Mento's Month: August '26
by mento
Did you know? The month of August was so named because after one long and humid summer that offered no relief the first cool breezes of autumn would arrive, leading the luminary figures of the time to exclaim "ahh, gust." More true facts like these can be found in this month's appraisal of all things games and anime.
Game of the Month: Final Fantasy XVI (Square Enix, 2023)
I have a list on Giant Bomb dot com. Well, I have several, but this one's about Final Fantasy and how—at one point in time—I'd played a game from that series for every year that it had existed, all the way back to 1987 when the first debuted on Famicom around the holidays in Japan up until the year I wrote that list I linked to. I've been trying to maintain it with a new FF game every year since then but I'll admit that I've been slipping, in no small part because I'm running out of good FF games (I'm not so desperate that I'm inclined to boot up All the Bravest or Dirge of Cerberus) and also because almost all the company's Final Fantasy productivity is being funneled into FFXIV and the FFVII remakes alone. Used to be we'd get a bunch of side-games every year to supplement whichever big numbered entry was next. All the same, 2023 did finally see a new one of those in Final Fantasy XVI so I'm giving that dumb little project of mine one last shot in the arm before the series hits its 40th anniversary next year.
Since I typically avoid learning too much about the games I intend to play one day, Final Fantasy XVI is a game I mostly only know from its reputation, since that was inescapable around its launch. Produced by the man currently considered the savior of the franchise, Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yoshida, the lead on FFXIV, and directed by Hiroshi Takai, a long-time designer who got his first directorial gig with the troubled but mechanically intriguing The Last Remnant, Final Fantasy XVI was—like The Last Remnant with its use of the Unreal Engine—an attempt to marry game design conventions of the east with the west. We still have crystals and chocobos and eidolons ("eikons" now) and malboros all popping up before the prologue's even done but the overall darker tone and more character-driven presentation was intended to hearken to TV hits like Game of Thrones, where we'd see multiple perspectives on the unfolding events and their potentially catastrophic consequences. A narrative that sees its moody protagonist lose everything he holds dear and spend a decade as a war slave only to grasp a sliver of hope upon a chance encounter with both a childhood companion and a freedom fighter with the connections he needs to fulfill a long-simmering revenge plan. I'm generally fine with the game's darker tone and shift to a more western style—Final Fantasy reinvents itself pretty regularly, after all—but I think I've yet to warm up to its combat.
Look, I get it. This setting and tone hasn't felt too "Final Fantasy" so far. Sometimes you gotta play to the cheap seats to reassure them.
You can use the strength of Clive's connections to the Eikon to supplement his combat options, including powerful (if cooldown-laden) finishers. Sure looks like I have room for a whole bunch more of these around this circle, huh?
Combat in Final Fantasy XVI uses real-time with cooldowns, taking after the paradigm established by the MMOs FFXI and FFXIV which in turn were assimilated and modified by the likes of Crisis Core, Final Fantasy: Lightning Returns, FFXV, and the FFVII remakes. A system that combines evade rolls and chain combos with partially menu-driven spell usage, adapting the stagger system from XIII to bring your opponents temporarily to their knees and leave them open to a barrage of attacks with a higher damage modifier that can be expanded even further as you extend the combo before they can recover. In practice this all sounds cool enough, especially once you throw in Soulsian parries and dodge-counters, but so far every enemy encounter has been an absolute damage sponge and I can't help but wonder if there are more systems that elude me for the real big DPS potential or if this game is just... like this the whole time. A game where even a minor sub-boss might take five to ten minutes of constant attacks, evasions, stagger periods, and outmaneuvering. A boss fight in a real-time action RPG probably shouldn't take the equivalent length of a boss fight in a classic turn-based Final Fantasy; I kinda assumed going real-time was meant to speed things up a little at the very least? Right now, I'm reserving any final judgment on the combat in case a few more layers are unpeeled and the true core of the engine becomes evident but it is the one aspect bringing the game down to a sloggish crawl right now, less so the exposition-heavy political outfoxing and heightened emotional drama frequently happening on the periphery.
Something I don't think I've seen a game do, but certainly more than a few streaming services (like the one Game of Thrones was available on perhaps), is that you can pause a cutscene at any time and consult an "active time lore" function to get information on everyone involved in the scene as well as its location and any other significant proper nouns, like a mentioned kingdom or a game-specific concept (such as the Dominants, individuals chosen by the eikon and able to transform into them temporarily). These will even update as the game goes along, taking into account new developments as they happen in the cutscene you're watching, which is both a level of explication and a level of infantalization of its audience that deeply impresses me. Evidently it was something added to help those getting lost by the plot (which, honestly, if you're going to do a GoT political conspiracy thing in the midst of a world already full of esoteric concepts it probably helps to offer some clarity from time to time).
