#pixel grotto

I got to play Resident Evil Requiem for work over the last two and a half weeks. I didn't write the review, but I 100% agree with its assessment that this is a highly competent game, but also one that stumbles about in its second half, fascinatingly reminiscent of a zombie in its death throes.

(The rest of this post will get real itchy and tasty with spoilers, so if you haven't played Requiem yet, beware.) I am going to attempt to summarize Requiem's poorly-explained story here, mostly for my own benefit, because the game expects you to read a 60-page document called "Grace's Report" upon completing it that still doesn't detail things well. Anyhow, the newbie lead is Grace Ashcroft, an FBI analyst who gets sent into the field by her boss to investigate the hotel where her adoptive mother was murdered. (Holy shit, take that up with HR immediately.)

Grace is secretly a child created by Umbrella Corp founder Oswell Spencer, who had an epiphany in his final years and realized that zombie-fueled genocide is actually kinda bad. And so he raised a regular baby before passing her on to Alyssa Ashcroft, one of the survivors of the oft-overlooked PS2 spinoff Resident Evil Outbreak, which is the first sign of Requiem dipping deep into the fan service test tube.

Unbeknownst to Grace, Spencer also gave her subconscious knowledge of a password that can activate a serum called Elpis, which counters all viral strands that Umbrella and its competitors had a role in making. In other words, Elpis is a trump card that Spencer created in his final days to screw over all of the other eugenics nutjobs in the RE universe, in a real "it is not enough that I succeed; others should fail" fashion. Two of these nutjobs include the baddies of Requiem - a creepy doctor named Victor Gideon and a jobber clone of Albert Wesker named Zeno, who is never actually identified as a clone throughout the narrative, but is 100% a clone. I mean, just look at the screenshot below.

Both Victor and Zeno don't know that Elpis is an antiviral. They think Spencer's last will and testament is a bigger and badder bioweapon, and they want Grace to open it up for them. After being kidnapped by Victor, Grace escapes into Rhodes Hill, a health facility/bioweapon testing center, where she gets chased by dozens of zombies and this game's stalker enemy, a big mutated girlie simply dubbed The Girl. Along the way, she makes friends with a little test subject named Emily, and also gets saved by Leon Kennedy, who's investigating the case and gives her a sexy revolver dubbed "Requiem" to survive. Hey, they did that thing where they put the name of the game into the game.

All of the stuff in the Rhodes Hill section of Requiem is ace. Playing as Grace is classic survival horror goodness, and the layout of the hospital features all of the puzzles, backtracking, and inventory management that made me fall in love with this franchise when I did my massive Resident Evil series playthrough almost a decade ago. There are some new wrinkles to the formula as well, coming in the form of zombies that retain pieces of their old intelligence and act in varied ways. Enter a chef zombie, who Grace must avoid as he marches back and forth in the kitchen with a giant cleaver. Then there are two singer zombies who the game describes as possessing "main character energy," and they'll unleash banshee-style screams if you get too close. These little personalities make what would pass for typical cannon fodder all the more endearing, and it's a wonder that Resident Evil didn't think of this sort of thing earlier.

Grace's Rhodes Hill nightmare is made more breathless by the inclusion of a few tidbits as Leon, who has so obviously had enough of this shit that he immediately starts kicking the undead left and right, whacking them to bits with his hatchet and chainsawing them as if he still hasn't learned how to use garden tools properly since his RE4 service in Spain. These are the action-orientated gulps of air that punctuate Grace's extremely tense survival horror moments, and they are very fun, especially when ya boy just darts through sections of the facility that Grace struggled with, blasting undead heads to pulp because you know he's seen far too much of this nonsense since the '90s. There's one killer sequence where Leon has to defend Grace from a rooftop with a sniper rifle that had me yelling out "LET'S GOOO" at very high intervals.

Unfortunately, the Rhodes Hill stuff ends about halfway through the game, and Grace gets squirreled away by Zeno and Victor. Leon takes center stage to follow them to the nuked-out remains of Raccoon City, which marks one of the first times that this series has ventured into the post-apocalyptic setting that nearly all of its lackluster live-action interpretations have insisted upon.

And it's here where Requiem stumbles. Instead of navigating tightly-designed corridors filled with personality-laden enemies, Leon's Raccoon City slog is dominated by a beige environment, typical zombie chuds, and a fetch quest to collect parts of a detonator. I've always believed that Resident Evil should never veer too hard into the dystopia inhabited by The Last of Us and The Walking Dead, where mutations have inherited the Earth and you play as a survivor trying to eke out an existence amongst them. It's just not as interesting as the series' forte, which is all about living in the existing capitalist hellscape that is the modern era, except one where corporations have learned to make and use the undead for profit. Leon's section navigating the ruins of Raccoon City proves me right.

The search for detonator pieces does eventually end, replaced with a foray into Raccoon City Police Department. And it's here that the game tries to emphasize the fact that Leon is coming home, grappling with the PTSD of 26 years ago while slowly dealing with the reality that he too has been infected by the T-Virus, a convenient twist that Requiem handwaves by saying it's due to prolonged contact with zombies over the years. You'll then walk through the hallowed halls that Leon navigated as a rookie in RE2, and the game clearly wants you to feel the passionate pull of nostalgia. It hopes to tug at the heartstrings of longtime fans, eliciting a tear from their eyes as they peer upon scenes they haven't seen in an eternity - even though all of the assets on display aren't really that old, as the entire police station map is just a dirtied-up version of what was made in 2019 for the Resident Evil 2 remake.

Some of the Easter Eggs here are good, like the inclusion of Tofu in RPD if you visit S.T.A.R.S. office and examine Jill Valentine's old beret. But much of it feels misplaced. For instance, the S.T.A.R.S. sequence would be more meaningful if it were Chris Redfield or even Jill herself doing the examining, since those two were, after all, the actual S.T.A.R.S. members of the franchise, while Leon was just a regular cop. (Once again, I long for Capcom to bring Jill Valentine out of forced retirement.)

Other bits feel way too convenient. Zeno just happens to have a Tyrant in his back pocket who looks like Mr. X, and so Leon gets to duel his old foe, which is neat at first but also feels like a very "let's hit you over the head with how rad Leon became over the last two decades" sequence. This feeling is compounded in the final area of the game, the ARK secret facility lurking beneath Raccoon City, where longtime secret character HUNK appears to challenge Leon to a duel. The game calls him the "Commander," just as it refuses to identify Zeno as a Wesker clone, but make no mistake, this is HUNK. If you parry correctly you can kill him without much trouble, and the entire fight is the equivalent of Boba Fett coming back for two minutes in a Star Wars movie only to be unceremoniously impaled by a CGI-deaged Luke Skywalker. (Has this happened yet? I stopped caring about Star Wars years ago.)

