Mento's Month: July '25

Game of the Month: Lies of P (Neowiz, 2023)

Though I'm not that far into the game yet I'm already very invested in Lies of P, the action-RPG that caused a minor splash in 2023 (and again far more recently due to some DLC) for being one of the better external attempts to recreate the Souls formula along with the likes of Nioh 2 and Hollow Knight. It's also one of my major pieces of 2023 RPG homework I've yet to square away, along with Baldur's Gate 3, Octopath II, The Man Who Erased His Name, Final Fantasy XVI, and the next Trails on my list Trails to Azure. It was a strong year for games exceeding 30 hour playthroughs so I'm going to have to get used to seeing that date pop up a lot in my gaming while I also struggle to catch up with all the new critical darling RPGs that keep getting released in the meanwhile. (I've been thinking back to the sort of RPG droughts we had in the late '00s and recalling that one old saying about waiting for buses.) Before I tackle any of those, I want to keep grappling with Lies of P's Bloodborne-adjacent combat system and worldbuilding while also accounting for its new ideas, like slowly recharging supers (or your last healing item, if you can survive long enough) or customizable weaponry where you can switch handles and blades around to your preferences. Probably a whole lot of time will be spent trying to get my parry timing back too.

This game's whole thing is a gritty retelling of the Pinocchio story, if that wasn't obvious from the literature around its release, which was a book written at the end of the 19th century by Carlo Collodi involving a puppet that longs to become a real boy in order to return the devotion given to him by his kindly inventor Gepetto, though he must pass a series of trials to prove his benevolence before this wish can come true. Most are familiar with the story through the Disney movie, which was plenty scary already for a kids' cartoon before Neowiz chose to zombie apocalypse it all up here, but there's been several other adaptations more recently as well. The most notable recurring morality test of the original story was the idea of Pinocchio's snoot growing with every lie he told, making his falsehoods "as plain as the nose on his face". In Lies of P, there's a similar system of getting through dialogue choices by telling the truth or lying but I've yet to determine what sort of outcome either will lead to—though I've been around the wooden block enough times to know you won't get any sort of result unless you stay consistent: I'm choosing to be a big ol' liar to see what kinds of repercussions it'll foment. Souls are called Ergo here which I quickly deduced came from "Cogito Ergo Sum", a fairly important bit of Latin if you're a machine trying to be human, though why it went with Ergo ("therefore") rather than Cogito ("to think") is anyone's guess. Maybe Ergo just rolls off the tongue better? It's a Korean studio so I'll give them some slack; renaming Jiminy to the more exotic Gemini (but still pronounced mostly the same) is a similarly odd choice. My one concern with all this Pinocchio imagery is that at some point I'll be forced to fight Roberto Benigni and that slapstick fighting style as he dexterously flops around the place is going to make him a real tough opponent to pin down, like this game's equivalent of Micolash.

I got hit with some nasty summer flu over the past week (mostly gone now) so I haven't made as much progress in this as I'd like, and what progress there's been is mostly of the "fits and starts" variety as I regularly cough up things that more resemble Bloodborne's Lovecraftian entities than anything this game is currently providing, but I'm still quite enjoying its peculiar deviations to what is a very well-worn formula at this stage in time and as I work on that parry timing—seems more reliable than the dodge roll, at least—I'm slowly getting a feel for the Eastern European-esque city of Krat and its infestation of insane animatronics. I know I'm going to have to remember I have the Legion Arm and Fable Arts to fall back on if just poking a dude with a rapier isn't working out; considering how spongy most of the larger enemies are, I'm going to say it's not working out all too often. It's looking like this thing's going to require two runs to get all the trophies too—gotta love it when 30+ hour RPGs do that, and also make so many of the side-quests instantly null and void if you move ahead too far—so I'm thinking I'll eventually spec from my current dex build towards a quality build (that's both dex and strength, with weapons that scale equally) and try some of these heavier strength weapons next time. That is, depending on how long this first playthrough takes, since I've barely made it anywhere so far.