Sadly, unlike Prime Video, this feature doesn't tell me if this Charon person was on any episodes of Law & Order. Dang, and she looked so familiar too.
Anyway, I'll probably see through quite a lot more of FFXVI in September so I'll move onto everything else it's doing when I get there. Well-worn territory some three years on, perhaps, but I've yet to miss a mainline Final Fantasy so this is appointment viewing (playing?) as far as I'm concerned.
Other Gaming Tomfoolery
Once again dominating this month, as it did last month, is Game OVA Reversal: a series I like to trot out every summer where I watch questionable anime and play even more questionable tie-in licensed games based on them. This Reversal season instead had me exploring anime based on games instead, with August covering Tecmo's Ninja Gaiden, Ritual Entertainment's Sin, and Falcom's Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes. Playing my first Ninja Gaiden game went about as well as you'd expect: I suspect even back in the day my patience for getting pecked into pits by constantly respawning birds would've been relatively low, and certainly more so now as an adult with responsibilities and potential stomach ulcers to worry about. Still, though, I can see the appeal of the games between the fluid controls and that great soundtrack. Sin was a trip in every sense of the term, and I'm still scratching my melon as to why such an also-ran '90s FPS saw enough Japanese interest for a studio to throw a whole OVA together (which, while also not great, felt like it was being too generous to the very slight story content of the game). Dragon Slayer's OVA was just kind of mid, much like Ys's, but the game had some intriguing qualities for a turn-based RPG of its vintage: still very grindy with some amazing low-quality voice acting and a bunch of script typos, but with so many QoL features (like auto-battle toggles and a forgiving death state) that it felt like playing a modern remaster of an otherwise average retro RPG.
The official sponsor of the 2026 season of Game OVA Reversal. If you want shit from Japan, Ryu's your man. Can I buy ninja stars here? Shuriken!
Speaking of retro, I haven't written any Retropiece Theater entries in a while but at various points this month I broke down and knocked off a couple more from my shortlist of games to revisit. I'm wondering whether or not to punt these two into a larger "smorgasbord" variety update for that feature or just write about them here. In brief, then:
Equinox is software created by Software Creations: a developer that is somewhat local to where I am that primarily worked on (not great, I'll admit) licensed games but had a few compelling originals, not least of which were the Solstice/Equinox isometric puzzle-platformers for NES and SNES respectively. I've yet to work up the courage to play the tougher Solstice but Equinox, which takes after Zelda to some extent with upgradeable health, new weapons to find, and new spells to utilize along with a discrete series of dungeons to explore, is one of my childhood favorites and replaying a game like that for a pretty accessible RetroAchievements set is, like, 70% of the reason why I'm so obsessed with that site right now as the industry collapses around our ears.
(Equinox) This reminds me, I gotta check out Lumo 2 one of these days.
The other retro game was The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX: the 1998 GBC remaster of the fourth Zelda game (and first portable one) which was another game I played to death as a kid. Specifically, though, I'd never played this DX version before and had a ball discovering new features like the goofy photo mode (which connected directly to the Game Boy Camera) and a so-so bonus dungeon. As was the case for Ocarina and LTTP, the real RA challenges here were the no-damage bosses as well as a game-wide challenge of never dying: getting to the end without a single Link death on your conscience added a sweet coda to the ending sequence which was apparently also in the original game too. Great set (the no-damage bosses aside) and I'm happy to have checked off a Zelda game I'd technically never played before.
(Link's Awakening DX) I believe this is the first time I've played Link's Awakening since playing Kaeru no tame ni Kane wa Naru, so now I finally get this reference.