This is not meaningful fan service. Rather, it feels designed to elicit a quick and dirty "holy shit" reaction from streamers, and it succeeds at doing so, if the Leon vs. HUNK reaction round-up on YouTube is any indication. But HUNK's cameo doesn't advance the plot in any major fashion, and one could say this about most of the relevations in Requiem's last moments. Lickers appear, largely to hit home more RE2 vibes. Zeno dies without anyone blinking an eye. Victor mutates into a Nemesis (but not the actual Nemesis that everyone knows and remembers from RE3). Grace heals Leon with Elpis, allowing him to presumably continue kicking ass for another 10 Resident Evils. Emily somehow survives despite mutating into a monster, so that Capcom can have a happy ending for Grace.

I had a rollicking time playing through this stuff when it was on screen, but thinking about it after the fact makes me feel cynical. After its initial setup, Requiem quickly becomes a game that seems desperate for players to adore it, throwing brushstrokes of the past at them like a painter dying to recreate their old style. But Grace's story of learning her past connections with Spencer and Leon's tale of dealing with trauma never align as well as they could have, resulting in a game that feels hammered together from two disparate halves, with Capcom hoping that nobody noticed along the way.

The entire premise of Requiem is somewhat flawed from the getgo, because we're expected to believe that Oswald Spencer - made out to be an utterly reprehensible individual in every other Resident Evil game - somehow became a better person in his final days. But if one were to accept this as a retcon, then there are ways in which Requiem could've been cohesively rearranged. The entire game could have been set in and around Rhodes Hill, for one, focusing more on Grace's story with Leon serving as backup, the role he excels at during the first half. Without the distractions of Raccoon City, Mr. X round 2, and HUNK, we could've had a scaled-down, focused plot about Grace's origins that perhaps provided a little more detail about Spencer's change of heart.

Alternately, if Requiem truly desired to bring players back to RE2's heyday, it should've axed Grace Ashcroft entirely. She's an endearing protagonist, and I do like how Requiem serves as a complete story for her, but this game could've easily starred Sherry Birkin, who appears behind the scenes as Leon's radio helper. She too is suffering from the T-Virus, and her inclusion is once again mostly confined to fluffy fan service rather than anything meaningful. But she could've certainly been recast as the lead role, perhaps with her going off to investigate Raccoon City after hearing rumours of the ARK facility beneath it. This would give Leon more than enough reason to star as the game's deuteragonist, considering their shared history, and it would've made all of the throwbacks to RE2 more pointed. Hell, if Capcom really wanted to elicit hardcore emotions, why not bring Claire Redfield back as well?

Alas, this does not seem to be Capcom's strategy with Resident Evil. Seemingly logical decisions, like making a game starring Sherry - once a little girl in RE2 who is now a grown woman committed to fighting bioterrorism on her own terms - are cast away, probably replaced with the argument of "oh, Sherry has no connection to Elpis, and she's too well-trained for the beginning of the game to be scary if you're playing as her." To this, I shake my head. If Requiem wants to convince us that Spencer regretted his life's work right before he died, surely a retcon of Sherry's origins that link her with Elpis is possible. Sherry could also have simply acted as a desk agent ever since the conclusion of RE6, justifying the limited inventory and more frightening gameplay that she'd be saddled with in comparison to Leon.

I am reminded, for a moment, that missed opportunities are par the course for Capcom. I am a Mega Man fan, after all, as well as a Breath of Fire fan, and I have seen how this company has bungled decisions multiple times with both series. So this is nothing new, and I suspect that Resident Evil's recent aggressive release cycle has also forced Capcom to prioritize pumping these games out quickly rather than carefully, ensuring that they're composed of bits that can be tweaked for future usage. You see evidence of this all throughout Requiem. Aside from the recyled second half, there are models just waiting to be reskinned for the inevitable Code Veronica, RE0, and RE5 remakes. (The Titan Spinner spider boss, Spencer's inclusion, and not Wesker Zeno, right down to his Matrix-esque powers.)

I felt this way when I played Village a few years back, which seemed like its setting was an excuse to make assets for the RE4 remake. And even though I ultimately like Requiem more than the second part of Ethan Winters' story, I cannot help but feel like this game exudes fumbled potential. What was supposed to be a requiem for the franchise as a whole, hence the name, comes across more as an example of how Capcom will continue to make Resident Evils as fast as they can, creating repurposable elements each year while never really letting old characters like Leon rest, and never really elevating what should be obvious choices at successors - like Sherry - to the driver's seat.

Requiem sold something like 5 million copies in a few days, so obviously, there are plenty of players who care little about these things and will eat all of it up. I probably will too, honestly. But I recall that Resident Evil's finest chapters were ones that did something new - RE2, RE4, RE7. Requiem dabbles with this, dangling its personality-filled zombies in your face. But ultimately, it is no RE2. It is the latest product from an annual release machine, too intent on forcefully trying to make us embrace the past and admire its cleverness. As a result, it pushes its finest parts to the rear while elevating the wrong parts to the forefront.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the bonkers Final Puzzle, an ARG-style challenge that had players from across the world coming together to crack a code that involved flushing toilets 8 times in a row and figuring out the distance from the Earth to the moon. And after all of that effort, what did the community get? An achievement and some measly currency points in the in-game shop. Blah. Requiem is fine, but Resident Evil as a whole can be much, much better.

There are several games I've written about here over the years that I enjoyed, yet were recipients of a mixed-to-negative mainstream reaction. See Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 and DmC: Devil May Cry. Now, you can add Gotham Knights to the list, which I started playing for breaks after work two months ago and found myself liking immensely.

Gotham Knights came out in 2022, and was released at about the same time that I proposed to my wife and we planned to move from the US to the UK. And so life got in the way, and I didn't get around to playing it until now. Public perception told me that the game was "mid," that it failed to live up to the Batman: Arkham series, etc. I must take the contrarian POV here, because after finishing Gotham Knights I actually enjoyed several aspects of it more than Arkham Knight, also known as the game that tries to keep the identity of its titular antagonist a secret, despite practically everyone who's read more than five Batman comics figuring out that it was Jason Todd within the first few hours.

