As it says on the tin, this is a blog that will cover entertainment and my personal opinions on the subjects at hand.
Author: Tiberius
Here, you will find a variety of opinions in anything and everything concerning entertainment. Movies, games, animation, music, TV; if it's a form of entertainment consumed by many, I may have written about it or I plan to do so in the future. Unless otherwise specified, expect weekly updates each Friday.
Out-of-schedule topics haven’t been a thing on this blog in over two months since I wrote about BLACK TORCH rising from the grave. The next topic will cover an anime I was really on the fence about watching, so take this one as a calm before the storm, so to speak. And thankfully one I’d been looking forward to for years.
At this point in time, I’ve got to propose a chicken and egg question about the origin of cute girls in dystopian fiction in East Asia. Whatever the case, there’s enough in the world to inspire such a setting for a mobile game. The one I’m referring to being Girls’ Frontline
Animanga came to the western Anglophone world in the early 1960s with Osamu Tezuka’s magnum opus Astro Boy, and about 20 years later came Dragon Ball and its more famous successor Dragon Ball Z, both penned by Akira Toriyama. Since then, the floodgates have introduced not only more anime to follow, but also different ways in which one defines a certain era.
The final part of this Legacy Video Game Trilogy concludes with a hard reboot that still has the sensibilities to pay homage to the most awkward yet charmingly nostalgic part of its existence. So to recap: MK Deadly Alliance gave us an ungodly pairing in the two sorcerers Quan Chi and Shang Tsung, whose combined strength and abilities gave them the leverage to revive the Dragon King’s Army and wreak havoc on all the realms, without Shao Kahn f[screams]king them over or Liu Kang stopping them.
Not without Raiden’s intervention and before I continue on that, I had time to watch some MK 4 endings and in both Raiden’s and Fujin’s endings, Raiden accepts ascension to the position of Elder God while Fujin replaces him as Protector of Earthrealm. Raiden chose him as a successor and Fujin accepted it. But in Deadly Alliance, Fujin doesn’t appear until 2006’s Armageddon. Plot-hole? Not so. On the production side of things, the devs didn’t think Fujin had the recognition and popularity as the Thunder God so they put him back in this game in arguably one of his better looks.
In Part 2 of this 3D Video Game Lookback Series, I bring you to the Midway era of the Mortal Kombat franchise. For this post, I’m largely going to include the games I have played from this era being Deadly Alliance (2002), Deception (2004), and Armageddon (2006). For those seeing this lineup and wondering about the others, I will briefly touch up on MK4 (1997), bear in mind that my exposure to that game is limited as I’ve never been able to play it even emulated or remastered as the Midway library only ever mentions the three arcade games, most likely due to the little love it received for being a subpar transition to 3D from 2D, written well in this blog from February 2020 and explained by Ed Boon himself in this documentary video included in Deadly Alliance, most likely recorded prior to the game’s October 2002 release window:
I rearranged my notes for this, and for once in two years, I’m glad I did
It’s been dog’s years since I rearranged my notes to get to topics I thought would take me longer to complete than normal. Work has had me begging for relief of some kind (more than I can get from a dakimakura or a viewing of my favorite anime):
I’ve made it a point several times that I don’t default to isekai, but I don’t remember clarifying what that means. I make a beeline for shows I find interesting, that some of them are isekai is pure coincidence. I’m not an isekai junkie like Gigguk or an isekai avoider like The Anime Man. I’m in the middle of it, all things considered. Of course, I’ve made it clear that I don’t always find contemporary anime to watch, but the subject of this week’s blog was all the rage when it was airing.
Let me know if this sounds familiar, a shy, nerdy girl with a nonexistent social life in middle school redoes herself come high school into a gyaru and becomes the cock of the walk at school with an expanding circle of friends. Quick! What am I describing? A new and circulating manga or an R-rated doujin by Shindo L?
Remember when I said that I don’t particularly gun for isekai anime? Well, it’s not because I have strong feelings towards it; it’s quite the opposite. I’m indifferent. A few good isekai will make the rounds and come up on my radar a few months after people finally stop yapping about them… except in this case where I discovered this one due in large part to its upcoming and currently airing anime adaptation that I haven’t been able to access through the usual channels.
Sometime in 2018, Bleach mangaka Tite Kubo released a one-shot manga known as Burn the Witch, starring two lead female MCs: Ninny Spangcole and Noel Niihashi.