Other Gaming Tomfoolery

As well as the aforementioned grimdark Timothée Chalamet simulator, I played plenty of unusual (well, maybe not for me) nonsense this month so let's get into it:

First, we should talk about the two Game OVA candidates for July—Sonic Soldier Borgman/Cyborg Hunter and Dr. Slump—where in both cases I afterwards played the game half of those examinations to their conclusion. Cyborg Hunter's a relatively short, sorta non-linear side-scrolling action game with a few neat ideas but is otherwise fairly generic. Dr. Slump is an adventure game with intermittent "action stages" where the goal is to follow the events of the show; the game did right by Akira Toriyama's cartoonish world of inventors and mischievous robot girls with its cel-shaded look, vaguely resembling Mega Man Legends, while giving you plenty of abilities to unlock and experiment with. Neither game is an all-time classic but the thing I typically don't expect from licensed tie-in games is imagination, as they're usually more by-the-numbers, follow-the-leader type of affairs thrown together over a few months to fit whatever strict deadlines they're wrestling with. Happy to see exceptions to that formula this month. (Be sure to check the links to see some deeper dives on the games and the shows that spawned them.)

I also wrote a thing on Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, the most maligned of the Final Fantasy spin-offs (that isn't a mobile gacha thing) and the first Final Fantasy game I ever played or indeed ever came out in Europe. It's a game for which I have some fondness even if I'd be the first to admit that it's an uninteresting cakewalk the majority of the time (I'll die on any hill you got to defend its soundtrack though) but something I've discovered by chasing RetroAchievements sets for old games is that they have this interesting tendency to not only make those games more challenging, which is a more appealing prospect for something like FFMQ than for the great many 8-bit and 16-bit games that were hard enough already, but to teach me new things about these games that I've completed multiple times apiece and felt, erroneously as it turns out, that I knew them back to front. FFMQ had some tailor-made challenges for the game's five big pivotal boss fights but its hardest achievement was a game-wide one that prohibited the protagonist from using magic. It meant some creative alternative strategies to its bosses beyond "nuke it every round where you don't need to heal". A great, if somewhat limiting, way to approach a game I could normally finish in my sleep.

Speaking of retro-style RPGs, I polished off Sea of Stars towards the beginning of the month. My views since my review in the June Mento's Month haven't really changed all that much: I think it's a spectacular throwback that maybe even goes overboard (but certainly not in a negative way) in how pretty it makes the game, though for all its timed hit business it didn't really switch things up with the combat all too often. You end up with six characters each with four specials and a few combination attacks and you've pretty much used all of them a hundred times each by the time you reach the game's conclusion. The elemental system is pretty basic too, and I still can't stand its Triple Triad equivalent Wheels. It's very hard to bring myself to say anything too negative about the overall experience, certainly, but I think I still prefer Zeboyd's considerably smaller budget efforts and the slightly less recent Chained Echoes as alternatives working that same beat.

Beyond those and the Indies to follow, I took on another trio of N64 platformer hacks as podcast games while I'm on a temporary picross break, as Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie are similarly games that I don't need to focus on too much given how second-nature their controls are by now. Banjo-Kazooie: Nostalgia 64 and Mario in the Multiverse both have a similar focus of putting their platforming hero through a bunch of different games, some of which were not originally from the same genre, and instead tweaked the level design for your usual set of collectible and platforming challenges. For Nostalgia 64 they're all fellow N64 games, including stages based on GoldenEye 007, Bomberman 64, and Diddy Kong Racing as well as the more expected guest appearances of Conker's Bad Fur Day, Donkey Kong 64, and Super Mario 64. Mario in the Multiverse extends the net even further with levels based on BioShock, Borderlands, Pizza Tower, Katana Zero, and Environmental Station Alpha. Big hit and miss ratio on that one (especially the Pizza Tower level) but one cool feature was learning a new ability in each world that you could carry into others, giving the game a slight backtracking aspect as you return with the necessary abilities for an elusive Star: the game's cool enough to put a signpost with the relevant ability nearby so you don't beat your head against an inaccessible challenge without the appropriate tools. Finally, we have Wario's Hint Art which has you download a set of image files from the internet, each hinting at the location of a hidden Star inside the hack (you need to ground-pound the right spot to reveal it). Some of these images are more abstract than others, so you really need to have some familiarity with the game to find all forty of them. Very simple but given the previously mentioned pox I came down with towards the end of the month it was just the low-effort (as in, required from the player, not behind its creation) task that I was looking for.

