Hello, loves. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), this will be another short entry. Not too much going on.

Personal

I finished The Boys season 4. While discussing the show with my friend, he was surprised to hear I consider it second only to the first season. Apparently I’m in the minority here? I’m not too surprised though, since I already felt like an outsider for feeling that seasons 2 and 3 were a big drop in quality (despite being entertaining enough.) I don’t feel like going much into why, as I gave the cliff notes last week. Things generally stuck to those impressions. I’m also doubling down on my prediction that the next season will be the last, if not the second to last. I didn’t look up if the staff verified anything yet, so don’t accuse me of cheating. So yeah, pretty decent season.

I’ve also heard My Hero Academia ended, which I still find hard to process. I had the impression it was going to be another forever-running shonen series, and I mean that in a bad way. The overarching plot felt largely directionless, and the stakes in the story arcs were all over the place which further contributed to the lack of narrative escalation. It felt like it was being written from week-to-week and never planned ahead. I still have enough investment to want to finish it on my own, so I haven’t looked up spoilers. It seems especially practical now, since the anime may end up covering the show in its entirety. Maybe it’ll squeeze out a couple of cool isolated moments, but I’m not expecting a whole lot in a general sense.

I’ve been pretty active with video games. Last week I mentioned I was looking to 100% Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime. It turns out the grind to max out all monsters and item quantities is ridiculous due to the Alchemy Pot requirements as well as the Pot itself being slow (9 items at a time!?), so I decided to just finish the meatier content for now. This entailed fighting the game’s superboss and finishing the tank battle tournament. I beat the superboss on my first try, which was kind of disappointing. Then again, with how simple the gameplay is, maybe it’s a good thing they didn’t make it require a lot of time. The tank battles took considerably longer, since even if you’re decimating the opponent, it takes a long time to win due to the pacing.

Regardless, it was still a clean sweep until the tank superboss, which was without a doubt the most challenging part of the game. I won my first try, but the enemy did end up exposing my tank’s engine. The problem is that with only one opponent on the field, you pretty much have to be trying to let them take your engine. Attacking them pushes them backwards, so eventually you’re inside their own tank and the equidistance to the engines is gone. At least I had a moment of tension for the game’s ultimate challenge. There’s still things to be done in the game in addition to the aforementioned. I’m missing some crew members and recipes, which is inexplicable to me. I believe I’ve beaten every tank opponent and cleared out every area, so I have no idea where those are. I hate using guides, so I still want to exhaust my search before giving in and using one. I might finish things up soon, or it might be sometime in the future. Dunno.

I started up Aliens: Infestation for the DS a day ago. It’s a WayForward game published by Sega based on the Alien movie franchise. If you’re familiar with The Mummy Demastered then you can imagine this as a sort of prototype. You play as a marine with a basic assortment of gun weapons and grenades, and you have to explore ambient environments without succumbing to threats ranging from androids to the Xenomorphs proper. It’s done in a “Metroidvania” style, but I hate that genre name so I’m calling it an explat, or “explorative platformer.” It’s a decent enough action side-scroller that doesn’t particularly excel in any area. The horror elements are undercut by relatively easy gameplay and a bevy of powerful tools at the player’s disposal. The explat design adds padding to the game more than anything else, because it’s so linear that it’s mainly used as a way to encourage backtracking to grab an item from an area that was previously a dead-end until an event flag was tripped. It’s disappointing that this probably would have been entirely improved with a standard level-based structure, as it’s amusing to see the Metroid franchise’s Alien influence come full circle. This one will almost certainly get a review when I’m done.

I’ve been playing through Majora’s Mask with my girlfriend, which is a lot of fun. I can’t remember if I mentioned this little side project of ours last week. We last finished up the Great Bay Temple, so structurally we’re pretty close to the end. In reality, there’s a lot to be done still, as I’ve skipped a lot of sidequesting in desire to show her the more interesting parts of the game. Yes, I know MM is all about the world-building, but it’s the kind of positive traits that are more than the sum of their parts. I want a good mix of the action sections and exploration.

About an hour ago I ended another play session of Custom Robo V2 with my friend. Since I’m playing on the Switch’s Japanese version of the Nintendo 64 app, all of the menu text is in Japanese. Obviously, it would be too much work to just port the English menu text over. I’ve ended every session by making a save state just in case the emulator fucked up, but this time I accidentally loaded the previous save and lost all three hours of my progress in The Grand Battle today. Normal emulators generate “accident” files consisting of your old save data that you can overwrite the erroneous one with, but this is Nintendo so I just get fucked. So annoying. I’ll have to grind back to where we were on my own. Fuck video games.

Oh, and I’ve been screwing around in Elden Ring. I’m mostly looking for excuses to put off the bastard of a final boss in the DLC. It hasn’t been a waste though, as I’ve found two generic bosses I missed in the main game. Crazy how that can still happen.

Also, a visit to my doctor a couple of days ago revealed I’m down 13 lbs from the previous month. So that’s cool.

Professional

My cousin helped me create a nicer-looking resume. That’s about it. Nobody wishes more than me that I had more to say here.

Public

I’ve managed to maintain pace with importing content. The anime section now contains the bulk of my more substantial work. I’m still excited about moving forward once my entire body of material has migrated here. I continue to incorporate new formatting ideas as they happen to come to me, so some of the anime reviews I’ve imported more recently are likely to have more data fields. I’m adding white space here and there to make pages more ergonomic, as well.

Something particularly embarrassing I noticed was that my central hub page linking to each medium’s list of write-ups was never updated past my initial creation of it. It contained a link to the anime section and nothing else! I’ve been promoting my site to everyone I could, and this entire time they only had one library easily accessible to them. I wanted to kick myself over it. Terrible shame. Upon reflection, the homepage wasn’t cluttered enough to justify having an additional directory, so I’m cutting that page out and just linking to the libraries on my landing page. I’d still like a navigation heading at some point, but I have to figure out how to make one.

That wraps things up for this week. Looking forward to bigger and better things! And as always, a special thanks to my beloved Jillian.