UNIT, the Doctor tries shipping Ibrahim with Kate and as he calls Ibrahim a beautiful man, he becomes horrified at the prospect of a man finding another man beautiful before the start of work makes him dismiss this doubt.

Back at home, Belinda's mum and aunt (she looks like she should be her nan ngl) come for a visit. As they note how they live the path of women in life, which Conrad thinks they're here for, Belinda's mum mentions that she went through 24 hours of labour, but Belinda can't remember how long her labour with Poppy, her only child, was, and she ends up having to ask her mom and even Poppy if they remember. For God's sake, Belinda. Even if Poppy wasn't a new soul then she's a recycled soul who drank the heavenly soup of forgetfulness made by my friend Meng Po before the bridge to the exit of hell. Her soul would have forgotten everything about her past life in blissful oblivion before being recycled to heaven and incarnated back on Earth in a human body, presumably after birth. Why would you assume she'd remember anything about her own birth? Anyway, a cup breaks and Belinda runs out of the house in horror and goes to scream in a forest. You and me both, Belinda.

Back at UNIT, everyone witnesses the Rani returning to the Bone Palace, presumably for 24 May. The Doctor wonders who she is and everyone suddenly becomes disgusted at him until he says that "she just is".

In the Bone Palace, the Rani brings some mortadella for Mrs Flood, who makes a sandwich for Conrad, the boy who wants the world to be better. Mrs Flood asks how the baby (who the Rani took from Bavaria) is and Conrad picks him up, noting that despite sustaining the world, he never cries, only chuckling... The Giggle. The Rani installs the Vindicator into a clock and asks Mrs Flood if the trap (for the Doctor) is ready, which it is.

Ruby encounters Shirley and the two recognise each other. Shirley takes Ruby to the homeless camp where she lives among the disabled, the dispossessed, and the ones who don't fit in, like Ruby. The way of the world is that the people there are poor, forgotten and irrelevant, but they all get glimpses of a better world. Ruby tells everyone about the Doctor and how she has lived through a 2025 previously (in 73 Yards) that wasn't like this. She tried telling her mum and her gran but they call her crazy and even her mum calls the police on her for expressing doubts. Ah, Carla "I foster kids for the money" Sunday, you inspired my "reincarnated motherfucker" joke last year and you've given me reasons to call back to it this year. If there's one good thing I've gotten out of this series I'm glad it's that.

The unique thing about being disabled is that sometimes they can see (or sense) things that able-bodied (and neurotypical) people don't. One of the people, Brian, shares his theory that everything that's wrong with this world comes down to Conrad; because he isn't disabled, he literally can't see them and they don't get seen, which is also known as perception bias. Ruby says that "he's like king, and ruler, and emperor and God". Shelby reveals that her group has plans to "bring down God" and asks Ruby if she wants to join them, which she accepts.

That night, John is watching TV when, after a glimpse of Susan Foreman, he is contacted by Rogue (ngl, without the jacket I thought he was Ricky September), who gives him a warning that "tables don't do that". Later, John stares at some cups on the table and notices that they drop through the table when people have doubts, something that has been happening all throughout this episode known as "slips". He realises that Rogue's warning was right and when he says that he "really liked him", Belinda calls the police on John for having doubts really liking a man. The Doctor is arrested and taken away, but Mrs Flood arrives with Belinda's mum, who presumably reported her, so she can look after Poppy while Belinda is taken away; Mrs Flood notes to Belinda that she noticed John's doubts because she has been having doubts herself.

Ruby, Shirley and another wheelchair lady sneak under the Bone Palace with a tablet on a tripod, hoping to cut off Conrad's transmissions so he will have to come down and find them, because Ruby believes that if she meets Conrad, she will remember everything, including the Doctor and the world that was.

Meanwhile, John and Belinda are brought into the Bone Palace, where the Rani tries to make John remember who she is. The Rani reveals to John that she bi-generated and that him stirring the Pantheon caused the birth of the most powerful of gods, Desiderium, the god of wishes. She then shows him to the Vindicator, which the Rani used to boost the power of Conrad's wish and create this wish world. A whole world cannot be wished into existence and even if so, it cannot be sustained because people will have doubts. But doubts are not the problem, but the whole point; if people question hard enough, then doubt can crackle the world. The Rani wanted to make the Doctor doubt because a Time Lord's doubt can rip open the structure of reality itself.

The Rani takes John outside to see London sinking. John asks the Rani why she would wish a world into existence only to destroy it; the Rani reveals that her true goal is to open the Underverse and bring back The One Who Is Lost; Omega, the creator of the Time Lords and the first Time Lord (or rather, one of them, alongside Rassilon and the Other). Oh God, Omega's going to contribute to the continual doubling-down of the Timeless Child, isn't he?

John remembers that he is the Doctor as the Rani has Belinda taken over the threshold of the Bone Palace. The Rani, not wanting to risk the Doctor stopping her, sends the Doctor falling into the Underverse as he yells that he has a daughter and that Poppy is real for some reason or something, like what?

This is only the first part of the finale so I'll reserve the rest of my judgement until after I watch the second part. I will say though, it feels like it's just going to go downhill from here.

Also, Tharries had a cameo in this episode. What an inspiring redemption story, from being a "mini Bowlestrek" and going on streams with him and Noelzone, to "seeing the error of his ways" and turning traitor on them to side with the likes of Mr TARDIS (who hasn't landed a gig on the Doctor Who crew afaik). He ended up getting a TARDIS wheelchair ramp named after him and a cameo in this episode. And look, I could care less about what he used to be, but I can't say the same for Bowlestrek, Noelzone or their fans. But hey, good for you.

Episode 8: The Reality War

As the Doctor falls into the Underverse, a door opens in the wall and Anita - oh, hi Anita! - takes him into the Time Hotel. Meanwhile, the clock strikes midnight and the world reverts back to 7:00 AM on 23 May - 24 May never arrives because it always resets, and it's done it hundreds of times according to Anita. Anita has also looked for the Doctor in his past, but she seemingly gave up after seeing him with Rogue. Anita asks why it keeps doing this and the Doctor says that the Rani needs the same day to keep repeating itself so that reality snaps and see underneath the skin of reality to find Omega.

The Rani says that the Doctor will try to stop her so they can't wait for another midnight, but Mrs Flood says that they won't have to because they have fixed on Omega in the Underverse.

Anita takes the Doctor back to Poppy's room in what was his house. The Doctor heads downstairs and changes out of his suit and into a kilt before heading into the kitchen, which makes Belinda remember the Doctor. They all head into the Time Hotel, where they note that Poppy is real and that she is in danger.

They then head into UNIT, where Anita opens Time Doors into the control room and makes everyone remember who they are; the Vlinx bursts out of the box it was placed in and Rose Noble appears as well because she's trans and Conrad could never imagine her for a second. They see the Bone Beasts outside and from the Doctor's explanation, they're like the Reapers from Father's Day except they feed on excitated atoms created by colliding realities. So why didn't they appear at the end of Series 2 then? Anyway, because all UNIT personnel are biochipped (yeah, keep proving Conrad right RTD), they are able to locate Shirley, Mel and Ruby, who quickly head to UNIT.

The Doctor has Susan Triad build a Zero Room before reuniting with Shirley, Mel and Ruby and introducing everyone to Belinda and Poppy. As the Doctor explains what is going on, he speculates that Poppy is made up of little scraps of memories come to life and based it on the Poppy he and Ruby met in Space Babies. The Rani teleports in and the Doctor asks her how she survived the second destruction of Gallifrey and the slaughter of the Time Lords caused by the Spy Master (she'd already survived the Time War somehow); she says some technobabble which leads me to think she bigenerated before this or something, I dunno. She used a Time Ring to get to Earth and began spying on Ruby and Belinda as Mrs Flood. The Rani intends to use Omega, who is still alive in the Underverse even though he was exiled to an anti-matter universe in the classic series, to resurrect the Time Lords and construct a new Gallifrey.

Mel asks the Rani why she couldn't use herself and the Doctor to restore the Time Lords; thinking that she wants them to mate, they explain that the second destruction caused a genetic explosion across time and space that rendered any surviving Time Lords sterile (the Doctor alluded this to Ruby in The Devil's Chord), meaning that Poppy being a Gallifreyan child, a Time Lord child no less, is impossible. The Doctor speculates that bi-generation is the Time Lords instinctually doing anything it can to survive, which likely means Fourteen doesn't have to merge back with Fifteen ala The Watcher, carry on.

Rose questions if Poppy is the solution to everything because she has Time Lord DNA, but the Rani says that Poppy is contaminated because her mother, Belinda, is human, much to everyone's disgust. Gotta get that little bit of racism in, hey RTD? The Rani says that the Doctor walks among the humans like he's one of them, but they are "like insects to him, playthings, a fetish". She promises to leave Earth untouched when she builds a new Gallifrey, but the Doctor says that the wish would end and Poppy would cease to exist. Belinda protests the Doctor and UNIT ending the wish even if it means that Conrad's world remains, saying that she remembers Poppy being her daughter and if she does, that means it's true. The Doctor and Rani clash sonics before the latter teleports away.

