Shrugging At The Inconvenience Of Space

The Little Prince, A Little Princess, Fairytales, and The Galaxy Express is here too – Thoughts on “Ranking of Kings” and Some Other Things.

I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking “depressing fantasy series about how life is terrible for marginalised people in typical fantasy world” or “dark fairytale about how monsters aren’t actually the bad guys” are two premises that might drive people away because they’re very common attempts at deconstruction of typical fantasy things and also often done very badly. Which is why Ranking of Kings…

11 Years before “Hackers” There Was “Video Warrior Laserion”

In the absence of much English-language popularity or information about Video Warrior Laserion I ended up with a wildly inaccurate picture of what sort of a series it would be; it seemed like it was going to be a show about someone going inside a computer to fight computer viruses and so on, because it had a reputation of “a robot programmed in BASIC by a hacker”. And indeed the opening credits…

Stronger than God or Devil, but Mostly God, is Daimajin

Arrow Films released a very nice collection of the Daimajin films in 2021, and I have since watched two of the three. They’re honestly extremely interesting entries into the giant monster/tokusatsu milieu because they run with a lot of ideas that I feel would in turn turn into super robot anime tropes, and well worth a watch. I think it’s fair to say they’re both very different to a lot of…

“Gun sans Sword” – It’s Burst Angel

It’s somewhat rare for a series to be simply described as a solid throwback to the dubious “glory days” of the OVA boom, because that’s a big kind of claim with a lot to unpack inherent to it. Something trying to evoke a high-quality, highly-acclaimed production like Patlabor (1988), Aim for the Top! Gunbuster (1988) or Bubblegum Crisis (1987-91) is going to be doing something very different to…

“My Large Adult Son Committed A Few Warcrimes” – It’s Trails of Cold Steel 3 (Again)

This is going to be a fairly comprehensive look at Trails of Cold Steel 3 and as a result is probably going to be best read if you have played the game already. It isn’t often that a game makes a big enough changed impression on me to want to discuss its story at length both at the midway point and the conclusion, but – and this may be a flaw in some ways – it backloads a lot of its plot, and…

“It Would Be Nice If These Damn Aliens Stopped Attacking Us So We Could Colonise This Planet” – It’s Dairugger XV

I was interested enough in Armoured Fleet Dairugger XV to keep watching past a point I’d usually give up a series that was not interesting me. It was a super robot show I was not familiar with outside of knowing that it was perhaps the biggest-crewed robot of that era of super robots (with fifteen pilots), that it was (seemingly uncharitably) parodied by Robot Chicken for the length of its stock…

“It’s Great to Hear From You Again, We Should Catch Up Some Time When Work Calms Down a Bit.” – Initial Thoughts on Trails of Cold Steel 3

For all, with distance, I can see the grain of some good ideas in Trails of Cold Steel 2it is fundamentally a weirdly paced, unrewarding game which serves some necessary story purpose – marking the characters’ development from students reacting to an unfair world to young adults trying to take action against it – but does so in a slow, inconsequential fashion. The story it covers needed to be…

“My Choice In Friends Might Have Caused a Slight International Incident” – Schools, Politics and War in “Fire Emblem Three Houses” and “Trails of Cold Steel”

School-set RPGs are not uncommon as a concept and so do not, themselves, need much specific introduction or explanation. Nevertheless, there is a subset that I find somewhat more interesting – those which take the idea of an academy for the young and influential to learn martial and political skills so they may become future leaders. The big one, for a while, was Trails of Cold Steel; I’ve…

Tabletop Game Review: Acceptable Loss

It’s been a while since I reviewed one of these narrative games, but a recent conversation about the RPG Dread and its use of a physical, inevitable death timer in a Jenga tower to evoke the progression of a horror film got me revisiting a game from the collection I downloaded.

Acceptable Loss (by @rpgnatalie ) is a simple game, although perhaps a little more complex than Dread in order to…

Tabletop Game Review: Laser Beams Like So Many Stars

This article was originally written for Who Dares Rolls (www.whodaresrolls.com) and is reproduced here with permission.

Laser Beams… is by Taylor Smith (@whimsymachine)

In the game’s own words, its premise is as follows:

“You are a huge fan of mechs and their amazing pilots. You love to watch their heroics on the news, you visit when pilots come to your town, you own multiple letterman jackets…

“The Battle Warehouse is Even More On Fire Than In Winspector” – It’s FIRE FORCE

Quote, of course, from the inimitable @dril

It is sadly possible that before long I will be intensely frustrated with Fire Force, because the things I liked about its first episode are things that will probably end up less prominent, and there is a whole fascinating world of things I will not like lurking in the wings unless it lives up to some interesting foreshadowing and pulls off some good…

Tabletop Game Review – 6 Minutes of Power Remaining

This article was originally written for Who Dares Rolls (www.whodaresrolls.com) and is reproduced here with permission.

Note: This article also includes some references to personal experiences of death and loss, and discusses those themes.

6 Minutes of Power Remaining is by Kris Ruff

A lot of the games in the Emotional Mecha Jam focus on humanising the mech in these mecha stories – often through…

Tabletop Game Review – Death Sentence

This article was originally written for Who Dares Rolls (www.whodaresrolls.com) and is reproduced here with permission.

Note: This article also includes some references to personal experiences of death and loss, and discusses those themes in detail.

It took a lot longer than I initially assumed it would for me to find the right words to review Jeff Ellis’ (@manyeyedmonster’s) Death Sentence; I…

Tabletop Game Review – 36 Minutes

This article was originally written for Who Dares Rolls (www.whodaresrolls.com) and is reproduced here with permission.

Christine Prevas’ (@cprevas) 36 Minutes is not an enjoyable game to play. It sits strangely within the genre it evokes because it plays out in real time a very particular sequence of suffering and death that absolutely would have a huge, unwelcome emotional impact on some…

Two Illustrative Playthroughs of “Alone in the Station Remnants”

This article was originally written for Who Dares Rolls (www.whodaresrolls.com) and is reproduced here with permission.

These two pieces of short fiction are my attempts to play the solitaire RPG Alone in the Station Remnants.

The most interesting thing I found about the experience was the challenge it presented in holding two registers or prose voices in mind and being able to switch between the…

Tabletop Game Review – Alone in the Station Remnants

Note: This article was originally written for Who Dares Rolls (www.whodaresrolls.com) and is reproduced here with permission.

A screenshot from Ace Combat 7 (2019), illustrating perhaps the sort of derelict military spaces that AitSR is about exploring.

Alone in the Station Remnants by caro (@seaexcursion) is, a very interesting solitaire writing exercise/character piece; solitaire roleplaying…

“Vengeance.” How Gun X Sword Does, And Does Not, Endorse It.

As I continue to watch Gun X Sword I’m struck by several things. Firstly it does not get significantly less uneven in quality. Secondly, the El Dora V episode feels even by the halfway point like a weird anomaly of sincerity – although other episodes, in their own ways, hit equally weird and interesting concepts. Thirdly it is a series that has an unbelievably strong villain even before he…