One Piece 1135 Review: Knightly Bandages

One Piece, Chapter 1135: Camaraderie Cups

I do like this chapter a fair bit. We have a nice juxtaposition of a lot of calm, slow world-building scenes contrasted with the scene of the two God's Knights (because until further notice, I think it's safe to assume that they are) prowling around Elbaf. We also have a bunch of payoffs here and there, as well as some buildup for what will be the main themes in Elbaf. 

We start off with explaining the owl library, with Saul introducing Bibelot, an owl that has the ability to gigantify any books that enters his territory. Lilith, who has memorized the Devil Fruit Encyclopedia, quickly identifies this as the Iku Iku no Mi, or the "Rearing Rearing Fruit" (at the point of writing we don't have official translations yet) which allows the growth of inorganic items. It's a nice way to give exposition that really does fit the worldbuilding, with the giants being a bit more superstitious and traditional, while Oda remembers that Vegapunk would know most of what there is to know about Devil Fruits. 

We get some discussion about the logistics of how this has been the way that giants learn of the outside world, since newspapers are also subjected to Bibelot's powers. 

We cut back to Team Luffy and the school of 'modern age' giants, who are so unfamiliar with war and excitement that even a slightly more energetic swing ride scares them. Luffy is extremely disappointed at these weakling children, but I really love it that it's Sanji -- who's gone through his own share of being forced to be a literal human weapon as a child -- who tells Luffy off. Again, there is an interesting dichotomy where there is some discussion to be had about how warfare in this stage of the world is actually useful, particularly since the world is about to descend into war in the next couple of years... but is it right to essentially brainwash children into doing so? 

It is, undoubtedly, a disappointment as a reader whose expectations is "fuck yeah, land of war", but in-universe you can't really say that teaching children the ways of war to always be a good thing. Yes, the children in Ripley's school is leaning too far the other side of the proverbial balance in that they're so disgusted by war that if any ever comes to their doorstep (and war will, in this case) the angry, offended looks they're ding isn't going them any favours. 

We then get a nice contrast as Colon, the recurring kid that's been a Shanks fanboy and the one we've seen in some early Elbaf chapters, shows up and yells at Luffy that he is 'wide open', attacking Luffy with a gigantic... toy sword. Luffy goes straight into battle mode, blocking and snapping off the sword... and then the fucking lunatic ATTACKS A CHILD WITH AN ARMAMENT HAKI GEAR THIRD ELEPHANT GUN.

Holy shit, Luffy! I know he's likely just aiming to miss, but need I remind you that a Haki'd up Gear Third Elephant Gun was the exact same attack that Luffy used to knock dragon-mode Kaido out of the sky when he thought that Kaido killed half his crew? 

Usopp calls Luffy out on this, but Luffy's more concerned about how not every child in Elbaf is spineless. The other kids have no real recourse but to yell mean stuff at Luffy a bit, but Colon is excited to see a Yonko. We learn that Colon is actually Ripley's son! And... and Ripley's partner and Colon's father is a human. This mysterious pirate (who I don't think is Shanks, if we're considering the slower growth of giants?) is fearless, and Ripley notes that they simply just never made it official due to their difference in growth rate. 

The group is split up a bit, with Robin, Chopper, Lilith and Bonney staying with Saul in the library. After being kind of out of focus, I like the panel of Franky being excited about the Adam Tree. The entirety of Elbaf is built around an Adam Tree, and I like that Oda remembers that the Adam Tree was first mentioned and introduced as the source of super-expensive wood that Franky wants to use to create the Thousand Sunny. Franky and Saul give us some exposition that there are many lesser Adam Trees all around the world, meaning that there are other sources of the Adam Wood that doesn't have to be Elbaf. 

And, finally, Gerd shows up with a bunch of Elbaf clothing for the Straw Hats. She still has a slightly disturbing 'oooh little people are so cute' string of inner thoughts, but I suppose Gerd just finds humans cute like pets or babies or something. She sure isn't kidnapping people and tossing them into a diorama and playing god with them! Anyway, Brook, Robin, Franky and Jinbe all get their Elbaf looks. They look like vikings!

And as the Straw Hats go to the banquet, we get the serious scene. The two God's Knights -- NotShanks and his partner who I'm calling "Bandages" until we get an official name -- are wandering around the Quiet Castle. The giant guards there are all friendly, with the understandable theory that these might just be lost members of the Straw Hat pirates. "Bandages" reveal that their goal is to look for Prince Loki, and demands Loki's location from them. 

Again, the guards are pretty friendly, and even gives the audience some repeated exposition about Loki is so cruel for killing King Harold. But "Bandages" gets pissed off, and just like any anime villain encountering generic unnamed guards, they become fodder to show off the villains' strength. The powers aren't exactly clear, and a bit more subtle art-wise, but it seems that the bandages around the God's Knight's face isn't just there for show, but related to her power. It's a bit more subtle since we only see them form around the guard's legs and arms, but random new bandages do appear and it seems to be what strangulates him and knocks him out.

The guard that answers the God's Knights first screams and convulses in pain, and either dies or gets knocked out. "Bandages" warns the other guard that this is what happens when someone is rude and prideful, and she's changing her 'ask' to an 'order'. 

So yeah. We don't get to see much of NotShanks -- clearly by design, and likely to prolong the illusion that he might be Shanks a bit longer -- but I like that we're actually getting some exposition about the God's Knights' goals. They're here for Loki, although whether to free him, recruit him or kill him we're not exactly sure. They're also not here to hunt down Luffy or Vegapunk or Bonney, which I do find interesting. 

But we leave the God's Knights behind for a while as we cut to the party! Luffy and Usopp are celebrating, and I absolutely love that we get three panels, one after the other, of the giants acknowledging the good that the Straw Hats have done for them. Dorry and Brogy talk about how they've defended their pride in Little Garden; Oimo and Kasshi recall how they saved them from their servitude under false pretenses in Enies' Lobby; and Hajrudin boasts about how he was saved from being erased from memory in Dressrosa. 

We even get a slightly longer recap later on from Stansen -- more geeky One Piece fans would already know that Oda snuck in Stansen into Hajrudin's crew and that he is a preexisting character... but realistically, the giant freed in Sabaody was so long ago and Stansen's first introduction was in a cover story. Plus, he grew out a viking beard! But these little connections are what makes One Piece great, and I really also do love that Oda respects that not all readers are built the same and adds in one of those Reverie recap panels to remind/retell the story of Stansen.

Anyway, there's no bullshit about the Straw Hats being mistaken as enemies or whatever, at least not by this particular village of Elbaf giants. Everyone raises their titular 'camaraderie cups' to the Strraw Hats, and welcome them, the friends of the giants, to Elbaf. The chapter ends with Mountainbeard Jarul showing up with his 'bojajaja' laugh. He is bigger than the other giants, and the shot of Brogy next to him highlights his immense size. And... we close off with what I assume is going to be his One Piece character gag, where he is extremely blase about the sword that's piercing his head (and lucky helmet). 

Anyway, I like this chapter a lot! It's a great chapter to close out the year (or open next year). Pretty fun stuff here, and a nice balance between lighthearted and more heavy stuff. Looking forward to see what we do with Elbaf! 

Random Notes:

• Yamato and the Inari Pilgrimage Cover Story: Tama kicks Holdem in the face, apparently defeating him. I like the detail of Holdem dropping his sword and that falling weapon cutting onto his belly-lion's head, taking that creature out. Remember that Holdem was previously beaten by a Gomu Gomu Red Hawk. This has rather hilariously led to a lot of powerscaling memes. 
• We get the return of the Momonosuke gag, where the naughty kids bury their faces in Ripley's breasts, while giving onlookers a snide remark. Sanji is angered by this. I didn't find the joke on its own particularly funny in this case, but Sanji's "WTF, are all kids like this now" comment is fun. 
• Speaking of Sanji, he's the one that reacts to Colon's revelation that his dad is a human. Sanji's expression is just one of surprise, and not one of his usual perverted exaggerations, but... you totally know that the gears are turning in Sanji's head. Indeed, assuming compatible DNA's, a male human and a female giant would be the mechanical way to pull such a pairing off. Plus, we have seen half-giants before in One Piece, albeit in the Foxy arc...
• I do find it funny that apparently, despite being Warland, Elbaf also requires people like Lilith to apply for resident permits. Visas and employment passes are the bane of international workers, man... 
• Out of the four Straw Hats with new wardrobe changes, I feel like Franky and Jinbe particularly rock their looks super-well. I wonder if Franky's beard is part of Gerd's costumes, or if he can spontaneously grow a beard like he does with his hair? 
• Without much else to speculate on, a lot of people have noted the similarities of the bandaged-up God's Knight with Uta. Which... other than the eyelashes (which Oda does on most of his female characters) and relationship with (a) Shanks, I don't really see. Thought it's worth mentioning, though. 
• The giant guards aren't exactly unnamed, with the one "Bandages" takes down being called Bogi, but I missed that when I first wrote the review. 
• It is a bit weird that Jarul would be alive now, but the chapter does note that he is the oldest living giant in existence, so I guess his lengthy age is an exception even for the giants' longer lifespans. 