Mrs Flood locks onto Omega and uses the Chronon Beam from the Vindicator to pull him out of the Underverse while the Rani sets the Bone Beasts on UNIT HQ. The Doctor has Mel and Rose prepare Ruby for the Indigo Device (a callback to Project Indigo from Series 4) before taking Belinda and Poppy into the Zero Room in the hope that the latter would be saved. As UNIT combats the Bone Beasts, the Doctor uses the Rani's coding he copied from her sonic to summon her moped and fly to the Bone Palace. He crashes into the Chronon Beam, which somehow takes down the Threshold, and Ruby teleports into Conrad's room, where he confronts her with a gun.

The Rani and Mrs Flood, knowing that the Doctor would arrive without a weapon, invites the Doctor to join them and rebuild the Time Lords even though they (or at least those of Omega's time) were tyrants and murderers. The Rani opens the door and Omega emerges, now a bony titan because he was transformed by the power of legends in the Underverse. Omega proclaims that he will become the God of Time as he picks the Rani up and devours her; the Time Ring is all that is left of her and Mrs Flood takes it and teleports away. The Doctor asks Omega what his intent is, to which he says that he is free to feast upon this world. As he muses that there is nothing he can do, he moves back toward the Vindicator before taking it and blasting him back into the Underverse with the power of a billion supernovas.

Meanwhile, Ruby thanks Conrad, saying that despite how he could have wished up an even worse world, he wished up a world where people just want to be safe and fed and warm, showing that despite what the Doctor said to him, Conrad still respects him in a way. Ruby notes that Conrad tried to give everyone a family and that in all their time they spent together, he never mentioned his dad. She uses the Indigo Device to teleport to the other side of the room and take the baby, wishing Conrad to be happy before ending his wish world. Conrad's room is revealed to have been the TARDIS all along as the Doctor comes in and they head back to UNIT. Also, why put down the Vindicator, Doctor? You know someone's going to find it when it drops out of the Bone Palace. The Doctor wishes for no more wishes, which presumably negates any wishes made (hence why they couldn't wish for Poppy) and expels the baby of his power.

Everyone gathers in the Zero Room as the Doctor opens it. Sure enough, Belinda is inside, and so is Poppy. Since they can't find where the baby is from (you negated the wishes, so why couldn't you use the TARDIS to locate his origin since his family would presumably be restored), they leave him with Carla and Cherry, the latter naming him Joseph, or Joe for short, after her late husband. Aww, now that Ruby's grown up, you have something to raise another kid for besides money, Carla.

And that's where the story should end. This is a series finale so it's an extended episode, but Omega, who barely had a presence in the story, was defeated with 30 minutes left in a 65-minute episode, as opposed to Sutekh who was defeated with less than 15 minutes left in a 55-minute episode.

As the Doctor and Belinda plan to continue travelling with Poppy, Belinda takes her parka off and Ruby notices it getting smaller as they fold it before it stops existing. She turns and realises that Poppy is gone and so is the cot. The Doctor throws Belinda's star diploma into space so that history is intact for the first episode. Ruby asks the Doctor and Belinda where Poppy has gone, but they laugh it off because they don't remember having a baby together, the Doctor even thinking that Ruby was referring to Space Babies Poppy.

Returning to UNIT, 24 May arrives without a hitch. The Doctor says goodbye to Anita as she heads back to the Time Hotel, but not before leaving her a message that "the Boss says hello". I don't care at this point. Susan Triad and Shirley note that there have been some changes, like the border between Norway and Sweden has shifted, the colour teal is a bit more blue (lol the teal "independents" in this year's Australian federal election were just Labor-lite woke Liberals) and Ernest Borgnine is still alive. According to Mel, Conrad is the chief cook and bottle washer at a café in Lewisham and nobody, not even Conrad himself, remembers who he was in Lucky Day. Is this the British/Australian equivalent of "put the fries in the bag", "put the avocado on the toast"?

Ruby keeps bringing up Poppy even though nobody remembers that she existed and the Doctor insists that she is remembering it wrong. She speculates that her memory is one of the glitches (because she remembered 73 Yards), but she insists that the glitches were real before they changed because everyone remembered Conrad and what happened in the wish world and what things were before they changed in this reality. Ruby brings up how the Doctor saved her as a baby, then Belinda brings up how the Doctor saved her from the time explosion in the first episode and ended up going through her entire life, and Susan Triad brings up how the Doctor set her free after being created as an angel of death by Sutekh through the TARDIS. Kate says that the Doctor has saved everyone, and in a way, they are all his children. My God, just end already.

The Doctor tells Belinda that he will find Poppy and heads for his TARDIS alone; Kate says that they can help him, but the Doctor says that reality has changed by one tiny degree and the only thing that is strong enough to change it back is himself. He sets off, and as he gets himself ready, the Doctor laments his imminent regeneration and we are treated to all his past faces again through the TARDIS. Suddenly, THE THIRTEENTH DOCTOR appears in the TARDIS- the Thirteenth Doctor? Am I gonna have to resurrect the Thirteenth Doctor Reviews- AHH, CHIBNALL TSUNAMI!

The Thirteenth Doctor was popped out of her timeline to warn the Fifteenth Doctor that he is about to cause a big time schism; he intends to punch a ton of regeneration energy into the Time Vortex to jolt it by one degree, but Thirteen says that if he does it wrong and ruptures the Time Vortex, he could damage the whole of creation (like it wasn't damaged already from the Flux). Fifteen asks if Thirteen is here to stop him, but she admits that it was never going to work and they hug. The two Doctors share some words before Thirteen goes back to her timeline. The Subwave Network was able to pull the TARDIS a second through time to get the Doctor to the Earth which was placed a second out of sync in time, but he can't change reality without making himself regenerate. Just end already!

The Doctor does what he was planning to do, which causes reality to shatter, cue Kamen Rider Ryuki opening credit sequence.

The Doctor then finds himself touching grass. As he holds back his regeneration, he sees that he is in someone's backyard; not just any someone, but Belinda's backyard. Sure enough, Poppy exists for real this time and because reality was changed, Belinda had to get back home because she works nights at the hospital and her mum looks after Poppy when she's out. We then get some scenes that show that this was the case all along. Anyway, we find out that Poppy is indeed human and her father is someone named Ritchie Akingbola, who she is separated from but still on good terms with. So much for that subplot about the Doctor having a daughter, amirite? By the way, where was Susan Foreman in the episode?

The Doctor says goodbye to Belinda and Poppy, then he heads out into space. Not wanting to do this alone, the lights of the TARDIS turn off as he opens the door to meet Joy the star. The Doctor's regeneration begins, the energy stretching across the galaxy as he regenerates into... BILLIE PIPER.

THIS. EPISODE. SUCKS.

Where in the name of sanity do I begin with this episode? We had so much buildup for the return of the Rani that we ended up having two of them. The Rani was supposed to be a mad scientist in the classic series but she and Mrs Flood were basically just Missy 2.0. Then when Omega came back, the new Rani gets vored and Mrs Flood, the old Rani, just vamooses. Thank God RTD didn't make bi-generation a Watcher kind of deal, but it doesn't change what I said about it cheapening the concept of regeneration as a whole (see my review for The Giggle/Kisekae Insights #37). The Master's destruction of Gallifrey making any surviving Time Lords sterile - I thought RTD was making Looms canon. Even if Time Lords were sterile in the first place, I think it would have been better if it remained ambiguous.

As for Omega - put aside the fact that he's suddenly in the Underverse rather than an anti-matter universe, he's suddenly a giant titan Bone Beast and the only time we saw Omega looking like Omega in this story was the flashback in the previous episode. Sutekh's redesign last year was more believable than this.

Belinda? She's been sidelined for most of this story and the companion who contributed the most effort to everything was Ruby. Why does Belinda suddenly want to continue being a mother outside of the wish world when the only thing she wanted in this series was to get home before deciding "hmm, travelling with the Doctor is fun, actually"? Did the wish somehow resonate with her and create Poppy out of a desire to have a kid? If we were supposed to believe that Poppy was Belinda's daughter all along, then the foreshadowing was very poor. She got a glimpse of Poppy in The Story and the Engine. That's it. And why was Belinda living in a share house in the first episode?

And finally, the regeneration into Billie Piper - fandom is calling her the Sixteenth Doctor already, but interestingly, the credits only say "And introducing Billie Piper"; she isn't explicitly credited as the Doctor per se. Put aside the behind-the-scenes stuff for now, Rose Tyler, Piper's notable character, was an iconic companion who helped launch the RTD1 era and she had an arc where she loved the Doctor but he was too oblivious to realise it until it was too late, then she got her own version of the Doctor and lived happily ever after.

