Blog update: Out with the old, in with the new... old?

So this has been a bit of a whirlwind of a couple of months. A lot of the stuff you see being published -- particularly the D&D and Digimon reviews, and any Pokemon let's play -- were all mostly done prior to my hiatus. They were all mostly just produced out of order, which was why I haven't published them before. Peeling back behind the curtain, I wrote the first reviews for the Liberator series Digimon in April; and more than half of the Mordenkainen D&D entries were done all the way back in last November.

It's just that getting things in order, formatting them (which is a nice little thing to do in-between work that doesn't require much brainpower) and spacing them up to cover my hiatus is what keeps a stream of posts here.

It is a nice pace for the blog, though. I do enjoy having longer, more substantial articles that are more... 'timeless', so to speak, compared to chasing whatever episode was newest or whatever. Some things like the One Piece live action or Marvel shows might still crop up here and there, but it will be the minority.

Seasonal reviews have also been good for me. I know that I am doing Daredevil and Bleach episode-by-episode, expect seasonal reviews for some other TV shows. I know that's how I'm going to handle some shows like Spider-Noir, and if I ever finish the CW-DC catalogue.

I also have been doing a bit of a cleanup for my older posts -- circa 2014 to 2017 I did a lot of quantity over quality, rapid-firing posts to ratchet up the numbers. Not all the reviews were good, particularly manga reviews that I did to catch up with weekly reviews. If you've been noticing the numbers changing in the older posts, that's because I've been quietly archiving and deleting the older reviews. Some were just essentially one or two paragraph forum posts anyway, and a lot of them used strong, crass reactionary language that I don't really reflect who I am currently. I really was trying to ape youtube reviews back in the day, I think.

So yeah... My Hero Academia, Bleach, Nanatsu no Taizai, Fairy Tail, Toriko, Attack on Titan and Black Clover reviews are now no longer on this site. They are archived, and if you ever feel the need to see them I'm happy to zip over my old reviews to you. Honestly, they were very weekly and reactionary, and I don't think anyone's looking at them anyway, If you feel the burning desire to check out my opinions of them more than a decade ago now (...time, god) I'm happy to lob them at anyone who asks. I thought of doing the same thing to some older One Piece content, but I need to find a nice cutoff point to where I started giving actual effort into those particular reviews. 

Also gone (or soon to be gone) are some old one-off TV and movie reviews that aren't superhero related, and many had... very poor writeups. If you know what they are, you're free to ask me for them too. I have them archived in my hard drive, and I'm not exactly ashamed of them...  but they are a product of my past. I was just trying to review everything, trying to talk about everything, and many of these reviews weren't made with any real understanding, analysis or much of a discussion beyond what's essentially a summary of the episode and about as much content of a forum post. Some of the lengths were about that of a forum post as well! Some older DC/Marvel animated movies were also similarly reviewed that way, and those have been removed as well.

There were a couple of other older superhero live-action TV shows who have been merged into 'season' reviews as well, since a lot of them were quite short and reactionary. I don't want to do this to every TV show just because I don't have a high opinion on the CW-DC stuff nowadays, but it's just to tidy up the blog so each individual post has a decent length. 

Ditto for a chunk of the reactionary Hearthstone content, particularly reaction/review stuff which definitely aren't relevant around three months after any given expansion. I did make a concession with the 'lore' articles, outdated as they are (and irrelevant as they are since the tcg has moved beyond actually adapting the Warcraft franchise and going into 'hats' territory) can stay. I did put in quite a bit of effort into them, and while Hearthstone has moved away from being particularly tied to Warcraft lore in terms of its themes (and WoW has moved through way too many expansions, toned down their novel production, and cycled their characters to be appealing to me) I feel like I'm proud enough of those articles to leave them up. 

There are also a couple of monster review pages whose wikis have gone belly-up and what is left is a mess with broken image links. For the most part I've been trying to host images either from larger wikis or from an imgur account, and that's a lesson I didn't learn until recently. 

By my notes, a total of slightly shy of 1000 (yes, that is one thousand) articles have been deleted (and a small portion like the D&D and some Digimon reviews were converted into newer articles). If my selections are right, you won't miss any of those thousand articles. 

It really boggles my mind how much I was trying to do -- manga, live action TV shows, monster reviews, card games... at this point, the identity of this blog, my writing interests and the engagement around them seems to be quite defined and I do want the backlog to reflect that.