Oh and I started playing Picross DS. Like many Jupiter games it has some annoying insistence on including the mode that penalizes you for mistakes as well as there being far too many shoehorned stylus mini-games (that early DS library, man) but otherwise just as slick as their future Picross e/Picross S series. I was never going to stay away from crossing boxes for long, so sue me.

The "Indie Game of the Week" of the Month: Ultros (Hadoque, 2024)

Another competitive batch this month—I really need to stop starting every IGotWotM segment with that; we get it, my taste is impeccable—but I'm going to have to give it to Ultros (#428) for its very distinctive structure, especially in the later game when you finally figure out what it was you were meant to be doing all along. An exploraction game with a sci-fi horticultural angle, early on it's the type of playthrough where you wander around confused about the systems and lack of direction and then slowly piece things together. The only obvious goal from the outset is to enter a newly available zone and reach its shaman-esque caretaker in deep stasis, destroy its pod, and get kicked back in time to the start of the game with certain details slightly different. The actual goal, turns out, is to get all these shaman on the "living network": like a LAN if all the wires and cables were instead greenery. By growing and fostering plants at pivotal locations a small distance apart you can create an unbroken chain of this living network from the entrance of a zone to where the shaman is sitting in its deepest depths. It can be a bit awkward trying to get all those plant physics to play nice but it does turn the game from a combat focused affair to one with a more puzzle-like approach, so that sort of pivot alone would make it memorable if not for the vibrant painterly visuals and surreal music also contributing.

Axiom Verge 2 (#426) is likewise an exploraction game with a novel gimmick at its core—like the previous Axiom Verge, you can hack the characteristics of enemies and certain other elements to reduce their threat or create new utility out of them—but was marred by some very same-y and uninteresting level design plus a really unappealing achievement set (yes, I'm the type of person for whom that matters) that puts it in second place for this particular period's indulgence of my exploraction addiction. Our other runners-up include two short sci-fi adventure games, the first of which is Mouthwashing (#427) which has enjoyed some notoriety of late after getting taken off certain distribution platforms. While the game heavily hints at some off-screen sexual assault (the reason for the takedown, as I understand it) it's far from exonerating that type of crime, so this knee-jerk reaction is one of several darker sides of this whole nonsense puritanical purge of games with mature themes or adult content. Heaven forfend that we approach sexuality from a measured, mature point of view; best to just pretend it doesn't exist and continue to be surprised at spiking teen pregnancy rates as those little scamps figure it out on their own. The other of those adventure games isn't quite as "adult" but still has its own heavy themes to explore, as The Station (#429) sees you perusing a dilapidated space station meant to observe and monitor a vicious, war-like alien species that nonetheless has gained an appreciable level of sapience, and with all its systems (including stealth) offline it's paramount you figure out what's going on—and what happened to its crew of three—before it can be discovered. Definitely a game built in that slow-burn, atmosphere-heavy Gone Home format where looking around an abandoned space for context clues is the main drive.

Mastering the Master System (Part 7)

This month's trilogy once again contains a game I wrote a separate blog about—the Game OVA on Sonic Soldier Borgman—so I'll be condensing its segment to just the achievements like before with Zillion. The other includes a game I greatly enjoyed back in the day as one of the few Sega arcade conversions that wasn't too compromised by dropping to 8-bit and the ever-capricious randomizer pick which, curiously, chose a game from the system's most prolific game series but not any of the official ones.