This isn't the first time that actors who previously appeared on the series became the Doctor; Colin Baker played Commander Maxil in Arc of Infinity before becoming the Sixth Doctor, and Peter Capaldi appeared as Caecilius in The Fires of Pompeii and John Frobisher in Torchwood: Children of Earth before becoming the Twelfth Doctor. Hell, even more recently, David Tennant was the Tenth Doctor and he reappeared as the Fourteenth Doctor for the 60th Anniversary. Steven Moffat did a little arc about why the Twelfth Doctor got his face, and RTD's explanation for why Fourteen had Ten's face was boiled down to him needing closure with Donna Noble and getting some rehab time for everything that happened to him up to that point.

But Billie Piper, who played Rose Tyler, becoming the Doctor (if that scene is to be believed)? It cheapens Rose's story arc and her significance to the Doctor Who canon. Imagine if in my personal project (Kisekae Insights), Hiroki Ichigo regenerated into his crush, Akari. Intertwining their timelines and fixing their relationship in time were creepy enough as they were. Also, David Tennant as Fourteen was literally the last incarnation, not too long ago. Fans let it pass because the Chibnall era sucked and RTD was coming back, but getting Billie Piper for the next incarnation literally reeks of desperation, particularly since, as I'll explain later, the future of the series is currently unknown. The Power of the Doctor was going to end on a fade to black during Thirteen's regeneration until RTD swooped in; I don't understand why they didn't just do it here. Frankly, with all these fanfictions people comment about the Doctor waking up from a dream and he's pre-13 again, those wouldn't be out of the question with the way the episode ended.

The way Fifteen left, unexpected as it was, honestly felt pathetic to me. He sacrificed himself for a child who may as well have been hypothetical because reincarnated motherfucker/Chris-chan/Lincoln Loud Ruby Sunday wouldn't shut up about the kid who resembled that one baby she met on her first adventure with the Doctor. And yet he believed it because he treated Poppy like she was real and not some random amalgamation of memories before he ended up forgetting her existence.

There is an indication that the ending was rewritten and reshot earlier this year after Ncuti Gatwa expressed his desire to leave the series. The main evidence of a changed ending is an image of the Doctor and Belinda dancing at a May Day party that didn't end up being shown in the actual episode. The original ending would also have featured everyone else in the episode at the party before Susan Foreman is seen looking over them with Poppy, who would be revealed as her mother (and therefore the Doctor's actual daughter), creating a cliffhanger for the next series. Susan's mother was never revealed at any point in the series or the extended universe, but many fans will assume that she was a Time Lord; I can just write off Poppy's involvement in the scene as Susan's mother regenerating into a baby (assuming RTD doesn't say that's actually the Doctor's daughter as an actual Time Lord baby), but I don't think the original ending will be any better than what we got.

The only silver lining was that RTD didn't confirm that Poppy was the Timeless Child or retcon that every Time Lord, including the Doctor, bi-generated previously, because I wouldn't have been able to restrain myself from going into a Combine Harvester meltdown. Oh, and Conrad got a happy ending, somehow. I'm glad Anita returned for the finale, too.

This series blows. Quality-wise it's less cringe than Series 14, but that's only because the cringe was swapped for contempt towards the fanbase. Most of the episodes slag off people that RTD and his sycophants don't like, including incels, critical fans of the series, grifters and conservatives, before turning around and slagging off the politically oppressed and even other fans of the series (notice how I said "fans of the series" twice), showing that they don't know what they're talking about - “the left can’t meme”, as some on the right would say. The only episodes I liked were The Well and The Story and the Engine, with Lux coming in as an honourable mention.

It's honestly hilarious how a lot of Chibnall/RTD defenders and NMD "bigots" ended up having the same opinions about the finale, because it's not like the latter group totally didn't predict that coming and warn the former about it. In all seriousness though, we need to talk about the RTD2 era so far, and to do that, I take you into a rant I've been preparing since the start of the series.

Remember the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who back in 2013? During the Series 7 finale, The Name of the Doctor, we took a look at all of the Doctor’s lives and we were even given a glimpse of a previously unknown incarnation who fought in the Time War before he became the Ninth Doctor. After that, we had to wait six long months, during which time I had a series of Doctor Who stores lined up for my personal project. And then on 23 November 2013, The Day of the Doctor premiered. We had a couple of preludes, a simultaneous worldwide premiere on TV (where in most countries it was broadcast on BBC Entertainment or a similar pay TV channel) and in cinemas with a teaser of the Twelfth Doctor, a docudrama of the First Doctor’s tenure and a parody sketch featuring three classic Doctors. This was one of three peaks in the history of modern Doctor Who. Things were so good back then.

Twelve years later, what do we have? The Doctor’s backstory destroyed many times over, lackluster stories that rely on nostalgia baiting and a returning showrunner who is a shadow of his former self and has shown that he does not care about respecting Doctor Who canon or the fanbase - at least, the part of the fanbase that isn’t constantly defending him and attacking those who criticise the show, aka the “bigots” or “fake fans”.

Just before the series started, there was an article on DoctorWhoTV titled One Fan’s Take: Doctor Who Used to Feel Welcoming, Now It Feels Antagonistic - Nerdrotic adds that it could apply to other franchises as well, including Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Marvel or DC. Looking at it, I sadly have to agree. My biggest problem with Doctor Who isn’t with wokeness or DEI, it’s with Chibnall and RTD disrespecting Doctor Who canon and the fanbase with things like the Timeless Child, the bi-generation, the justification of Davros being shown without his life support wheelchair, Sutekh being attached to the TARDIS since The Pyramids of Mars or this goddamn series finale, the latter attacking fans who have a problem with it and the sycophants cheering him on.

A main criticism of the Chibnall and the RTD2 eras was the writing, and while I agree with that criticism, I want to add something to it - the writing in those eras has come out of a lack of respect for the series’ canon and its fanbase. The showrunners have shown no regard for the fanbase, not putting them in their eyesight, treating us like we're stupid, but hey, at least Chibnall didn't slag off fans who criticised his era.

The reason why I don’t recognise the Fugitive Doctor, any of the Timeless Child incarnations or even those faces from The Brain of Morbius as incarnations of the Doctor is because it reinforces the franchise-breaking retcon that was the Timeless Child, elevating the Doctor to being “special upon special” when he was already special among the Gallifreyans and to the beings he travels and interacts with. While I am okay with bi-generation only applying between Fourteen and Fifteen because of it being a myth and also because they were fighting the Toymaker, I reject RTD’s assertion that the Doctor’s other incarnations bi-generated at the same time or that other Time Lords can bi-generate as well because it defeats the meaning of regeneration being the death of one incarnation and the birth of another.

As for the Davros “retcon”, fans could easily wave this away as being an alternate timeline where Davros invented the Daleks before he had the accident where he had to go on life support, but no, RTD had to say that associating disability with evil was bad and “erase” Davros’ disability in an event that he said was highlighting disability. And Sutekh? RTD could have said that he attached himself to the TARDIS between The Power of the Doctor and Wild Blue Yonder. He didn’t need to go that far back.

Politics-wise, yes, Doctor Who has always been woke, always been political, blah blah blah, but these days, the Western entertainment industry in general seems less focused on creating quality escapist entertainment and more focused on hammering in The Message, aka current-day politics. People seek franchises and fandoms to escape from the stresses of living in the current year; they don’t need to be constantly reminded how bleak and unjust life and the world is (unless they’re watching the news).

I tolerated everything for 5 series because I thought things would get explained or things would get better with each series. Sure enough, not everything got an explanation and things only got worse with each series. What did I get instead?

RTD has told fans to “fuck off” for being told to stop shoving politics down people’s throats and tell good stories. Ncuti Gatwa has told the same fans to “go and touch grass”. Even before this series started, Varada Sethu said that they were doing the right thing if they were getting comments about “Doctor Woke or whatever”, even boasting about Gatwa saying that “we’re going to piss off so many people”. Millie Gibson put her two cents in as well after her episode aired, though what she said was tame compared to RTD or Gatwa.

It’s one thing for the creators to say “haters gonna hate” and just don’t care too much about them, but it’s a whole different thing altogether when the creators directly attack them, snarking back on social media, complaining for hit articles in the access media, or just insulting your audience directly on your show, the very people who were part of the reason why the series is so popular. “We don’t need ‘fans’ like them,” they’ll say. “We have plenty of people who still love us, plus despite the declining ratings, we still get at least a million viewers per episode!” Okay, if you don’t want them, don’t be surprised when they leave and have no interest in coming back.

To be fair, even fans or “defenders of RTD/Doctor Who” have had their own criticisms about how politics has been covered in the show, particularly since although it’s coming from a member of the LGBT community and a trans ally, he is a white late-boomer/early Gen-X man trying to cater to a Gen Z/LGBT audience he doesn’t really understand or even a Gen Alpha audience who just aren’t mature enough to understand everything yet. It’s the fighting amongst the fanbase and the creators putting their (unwanted) two cents into the fight that is the problem. RTD making attempts to “own the bigots” is just giving them material and making himself a target of vitriolic criticism while tanking the quality of the writing in the process. Some people have said that RTD is going through a mid-life crisis, to which I say sure, if you think people can live to be 120 then 60 can be considered middle-age.