I also feel like I might merge some of the articles, particularly super-old and rushed reviews for the older superhero shows, into huge mega half-season articles. I won't do it for everything, but some of my older DC/Marvel stuff are admittedly quite rushed... I don't have the desire to rewrite everything, but they look much neater in chunks like what I did with the recent Supergirl and Black Lightning final season reviews. So expect that to maybe hit some of the oldest of my superhero TV content, and probably things like Dragon Ball Super episode reviews.

But enough about removing stuff... what about adding stuff?

As anyone that might be paying attention to my... extremely disorganized Digimon review revisions, I'm paying attention to some of the older articles. Many stand up quite well, but not all of them! I just did a big rewrite of D&D and did a bit of a MTG rewrite; and republished both of those. But some others could use a bit of a polish. It really depends on whether I feel like essentially republishing a majority of the rewritten articles, which I did with D&D and MTG since I rewrote everything more or less in order. But for everything else? Especially when I'm just rewriting parts of it? The older Digimon reviews will slowly get revised and reshelled out over time. It is a bit of a problem with the reviews that I have specific numbering systems! It's also... a lot less fun to be rigidly reviewing everything as per a system, which burns me out quite quickly, hence me rethinking how I want to revise or republish some monster reviews.

(For D&D, Fizban's -- which didn't need that much work but was still substandard, shorter reviews, is also up for a rewrite)

But in addition to refurbishing my old stuff... I also do want to move back to finishing up D&D 5th edition and finishing up on all the books I've never covered on this site! New stuff! Ravenloft, Dragonlance, Barrier Peaks, Vecna, Mind Flayers, all sorts of weird stuff! And that's before moving on to new (or rather, old) material as I'm quite excited in covering the 2E Monstrous Manual. 

There are a couple of new 5E D&D discussions I do want to do -- the 5E player races is a bit of a bug on my side that I do want to do at some point. I don't think I care enough to do classes, though. But 'appendix' style reviews for beast statblocks released in the adventures, and a "Rogues Gallery" of the named bosses I removed from my older reviews might be an option. That one will just take a particularly large amount of work.

And beyond that? I've been thumbing through a brand new 3.5E Monster Manual I find, and the Pathfinder 2E Monster Core... it'll be fun to go through a different set of ttrpg monsters!

Digimon, now -- my rewrites will continue. It will be sporadic, and some rescorings and rewrites will take priority. I did get through a chunk of the Olympos XII,  Frontier characters and 02 Armor evolutions, but not all of them. Video game bosses, baby Digimon and non-show lines that debuted without a significant media counterpart have also had poor reviews by my standards. These little extra rewrites will, hopefully in time, Ship-of-Theseus my entire Digimon review catalog pre-2026 without me needing to rewrite everything in a regimented way like my D&D and MTG articles. 

Also in general, all the introduction segments for the Digimon articles suck. I will rewrite them and make them less of a anime series review perspective, but rewriting intros is a lot less interesting to me than actual monster reviews, so that would probably take a while. (This extends to a lot of my older content like Pokemon, Resident Evil and MTG where my intros really try hard to summarize entire chunks of lore; when the same things tend to either get repeated or be entirely irrelevant to the monster review).

The X-Antibody articles are dire. I know. They are also some of the ones that are a bit less interesting to rewrite. Being numbered "episode X" now means those are probably ones I will re-publish and move the release date to a future time, depending if I ever get to the mood about talking about the X-antibodies.

Currently, the plan is to finish at 2025's releases -- I've done most of the legwork all the way up to Liberator and New Century's releases, but while I have a draft up for some of the Beatbreak partners, I won't be publishing/finishing those until the anime has finished airing it; so expect the Digimon reviews to go on another (hopefully shorter) hiatus after I hit the Toho Braves/Pendulum Warriors series. I think we went on a pretty good run for the Digimon reviews this time around, and particularly so with the engagement and the additional revisions to older articles. 

And, of course, my MTG rewrites is always a thing.

I'm done re-reviewing the entire Mirage block, after a massive, well, writer's block back in 2025 when I was doing a lot of the MTG. But I'm through with that, and with us entering the Weatherlight saga and me taking these reviews at a much slower pace to preserve quality, I do hope to get through all of the pre-Mirrodin blocks over the next couple of years, and catch up to where I stalled back in 2020 or whatever when I had my massive MTG hiatus.