Movie Review: Venom - The Last Dance

Venom: The Last Dance (2024)

And so, it ends. I've always admitted that despite its quality, I've liked the two previous Venom movies. They aren't the best, most serious adaptations of everyone's favourite symbiote anti-hero ever, but they do a rather great job at being action movies. Slightly more crude, slightly more violent, and relying a lot on Tom Hardy's dual performance as both an exasperated Eddie Brock and what some people have been calling 'frat-bro' Venom... but they have been entertaining stuff and, for the most part, the only parts of the so-called 'Sony Spider-Man Extended Universe' that actually worked. Venom has enough star power among comic-book fans and the concept is novel enough that, just like comic-book Venom, the character and his own mythology was enough to pull on a couple of movies on his own. But it's still apparently not enough, because after two movies, they finally decided to pull the plug with a third one to complete the trilogy. 

And it feels... weird. All of the promotional material, and the cold open, focuses on this big bad evil symbiote god Knull. Who... devoid of the comic book context, is pretty impressive even if he does look like a villain from a World of Warcraft cutscene. Now I'm not expecting him to be a major, fully fleshed-out villain -- none of these superhero villains tend to be -- but I expected him to at least be relevant to the story of the movie if they're going to go through the trouble to introduce him. 

No, we don't get that. 

I also didn't expect much of the frankly rather minimal-effort tie-in to Spider-Man: No Way Home, where Eddie got transported to Earth-616 by Dr. Strange's spell. It is quite bizarre to see that we tie in so much of this otherwise irrelevant post-credits scene from another movie, with an extended scene of Venom and Eddie being drunk and the bartender being arrested later on. Considering this has nothing to do with the upcoming Xenophgae plot, or the sinister government agent plot, it really feels like it's a completely unneeded tie-in. 

We then set up aspects of the story that ties in to the previous two Venom movies. Turns out that Detective Patrick Mulligan is assumed dead after the events of Venom: Let There Be Carnage, and Eddie Brock is the primary suspect. This leads Eddie and Venom to be on the run, trying to get to New York City in an attempt to clear Eddie's name. It's a simple enough premise. I also really enjoy the scene where he fights a bunch of animal traffickers as a nice re-introduction to the audience about these two's dynamics. 

A new anti-Symbiote organization, Imperium, begins to hunt down Eddie Brock and Venom. Led by a staunch soldier Rex Strickland, they work on the soon-to-be-decommissioned Area 51 with a bunch of scientists. We've got the 'science over everything' Dr. Teddy Paine, and her assistant Sadie Christmas. They've caught the shell-shocked and near-vegetable Patrick Mulligan. They've also got around a half-dozen of other captured Symbiotes, which feels to be in stark contrast to how the other Symbiotes appeared to have been wiped out in Venom, but whatever. A green symbiotes bonds with Mulligan, and 'Toxin' (not actually named in the movie) gives the three named Imperium government agents a bit of a warning about the incoming darkness and some stuff about the Codex.

Both Strickland and Paine get... some character development over the course of the movie. They're acted competently, and get enough screentime to be memorable. Strickland goes from just a random soldier to being vengeful after his team gets killed partway through the movie, to finally realizing that Venom is the 'good' alien. Paine is dispassionate and doesn't care about anything but the science, until I guess she grows a bit of a heart in the climax. 

Eddie and Venom suffer this consequence first-hand as they try to latch onto the side of an airplane as Venom. The Xenophage tracks them, leaps up and we get a pretty cool battle on top of the airplane before they all crash-land onto the Nevada Desert. The movie cuts back and forth a bit about exposition -- some is delivered to us by Venom, and some by 'Toxin' later on.

But basically, the God of the Symbiotes, Knull, is awakening and he's sent one of his minions, a hideous organic beast with a whirling tooth-maw called the Xenophage, to Earth. The Xenophage can detect Eddie and Venom when they fully transform into their Venom form, and is hunting them for a 'Codex' that is embedded within their DNA. This 'Codex' is something that is forged when a Symbiote fully bonds with their host and resurrects them from the dead, which is a nice little change from how it was in the comics and helps to streamline matters to make Venom and Eddie a bit more special. 

After some nice visuals like Venom taking over a horse, we get more action scenes. We get a three-way fight between Strickland's soldiers, Eddie/Venom and the Xenophage as they encounter each other. This leads to the deaths of many of Strickland's soldiers, and in perhaps the only nice thing I can say about the Xenophage's usage in this movie, we get to see just how horrifyingly unkillable the constantly-regenerating Xenophage is. 

Barely surviving the river fight and nearly being separated from Venom (which is a nice, tense scene), Eddie hitchhikes and meets a family of crazy UFO enthusiasts, the Moons, who... I get why they are included in the movie. It gives Eddie and Venom some 'humans' to bond with. But they are such a distraction in an already cluttered movie that doesn't deliver in a lot of what it wants to do, so giving us a family of kooky hippies does nothing but grind the movie to a halt. There is no reason why we couldn't have brought in some of the cast from the first two movies (or even used Patrick Mulligan and/or Mrs. Chen, who actually show up in this movie!) and use them as the nice humans that Venom needs to save.

Eddie and Venom arrive into Las Vegas and get up to some of their usual hijinks, which is actually fun. They meet Mrs. Chen, the lady from the store, rather randomly. We get another joke that overstays its welcome, which is Venom and Mrs. Chen dancing on the penthouse. This leads to a fight against the Xenophage, who comes in and breaks the penthouse. By un-transforming, they distract the Xenophage and cause it to bugger off, but Strickland's men comes in and arrest Eddie and Venom, separating the two. It's a nice sequence as Eddie actually begins to panic after being separated, after the two spent so much time bickering in the Nevada and Las Vegas scenes. 

Eddie and Mulligan/Toxin have a bit of a chat, which is basically the last time that Mulligan is even relevant or coherent in the movie. We get a massive confrontation as a vengeance-happy Strickland wants to execute Eddie Brock to prevent the Codex from ever being utilized ever again... which is actually a rather smart thing to do other than the fact that we like Eddie. Sadie Christmas frees the sample of Venom taken from the bar and uses it to bond to Eddie and save him from Strickland's trigger-happy shots.

Of course, this attracts the Xenophage, who attacks the Area 51 facility. Toxin dies an inglorious and anticlimactic death, but not before telling Venom that the other Symbiotes are opposed to Knull and they will help him fight back. We get a very cool sequence as the other Symbiotes in the facility are released. they begin to bond with random staff and start unleashing all sorts of powers against the Xenophage. Some have fire powers, some have whips and giant fists and whatnot... it's a nice visual scene if nothing else, and Sadie bonds with her comic-book counterpart's Symbiote, Lasher.

Elsewhere in the planet Kylntar, Knull sends even more Xenophages to Earth via portals. A single indestructible, constantly-regenerating Xenophage is horrifying enough for the combined Symbiote and soldier army to fight back, but several ends up overwhelming everyone. Oh, and the Moons are there too, with the movie following their completely uninteresting storyline of them sneaking into Area 51 and finally discovering that holy shit aliens are real. Their main contribution is just to be there for Venom to have someone to save.

Anyway, after a bunch of fight sequences, most of the other symbiotes are killed (including Lasher). Venom decides that he needs to sacrifice himself to destroy the Codex, since he's not willing to sacrifice Eddie. Venom turns himself into a giant net, and after a goodbye with Eddie, leads the Symbiotes towards a giant acid tank. Together with a mortally-wounded Strickland, Venom forces the Xenophages as they are burnt and melted to death by the acid, but dies in the process. The goodbye between Venom and Eddie is... all right. I wouldn't say that it's super-duper emotional, but it's not terrible. 

The only surviving Symbiote after this climax is Dr. Payne, who bonds with the Agony symbiote to flash-step and save Sadie from the explosion. Which feels honestly quite randomly inserted into the climax that's pretty focused on Venom and Eddie's separation, as well as Venom and Strickland's sacrifice. 

The rest of the movie rapid-fires through a conclusion. Eddie wakes up in a hospital, where some government agent tells him to keep the events a secret in exchange of having his criminal record expunged. We get a quiet scene as Eddie finally arrives in their goal, New York City... but without Venom. A mid-credits scene show Knull being all ominous; and a post-credits scene show Venom having survived, bonded to a cockroach in Area 51. 

It's... it's a messy movie. Two major things, I think, really hurt the movie -- the first being the inclusion of so many new characters at the expense of existing ones. The Moons really add nothing to the story and only really bring it down... I feel like changing whatever role they had and substituting Mrs. Chen in (even if they can't get Anne or Dan's actors back) would've done so much better in actually making them feel relevant. Patrick Mulligan is also reduced to nothing but a rambling plot device, which honestly feels like a waste of the audience's investment and time. The second factor? The antagonists aren't interesting at all. Strickland is all right for what he is, but the big symbiote threat isn't actually a character, but a glorified attack dog. The Xenophages were pretty effective as a monstrous threat, but for all the attention that the exposition has towards how they are heralds of Knull and how he is the big deal, it feels like such a huge missed opportunity to not have Knull show up. There are ways to have him show up and fight Venom here in his last big cinematic hurrah without killing Knull off at the end of the movie. 

What we got, instead, is that Venom fights a glorified personality-less attack drone with a bunch of allies who are also personality-less .This would've been a bad thing to do even if it was 'just' a middle movie, but as the climax and conclusion of the Venom saga?