You know the meme up the top of this post of RTD with Toei tokusatsu producer Shinichirō Shirakura? I created this for my review of The Giggle when RTD took over Chibnall as my Shirakura parallel with the bi-generation. For those of you who don’t know, here are some of Shirakura’s sins; he took over the second half of Kamen Rider Hibiki and he tanked it for various reasons, oversaw two anniversary Rider series whose stories were incomplete or didn’t make sense and oversaw a series of Rider-Sentai crossover movies that disrespected legacies or assassinated characters. And yet, despite all this, Shirakura never directly insulted fans on social media (and even if he did I’m pretty sure he would get fired from Toei imo). I think you can see what my preferred franchise is at this point.

Responding to a rumour from The Sun about Doctor Who going into another Wilderness Years, a spokesman for the series stated that Bad Wolf and Disney made a distribution deal for 26 episodes and that a decision on whether Series 16/Season 3 would be commissioned would be made after this series has premiered. This covers the 60th Anniversary Specials (3 episodes), Series 14 (8 episodes), Series 15 (8 episodes), their associated Christmas Specials (2 episodes) and the upcoming spinoff The War Between the Land and the Sea (5 episodes). There’s also no news on whether we’ll be getting another Christmas Special this year either.

The silence from Disney regarding the renewal of funding for future series likely contributed to Ncuti Gatwa leaving and the finale being rewritten. Apparently, RTD already has the next two series lined up and that they will be produced regardless of whether Disney decides to fund them or not, but the BBC hasn’t officially commissioned them at the time of publishing. Gatwa did say that the plan was to do two series instead of three, but given what we know, this just sounds like PR bullshit; whether the current uncertainty over the series' future or other factors contributed to his decision to leave, I think he's about to get some big roles soon and become the Sōta Fukushi of this series - hell, he was featured in the Barbie film just before he was announced, he was finishing up Sex Education when his first series started filming, and after finishing filming on this series last year he went back to performing in theatre. I don't think it's fair for him to be on standby while the BBC and Bad Wolf wait for an answer from Disney, then mess up his schedule to begin production immediately or keep fans waiting until he's available. Billie Piper being hired as the replacement for Ncuti Gatwa is practically a ploy to get Disney to hurry up and renew their funding for the next series.

This is the third time in a decade where we've gotten only two series in a row before a long break with or without specials; the first break was in 2020-2021 after Series 11 and 12, the second was in 2022-2023 after Series 13, and now after Series 15, this is set to be the third break. Assuming that the next series gets commissioned this year and the production schedule from Series 14/15 continues, the earliest we’ll get Series 16 will likely be in 2027. Sadly however, based on this and what I’ve seen throughout this series, I don’t want to review the series anymore from this point forward.

Oh sure, I said that I’d stop reviewing the series after The Giggle and I ended up doing consolidated series reviews for Series 14/15 which were supposed to be “quick thoughts”, so clearly I don’t know when to stop being a windbag. Honestly, I think this is really going to be it for me, because frankly, I’ve given enough face to this series by giving it a chance only for creators and broadcasters to throw it away by disrespecting canon, slagging off the fanbase (who disagrees with them) or failing to provide a consistent schedule for the series, and I don’t want to support it anymore.

"But if you don't like the series, then just don't watch it. If you don't like being in the fanbase, you can leave at anytime. This isn't an airport, no need to announce your departure." I've thought about staying so all the fans who say I'm not a fan for not liking the current direction of the series can cope harder, but I can't find the strength to stay anymore so I'm doing just that. However, I'm not going to give those fans the satisfaction of having driven another fan away from the series. As such, I have some final words for RTD and his sycophants, and if the Doctor's words to Conrad in Lucky Day could apply to fans like me, then allow me to borrow them for fans like them:

You know critics like Bowlestrek, Nerdrotic, Noelzone, Disparu or The Critical Drinker? They once fought this battle on behalf of fans like you or me, who despite their nature, just wanted a show where fans could escape, be entertained, be inspired, be validated.

And then in response, there's this noise, this relentless, relentless noise. Cowards like you who destroy canon, enable destroyers, take the criticisms and concerns of fans and use it to divide them.

You are exhausting.

You belittle us, gatekeep us and seek to drive us away because the only strategy you have is to wear us down.

The Doctor may have energy to burn and all the time in the universe, but I am not the Doctor and I have better things to spend my time and energy on.

I’ve left the “toxic rich Asian” part of me behind and I care less about Doctor Who nowadays compared to 10 years ago. There's a few places where I could have said something harsher, but in the end, whether Doctor Who continues or goes into another Wilderness Years, whether the series continues to receive support from Disney (or another company) or they have to survive off the BBC licence fee alone, I wish you all well.

#RIPDoctorWho

[yeonchi]

Doctor Who Series 15 Recap Review Part 1

#RIPDoctorWho. I honestly never thought I'd be saying this at the beginning of a review, but here we are. The last time I unironically said this was in my review for The Giggle, but over the course of this series, I started to plan out the conclusion of this recap review and updated some of my older reviews with that hashtag so I can track how Doctor Who got to the state that it is today.

It's been a year, or rather 11 months, since the last series. Let's get into Season 2 of RTD2, better known to me as Series 15. Spoilers after the break.

2024 Christmas Special: Joy to the World

The Doctor crosses through various periods in the Time Hotel; he was originally looking for some milk but he tracked down a Silurian with a briefcase. The Silurian eventually arrives in the Sandringham Hotel on Christmas Eve 2024, inside a room where Joy Almondo is staying. The Doctor refuses to touch the briefcase but Joy does; the briefcase cuffs itself to her and releases the Silurian, who disintegrates. The Doctor opens the briefcase and discovers a star seed inside. The briefcase asks for a passcode and a second Doctor from the future comes in and gives it to him before taking Joy with him into the Time Hotel, telling the first Doctor that he will need to stay and complete the loop, the long way around.

With the Time Hotel's next arrival being in New York on Christmas 2025, the Doctor has no choice but to stay at the Sandringham Hotel for the year, bonding with Anita who would be considered his companion because of this. Eventually, Christmas Eve approaches and the Doctor returns to the Time Hotel. The Doctor deduces that somebody is trying to "microwave a star" by leaving the star seed in one time zone so it can be retrieved thousands of years later. At the same time, he triggers Joy by reminding her of her mother, who died in hospital on Christmas Day during lockdown while politicians were partying at 10 Downing Street despite them making the restrictions that prohibited most public gatherings. The UK should be so lucky. Down in Melbourne, you couldn't go down to the pub or to an outdoor playground, but you could line up for a takeaway coffee or go to a BLM rally. Only 5 people could visit your house but you could have an outdoor gathering of up to 20 people. And that's not to mention the 5km travel limit, the curfew, the mandates; as authoritarian as those guidelines were "for our safety", it was a gigantic and inconsistent clusterfuck.

Anyway, getting triggered causes the briefcase to release itself from Joy. The Doctor checks the briefcase again and discovers that it was made by Villengard, the weapons manufacturers who were the subject of the conflict in the last series' episode Boom. Because human history on Earth only lasts a few thousand years, they would have needed to go 65 million years into the past. Sure enough, a dinosaur appears and swallows the briefcase.

The Doctor deduces that Villengard would need to retrieve the case again once the star seed matures and is about to detonate; sure enough, he gets a call from the star thanks to one of the hotel staff (Trev Simpkins) he met at the start whose consciousness ended up absorbed into the star and linked to the briefcase's software. The Doctor is guided to the briefcase which is inside a stone pillar, but there is only four and a half minutes until detonation. He goes through multiple time zones to break it open, but when he gets back to the briefcase, the star seed is missing; Joy took it into herself and proceeds to rise, letting the star seed detonate itself in space.

The star is seen throughout Earth's history, from Ruby in 2024 to Joy's mum at hospital in 2020. Anita is offered a job at the Time Hotel thanks to the Doctor and the Doctor realises that he is in Bethlehem in the year 0001. Except there is a debate as to when exactly Jesus was born and the most popular theory is that he was born between 6 and 4 BC as the latter is apparently when King Herod died, but let's not let historical accuracy get in the way of a heartwarming story.

This special was written by Steven Moffat, who also wrote Boom for Series 14, and I think it was better than that episode, discounting the usual SJW red flags. Frankly, Anita's actress should also have been credited in the opening credits because 10 minutes of the special was dedicated to the Doctor spending a year with her instead of the actual companion, Joy.

Episode 1: The Robot Revolution

17 years ago, Belinda's boyfriend Alan has a star named after her, giving her a framed certificate, or diploma (which isn't what that is, by the way), that she would keep all this time before easing her into a kiss, because even in 2008 men have to be wary of women claiming that a kiss is sexual assault, even if they're dating.