I do love talking about Magic; it's just that the MTG articles really take a bit longer to write due to the average length of one of those. I suspect once I move past Mirage and through a bunch of the slower Weatherlight-themed blocks that I can blast through the older sets a bit faster. 

There have been questions about Yu-Gi-Oh as well, which I think is also overdue for a revamp. I did significantly less Yu-Gi-Oh than MTG, though, mostly because of how different the Yu-Gi-Oh release format is and how annoying it is that some cards that are significant in the anime/manga just only appear in random bonus side-booster sets. That said, I do want to take a crack of at least doing those articles again, at least the main expansions all throughout the original first series and maybe the GX era -- with more consistent image quality, too, which was a problem back in the day. 

I do think a lot of these older reviews that I am rewriting are all essentially new content enough that I can justify essentially reposting them if I do enough changes. One on top of mind are Resident Evil reviews, particularly the post-RE7 games and the remake series. I've since played through almost all of them (plus RE5) since I've done the reviews the first time around. These, I feel, will change quite significantly that I can justify to myself republishing them.

Anyway, a long self-indulgent talk about what I've been doing with my little corner of the internet. Over the next week, more reviews as usual!

Announcement - Semi Hiatus

Real life caught up to me, and I am going to be on an indefinite hiatus on this blog for the next couple of months. Really don't have time to review and catch up to new shows, nor do I have time to write too many long-form articles.

At the very least, though, I have written a fair amount of things that have been scheduled to be uploaded. The following review series will still be going on. You guys will still see some regular updates for at least the next couple of weeks, although it will dry up once my buffer is used up. 

• Dungeons & Dragons: Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes has more or less been completed, and will still be uploaded every weekend. That, I think, will be the bulk of the content you guys get to see in the upcoming months. I may get some additional stuff written for D&D's AD&D Monstrous Manual or other collections of adventures finalized and edited as well. 
• Marvel's Wonder Man has been reviewed to the last episode.
• Marvel Zombies is reviewed, but is scheduled for October for Halloween. If the hiatus is longer than I thought, I'll publish them a bit earlier. 
• I also have three 'reviewing monsters' articles, one for the Genshin Impact's Nod-Krai and another two for Undertale, ready to be released at some point. 
• I may have some stuff to write about Digimon, but it'll be pretty short and i still haven't watched anything post-Tri -- not the Kizuna movie or the Adventure reboot/remake or whatever comes next. I actually had a partial rewrite at least episodes 48 and 49 of my Digimon review once I've watched those anime, but maybe I'll just go in with 50 catching up with Digimon since 2021 with zero context... we'll see. 
• I have maybe two, three episodes reviewed for Daredevil: Born Again, Season 2, with review drafts done. While I don't think I can finish the whole season's reviews during the hiatus, some of them might be released. 

In addition, I have a full playthrough of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon DX that's been scribbled but not properly edited or formatted, and those might be published in June or July. 

I've also revised my Resident Evil 5 review, which is quite old, but I've cleaned that one specifically up because I played through RE5 earlier this year all the way to the end. 

There's also the less-exciting CW superhero show season reviews and 'reviewing Pokemon attacks' -- some of which have been sitting in my drafts since last year -- some of which I just need to spellcheck and edit (which GPT is good at, but I don't like shoving my work into GPT... but it will be helpful with a 'fix only spelling and grammar, do not change a single piece of the content' prompt).

Other than that, content in this blog will be very dry -- especially for 'new' and 'live' series, like the One Piece manga, or anything that I haven't watched (the One Piece live-action, the new Bleach or JoJo...) and however those reviews will look like will depend on how I feel when I get to actually watching them. 

(I did read One Piece 1181, it sure is a cool action chapter!)

TL;DR, there will be a buffer of posts coming up in the next couple of months, but that's mostly about it from me until late August. Bit of a bummer, but life gets in the way and I'll see you guys then!

2026

Happy new year!

I hope you guys have been enjoying the holidays, and the recent batch of blog posts -- mainly Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual reviews and my let's play of Pokemon Legends Z-A. Most of them were pre-written in October and November, and I do think that I've been quite transparent about having a bit of a backlog for those projects. In the upcoming year, I think the same style of writing will have to continue due to a lot of changing schedules on my end. I just simply don't have a lot of time to both consume and write new material; and I honestly do find writing long-form articles to be a lot more fun to write and post. So expect that to continue. 

