Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week saw me at last finishing my Blue Prince adventures, which I am not ashamed to admit concluded with me looking up a whole lot of answers that I would never, ever have figured out myself. The game passed the point of what I’d consider a “reasonably achievable deduction” with the introduction of the “A New Clue” book, but I still enjoyed a more guided ride through the conclusion, and can’t really fault the game for culminating in puzzles no mortal mind could comprehend. The game’s balance of increasingly tamable roguelike runs and larger meta-puzzles is truly a magical combination; I imagine its appeal will be forever limited by its demanding nature, but for me, Blue Prince is already a pantheon property. Anyway, we’ve also got some films to get through, so let’s charge right into the Week in Review!
Author Archives: Bobduh
The Legend of Vox Machina S3 – Episode 7
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m delighted to be returning to the Legend of Vox Machina, touching down in a moment of crisis and calamity for our poor adventurers. Having just secured a platemail vestige for Pike and beaten a dragon in the bargain, they returned to Whitestone to see it bathed in fire, the sky alive with Thordak’s nightmare brood. This attack marked the end of their alliance with the devious Raishan, and the beginning of a new quest: killing that asshole Anna Ripley.
So basically, it seems like we’ve surmounted the third act finale of Mercer’s overall campaign structure, in keeping with the villain-slaying standard of the Whitestone and Thunder Herd act finales. DnD is an eternal compromise between player agency and narrative necessity; stories aren’t structured arbitrarily, their rise and falls of drama are paced so as to cultivate reader interest, offer moments of release, and ultimately reward the reader for their investment. As such, while DnD campaigns are often more freewheeling than your average fantasy novel, a skillful DM will still infuse them with the structural momentum of a traditional narrative, drawing rising action together into cathartic peaks, and then humbling the party before starting that rise over again.
Incidentally, my party’s own ongoing campaign has just reached a similar point, having recently defeated the vampire Strahd with some kind of holy hand grenade. We’re actually in a much trickier spot, as the self-contained nature of the Curse of Strahd campaign means we’re now left with no dangling threads to pursue, and essentially have to reinvent a reason why we’re even traveling together. I’m doing my best to make some player-side sense of our ramblings, but have to admit I’m becoming increasingly nostalgic for my days of DM-side campaign control, as the richness of a player character is in large part a reflection of how meaningfully they can interact with the DM’s world. Let’s enjoy Mercer and Percy showing exactly how that’s done as we return to Vox Machina!
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End – Episode 11
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m eager to return to the wandering journeys of Frieren and her companions, in the wake of their victory over Aura the Guillotine and her executioners. Though this arc was ostensibly an articulation of demonkind’s incompatibility with human society, our last episode demonstrated that it was more specifically about Frieren’s soft-spoken hatred for demons, the experiences that led her to see them as incapable of compassion or emotion. In her attempts to define monsters, Frieren only demonstrated how her own life has led her to be so quick to assign that label.
It is now much easier to see how Frieren has drifted through life while acquiring so few emotional attachments. A conventional social structure was stolen from her as a child, while her replacement “family” Flamme taught her only to pursue power and cultivate ruthlessness. Even Flamme ended up regretting her pragmatic bond with Frieren, relenting just in time to pass on the field of flowers spell that connected her with her own parents. Given her own insistence on adorning Himmel’s monument with flowers, it’s clear that lesson stuck – but otherwise, Frieren’s lessons and temperament reveal she is precisely the weapon Flamme made of her, no more or less.
As such, it is up to this current journey to teach her new lessons, to invite her to find love and sanctuary in others, even if such unions will inevitably pass. Every day with Fern and Stark demonstrates that time spent with valued companions is never time wasted – in fact, it is often the seemingly idle, shapeless days that stand most clearly in memory, typifying the spirit of mutual fondness that made your time together so special. Let’s see what fresh memories await as we return to Frieren!
Yuri is My Job! – Episode 10
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time! Today we return to Cafe Liebe in a moment of crisis, with the tension between Kanoko and Sumika approaching some kind of breaking point. While Kanoko initially joined the Cafe Liebe staff just to spend more time with Hime, what she has discovered since has proven intolerable. Not only is Hime thriving in this space, she’s even reconnected with her first friend, who seems to share some bond with Hime that Kanoko herself cannot understand. What happened to her Hime, the Hime who secretly despised all others, and who was only willing to share her earnest feelings while nestled against Kanoko’s shoulder? This clearly will not stand!
Kanoko’s perspective is unhealthy, but perfectly understandable. While Hime initially thought she was teaching Kanoko how to get along in society, the lesson Kanoko received was to always rely on her specifically, and to trust in Hime to be her sole confidant in an otherwise hostile world. But in spite of Hime’s cynicism regarding social performances, she’s actually a deeply empathetic person; while Kanoko simply tunes out her surroundings, Hime is always aware of people like Mitsuki or Kanoko, those who need help connecting with others, or a particular space where their personalities can shine. Hime’s personal bonds are a route towards a greater general appreciation for people’s diverse personalities and passions, while Kanoko has made a fortress of her one bond, seeing Hime as the only connection she’ll ever need. That’s obviously unsustainable, meaning the question is really just “how much will Kanoko tear down before she starts to grow up?” Let’s find out!
Spring 2025 – Week 11 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week I’ve been unfortunately jonesing for some goddamn Dungeons & Dragons, as our third campaign party is suffering from scheduling issues, while our second campaign has currently run through all of my written material. It’s becoming hard at this point to imagine how I actually managed a weekly quest-writing schedule back during the main campaign; these days it generally takes me a few months to write an arc that will only take us around five sessions, so I’ve clearly got to achieve a better complexity balance for my own sake. In the meantime, I’ve been hacking diligently away at Blue Prince, and just recently reclaimed the throne of Orindia. Still not sure if the game actually has a “finish line” or not, but my passion for drafting mansions has not wavered, so I guess we’ll find out. But for now, let’s turn our focus to other matters, and burn down the week in films!