Finally, we have the revolving chair that is the Podcast Game of the Month! Yaaay! Voxelgram 2 started the month off strong covering this beat for the first two weeks of August, still finding that ideal interpretation of three-dimensional picross that not even HAL Laboratory could quite achieve, and there's an extensive amount of user-created bonus puzzles (if not quite as much for Voxelgram 1; I guess give it time) if I ever decide to hop back in, along with new versions of those Voxelgram 1 puzzles with 2's multi-colored mechanics. Still thirsting for nonograms, I booted up Walfie's Nonograms: a GBC homebrew with puzzles based on the cozy art of the titular internet illustrator (who often works with Hololive, among others). Like the Pokémon Picross GBC prototype floating out there, it's a look into a parallel world where picross continued to dominate Nintendo portables (though it still had a good run on SNES/SFC, all things considered). I've now moved onto my present podcast game, which is... Super Mario Galaxy! It is a little irritating to set up the Wii Remote + Sensor Bar combo each time I want to play (good thing I've still got my Wii U hooked up) but this is some dang good Mario, y'all, and there's a unique challenge for almost every stage in this game courtesy of a very comprehensive achievement set built to be the vanguard of a recent wave of Wii games receiving RA support. I might factor more Wii games into the RA rotation since I've already gone to all this trouble: Elebits is definitely next but I'd love a set for Captain Rainbow once it gets a proper fan translation. For now, however, I imagine I'll be jumping across planets and stars for quite a while yet: there's also all of Luigi's Stars to find too, and probably more than a few speedruns and other nightmare cheevos I'm going to need to take my time with.
(Walfie's Nonograms) Happy dance! (My 100th RA mastery too. Next goal is to reach 50k points before the end of the year.)
The "Indie Game of the Week" of the Month: Clash: Artifacts of Chaos (ACE Team, 2023)
The pick of the month was a real tough choice between all four of these, so my usual tiebreaker is to give it to the most unusual game. That said, I am starting to get used to Ace Team's bizarre Zeno Clash series after three of the things and though Clash: Artifacts of Chaos (#479) does change the formula quite significantly for the sake of a more Souls like experience (something else that's long since felt novel to me) the merging of the two paradigms proved not only compelling but oddly harmonious. A hand-to-hand brawler's only one hair width away from a fighter already and Souls games also have that dance of evasion and finding your moment to strike when it'll have the most impact. The character designs were once again on point with how misshapen and unique they were and the world of Zeno Clash remains a multi-layered mystery punctuated by a whole lot of punching.
(Clash: Artifacts of Chaos) Your eyes go intuitively to the big screaming face on this mountain, but not necessarily the dozens of rocks shaped like wieners. There's probably a Freudian term for this.
Three excellent runners-up then follow close behind: Thank Goodness You're Here (#480) is a delightful adventure game, though by a very loose definition of the genre, in which your tiny dogsbody goes around helping a town of Yorkshire-derived eccentrics with their various errands and problems. The appeal of the game is in its surreal sense of humor, occasionally pock-marked by double entendres and some very local references, and while its structure requires you circle around the same handful of areas over and over it's still very capable of surprising you with its next non-sequitur or skit. Like Jazzpunk, it's a strong case that comedy can work in games despite the timing issues inherent to player agency. Next is Call of the Sea (#481), a first-person adventure game more beholden to Myst than many of its more puzzle-focused brethren like The Witness or Portal, in which you guide the 1930s socialite Norah Everhart across an ominous island touched by the influence of the Great Old Ones of Lovecraftian fame. Every area builds up to one big puzzle to solve, and procuring the clues needed to suss it out also, conveniently, gives you the opportunity to absorb the subtextual and epistolary storytelling behind the doomed expedition that arrived ahead of you, led by your own scholar husband. An attractive game with a solid conceptual structure for a genre like this and a worthy scion of all the book reading and lever pulling of its famous spiritual antecedent. Finally, there's Doomblade (#482), an exploraction game with a novel control method that has you near-instantly warping and shredding enemies by clicking on them with a mouse cursor. This naturally ties into the traversal as well, using this rapid combat movement to target flying enemies to quickly jump between them to reach new heights, with the progress-enabling upgrades often expanding the utility of this traversal format even further. The grimdark setting is probably nothing you haven't seen before (it's reminiscent of the more Souls-adjacent exploraction games of late, even if this game specifically has very little in common mechanically with From's RPG series) but the gameplay ingenuity is where it shines.
(Thank Goodness You're Here) I saw a few Vtubers play this and they seemed very confused by this statement.
The Weeb Weeview
Going to try something a little new with this month's mid-season rundown. My first impressions for what I've been watching this summer 2026 anime season can be read in the previous Mento's Month (if I remember to link it; otherwise it can be found in my profile page) (and if I forget to link that, I guess you can find it in hell along with my attention span) and those were written after maybe three episodes at most for each of the featured shows. Now that most of them are around 7-8 episodes into their respective runs, I've a much firmer idea of their strengths and the trajectory of the full season barring some massive left-field cliffhanger twist in the finale.