Yeah. Maybe the film designers were holding on with the hope that they are able to renegotiate a contract with Tom Hardy to keep doing Venom movies. Maybe they wanted Teddy Paine/Agony to herald a brand-new Symbiote-led franchise fighting against Knull. Whatever the case, it's moot since the Sony Spider-Man universe ends up being canned entirely. I felt like it's such a shame since the Venom movies are some of the more solid efforts from that shared universe, and to have it end not with a bang, but with a whimper... it's kind of a shame. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Eddie and Venom got transported to the MCU universe at the end of Venom: Let There Be Carnage and we see him getting drunk in Spider-Man: No Way Home. 
• The storyline of minions of Knull hunting for a 'Codex' to herald the God of Symbiotes' return is a rough adaptation of the Absolute Carnage storyline, which in turn led to the King in Black storyline featuring Knull arriving on Earth. Only in that storyline, it was Carnage hunting all previous symbiote hosts instead of just Eddie Brock. 
  
• Named characters:
• Patrick Mulligan turning into a symbiote is a reference to how his comic-book counterpart became Toxin, though the appearance and personality of Toxin deviates a lot from comic page to movie.
• Dr. Payne is a composite and gender-flipped version of Dr. Thaddeus Payne, a.k.a. 'Dr. Pain', a minor Venom villain. She also bonds with the Agony symbiote, although the movie gives Agony electrical and super-speed powers instead of corrosive spit. 
• Sadie Christmas borrows her name from a minor host of Lasher, one of the five Life Foundation Symbiotes, and indeed bonds with a Symbiote that resembles Lasher in the movie's climax. 
• Rex Strickland was a 'Sym-Soldier' in the Vietnam War in the comics who encountered a different batch of symbiotes connected to Knull in the comics.
• Knull, the King in Black, is the Symbiote God imprisoned in the heart of the Symbiote homeworld Kylntar. In the comics, Carnage's efforts would eventually free him and he would lead his Symbiote army in war against the galaxy. 
• The Xenophages are a race of giant bug-looking monsters that feed on Symbiotes naturally. They are unaffiliated with Knull in the comics, and the movie has given them the role of various Knull-minions like Carnage and Grendel. 
• A soldier called Thompson has his legs chewed off by the Xenophage. This is most likely a reference to Spider-Man's bully Flash Thompson, who lost his legs in the Iraq War and would later be better known as Agent Venom.
• In addition, some of the other unnamed symbiotes are based on characters from the comics:
• An orange symbiote with giant fists is the movie's version of Phage, albeit with comic!Riot's signature shapeshifting ability -- movie!Riot was given Phage's blades instead of his comic counterpart's club-fists.
• One of the whirling Symbiotes seem to have the red-and-yellow colours of Scream, but none of the bonded Symbiotes have that colouration. 
• Three unnamed Symbiotes that do not correspond to characters in the comics appear in the final battle -- a two-headed Symbiote (possibly inspired by Hybrid, but that's reaching), a white-and-black Symbiote, and a bizarre fire-shooting Symbiote. 
• This isn't the first time that a symbiote has bonded to an animal -- Venom famously bonded to a Tyrannosaurus rex in the Old Man Logan comics and Carnage survived his death at the end of Absolute Carnage by bonding to a fish. The Mania symbiote also survived by bonding to a cockroach. 

Reviewing Monsters: Elden Ring, Part 2

So yeah, I'm definitely having a lot of fun with Elden Ring. I do find that this game is just so nice to let me... decompress? Which is a weird thing to say about a game notorious for being tough, but it's also a very grindy game where the runes and the slow unlocking of areas in the map really does let me see my progress in a semi-meaningful manner. I can just hop in, play for a couple of minutes and see that rune meter go up and maybe level up or upgrade some equipment or something, y'know?

I'm still taking it easy in terms of the main story, and Margit does make for a pretty good 'beef gate' enemy, all things considered. I'm really enjoying the scenery and slowly learning a lot of the mechanics -- there's a lot of stuff to upgrade, a lot of mechanics and different ways you can play, though obviously your starting stats (and how you level up) does kind of pigeonhole you into one way or another. 

I've breached out of Limgrave in search for better equipment, particularly with a guide that tells me where to find certain nice early-game weapons for the class I'm playing, which is Astrologer. The Roundtable Hold do have some traditional RPG vendors, but none that sell intelligence-stat spells, so I do need to look for the NPC that does that. I do enjoy playing as a spell-slinging magician shooting from afar, though I do admit that going in full Guts from Berserk would be the most thematically-appropriate class to play in this setting. 

So far the story is mostly just the world-building. All the background information about the demigod war and this Godrick-the-Grafted guy who's the first demigod we'll be fighting in Limgrave... whose castle I can't even enter yet. I'm sure things will get a bit more complex afterwards, but now I'm just learning about the world and the game mechanics in general. Still haven't defeated Margit yet, though I haven't really tried to... I'm slowly working my way and killing the mini-dungeon bosses around Limgrave and the Weeping Peninsula!

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Noble Sorcerer
As always, we'll start off with some humanoid enemies... and it is admittedly a bit hard for me to tell if we've got a new enemy or not, or if it's still considered the same thing by the game (and the Wiki classifications) or just the same Godrick soldier with better equipment. The Noble Sorcerer is a bit fancier than the Wandering Noble, though, in that it can cast spells! Just like my Astrologer! Noble Sorcerers can shoot 'Glintstone Pebbles', which is such a delightfully whimsical name for the game's equivalent of Magic Missile, flavoured as shooting a specific kind of magical stone at the enemy. It's pretty fun to see that the Wandering Nobles have their own 'elite' versions and they're not all just abused and bullied by the Soldiers of Godrick! 

I guess this is about time that I mention the 'Spirit Ashes' mechanic. In addition to weapons, spells, talents and a buttload of other things, one thing that makes Elden Ring a bit easier than your average Souls/Borne game is the ability to essentially use the Spirit Ashes to summon a ghostly facsimile of enemies or heroes of long bygone eras. The Noble Sorcerer is one of the few I've gotten, which do add a bit of a lore in the description. The Noble Sorcerer's spirit ashes describes that, well, at least my Noble Sorcerer ghost buddy was once a nobleman who tried to learn at the academy of Raya-Lucaria... but he's only got money and no talent, and was only able to cast only the most basic of sorceries. Poor Noble Sorcerers! And now as an undying spirit he's forced to do my bidding and tank hits from giant trolls!

Starcaller

I found these guys gathering around a bunch of craters with purple rocks, and they seemed to be some kind of weird cult. Turns out that they're scavengers that dig around the wake of meteorite strikes for bizarre, purple rocks -- like the Gravity Stone Fan item I looted from them, which explains a bit on how they're able to fight... they can manipulate gravity, represented by them slamming that slipshod-looking pickaxe onto the ground, and then using magic to lift up a boulder larger than their torso and then wield that as a giant hammer. That's honestly a hilarious bit of visual comedy in an otherwise pretty dour game!

Alabaster Lord
A bit more impressive than their Starcaller minions (worshippers?) is this guy, who rose out of one of the craters and actually uses some gravity-themed magic like pulling my character close to him so he can bash me with his giant sword. Visually, the Alabaster Lords aren't the most interesting... they resemble drow elves or dark elves of traditional fantasy games -- gaunt, dark-skinned and white-haired, with stern eyes and whatnot... it's a bit of a played-out trope, even with the cool gravity magic. 

But the additional item lore does give them an interesting bit of description -- the Alabaster Lords are literal aliens, or as much as 'aliens' can be in this setting, actually having skin made out of stone and 'rising to life wherever a meteor strikes'. It was quite literal with the one I killed in-game, and there seem to be a bit more with these guys later on in the game. I do admit that the one I met wasn't the most impressive enemy out there, but at least the gravity magic depiction was pretty cool. 

(Note that the overworld versions are technically called "Lesser" Alabaster Lord, while the actual Alabaster Lords are the versions that serve as bosses of minor dungeons with higher HP and stuff. For the purposes of this review, I'll consider all of them the same enemy unless there's some kind of significant lore or visual difference). 

Fanged Imp

Fuck these guys in particular. I get it. These Dark Souls/Bloodborne-style games are meant to have as many annoying enemies as possible, to punish you and make you die if you lose your focus. I get that. I respect that... but there's a special kind of irritation when it's the common enemies that fuck you over and kill you, knowing that you have to go through the exact same gauntlet of the same enemies because that's how the game's set up. 

Fanged Imps are... well, they're more 'gargoyle' than 'imp' in terms of what they are exactly, being stone statues that blend in with the catacombs they inhabit. Pretty simple in terms of what they are, they're gangly rock-men with devilish heads and tiny nub-wings. Only when an unfortunate Tarnished gets close enough that they pounce you and really charge in and swing like an unhinged lunatic with these weapons that the game call "Forked Hatchet", but it doesn't even look like a weapon. It looks more like a malformed, mutated fork-sickle thing that's just meant to be as assholish as possible. And the Imps, in addition to hitting fast and probably surprising you, also deal the 'Bleed' effect with their nasty rusty implements.

The dungeon you first find them in, Stormfoot Catacombs, is also placed relatively close to the starting area (though I missed it while running all over Limgrave) and also chock-full of environmental traps like fire-breathing pillars. The Imps also hide in different ways, picking corners just out of sight or latching on to the wall like stony asshole geckos. 

What bastards! If nothing else, they really do embody what I think of when you say 'Imp'. 