Blue Flag – Volume 4
Seiya storms the barricades as we open Blue Flag’s fourth volume, first challenging his brother Touma on his reckless actions, then turning his barrels towards our other leads. As in his first appearance, Seiya cuts through all this adolescent anxiety like a hot knife through butter, casually dragging Taichi aside and challenging Futaba on her relationship with the pair of them in one easy gesture. When high school dramas only feature high schoolers, their perspective can get a bit myopic, naturally embracing the sense of consequence and finality that attends untested adolescent emotions. Emerging from childhood into anxious self-awareness, adolescents can naturally feel overwhelmed or paralyzed by the choices before them, seeing in each choice made an endless hall of potential doors that have all slammed painfully, permanently shut.
This is understandable; not only are they thinking about how their presentation and actions affect others’ impressions of them for basically the first time, they’re combining that understanding with the natural anxiety of high school, the first time in most of their lives where the stage after this one isn’t known or guaranteed. So they really do have the chance to screw up their lives in lasting, consequential ways, making it all the harder to make any key decisions.
Mezzo DSA – Episode 1
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re diving into another property by Yasuomi Umetsu, the distinctive director of Kite, Mezzo Forte, and Wizard Barristers, alongside an eclectic scattering of OVA contributions and other projects across the last few decades. Umetsu’s unique aesthetic style and dedication to kinetic action drama mean that although his works are few in number, they’re all extremely reflective of his art design preferences and narrative interests; he composes action with the playful mastery of John Woo or Shinichiro Watanabe, imbuing his worlds with a weighted sense of physical conflict and a vast assembly of character-rich background details.
Having already screened the two-part OVA Mezzo Forte, we’re now diving into the franchise’s followup television drama, Mezzo DSA (short for Danger Squad Agency, the optimistic title of our main trio’s operation). The OVA era was likely a perfect fit for Umetsu’s mixture of perfectionism and incidental erotica – a fifteen year stretch where you could fund an intricately animated passion project, just so long as there was a sex scene to promote on the cover. With that era now ceding to the late-night TV paradigm of the post-Evangelion market, I’m intrigued to see how Umetsu adapts his style to the more limiting confines of weekly episodes, as well as simply happy to check back in with this charming trio of mercenary miscreants. Let’s get to it!
Galaxy Express 999 – Episode 10
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am eager to return to the journey of Tetsuro and Maetel, as we explore a fresh episode of the fantastical Galaxy Express. Our last episode saw the pair touching down on the planet Trader, and for once enjoying the generous amenities of a modern city as they prepared for the next leg of their journey. But no glimmering facade comes without its ominous underbelly, and in Trader, the vast gulf between the haves and have-nots is expressed on every street corner, as desperate travelers beg for charity from anyone who might answer.
The threat of starvation has a way of clarifying our relationship with others, demonstrating how the civility of society is essentially another form of imprisonment, a culturally conditioned expectation that we will suffer in silence rather than disrupt the mirage that is capitalism. True scarcity pierces the veil, forcing us to act in desperate, ugly ways in order to survive, and through this desperation reveal that forms of classism or servitude based on financial relations are in truth no more civilized than the gun and the lash. It is a very convenient thing to have your inhumanity enshrined as the culturally accepted mode of exploitation, while the cries of those you’ve impoverished are at best framed as “undignified,” and likely as not criminalized altogether. All we can hope for in such desperate times is that the fire of compassion not be snuffed out by pragmatism – and in this woman he has allied with, whose poverty and kindness remind him so much of his mother, Tetsuro may have discovered another keeper of the flame. Let us return to Galaxy Express 999!
Spring 2025 – Week 10 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week I’ve been balancing work, personal creative writing, Blue Prince runs, and further episodes of Dimension 20, as I munch through its second, fantasy New York-set season. After watching so much Critical Role, I’m feeling a little foolish about only now checking in on the work of a dungeon master whose style and priorities are so much closer to my own. Basically everything I have issues with regarding Matt Mercer’s style is resolved by Brennan Lee Mulligan, who shares my preference for more direct, narrative-driven sagas where player agency is exercised through the moment-to-moment action, rather than through choosing their approach to an entire continent’s worth of potential conflicts. It’s a far more cinematic, propulsive approach that allows for significantly more coherent character arcs, and has me taking all sorts of mental notes regarding player direction and NPC construction. I’ll likely have more to say on that later, but for now, let’s quit with the dilly-dallying and get to the week in films!
The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, REALLY Love You – Episode 13
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we are privileged to be checking back in with a family we all know and love, a family which only seems to grow stronger and more preposterous with every passing episode. That’s right, we’re returning to the adventures of Rentaro and his soon-to-be one hundred girlfriends, their ranks just recently bolstered by the addition of initial girlfriend Hakari’s mother Hahari.
With Rentaro now dating a fellow student and her mom at the same time, there is effectively no known boundary for the coming absurdity. Of course, even more preposterous than 100 Girlfriends’ premise is the fact that it actually, consistently demonstrates the fundamentals of mutually loving relationships, demonstrating more clarity of affection and constancy of consideration than many traditional romances. As I’ve said before, 100 Girlfriends’ secret weapon is that Rentaro himself is utterly charming; far from the nebbish creeper harems often set as audience surrogate, Rentaro is actually easy to fall in love with, and consistently proves himself a paragon of romantic gallantry. With the family secure and the future bright, let’s return to 100 Girlfriends!