Let's Play / Pokemon:

Gameplay wise, I actually finished up the finale of the base game of Legends Z-A a couple of days ago, which is probably an indicator of what my buffer looks like. I scribble down a lot of notes and write them up as I go. I will be covering Legends Z-A all the way through the postgame and the DLC, although expect a bit of longer gaps between episodes of the DLC playthrough. 

After that, if Generation X isn't out by then, I'll be doing a playthrough of Mystery Dungeon DX, of which I have actually done part of but shelved when Legends Z-A came out. 

I am slowly doing a "Let's Review 'Em All" segment for all the new mega evolutions introduced in Legends Z-A, but I will withhold publishing it until I've experienced all the mega evolutions from the DLC, and also for at least some modicum of official artwork to be released. 

In the new year, I also want to properly continue my 'reviewing moves' series, which is halfway-done. I know it's not the most well-received one, especially compared to other monster reviews, but I don't like leaving that project half-done. I wouldn't be opposed to remastering my older reviews the way I did for D&D Monster Manual, at least redoing Generations I-VII, but that'll probably be 2027 at the earliest. 

Monster Reviews:

I do have all of the rest of the Monster Manual done, so enjoy my coverage of the 2024 5th Edition Monster Manual as they release over the first couple of weeks of January. I will then finish with my own coverage of Elden Ring, which was put into hiatus, as I go on. I have completed the game maybe in September, but the reviews take a bit of time to write. I am slightly into the Shadows of the Erdtree DLC, but Pokemon and general work kind of distracted the heck out of me, so expect a delay of when I'm ready to publish the DLC reviews.

After that, I will be 'remastering' the two bestiary books of 5th Edition in the same vein as the 2024 Monster Manual -- Volo's Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes; collected together and remastered for the 5.5E rules in Modernkainen's Monsters of the Multiverse. It will probably be a bit faster because the statblocks and lore are essentially unchanged between 5E and 5.5E, but expect some expansion regardless, similar to what I did to the 5.5E Monster Manual. I really did find that in the past I was quite intent on trying to cram as many monsters and getting all the books done as fast as possible, and we're going for quality over quantity and speed this time. 

Depending on the schedules, this will alternate with my much-more-condensed mastery of the rest of the adventures... which will be a lot faster due to adventures tending to have a lot less monster lore compared to bestiaries. 

Something that I have mentioned in my Monster Manual reviews is that I've gotten a very well-maintained copy of the 2E AD&D Monstrous Manual, and I'll probably at some point also do a 'readthrough/review' of it. Having done an extensive review of the 'core' monsters in 5E for D&D will make it easier to not have something to refer to as a baseline comparison. 

MTG reviews are still slowly ongoing, despite the lack of updates on that front. Mirage is just a bit of a slower set for me to go through, but also D&D and other stuff are getting in the way, you know? MTG is probably going to be a bit of my 'ultimate' gotcha once I get all the way to the pre-Universes-Beyond expansion. 

Other Stuff I'm Doing...

I'm doing a bunch of other video games on the side for destressing, but not all of them are good for content here. I'm replaying Darkest Dungeon, this time with all DLC's installed, and there is a small chance I remaster the 'reviewing monsters' for that game the way I did for Devil May Cry V. 

I'm also still slowly catching up to Genshin Impact; but I am intentionally putting off the monster review until more patches for Nod-Krai have come out. 

One Piece manga coverage will continue as normal; and I do plan to review Bleach: Thousand Year Blood War as it comes out. Probably will do the Netflix live-action One Piece season 2 reviews, but for both of these, I'll probably take it a lot more easier. 

Other Reviews:

I do know that the past year did give a lot of sequels to other projects that I've done reviews for, but I am very much behind on... on everything. And I also want to have time to just... sit down and enjoy my media without the tension of having to know that I'll write up reviews. 

I'm also probably, if I'm motivated to, going to clean up some of the older reviews like old manga-chapter reviews, to trim down the amount of posts on this site. A lo of them were rushed and way too descriptive without much of value. 

