I decided to watch a Studio Ghibli film I hadn’t seen yet and give my first impressions of it. So I watched Howl’s Moving Castle, which had the misfortune of being released at a time when my interest in anime (and movies and television in general) were at a low ebb. It also had the… Read More A New Perspective on Howl’s Moving Castle
I’m in the middle of watching Mawaru Penguindrum, which is shaping up to be my kind of show—fantastically weird, formalist and borderline nonsensical. It centers on three orphaned siblings: Kanba, Shoma and Himari. Himari is, unfortunately, suffering from some some sort of unspecified terminal illness, which takes her life during an outing to an aquarium.… Read More Penguindrum: Destiny, or…?
These days I don’t have much time for video games, and I wonder at times if I’ll hold on to the hobby in the years to come. So I thought that now would be a good time to throw together a top ten list reminding myself of why I loved this medium in the first… Read More Josh’s Top Ten Video Games OF ALL TIME
I watched a couple episodes of That Time I Got Reincarnated As a Slime, which is, as it says on the tin, a story about a guy who dies and comes back to life as a slime in an alternate fantasy dimension—you know, the lowest level of monster you might bump into in a Dragon… Read More On Reincarnated Slimes and Eating
Gatchaman Crowds, a series that offers a really quirky, unique spin on the sentai genre, opens with the rather happy-go-lucky teenager Hajime being abruptly inducted into the ranks of the Gatchaman, a group of superheroes dedicated to protecting the earth from extraterrestrial attacks. In particular, they’ve been locked for some time in a conflict with… Read More Reflections Upon The Viewing of Gatchaman Crowds
Dragon Quest XI is probably one of the best games to come out this generation that I’ve played, which is no mean feat; the past two or three years have been pretty good to me, gaming-wise, with a lot of stuff I like just falling off the shelves. I say probably because DQXI is a… Read More A Lot of Words About Dragon Quest XI
Phantasy Star IV is the platonic ideal of the JRPG. Dragon Quest may have laid the foundations for the genre, and a lot of Final Fantasy entries have certainly pushed it further, but PSIV is the one I’d point to if someone wanted a sample of what it was all about. It’s got satisfyingly crunchy… Read More Phantasy Star IV and Ultimate Explanations
I’ve recently gotten around to playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. You know, the one everybody’s been frothing at the mouth over. And it’s indeed a great game, perhaps my new favourite in the series (even if it isn’t exactly the flawless diamond that a lot of people seem to think it… Read More Storytelling and Myth in Breath of the Wild
In lieu of writing something, I thought I’d share some of my fan art. I actually find fan art to be one of the trickier things to do—reverse-engineering someone else’s character takes you outside of your own habits and comfort zone. But for that reason it can also be very instructive. Unfortunately, no real thematic… Read More Josh’s Fan Art Gallery
I’ve been slowly working my way through Okami, another one of those older games that I heard a lot about but never got around to playing. Set in a vague, “once upon a time” point in Japan’s past, you play as the wolf goddess Ameratsu, who a century prior had helped defeat the serpent demon… Read More Okami and the Christian Artist