Cyborg Hunter / Sonic Soldier Borgman

• Type: Selected
• Developer: Sega
• Release Year: 1988

The Sonic Soldier Borgman video game saw a localization that stripped all the anime references out without compromising its core, which would be a positive except the game was kinda whatever despite some innovations. Definitely a big difference between it and Zillion, despite being both first-party efforts (and it's a bit strange to see so many first-party tie-ins; it wasn't something Nintendo did all too often). Even so, the addition of a first-person cam and some non-linear exploration (if not quite at exploraction standard, since there's no point backtracking to earlier areas unless it's to heal) did make the generic side-scrolling shooting parts a little more palatable.

The achievement set here is pretty well-thought out with about half dedicated to usual item acquisition and progress. You don't have to fully complete every area to move on but going from A-B-C-D-E-F-G nets you items that are useful in the zone that immediately follows, if not more universally in the case of the guns. Navigating the last area without the jetpack gadget alone would be nightmarish. Of course, saying that, there are three achievements for skipping as many levels as you're allowed, as well as four tougher ones for beating each boss with only your starting punch. There's achievements related to the CODEC equivalent too: five that are unmissable, three that can be skipped by having the right items before she tells you to get them, and one for getting all five unmissable and all three of those skippable ones in one run. I could go back and get that, but... I think just getting most of this set suits me fine. It's a short enough game that the variations make for some interesting challenges at least (and there aren't any no-damage ones, yay).

• Achievements: 38 (of 43) / 88% / RR: x8.25

Gain Ground

• Type: Selected
• Developer: Sanritsu
• Release Year: 1991

Gain Ground is a top-down shooter in the Ikari Warriors/Commando mold, only rather than long vertically-scrolling stages each of this game's levels comprise a single screen with a clearly marked exit zone to head towards. What makes Gain Ground distinctive is its whole "warriors from across time come together" plotline that sees modern day riflemen fight side by side with primitive spearmen, mages, archers, bazooka wielders from the far future, and ninja. Each of the game's ten units have a standard firing mode and a special one that contributes to their usefulness: the grenadier can hit enemies higher or lower with their grenades (much like in Ikari Warriors) while the mages and ninja can set traps that either stun enemies or eliminate them should they wander over them. You start with three basic units and can acquire more by walking over their icons in the field and escorting them to the exit. With each world you move further forward in time, increasing the difficulty as you go from medieval crossbowmen to turrets to cyborgs. The game first hit arcades in 1988 and was developed by Sega, hitting both the Master System and Genesis in early 1991: in the former's case it only reached Europe and Brazil, since the system had become defunct in the other territories. Both console versions were developed by Sanritsu, which would later that year form SIMS: a joint venture between Sega and Sanritsu that would port many other Sega arcade games.

Gain Ground was one of my favorite Master System games growing up so it, along with Air Rescue from back in April, were dropped into this rotation purely because I wanted to see it again and also to determine how rusty I'd gotten. For one of these old arcade shooters it's very reasonable, allowing you to take fallen allies to the exit as a means of rescuing them (they can't be used again that level, but will be in future levels), as well as recruiting many additional and specialized units that you can enjoy experimenting with. You can also skip any level you wish for the first three worlds besides the boss fights though doing so means losing out on any hostages you could've rescued and added to your group, and it's definitely not a bad idea to march towards the end game with a veritable army at your back. Boss fights are the one case where you can't rescue anyone so care needs to be taken (and ideally some practice) and the last two worlds are not only as tough as hell but don't allow for level skipping nor do they contain any hostages, so that's about the point where the game decides "Hey, you've spent long enough on the cabinet, maybe let those waiting behind you have a turn?". The Master System version naturally suffers some slowdown on levels with a lot of enemies and projectiles flying around and the hit detection could've used some polishing but it's a pretty decent rendition, if one that had to jettison a lot to fit onto the cart. Also kinda neat? You can play as either Player 1 or Player 2 (or both) and all the characters are female for Player 2. They all have their own unique sprites and portraits too, but are otherwise functionally identical to their male counterparts. Unusual bit of representation for a game of this genre but I bet it was appreciated by the underserved female gaming audience for this console—marching around with valkyries, kunoichi, and goth sorceresses makes for a nice change at least. To this day I don't think I've played "real" Gain Ground so maybe my perception is warped but I always felt this was one of the better games on this system; I've just confirmed it again here and now.

