It’s that time again, lads. I’ve experienced some media, mostly video games, and it’s time for me talk about them to the void.
No More Heroes
First up on the docket is the original No More Heroes. For the uninitiated, NMH is a 2007 Hack n’ Slash game created by Suda51 and his team over there at Grasshopper Manufacture. If ya don’t know who Suda51 is, He is game developer and director well-known for his out-there projects, and a lot of his works end up being cult classics, NMH included.
We follow loser otaku and overall human shit-stain Travis Touchdown as he mows down assassin after assassin to become to the #1 assassin so he have sex with this really rude white lady. Yeah, it’s even more absurd in practice than on paper, bud. No More Heroes is really cool in that you can take this story completely at face value and have a good time, but if you also want depth and themes in your games, it’s also still right there the whole time. Travis has a rather telling inner monologue during the first boss fight that really lets you know that despite the intro to this game being him mowing down some unfortunate guards with his Definitely-Not-Ebay-Lightsaber while shouting profanities that there’s more under the surface.
The gameplay is not super complex. While there is some cool tech that can help you push your style and combat prowess even further, the basic premise of the game is indeed chop down whoever’s in your way. I had a really good time with it, and I’m gonna have even more fun when I replay it and ramp up the difficulty.
The bosses are the standouts and are what most people remember about this game. You cut down mooks and reach the bosses at the end of the levels, and they all have very memeorable designs and some pretty unique enough gimmicks. Reversing your screen, wanting you to hit their projectiles back, straight up running from you, instant killing you if you attack while they’re downed, etc. The bosses encounters make this game. They’re super fun, very memorable, and the all the music is killer, pun completely intended.
There’s other stuff you can do. You can run around Travis’ city and collect legally-distinct Dragon Balls that can help you unlock powerups and new moves and there are free missions you can do to try and see how much you can fuck up some unfortunate mooks. That’s about it, tho. The gameplay loop of NMh is built on doing odd jobs for money and using said money to buy your entry into the boss level. And while you can do assassin jobs to keep the slash gameplay loop for essentially the whole game, the more infamous part of this is that Travis literally does odd jobs around town for money, and they are menial. Picking up trash, washing away graffiti, getting rid of scorpions, finding cats, etc. And if you want the stronger beam katanas, you will need to do these a lot. They can get pretty boring, but in the grand scheme of things, I really didn’t mind. They offer a break in-between all slashing and cartoon violence. There’s just something pretty funny about mowing someone’s grass and then going off to have a fatal showdown with someone’s grandma with a laser cannon.
My history with No More Heroes actually goes back to around 2019-ish. I bought Travis Strikes Again on my PS4. Not the ideal way to get introduced to this franchise since TSA is kind of a Retrospective that Suda uses Travis to go through. But regardless, that game is so much fun, and the number one thing going through my head as I was playing was, “Wow, whoever made this must really love games”. And I felt the same way when I finished this game; Suda and his boys over there really love video games. You can’t make stuff like this and Lollipop Chainsaw and The Silver case without loving games. This game is just so wacky and fun, but can still make you sit down and think, and I think it takes a special kind of guy to make a game like that. This is definitely one of my favorites; glad I played it.
Beam Katana/10. I will be replaying.
Three Houses
So, I was about to break the running gag I’ve had going for like 4 years now of not finishing Persona 5 Royal…and then I forgot my PS4’s power cable at my brother’s house and it is now lost to the ether. When we will find it? When it wants to be found, dammit. But that left me with a hole in my free time..and then I remembered I have a whole-ass Nintendo Switch.
Fire Emblem Three Houses is a game I bought on launch and loved. It was my first real exposure to Fire Emblem. Now, I played a Fire Emblem on my GBA back when I was a wee lad, but if you ask me which one, I’m going to look at you like you’re crazy because I’ll be damned if I remember the name of the game or any of the characters, and I definitely didn’t finish it because I lost my gameboy and all my games at some point before getting a psp.