Here's my take as someone who used to run a Batman fan account on Instagram (for more than six years with 30k+ followers, if I do say so myself) - the Arkham titles are superb from a gameplay perspective (well, maybe not the Batmobile fights in Arkham Knight) but they are not sacrosanct. With the exception of Arkham Origins (which was incidentally made by WB Montréal, the company behind Gotham Knights), I've never especially vibed with their storylines, which veer on the side of Joker overexposure and a specific interpretation of Batman seemingly inspired by how the character was consistently portrayed in the late '90s and 2000s - as an utter asshole always at war with his companions, shutting Robin, Batgirl, Nightwing and the others off at every conceivable opportunity.

The ideal Batman game that exists in my brain has always been one that would embrace the concept of the Bat Family, simply because my preferred version of Bruce Wayne is a man who was robbed of his family as a child, but rebuilds it in his own way as an adult via superheroic allies. Sadly, the Arkham series barely acknowledged Batman's connections with his wards, aside from brief DLC and a few tag-team missions in Arkham Knight, which were among the best parts of that game.

Gotham Knights is therefore pure fanservice for my perhaps biased tastes. Not only do we have Dick Grayson, Barbara Gordon, Tim Drake, and Jason Todd (who is finally presented well here, a rarity for the poor second Robin in any piece of media - including comics themselves), but we also get a tale where Batman is dead, killed in action by Ra's al Ghul. The various Bat kids, robbed of their mentor, must find their own path in Gotham and deal with obstacles like Harley Quinn, Mr. Freeze, Clayface, the League of Shadows, and the Court of Owls - probably the most interesting new threat in Batman comics to have emerged in the last two decades, even if their best story is still the one that introduced them.

The game isn't 100% perfect in its characterization of any of the aforementioned characters, with Harley, Freeze, and Clayface coming off as carictures designed primarily for co-op boss battles. Nevertheless, the Bat Family shines. Nightwing is the pack leader struggling with walking in the shadow of the man who raised him, Batgirl is the sole team member who's lost not one, but two father figures in rapid succession (Jim Gordon's dead in this universe), Red Hood is grappling with post-Lazarus Pit anger as he always is (but this time he's actually in therapy, which the game portrays well), and Tim Drake is the impressionable youngster dealing with self-doubt. They all feature unique playstyles that match their personalities, and while WB Montréal took a few noticeable liberties for the sake of varied gameplay (hello, Red Hood who is infused with Lazarus energy that makes him double jump), their respective abilities and stories were, once again, major fanservice for me.

Atop all of this is the spectre of Batman himself, who might die impressively in the intro but lingers on thanks to audio logs left behind for his kids, training mission openings, and a few twists and turns near the end. This is a Batman who is probably still a hardass in certain regards, just like his Arkham self, but also exemplifies the characterization that I prefer - that of a man who's assembled a found family and is proud of them. When so many pieces of non-comic Batman media completely ignore this aspect of the character, focusing on easier-to-convey interpretations like the noir-infused loner or the cold manipulator, it's refreshing to see a product embrace the human side of Bruce Wayne. I think in the world of video games, only the Telltale series (also severely underrated) displayed an equal appreciation for the man behind the cowl.

Good level design in a Soulslike is vital, and can serve as a nice justification of all of the backtracking you need to do after you die. The ideal is to make you feel satisfied that you've learned the ins and outs and shortcuts of an area, kind of like how you might feel satisfied learning the nuances of a new neighborhood in real life. A solid Soulslike level should scratch an "a-ha!" itch deep in the brain and feature branching paths that intersect at some point, bringing players back to their origins via a route they never imagined possible.

After putting 90 hours into Wuchang: Fallen Feathers for work, I'm convinced that it contains the best level design I've seen in a Soulslike in recent memory. This is a wonderful thing. But it's somewhat tempered by the fact that the game also contains some of the worst habits of a Soulslike (and modern gaming in general) that I've come across.

The intricate level design becomes apparent in the first major area, the village of Worship's Rise. There are so many pathways in and out of the village's corridors. Doors that lead to courtyards that lead to backrooms where you can nab an item, sneak up behind a heavy enemy for a backstab, or find a ladder that leads to a rooftop. Said rooftops are filled with more enemies who were previously inaccessible, and if you happen to cross enough rooftops, you'll find a staircase that leads to a hidden boss, a tree that you can kick down to take you back to the safe hub point, and a pathway that circuitously leads to the side door at the start of the region that was previously inaccessible.

It's all such a delicious example of Matryoshka doll design, if you will - routes hidden within other routes, all of which meld together to create a place that feels not just like an area in a video game, but a living community with all of the messy, roundabout vagaries that result from humans living in close proximity with other humans. It's these levels that I appreciate the most in Soulslikes, and they're part of the reason why I don't like Elden Ring as much as many other people - because when you take one of the hallmarks of this genre, which is tight area memorization, and then make it open world, the framework gets both watered down and overwhelming as a result.

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers certainly doesn't feature watered down levels for most of its playtime. The final area is the exception - it's far too "video gamey" in that you've got to pull levers to operate lifts and collect McGuffins to manifest platforms across wide-open spaces. That said, it's about as meh as the last, literally unfinished stretch of Black Myth: Wukong - the game that this will get endlessly compared to, seeing as they're both made-in-China Soulslikes.

What Wuchang does do is get carried away with "gotcha" moments, pasting them atop the aforementioned wonderfully designed levels to induce a sour taste in your mouth. An enemy jumping out from the shadows to gank you from behind, rubble that falls from above to wreck you unexpectedly, a sudden bridge collapse when you're desperately just trying to make it to the next save point. And then you get to the save shrines themselves, some of which are actual MIMICS that will kill you after you've just endured a boss! A certain amount of this stuff is par the course for the genre. But Wuchang gets perverse with it, exhibiting what someone on the game's Reddit accurately described as "too much malice."

Case in point - halfway through the game, you're dealing with a snow level. Hidden in the snow are landmines that will decimate your health if you step on them. But if you stand in the snow for too long, you'll also get the Frostbite status effect, which will wreck your Stamina. Meanwhile, enemies lurk throughout the landscape, including beefy rebel warlords who will carve you in half with their blades. On top of that, you'll occasionally run into smaller mooks piloting cannons from afar, who will fire at you when you least expect it. Oh, and then there are also snipers lurking on towers far above you, and these wankers will shoot exploding fire arrows at you, often around the same time as the cannons. Like, does this game actually need all of this nonsense happening at once? Could you at least remove one of those obstacles?

