Now I wasn’t at Evo– for those of you not in the know, the biggest fighting game tournament in the world and something of a Super Bowl/Anime Expo at the same time for our subculture— but I did spend my entire weekend holed up watching the tournament final
Nothing has ever burned out my brain quite like playing competitive riichi mahjong. To play the game at a high level in person (as opposed to in an online game), you need to maintain a state of intense concentration for a long, sustained period. You’re not just struggling to
anime
"(Oshii's) thinking about everything we make... human attempts to build a purer, better form of ourselves without all the original sin. Something innocent."
Nobody likes battle passes, but they’re tremendously psychologically effective. Players in a battle pass game are dished out a cookie-crumb trail of little tiny in-game prizes the more they play the game. The “premium”, as in paid, battle pass hits players with FOMO over some attractive grand prize; if
anime
(Just as a heads-up: I’ve kept things relatively non-graphic, but very late in this piece I describe a sexual assault in the manga in question. I'll also be talking about a comic that only exists in English in fan scans, and which for reasons we will get
video games
In its nearly decade-long run, Tekken 7 left behind a complete package that left nowhere to go next. The gameplay is that unique Tekken blend; it works because it works, and you don’t mess with it. The graphics are already pretty high-end ten years later. The cast– adding enough
(There are spoilers in this piece for only the last five minutes or so of Metallic Rouge’s final episode, which are so important to to the series overall that we have to discuss them in full.) I’d been excited about Metallic Rouge since I first heard about it,
video games
This is probably the first thing you want to know, right? I just want to get it out of the way...
The short version of my take on Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is that you can read my review of the previous game, take each individual complaint, and imagine the reverse of that. The developers of Infinite Wealth have fixed every pain point of their previous RPG outing, finally reaching
anime
I haven’t had the chance to talk about the current anime season much, but suffice to say my favorite was easily Brave Bang Bang Bravern. Director Masami Obari and writer Keigo Koyanagi delivered a strange, self-parodic, unpredictable, yet moving narrative packed with all the explosive heroics and joyous catharsis
This is a table of contents for my project "Mahjong Stuff in Pon no Michi", a series of blog posts that explained most, if not all, of the inside mahjong details and jokes in the anime series Pon no Michi. If you've been reading along with
Well, here we are at the final post of the “Mahjong Stuff in Pon no Michi” project, one I never gave a better name. This show was honestly a bit of a trudge— I maintain that episode 6, the all-night mahjong episode, was actually quite good— but playing mahjong consultant