The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, for the Nintendo Switch, is an incredibly faithful remake of a decades-old game, with all the charm of the original, plus gorgeous art and sound, and a variety of quality of life improvements. I confess I came to this game highly biased. Link’s Awakening, the old black and white… Read More Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (Switch) Review
Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? is, as the absurd title implies, generally a fairly lighthearted show. So I was quite surprised when it abruptly featured an arc dealing with sex trafficking. I appreciated the unambiguously evil portrayal ofthe goddess Ishtar and her chief pimp Phryne. The show clearly… Read More Bell’s Heroic Love (in a Dungeon?)
Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl is a sequel / follow-up to last year’s delightful Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai. It’s very much more of the same, and that’s a good thing. The series ended without resolving the curious case of Makinohara Shoko, and now the film delves into that… Read More Review: Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl
Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? takes place in Orario, a setting populated by gods drawn from a variety of ancient mythologies. These beings form followings known as familia. Early in the second season of the series, the god Apollo attempts to poach protagonist Bell Cranel from his goddess,… Read More Making Gods in Our Image (in a Dungeon)
The backstory of Uotani Arisa, friend of Fruits Basket protagonist Honda Tohru, is a genderswapped retelling of Jesus’ parable of the “prodigal” son found in Luke 15. Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it was fun to say, and it got your attention, didn’t it? And there really is some great thematic resonance… Read More The Prodigal Uo-chan
When Soma Kisa is introduced in Fruits Basket, she has been facing bullying and, traumatized by the situation, stopped speaking. She also quit going to school, and so eventually she receives a letter from her teacher asking her to come back. Fortunately for the audience, we have Soma Hatsuharu and Soma Yuki around to read… Read More Finding Love in the Face of Self-Loathing
Harem romances are fairly common in anime and light novels. That is, many of these stories feature a male protagonist with several female love interests (only two love interests is merely a love triangle, not a harem). A harem story may or may not involve the guy marrying all the girls. I’m not a huge… Read More On Harem Romances
Steam had its summer sale not long ago, and I picked up a few visual novels to try. Each is available for both Mac and PC. Magical Diary: Horse Hall Magical Diary: Horse Hall is a very “meh” sort of visual novel. Bland backgrounds, forgettable music, and somewhat ugly character sprites do nothing to salvage… Read More A Trio of Visual Novel Reviews
Over the past year, I’ve become something of a light novel addict. #BlameBtT. Inspired by what Frank has written about light novels, I thought it might be worthwhile to survey the light novel series I’m reading. With a couple exceptions, these are overall impressions of each series, not reviews of individual volumes. Since I can… Read More What Am I Reading & Should You Try It?
*Warning: presumptive spoilers for a future season of Sword Art Online Alicization* Lingering the background of Sword Art Online Alicization has been the question of the nature of the soul. Early in the anime, the story established that scientists had narrowed down the soul’s nature to a light-based phenomenon they call a fluctlight. These fluctlights… Read More Love Versus Materialism in Sword Art Online Alicization