This "malice" extends to other aspects of Wuchang. The two most troublesome guides I had to pen for work were on all 24 bosses and all 4 endings. It's an ongoing problem in this genre that the playbase has gotten substantially good, and so devs resort to the same tricks they used back in the NES era to extend a game's lifespan. Make everything a pain in the ass, especially the bosses, and Wuchang takes that to heart. Some of these attackers have such nonstop hitstrings that you'll need to resort to cheese tactics to surmount them, and while the game's generous free respec system lets you switch up weapons at any time to develop a suitable build, I do feel like there are some battles that are just intended to unfairly wreck you.

NPC quests act similarly. The good ending is entirely dependent on fulfilling three questlines, none of which are signposted well, and there's a point of no return where you can accidentally lock yourself into the bad ending if you agree to help another NPC. He does indicate that assisting him will change the world irrevocably, but my main issue is that he stands at a very odd point in the level - on a road next to a save shrine, in front of a cave that you technically need to explore in order to encounter key story revelations. Why not put him on the other side of the cave instead? I can only assume that the devs were kind of hoping that some players would lock themselves into an unideal scenario, and once again, that's "malice" for you.

I point out all of these things only because Wuchang is probably one of my top games of 2025, simply on the strength of the overall level design alone. But when they got that aspect down so well, I can't help but wish they'd sidestepped the assholery prevalent in other parts of the game. These levels are already superb - you don't need to inject them with a thousand and one moments that only exist to upend the player and toss them about like a ragdoll. The same goes for the bosses and NPCs - all of the technically good elements are there, but there have been intentional wrenches tossed into the cogworks that cause aggravation and bafflement.

The titular protagonist Wuchang herself is emblematic of these foibles. She's very much a "this is what Mainland China audiences find attractive" heroine, and boasts skimpy outfits that were supposedly added to Wuchang: Fallen Feathers after its initial 2021 reveal was criticized and Stellar Blade picked up subsequent acclaim for featuring a nearly naked protagonist. Some of the sexy clothes make sense, since Wuchang's supposed to be a former pirate, but the ones that resemble nothing but underwear are goofy detractions from the overall vibe of the game, which is a serious tale about Wuchang trying to resurrect her dead sister. Considering the large amount of normal armor options that cover Wuchang up entirely, one has to wonder if the game's sex appeal was dialed up in the eleventh hour - and once again, the devs didn't have to do this. Their product, and the protagonist headlining said product, were both good enough.

Around the end of last year I made the decision to get into Goblin Slayer, and I've now gone through every chapter of the manga released in English, including all of the spin-offs. I've also skimmed parts of the light novels and anime, and I even did a readthrough of the Goblin Slayer roleplaying game with my buddy Daniel of Asians Represent, mostly to see how well it translated bits and pieces of Sword World, the most popular fantasy TTRPG in Japan.

In short, I know the franchise well by this point, and I like it, which is not what I expected. In fact, I steered clear of Goblin Slayer for years because of its reputation. If you're unaware, when the anime adaptation came out in 2018, it turned heads for depicting sexual violence in the very first episode. Basically, newbie adventurers go down into a dungeon, attempt to fight some goblins, and suffer terrible consequences, with the women of the party facing the sort of fate you might expect. It's a plot point intended to communicate to the viewer how awful goblins are in this world, and it also offers justification for the titular Goblin Slayer to show up on the scene to save the only survivor, Priestess. Goblin Slayer kills all of the goblins responsible for the attack, and he even goes the extra mile to unearth a hiding spot of goblin children. When Priestess shows some reservations at slaughtering kids, Goblin Slayer remarks that there's no such thing as a good goblin before stomping the little ones to bits.

In case you didn't know, Goblin Slayer is based on Kumo Kagyu's Dungeons & Dragons adventures. There's probably some influence sneaking in from Sword World, Tunnels & Trolls, and Wizardry, since those are the often-cited building blocks of Western fantasy tropes in Japan, but D&D is definitely at the forefront of the recipe. And knowing that Goblin Slayer evolved from D&D is what made me want to read it. (Well, that and the main character's armor design - dare I say that GobSlayer possesses one of the simplest yet coolest armors in all of existence.)

However, when I run D&D myself, I always say that all three of the things that this franchise begins with (bioessentialism, sexual violence, and violence against kids) are off-limits. So why does Goblin Slayer get a begrudging pass from me?

It's probably because I see the series as a meta analysis of D&D, right down to the tendency of most Dungeon Masters to get needlessly edgy with their campaign story arcs. Put another way, this is a 3.5e campaign where the star player has min/maxed himself around only one thing: the best possible build required to kill goblins. He's somehow managed to gain 15 levels by doing this, and he comes up with incredible battle strategies that the rest of his party quickly fall in line with. Every time I see GobSlayer pull off some ridiculous tactic to take down a foe, like the time when he links a portal scroll to the bottom of the ocean and proceeds to unleash the raging tides of the sea against an ogre, I can't help but shake my head and mutter to myself, "Damn, that's cool."

Then there's the more obvious fan service. And I don't mean "fan service" in the sense of pantsu shots or big boobed femmes, though Goblin Slayer does have a lot of that. (Hi, Cow Girl, childhood friend of the main character.) No, I'm talking about the fantasy roleplaying fan service. For instance, GobSlayer and his buddies fight creatures out of every edition of the Monster Manual. There are obviously goblins up the wazoo, but you can also expect beholders, drow, liches, oni, and even a mythologically-accurate tarasque, which shows up in Goblin Slayer: Year One.

There’s also a dungeon crawling aspect as GobSlayer and his party systematically plan out their roles and tactics everytime they delve into a hole in the ground. There's constant talk of who needs to be in the "frontline" and "backline," which are terms right out of Sword World, and Dwarf Shaman and Priestess are often chatting about how they can only use their spells a select number of times a day, which is that Vancian magic we all know and love/hate. Dai Katana, a franchise prequel that tells the story of a samurai and his comrades, outright feels like Etrian Odyssey in how it systemically shows the party tackling a megadungeon level by level, mapping as they go. (This does get repetitive over time, and I liked Dai Katana the least out of all the Goblin Slayer spinoffs. The characters have cool designs though, especially the mantis-like myrmidon dude.)