The game is pretty similar to Persona. If that’s a common thing throughout the franchise, I would not know. We play as unflappable mercenary Byleth as they get scouted to become a teacher at the Church’s officer academy, where the three future leaders of the nations that make up the continent this game takes place on all happen to be studying at. You choose to teach one of them and go on a journey full of betrayal, dragons, war crimes, and optional marriages. You have months, and at the end of each month, there will be a big battle. Up until that point, you are free to teach your students skills you want them to excel in, plant herbs to grow stat boosters, do tasks around the monastery to build your social links, and perform free battles to build exp. Again, really similar setup to Persona, but that’s far from a bad thing. One thing to note that really ground my gears is that exp is not a thing you get from just being in the battle. You get exp specifically when the unit fights or takes some sort of offensive or supportive action. That might sound like a “duh, nigga” moment, but hear me out; It can get real easy for some of your students to fall behind, so you have to be kinda meticulous, at least by my standards, so that you can get a decent amount of exp on the characters you intend to use. This is especially true on the harder difficulties; on normal, you have unlimited free battles on weekends, so if there’s someone you wanna raise up, you can get them up to speed after a couple of battles and be done with it. On hard and maddening, you have the standard free battle amount of 2-3, so you have to be a lot more purposeful since there’s essentially a finite amount of exp in the game now. Not a dealbreaker, but as someone who likes to try stupid stuff, that rains on my parade since it means I have to know far ahead of time who I wanna play and what I wanna play them as on top of making sure I feed kills to people.
Fire Emblem is more or less the only game of its kind that I’ve played. My time gaming has steered me towards action RPGs rather than strategy RPGs, but this was a welcome experience. Now, I’m making far more use of the game’s systems than I did when I played back in 2019. On my first playthrough, which was Silver Snow(for the sake of avoiding spoilers, I cannot tell you how I got this route), I basically just did everything that was obvious in front of me. I advanced people to classes that made the most sense and made sure to try and not get anybody killed. But on my 2nd playthrough, Verdant Wind, I made more use of things like gambits, reassigning class abilities, mastering certain classes for their skills, and I generally leaned more towards doing things that would build better strateguc habits than my previous strategy of “Byleth go brrr”. These were on normal, and my next playthroughs for Azure Moon and Crimson Flower will be on hard, which is where the good habit building will pay off.
The combat is good, but the real standout of this game is the characters. There are a lot, and they’re all loveable. And unlike Persona, where the social links are exclusively between the protagonist and the target character, these characters have social links with each other as well. Not everybody has one with everybody else, but generally speaking, students will have socials with everybody in their house, a decent amount with those outside their house, and a couple with faculty/soldiers. It’s a really nice setup that lets you see more sides of the characters and also lends to the worldbuilding since a lot of these characters have different backgrounds, even ones from the same region.
The game’s great,and I’m excited to finish the other two routes on Hard. I would play maddening, but that sounds like an exercise in pulling your teeth out with a rusty spoon, so miss me with that.
Freezing
Back in the distant year of…2014, I stumbled upon Freezing. This was around when I was getting back into anime and manga. In addition to Shonen Jump stuff, I found myself interested in ecchi anime, because of course I was. I had seen stuff like Ikkitousen adn Sekirei years before thanks to a school friend, and having itnernet access allowed me to find more series on my own time. Enter Freezing, a series about hot school girls fighting aliens and each other, mostly each other, really.
So, keeping it a buck, the easiest way to describe Freezing, now that I have read all the main series manga recently and having watched both seasons of the anime years back(I’ll probably rewatch the anime at some point, tbh), is Dragon Ball Z, but with tiddies. This series escalates very fast. There will be a technique or form introduced in one arc, and in the very next, they still have to step their game up because the newest threat is even stronger. It’s DBZ but with hot women instead of saiyans. It would feel wrong to describe it as a harem series because even though our sauceless main protagonist has all the trappings of a harem protagonist, only two girls are actually interested in him, and they kinda stop seriously fighting about it relatively quickly. The rest of the girls are spoken for. This series has the girls, The Pandoras, and their male partners, limiters. Just about every Pandora-Limiter pair we are introduced to are involved romantically or on the cusp of being involved.
Considering that the appeal of this series is “hot women beating up aliens and each other,” the story and characters are nice enough. I don’t think I’d ever recommend this off the strength of its story and cast alone, but if the cheesecake brought you here and you actually wanted a decent narrative to go with it, this is probably up your alley. Satellizer is pretty likeable, and once the whole bullying arc that the series starts on is over, her schoolmates are pretty chill. Kazuya, our main character, has more balls in the manga than the anime, but at the end of the day, he’s a timid guy who can’t fight in a series where women box with aliens. Him being cool was probably the last thing the people behind this series had on their minds. The backstory of his family is some of the best drama in this series, but his actual character is mostly nice guy protag #5423. I don’t hate him, but I would never say I liked him all that much. The stars of this series are the girls, and they’re the cool ones. The other limiters get to shine from time to time, further making Kazuya look like a buster, but again, it’s mostly the girls.
