Author Archives: Bobduh

10 Royal Games Plays Metal Gear Solid V, Part One and Two

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Hey guys! The first let’s plays by me and my friends are finally up! We had some initial technical issues getting it all together, but things should hopefully be much more consistent going forward. We started off this week with some Metal Gear Solid, the hot new game everyone’s talking about, and we… well, almost got through the intro cutscene. Look, it’s Metal Gear, these things happen. We’ll hopefully be back again in a couple days with more videos, and until then, you can check out all our stuff so far on youtube!

You can check out our existing videos here:

Part One

Part Two

If you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to let me know either here, on ask.fm, or even on youtube (youtube comments, god forbid). We’re just starting out, so I’m sure there’ll be stuff to adjust as we go along. And I hope you enjoy!

Paranoia Agent – Episode 9

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We got another lighthearted episode of Paranoia Agent this week, though this one unfortunately wasn’t nearly as strong as the last. In fact, this was likely the weakest episode of the show so far – composed around a fairly weak structural conceit and full of stories that didn’t really amount to much, it clocked in a fair degree below the level of quality the show has set for itself. It did have its moments though, and I’ve heard the next couple episodes are excellent, so I’m not worried. They can’t all be winners.

You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my notes below!

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My Hero Academia, Volume 1 – Review

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Back to the manga pile, this time for something a little outside of my usual fare. My Hero Academia is textbook Shonen Jump, but I can dig that if it’s executed well, and this one’s very polished. It’s extremely readable, the premise offers lots of fun character-design potential, and the art is excellent. I’m guessing/hoping it’ll gain a bit more personality as it goes along, but it’s also just nice to have a more diverse selection of manga to be keeping an active eye on. I’ll be sticking with this one.

You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my notes below!

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Gatchaman Crowds insight – Episode 9

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SHIT IS FUCKED. Things are a total mess in Gatchamanland, and it will take more than Hajime wearing cute pigtails to sort all of this out. This was another solid episode in a very impressive sequel, and one that made me feel frankly a little awkward to cover, considering how charged the topics it’s dealing with are. Gatchaman is hot-off-the-presses commentary, its thoughts on the dangers of groupthink in more harmony-focused Japan equally relevant to modern online discourse. These conversations have essentially been turned radioactive by recent controversies – there are people looking to start witch hunts all over, and gamergate lurking in the background, eager to either pounce on targets or seize on comments as vindication of their pet issues. It is awesome that Gatchaman Crowds is so relevant to what’s going on this very second, but I sure hope writing these posts doesn’t get me killed.

You can check out my megasized writeup over at ANN, or my notes below!

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Classroom Crisis – Episode 10

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This week’s Classroom Crisis was… an episode. For the second week straight, the show focused largely on Nagisa’s political dealings within the Kirishina Corporation, and for the second week straight, those dealings failed to have basically any emotional grounding or sense of coherent internal drama. Nagisa’s stuff here is really just “stuff happening” – it all exists to the side of the conflicts that either have some earned emotional weight or drive at the contrast between pragmatism and idealism (which is a conflict that’s itself largely confined to the conversations between Kaito and Nagisa, since the actual political stuff is way too simplistic to carry much meaning). This episode had one great conversation between Iris and Mizuki that reflected what the show is actually good at, but aside from that, this was a dreary wash.

But anyway. You can check out my breakdown over at ANN, or my notes below!

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Summer 2015 – Week 9 in Review

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Wednesday has come again! It’s time to talk about cartoons and other very serious things.

Uniquely serious things at the moment, it turns out. “Anime is serious business” has lost some of its humor in light of last week being my final week with a day job. Right now, as of this week, anime is my business. My only business.

This is kind of terrifying! I can’t exactly say I’ve reached the point where I can go comfortably full-time on criticism and writing in general, but I can at least fake it for a while. Between my ANN work, my advertising money, and my Patreon support, I’m gonna try to make a go of this. Things are gonna be kinda tight for a while, but this also means I’ll have a whole lot more time to work on writing projects for all you guys, so hopefully this is one big step towards a pretty delightful future. If you’d like to support me in this grand experiment, please feel free to chip in a couple whatevers, though I also accept worried, half-disbelieving “good lucks”, or even confident ones.