The following, in particular, I'm probably not doing:

• Stranger Things... I might do a full season review and just call it a day to leave it there. If I do it. It is the last season, but to be frank with season 4 I really ended up feeling a lot less invested with the Vecna storyline and everything. 
• Alien Earth: I have been technically reviewing the Alien series, but if I do this one, I'll probably do it as a season. But probably not. 
• MCU stuff: I have partially-written reviews for some of the TV shows (Marvel Zombies and Ironheart) but they will get released way later. Movies (I think I only have Fantastic Four left?) (never mind, I actually have done it in September lol) will take a bit more time to write, mostly because I just don't have the motivation at the moment despite actually enjoying a fair bit of their newer content. I'll try to get them done done before Doomsday, at least. 
• Other standalone superhero movies... I keep sitting on a half-written draft of Beyond the Spider-Verse and Superman. Enjoyed both a lot, but found it hard to really sit down and write their reviews, especially after the 'vibe' is a bit gone. X-Men '97 is also another one I enjoyed a lot, but didn't have the time to write it. 
• One Piece anime: I know 'season 1' (heh) is over, and Egghead isn't that long, but it's just such a huge commitment to have something to say about every episode and the changes done in each episode. Even if I do this, it's probably not going to be in the first half of 2026. 
• JJBA Part VII: Steel Ball Run: I love JoJo and I love Steel Ball Run. Unfortunately, probably this is going to be pushed backwards until I've got a bit more time, and be a bit slower. 
• My Hero Academia anime: I'm probably going to go through all the anime since the series is over in animated format, but I don't think it's going to be any time soon. And while I watched JJK season 2, I don't really think I have much to add beyond 'good adaptation' and 'action is rendered well, wow'. Ditto for Overlord season... 4? 5? I guess anime adaptations just isn't all that exciting for me to write for anymore? I tried doing a couple of episodes when I watched the adaptations for Demon Slayer and Dandadan earlier this year, but just couldn't get motivated to write for them. 
• CW shows: I haven't caught up with most of them, and if I do, I'll maybe do seasonal reviews. 

Which is to say, I do think that the last couple of years have really helped me focus what I'm happy to write for, and what I'm motivated to write for... and what's good to read. 

Blog Refurbishing

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. I'll also talk about the deluge of beta Pokemon design, though to be frank the 'gigaleak' or whatever aren't quite as exciting as the spaceworld beta due to how so many of them are just kind of obvious stand-ins. I brought a copy of Pokemon Shining Pearl, and while I might not play it immediately, expect a playthrough at some point, even if it's truncated in the vein of Let's Go Pikachu. 

At some point, I'll complete The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and do a monster review of it. I also am reading through a boxset of 5E Dungeons & Dragons: Spelljammer. I know I'm around two years late on the D&D front, but I'm quite excited to do a monster review for Spelljammer! I know I probably need to fix a bunch of the older D&D material, particularly the crossover stuff. But one thing at a time. 

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!

But before I talk about the final block in the 'traditional' magic (the Onslaught block), I had wanted to fix the many, many broken links in my old MTG articles. A lot of pictures are broken, a lot of the actual content is not the best, and I had tried my best to clump multiple expansions in one page just to rush through things, which made things really cluttered. I was also very obviously trying to speed through as many expansions as I could, which ends up really coming off in the middle articles. I really didn't like it, particularly when I was going through the articles and going 'wait, why didn't I talk about this, or that card?'

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...

...or maybe not! I think I would like to talk about all the MTG cards the way I did with all Pokemon. But trying to force myself to catch up and follow the ordering of expansions might lead to another burn-out, so in-between the canon chronology I might just do a couple of special reviews to the planes and expansions that I actually want to talk about. I do plan to talk about the pre-constructed decks I own already. By virtue of owning the physical cards, I already have more to say about them! And maybe I could to a thematic review for minor tribes. Like, all the Wurms, or the Spiders, the Demons, the Phyrexians... we'll see.

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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. 

Also I may go on a bit of a similar shearing thing that I did in 2021 ish and remove some of the older manga reviews that aren't up to standards. We've moved away so much from manga reviews in this blog anyway, and looking back to my older reviews, a lot of them are very poorly written and use too much crass language. Attack on Titan and most of Fairy Tail have been removed a couple of years back. I'm in the process of archiving and removing the Toriko reviews, and at the end of all of this revision I'll be removing a bunch of the other manga reviews released pre-2017. A lot of these older reviews are rushed, very 'Youtube reaction zomg' minded, and frankly a lot of them were just one or two paragraph reviews that I was using to try and bulk up the post numbers on the blog. 

