Stuff I liked in April 2026
Belated! Last month was, as previously told, rough for me. Let's look at some of the good.
Playing: I've been replaying Secret of Mana, which I've wanted to do for a long while. I don't think I've appreciated in previous runs how this is genuinely one of the most beautiful games ever made. Every village is pure pastoral bliss. The adventure has the palette of a vibrant yet pastel spring. It's also a thoroughly childlike game, and I mean that in the best, thoroughly-positive sense: the graphics are big, friendly, and bursting with (expertly-chosen) color, and every action is so rambunctious, with characters jumping and tumbling their way through the world, shaking treasure chests above their heads and throwing them down with such exuberance they leap off the ground. The early journeys through bright green, waving grassland pathways against Hiroki Kikuta's summer score bring to mind the best of late-July backyard adventures. The combat can be lacking in ways I didn't remember - there are times, by accident or design, when your weapons just will not hit, and times when you're frustratingly taken out of the action as an enemy winds up a spell. But this remains far and away the best of the Mana series for me, and I'm glad I revisited it.
Watching: Supergreatfriend's runs of Biorand, a randomizer for OG Resident Evil 1, 2, and 3. I've never been big on randomizers, but this one has features that give it passive entertainment potential: a) it puts in PS1 polygonal versions of most every major character in the series (complete with voice acting) up to RE8, which is a kick in itself, and b) it classifies character lines by tone (excited, sad, explanatory, etc.), and while lines are randomized in cutscenes, they're substituted by lines of like tone. This makes the conversations more coherent and allows, on occasion, for true magic to occur - like Steve Burnside going through Silent Hill-esque trauma processing over being separated from Claire, or Lady D and Wesker forming certain…alliances, or some characters with a very limited number of lines popping up everywhere. And then there are randomizer hijinks like five Mr. Xes in the main hall of the RPD. Always fun.
(I also appreciate the run of older, well-known titles Game Grumps has been on - Mickey Mousecapade, Golden Axe, Altered Beast. Arin's a bit heavy with the rewind & restores, but it's neat to see their reactions to full runs of such familiar games.)
Not much DbD or Hello Kitty last month, but I have a different illustration of that dynamic in the next two entries:
Forgotten from last month: Hitman featured Milla Jovovich as a Elusive Target in a take on her Resident Evil movies, complete with a Red Queen analogue crossed with the narrator from The Stanley Parable. I don't play Hitman, but the bit is appreciable even if you don't. Stick with a YouTuber you like for a solid playthrough of a basic run (there are a lot of folks producing Hitman videos with unfortunate commentary out there), then hit up this channel (no playlist; you have to scroll) for a lot of alternate takes and little details in the margins. I never thought Hitman my type of game, but the puzzlebox design on display here is making me reconsider that.
Reading: The Complete Brambly Hedge, a collection of a children's book series vintage 1978 following a community of mice who live in a field, illustrated with vibrant storybook watercolors. This was a random library find from the "to be reshelved" section; I later learned that the librarian herself had borrowed it and was very happy that someone else had discovered it in turn.
The watercolor + hand-drawn illustrations make nature look wild and beautiful but simultaneously a cozy home for the mice. The sense of scale is done very well - the world is still big and daunting and untamed, particularly to the mice, but they have their own little niche in it. The mice live in strong harmony with nature: weaving spherical homes out of wheat & reeds, making dyes from lichen. (I liked the sea chapter, where a few of the mice sail down the river to replenish their salt stores and the sea mice's home is made of seashells.) There's also a strong sense here of a community pulling together and taking care of their own - many of the adventures revolve around, say, a few mice taking a journey to bring blankets to a couple old voles who live in a faraway field, or remodeling a cottage for a new mother. There's no human presence, and while it could be because they simply don't show up, it all brought to mind slightly (if only personally; this may not be intended at all) a touch of something like Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, where the world has moved beyond humanity's influence and is more peaceful for it.
I will be a bit unkind here and say that I do think it's missing that something to make it truly classic. The illustrations of the little mouse world are packed but don't have any real surprises hidden in the corners; a sparkle of wit would have picked up the straightforward stories. It's very unassumingly twee, at least to me. (Also, I find the little scamp mouse whose antics we're supposed to love kind of a pain in the ass.) But it does enough right where I'm comfortable in putting it here, and I think the right audience would really love this. Maybe you're part of that audience!
I took a cue from Tiny Bookshop last month to start the manga Monster, which I've long wanted to read. I've plumbed only Vol. 1, but that was superb. You're likely familiar with the premise: a deeply moral doctor defies his money-grubbing hospital to save the life of a young boy, an act that runs him afoul, in a twisty way, of a serial killer.
I was familiar with Naoki Urasawa's earlier work, particularly the judo manga Yawara!, through its use in Mangajin's Basic Japanese Through Comics and Japanese the Manga Way, which were very helpful in teaching casual speech and how manga uses language when I was starting out as a translator. The glimpses of Urasawa's stories there helped paint manga as a more expansive storytelling form, with more room for nuance and humanity, than the traditional showcased superhero fights.
Urasawa's use of the manga artform in Monster is master-class: the nuance and range of his character expressions; the dramatic timing; the panel composition & framing…it's absolutely on another level and makes the story read like a top-tier live-action drama. (The line strength and use of black and white in a certain pivotal scene reminds me of Vheen Hikuusen, which is, as you might expect, high praise coming from me.) The plot is labyrinthine and thrillingly paced, an engaging mystery on several levels…but I also appreciated how it gives equal weight to the mindset of its protagonist, a man of very strong moral character, and how what he discovers challenges his fundamental views on the world. Lesser stories would relegate this to a simplistic, derisive "naive man discovers the world isn't sunshine and roses!"; this manga takes as its centerpiece, and takes very seriously, this man who's very committed to doing the right thing in the world but is thrown into situations where it's increasingly hard and unclear how to accomplish that. It simultaneously has a huge heart and is fiercely intellectual about the dilemmas he faces.
I'm not sure about the twist in the last chapter of the manga - it was obvious something like that was in the works, but I found it more fascinating when the protagonist was driven pure by his moral imperatives than partially by plot needs. I'm absolutely eager to experience the rest of this story, though. (I just wish there were digital versions.)
Real life: I bought new birdfeeders to replace the old ones I had that were broken (squirrel jumped on them). I don't have a picture, but they're the clear plastic type that suction-cup onto the outside of your window so you can watch the birds eat (and vice versa). When I first started feeding the birds, I got mostly chickadees, but now, it's a bunch of finches (house, gold), a few song sparrows, and a pair of cardinals. It's nice to have an ongoing source of nature near my workspace, particularly since it is, as I write this, the middle of May, and we still had the threat of snow just yesterday.
Translation project updates: There was, to put it mildly, a good deal of disruption this month, but save for one file that needs special care, I'm done with the revisions for the new formatting. Now it should be just a matter of translating files, so in the future, I'll be reporting in with numbers on that.
I end with a clip featuring a movie I do not like but a joke I very much do, where the very different vibes of the two principals play perfectly off each other:
