...and a happy new year!

And so, another year has gone by!

And this year was a bit of a weird year for me. I got my Master's degree, which I thought was going to be so busy that I would have to cut down a lot on blogging, but turns out that... I think I posted more over 2022 compared to 2021? But I think I do have gotten into a nice habit of not trying to rush things out and take things at my own pace so that I don't burn myself out. Me circa 2018 would probably force myself and burn the midnight oil just to get the playthrough of Pokemon Violet done before December was out. 

Admittedly, it does really help that the current projects that I'm doing, ongoing, have felt a lot more like fun things for me to blog about instead of obligations? I think that was what led to the huge burnout in 2020 or so -- trying a bit too hard to review everything I watch or read. Some pieces of media I ended up just... consuming, and that's it. There are some things that I would like to talk about in this blog over the next year (or for me to just write up and edit later on as a bit of a 'buffer' for if/when I get busy) but so far, here are my quick rapid-fire talks of what else I watched this year that I normally would've reviewed...

• Kamen Rider Geats: Amazing arc-structured show. I like it more than Revice and definitely far moreso than Saber. I don't know how I'll handle the reviews for this one, though, since I kind of binge-watch the show and so a lot of the details might be mixed up in my head. Great that they used a very explicit arc structure, and the vibes of the show really does feel like Garou in a way. A great combination of Kabuto and Ryuki, I feel.
   I'll wait until the second arc is over before deciding if I'll do reviews per arc or after the show itself is over. 
• Kamen Rider W: Fuuto Tantei: A short anime adapting the manga that takes place as a sequel to W. Great animation, and the voice actors they got really do channel the original actors amazingly well. The plot is pretty neat and they got to do things that wouldn't be feasible in a live-action show, but a lot of it does hinge on how much you like Tokime, who I don't mind but might understandably rub some people the wrong way. 
• Dr. Stone: I read all the manga. It's... it kind of lost me around the middle-end parts (particularly the post-Xeno arc and the globetrotting ones), but I really did admire how succinct the ending is for a manga that seemed to be somewhat rushed. It's not the best, and in the last 20 chapters or so all the characters that's not Senku kind of blur together... but at least we didn't get a Toriko or Bleach syndrome with this one, at least. I also admired how the manga was quick to realize that its original supporting cast wasn't the best, wrapping up the Tsukasa arc and then ditching the original cast for the Ishigami Village. Good job, there. 
• Chainsaw Man: I thought of doing episodic reviews for the anime, and might still do so if I rewatch it next year. Love the manga, which I caught up to around May this year. Great direction that they went with for the anime adaptation, especially the very sleek and smooth animation.
• Spy x Family: Extremely funny. I watched the first season of the anime on November or whatnot, but when the anime was at the height of its popularity I actually went and read the manga instead. Pretty fun!
• Cyberpunk: Edgerunners: I'm only vaguely familiar with the story of Cyberpunk 2099, but familiar enough to watch this show. I'm two or three episodes away from finishing it, but so far it's done a wonderful job at both introducing the world of Cyberpunk and also telling its own very self-contained story. 
• Overlord, Season 4: Was late to the party on this. A return to form after the rather sub-par animation of season 3, but I do feel like they rushed a bit too quickly through this? It's been a while since I read the light novels that corresponded to this, and I know they cut out one of the arcs to save it for a movie, but I did really feel like we could've had one or two extra episodes to pad things out. 
• Kaguya-sama, Season 3: Very fun, very light. This one adapts all the way up to the school festival confession arc, which is nice and emotional and all that, but the best thing this season did is the rap episode, where they actually got the voice actors to rap and even make a rap MV at the end. Great!
• House of the Dragon, Season 1: Neat enough for a 'oh, hey, let's watch a couple of episodes of this' show when I'm doing my Genshin Impact dailies on my tablet. Surprisingly got pretty fun towards the end, great acting from Daemon and both Rhaenyra actors. The time jumps are a bit jarring but pretty fun, and I expected the conflict to end in the first season, which is a bit surprising but very welcome.
• The Sandman, Season 1: Neat-o. Huge fan of the comic book series, very faithful adaptation, great casting for Morpheus. Not much else to really say about it? 
• The Boys, Seasons 1-2: Haven't watched season 3, but what a riot. A roller-coaster of a series, very fast-paced and fun. A brutal deconstruction of the superhero genre, which I tend to not care for, but the writing for the TV show is pretty fun. Great actors for Homelander and Billy Butcher, too. Will eagerly consume the next seasons.
• Invincible, Season 1: Also another deconstruction of the superhero genre, albeit this one is an animated show. Not as huge of a fan of this one as the Boys, but this one I feel is a bit more optimistic and flows more like a superhero show itself, since the main character is actually an honest-to-goodness superhero.
• My Hero Academia (the manga): still do plan to catch up with the anime eventually, but the manga's pretty interesting. I do admit that I kind of lost interest around the time the 'final battle' showed up, but they did an okay job focusing on many of the 1A class members in this final showdown... even if I really do think that I don't particularly care all that much about Shigaraki's redemption. 
• The Book of Boba Fett: Very messy? It's not the worst thing I've watched, and it got a lot better when the Mandalorian showed up and it led to the 'the best episode of Boba Fett is the one without Boba Fett'. I admittedly never cared all that much about Boba from the old EU, though, and I do like the bit of expansion of Tatooine's culture. The stupid Cyberpunk reject vespa riders are very eye-rolling, though, and Boba himself isn't the most interesting character in this show. 
• Kenobi: Very fanservicey. Great that they got Hayden and McGregor back, and while the fanservice is obvious, I did like any time Obi-Wan and Vader faces off against each other. Great child actor for Leia, too. Huge plot snarls for them apparently forgetting each other when we get to Episode IV, but I do feel like this was pretty neat as far as a 'story never told' season like this would be handled. Third Sister was very underwhelming, though.
• Andor: Eeeeeeeeeeh is my big response to it. It has a promising if plodding first batch of episodes, but... for a show about Cassian Andor, it really didn't give Andor much of a personality beyond generic rebel hero, and while the plotlines that they show are interesting on paper, they really aren't things we haven't seen in other Star Wars project. The heist and the prison break episodes were neat, but there's something rather odd when the side-stories are more interesting to me than anything involving the main characters. It has its fandom, though, and I don't count myself among it, but I'm happy that this was relatively well received by critics, I guess. 
• Jurassic World: Dominion: A mess of an ending, because I'm here for dinosaurs and not locusts and clones. Neat conclusion to the characters from the two previous World movies, I guess, but I really couldn't care all that much when they kinda ignored the most interesting part of the franchise, which are the dinosaurs?
• The Batman: Great reboot. Great Dark Knight-style distillation of the things that made Batman cool while still being grounded and down-to-earth. Unlike the DCEU, I absolutely approve that the makers behind this movie really understood that the 'vengeance' part isn't the main point of Batman stories and that he's supposed to be a hero and a hopebringer and the 'fear' stuff is just a tool against the bad guys. 