As such, I'll run down the same list again (plus a few additions) and rate them on whether they've: Improved, or at least hit their stride after a few shaky early episodes; Declined, potentially because they couldn't quite pull off the potential of its premise for the long run, especially if they're an isekai show since those lose steam ludicrously fast; or stayed Even, remaining consistent for better or worse (depending on their original quality).
(You and I Are Polar Opposites) I've never identified with an anime character more than Taira (on the left). Except for the part where he now has a baddie yearning for him.
I'll save the final ratings for when the shows have concluded—seems only fair, after all—but if you've been vacillating on starting a few of these or possibly bounced off them quickly, maybe hearing that they've turned things around could change your mind on them.
Daemons of the Shadow Realm: Even. This is the sort of show where there's a bunch of moving parts so you have to pay a little more attention than normal, constantly introducing new villains and factions fighting to either enslave or kill the twin protagonists for their OP gifts, but the character work and animation have been just enough to want to keep checking in every week. I'm not sure why it isn't hitting that hard (I think I'm just done with pure shounen these days; similar to superhero movie burnout) but the quality behind it is evident enough.
From Old Country Bumpkin to Master Swordsman (S2): Even. The show is just fine; I like the themes about the inner conflict of the middle-aged between wanting to keep pushing ahead with your dreams in spite of how late you're realizing them or stepping aside for the next generation and the realism they give these characters and their conflicts—it's very much a Game of Thrones "low fantasy" setting, though considerably nicer—but I so much prefer the way the manga's been adapting the stories and characterization, even if the absurd level of skill on display sometimes robs the material of some of its down-to-earthiness. "Snob who prefers the manga" is a bold new persona I'm working on.
The Frontier Lord Begins with Zero Subjects: Even. I still don't know about this one; I generally like the cozy vibes of nation-building fantasy shows and how they steadily develop a likeable cast of characters as the population expands but the child bride angle plus a human dude falling for Animal Crossing's Isabelle plus the overall slow progress is making it more of a hard sell. I did like that he recruited an educated mousekin to ride around on his head and direct his combat tactics: a "Strategooie", as it were.
The Ghost in the Shell: Improved. It took me a while to adjust to the breakneck speed, as it does the thing of dropping you in the deep end to soak up the vibes rather than being too expository right off the bat, but I'll admit that I'm loving the manic humor/pace of the show even while it still takes the time to pay service to the material's heady themes of cybernetic transhumanism, AI, and other new technology's effects on society that the Oshii adaptations took so seriously. That we saw a Dominion Tank Police cameo feels like no coincidence: I could totally see Science Saru moving onto that next since the tone/style of its older OVA is similar to what they're doing here.
Hell Mode (S2): Slightly Improved. We've quickly switched from adventuring parties to open warfare against a hostile invasion force of millions, with the protagonist Allen using his recent leveling up to adapt to the logistics of having hundreds of summoned creatures to quell the horde. In essence, we went from a Pokémon to a Master of Monsters. I like when isekai shows are able to evolve like this (Tensura being a famous case) because it means they don't hit a ceiling quite as quick, but I am curious how much more broken this guy can get: he's even negotiating with lesser gods for class promotions.
I Became a Legend After My 10 Year-Long Last Stand: Declined. I sort of recall now why I dropped the manga, since there's not a whole lot to territory to explore when your protagonist is already OP and it's not explicitly a comedy. We beat the vampires and now it's some other thing. Always some other thing.
A Livid Lady’s Guide to Getting Even: Improved. I can't even describe how far off the rails this show is going. "Deranged" doesn't feel sufficient. Innocent "villainess" betrayal and banishment anime typically don't go full circle and make her the worst human being on the planet (it's usually a case of "the best revenge is to live well") but in a season that also includes the continuation of The Saga of Tanya the Evil she's in good company. Bad company. Whichever.
Overshadowed to Overpowered: Declined. Much like I Became a Legend the juice is already mostly squeezed out of the premise of a guy who gets reincarnated to a time where his already prodigious powers are now even more so, but the show has just finally gotten around to exploring the mystery behind why everyone got nerfed: someone broke an ancient civilization's magical monolith. Neat idea to have modern magic usage be in some way tied to ancient technology (nice way to turn that Clarke quote on its head) but this show's like 10% interested in that and 90% interested in the thighs of the demon elf ladies following the protag around. Hey, you gotta focus on what the audience wants most.