17 years later, Belinda Chandra is a nurse. The Doctor tries to get her address at her hospital, which he does somehow (while potentially killing a bunch of people by cutting off the power, our hero everybody) and goes to her share house just as she is kidnapped by some robots from the very star named after her which is actually a planet. On the way, Belinda complains "Go get Alan, he bought this thing!" as she goes through a time fracture. Remember this as it will be important later.

Belinda is brought to the planet Missbelindachandra One, where she is to be married to the Great AI Generator in a welding of metal and skin. The Doctor, who had followed Belinda, arrived six months before her and became the Historian after his TARDIS was impounded, covertly tells her that the robots are faulty and they cannot hear every ninth world. There are rebels fighting back against the robots and the Generator and they immediately turn on them, some of them (including Sasha 55) sacrificing themselves to get the Doctor and Belinda out.

They head to the Undercity where Belinda helps treat the wounded, but the people (the Missbelindachandrakind) have resentment towards her for being the reason so many of them died. The Doctor explains to Belinda that the border between this world and Earth keeps jumping about in time which is why the Doctor has been there for six months. The diploma the AI Generator had is the same one that Belinda has, that the robots took with her; the robots likely brought it back from the future, but it ended up 5000 years in the past.

Feeling some guilt over being the cause of this, Belinda reactivates a polishing robot the Doctor turned off, allowing the robots to track them to the Undercity. Belinda offers herself to them and the Doctor goes with her as they are brought to the Great AI Generator. As she approaches it, she notices it say something Alan had asked her 17 years ago - "Are you married?"

It is then that we learn that the Great AI Generator is actually... Alan Budd, Belinda's boyfriend from 17 years ago that she thought moved away to Margate. So when Belinda said, "Go get Alan," the robots actually went back through the time fracture and brought Alan back, ten years before the Doctor or Belinda arrived. Alan was incorporated into what would become the Great AI Generator, and he started the robot revolution by killing the first person that tried to ask him a question. The Doctor asks Belinda why she broke up with Alan, to which she reveals that it was because he was trying to coercively control her, something that he laid on her when he tried to propose. Yeah, coercive control doesn't work like that. Usually all the "rules" would be laid out over time and not when they're trying to propose, which you'd think would be when they'd shut up about their "rules" just so their target can say yes.

Also, by timey-wimey reasons, because Belinda was the reason why Alan became the Great AI Generator in the first place, the events of this episode were, in a way, her own fault. "But Azuma, Alan didn't have to be creepy and name a star after his girlfriend in the first place!" Yeah, and Belinda didn't need to call it "planet of the incels" when it was really just being run by one "incel". And technically, Alan wouldn't be an incel at all. RTD has no idea what incels are.

Belinda asks Alan how he could live with himself, to which the Doctor says that he can't. His brain communicates with the machine on an eight-part loop, so the robots can't hear every ninth word and Alan can communicate his truth at the same time; he wants to be saved from the pain. The Doctor passes Belinda's diploma to her through the polishing robot and she touches it with the copy that Alan has, causing a time explosion. The Doctor manages to absorb it alongside Belinda and they survive, though Alan is nowhere to be found; the Doctor sees that he was regressed into a sperm and an egg, which is quickly cleaned away by the polishing robot. RTD turned someone into semen and period blood and I could never find an opportunity to use that plotline in a story. What's next, a Kamen Rider W ripoff with Gaia Memories and humans being used as an analogy for sperm and eggs, and the resulting abominations being the equivalent of Dopants?

The world is freed from Alan's control and the robots declare to live in harmony with the people. The TARDIS is returned to the Doctor and the Doctor tries to take Belinda back home because she has to go to work the next morning, but for some reason, they are bouncing off 24 May, the date they left, and it isn't because of the time fracture because the Doctor closed it; as such, they will have to go the long way around. We then see that the Earth has apparently been destroyed, as we see a taxi, the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, a pyramid and the star certificate/diploma floating in space.

This episode was meh, better than Space Babies for a series opener, but fuck, the wokeness came at me like a truck, especially that "planet of the incels" line. Was this an MSM-fed normie idea of an /r9k/ reference? I'm gonna have to give a "fuck you RTD" for this episode.

Episode 2: Lux

While trying to get Belinda home to 24 May, the Doctor lands in 1952 to use a Vortex Indicator (Vindicator) in order to cast a signal to that day. They find themselves in front of the Palazzo Picture House (Cinema) in Miami at 4 AM - the Vortex Indicator completes its job quickly, but the Doctor notices that the cinema has been chained up strongly. Um, I don't know, maybe because it's 4 AM and the cinema is closed? But seriously, he and Belinda decide to investigate and they learn that 3 months prior, 15 cinema-goers went missing one night.

The Doctor and Belinda head inside the cinema to see the old projectionist, Reginald Pye. Reginald tries to tell them to go away, but the movie stops and Mr Ring-a-Ding from the animated movie appears. The two try to find out who he is and Mr Ring-a-Ding tells them not to make him laugh, because his laugh is... The Giggle. Mr Ring-a-Ding is Lux Imperator, the god of light and one of the Gods of Chaos of the Pantheon of Discord. He came into existence through a beam of moonlight reflecting itself onto the film.

Suddenly, Reginald plays Mr Ring-a-Ding's song and Lux is forced to perform it, allowing the Doctor and Belinda to escape. Reginald says that he has been showing Lux movies to keep him fed; he didn't run away because Lux was able to recreate an apparition of his dead wife. The Doctor and Belinda find a film strip containing the 15 missing people trapped in it; Lux turned them into images.

Lux enters the room and seals the Doctor and Belinda onto film. They become animated characters and regain their dimension through expressing emotion and acquiring depth. They seemingly manage to escape the film only to be confronted by a policeman, but the Doctor sees that he is wearing the uniform of the NYPD, meaning they are still in the film.

The Doctor and Belinda manage to escape the screen, where they encounter three Doctor Who fans. One of them (the fat lady in the wheelchair) says that she knew it would happen because it was leaked online, namedropping the hashtag #RIPDoctorWho. I knew that RTD was poking fun of, or rather, mocking the fans with this when I first saw it, but for him to jam it in like this probably shows that he either doesn't understand why #RIPDoctorWho was coined or he lets the haters live rent-free in his head after the 60th Anniversary (because the episodes in this series were produced while the last series was airing or due to air). Still, RTD can go fuck himself for that.

As the Doctor and Belinda talk to the three fans, they learn that their favourite episode is Blink and the token guy in the group gives the most basic summary of the episode. They also learn that the three are not real and that they will cease to exist once the Doctor and Belinda leave, because they are real (at least in the context of Doctor Who).

After leaving the three, the Doctor says that to get out of the film, they have to stop it; the celluloid in the film will burn from the heat of the projector and set the reel on fire. The Doctor and Belinda do so and are successful. The Doctor gets a burn on his hand and he uses a pocket of remaining bi-generation energy (like when Eleven healed River Song's arm that time and oh my god, we're calling it bi-generation energy now) to heal himself.

This is what Lux has been waiting for; he binds the Doctor up with film and shines the projector through him, transferring his bi-generation energy to him and creating a body for him. Following the plot of the episode as told by the three fans, Belinda rips out all the film in the reels and throws it to the ground. She then goes to borrow some matches from Reginald so she can set the film on fire, but he offers to do it himself.

The exploding film opens a hole in the theatre, exposing Lux to the light of the sun. Lux, who had become real, reverts to being animated as he begins continuously growing out of the Earth and into space, becoming the whole of creation itself. If humans are 60% water and they can still drown, giving Lux all the light in the universe makes him infinite, yet invisible. The 15 missing people are released; as the Doctor and Belinda leave, Mrs Flood mentions a good show on a limited run ending 24 May...

As the credits run, the three Doctor Who fans are revealed to be alive.

Gotta say, this episode was pretty amusing (and meta). They did implement the racism of the time in there (because they felt the need to tackle those issues), but unlike Series 11's Rosa, it shows that not everyone has animosity towards people of colour, but that's not the important thing in the episode. If I was to review this episode like I did before, I would have given it a -5/10. Yes, as good as this episode was, I'm docking points for RTD namedropping #RIPDoctorWho, because he knew what he was doing with that.

Episode 3: The Well

After failing to get back to Belinda's home time, the Doctor lands 500,000 years in the future and goes to take another Vindicator reading, but they find themselves on a ship with a crew of troopers preparing to jump onto Planet 6-7-6-7, which is mining Carbon-46. The crew are investigating a colony base with 35 colonists which went silent over two weeks ago. Because of the galvanic radiation on the planet, the ship needs to land slowly, so the Doctor and Belinda can't leave for five hours.

As they go inside the base, they begin to discover all the mirrors smashed and all the colonists dead, with the exception of one Aliss Fenly, the crew's deaf cook who had to shoot her best friend, Sal, who tried to kill her. The Doctor goes with troop leader Shaya and second-in-command Cassio to investigate central control while Belinda stays with Aliss. During this, the Doctor and Belinda discover that to the crew, the planet Earth or the human race doesn't exist.