Also removed from the blog are the old Westworld, Star Trek Discovery and Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers reviews, which are filled with broken links and just poor quality overall. I was in a mood of just publishing as many articles as possible back in the day, and I think the blog works a lot better without random TV reviews of franchises that I don't really have the strongest knowledge of during the time of review. 

So basically, things to expect next year:

...and a happy new year!

And so, another year has gone by!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Year Housekeeping

Happy new year, guys. 2020 was sure a year, huh?

Throughout the year I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do with this blog. I obviously am not going to quit any time soon, but the more I organize the pages on this blog, as I do the 'pages' on the right hand side and do lists of episodes and series that I covered, I do realize that there are a lot of things in the past that are... not done particularly well, or are simply things that I'm not proud of. And as I've been sorting out a lot of the older things I've done, I realized that maybe it's time to do some cleaning. I've been blogging since... 2014? Shit, it's been a long while. And... there are a lot of posts from back then that I wasn't the most proud of. So over the past couple of days I've done a bit of house-cleaning.

A lot of those 2014-2015 era reviews are honestly done without any real foresight or amounted to much beyond my reactions, and the quality of said reviews are... not the best, let's leave it at that. I do mean to be transparent, so I'm going to list the things that I took down. Gone are the JoJolion, HxH, Magi, Akame ga Kill, Attack on Titan, Berserk, One-Punch Man and like the half-dozen Boruto, Naruto, Bleach and Promised Neverland chapters that I did. 

It's not a manga thing, because I still enjoy a good chunk of the manga I've read! It's just that... I'm really not proud of a lot of the reviews I've done; half of them felt more like at-the-moment reactions than actual reviews. Most importantly some had... pretty crass or immature jokes that I'm not very proud of five years later. I almost removed the One Piece, Academia, Toriko and Taizai reviews circa 2014-2015, but they'll stay up for a while while I slowly work through them. 

Also gone from the blog are RE:Zero anime episodes; as well as Justice League Action and Westworld episodes. Due to how hurried I talked about them back in the day to cash in on views, they were written pretty shoddily, and there were a couple of things I said in RE:Zero episode reviews that I'm not very proud of. A bunch of very short movie reviews and my coverage of Chronicles of Blood monsters were also taken down -- they weren't written well and had a lot of broken links.

I also took down a lot of "News Reactions" pages and "Top Ten" video game attempts. It's mostly just very outdated Hearthstone or Pokemon stuff that was my rather poor attempt at cashing in on some click-bait nonsense back in the day. A lot of them have essentially became defunct with my far more extensive talking about the cards and monsters anyway. I also wiped out my very, very old and clunky text-based let's play for Minish Cap, ALTTP and ALBW -- which, at least, is good practice for a lot of my newer let's plays. There was a pretty terrible Chronicles of Blood 'reviewing monsters' bit, which was the prototype before I actually did Pokemon reviews. 

Not taken down, however, are the old Gotham, Agents of SHIELD, Flash and Arrow reviews. I almost did so, but since there's a neat sense of continuity to the newer TV reviews, I decided to leave them up. Maybe I'll fix them at some point. Ditto for Fairy Tail chapter reviews, which had a lot of fun discussion in the comments that, against my better judgment, I decided to leave up. I'm going to go through some of the Toriko reviews with a fine comb later on and decide if they're worth leaving up.

EDIT: After consideration, I took down the Tokyo Ghoul reviews. Some of the earlier ones from when I started blogging were pretty iffy, and there are certain topics about which I don't agree with what I have said in the past. A lot of the manga reviews from that period of time were also very hastily written and terribly edited, feeling more like an attempt to garner reviews as much as possible while the chapter is still fresh, so instead of a review it felt more like half-baked reactions -- particularly in chapters where not much happened. So I've removed them all. 

There were also a bunch of reviews that I merged together, mostly the Digimon Tri and Pokemon Generations ones. Also, I'm prepared to take down a bunch of old superhero movie reviews, too, because I'm going to replace them with brand-new ones in 2021 since I just rewatched the entire MCU. 