Finally, there's the idea that GobSlayer's realm, the Four-Cornered World, is a literal four-cornered game board lorded over by "gods" who are just enjoying a cosmic tabletop campaign. The more you read, the more this becomes clear. Everyone's referred to by their class or job titles rather than their names, after all, and a major arc in Year One involves GobSlayer assisting a mage who wants to enter the realm of the gods and "travel beyond the game board." After the pair ascend to the top of a seemingly endless tower (I do dig a reverse dungeon crawl that goes skyward rather than downwards), the mage disappears as her role in the campaign narrative that the "gods" have developed presumably ends. And last but not least, GobSlayer himself is constantly referred to as an average miniature on the battle map who somehow took on a life of his own by surviving whatever threats the cosmic GMs tossed at him. "He does not let anyone roll the dice," the tagline for the franchise goes.

I love all of this stuff. Maybe I'm giving Goblin Slayer too much credit, but I see this series as a deconstruction of what it means to sit at a table and imagine lives and stories for a diverse cast of characters, riffing off of fantasy concepts first assembled by Gary Gygax and his contemporaries back in the 70s. I can't be that off-base with this assumption, seeing as how characters in Goblin Slayer regularly "curse Gygax" when stuff goes wrong.

But just as Gary Gygax had questionable views when it came to a wide variety of things (like women, for instance), Goblin Slayer's got icky bits that can't be swept under the rug. This is a franchise that depicts female victims in titillating poses when they’re being abused. Goblin Slayer isn't alone in this regard - plenty of other seinen manga exhibit this nasty habit, including fan-favorites like Berserk - but it feels all the more annoying here because Goblin Slayer presents its assault scenes mostly at the very beginning for the sheer sake of shock value. As the series goes on, sexual violence disappears from the narrative almost entirely, as if Kumo Kagyu and his collaborators realized that it shouldn't have been emphasized in the first place. Instead, we're left with an interesting tale about GobSlayer moving through trauma (his family was killed by goblins when he was a kid, you see) and slowly learning how to feel again as he surrounds himself with the found family that is an RPG party. That's a good story, and a heartwarming one. Unfortunately, it's buried under a veneer that will likely turn many away.

I can't blame anyone for noping out of Goblin Slayer due to the sexual violence. I also can't blame anyone who doesn't play TTRPGs for not fully understanding the appeal of witnessing GobSlayer and his buddies strategize about the best way to defeat hobgoblins. But personally speaking, Goblin Slayer hit me in some good places, warts and all. I was fully prepared to write the franchise off as grimdark schlock, but it surprised me - and after reading up on some of its contemporaries, like Redo of Healer (which really is schlock) I'm further convinced that the series is smarter than it appears. It's just a shame that the smart bits are held back by the same problematic tropes that often cause D&D itself to falter. (Remember that whole orc discourse from 2020?)

For better or for worse, Goblin Slayer is representative of all sides of traditional tabletop roleplaying: the critical successes that celebrate imagination and comraderie, the critical failures that dehumanize women and veer too far into edgelord territory, and everything in between. The franchise has its problems, for sure, but there are moments when it shines - just like the glint of a well-painted miniature resting on the edge of a four-cornered game board.

After eight months of reading Berserk, I finally finished all 380 chapters that have currently been published. I probably could have come to the end sooner, but if I'm going to be very honest, I usually only read manga when I'm on the toilet. So that's why it took so long.

It was certainly something to have Guts as my companion during 32 weeks, a digit that is close to the number of years that Berserk has been publishing. The series originally started around 1988, with a prototype story that set the stage for what would later become the self-proclaimed "strongest fantasy comic." I was born that year, so this manga is as old as I am, and it's hard to find a similar dark fantasy comic that started back then and is still unfinished. I suppose Bastard!! is a close relative, but Bastard!! doesn't ever seem to be coming back from hiatus.

On the subject of hiatuses, I feel lucky that I binged Berserk all at once, because if I had taken to it in the late '90s or 2000s - when most English-reading fans probably dove in, thanks to the 1997 anime adaptation - the slog might've been too much for me. (How many years did Guts and friends spend on that damn boat? Eight? In retrospect, it's funny. If I had been dealing with it at the time, I might've lost my mind.) And then there's the fact that Berserk has outlived its creator, Kentaro Miura, who passed away in 2021 at the all-too-young age of 54 - a testament to how unhealthy the life of an eternally overworked mangaka is.

Berserk is a rare beast, a longrunning work that outlived its creator and is now being finished by people close to him. It's also a work that has evolved over time, and returning to those early chapters after having consumed the whole thing is tough. There's so much mistreatment of women, such gritty '80s violence, so many instances of a young Miura including something brash that probably seemed cool to a guy in his 20s. I wrote about Goblin Slayer some time ago, and how that franchise received criticism for its shock value reliance on sexual assault. Berserk is guilty of the same faults, and takes them to deeper levels. After all, this is a series that has its opening panels begin with the protagonist in mid-thrust, copulating with a woman who transforms into a demon. Then she's called a "bitch" and has her head blasted off via Guts' prosthetic arm cannon.

If I'd read Berserk in my hornier and angrier years, I probably would've been fascinated by this stuff. As an adult, though, I look at these scenes and realize that they probably set the stage for many of the bad habits that have emerged in seinen manga. Even though Miura's supposedly said he regrets the opening sex scene, there's still the fact that the edginess continues through the Golden Age Arc, the series' fan-favorite saga that tells Guts' origin. Guts himself is molested by an older member of his mercenary party as a child, and in a depressing combination of problematic stereotypes, the guy happens to be one of the few Black characters in the entire manga. Meanwhile, there are countless scenes of Casca, the franchise's female lead, getting violated and shoved around by a wide variety of saliva-dripping monsters.

I struggle with Casca, who represents several of the flaws that exist in Berserk. She starts with potential, but is also the typical strong-willed female character that many male authors resort to because it's easier to write such a trope rather than create someone realistic. She later becomes traumatized after she is raped by the demonic reincarnation of Griffith, Guts' androgynous rival who is a compelling villain, but also remains somewhat underdeveloped to this day. This scene is rendered with Casca in titilating poses all the while and is pretty disgusting. Following this incident, Casca becomes nonverbal for much of the manga - and while there are moments of brilliance that come in the later chapters, such as when Schierke and Farnese navigate her dreams and put fragments of her shattered soul back into place, she's almost always in some kind of distress, a plot device for Guts and Griffith to conveniently go to war over. Don't get me started on how she's also apparently the mother of the Moonlight Boy, the unborn child of Guts and Casca who for some reason has taken control of the body that Griffith incarnated in.