Rich Girl Caretaker: Even. Whenever I think this show is too cloying or too rich-people-celebratory for its own good, it hits me with a romantic moment that feels both earned and genuine. It's not competing with the big romance shows this season but it's pulling its weight, I'll begrudgingly admit.
Skeleton Knight in Another World (S2): Even. One thing I like about this show that sets it apart from a lot of isekai is that it feels like there's a plan in motion; that we're constantly moving towards some major overarching goal with each storyline about freeing non-human slaves and drawing the ire of the human supremacist theocracy pulling the slave trade's strings. Arc maintaining his goofy heroic superhero persona is something I wonder if the show/source material maintains forever, because it's become a little out of step with how much darker the show has become. Not that it's close in that regard to its big brother Overlord just yet.
Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You: Even. The thing is, I already knew how good this show was going to be the moment I started it and it has yet to disappoint in the slightest. Introducing Yamada's coworkers, like her gruff romance fiction aficionado manager, has boosted it a little but it's the consistent low-key nature of the show and its main couple that's making it a winner. Real strong contest between it and Polar Opposites for best romance this season.
That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime (S4): Improved. Loved getting to know the new Black Numbers crew and we're getting some prime power-scaling nonsense from this current arc as the antagonist former hero goes scorched earth on his enemies, including Rimuru, taking a small break for its current extended flashback arc. Keep in mind this is only an improvement from the start of this cour, rather than the whole fourth season, since Tensura has a lot of ebbs and flows to its structure. Slimes are predominantly liquid after all.
Tomb Raider King: Improved. I've read a few of these manhwa now and they typically all have a smirking, devious anti-hero type lead (Solo Leveling being an exception, since Sung Jinwoo doesn't really do "personality") who you root for despite being a little shit, and TRK's Seo Joo-Heon is definitely no exception. Very different energy, from both SL and other manga adaptations this season alike, but a welcome one for now.
Trapped in a Dating Sim (S2): Even. Of late, TiaDS has sorta taken the Cautious Hero route in revealing some pretty dark backstory and elevated stakes despite ostensibly being a comedy (though the love-tester ship was still hilarious). The new (if somewhat predictable) revelation did at least offer another intriguing spin on being isekai'd into—and trying to make the most out of living in—the world of a shitty video game that has no internal logic. Still sticking around for the promise of the "Blight Club Isekai" premise more than for the show itself so far.
You and I Are Polar Opposites (S2): Improved. We're getting concrete TairAzuma progress. Nuff said.
Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games: Even. Beginning to feel more like the show is just yuri bait after those first few frisson-rich episodes; now it's fully become people spouting fighting game terminology and everyone's first trip to EVO Japan (what a time to promote that event; the Saudis probably aren't too happy the premium FGC anime right now is so LGBTQ-coded). It's still charming in that "cute girls doing cute things" way, well animated, and pretty educational if the gameplay nuance of Street Fighter 6 in particular was something you were interested in but there's gotta be a real limited audience for this. Besides Shawn.
Though I Am an Inept Villainess: I put this at the end because I added it to the rotation since the last update, so I'm inclined to go a little deeper here. Between The Apothecary Diaries and those Road to Empress games it feels like the iron's real hot for sneaky competitive Inner Palace concubine media and this does the Freaky Friday thing by body-swapping the beloved but sickly Emperor's favorite and the self-absorbed and magically inclined villainess: the former ends up loving having a healthy body to push to its limits even if she is roundly mistrusted by everyone, while the latter doesn't have the former's mental fortitude and struggles to maintain both the ruse and her sanity as she lays dormant in her sick bed. It's an entertaining combination of the cutthroat conspiratorial court ladies intrigue angle and the body swap "fish out of water" comedy angle with Apothecary's eye for the beautiful but deadly world of double-dealing debutantes and their two-faced facades.
Some other external recs I still need to get around to: The Elusive Samurai (S2), Sparks of Tomorrow, Clevatess (S2), Goodbye, Lara, The Saga of Tanya the Evil (S2), and Dara-san of Reiwa. There's just too much anime for one guy. Probably too much of this article to read too, so I'll conclude things here. See you again soon in September for what I hope will be a month with far fewer cool celebrities dying. My mouth to the Grim Reaper's ear-holes, and whatnot.