I also played through Mass Effect 3, going through all the DLC's which I never actually got to before. Still think the ending is dumb, but my headcanon is that the Reapers blew up and the Citadel DLC happens after everyone survives and nothing bad happens to any of our heroes as the 'best' ending, so yay for that. I was planning to go into Mass Effect Andromeda, but... the opening kind of lost me, and I got Pokemon Legends Arceus, Pokemon Violet, Pokemon Scarlet, Persona 5 Royal and Final Fantasy XII all vying for my attention, so no Andromeda-ing for me in the near future.

Next year I do plan to do a lot of stuff... I have been slacking on monster reviews and do plan to talk more about it. Obviously the ninth generation of Pokemon will show up no matter what, and I do have several other Pokemon-related articles that I have been doing on the down-low, but I do plan to give a lot of my older Pokemon reviewing articles a bit of a rewrite. That's going to be a big project, though, and while I did revise some of them (particularly the scoring system, which is now at 6 balls!) I do kind of want to go back and rewrite a lot of them... particularly the pre-Alola reviews do feel a bit dated, especially compared to the quality and length of my reviews in the Alola and Galar reviews. It would put a severe dampener on the scheduling of other content on the blog, though, since I would want to do full rewrites...

Eventually, I do have been writing down long drafts of my commentary on Pokemon moves in the background, and would be polishing them for the first half of 2023. After those are done, I might do some 'reviewing humans' for Hisui and Paldea, though those articles really didn't do all that well, so... I do plan to do a bit of an addendum to my 'fan region', too, and highlight just how much better Pokemon Scarlet and Violet actually handled a lot of the concepts that I've mentioned there. 

My main priority now is to finish Pokemon Violet first, of course, but I do plan to do Scarlet after that (I'm actually doing Scarlet concurrently... basically Violet is when I sit down and pay attention, and Scarlet is my 'meandering around while I watch TV' game) and then jump straight into Persona 5, which will be the brunt of my next batch of 'reviewing monsters'... which will be done in the same way as what I did for Final Fantasy XIII and VII, where I talk about the monsters (and personas!) as I encounter them in my playthrough.

Other reviewing monsters... I do plan to talk about Scarlet Nexus, a game I saw a friend finish, and will dissect the very bizarre monster designs of that game. A lot of the video game monster designs do kind on hinge on me playing through the games itself, but maybe I am being a bit hard and I might just sit down and talk about games that I've seen people play through. Other games that I do plan to talk about at some point include Metroid Prime 3, the Mario games, the Fallout games, Morrowind, Zelda 2, Trails of Cold Steel, Silent Hill... we'll see. I have zero knowledge of the franchises, but I really do want to talk a bit about a bestiary from the Monster Hunter and the Dark Souls/Elden Ring franchise. I also do plan to talk a bit more about Kamen Rider monster designs, with Kuuga, Zero-One, W and Faiz kind of being up there in terms of the series that I might talk the most about. 

Other things I plan to do for the future... I haven't actually watched the second or third parts of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean, and that, I think, will be a bit slower as I go through them. I still plan to talk about Bleach as it goes, and maybe I'll do a 'season 1' type write-up about Chainsaw Man and some of the independent superhero shows there. I do have drafts up for a lot of the DC movies, though it's all going to depend on whether I have the energy to proofread them. 

Anyway, that's 2022, and it sure is a wrap!