There's a lot of stuff in Berserk like the Moonlight Boy that isn't explained very well. While many devoted fans make it their life's work to break down Miura's plotting with university-style essays, the sheer truth is that he was working on this comic for 30+ years, and making it up as he went along. Berserk's strength, then, is not so much the plot, which spends a lot of time meandering around after the Golden Age Arc is complete. Nor is it the characters - though aside from my issues with Casca and Griffith, I do really like Guts, Schierke, and the others. (Even Chestnut Puck - I love me some Chestnut Puck.) No, where Berserk excels is offering a feeling of growth when you look at its beginning versus its current state. This growth happens gradually, though it becomes especially noticable in the Millennium Falcon Arc (chapter 170 or so), which is less edgy than everything that came before. As Guts becomes more than a tortured warrior obsessed with ripping and tearing, the vibes of Miura's work begin to mellow with him.

This is not a bad thing. You can't always wallow in darkness without any semblance of light, and a mangaka cannot work on the same story for decades without maturing as a human being. Berserk showcases what I assume was the maturation of its creator with Guts slowly gathering a party of like-minded damaged souls - or rather, a nakama, to use a Japanese word referring to a group with familial bonds. The story also brings in more fairy tale elements to balance the dark fantasy, and even though we never really find out what the Hellraiser-inspired God Hand are all about, we do get scenes showing Guts learning to trust again, especially as he controls the insiduous Berserker armor with the aid of Schrieke's magic. What was once an angry young protagonist developed by a young author becomes someone deeper, and the world around him grows as well.

That said, Miura is no longer with us, and Berserk's recent chapters have once again seen Guts falling into the depths of despair. But the growth that the manga accumulated over time is still there, carried on by the Studio Gaga artists continuing Miura's legacy. Gore, violence, and the occasional naked woman continue to dot the comic, but everything feels somewhat more controlled and uderstated rather than explotative. Berserk's recent artwork, as of Chapter 380, is even more rooted in shoujo traditions than ever before. This was always the case for Griffith, but the manga has more of an expressive, almost watercolory feel these days that is such a far cry from the hard and harsh seinen roots that it was so entrenched in from the start.

Hand-in-hand with Berserk's evolution is the foundational legacy it inspired, and I would be remiss to not highlight the subsequent works which bathed in Miura's vision. Final Fantasy VII's Cloud, with his monumental Buster Sword, is Guts in a thinner, blonder frame. Elden Ring's Blaidd resembles the Berserker armor, and there's even a giant golden tree in the background of the entire game, which is literally something that Griffith raised in the manga. Finally, the aforementioned Goblin Slayer, while taking most of its influences from D&D, Sword World, and other TTRPGs, does indeed feature another not-Guts fighter with a big sword, and it probably wouldn't exist in quite the same way were it not for Miura's manga.

At the end of the day, I'm probably less enamored of Berserk than many others. It has tremendous faults, ranging from its treatment of women to a plethora of plot elements that never really go anywhere. But it remains a seminal project almost the same age as I am, with influences that have permeated the fabric of many of the media experiences that I enjoy. I am glad that I spent these last eight months reading it, and part of me is sad that my toilet time is now free of the severe angst - and eventual acceptance - that Guts provided. I hope that his story may be finished sometime in the far-flung future, and I wish that one day he'll find some semblance of peace...like "buried memories from the days of an early spring."

I just finished Vagrant Story, a game that came out in the heyday of Squaresoft in 2000. I never played it 25 years ago, though I was aware of how Famitsu had given it a perfect score. I was also aware of its excellent translation and Metal Gear Solid-turnt-medieval cutscenes. But the game itself escaped my reach, which is perhaps fortunate as I doubt I would've been able to complete or appreciate it as a kid.

As an adult in his late 30s, I find Vagrant Story utterly compelling, perhaps because it is different from much of Square's output. Project head Yasumi Matsuno mentioned several times in interviews that it wasn't meant for everyone, and it certainly subverts the streamlining that defined the Final Fantasy games around the same era. Instead, the influences present are older and feel more primal. If I were to trace Vagrant Story's lineage, I'd point to early Japanese PC titles like Dragon Slayer, any number of Sokoban games, and Wizardry.

Above all else, nowhere in Vagrant Story is the JRPG party of teens and young adults full of pluck. Instead, you are a one man army named Ashley Riot who declares "I am the reinforcements" while wearing assless chaps designed by illustrator Akihiko Yoshida (probably better known for his Nier art nowadays; oh wow, here's a post I wrote on his work ages ago when this blog was but a baby). Ashley has little in the way of pluck - his is a grim mission into the cursed city of Lea Monde to rescue a duke's son and stop a cult, and though there are enough twists and turns along the way to boggle one's brain, Vagrant Story remains a dungeon crawler through and through. Expect to vanquish dozens of foes and suffer the occasional block pushing puzzle as you traverse rooms with gothic names like "Repent, O ye Sinners."

The fact that each room is meticulously named serves as a nice representation of the detail under Vagrant Story's hood. I often had trouble understanding complex systems in games as a kid - chalk this up to my childhood diet of point and click adventures, where story was king - and while I wouldn't say I'm necessarily a fan of them in this day and age, I can at least appreciate dense mechanics after having worked on so many analog equivalents in my career as a tabletop RPG designer.

Vagrant Story's systems bang and clang with a fury, reminding me of a Palladium TTRPG from the '80s with a gargantuan chart of weapon combinations that you need to look up in order to figure out how to optimize your damage. Hot damn, this game happens to have just that. Weapons are, in fact, the bread and butter of Ashley's existence, for Agent Riot does not level up himself. Rather, his weapons level up depending on what enemies they slice and dice, and all weapons are divided into a series of types (blunt, edged, piercing), specialize in harming a different class of enemy (beast, dragon, evil, human, phantom, undead), and possess an affinity (physical, air, fire, earth, water, light, dark) that's absolutely the stat you want to maximize.

You'll run into countless workshops throughout Vagrant Story that kind of function like the save rooms in Resident Evil, playing relaxing music and letting Ashley take a brief breather. But instead of merely capturing your progress, these workshops let you forge and combine new weapons, mashing up the classes and affinities of your killing tools to create new combinations that are sometimes awesome. The game uses a complex formula for combining weapons that requires much trial and error, or at least consulting that chart I mentioned, but it pays off in the end when you do manage to construct a masterpiece. Upon commandeering your customized weapons into battle, the fact that you put blood, sweat, and tears into them fosters a unique attachment that goes beyond any random pickup you could find in a chest.