This achievement set is also fantastic, mostly because it allows the level select cheat for all but the bog-standard "progress to the end of the game" milestones. Each stage (there's fifty total) has a "no dying" requirement that isn't as harsh as it sounds once you know which squadmates work best for which areas, though you do have to defeat all the enemies each time rather than just making a break to the exit (which would be too easy if you only had a handful of members to escort). Beyond that, every world has a stage assigned a "pacifist" achievement where you march your whole squad to the exit without killing anyone—some real nasty evasion challenges in there—and then there's a bunch of character-specific level clears, like defeating the first boss with the weakest unit (the spearman). Using the Special Mode, which not only lets you skip around levels but gives you one of every type of unit to practice with, meant all these achievements were easy enough to retry if you messed up. That one remaining achievement, which I very much rue, requires beating the game with a squad of less than six members: you can replace the weaker starters but you can't ever have more than five at once. This gets tougher around World 4 and 5 since there's no extras to rescue in case you lose someone. Once you have your five, it's pretty much a straight shot from the World 3 boss to the final confrontation, and those 21 levels get real unpleasant if you're trying to perfect them all. Worst of all is the final boss: it's a full-on battle of attrition since you can't ever hope to evade its bullets (it's the only level without a "no deaths" achievement attached to it) and just doing it with five people would require some insanely precise gameplay. It's a 50-pointer for good reason and exponentially harder than any of the others, so... I wussed out. 98%, though; that's nothing to sneeze at.

• Achievements: 81 (of 82) / 98% / RR: x4.19

Alex Kidd 3: Curse in Miracle World

• Type: Random
• Developer: Yéti Bomar
• Release Year: 2021

If you're penning a Master System feature there's only so long you can hope to elude the King of Janken himself, and Sega's erstwhile mascot, Alex Kidd. Like the legendary Son Goku except minus the everything, Alex Kidd is a little wiener with big ears, a big punch, and a proclivity for random-chance rock-paper-scissor matches in lieu of traditional boss fights, choosing to test the player's tolerance for arbitrary bullshit rather than their skill. There are five official Alex Kidd games for Master System (and just one for Mega Drive) but this isn't any of those. Curse in Miracle World is instead a pretty recent fan hack that seeks to drop the gimmicks from the later Alex Kidd games and stick to the main "chronology", which I believe was the original game (Miracle World) followed by the 1989 Mega Drive game Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle. I wasn't aware this series really had much in the way of continuity: looking through the names of this series, like "Alex Kidd in High-Tech World" or "Alex Kidd in Shinobi World", it felt more like it there was a whiff of desperation about it, like if they could just find the right setting for this moptopped goober he'd launch to the same heights as Mario. I like him more than Bubsy, at least?

You know, I did let myself hope for a moment that since this was a modern reimagining of the series that it would be far more approachable than the original games. Like how Indie throwback developers make concessions to account for decades of quality of life improvements and the like? Nope. The developer of this hack seemed adamant that this Alex Kidd not-sequel needed to be every bit as arbitrarily unplayable as the games it homages, denying any unfortunate fool who thought to boot this up out of idle curiosity the benefit of even a continue system or proper sprite collision, and it's just as miserable an experience as any Alex Kidd game you might care to mention. It takes some real courage to want to make a "warts and all" reboot for a series that was already 90% warts. In that regard at least, mission successful. Once again you're at the mercy of some not-great floaty jumping physics, a small-range punch where its area of effect seems to mystically shift per enemy and/or obstacle, vehicle sections that go way too fast and are immediately over the moment you brush against anything, traps everywhere you turn that each spawn an invincible ghost that homes in on you while passing through everything and moves just as fast as you (have fun eluding that), and of course the requisite janken boss battles that then become real ones if you humiliate the dude by winning enough times. The no continues thing was the real kicker though, and after reaching level 6—a snow level with invisible pitfalls and monkeys that keep pelting you with (lethal) snowballs from their perches—I'm disinclined to make up that lost ground a second time.