A few people have asked if I’d be willing to proofread, edit, or review things on commission, and the answer is definitely yes. I’m going full freelance here, meaning I’m a mercenary with nothing to lose and everything to prove, meaning yes I will take your projects that sounds awesome. I’ll hopefully integrate ways to inquire about such things on the site in a more formal way shortly, but you can message me here, on twitter, on ask.fm, or on patreon if you’ve got anything you’d like to discuss. The one formal project I’m most concerned with getting off the ground is setting up communal support funds for specific shows – like, if ten people want me to start reviewing Eva episodes one by one, they actually have a convenient way to make that happen. I’ve got a whole big to-do list to run down there.

Speaking of formal projects, I’ve got one more surprise! People keep asking me when I’m going to play some videogames again, and that can finally be answered: a couple friends and I have just created 10 Royal Games, a channel where we’ll be playing through all manner of games and shooting the shit on whatever strikes our fancy. We’re starting off with some very classic Zelda and some very fresh Metal Gear (first videos should hopefully be up tonight, and I’ll link them both here and on twitter), but feel free to suggest other stuff we could dive into, or topics you’d like us to bring up. It should be fun!

WELP, THAT COVERS ALL THE WORK STUFF. Now that I’ve sobered everyone up with serious discussion of my financial future, let’s soothe those weary brains with some ramblings about anime. And manga! And maybe some western cartoons! Hell, let’s just randomize the whole damn thing. RUNNING ‘EM DOWN.

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Fall 2015 Season Preview

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It’s time! Time at last to start thinking about putting this lousy season behind us, time pick our heads up from the anime-parched earth and take a glimpse towards the horizon. Is that a mirage in the distance, taunting us with the thought of media sustenance? Are we doomed to wander this barren waste forever, continually lowering our standards until eventually we forget anime was anything more than a vehicle for monstergirls and pee jokes?

Nah, there’s some new shows coming out. Some of them look pretty good, too! We’ve got long-awaited manga adaptations, sequels to steady favorites, new entries in venerable franchises, and even some tasty-looking originals and wildcards. My overall bench isn’t terribly deep, but I’m confident I’ll be happy with at least a couple of them, and even outside of my picks, every season holds surprises.

As always, I won’t be running down every new show here – there’s vast selections of shows I know I’ll never be interested in, and even among those shows, if there are any standouts, I’ll hit them during preview week anyway. If you want the full list, you can check it out over on anichart – here, I’m just gonna break down what I’m excited about, along with maybe a reason or two to feel optimistic. So let’s get to it!

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Paranoia Agent – Episode 8

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Paranoia Agent changed gears entirely this week, leaving Shonen Bat behind to tell a heartwarming story about suicide. This was definitely an unexpected choice, but the end result was wonderful – an almost self-contained vignette that basically established a small makeshift family, telling lots of great jokes in the process. It was witty and warm and endearingly awkward, pretty much nothing like Paranoia Agent as I’ve come to understand it. Apparently Satoshi Kon just had some loose ideas or something, and figured this was the place for them. Normally that’d be a problem narrative-wise, but this episode was so very good that I can’t complain, and Paranoia Agent’s spent so much time jumping between viewpoint characters already that it basically came off as a lighter but still vaguely coherent intermission piece. Fair enough, Paranoia Agent!

You can check out my full review at ANN, or my notes after the cut.

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Gatchaman Crowds Insight – Episode 8

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Things sure aren’t looking good for our heroes now. Gelsadra reigns supreme, Tsubasa refuses to listen to anyone, Rui has given up hope, and Hajime is still holding off on taking action. It’s depressing, frankly – this season’s overall been much heavier than the first one, and this was the heaviest episode yet. It was also a really good one, of course, and gave me plenty to talk about, but man. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing our heroes have fun again, hopefully, eventually? I guess we’ll have to see.

You can check out my full writeup over at ANN, or my notes below!

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Classroom Crisis – Episode 9

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Well, we finally hit Nagisa’s big “betrayal,” and it honestly felt kinda underwhelming. He didn’t actively help A-TEC, but his move here was more an incidental betrayal of convenience than a strong dramatic choice between friends and revenge. But I guess that’s somewhat reflective of Classroom Crisis’ fundamental strengths and weaknesses – it’s very strong when it comes to building these characters and putting them in a room together, but its ability to tell a tightly composed story isn’t the sharpest. I’d figured that was likely due to the need to add a bunch of nonsense anime diversions like the beach episode, but maybe this writer just isn’t as good with plotting as he is with writing people. Either way, this episode still worked nicely when it leaned into the show’s strengths, so I’m still fairly confident everything will turn out well in the end.

You can check out my full writeup over at ANN, or my notes below!

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