For instance, everyone on the internet acknowledges that you need to have at least three weapons of each type to finish Vagrant Story. I personally beat the game with seven. You have the option to name them all, and mine were dubbed Backwoodsman (a heavy axe), Berserk (a greatsword), Exorcist (a heavy mace), Gobsmasher (a mace), Headshot (a crossbow), Sting (a sword), and Windpiercer (a spear). I tried to consolidate them at one point, but I couldn't do it. Vagrant Story's obtuse weapon mechanics had demanded a certain degree of systems mastery from me, and the result was me falling in love with my motley collection of blades (plus one projectile shooter) to the point that they had gained a degree of sentience in my mind.

Beyond blacksmithing, Vagrant Story's combat is also an intriguing beast, featuring a wireframe around Ashley similar to the one that surrounded Aya Brea in Parasite Eve. You can target different body parts of an enemy, and reducing the HP of each part will affect that enemy's stats. Bash the head to bits, for example, and said enemy won't be able to use spells, since their intelligence will be shot. Attack their legs, and their speed will be reduced. Meanwhile, foes can target Ashley's limbs in a similar manner. To inflict the most damage and defend to the utmost, you'll need to master Chain and Defense Abilities, which are assigned to each button and need to be pressed at the exact second an attack hits, a la Paper Mario, but more grimdark. You can technically keep chaining attacks forever, but doing so increases Ashley's Risk meter, which greatens his chances for dealing crits but increases the damage he takes from enemies while decreasing his accuracy. It's all a balancing dance, between Risk and every other system under the hood, and I haven't even talked about Break Arts or Magic here.

Systems, systems, systems. Vagrant Story has a lot of them, to the point where you really should play the game with a guide for maximum enjoyment. I actually went and ordered the excellent Piggyback strategy guide from eBay (expensive but worth it) after deciding that I was going to play this, and I recommend that anyone tackling Vagrant Story today take a similar approach. Because let's be real, at the moment the only accessible way to experience this game is via emulation. (I played it on the Steam Deck, and it works like a dream.)

Even with a guide, though, it's possible to make it to the final boss with an underpowered weapon that only does 5 points of damage. I mention this to stress that there are definite cracks in the veneer of Vagrant Story's plethora of systems. But the game possesses the conviction which made me want to learn these systems, and it was certainly helped in this regard by the story, which was expertly translated by Alexander O. Smith. There's some important background info hidden in the Japan-only Ultimania guide that was never translated into English outside of fansites, and in a truly baffling decision, you'll miss a vital opening movie that clarifies Ashley's mission if you press Start too quickly on the title screen. But by far and large, Ashley's tale is a gripping one that delves into how people curate the memories they choose to believe, and even invent new memories in order to deal with trauma. Anyone who played Final Fantasy Tactics knows that Yasumi Matsuno has always used games to tell thought-provoking stories, and the stuff on display here is so good that if you don't want to play the game, you should at least watch the cutscenes in a compiled two hour format on YouTube.

Vagrant Story has yet to receive a sequel that develops its loose threads, though it feels like some spinoff concepts made their way into Crimson Shroud, Matsuno's 3DS experiment that required you to use a stylus to throw digital dice. Sequel or no, Vagrant Story deserves at least a remaster to streamline its clunkier edges and make it accessible to a modern audience who, like me, would probably appreciate it more than the reception it got in 2000. Mockups of such a remaster regularly appear on the Vagrant Story subreddit, which still fizzles with the fervor that only a cult classic can create. And lengthy analysis is all over YouTube, including an excellent series by Resonant Arc, who break down both the game's mechanics and plot in several must-watch videos that greatly helped my playthrough.

Not too long ago, I married Maru, the nerdy Stardew Valley girl who makes robots. I then proceeded to get her final 14 heart relationship event, after which I lost interest in Stardew Valley.

This has happened to me before. 20 years ago, when I was into Harvest Moon 64, I chased Karen incessantly, giving her all the random gifts that I could forage in the forests and spending my evening hours in the bar with her at the expense of my farm. Upon winning her heart, I stopped playing the game.

Back then, I liked to joke that this represented some sort of cad-like behavior in myself - that the chase was all that mattered to me. But as an actual married fella these days, I know this isn't the case. Rather, I've realized that I enjoy Stardew Valley (and by extension the Harvest Moon games that inspired it) not so much as the cute farming game it mostly is, but as a relationship game. And when I say relationships, I don't just mean the ones that occur with Maru and the other dating options. I mean the whole idea of moving into a small country town, making friends with the villagers, and becoming a fixture of the community. All of that stuff vibes with me way more than the act of growing turnips, milking cows, or building silos so I can grow turnips more efficiently and milk even more cows.

To explain this in more detail, many serious Stardew players post pictures on Reddit showing their pimped-out farms that are entirely automated with turnips that grow themselves. My farm, in contrast, is a bit of a mess - it's semi-automated, but I've got trees planted far too close together, my crop arrangements aren't aligned, and the western sector of my farm continues to remain a shitshow because I just can't be arsed to clear away those rocks and stray weeds. All this aside, my farm is good enough, and I don't feel like continously improving it because it's not the meat of the game to me.

The meat, rather, is those aforementioned connections made with villagers, all of whom are kind enough to show me their current affection level with a handy little colored dot representing a heart in the righthand corner of their text boxes. Over the process of wooing Maru, I managed to max out the hearts of her parents, her brother Sebastian, all of the villagers who live in proximity of her family's mountain home (hello Linus, you swell hobo), and almost all of the other bachelors and bachelorettes, who proceeded to hit on me shamelessly after Maru and I went steady, because that's just how this game works. (Everyone lusts for the farmer.)

And so, with most of the townsfolk that I cared about either in love with me or enamored with me as a close friend, my interest in the game dwindled. Oh, there's still stuff to do in Stardew Valley, like finishing the community center or getting a 100% score, and for a while I considered both of those challenges. But the community center is infamous for the busywork required to complete it, and it forces me to pay attention to my seasonal crop output, fishing catches, and recipes in a way that requires min/maxing or guide-consulting, which is something I feel reluctant to engage with in a game about retiring from the stress and monotony of city life for the simplicity of the countryside. Once the center is complete, as well, nobody in town actually uses it, which is perhaps the most lamented fact on the Stardew Reddit. And as for the 100% score, I'm just not built to achievement-hunt and do every little thing for the allure of getting the 'perfect' game these days.