Erdtree Burial Watchdog

There are some things about this boss that made me go 'huh' in retrospect. What, exactly, is it protecting? Is the stone creature created by the same force that made the also stony imps? Why the fuck is there a mass of corpses piled up like some kind of sick grape-soup attached to tree roots at the back of the room the Watchdog is in? Did the Watchdog and the Imp do that with the corpses in these catacombs, or was this grotesque tapestry the very thing that the Watchdog is guarding? And there is also the typical 'aw man the boss killed me again, better remember the pattern' that these Elden Ring bosses are slowly drilling into me. 

But my biggest question when I saw it was "but it's a cat???"

My next question was just looking at the sheer bizarre absurdity of this thing. It's a giant stone cat with the most uncanny sneering-demon-possessed-mummified-carcass face. It sits like a regal cat. It has a comical crown and cape put onto it, which contrasts so much with its 'immortal protector gargoyle-golem' vibe. Its tail glows and it breathes fire, because why the fuck not, that's not the weirdest thing here. It's also wielding like a giant Berserk greatsword, because, again, why the fuck not, that's not the weirdest thing here. 

It's a cat. It's a cat statue with all of these absurdities I listed above... and then it moves by... standing up like a human. Okay, I thought, then it's just a giant humanoid boss. Fine... and then halfway through it just jerks and floats through the air with telekinesis or some shit, before slamming down with sword shockwaves. I've seen some people online describe it as "a toy whose arms and legs can be moved by a child, and this invisible giant child is moving the giant cat around the room", which... is such a bizarre way to explain the logic behind what parts of the stone-kitty actually do move and what parts don't, but there you go!

The boss fight isn't honestly even that hard; I had more trouble with the imp dungeon. But the sheer absurdity and me going 'wtf is it doing' has made this bizarre rock kitty somehow one of the most memorable boss encounters so far. It's just so weird!

Demi-Human Queen

Not quite found in the starting area of Limgrave, but found as the 'boss' of the Demi-Human Ruins in the Weeping Peninsula area. Turns out the Chiefs aren't the real leaders of the Demi-Humans, but there's a bigger head honcho! She doesn't quite have a boss bar like the two chiefs, since she's not found in a dungeon, so I guess she's not quite considered a boss? She basically has a lot of the same anatomy as the emaciated rat-people that she presumably 'rules' over, though her limbs are longer and her larger size makes how thin these Demi-Humans are a bit more apparent. 

She has a shoddy crown on her head, and wields a Demi-Human Queen's Staff -- which she uses to cast spells and shoot rock shards at you. In one of the nicer bits of animation, the Demi-Humana Queen alternates between using the staff to cast spells, using the staff as a goddamn club, and there are even animations for her trying to channel a spell, failing, and then throwing the staff away in frustration. That's neat, and really shows just how wretched this giant rat-queen is. 

I actually really like the AI of the game programming all the lesser Demi-Humans to cower and surrender after I kill the Queen... which... yeah, I kind of need the runes and loot. Sorry, surrendering rat-people. 

I play the Astrologer class, which was why I hunted down the Demi-Human Queen to loot her staff... and it's rather interesting that the little story around the Demi-Human Queen lies around the staff -- it's a powerful staff with minimal intelligence stat requirements, meaning that anyone stupid can hold the staff and cast sorceries... even an angry Demi-Human. And a Demi-Human with a staff, I suppose, is powerful enough to be the strongest of them all. 

Interestingly, however, if you do the questline of a nobleman called Sir Kenneth Haight, clearing a fort of Godrick's soldiers, he would talk about 're-establishing connections with the Demi-Humans'. Heck, when you arrive in this fortress, the Demi-Humans are actually fighting against the Godrick soldiers. This, combined with Boc's clear sentience and intelligence, implies that whatever state the Demi-Humans are in is unnatural. When you return to the fortress, it's even staffed full with Demi-Humans who don't seem to mind Sir Kenneth's presence (though they'll still fight me). That's quite interesting!

Miner

Another human (humanoid?) enemy is the Miner, who was the main enemy found in the Limgrave Tunnels dungeon. Which... is extremely peaceful to explore thanks to how different the Miners were compared to the fucking imps. The Miners are maybe a bit more powerful if we're counting damage output, and there are some carrying sacks (like the one pictured here) that can lob explosive coal or whatever... but the Miners are so passive. They won't really attack you if they're absorbed in their mining, so you can just leave them be to let them toil for eternity. Of course, disturb their mining, or, god forbid, steal the stones that they're trying to get into, and they'll go straight into murder-mode. 

There isn't much story behind the Limgrave Tunnels, honestly, and none I can really find online that explains what's going on there, so I guess these guys might either be cursed, or just similar to the Soldiers of Godrick where they've degenerated so much that they are now wholly focused on one single activity -- mining and mining only. 

One thing to note is that these guys, for some reason, are really resistant to regular sword slashing damage, which I guess makes them an early-game enemy that forces people who rely on swords to diversify their weapons (or spam spells, as I do) but I'm not really comprehending the logic why. I guess maybe their skin has been turned a bit stony thanks to all the time they've worked in mines? That sounds like it fits the logic of this game, at least. 

Giant Rat

These sure are giant rats! They're the size of dogs, they have a nasty look in their faces, and you can tell that their fur are pretty nasty and diseased-looking. They are big rats and attack in swarms. Again, I don't really have much to say about them. I would say that they look appropriately diseased, but I saw the great work they did with the dog model and that is a truly rabid, diseased-looking animal. This guy's just a slightly dirty, slightly angry rat. 

Archer Golem

Oh, oh, this guy. He is really cool, though! I was just wandering around the Weeping Peninsula when suddenly the sound of something like a cannon being shot whistled through the air and something exploded next to me... which I think isn't too far off from the intended experience here. Which, well, to be ambushed by heavy artillery. It's something that those loser Soldiers of Godrick do around chokepoints, but with very visible ballistae that take quite a while to reload. When I first met the Archer Golem, I thought that it was some kind of a missile launcher... but that's impossible in my fantasy game, right? Turns out it's just really big, really powerful arrows slamming and creating gigantic craters all around me, being shot by this giant suit of armour with glowing flames on his chest and limbs. 

Ultimately, though, these flames kind of are their undoing -- whether you're a barbarian swinging around giant broadswords or like me, astrologers that spam-machinegunning pebbles, once you close the distance by dodging his giant bows, the Archer Golem is surprisingly a rather easy 'miniboss' to fight, with his glowing, fiery ankles being weak and causing him to collapse. 

There really isn't much in lieu of context of what the golem is. The Archer Golem I met was near Castle Morne, which has its own little tragic story with the lord of the castle and an uprising by the Misbegotten slaves... I guess the Golem is likely to belong to the (now deceased) lord, meant to protect the castle against invaders that come from the outside... not realizing that the biggest threat to the lord came from the inside? Pretty cool setpiece, if nothing else.

Common Troll

Speaking of setpieces, these guys! I've seen a lot of these guys lumbering in the distance of Limgrave, keeping a wide berth and just avoiding them until I get some levels. They're this setting's trolls, apparently, not undead giants as I thought they were. I mean, yeah, All Trolls Are Different and all, but come on. These guys are super-gaunt old man corpses with their stomach hollowed out. Why are their stomach hollowed out? You really can't fault me for thinking he's an undead revenant of some sort, can you? 

What a nasty-looking creature, by the way. I love how wretched these trolls look. Ragged mop of hair, two 'tendril' mustaches streaming down from a face that's mostly skull... flabby old-man musculature on his arms and legs... which, by the way, those muscles are actually animated to flop around pathetically if you hit them, really driving home how this guy, while huge and threatening, has seen much better days compared to what their size and appearance suggests. 

In addition to the lumbering ones that roam Limgrave, some of them are actually used as beasts of burden (!) by the Soldiers of Godrick, who lash two of these trolls to pull giant carts (with, of course, treasure chests in them). Groups of Godrick soldiers and Kaiden Swordsmen would escort these convoys, and there's some great storytelling through gameplay where these 'enslaved' trolls are so passive that they don't fight like their wilder cousins, and will only halfheartedly stomp you after you hit their legs. They also have giant chains attached to giant stakes driven through their chest, and... yeah, how are you alive, trolls? Are you sure you're not undead? 

Anyway, a very, very cool monster design. Disturbing looking, but very cool. I like this one. 

Stonedigger Troll
This guy acts as the boss of the Limgrave Tunnels  dungeon, and he's got a giant ornate club instead of the swords that regular trolls use. He sure is a big scary guy,  and it's a bit harder, as always, fighting big scary guys when they're running around in a short, confined arena. I died a couple of times to him before I realized that he can be stunned surprisingly easily with magic spells, at which point the fight kind of became trivial. 

I don't actually have much to say here that I haven't said in the 'Common Troll' entry. He sure does look like a giant, shambling, corpse, and that open stomach still raises a lot more questions than it answers. 

Abnormal Stone Cluster

These are... super weird. Most of the enemies we've seen have been pretty standard 'high fantasy' or 'dark fantasy'. Sure, they are creative and all, but then we've got these guys. Also called 'Lookout Stones' by the Wiki, the Abnormal Stone Clusters are mostly found posing like that picture on the left -- a mass of spherical stones with a single glowing purple light, arranged around a portal to an 'Evergaol', which implies some kind of a prison. And the Abnormal Stone Clusters aren't hostile, they're just... there. Being creepy.