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The big, major one: due to the sheer amount of troll and flame-bait that they received, particularly throughout November and December... I reverted all my Hunter x Hunter episode reviews to private. I had simply just auto-spam-deleted a lot of the "you suck, die" troll comments, and it's not that much of a hassle to do so... But it's honestly not something I care to do every day and they started commenting on my non-HxH related pages. I know, 'don't feed the trolls' and all that jazz, but it's honestly really, really annoying. I don't care to deal with the aggravation of removing comments that flame me every day, so yeah -- there's like a new batch every month, and they're all invariably just trolls that just come to very rudely and violently defend the series. Because apparently they've got nothing better to do than to hunt down every single review and bash anyone who doesn't share a singular opinion about their favourite series. Again, I honestly have better things to do with my life than to deal with an influx of flame comments, let alone respond to them. And honestly? I really don't care enough to leave it up, not if it's going to attract cockroaches every couple of months.

This is not to say that some of you very polite folk who are willing to engage in mature discussion with me in the past are the problem. Not at all! Silver Chariot and Richard, if you guys are still lurking around, you guys are amazing and very polite even when disagreeing -- and I get it! Some things that I don't like is something that other people like, and vice versa. That's what being people are, that's what being adults are. Works of fiction (or anything in general, TBH) can be very great and still have aspects of it that simply doesn't work for someone. It's okay! As long as you're being civil about it. It's one thing to discuss the different viewpoints on a piece of fiction, even though you vehemently like or dislike a series, and I enjoyed it. Anyone who I've ever replied to, you're okay in my book, because you're all polite and nice and talk like people.

I'm not ashamed of my reviews, and I still stand over my opinions. I still like the series and think it's pretty great! I also simultaneously still don't think it's perfect and has some weaker parts, and no amount of "you don't understand the perfection of this perfect series" is going to ever change that fact. And the sheer amount of juvenile commenters that are swarm to those posts just to drop the same old argument isn't something I care to deal with. I'm by no means ashamed of what I've said about the series, though -- that's my final word on it. Anyone who's interested enough to see them, drop me a message or something. Just be polite about it. 

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Also, I'm currently working on fixing a lot of the broken image links and formatting on some of my longer 'reviewing monsters' pages, although I do have a bunch of reviews ready to go up in the next month. 

What can you expect from me the next year? A bunch of old series are still going on. Among the 'monster reviews', I do plan to finish Digimon Reviews, Resident Evil and Reviewing D&D 5E monsters; both of these are technically a lot further ahead but a lot of editing needs to be done. I plan to review more Legend of Zelda monsters. I plan to finish at least the second and third seasons of Batman Beyond; and regardless of the lack of viewership, at the very least finish up Pokemon anime/cartoon reviews up until the end of Orange Island. I plan to review all of the Heisei Kamen Rider shows. I plan to review all the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. I plan to review some superhero shows, but in seasonal format -- I do plan to wrap up Legion, Doom Patrol and a bunch of other shows that I've watched but didn't have the energy to do episode-to-episode reviews. When the CW superhero shows come back, I will probably do half-seasonal reviews for them. One Piece, too, probably will continue to have monthly recap reaction reviews from me.

As 2021 goes on, I might pick up one or two new TV or anime series to maybe review (I am sort of interested in maybe reviewing one of the older Kamen Rider shows episode-by-episode; or to watch something like the older Flash live-action TV series), but I do plan to mostly just do more longer articles in general, which I enjoy so much more and is a lot less clutter on the blog. 

What to look forward to? MCU reviews for sure, which I plan to do however long it takes me. The Disney+ stuff might take a bit later for me to watch because I'm still wondering whether I care enough to be subscribed to it, and if I do, whether there's enough content per episode to want to make me do episodic reviews or do it Kamen Rider style with 2-3 episodes per post. Or just do an entire seasonal review. 

Anyway, I'm still here, I'm still going to blog about superhero movies, superhero cartoons, the odd One Piece chapter review, and video game monsters. Just expect more longer articles at a less frequent schedule than I had been doing before. I do plan to slowly go through all my 'longer' articles and slowly fixing them. Things will just be a bit slower in January and February 2021, I feel, but that's okay. I'm taking it as a break. 

Anyway, happy new year, and I'm going to work harder at writing this year.