Happy new year to all! So things have been a bit slower in this blog, thanks to a lot of real-life stuff and traveling that I've been doing. I've been slowly catching up on some TV shows and anime that I've been doing, and One Piece reviews are still regular, but I don't have quite as much time to read/watch and write this year.
As we near the end of the year, I would like to note about the projects that I'm doing in the future, and what I have been doing. I'll get future projects out of the way: yes, I'll continue reviewing Elden Ring monsters as I continue playing through the game. Bleach: Thousand Year Blood War, as you can tell, is still being written and will be wrapped up hopefully by the first couple of weeks of January. Trying to track the differences is one of the bigger challenges.
Future projects? Yes, I'll let's play Pokemon: Legends ZA as I play through it. Yes, I'll review What If Season 3, though maybe around February (I've written reviews for around the good half of the season, but I'm not the biggest fan of some of them). Ditto for Your Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man. Can't promise reviews-as-episodes-come-out. At some point, I might do X-Men '97. Yes, I'll review the outstanding newer superhero movies that came out last year (Deadpool & Wolverine, Joker 2, Kraven the Hunter and I still haven't talked about Across the Spider-Verse). The live-action DC is getting rebooted, and I guess I'll probably keep up with it? The movies, for sure, with the upcoming Superman, but I suppose the smaller projects like Creature Commandos are short enough for me to do at reviews of -- at least seasonal ones if I can't find enough time/energy to talk about each episode.
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I've also been reading/watching a lot of stuff off-screen, and it's kind of nice to do so without the pressure of reviewing them. I'll go through some of the things that are quasi-relevant to this blog... I caught up to Invincible and watched all the way up to last year's season of The Boys. Generally while I'm not the biggest fan of the super-gory deconstruction of the superhero genre, I think The Boys' TV adaptation is done well enough that it's got a nice balance of both respecting and lampooning the genre. Invincible is a fair bit more restrained in mocking the genre, though Billy Butcher and Homelander are way more inherently over-the-top entertaining in my opinion.
I've also caught up to the Jujutsu Kaisen finale, and... it was a hard final battle to really read. Generally I think I've always been quite vocal on how over-explaining abilities and not keeping it properly in the pace of a fight scene in a shonen manga isn't particularly entertaining -- it's something I'd devour on a databook or something, but not as part of a narrative. The ending isn't as terrible as some other shonen like Bleach and Naruto, but it's still kind of a disservice. My Hero Academia's ending, meanwhile... it's a bit more 'neutral', I think? Things that I thought would happen ended up happening, so there's not much of a surprise. It's a bit more abrupt but at least I felt like the landing was done well.
I've also read a bunch of other manga as well. I'm entertained a lot by Dan Da Dan's ridiculousness, which feels like all the wackiest parts of Bleach and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure merged into one. Haven't watched the anime yet, but I caught up to the manga. Undead Unluck is a bit more ambitious, I think, and I'm maybe 30-ish chapters in? I don't think I like it as much as Dan Da Dan, but the artwork and worldbuilding's really nice. Record of Ragnarok was an insane, high-octane readthrough. Very over-the-top action scenes and descriptions, even though some of the original twists on the mythological gods are a bit hit-and-miss. I really enjoyed my time through the 80-90 chapters of that.
I also reread Gantz, and I really do think that the manga is beautifully done in the first couple of arcs but kind of went haywire right around the alien invasion. I'm also starting to read Gintama again, although I binged a lot of its earlier seasons and volumes back in 2018 or something. I caught up with Hunter x Hunter with the mangaka thankfully getting better and returning to a semi-regular schedule, but... my criticisms still stand, and I think the newest batch of chapters really exemplify my love-hate relationship with this series. HxH is great when it's explaining a lot about characters I care about. It doesn't even need to be older characters (though the Phantom Troupe backstory is phenomenally awesome) but any time we go to some of the minor bodyguards and nobody princes, it's really hard for me to care.
I've fallen of Genshin Impact a lot, but that's less about lack of interest and more about simple time that I have to sit down and game. The sheer scope of the new areas coming up one after the other has successfully intimidated me to not play until I have more screen time. I'll be catching up to the main archon quest (which is actually quite well-written) over the next couple of months.