Stardew Valley also carries over an unfortunate habit from most of the Harvest Moons. Once you marry someone, their personality slowly diminishes as their story reaches a conclusion. This is fairly typical for video games, which have never managed to represent marriage as something that's a beginning rather than an end. Yes, you can have kids with your spouse, but those kids only grow to toddler age and end up waddling around your farmhouse for all eternity, only slightly more interesting than furniture. And I don't really want to have kids with Maru anyway - I just want to manifest the outcome of her 14 heart event, which was a cute astronomy date where we reminisced about her robot MARILDA, who gained sentience and decided to fly through the cosmos. At the end of it, we watched a falling star, and I told her I'd made a wish to grow old with her, and she said she had the same wish. But this wish shall never play out.

I say all of this with some facetiousness. Obviously, Stardew Valley is a very good project made by one very hardworking guy, ConcernedApe, who put years of his heart and soul into it. Marriage was just one piece of the puzzle for him to implement into a game that needed to juggle enough elements to appeal to fans of Harvest Moon, Rune Factory, and heck, even Legend of the River King. But as someone who loves the relationship side of these life sims more than anything else, I simply daydream of more. I chose Maru because she's the closest Stardew character who resembles my real-life biracial wife, and as one of only two POC characters in the game, I demand to know more about her existence as a half-Black resident of a mostly white town. On that note, what are her thoughts on being neurodivergent and having astronomy and robots as her special interests? (Yes, her dad Demetrius is most certainly on the spectrum, and Maru probably is too.) What about her relationship with her half-brother Sebastian, who resents her as the child who receives more fatherly affection?

All of these character traits gleamed at me as I got to know Maru, and alas, they remain mere gleams that are not further developed. Once again, I suppose it's a bit much to ask for Stardew Valley to delve into topics like race relations, since this is after all a very white game due to what I assume are the life experiences of ConcernedApe. (Maru herself is a 'Black girls do STEM' sterotype, admittedly.) But the fact that Stardew even bothers to bring up these topics at all makes me see the lovely potential that exists beyond the stars, and I wish that potential could be cultivated.

If I were to turn all of these hopes into reality, I suppose my ideal Stardew Valley would be one that still looks the same, but doesn't place end goals on farm success. (Indeed, I think you could replace farming with a wide number of professions - I'd personally love to play as a bookstore owner or libarian in a small town.) Rather, the finale would depend on raising those little heart levels in everyone's text boxes, creating community to the fullest, finding friendships that don't always exist in real life, and loving someone with all of their warts and drama - through spats with their family, realizations of their deeper self, and wishes that may never fully develop. Until we finally grow old and die together. The closest Harvest Moon ever got to managing this was with A Wonderful Life, but to quote an old meme, I think we can go deeper.

So that, in a nutshell, is why I married Maru and stopped playing Stardew Valley. To me, my game more or less reached its natural finale when the two of us smooched under the stars and thought about a future where we grew old and crusty together. That's the future that I long for with my real-life waifu...and I guess I kinda want it with my in-game waifu as well.

I learned of 'natural fantasy' as a subgenre the other day after seeing the Fabula Ultima Natural Fantasy Atlas, which defines it as any work that features a connection between nature and humanity. Imagine green-infused organic trappings, references to the planet as Gaea, cautionary tales of climate change, lush forest settings, and protagonists who are druids, rangers, friends to animals, etc.

Avowed, an excellent action RPG made by Obsidian Entertainment, is one of the best natural fantasy media pieces I've seen in recent memory. The game seems to have gotten a good reception since its February release, but I'm of the mind that more people should play it. Set in the backdrop of the Pillars of Eternity duology, a world that feels like a Game Master's homebrew setting in the best way possible, Avowed casts the player as an envoy for a far-reaching empire who's supposed to check its colony of the Living Lands. This frontier island is suffering the effects of the Dreamscourge, a virus that both destroys minds and makes multicolored mushrooms pop up on everyone's skin.

Despite the terrible trappings of colonization, I find myself drawn to its real world historical paths and consequences, and the same is true for fictional tales. Avowed lets you subvert the role of the imperial lapdog, and you can be as empathic towards the Living Landers as you want to be, and even openly defy your orders. But beyond that, the game also delves into the idea of the Living Lands as its literal namesake - a breathing entity that's manifested an ecological scourge as a direct result of the colonial efforts of the occupying party.

As someone who's been working on a tabletop game for the last year and a half that deals with themes of ecological change (Mappa Mundi, go check out our recently-funded Kickstarter), I find these concepts extremely compelling. Avowed takes them to interesting places, and by the end of the game, the player's influence stretches beyond that of a mere political tool, becoming either a savior of nature or at the very least an instigator of change in the wilds.

All of this is the epitome of natural fantasy, I think. Avowed is far from the only property to investigate these things - Breath of the Wild showcased a similar flavor in video games, Princess Mononoke and pretty much all of Hayao Miyazaki's work does the same in the realm of anime, and I'll insert another shameless plug here for Mappa Mundi as an up and comer in the tabletop space. But Avowed does so with a wonderfully beautiful sheen - mushrooms really are so prevalant everywhere, those with mycophobia should be aware - and some of the best designs for dryads and other plantlike humanoids that I've seen in recent memory.

I was not aware of the term 'natural fantasy' when I first began working on Mappa Mundi or playing Avowed, and I'm not sure how 'official' this subgenre classification is. But I realize now that I've always been pulled towards these tales. The Mana/Seiken Densetsu franchise remains one of my fondest JRPG series, with an overarching plot that revolves around a world fed by magic from a giant Mana Tree. My first D&D character was a ranger, my first World of Warcraft character was a druid, and I've typically gravitated towards all of the other classes that I mentioned at the start of this post. And when I even think back to how I first fell in love with the fantasy genre in the hands of Tolkien, it was the pastoral existence of hobbits in a make believe version of nature-infused England that got me. (As I get older, I lust for the life of a hobbit more and more, second breakfasts included.)

Musing on this reality makes me chuckle, as I wouldn't consider myself an 'outdoorsy' or 'nature' person in day-to-day life, at least as far as those terms are defined by most people. I don't like going on hikes, and while I've been camping before as a boy scout, I tend to prefer the comfort of my own bed above all else. But perhaps there are more ways than one to feel an appreciation towards the planet we occupy, just as there are oodles upon oodles of fantasy subgenres waiting to be defined by products like Fabula Ultima (which really is a great TTRPG; go play it). In my case, I'm very happy to study my appreciation for natural fantasy through Avowed and similar tales, which in turn make me feel both the pulsations of this living land and the desire to save and serve it, in my own deeply personal way.