Category Archives: Week in Review

Winter 2025 – Week 8 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I’m pretty sure this goddamn snow-stuffed winter has inflicted me with a recent head cold, so please appreciate my suffering as I tirelessly work to supply you good people with more of my meandering opinions. This week saw me reaching the end of Black Myth: Wukong, which I frankly feel a little ashamed about even finishing; the game is a fundamentally misguided and altogether miserable experience, and I only really finished it because I still feel some regret about dropping Lies of P. I know the only way a bad game can actually get one over on you is by tempting you to play it longer than you’re having fun, but I nonetheless still possess a touch of senseless “gamer pride,” which compelled me to beat the endlessly aggravating, fundamentally anti-player experience that was Wukong. Fortunately, my week was otherwise furnished with a generous scattering of film features, so let us turn our minds to brighter topics as we burn down the Week in Review!

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Winter 2025 – Week 7 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am celebrating my birthday in style, by formatting reviews, writing up this here blurb, and maybe doing some laundry later. Hell yeah, no breaks on this party train. As far as general week-in-review business is concerned, I have spent the last week getting progressively more angry at Black Myth Wukong, which appears to have been designed by thirty independent developers who were barred from any mutual conversation. As a result, none of the game’s control mechanics, enemies, or environments successfully mesh with each other, which when combined with the game’s frequent outright glitches makes for… well, it’s not Hollow Knight, I’ll tell you that much. I’ll have to let you know next week if this journey to the west ends with me crushing the disk and chewing up its shards, but for now, let’s break down some films!

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Winter 2025 – Week 6 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome on back to Wrong Every Time. We’re now roughly halfway through the winter season, and I’m happy to report that I’ve actually been catching up on BanG Dream! Ave Mujica, having screened and written up its first four episodes over the last week or so. It’s certainly more of a fantastical melodrama than MyGO, but still exceedingly entertaining in its own way, pitting girls who need even more emotional guidance than Tomori or Soyo against bandmates who give even fewer shits than Anon or Raana. The results are as disastrous as you might expect, leaving me with a disorienting psychological crime scene to sort through. I’ve also of course made time for a scattering of variable film screenings, ranging from recent blockbusters to delightful mid-century adventures. Let’s break ‘em down!

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Winter 2025 – Week 5 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week saw me finally breaking ground on the current anime season, as I screened the first two episodes of MyGO followup Ave Mujica in quick succession. While the show is certainly more broad and melodramatic than its predecessor, it’s also extraordinarily entertaining, showing that MyGO’s writer/director team are just as confident with this sort of operatic theater as they are with MyGO’s quieter pleasures. We’ve also been munching through the Ramayan, and have at this point reached the big action-adventure core of the series, when Ram’s wife Sita is stolen and he must square off with the demons who’ve claimed her. It’s a pleasure as always to see such a formative, archetype-defining text in motion, and it’s serving as a fine compliment to our Armored Trooper Votoms excursions. But let’s forget all that business, for today I bring you a selection of fresh films, plucked directly from my towering film review buffer. Let’s break ‘em down!

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Winter 2025 – Week 4 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. With the winter season now solidly underway, we’re finally reaching the point where we can separate meaningful contenders from first-episode pan flashes, a process that so far seems to be indicating this is an entirely sequel-centric season. We’ve got 100 Girlfriends, Ave Mujica, and The Apothecary Diaries, the third of which I have at this point heard enough about from enough reliable sources that I’m actually getting curious. Of course, I’ve also still got plenty of Armored Trooper Votoms to get through, and have recently started the ‘87 TV adaptation of the Hindu epic Ramayana, which my housemate first watched as a kid. So yeah, eclectic mixture of media at the moment, and I’m having a delightful time with all of it – including these fine film features below, which I have hand-selected for your latest Week in Review. Let’s get to it!

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Winter 2025 – Week 3 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. We’re still deep in the January doldrums at this point, but I’ve been keeping busy however I can, and it seems my tabletop associates are at last emerging from their hibernation and bellowing for treats. It’s significantly harder to set up DnD sessions now that we don’t share an apartment, but the spirit is willing even if the scheduling is weak. I’ve also been making good on my resolution to get back into traditional fiction this year, and have already written a short story that’d been bouncing around my head for months. Plus I’m still munching through the delightful Metaphor Refantazio, which is so good it’s actually becoming a bit of a problem in terms of getting to other projects. Nonetheless, my film viewings continue apace, and I’ve curated a fresh collection of reflections for you all to peruse at leisure. Let’s get to it!

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Winter 2025 – Week 2 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome the heck back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am looking out at perhaps the first clear day of the new year, a sight that would perhaps inspire me to get off my ass and go enjoy some nature, if it weren’t also twenty goddamn degrees outside. Instead, I will likely stay safely indoors and play a whole bunch of Metaphor: Refantazio, which has succeeded in inheriting its Persona brethren’s capacity to utterly take over my life. Seriously, we’ve got like turn timers running to ensure everyone gets an equal share of Metaphor, it’s an absolute mess over here. Anyway, with two hour timers separating Metaphor play sessions, I’ve also found time for plenty of film features as well. Let’s break ‘em down!

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Top Anime of 2024 (And Year in Review)

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Hello folks, and welcome to the end of another year on this swiftly decaying orb. There’s no sugarcoating it; this has been a year of absolute horrors on the global stage, with my own government doing its best to sanitize a ruthless genocide while the world at large slips further into regressive, reactionary social attitudes and outright fascism. The neoliberal consensus of the early 2010s has broken on the back of capitalism’s increasingly ruthless post-COVID exploitation, and the best message the alleged adults in the room could muster was “things are fine the way they are,” a message that resonated so poorly it sent a narcissistic, buffoonish reality show host back into the most powerful seat in the world.

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Winter 2025 – Week 1 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. It’s the beginning of a brand spanking new year, and though all signs point to a renewed slate of horrors bearing down on us, I’m determined to at least start the year with as much confidence and enthusiasm as possible. I mean, we’ve got… what, that Elden Ring multiplayer spinoff coming at some point, right? And I think Hades 2 will be coming out of early access? Plus One Piece will be coming off hiatus in a few months, and I imagine Toei will be pulling out all the stops for Egghead’s finale. Alright, so we’ve got some stuff to look forward to, that’s definitely a start. I’ll keep brainstorming new reasons for the season, and in the meantime, let’s ring in the new year with a fresh collection of films. On with the Week in Review!

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Fall 2024 – Week 12 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I write to you from the midst of more end-of-year preparations, as I simultaneously chart out my favorite anime of the year, and also cram in as much Dead Dead Demons as I can before the dead dead deadline. I’ve been enjoying the show more now that I’m past the point I read in the manga, and am no longer directly comparing the two; taken as a work in its own right, it provides a fatigued, almost fatalistic snapshot of our lives on the cusp of apocalypse, perfectly echoing both our real-world inability to contest the decline of late-stage capitalism, as well as the ease with which that uncertainty lets us justify the unthinkable. I’ve also been puttering away at some big Dungeons & Dragons projects, and am currently nearing the end of designing a “quest” that’s in truth a brief campaign in its own right, featuring a fully populated boom town and a variety of Wild West-evoking side quests. I’ll probably let you know how that turns out either here or in my Vox Machina pieces, but in the meantime, let’s break down the week in films!

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