And attacking them has them turn their attention to you, wiggling and levitating like a worm, and even splitting apart into individual stones to attack you like a 2D platformer enemy. There's an eyeball on one end (which is the glowing part) and they have an attack where they clump all their rocks together and detonate. I'm honestly not quite sure what these guys are meant to be. Their location around Evergaols seem to give the fandom the collective theory that these guys are some form of ancient lookout system, but they're just essentially glorified security cameras, and not the actual guards? Eh. They look weird, and I do like weird, but it's just kind of a bit bizarre to see these guys who look more at home as enemies in a 2D Zelda or Metroid game than a game like Elden Ring, is all. 

And I guess that does make me appreciate the game a bit more, knowing that there's place here for stuff that... that are just 'weird' instead of just cool. I feel like this is a nice place to end this review!

Bleach TYBW E34 Review: tAlk to the hAnd

Bleach, Thousand-Year Blood War, Episode 34: Baby, Hold Your Hand

So after the past couple of episodes having been extremely radical changes and restructurings to the plot of the Thousand-Year Blood War arc, it seems almost quaint to note that the next five episodes are extremely faithful adaptations of five sequences in the manga -- two episodes for the Mayuri/Pernida fight, two episodes for the Kyoraku/Lille fight and one episode for the Haschwalth/Bazz-B fight. The only major change is the ordering, where 'Friend' is moved to the very end of the sequence while the Kyoraku and Mayuri fights alternate with each other and makes it seem like they're happening simultaneously instead of one after the other. Also, all scenes of Gerald Valkyrie facing off against the rest of the Shinigami are essentially moved to after everything that has happened, so we can assume Gerald is still just screaming into thin air.

And it's quite interesting because for the most part, episode 34 of the TYBW anime, 'Baby Hold Your Hand', is extremely faithful to the source material, making it both simultaneously easy for me to write this review but also... it's not the most interesting one to talk about. Which is an odd feeling, because I've always felt like Pernida-vs-Mayuri is the best fight out of the three Schutzstaffel fights that we get before Bleach rocketed to its abrupt conclusion a decade ago.

Anyway, we start off with a bit of a follow up to 'Gate of the Sun' last episode, where Uryu looms over the fallen Renji. We get a nice extra follow-up to that sequence, where it's revealed that Sternritter "X", Lille Barro, has been watching the whole interaction with his sniper rifle, which is a nice little follow-up to Uryu being distrusted by the rest of Juhabach's Sternritter.  

Almost the rest of the episode just adapts canon material, however, as we see Kenpachi and Mayuri's group run and come across the mysterious hooded figure, Sternritter "C", the Compulsory, Pernida Parnkgjas in their way. Throughout most of the initial battle, Pernida's almost entirely silent, and I absolutely love the banter between Kenpachi and Mayuri as they're technically allies but they really hate each other's guts. I'm not going to replicate all of the banter here, but it is quite hilarious as they just continue to throw snide remarks at each other. 

Perhaps a little goaded by Mayuri's remarks, Kenpachi charges in and unleashes a slash towards Pernida. Mayuri notices something at the last second and yells at Kenpachi to wait, causing Kenpachi to leap backwards. As he lands, Kenpachi notes that he's "merely" lost an arm, with his sword hand all mangled like most of Pernida's victims. However, Pernida's head is cut in half, and blood begins to geyser from the strange creature's hood.

Again, the mystery behind what Pernida is was stretched out for a long time in the original manga, but it flows quite well in the anime. Pernida contorts their hooded form, and expands tendrils from his hood and crushing the building walls. Kenpachi and Mayuri continue to banter, even as they're both bewildered by what the hell Pernida is. There's some fun snide remarks back and forth as Mayuri snipes at Kenpachi's that he's just 'talking to himself'. 

While all of this is going on, the vice-captains have a little tete-a-tete session. And... it is kind of a shame, honestly, that Ikkaku and Yumichika don't get to do anything in the entire Thousand-Year Blood War arc, despite them both having powered-up forms of some sort. But Ikkaku and Yumichika take note that Nemu has been surprisingly vocal in voicing her opinions. Even if Nemu is just agreeing with her other allies, it's a stark difference from the quiet obedient golem that she has been throughout her entire lifespan. 

Kenpachi's mangled arm begins to rotate and twist even more, and Kenpachi does an absolutely metal thing of just using his left arm to rip the wounded arm off at the shoulder and tossing it away. Oh, and he makes a point to retrieve Nozarashi from the discarded limb. I know this is Bleach, but the sheer badassery of Kenpachi doing it with the calmness and ease of someone who's just picking up a dropped phone from the ground. Kenpachi's arm, like many other things that are attacked by Pernida, gets balled up into a ball of viscera and gore. Even as he acknowledges that he doesn't know jack shit about the entity before them, Mayuri continues to verbally joust with Kenpachi throughout this whole encounter, leading to a hilarious scene of Kenpachi charging straight back in, yelling at Mayuri that he's just "talking to himself". 

I love Kenpachi, but I have to admit that his strategy is insanely dumb, because he just plans to cut Pernida in half before he can uses his powers... except he doesn't unleash his Shikai? You'd think that would be something he does here, which would at least make logical sense. Instead, Pernida's 'head' wraps around the blade of Nozarashi, and their Compulsory powers strike Kenpachi as his legs and other parts of his body beginning to twist and contort.

Then out of nowhere Mayuri stabs Kenpachi with Ashisogi Jizo's three-pronged blade! Kenpachi curses at Mayuri, but Mayuri just calmly notes that this is proving one of his hypothesis because Ashisogi Jizo is paralyzing Kenpachi's limbs. Mayuri stabs his thumb into the baby face on the hilt of Ashisogi Jizo to activate "Fear Factor Four". Why does he need to do that? Why doesn't he? Ashisogi Jizo unleashes a loud scream that paralyzes anything that hears it... which includes Kenpachi's whole body, stopping his neck from being contorted even further. We later get a brief final pot-shot as Kenpachi's eyes glare at Mayuri for this very undignified rescue, to which Mayuri just handwaves as him needing to improve the paralytic properties of Ashisogi Jizo. 

This is Kenpachi's contribution to the battle, which is unfortunately quite short, but we're basically beginning Mayuri's big battle in this arc. It has always felt a bit abrupt, but what are you going to do? Mayuri reveals that he has understood the powers of 'the Compulsory', which involves Pernida slipping nerves into their enemies to control their movements and twist limbs and stuff. Mayuri also ties this into how Quincies can control stuff with Reishi, which... I'm not sure is a comparable analogy, but there you go.

Pernida attacks Mayuri with their nerves, and Mayuri does the hilariously logical thing to do against a nerve monster... he takes out a vial of acid and just splashes it in front of him, burning the very exposed nerves and causing Pernida to screech in high-pitched pain. As Pernida howls, Mayuri gloats about all the dissection that he is going to do... and waxes lyrical about the 'touching sacrifice' of a Gotei 13 Captain in the name of discovery, much to Ikkaku and Yumichika's frustration. 

And Pernida finally explodes the hood, revealing itself to be...

A GIANT FUCKING HAND! With an eyeball with two eyelids, and, initially, a bunch of chains around the fingers.

Mayuri is as flabbergasted as the audience, noting that this isn't what he was expecting. None of us did, Mayuri. Mayuri is quick to realize that Pernida is the Left Arm of the Soul King, and Pernida assumes its full form, extending a full arm to loom over Mayuri and transforms into a giant form. Pernida, by the way, is done in CGI as most people expected. I will be the first to say that it doesn't look as good as Dangai Joue or Kaka Jumanokushi Daisojin, mostly because Pernida is meant to be a giant organic being that's supposed to move naturally. It's not as bad as people made it out to be, though, particularly in motion. 

Mayuri gives a bit of an exposition on the Left Arm of the Soul King (which is mostly repetition of what we've heard in the Ukitake episode) and we get a nicely improved scene as Mayuri pulls out a collapsible umbrella with a face to block the nerves. As the nerves hit the umbrella, it screams and dies... which is a lot more black-comedic in the anime. Mayuri does this a couple of times too to block Pernida's nerve attacks as he calmly converses with Ikkaku and Yumichika about the Soul King, which is darkly comedic.

Mayuri then addresses Pernida, saying that as a scientist, he is extremely happy now because he's found an object that he has never met before, and is exceeding every single one of his expectations. Pernida is a bit nonplussed, and he begins to speak to Mayuri in a slightly deeper voice. Pernida begins to tear apart the ground around them with nerves that spread everywhere, forcing Mayuri to leap around. Mayuri keeps addressing Pernida as the 'Left Arm', to which Pernida asserts -- in caveman speech -- that their name is Pernida Parnkgjas, a Quincy. Mayuri delivers an extremely petty response to that, noting that being the 'discoverer' of Pernida, Mayuri has the right to name it. He then admits that he's willing to make a special exception since Pernida itself is making the request... but Mayuri will decide the spelling regardless. Mayuri's dialogue throughout all of this fight is just hilarious.

Pernida is just confused about the big words coming out of Mayuri's mouth, but rightly assumes that it's an insult. Pernida unleashes his nerves to the ground and creates giant stone hands to crush Mayuri, who is actually a bit surprised that Pernida can extend his nerves into inorganic matter. And I think the brief shots of Mayuri being surprised -- since unlike his other fights, he hasn't had the chance to observe Pernida's full abilities -- is really important on the theme of Mayuri's character development throughout the Pernida battle. 