Belinda begins seeing something behind Aliss, but no one else can. This happens again to Belinda, and soon, this happens to some of the crew as well. Aliss says that this is how it started and how she ended up killing Sal. One of the crew is ordered to go behind Aliss while she remains looking at another, and the crew member who went behind Aliss is thrown back and killed by an invisible enemy Stand.

The Doctor recovers the base commander's final statement, showing the crew yelling about something coming out of the mine and they don't know how to stop it. He begins to realise something; the galvanic radiation came from an X-tonic star before it burnt out 400,000 years ago, then during the wars, the carbon-46 was stripped off the surface of the planet and was left in ruins. Carbon-46 is also known as diamond and the surface of the planet was once made out of diamonds; Planet 6-7-6-7 is Midnight and the enemy Stand, the thing behind Aliss, is the Midnight entity, also known in the credits as "It has no name". I'm gonna call it a Stand because it's funnier and it's totally not a JoJo reference.

The Doctor rushes back to Aliss just as the crew member dies. Belinda explains that if someone is looking at Aliss, then anyone who goes behind her dies - "if it was a clock-face, you die at midnight." Cassio attempts to kill her but Aliss says that if he kills her then the Stand will go behind him; half the crew killed each other to get rid of it but it just went behind them. Cassio declares a Red Code and takes over command in an attempt to drag the Stand out into the open, but several troopers end up being thrown around as a result until Shaya manipulates the Stand into killing Cassio. Shaya decides that they need to leave Aliss behind and get off this planet, but after the Doctor tries to communicate with the Stand, shedding tears in fear over what he learns.

The Doctor realises that there is a way they can get Aliss off the planet; he has Shaya shoot the pipe vents to rain down a stream of mercury, causing the Stand to see itself; it destroyed all the mirrors in the base so that it couldn't. Aliss is thrown forward and they run. As they get to the airlock, Aliss is sent up first, but then the Doctor and the others are suddenly attacked; the enemy Stand is now behind Belinda. Shaya decides to shoot Belinda and have the Stand go behind her before running back into the base and falling into the mine, taking the Stand with it before the whole base is nuked, until the next idiot somehow encounters the Stand in the rubble of what was a former diamond mine. Belinda had been shot precisely so that there was a chance she could survive, and of course she is saved.

Following this, one of the remaining crew members makes a report to someone who might be Squadron Leader Chinchappa, but is actually Mrs Flood, who asks her if the Doctor used a Vindicator, which she confirms. She's going to be the Susan Triad of this series, isn't she? The episode ends with another remaining crew member apparently seeing something behind the other's back...

This episode is a sequel to Series 4's Midnight and I have to say, it's actually pretty good and better than the last two episodes despite being written by RTD, though I suppose he had to rein it in because this episode was co-written with Sharma Angel-Walfall. See what you can do when you're not disrespecting continuity or attacking the fanbase? I suppose nuking the base with the enemy Stand inside was a way to deal with it, but I think it was just buying time until the next encounter, like how the hostess threw herself into the X-tonic light alongside the Midnight-possessed Sky back in the 2008 episode. I felt disappointed that we never really got to see the entity so it it could actually be dealt with; the Doctor Who Unleashed for this episode shows Paul Kasey wearing a mask for it, which I swear I've seen before because it looked a bit like the mask used for the Passenger form in Flux.

Aliss is played by Rose Ayling-Ellis, who was born deaf and thus her character is also deaf. The last time a deaf actor was in Doctor Who was in Series 9's Under the Lake/Before the Flood, with Sophie Stone playing Cass, who is also mute on top of being deaf. Cass had a teammate, Tim Lunn (Zaqi Ismail), interpreting for her, but in this episode, Ncuti Gatwa had a bit of training in British Sign Language as well so the Doctor could directly communicate with Aliss (the last time, the Twelfth Doctor learnt semaphore and it apparently erased BSL from his mind so he could still sign, but he didn't know what he was signing).

A little detail I noticed in the episode is that on top of signing, the Doctor also had to use the transcription/subtitling modules the rest of the crew used. One reason is, as Shaya says, is that they want all conversations audible (and documented), but another reason is that despite having subtitles on the screen, there is no way to convey emotion or emphasis through text alone, not to mention that signing is faster than captions or transcription during live events, and even then, captions or transcripts may not be 100% accurate.

Several BSL consultants and interpreters were brought onto the crew for this episode, plus Rose was given the script to review so she could give notes on the episode based on her experiences as a deaf person; there's also a moment where the Doctor turns his back to Aliss and Aliss becomes distraught/angry at him because she doesn't know what he is saying. As I was watching the episode before the revelation (I did hear rumours that this was going to be a sequel to Midnight), I almost thought Aliss was going to be the villain for this episode, which if she actually was, would have made RTD look hypocritical considering the "disabled people can't be villains" thing.

Episode 4: Lucky Day

Like the last series, we've got another Doctor-lite episode along with the return of reincarnated Chris-chan Ruby Sunday.

On New Year's Day 2007, an eight-year-old boy named Conrad Clark encounters the Doctor and Belinda using a Vindicator, the Doctor giving him a 50p coin and telling him it's his lucky day. He goes back to tell his (alcoholic) mum but she tells him "enough with the lies".

17 years later in 2024, Conrad sees the TARDIS again when he hears a noise inside the building. He goes inside, gets some goo on him and sees a Shreek before the Doctor and Ruby (from between episodes 2 and 3 of Series 14) deal with it. He learns that the pheromone from the goo will absorb into the bloodstream and mark them as future prey unless they take the antidote, which the Doctor gives to Ruby. As the two go back to the TARDIS, Conrad quickly takes a picture of Ruby and shares it.

A year later, Conrad is hosting a podcast featuring eyewitness accounts of the TARDIS; Ruby managed to find the photo of herself and went on the podcast for an interview. After recording the interview, Conrad takes Ruby out for a coffee and she tells him more about the Shreek; they come from their hive in a pocket dimension once a year to hunt, but this year, one of them comes to the same location it did last year, meaning that it had already marked its prey (Conrad) with its goo, but UNIT had already captured it. Ruby gives an antidote to Conrad and eventually, the two of them start dating.

Conrad mentions that his mum died of liver cancer and Ruby opens up to him about her experience with the Doctor in the TARDIS, fulfilling her need for someone to talk to about it. Conrad and Ruby head out on a weekend trip to a village called Colson where they meet the former's friends. Ruby notices the electricity flickering in the pub and calls Kate at UNIT, only to find no signs of Shreek there. Soon, two Shreek show up outside as Conrad notes that one of his friends is missing.

Ruby heads outside to confront the Shreek and Conrad soon joins her as well. They seemingly find the remains of Conrad's friend, at which point Kate and UNIT arrive. As the UNIT soldiers aim at the two Shreek, they stand on two legs and take off their masks; they were Conrad's friends dressing up as them. Conrad reveals that he is part of a group called Think Tank, a group of alien-deniers aiming to expose UNIT's lies and agenda, and that they are also livestreaming the event on social media.

Conrad and Think Tank are arrested, but they are released 24 hours later after public backlash. Think Tank doxes every person employed by UNIT and Ruby is brought to UNIT HQ. She learns that Conrad applied for a job at UNIT, was interviewed by Kate and was apparently rejected, plus his mother is very much alive, living in the south of France in a villa that he paid for. The containment cube containing the Shreek is about to be transferred to Geneva as Kate comes back after learning that the government is ordering an inventory audit of UNIT premises.

With help from an inside man, Conrad enters the building and heads up to the control room at the top. Kate reveals why she didn't hire Conrad eight years ago and it's because in her notes, she wrote "Don't trust him" for some reason. In the confrontation, Kate shows Conrad the truth he has been demanding; she opens the helipad doors and lets the Shreek out of its cage - he hadn't taken the antidote so the Shreek is still hunting for him (apparently people actually think this is some sort of parallel to antivaxxers lmao). With no way to escape, Conrad tries confronting the Shreek and it's only when he is cornered and closed in that he admits that he lied about everything. Ruby gets the Shreek off of Conrad and tells him to go to hell. Conrad stands up, remaining defiant until the Shreek bites his arm off.

The next morning, Colonel Ibrahim tells Kate that she went a bit too far while Shirley notes that public opinion of UNIT has improved. Later, as Conrad sits in his prison cell, his arm reattached, the Doctor brings him inside the TARDIS to give him a lecture for betraying Ruby, saying that cowards like him weaponise lies and generate relentless noise to wear people down. Conrad asks the Doctor if he met Belinda yet (meaning this scene takes place just before the start of the series, which led to him trying to find her in the first episode), and the Doctor reveals to him that he dies in a prison cell at the age of 49, alone and unloved, while the world carries on. In response, Conrad says that he rejects the Doctor's version of reality and tells him to put him back in his prison and get off his world. Conrad is then visited by Mrs Flood, acting as the governor of the prison, telling him that it's his lucky day.