The achievement set would be cool if any of them allowed for a level select, though apparently a scant few of the harder ones do. Half the set are bonus challenges for those who have played each level a few times and know what to avoid, like hitting all the ? blocks (half of them tend to be those ghost traps I mentioned), defeating all the enemies (need to be careful here too, since some can just wander off the screen and despawn forever), complete a vehicle section without losing said vehicle (nigh impossible by design, since they're effectively shortcuts), and looking for secret passages with goodies at the end (actually useful info to know). Actually... now that I see the hardest achievement is completing the game without continues is making me reconsider some previous misconceptions—but, sadly, with some research it sounds like said continues are items that cost an arm and a leg and are only sold at certain vendors, so a huge hassle to procure in other words. As much as it hurts to take on a percentage deficit this major, believe me when I say that continuing to play this would hurt even more. Ah well, what are the odds we'll ever have to play another Alex Kidd game before this feature's done?

• Achievements: 11 (of 60) / 18% / RR: x2.90

The Weeb Weeview

Since this has been a grossly overstocked season for sequels to excellent shows, there's a risk that many of the originals that debuted this past month could get lost in the shuffle. Here's a smattering of opinions on the newcomers for summer '25 that I've ranked by how much I might recommend them (A.K.A.s are my own):

1. Gachiakuta (a.k.a. Recycle, Reuse, Revenge): Looks like Bones branched away from its overly nice shows like MHA and Mob Psycho 100 for some pure grungy revenge shounen and by gar it's been a spell. From its... I guess "trash metal" music drops to its vivid eye close-ups on a mentally disintegrating protagonist, it seems poised to be something a bit edgy and divergent from what everyone else has been doing lately (unless it's some minimal-budget, SA-implicating garbage for angry teens). Ironically, given the theme of a kid trapped in a nightmare world of human refuse, the visuals and animations both in combat scenes and out are damn clean. I've put this on the back-burner for now—these popular shounen things have a habit of getting to over 100 episodes long if you so much as blink, and that's a bit too much investment—but I might binge the whole lot later in the dead zone before October if there's enough effusive word of mouth since this will be a two-cour season (24 eps) and I have no idea what the autumn holds yet.
2. The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity (a.k.a. Rival Schools: United in Matrimony): The big romantic drama rival to My Dress-Up Darling Season 2 is this relatively simple but gorgeous anime about a kid from the rough school for boys falling for the valedictorian of the prestigious ladies' school next door, and vice versa. Given the animosity between the two schools it's mostly been an exercise in the usual Romeo and Juliet tropes (hopefully not all of them) but the unfolding of their burgeoning relationship from episode to episode makes it a riveting watch regardless. They're even focusing on ancillary characters like those in their separate friend groups, since I guess the central relationship on its own wouldn't carry a show like this, and I'm particularly invested in hearing more about the stern but sensitive Subaru who feels she owes a debt to the heroine Kaoruko for saving her from bullies, even if she's taking on an antagonistic role right now in trying to split the OTP apart.
3. Lord of Mysteries (a.k.a. We Have Bloodborne Back in Our Bizarre Pocket Dimension): Speaking of gorgeous, Lord of Mysteries is a Chinese show that requires some degree of viewer concentration to understand what's going on in each of its mini-feature length episodes but it feels like a journey that will be worth embarking upon for the visuals and Victorian-era worldbuilding alone. I've actually hit pause on this one since I started up Lies of P (above) given the lore for both is equally dense and pretty similar, so I figured I'd spare myself the confusion.