Mayuri pulls out a throwback from all the way back in the Soul Society arc, extending his own arms into multi-segmented tentacles and starts doing a Spider-Man sequence, moving across buildings while Pernida rampages and uses their nerves to blow up everything. This is, I think, the main part of the Wahrwelt arc where the 'Shinigami can't fly!' comes into play. Pernida's nerves snake up the sides of buildings and Mayuri keeps trying his best to jump off of buildings, but eventually he's cornered and two giant stone hands slam and squash Mayuri like a bug...

...seemingly. Mayuri detonates his glowing sunflower outfit before the nerve-infected stone hands slam down on him, and he rockets away. Mayuri falls down to the ground as the nerves also swarm around the ground below him... and Mayuri presses a button on his shoes, creating floating discs of reishi under his boots. Mayuri notes that he has been studying Quincies for years, and this is the Quincy technique of Hirenkyaku -- and also briefly notes that it might have a different original name since Hirenkyaku is what the Ishida clan called it. 

We never learn what the original (and presumably German) name of Hirenkyaku is, by the way, in either the manga or anime, so I wonder why this line is kept in. I also kind of wished we had a bit more tie-in to the fact that Kurotsuchi Mayuri is an insane Quincy-dissecting psychopath, which would've been interesting to bring up in this fight against a non-human Quincy. It's a bit of a missed opportunity.

Mayuri continues being cocky, tossing out a snake-like explosive... which of course is also alive and is groaning in pain as it wraps around Pernida's pinky finger and detonates, severing Pernida's finger as they scream in pain. Mayuri walks up and confidently douses it in preservatives to keep the sample after the battle... and Mayuri gets caught off-guard as an eye appears on the severed finger, stabbing Mayuri's right arm with nerves.

Mayuri's own pinky finger snaps and breaks, and he uses his good hand and some stitches to rapidly operate on himself. He crows about how he's just able to reconfigure the arrangements of nerves, muscles and blood vessels to neutralize the infiltrating Compulsory abilities, but it's also quite clear from Mayuri's expressions that the unflappable, always-prepared scientist was actually caught off-guard. He's nowhere in control as he was in the fight against Szayelaporro or Uryu. 

Pernida even mocks Mayuri a bit for panicking, before causing the severed finger to morph into a full hand. This second Pernida-clone charges towards Mayuri like a goddamn Wallmaster from Zelda. Mayuri tosses another suicide-bomb worm dude to slow the second Pernida. Meanwhile, the main Pernida body snaps off its middle finger to create a third Pernida. That, uh... that is sure a very interesting-looking visual for sure. 

Another fun dark comedy moment is Pernida screeching about the blood from the stump dripping into his eye. That's the consequences of your actions, Pernida! Mayuri goes into a speech about how fun it is to experience both in succession as the three Pernidas rear up, and Mayuri unleashes his Bankai. Ikkaku and Yumichika panic at the possibility of Konjiki Ashisogi Jizo coming out and flooding the area with poison, and they evacuate Kenpachi... but Mayuri's Bankai is a bit different! It's Konjiki Ashisogi Jizo: Matai Fukuin Shotai, the latest in the Gotei 13's upgraded Bankai. The anime has a very cool sequence of a large purple embryo-like mass emerging from the tip of Ashisogi Jizo before exploding into a giant purple reclining baby. 

Mayuri notes that this new modified version of his Bankai has the abliity to give birth to new Ashisogi Jizos based on the data he sends it. Which feels like a distillation of Mayuri's surveillance-and-countermeasure combat tactics. The original form of Matai Fukuin Shotai roars and its stomach splits open to give birth to another Ashisogi Jizo that looks a bit more familiar to the Bankai form we're more used to. Yellow skin, black eyes, multiple caterpillar-like hands.

Yep, it's a baby giving birth. God damn it, Mayuri. 

The new Ashisogi Jizo begins screaming in pain, and Mayuri dismisses it as having nerves on the outside of its body, which causes it intense pain... but Mayuri, of course, doesn't give a shit. Hell, he might've just done it just because. Pernida fires nerves at this new Ashisogi Jizo, but the nerves just pierce... and the outermost layer peels off. This new Anti-Pernida Ashisogi Jizo has 70 thousand layers of nerves, and Pernida can only tear apart a single layer at any time. We get a sequence as Ashisogi Jizo roars and charges towards Pernida, giving us the surreal imagery of a giant golden demon baby swallowing several sentient arms with eyeballs whole, one at a time. 

The episode ends with Mayuri's seeming victory as he does a mad scientist cackle while Ashisogi Jizo finishes devouring the final Pernida... and we get an ominous shot of Nemu watching from the side.

And it's, again, a pretty faithful adaptation of half of the Pernida fight, which doesn't really leave much for me to discuss since most of my commentary is going to be in the second half of this fight. In the manga, the fights just go on uninterrupted, but the anime makes the decision of splitting it up into alternating episodes with Mayuri and Kyoraku, which makes it a bit less repetitive and makes it look like other characters aren't just running around like dorks while a single long fight is going on. I can get why they did it. But, well, any episode where Mayuri is hamming things up is always entertaining if nothing else, even if I was slightly disappointed that we didn't add too much to this one. 

Random Notes:

• Lille watching Uryu through his sniper rifle seems to be the anime's take on a couple of panels removed from the anime; which is Lille glaring at Uryu suspiciously in the scenes after he caused Ichigo to fall from the Soul King's Palace.
• We also get a brief anime-original scene of Bazz-B, Liltotto and Giselle discussing their next move on a rooftop. Giselle is just airheadedly noting how cute Juhabach and Haschwalth would be as zombies, but Liltotto points out Bazz-B's rivalry with Haschwalth, and tells him to go and do whatever he needs to do, setting up the 'Friend' chapters. 
  
• Hanataro just... disappears from the group. This is also something that happens in the manga equivalent of this scene, although the tankobon omakes show a little doodle of Hanataro being knocked out when Mayuri first releases Ashisogi Jizo's shikai form. It's nothing super major, but considering the anime's been great at keeping character continuity, it's a bit of a shame that we didn't get a shot of Hanataro getting knocked out here. 
• There's actually a kinda cute expression on hooded!Pernida's two eyes when it screeches in pain after Mayuri pours acid on his nerves.
• Kenpachi does show up later on, but I remembered that it was super lame that it seemed like the manga brought back Kenpachi just to become the sacrificial lion to Pernida... and he didn't even show off his Shikai again. 
• "You're not fit to call anything creepy." -- Zaraki Kenpachi on Kurotsuchi Mayuri.
• One thing I don't like is that the anime never uses a consistent colour for Pernida's nerve attacks. It was red when Pernida is cloaked, but at some point it becomes white after the CGI model enters the scene. 
• There is a nice little speculation moment from Ikkaku and Yumichika on whether the Soul King is a giant when they hear Pernida being identified as the Left Arm of the Soul King. Mayuri brushes it off as "how the fuck would I know, I've never met the Soul King", but it does raise a question on whether this will be followed up upon in the new anime!
• I like that Mayuri briefly ponders what organs that a giant hand with an eyeball on its palm is using to speak. 
• Whatever happened to Nemu's own 'glowing' outfit with the cute top-hat? It just disappears both in the anime and the manga!
• It is kind of interesting that in the previous cour, we've got an anime-exclusive flashback of Ichibei utilizing what would become Pernida to fight a younger Juhabach. I had thought that it would become a flashback in the "Baby Hold Your Hand" two-parter, but the fight has been pretty faithful to the source material. While at the time of writing this the cour 3 finale hasn't been released, I really would like to know what the heck that is all about! 

Reviewing Monsters: Elden Ring, Part 1

This has been a long time coming!

I've always been a fan of the music and monster designs of the 'SoulsBorne' series -- a series of games created by FromSoftware that is infamous for being really not friendly to players, making it hard, with memes of 'YOU DIED' from the Dark Souls series being like 90% of the gameplay or whatnot. 

But Elden Ring is a bit different in that it's still hard compared to all average action-RPG video games out there, but it's a tad more forgiving compared to Dark Souls and the rest of its cousins. It's also an open-world game with a highly-praised mythos and worldbuilding (the game's directed by Dark Souls' Hidetaka Miyazaki and part of the mythos is written by A Song of Ice and Fire's George R. R. Martin, and it's famous for heavily homaging Berserk and obviously Lord of the Rings). 

I really was hesitant about picking it up when it was released in 2022. But the DLC was released around halfway through 2024, and... I didn't have the time or the focus to play the game at the time, but I've been slowly, ever so slowly, piece-by-piece going through the game and exploring it. (I have a draft of my slow, laborious let's play of the game, but since I'm not sure if I'll ever really complete it properly, I'll wait to see if that's going to be something I do). 

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Onto the game itself! Elden Ring takes place in the realm known as the "Lands Between", which was once a prosperous land ruled by Marika the Eternal and her demigod children with the power of the mystical Elden Ring. Marika disappeared, one of her demigod children was killed, and the Elden Ring was shattered into Great Runes that caused the remaining demigods to fight over them in a scramble for power. 