So let me get this straight. Conrad is enamoured by the Doctor but his mum doesn't believe him, so he starts believing in aliens and tries to get into UNIT, but he gets rejected so he starts a podcast about the Doctor and the TARDIS, then he runs into the Doctor and Ruby having an adventure, takes a photo of Ruby and basically stalks her for a year until she goes onto his podcast, starts dating her to lead her on so she can meet his friends, then stages a fake alien sighting to "expose" UNIT which was apparently his target all along, get arrested then freed after suddenly having the public on his side, dox everyone working for UNIT and stage protests across the globe, then storm into UNIT HQ alone to make Kate admit that UNIT is faking everything only to get his arm bitten off and sewn back up like a doll?

What the fuck was this episode? Can I honestly call this another leftist fantasy episode, because after that twist I got so confused at the goodest logic going on in the second half I can't even tell if it's a leftist projection. How did Conrad's pipeline go from meeting the Doctor to wanting to find the TARDIS to going full-blown ACAB at UNIT? If it was just getting rejected by UNIT alone then it's honestly a stretch and a pretty weak justification, to put it lightly.

Straight white male (and SJW?) villain aside, this episode only serves to show that leftists don't know what they're talking about when they talk about "conspiracy theorist grifters", which Conrad obviously seems to be an expy (or caricature) of. In this decade so far, these so-called "grifters" have been shining lights on tangible issues like lockdowns, vaccine mandates and the enshittification of Doctor Who and while I don't agree with everything they say, that doesn't necessarily mean they don't have a point. Conrad is apparently trying to show people that UNIT are spying on people, covering up lies and faking alien invasions, but the episode doesn't give any evidence to back his viewpoint or provide any motivation into his actions, so I couldn't find anything agreeable with him even if I wanted to. Granted, we've all seen the series with the viewpoint that UNIT are the good guys so maybe the thought of UNIT doing shady things never occurred to anyone. Or maybe I'm just frustrated because I think grifters are right (sometimes).

You know, if this episode were done with the Tenth Doctor (not the Fourteenth) then I think the Doctor would have given Conrad a chance, to travel with the Doctor in the TARDIS on the off chance that he might rethink everything he's done despite how contrived it came to be. If Conrad chose to reject that chance because he still denies it, then it would be on him.

This episode was written by Pete McTighe, with the scenario devised by RTD because of course it is. What the hell happened to you, Pete? You wrote two of the more decent Message episodes in the Chibnall era (Kerblam!/Praxeus) and now you've written something that is somehow even worse than the SJW-fest third episodes (Rosa/Orphan 55). I guess I should have expected better coming from someone who wrote for the Chibnall era. RTD wanted to explore evil in the form of "toxic online hatred", but I think when he saw Conrad's role in the story, he didn't care how much sense anything else in the story made as long as it served the goal of "grifters bad". Also, Pete, why did you pussyfoot around calling Conrad a "grifter"? You knew what you were doing with this episode, so you might as well have owned up to it.

By the way, this is an actual quote from Pete McTighe: "That speech I wrote for the Doctor at the end of the episode – he says everything I wanted to say." Coincidentally enough, that scene was filmed on 23 November 2023, right on the day of the 60th Anniversary. What a happy birthday.

Let's face it, we'll definitely be seeing Conrad again in the series finale, otherwise Doctor-lite episodes are a waste of time when you only have eight episodes in a series. They're good as filler episodes in a 13-episode series when time constraints meant that they had to be produced alongside another episode without the Doctor and/or the companion, which this one was as it was produced alongside the first episode. 73 Yards and Dot and Bubble were Doctor-lite episodes because Ncuti Gatwa was busy filming on Sex Education as production of Series 14 commenced, so that was excusable. And somehow, they weren't as bad as this episode.

Of all the years I've watched Doctor Who, this is the first time I actually felt that an episode was actively insulting my intelligence. The Timeless Child, the bi-generation and the Sutekh bullcrap was insulting enough but at least I could understand what was happening. I saw though RTD's intentions with the remarks about incels and #RIPDoctorWho in the first two episodes of this series. But this episode - what the fuck was it trying to say or do? Even if I knew, I'm still baffled at all the logical leaps that are apparently required to even agree with anything in the episode. Go check out Aimless Words' review thread for this episode on Twitter. They put it better than I could have done here.

Anyone who likes this episode and thinks this is a gotcha on grifters or NMDs needs to take a good long look at themselves. The episode's story doesn't make sense and you know it.

Episode 5: The Story and the Engine

A note I made before watching this episode so I can prove myself right or wrong when I watch it - writer Inua Ellams apparently sees this episode as a companion piece to Dot and Bubble. You know, that episode with all the elitist nepo babies which, by the way, are actually thinly-veiled racists as well, and we totally didn't see that twist coming when their attitudes could be written off as just being, you know, elitist? Yeah, I'll bet anything that relates itself to that episode is going to be shit. Anyway, on with the story.

The Doctor gets the idea to head to Lagos, Nigeria to boost the Vindicator's effect as it boats the largest technology market in Africa (for ewaste lmao) and it is near Omo's Palace, a barbershop owned by Omo, who met the Doctor once as a boy in a forest fire. The Doctor frequents the barbershop because it's a place where he is accepted, where he can get away from being differently in some parts of the world. So much for the Doctor saying that he shines over racism, but I can understand having a little place to get away from everything. Honestly, I eat out at Chinese restaurants and cha chaan teng cafés more than I eat out at pubs or fast food joints, so who am I to judge?

After using the Vindicator in 2019 Lagos, the Doctor leaves Belinda in the TARDIS while he heads to the barbershop. He notices a sign warning him to turn back followed by posters of missing people, including Omo and a few others. Entering the barbershop, the Doctor greets Omo and realises that the others inside are the missing people on the posters. The barbershop has a new owner, who has no name other than the Barber so I'll call him as such. The Doctor notices one of the men's hair growing back after just having had a haircut. He watches another man get a haircut and tell a story, which comes to life on a window, which seems to stablise something that they need to feed because it is hungry.

The Barber and his assistant, Abby, are the ones who are controlling whatever they are feeding. It is then that Abby comes back with food and the Doctor notes that he knows her face, but she just tuts at him. Huh, that's the same reaction I got from Roberta Tubbs when I saw her in Quahog some years ago. The Doctor learns that the Barber and Abby used to work for the latter's father and they are travelling somewhere. Omo met the Barber when he offered to give him a haircut in his own shop, but when he did, the shop seemed to transfer itself to him and Omo was unable to leave, along with the others who had come in, a select few who loved the shop.

The thing needs to be fed again and the Doctor offers to tell a story. The Doctor sits down in the chair and finds himself restrained for some reason. Compelled to tell a story, the Doctor tells a story of how Belinda helped save an old woman just as she was about to go home for her nan's birthday. The Doctor's story feeds the thing more than it did with the others, allowing them to go faster.

The Doctor's hair grows back and he has a falling out with Omo over being used by him. He turns to leave, but when he opens the door, everything starts flying; it turns out that the barbershop is on a giant mechanical spider travelling through some kind of web that is apparently in outer space or something (was it though?). The Barber tells the Doctor that the shop are in outer space and Lagos at the same time; they are travelling through something called the Nexus, also known as the World Wide Web. A time-space compressor is fitted into the doorframe and only he and Abby can return to Lagos because they control it.

Belinda, having been affected by the alarms ringing in the TARDIS every time the barbershop door was manipulated, heads to the barbershop. The Barber says that he goes by many names, mostly those of gods related to stories. The Doctor and Belinda laugh at this, particularly because the Doctor has met all those gods before and the Barber is not any of them. The Barber admits everything; the storytelling gods needed to strengthen their bonds with humanity, so he travelled around the world to spread their myths so that they may be worshipped. He built the Nexus with a strand of the gods' essence and collected the stories of humanity to feed the gods; later on, he built the Story Engine and powered it with the stories he collected before the gods threw him out of his life's work when he wanted to be recognised; the Nexus had been primed so well that it would work without him.

The engine runs out of energy again. The Doctor realises that Abby is Abena, the daughter of the man-spider Anansi who wagered her to the Doctor and purposely lost the bet so he would marry her, despite his best efforts at trying to lose the bet himself. She ended up with the Barber after the Doctor abandoned her, because at the time he was- JO MARTIN, THE FUGITIVE DOCTOR?! Anyway, their objective is to take the shop to the heart of the nexus so that the Barber can become storyteller supreme. The Doctor recognises that the Barber is doing this for vengeance and the Barber reveals that he intends to cut the storytelling gods out of the Nexus and all of memory, destroying them and endangering humanity.

The Barber attempts to force the Doctor into the chair but Abby offers to tell the story herself. After Abby tells a story about how female slaves would braid their hair into maps so that they could help others escape, as slaves were not allowed to carry paper, the Doctor causes a distraction and uses the map Abby braided into his hair to get to the Story Engine with Belinda.