4. I Could Never Be Your Freaking Lover! Unless... (a.k.a. Bocchi the Scissors): Figured this would be a comedy going by the title but it's a bit more dramatic than I was anticipating, following an introvert trying to reinvent herself for high school whose social anxiety and miscommunication snafus aren't always played for goofs. She's as confused as anyone else why all these beautiful classmates keep falling for her, but for her supposed inability to express herself she tends to say exactly what they want to hear at the right moment, making the (if initially one-sided) romantic liaisons more believable than in typical harem stuff. The scene where she is almost molested by the pushy class madonna who always gets her way (her first "conquest") is given the amount of grace and gravity you'd hope for rather than being hand-waved away as "those wacky lesbians are at it again". It's a show taking itself more seriously than you'd freaking expect.
5. Bad Girl (a.k.a. More Petplay Per Pound Than "My Roommate is a Cat"): This would be the purely comedic foil to ICNBYFLU (that abbreviation makes it sound like some kind of medical charity) delivered in that Azumanga Daioh-style of the anime equivalent of a 4-koma, or 4-panel gag comic, with multiple bite-sized skits about a wannabe delinquent trying to charm her overachieving senpai by being a charismatic (read: terrible) troublemaker. Classic scheme of trying to get with the woman by sticking it to the man. As I surmised last month, this will all depend on your tolerance for mildly bawdy jokes about protagonist Yuu's horny dilemma of persisting with this struggle to get her love interest to acknowledge her as an equal or shrugging and deciding to go all-in on the current dynamic of being her puppy, praying to the gods of degeneracy that it becomes sexual somehow. Amusing enough but I'll have to see if it has enough material for a whole season; Shikanoko Nokonoko Koshitantan, the last one of these absurdist yuri-coded gagfests, absolutely did not fulfill any potential it may have had.
6. Detectives These Days Are Crazy! (a.k.a. Columbozo): A gag show about a has-been teen detective (now a middle-aged loser with scoliosis) who rediscovers his verve, sorta, thanks to a new teen assistant and the current teen heartthrob detective who looks up to him, for reasons that aren't super apparent, along with that guy's own ambiguously-aged assistant. It's a show that's heavy on non-sequiturs and reference humor, especially with regards to Japanese detective dramas, so the gags won't always land for an international audience but there are the occasional bright moments in each of the episodes I've seen so far. A hit and miss show if you aren't firmly entrenched in that part of the world's history with the crime mystery genre though it's not like it stopped many of us from appreciating Umineko and Ace Attorney, I suppose.
7. Secrets of the Silent Witch (a.k.a. On The (Z)Hex Spectrum): Very pretty show about a powerful witch enrolled in a noble wizard boarding school in order to bodyguard the kingdom's imperilled third Prince from the shadows. Her serious introvertedness makes this a lot harder for her, both the benevolent espionage and navigating highschool life in general (relatable), to the extent that you wonder if the rival sage that put her in this position wasn't doing so out of malice. She muddles through, though. What I like about this show is that they don't sugarcoat how she's on the autism spectrum, especially with how she'll only become super animated around others when talking about math which of course is also power in any thaumaturgical magic system, and likewise how the show avoids too much cringe comedy at her expense, instead often making things just work out for her and her skillset despite her obvious limitations elsewhere. It's not overly mean, in other words, which I've grown to appreciate more and more these days when we're surrounded by cruelty on every governmental level.
8. Busamen Gachi Fighter (a.k.a. Charisma Dump Stat): I think I assumed this was going to be a gag show since the premise is of a visually repellant dude who exchanged his looks for bonus building points during his character customization isekai process and keeps having to pretend he's not an utterly invincible "Absolute God" around his gaggle of normie companions, but it's slowly taking on an intriguing mystery side to it as said gaggle apparently all have a connection to the well-meaning but luckless man he was in his former life. Rather than his original plan of ditching this crew at the first opportunity—there's two women in the group and he decided to make himself effectively allergic to girls, and sex will just straight up kill him, which is some appreciated asexual representation—he decided to stick around and ensure they come to no harm, his magnanimous nature following him into this world in spite of his better judgment. Also, I'm pretty sure the show just had an Ys reference? So yeah, that's enough reason to stick with it for now but I'm not yet convinced it'll have some exciting new angle on the "OP isekai hero" cliché.