My Kamen Rider coverage on this blog has been very lacking, but I've been caught up to the previous seasons. I really like Kamen Rider Geats (even if the ending is a bit messy) and I'll probably do the series-long reviews at some point in the future. I think it's the concept of Kabuto done right, with a literal 'ace' with minimal personality as the main rider and a typical 'loser story' as the secondary character. Kamen Rider Gotchard had a fun cast, but I don't think I've ever really got into it quite as much as I did with the other Reiwa shows of Zero-One, Revice or Geats. The newest one, Kamen Rider Gavv... I really like the story and worldbuilding, actually, but not so much the noises and gimmickry. Which is weird since I'm a huge Gaim fanboy and that one also had foodstuff, but there you go.
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But I haven't been entirely doing nothing in the lulls between my blogging. I have been fixing a lot of stuff on the back end, particularly everything on the 'reviewing monsters' page. A bunch of the Pokemon and Digimon reviews have had their layout fixed, though I honestly still agree with essentially a lot of the content. The D&D articles, while they are a bit less format-intensive, have also been fixed a lot.
What needed a lot of work, however, is Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic: The Gathering, both of which needed a ton of image formatting. I haven't touched Yu-Gi-Oh at all mostly because I honestly might just want to redo all the articles in general and be a bit more willing to split expansions into multiple pages.
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But Magic? Magic the Gathering holds a special place in my heart. I last did a MTG review sometime during COVID times, so it's almost been half a decade since I did a MTG article. Since then, I've played a lot of Magic, with my interest in no small part being piqued by doing these reviews. However, my reviews have been stuck for a while. Ironically, I really would've liked this hiatus to happen before Mirrodin so we have all the old-format cards in Dominaria be covered beforehand... I'd really like to start off these reviews with Magic's actual 'soft reboot'. But that's what happens. Oops!
I was also very wound up with formatting at the time, which I felt informed my choices of not talking -- or talking too much -- about certain aspects of it. Having reviewed a bunch of other stuff since that, I think I can do a much better job -- and be a lot more comfortable -- making longer articles.
Having actually played more the card game, I also think I have a bit more to offer in terms of talking about some gameplay mechanics and how it ties to the flavour, which meant I had a bit more to talk about. The focus of my talk will still be on the monsters, but I would take time to highlight some gameplay mechanics here and there.
Which brings me to a bit of a conundrum... do I re-release these articles to reflect the time working on them? But then that would clog up the blog with a lot of long articles. But did it matter if I was going to have a slower output in the next couple of years anyway with my work?
So I have been editing some of these articles in the background, and a lot of them did need a bit more work... and I'm announcing that I will be re-releasing ('timeshifting', to use a MTG term) them in 2025 as I fix them. That incentivizes me to put in a lot more writing effort since these will be translated as 'new posts', and to really fix some of the content in them. Over the next couple of weeks you'll get to see a bunch of the articles that I've already done. And with the exception of my third article (The Dark/Antiquities) I'll be splitting almost all of the 'two smaller expansions' posts, another motivation to change stuff. I'm not sure how long this will take, but it's definitely something that lets me be a lot less passive in editing and writing as compared to making new articles.
To that end, I'll be taking down all my older M:TG articles, and will re-release them over the next year. Some of the earlier articles have had the changes made to them, but some of them need a bit more work. Hopefully that revamping will be done by half the year (optimistically) and I can start talking about the Onslaught block and beyond afterwards!
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On the TV show front... this is probably a bit less exciting to most, but I've watched a lot of the CW DC superheroes shows on-and-off ever since I also hiatus'd myself from them in 2020-ish. I haven't completed all of them, but I've watched enough to write seasonal reviews of them. I don't think I care that much for them to do individual episodic reviews like I used to (and I don't think people would care as much), but longer articles would work.
Also expect, once I get to watching it, season 2 of Jujutsu Kaisen be done in a similar format... maybe. We'll see. I don't think I'll be doing One Piece's Egghead arc, not unless they give us a lot of expansion, but I would like to note that I have been watching the anime and have been liking it.
So basically, things to expect next year:
Welcome to the new year! How it goes smooyher than the last one
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