The Barber follows the Doctor to the Story Engine as well; noticing that the Barber had some Hemingway books on the shelves, the Doctor tells him a story about how he challenged Hemingway to write a story in six words. Suddenly, the engine somehow connects to the Doctor and stories of his past incarnations are displayed (luckily, nothing outside of what we've seen on TV), but the Doctor had taken out a third of the engine and his stories would cause it to overload. He makes the Barber choose between sacrificing seven billion people (by going through with his plan) or only seven people (by letting them go) and the wording of this is kind of weird when you think about it.

The Barber compresses the corridors and opens the door to the shop, allowing everyone to escape. The Doctor sends Belinda out as well before encouraging the Barber to escape with him as well, so he can live long enough to write his own six-word story. The Doctor and the Barber escape and the ship tries to manifest itself, but the Doctor sends it back to the Nexus where it explodes. The three men with Omo prostrate themselves before Abby and go on their way. The Doctor encourages the Barber to start his own barbershop and continue collecting stories for himself. Omo makes up with the Doctor and leaves his barbershop to the Barber, naming him Adetokunbo after his father. Abby parts ways with the Barber on good terms, unwilling to resent the Barber despite him lying to her about his motives.

Fugitive Doctor aside, this was a pretty good episode that proved my initial suspicions wrong. I can see where the Dot and Bubble parallel comes into play when the Doctor realises that Omo was using him for the Barber's own ends. It's a cultural episode representing Africa like Legend of the Sea Devils represented China. Also, the Doctor we saw at the end, when he was encouraging the Barber to write his own six-word story - where the hell was he last week when he was confronting Conrad in the TARDIS? Oh wait, he's a straight white male grifter so he totally doesn't deserve any mercy or redemption. We know he's coming back for the finale, so if he doesn't get a redemption arc or at the very least, an elaboration on his character, we're going to have a serious problem. I'm still baffled over last week's episode and I'm honestly baffled at how such a beautiful episode like this came after such an atrocious episode.

Episode 6: The Interstellar Song Contest

How fitting that this episode premiered on the day of the Eurovision Grand Final and that it was just squeezed in after the FA Cup final between Crystal Palace and Manchester City on BBC One.

The Doctor and Belinda arrive at the Harmony Arena in 2925 during the 803rd Interstellar Song Contest and decide to stay and watch after using the Vindicator. Mrs Flood is in the audience as well, confirming that the Doctor is using the Vindicator and that it has been primed after this use. Two men, Gary and Mike, are unable to get into their pod, which the Doctor and Bel are in, which ironically saves them from what happens next.

A Hellion named Kid hijacks the gallery and is revealed to be working with another Hellion named Wynn, switching the live feed to the dress rehearsal version. The Doctor suddenly realises something and jumps out of the pod to investigate as the contest begins. Kid turns off the safety protocols and opens the air shield, sucking all 100,000 beings out into space, including the Doctor, the TARDIS and Mrs Flood. Belinda is saved when she hits the roof of the pod before it closes on her.

Belinda heads out of the pod and into the hallway, where Cora from Trion and Len (her manager?) have also survived. Belinda is distraught that the Doctor is gone, while Len tries to access the computer core, but finds that something is rewriting everything.

The Doctor sees a vision of Susan Foreman (finally, they got Carole Ann Ford back) and somehow manages to unfreeze himself and fly himself back into the Harmony Arena using a confetti cannon. The Doctor faints upon entering and Mike helps him regain consciousness. The Doctor reveals that the 100,000 people outside are still alive because he triplicated the gravity mavity field. He accesses the computer core as well and discovers that the Hellions have uploaded a primitive delta wave, which will kill all 3 trillion people watching the contest.

Kid discovers the Doctor trying to interfere with the systems and Belinda manages to see him as well, much to her relief. Belinda hears the Doctor threatening Kid and realises something is off with him. Cora reveals that she knows Kid and Wynn because she is a Hellion as well, her horns cut off by force; the planet Hellia was harmless until it and its people were bought by the Corporation sponsoring the Song Contest, taking the Hell Poppy (which is used for honey... flavouring- damn, a Kamen Rider Gavv reference made before that series was commissioned lol) and its seeds and burning the fields so they could never grow it back. For some reason, the Hellions are "treated like scum across the galaxy" and rumours have been spread about the Hellions "doing it to themselves" and that they practice cannibalism and witchcraft.

Kid prepares to transmit the delta wave, but then the Doctor enters the gallery using a hologram decoy, destroys the delta wave device and disarms Kid before using a hard light hologram of himself to torture him. Susan, in his head, tells the Doctor to stop, but he doesn't stop until Belinda comes in with Cora and he realises what he is doing. The gallery operator regains control and Kid and Wynn are taken away.

The Doctor enlists the help of Gary and Mike to bring everyone back into the Harmony Arena and unfreeze them. He also enlists Len's help to turn a VIP pod into a revival booth so that everyone can be unfreezed faster. Once everyone is brought back, the contest is rendered null and void, but Cora gives a performance of a song from her home planet Hellia to 3 trillion people to remind them of the world that they lost. After the song, the arena slowly bursts into cheers for Cora.

The Doctor and Belinda prepare to leave in the TARDIS, but not before they are greeted by a hologram of Graham Norton, who informs them that Earth was destroyed on 24 May 2025, the day when Belinda left. Rushing back into the TARDIS, the Doctor plugs the Vindicator into the TARDIS, but as they set off, the console room glows red and the Cloister Bell rings before the TARDIS door blows in...

In a post-credits scene, Mrs Flood is the last person to be revived, but being in space for too long froze her double brainstem, causing her to bi-generate as she is revealed to be the Rani. Damn, so RTD did get the rights to the Rani. I said before that Sacha Dhawan's Master in the Chibnall era should have been the Rani given that the Master died at the end of the Moffat era, but I guess that didn't happen given that Chibnall slagged off the Rani's creators, Pip and Jane Baker, back in 1986. Also, is RTD seriously making bi-generation the new regeneration? What happened to it being a myth?

Say what you will about the episode's writer, Juno Dawson, I thought this episode was alright, save for the Doctor torturing Kid maybe. There have been theories and rumours that Mrs Flood was the Rani and I'm glad that the Rani has finally been reintroduced, despite everything else in this series. I also hope to see Susan again in the two-part finale after that red herring last series.

I thought that the Hellions hijacking the Song Contest was a parallel to Russia or Belarus being suspended from Eurovision over Ukraine or Israel continuing to participate in Eurovision despite what they are doing to Palestinians. However, seeing the dynamics between Kid, Wynn and Cora connected another parallel for me, namely the two main dynamics of the pro-democracy protesters during the Hong Kong protests of 2019-20. Kid and Wynn are the radical 勇武 valiants willing to use violent means to send their message, while Cora is the peaceful, rational and non-violent 和理非 who became a singer and performs at the Song Contest to spread the message of her home to the entire universe. But like other things in this series, we don't get a deeper elaboration on the Hellions other than what we've been given. And if this actually is a jab towards Hong Kong/Ukraine/Palestine etc, honestly that is the least of my issues right now.

This review is getting too long so I'm splitting it into two parts. The series finale will be in the next part. My brain will never stop blowing up if I keep thinking about the goodest logic of Lucky Day for another second.

[yeonchi]

See what happens when I'm not the showrunner and we leave it to RTD.

[yeonchi]

it might be just me but i feel like you probably can’t call yourself the best mother in the world when every time your daughter acts weird you immediately kick her out of the house ??? 🤔 like whats that about carla

[yeonchi]

ncuti leaving with no dalek episode no cyberman episode no master episode

[yeonchi]

Screaming

[yeonchi]

So Ncuti Gatwa only got to have about 18 episodes of the show; didn't get to have a Dalek, Cybermen, or Master story, the big mainstays of the franchise; had to share his introduction with David Tennant, and now (despite how much I loved seeing her again) his exit too with Jodie Whittaker; and is now sandwiched between Tennant and Billie Piper.

Something doesn't sit right about all that to me.

[yeonchi]

me trying to explain to people who don’t watch doctor who how absolutely bonkers that finale was even by this show’s standards:

[yeonchi]

finale so bad it unites the fandom

[yeonchi]

[yeonchi]

Fifteenth being like

[yeonchi]

Uh. What was that?

Like I'm sorry to be so fucking on edge about this, but if Carole fucking DIES before she gets proper screen time again in this god damn series I'm actually going to be so livid, I'll have to take the day off from work.

Don't play with me. Don't toy with me like that.

And they did 15 so dirty his entire run... He on god only had a handful of well written episodes, and the rest was just bad writing. Ncuti was such a phenomenal actor, and he only got 18 episodes :o| I guess you could add him to the list of doctors with incredible actors that got screwed over by the show... And he was so overshadowed by nostalgia bait, yet he didn't even get to fight a dalek. Fucking crazy.

[yeonchi]

[Image ID: A Doctor Who version of the Destiel confession meme. It shows Rose Tyler tearfully saying 'I love you' to the Doctor on Bad Wolf Bay in the episode Doomsday. Under that is a screenshot of the Doctor from the same scene, his answer is 'I regenerated into you'. /End ID]

I am sorry, but I just had to do this.

[yeonchi]