And as gods fight for the right to be the new ruler and restore the Elden Ring, the Lands Between paid the price. And that's where our story begins -- in the blighted-out ruins of the Lands Between, torn apart by wars waged by mighty gods wielding vile, corrupted magic, really royally screwing up the land. This 'Shattering War' ended in a stalemate, the demigods lurk in their strongholds... and you play as a 'Tarnished' -- one of several figures drawn by mysterious forces and pulled into this succession war. 

A lot of the specifics (and even what a 'Tarnished' is) aren't actually told to the player, and honestly that's the interesting part of Elden Ring lore, where a lot of the things you meet in your journey clearly means something, but no real explanation is given. And I'm going to try my best to make this a bit of a 'live' review as I go through the game. I am told that there are some stuff that will make more sense as I travel a bit more through the game, and some context will be given to me later on. Now I'm a fair bit into the early game and I've had some context here and there, and I'm willing to read a bit of the fan-wikis but I'm also not really looking for major spoilers. Any major mistakes I'll probably correct in subsequent posts. 

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Wandering Noble

The first tutorial goons you fight are these Wandering Nobles, who shamble around like zombies (and I thought they were just zombies for the longest time) throughout the weakest parts of the game. We really don't learn much about them beyond the fact that they're hostile, they don't speak much, and they wander around disorganized-like. 

We later find out that these Wandering Nobles were exiled from their birthplace and forced into the Lands Between, but perhaps because of their nobility, they don't have much in terms of survival skills and just shamble along until the chaos of the Lands Between break their minds that they become mindless. And I guess it's meant to be ironic that these guys are 'nobles', but in-universe we see them being treated as the lowest by the other human soldiers, who watch over them as they toil. 

There are several different variants of the Wandering Noble, as this picture shows... but Elden Ring doesn't actually tell you the specific names of your enemies so it's not the easiest to figure out if this or that or that other humanoid enemy is a 'Wandering Noble' variant or not, but does it really matter? Everything in this gods-forsaken world is hostile to you, and that's a lesson that the Tarnished needs to keep in mind.  

Godrick Soldiers

A bit of a step-up are the various 'Soldiers of Godrick', some of them dressed up in rags and farmer hats like the left ones, but most of them dressed in red-and-green regalia and knight's armour. There is a relatively wide variety of these soldiers, with the ashen-grey ones being about the same strength as the Wandering Nobles, while the actual soldiers can vary in difficulty depending on their equipment -- some of them even have really massive tower shields, or ride horses, or operate giant firebomb-shooting ballistas. 

As usual, I don't have too much to say about generic humanoid enemies, but I do really like just how... ghoulish-looking these guys look. It's perhaps a bit hard to see when you're rushing and rolling and stabbing these fuckers before they can stab you, but screenshots like these and inspecting their corpses show that their faces are... not the most humanoid looking. We're in the region known as 'Limgrave', ruled by the demigod Godrick the Grafted -- who these guys serve -- and whether it's the corruption from Godrick himself or just the general aftermath of the Shattering screwing up everything in the Lands Between, I'm not entirely sure. But these guys sure are easy to kill one-on-one. The trouble is, just like everything else in Elden Ring, the whole of Limgrave is the territory of their big boss Godrick and there's a lot of them.

The reason why the Godrick Soldiers and the Wandering Nobles look so emaciated and almost zombie-like is because of something that I've been kind of spoiled on, but basically death doesn't really work right in the Lands Between after the shattering of the Elden Ring. Essentially, the way I understand it, dying of old age doesn't work in the Lands Between anymore, causing everyone to shamble about, undying, unmoving. 

And for special beings like the Tarnished, they have a form of quasi-immortality that allows them to resurrect near sites of Grace, which explains the 'respawning' video game mechanic. I thought that combination was pretty cool. 

Tree Sentinel

This is our last 'human' enemy in this page, though I'm not entirely sure that big boy here is a 'human'. Right after the tutorial cave where the 'boss' is a generic Soldier of Godrick with slightly more health, we get free rein of the open-world game, and one of the first thing you'll see is a golden knight with a big-ass halbred riding a golden horse. And this guy... is actually a boss masquerading as a regular enemy, because the Tree Sentinel is near-impossible for you to defeat right off the gate, and would be a bit of a challenge even if you've grinded your character up a bit. 

And I'm just using the Tree Sentinel here because monster-wise he's just a big knight, but I'm using him (and his reputation among Elden Ring players) to illustrate how the world is actually very purposefully unbalanced and you have to really pick your fights. There are a lot of enemies that I've met and ran the hell away from, like Flying-Dragon Agheel or these skeleton giants that lumber around, and I won't actually talk about them until I've defeated them and seen some, if not all, of their animations. I think that's fair, I don't get to talk about them (or look up their wiki pages) until I actually vanquished them. 

Animals

Just like most open-world RPGs, there are a bunch of... technically non-combatant enemies that aren't harmful to you. Sure, the boars can deal some minimal damage if they run into you, but most of these guys are just here for flavour. A bunch of boars, some deers and goats and sheep, turtles with loads of HP, scarabs that you really need to kill for a specific type of loot, some birds and penguins... basically, the one thing to note is that the goats in this universe can roll to escape. Like Sonic the Hedgehog. That's just something so bizarre and not something I would associate with a goat, but why not, y'know? 

Wolves & Dogs

Canines of all sorts probably form the 'mundane' animals that fight you the most, because the Soldiers of Godrick domesticate them and use them as watchdogs in their camps. Wild wolves are also found all over Limgrave, and there's even a small dungeon populated almost exclusively by wolves. Not much to say, we all know what wolves look like... but the dogs are surprisingly a fair bit more interesting, being so mangy, so raggedy-looking and the art department did a wonderful job at making this poor pooch look so utterly wretched. You just know this isn't like a well-taken-care dog, this is the stray mutt of the stray mutts, probably filled with all sorts of mange and rabies and lice and fleas. Nasty!

Giant Bat

Right, something a bit more uncommon now -- giant monster bats! Pretty cool design. The main body is a fair bit exaggerated from a real bat, with long human-like legs and a body structure with a ribcage and abdomen that resembles more of a Man-Bat than an actual bat. Love the face, too, which has such large, nasty leaf-like ears that take up so much of their head and makes them look more intimidating than they already are. Many real-life bats have these big leafy ears, but their faces are usually a lot cuter -- or at least not a snarling demonic mess like this guy. 

Because these are video game monster bats, the giant bats have a sonic-scream ranged attack. Also, being bats, they are more of them at night. They're honestly not particularly threatening, but they would also be one of the first airborne monsters that would give melee-exclusive builds a bit of a trouble. 

Demi-Human

It's not all soldiers, and in the fringes of Limgrave are these Demi-Humans, who lurk in caves and beaches and dress up like your stereotypical 'goblin', or your stereotypical cave/jungle-dwelling barbarian primitive pepople. Their faces are deformed, their mouth are filled with fangs, their skin are chalk-grey, they are always violent and they wield crude clubs and swords. At night, their eyes glow and they become a bit more feral, but are otherwise as easy to take down as most of the basic humanoid enemies. 

And... what are these guys? Cursed humans? A separate race entirely? Is this what became of humans that aren't "Tarnished" like your player character, or aligned to a demigod like the soldiers of Godrick? Or is this something else entirely? And actually, one of the first questgivers is a very verbose Demi-Human called Boc the Seamster, who's a bit of a pariah among his own tribe. Are the Demi-Humans actually intelligent and they just refuse to communicate to humans? Or is Boc a bizarre anomaly? 

Demi-Human Chief

The boss of the Coastal Cave that Boc sends you off to in his sidequest has two massive Demi-Human Chiefs as the boss, and their face look a fair bit more beastly, looking like... well, a 'rat-man' was what came to mind when I first saw them. If rat-men were twice the size of a human, wear armour made up of scraggly animal corpses and bones, and jump around and try to murder you with giant daggers (which would be swords to humans), that is. 

There's ultimately nothing super-interesting about the Demi-Humans other than the ambiguity of what they are (or what the term 'demi-human' really means) but it's always a fantasy staple to have these goblins or orcs or morlocks or troglodytes or moblins or bokoblins or falmer or rieklings or whatever you want to call them.

Beastman of Farum Azula

A boss of a different dungeon (which's populated by wolves) is the Beastman of Farum Azula. They're also humanoid, but their face are modeled in a bit of a more... mangier and ferocious-looking manner than the Demi-Humans. The jaws are larger, the hair around their body is messier, and they wield this large giant mean-looking murder-blade, and around their bodies are golden chunks of ornate armour.

They're a bit of an early-game hint towards an area in the future, so I shan't really say too much about them, but while they're not my thing I do like the variety of monstrous humanoids in the game. 

 

Kaiden Sellsword

Dressed in Nordic-style fur armour, riding horses and having giant curved blades, the Kaiden Sellswords patrol some parts of Limgrave. As their name implies, they're here to work for money and kill whoever their bosses wants them to. Unfortunately, this also apparently means you. They're a fair bit more dangerous than the average Godrick soldier, and they're a nice lesson to not always rely on your horse Torrent to escape since the Sellsword can and will run you down and knock you off your horse. Not much to say other than describing the fight itself -- as always, this will be a common theme in these reviews if you're just a human. 

Giant Crab

We're back to some beasts with some enemies that are a bit more dangerous than wolves or giant bats, and... we've got a giant crab! I think there's just something so humiliating about being killed by an animal that, to us humans, never ever pose any kind of threat. Crabs aren't like spiders or snakes that already pose some 'danger' to our minds due to their ability to kill us with venom; and they are most certainly not like the wolves or bears or lions of the world that can make a meal out of humans. So there is a hilarious sense of 'aw man' when a giant seafood special scuttles up and makes a seafood special out of you. 

I would also like to say how immaculately well-done the crab is modelled in this game. Particularly the mouthparts, which are adapted very faithfully from the real organism, and how they all move around creepily as the crab goes around to murder you. And it's not just able to murder you with its massive, gloriously rugged-looking claws -- the crab's able to pull off a Pokemon and shoot a fucking hydro pump to snipe you as you're trying to run away with a horse. The crab's also able to hide under the sands and swamps -- the first one that killed me ganked me right after I rode away from the dragon in the swamp, just bursting out of the ground in what looked like a safe corner of the map and snippety-snappety and I'm dead. 

Runebear

Regular bears are also around in the game, but they're only marginally a bit more powerful than wolves. Not too much of a threat unless multiples of them come out to murder you... or if they're hanging around one of these guys. A big bad Runebear. From the image you can see the glowing runes scrawled all over his chest, which presumably is how it got stronger and much more larger. These Runebears are the size of small dinosaurs, lumbering through the forests accompanied by its smaller regular bear buddies (which now look like baby bears next to the big Runebear). They're unbelievable hostile, powerful, and... well, the way I managed to kill one was to aggro it all the way to a bunch of Godrick soldiers, and wait for the Runebear to wipe out all the Godrick goons before I rush in with my ghost-wolves for the kill. 

Most interestingly is that the Runebears have a much more humanoid stance, which I thought was just my eyes playing tricks on me but it's extra-obvious next to the regular bears. The Runebears have a much more humanoid-shaped chests and far, far longer forelimbs. I think the longer forelimbs is a reference to this extinct short-faced bear, but that doesn't explain the massive gorilla chests that these Runebears have. The place that I find them from is around some mysterious runes tied to a big magical tree, which might be an explanation as to why the bears got magically mutated, I suppose.

Again, I might do a 're-review' in subsequent entries as I learn a bit more about the game and explore different areas!

Giant Dragonfly

Of course I have something to say about the big creepy bugs in a video game. I always have something to say about the big creepy bugs in video games! These guys show up quite early in swampy areas, darting around your head and moving quickly and zipping in and taking a bite out of you. Not the most threatening (especially since I'm playing an astrologer class, who can shoot magical bolts) but in numbers, and when you're also being simultaneously harassed by bears and stuff? Yeah, it can be quite disorienting. 

But the thing is, these aren't exactly giant 'dragonflies'. No, the size and ferocity of this creature is certainly exaggerated compared to the real animal, but the anatomy -- including the characteristic wings, the long tapering antennae, and those iconic monster jaws -- are based on dobsonflies. Specifically, the male variation, which are the ones with the iconic and nightmarishly large Pokemon-sized claws. 

I guess the team assigning names either didn't have good communication with the art and design team (which I find unlikely, considering how polished this game is), but maybe they just find the name 'dobsonfly' to be weird in a fantasy video game? Who's Dobson, am I right? But then I felt like they missed a huge opportunity to call these dobsonflies by their larvae's common name... the hellgrammite, which already sounds like a D&D monster anyway.

Anyway, these Giant DobsonDragonflies exist in two different variants -- a brown one and a green one -- which are assigned differently shaped mandibles. They're all functionally identical, though.

Land Squirt

The Land Squirt, meanwhile, is a bit more accurately named -- and it's based on the real-life animal, the Sea Squirt... which are one of those immobile animals forming coral reefs and stuff, similar to the more famous anemones, who are actually classified and behave like animals, and not plants. Sea squirts of the subphylum Tunicata are extremely varied in shape, but at the core they do have a similar body plan that's reflected by Elden Ring's Land Squirt here -- a body, and two siphons, one acting like a mouth and the other acting like an anus. Both siphons function for respiration and for feeding. They're otherwise just sessile and don't have too much for me to talk about... other than the fact that subphylum Tunicata, despite their very simple form, actually possesses a notochord -- which is the primitive, stiff central rod that in vertebrates have evolved into spines. 

Anyway, we're supposed to be talking about the fictional Land Squirts in Elden Ring. They sure are giant, bulbous and tumorous. I'm not sure if they're just working off of the most basic sea squirt body plan or if they had a specific species in mind, but sea squirts aren't the most exciting subphylum for me to spend a couple of hours trawling through. I do really like how they are interpreted here, with the two siphons being faithfully depicted. It uses the horizontal-pointing siphon (the 'anus' one, in real squirts) to shoot out clouds of poisonous gas. Which, by the way, is something that real sea squirts can do when an annoying fish gets too close. They also have these fleshy, almost gastropod-like 'root' system extending out from beneath their main body, which visibly tears off when you kill the squirts and cause them to tumble. 

I do really like the design of this thing. It's so... simple, honestly, in video game enemy terms, but it brings a bit of a 'wtf' out of me when I first saw them and I tried to figure out what they are. I thought they were some kind of tumour-fleshblob monsters until I bought the 'Note: Land Squirts' item from a random merchant which puts a name to the creature. Pretty fun, and honestly I also do think that from a game design perspective having an immobile enemy with a very clear direction of where they're going to attack does make for a nice way to introduce players to the poison status effect. 

Land Octopus / Giant Land Octopus

Probably my favourite enemy so far is the Land Octopus, or its bigger cousins, the Giant Land Octopus. I didn't even realize what I'm looking at until I saw the bigger versions with the more visible beak and the more splayed-out tentacles, actually -- the smaller Land Octopuses are the size of like a small dog, and the tentacles are so bunched up together that they look like a moving mass of... viscera, or feces, something. 

But I guess the idea here is to take 'cephalopod' and be way, way more 'pod' (leg) than 'cephalo' (head). Because the interpretation of the Land Octopus here is to change just a little bit of the design, make the head made up entirely of tentacles, and just have this thing transform into the creepiest globster-looking regular 'wildlife' in the game. The drops we get from them, the 'Land Octopus Ovary', tell us that the land octopus actually specifically hunt down humans for blood to nourish their little eggs, which explains perhaps why the species is so hostile.

Just like the regular 'crabs' in the game, the smaller Land Octopus aren't particularly dangerous. The big ones, though, tower over you and have two giant tentacles that it whips around for range... and if you try to run, They can use the tentacles to vault themselves off the ground and slam down next to you -- not the way you'd expect an octopus to behave! Most bizarrely is its beak -- interpreted not as a clean, smooth chitinous beak like real octopi, but this desiccated bird-beak skull that poke out monstrously out of the mass of tentacles. Nasty!

Another nice little detail -- and I only know this because I was a huge fan of octopi and kept a couple as a child -- is that the Giant Land Octopus model, in addition to having a visible beak, also has a bunch of tiny little tumour-like growths poking out from between the folds of its tentacles. These aren't a sign of Resident-Evil style rot-monsters, no! We don't get to meet the actual rot-monsters until a couple of areas into the game! No, these are octopus eggs. I guess Mama is out and about, lurking into where these silly adventurers are, to slaughter you and specifically nourish their eggs!

While all of this alone is already enough to make the octopus be memorable, they also have one last trick that I found out to be pretty cool -- the Giant Land Octopus, when its HP gets low enough, can heal itself. Pretty simple for a video game enemy, and hardly noteworthy... until you see how it does it. Octy here will eat its own limbs, tearing off the long tentacles temporarily to convert them into food that heals its HP. It's a huge exaggeration of an octopus's ability to regenerate its limbs (since let the battle run long enough and the Giant Land Octopus will regrow those limbs) but it's a fun and very 'comic-book-y' one!

Mad Pumpkin Head

This one has a fun and almost whimsical name! Any large creature standing in a bridge immediately gains some suspicion from me, particularly after being traumatized by good ol' Margit (who we'll cover later after I beat him). Mad Pumpkin Head here is a big, hulking brute with a giant stick (which I didn't realize was also tipped with a pumpkin-shaped club) and a giant... well, I guess it's a pumpkin around his head! His bark is a bit worse than his bite, though, because -- and it might be a factor of my class and abilities -- ranged glintstone pebbles really shreds through his defenses. 

He's a big, angry muscular giant-man, and when I meet him he's just bashing his giant pumpkin-shaped helmet onto rocks or his weapon. Or, at least, I thought that was his helmet and he's just a crazy lunatic. Apparently, the Mad Pumpkin Head is cursed to wear the pumpkin-shaped helmet (or maybe cursed for his head to turn into a pumpkin? This is a fantasy setting, after all) and he's on the verge of a panic attack. The Pumpkin Head I fought was alone, but apparently he can be driven into a frenzied rage if we agitate him enough. 

...which also means that it's also very possible for you to sneak past him since he can't really see you. I think it's a mercy-kill for you to actually engage him in combat and put the poor guy out of his misery, though, considering how pained he is as he bashes his head over and over and over and over...

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And that's all the time I have for you today! Again, I'm doing this as I play through the game and defeating the enemies, so while I have encountered bosses like Flame Dragon Agheel, those undead giants with no stomaches and everyone's good buddy Margit the Fell Omen ('put this foolish ambition to rest', am I right?) I'm going to leave them for when (if?) I beat them. See you guys next time!