My personal favorite after Satellizer would be her love rival Rana. Rana’s design is great, and she’s just a sweet girl when it comes down to it. I mentioned that they stop fighting over Kazuya relatively quickly and that’s because Rana basically goes from “I will take him you” to “hey, threesomes are cool, too” after like one arc of being around Satellizer. She’s a real one, and her being friends with Satellizer was actually my favorite part of reading the manga. If I had one complaint, it’d be that she initiates a lot of their nice friend moments. Satellizer has a really nice one near the end of the series where she’s told to get her trusted comrade, and we immediately cut to her Shaking Rana and asking her for help. Yeah, if I had one complaint, it’s that I wanted more scenes like that from Satellizer outside of fights because they obviously care about each other in battle.
I will say if the part you are more interested in from that “DBZ, but with tiddies” description is the tiddies, watch the anime. The manga shows the nipples, but the anime generally ups the fanservice and has eyecatchers and OVAs to boot. If the DBZ portion is the one that interested you, go for the manga. There’s more story, and the fights are more brutal. Of course, the manga is unfinished and will never be finished, really. The guy that wrote this series is infamous for starting series and just leaving them on Hiatus. More power to him, but I’m definitely not anything from him again. This series is cool, and it has a pretty special place in my heart as my first real ecchi series, but I’m not falling for this twice.
But yeah, cool series. Satellizer best girl; I’ll actually fight you for her. One of the only anime characters I’d even think about calling “Waifu,” and I never fucking do that.
Hollow Ataraxia
Fate is a pretty important IP for me in the grand scheme of things. I never would’ve guessed that I’d still be around this franchise when i watched the anime back in 2014, but here we are.
Unlimited Blade Works was a great anime, in my opinion. I haven’t read the original VN, so I can’t complain about all the things they cut, but I liked the story that was told. Emiya Shirou is a real one; he’s fucked up beyond repair in that head of his, but watching him struggle to live up the ideal that kept him going for years and protect the people in front of him has always gotten a reaction out of me. His showdown with Archer was amazing, and watching him try to help Sakura in Heaven’s Feel put a smile on my face. Fate/Stay Night gets the stamp of approval from me.
Hollow/Ataraxia is a sequel to FSN. Some weird things happened, and there’s a setup where elements of all three story routes from FSN are canon. This leads to a situation where All the servants sans True Assassin are still around and everyone not named Kirei is still alive, Kirei staying dead simply because there’s not route in FSN where he actually lives.
Somehow, the grail war has restarted, and on top of that, there is a 4-day loop that the cast is stuck in, and on top of that, there’s a new master with a servant from a new class that are aware of the loop and want to abuse it so they can eventually win the restarted grail war.
Now, that sounds like prime action setup, and it is, but the vast majority of this game is comprised of the Loop portion. You spend each 4 day loop interacting with various FSN characters from Shirou’s perspective. Eventually, you will unlock scenes that advance the plot that I mentioned, but most of this game is experiencing Slice-of-Life scenes with the FSN roster. And believe it or not, that is actually plot-relevant. I cannot stress enough how much of a must-play this game is if you enjoyed Fate/Stay Night at all. You get to see so much more of the characters. Just about everyone gets plenty of moments to shine. And this game is funny funny. Genuine laughs here, man. It’s just great. Rider all but verbally offers Shirou some ass to repair her bike, Shirou and Shinji duel for the fate of the world, Saber plays soccer with kids, it’s all dumb, good fun. The only ones who don’t get a lot of focus are Assassin, who is bound to the temple gate, so he can’t leave for shenanigans like everyone else, and Berserker, who is relegated to essentially being a force of nature both for the fact that he literally cannot speak and another, actual plot related reason. Still, they both get to look cool at the end. If you wanted True Assassin to show up, I’m very sorry. The only thing I can tell you is go read/watch the Camelot Arc from FGO because he’s honestly a MVP in that.
Bazett and Avenger, the new master/servant duo, are probably my favorite Fate characters now that I’ve beaten the game. I spoiled myself a little bit with Avenger, but I actually ended up avoiding the real spoilder about him. All I can say is that if you play FGO, do not look at him for very long and do not do his interlude. It’s a spoiler, but it also doesn’t spoil the real important part. As for Bazett, her appearance in FGO doesn’t spoil anything, really. But yeah, these two are great; I love them to death.
All in all, I finished the game after like 40 something hours. That was 40 hours well-spent. I’d like to experience it again after some time away.
Again, if you like FSN, play this game.
Also, the best Type-Moon girl debuts in this game.
I guess it’s time for Tsukihime, now…
Closing
Okay, I’ve more or less gotten what I wanted to say off my chest. I’ve played/read a bit more than this, but this is what I wanted to talk about. I’ve been revisiting the Senran Kagura series, but I’ll save talking about that for another time. Same with Gintama. But this is me ackowledging that I’m playing/reading them and having a good time.