9. Apocalypse Bringer Mynoghra (a.k.a. Khorne and Mayonnaise Pizza): A little while back I caught one of these isekai shows where its fantasy world was more like a strategy game, rather than the standard monster-mashing RPGs, and this one's similar in that it took a terminally sick kid who always leaned towards the most evil faction in his Warhammer-esque TBS game because they were the hardest to win with (and thus the most rewarding). Now that he's become an overly nice version of Ainz Ooal Gown (as in, the titular overlord of Overlord) I'd be curious to see how the show parses his genial personality versus the various good factions his team of dark elves and bug monsters are going to be massacring en masse in due time for the sake of survival if nothing else. Having fond memories of burning the world down as an evil faction in classic Master of Magic—my PFP is the strongest hero on the villain's side—this show kinda speaks to me but I'm not sure if it has the juice to go the distance yet. Waiting to discover the ratio of war crime atrocities to "I'll invent proper irrigation practices so the Daemons of Chaos faction won't go hungry and need to resort to cannibalism".
10. See You Tomorrow at the Food Court (a.k.a. The Yappening): Quiet studious girl and intimidating gyaru (fashionable gal) who don't have much of a friend circle at their respective schools instead meet almost every day at their local mall's food court—already calling bullshit on those still being a thing—to vent about their lives and gush about their weirdly specific nerdy hobbies and interests in a freeing context where neither has to worry about what the rest of their schoolmates think. The episodes have the same format as Bad Girl where you'll get multiple "skits" per episode that don't necessarily connect narratively but continue to expand this unlikely friendship (and hints of more, though I imagine the show won't progress beyond that) between two weirdos that clearly appreciate having a conversational partner to bounce off. Definitely not a show for everyone given it's 90% back-and-forth conversations between the same two stationary teenagers but it's neat it exists, I suppose. It's like a Samuel Beckett play if he instead wrote "Waiting for Gacha Pulls".
11. Cultural Exchange With a Game Centre Girl (a.k.a. We Have Age of Consent in the UK Too, Buddy): I got a little squicked out by what initially seemed like a harmless show about a British girl getting the wrong idea about a Japanese game center employee's interest in her and her falling head over heels despite the cultural differences, after they decided to made the leads' ages 13 and 18 respectively. That puts him in college and her halfway through middle-school (which coincidentally is also the same year his little sister is in, whom the female lead befriends). The fact he wants to keep this slowly developing thing a secret from his sis because she'd think it'd be real friggin' weird that he's dating someone her age is a sure sign that something's not kosher here, though you could argue that he's trying to be delicate about not responding to her feelings until they're... nope, that's grooming. Well, the video game references are fun, at least?
12. The Stunned Hero and the Assassin Princesses (a.k.a. The One Slump Chump or The One Goof Doof): Really just a single joke on repeat here but I guess the show's serviceable enough if I just want something to stick on in the background. Three very dangerous ladies want to kill this one guy for independent reasons and yet, because he's a nigh-indestructible Saitama type and occasionally says something that makes their hearts skip a beat (rather than the boisterous dialogue he imagines saying in his head, if his social phobia would let him), they keep "accidentally" missing their shot. We're kind of in a loop right now as the three heroines keep alternating with their newest plan to murder the dude and it's starting to feel like a harem anime equivalent of the Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner cartoon, just with way less falling off cliffs. To its detriment. (Also, what's with all the socially maladroit protags this season? Just what do they think of people who watch anime habitually? Maybe I shouldn't press this further.)

Too Long, Do Relinks

• Indie Game of the Week 426: Axiom Verge 2
• Indie Game of the Week 427: Mouthwashing
• Indie Game of the Week 428: Ultros
• Indie Game of the Week 429: The Station
• Game OVA Season 4: Episode 3 — Sonic Soldier Borgman
• Game OVA Season 4: Episode 4 — Dr. Slump
• Entry-Level: The Mystic Quest to Make the Easiest Final Fantasy Game Actually Challenging