the original Eden of the east series was left on a pretty inconclusive note. sure the ending was super memorable and fun, had me crying or sure, but it wasn't very definitive. this right here was the reason why. the series was intended to get at least 2 seasons to wrap itself up but after how well the original show did they decided to do something a little more interesting, they made the second season into 2 movies. these days that's pretty common, chainsaw man and demon slayer both did this to great effect but it was something a little uncommon at the time. anime movies like that were usually fun side stories or OVA tier adventures, it was rare for you to ever see a series go out like that. they swung for it though and they nailed the landing perfectly. each of the two movies has a different focus but both i find are worth watching. king of Eden is a lot slower paced and focused more on saki and her relationship with takezawa, this was one of the series strongpoints and i think a lot of the best of this is in the movie which i think is part of why it's the stronger of the two movies for me. paradise lost meanwhile is focused a lot more on the overall story and is just an attempt to wrap everything up, it's super fast paced and a lot more focused on the action and big time flashbacks.

like i said i find king of eden to be the more interesting movie. the focus on saki as the protagonist works out really well and i love that the eden gang get a spotlight too, providing backup from an office building while saki does her thing in new York. That new York setting is another thing that really makes the movie stand out, it's a super pretty depiction of the city and it makes for a genuinely interesting backdrop to the movie, you even get to see some interesting locales like ground zero and a huge bridge who's name i forget. the story itself in the movie is solid. I'm not a huge fan of how they do the whole takezawa amnesia thing again but i think it's fine for what it is since it lets the movies romance shine in an interesting way. saki really carries a lot of the story with how fun she is as a protagonist and how she bumbles her way around new York. She also has probably my favourite comedic scene in the whole series with her gun shenanigans in new York at the start, it's so funny and it makes for a fun contrast to how things were following takezawa in the main series. it also introduces a new selecao with a crazy director who's sole motivation seems to just make a good movie out of the other selecao, not sure how he plans to win the game with that but he's a fun character to be around and all of his scenes are great. takezawa is great as always even as with being more of blank slate here. He's such a cutie in all the romantic scenes that i can forgive them for rewriting so much of his development. it's such a strong core for the movie to have and it's always made it a personal favourite romance for me because of that. the scenes with the theatre and the merry go round especially are just so cute and romantic, real butterfly moments.

his development as the "air king" is an interesting direction too, the idea of someone like him becoming this folk hero to the NEET's is something i do wish the movie explored a little more because i think it's really cool, the sequel corrects this at least. the imagery of him finger gunning down missiles is also just rad as hell and i love how it gives something to do for selecao number 6 who ends up becoming one of the series more interesting characters in the two movies here. i do feel more iffy about the movies big twist though, having the selecao live just feels a little deflating and anti-climactic, it really ruins a lot of the stakes of the story for me and i think it would have been more interesting as a last second thing or even just leaving it out altogether and making the story a little darker. i don't mind the levity but i don't think it serves the story as well as it could have here. the other eden cast get to shine here too, kuroha gets a little bit of focus which is super welcome, she's just so rad! the eden gang too! it's nice seeing them all together again and it's great to see panties join them for the ride. they're just such a likable group and i was happy to see more of them. it's a pretty solid time all things considered, it's really just 3 or 4 episodes of the show thrown together but it would make for a very solid set of episodes. sure they're not the strongest but there's enough here to make it super worthwhile of a watch, especially if you like the romance or the cast. if you grab the DVD version of this too you get a bonus compilation movie of the original series included on a second disc! so that's neat too.

paradise lost is a little less interesting to me. it's basically just the series conclusion and it comes out a little more rough compared to the rest of the show. it's super heavily focused on wrapping up as much as it can in its runtime and i think it accomplishes that pretty well, though it does end up being one of the less interesting stretches of the show for me and it can feel a little rushed at times. it's less focused on the romance or the fun character moments which is a real shame. the side cast get a lot less focus here, the eden gang and kuroha are real afterthoughts (though sis does get arguably the movies best moment to herself) but you get at least a little of them. same goes for the selecao who get some focus but for the most part it's very focused on the core duo and selecao 1. that's fine since it's the finale and it makes good use of them at least, the majority of the cast do at east have their stories wrapped up a little . there's some solid action here too and the stakes are always high, it's one of the more tense stretches of the show. it's very well animated and i love some of the locations they use like the Truckstop, the bar or the airport which are some of the movies best scenes. the focus on finding takezawa's mom is also interesting and handled well, even if i think it's weird to have such a huge red herring in there so late into the shows runtime. while it's interesting it does end up feeling like kind of a waste in the end, but it does feel like it's meant to be unsatisfying. the series does at least make good use of Mr. outside, he's a fun character and it's so cathartic to see takezawa finally confront him here. his motivations are so interesting and he has a real presence to him in all of his scenes, he steals the show for his time there. the juiz sisters too! they're fun and i love the design for them, even if they don't do much. i like takezawa's final act too, it's a symbolic gesture that makes sense for him and i think it's cute. it's the kind of thing i could really see bringing people together, it's clever. really my only issues with it is how i wish it was a little longer and expanded on things more aor how i wish the romance had more fulfilling conclusion. the latter especially feels super unresolved in a way I'm not sure i like, but I've made peace with it and i do like the ending they have in place quite a bit. it's not the strongest set of episodes and i think the original series finale is a lot stronger, but as far as anime endings go it's not a bad one. it's for sure worth following through to the end.

the music here is on a similar level of quality to the rest of the series. you get two amazing songs from school-food punishment with "light prayer" in king of eden, which is the bands best song. paradise lost then gets "after laughter" which is also pretty great, though maybe not as good as the prior two. still easily two of the best ED songs in the medium though. king of eden also has a separate vocal track OP in "invisible" by Leah, which is a solid opener but not quite as good as any of the SFP tracks, it has some fantastic animation to accompany it though. the movies' original score by kenji kawai is as good as always, catchy and super memorable, though maybe less so than the original show's tracks. standout tracks here being: "No way", "bojou" which re-uses a motif from the original series OST and is one of the prettiest tracks here. same with "misunderstanding" which could have been ripped right from the original show, it fits right in perfectly. "a widow", "tachi no kunou", "no pain, no gain" and "kaikou" round off a lot of the other highlights. though "yomigaeru kioku" and "meimonaki mono tachi" deserve special shoutout, they're probably the best songs on the movie OST. "no ni hanatsu" and "omoide no gold ring" are great too, though not quite best in OST material.

there's a few ways to watch these nowadays. both are pretty cheap on DVD, maybe £3 each or so but there's a collected DVD and blu ray version that combines both into a single package with the original series. this feels like the way to go if you have neither since even at that it's about £10-15 total for one of the best series out there. if you don't want it physical it's streaming a few places online and both the show and the movies are floating around on youtube for free so if you want to see hem for free that's your way to go. the most you would lose out on is your time, which isn't much since each movie isn't much over hour and change and they're fast paced enough that they both really race by. i do recommend them a lot, they're a solid extension of one of my favourite series. it's a show i'm really passionate and i do hope people check it out based on this recommendation, it's fun and funny and so charming and the story it tells is genuinely great, so please at least consider checking out few episodes of it if you can.

i also played the two Konami made TMNT beatemups from the 90s. these were never massively on my list to play but some time ago i grabbed the Konami collection of the games since my local as closing down and i wanted to grab one last game to remember the place by. sure the games were iconic in their own right but I'm just not a beat'em'up person, pls the IP just does nothing for me. I've never seen any of the movies or tv shows and the comics never came across my radar at all, the whole thing from the outside just seemed really unappealing and the opposite of the kind of thing I'd be into. these games though, after playing them i can say i am into this. they're fun and colourful and super charming. the levels are varied in both and really pretty, with the highlights from the first game being the burning building, the city streets and a really cool highway level where you ride on skateboards. the second games highlights for me would for sure be the cool time travel levels like the pirate level, the wild west train and the future city, though the first few levels on a skyscraper and the streets are rad too. both games are very pretty and there's some solid cutscenes here too and even some vocal tracks in the second game. the gameplay is solid enough, a few combos and grabs and in the second game you an even throw enemies into the screen which is really cool, but they do get a little repetitive near the end. the game does try to spice it up with some cool hoverboard levels and boss fights which do a lot to spice up the level variety there but otherwise its some pretty standard stuff for the genre. you'll know looking at gameplay weather you would have fun here or not. there's 4 playable characters that all have different weapons but beyond the special moves there isn't a ton of difference between them in terms of the overall gameplay, i tended to prefer the staff turtle and the duel wielding sword turtle myself.

the soundtracks are pretty killer though, tons of super listenable music across both games. funky as hell with a very distinct sound font to them. standout tracks for me would be "fire", "downtown", "underground", "it's a party" which is the OST highlight for me, "shredder" and "turtle boogie". for the second game, which has an even better score, the best tracks would be the delightfully cheesy "pizza power", "turtle swing", "alley cat blues", "sewer surfin" , "pirate ship", "mutant train", "neon night riders" which sounds straight out of the snatcher OST, "starbase" and the credits version of "Pizza power". it's an OST I'd heard in tons of places over the years and it's easy to see why, it's a fantastic soundtrack. the games can be pretty tough but if you play with infinite continues it's a good time, shouldn't take you more than a half an hour a game too so it'd be a nice breezy night. i played through both with a friend and I'd say that would be the recommended experience, it's an experience I'd recommend having if you're able to get people around the couch to play it, but even alone these are a solid time. if you grab these via the cowabunga collection you even get a few different ports of each which is rad, though for this i stuck with the arcade versions. down the line i may check those out too, it helps you get tons of other games too like the NES games, the Gameboy titles and even a fighting game. so I'd say track that down if you can. it's affordable and on basically all current and last gen platforms for basically nothing, the physical release shouldn't run you more than £15 which is a steal for how much you're getting here.

over the years there have been some games i regretted playing the way i did, games that i went in expecting to hate and never gave a real honest chance to. doom 2016 is the biggest of those games. i went in wanting to dislike it, I'd hated its energy and its very edgy dudebro vibe it had going on and it annoyed me how often I'd see it posted and how it felt like it was being pushed on me way more than i wanted. I wanted to hate it almost just as a way to prove i was right about my initial impressions. i was so obstinate that i would be right that i borrowed a friends copy just so i could play it and confirm those biases. my playthrough did confirm almost all of them: i hated the gameplay, music and everything else it had to offer and generally i just had a really bad time with it. it went on to be a game that just irrationally annoyed me any time it was brought up and it was one of the few i always got really belligerent over. i feel silly about this behavior now, it was net posturing and it's downright embarrassing to look back on. i replayed this purely to overwrite the games memory in my head, to at least dislike game on its own merits if i hated it this time, rather than having my opinion formed entirely out of spite and preconceived notions. i didn't hate game though, not this time, but i also didn't love the game. I think it's a solidly "fine" game that i don't think i care for all that much, but at least that's an opinion i reached of my own accord this time.

the gameplay i think is my first big sticking point with it, it's got the basic parts of something that could be really fun but it has a few small issues that all add up to break up the pace, variety and flow in a way that i think makes it a lot less fun than it could be. it wants to be a painkiller style shooter and it has the basic bones of one with its enemy waves and arenas and weapons but it just can't manage to have either the speed or the fun of a painkiller because he mechanics just don't let you. the main culprit in this case is the glory kill system. a mandatory QTE you need to do every once in a while for health and ammo. it's the worst part of the gameplay to me by far. it's repetitive and you need to constantly stay on top of them, it makes you feel like you're playing the game wrong for using anything counter-intuitive to that system which just so happens to be all of the games more fun weapons. the game almost punishes you for killing enemies or playing it too fast which feels like it goes entirely against the style of gameplay the game wants to have. to its credit it does get little better in the endgame once enemies that can tank more than a shot or two of the more powerful weapons start to appear, but it feels too little too late by then and these later sections become their own problem with how that bigger health pool makes some of the weapons downright useless. the chainsaw system does feel like it's meant to help here, it's a melee weapon you can use to instantly refill all ammo, but it's got it's own issues. for a start it too requires ammo that is very scarce and there were entire levels here where i just could not get any at all. so it's really just a band-aid solution.

the weapons can be fun when the game lets you use them though, the screen clearing BFG, the aforementioned chainsaw, the super shotgun (that never feels as powerful as it should, sadly), a cool rocket launcher, a rail gun and my personal favourite: the minigun. not all weapons are great though. the machinegun is fun but redundant once you have the gatling gun, the basic shotgun loses usefulness early on, the pistol is useless after level 1 and the pulse rifle is similarly nothingy, especially since you get the rail gun like the next level. each weapon type has 2 different alt fires and usually a less powerful version that shares an ammo pool with it like that shotgun and machinegun. the alt fires can range a lot in usefulness, though there is an issue here with redundancy i find. like the rail gun has a charge mode with a scope, and a different charge mode without a scope or how some of them amount to just enhanced zoom or some variation of grenade. that said a few are really useful. the grenade launcher is the only redeeming thing about the basic shotgun after the second chapter, the zoomed in modes for the gauss canon are great, i love the duel barrel for the gatling gun, the lock on for the missile launcher is amazing and the micro missiles are a ton of fun for the normal machinegun. others like the stunbomb, the scope for the machinegun, the rotator for the gatling gun or the remote detonation for the missile launcher i just got zero use out of though, same with the likes of the charge shot shotgun and the pistol.

the games music and energy are two other things i found i really disliked. it's a very ugly game to me both in sound and in visuals. the OST by mick Gordon is the biggest offender for me, i find it just really unpleasant to listen to and i think it's one of the main reasons i disliked my first playthrough of the game so much. it fits what the game is going for, sure, but it's so aggressive and harsh that for me that i can find it a big hurdle to really get invested in. i just didn't like listening to it and it made it harder for me to get into the game. no tracks really stood out me either, they blend in very quickly for me. for this playthrough i changed the music up by adding my own, original xbox style custom soundtracking it which i think is in the right spirit here, like it's 2005 and i'm playing doom 3 with nightwish blasting. some school-food punishment, some suisei hoshimachi, leetstreetboys and morihime, plus some Eurobeat, ado, halca, Lisa and tommyheavenly6 thrown in there. it made for a much more enjoyable experience for me and it actually made me look foreward to sitting down to play some, something that never felt the first time with the game.

i find the levels similarly unappealing and ugly. it's game with very samey, boring levels that really only have 2 colour pallets, 3 if you really want to count the mars levels. you got grey indoors and red/orange outdoors with hell and neither are all that interesting to look at or explore. i just find the bloody, demonic metal kind of aesthetic is just not for me, but much like the music think if this is your vibe then you'll find a lot to love here. i just didn't like the general levels much, but there is occasionally a slightly more interesting environment to explore like the office building or the hell ruins, so that's neat. it doesn't stop the levels from looking and feeling repetitive though. the game has a story and it really tries at it, which surprised me the first time i played. it's not a good story or very interesting but i respect the fact it really tries its best at making you care for its lore and world and giving the doomguy a real presence. killer VA performances though, especially with daran de paul as samual hayden. it's a game on the harder end on anything above easy and on my first run that was a big sticking point for me. i played it on "ultra-violence" which was i assumed to be normal but i think was actually hard and i had a bad time with that. this time i stuck with normal though and had a much better time, though even here i would still consider the game to be difficult, enemies are very spongey and ammo runs out far too quick. length-wise it's not super long, which is nice. it doesn't massively overstay its welcome despite how samey and repetitive it gets so i think it's worth sticking through that. my run was about 7 hours this time but you can probably do it in less on easy. there is a lot of replayability though with those unlockable modes, the weapon upgrades you earn, hidden collectables plus other modes like multiplayer and a WAD-lite mode called snapmaps. for the £3-5 the game goes for physically i think it's worth checking out at least. I'll probably check out a few of the other games though, for as much as i didn't care about this one. those other games do seem like they could be a little more interesting. doom eternal often gets compared to DMC so that alone has me interested and the one after it reminds me of painkiller aesthetically, though the parry mechanics are massive turn off for me. doom 3 I'll also probably give a try to, it seems like a neat horror game. that'll be about it though, the older games before 3 just don't appeal to me at all in gameplay or style, i tried 1 and 64 and neither were really for me, though the latter i did *adore* the OST for.

the 2010 Astro boy movie is one i left last here and it's for a good reason. It is by no small stretch of the truth, one of the worst movies I have ever sat through. it's not the worst, sure. I've finished stuff like every gods not dead movie, every left alive movie, lost highway and all 6 seltzerberg movies. A lot of those mentioned even in theatres, but very few of them made me as just, annoyed and offended as this did. it's not even necessarily that I dislike foreign takes on anime, dragonball evolution is the only piece of dragonball I have and will ever see and I think it's a good movie. speed racer is pretty easily one of the best movies ever made. I will forever defend Netflix death note and even when adaptations do get really bad like ghost in the shell or cowboy bebop they're at the very least funny. I never felt that way about this, there was basically nothing to enjoy about this and I wasn't even familiar with astroboy going in. I disliked this enough that right after I went and watched the 90s series just to be able to compare and it just made me even more upset, I can honestly say that I feel a genuine sense of hate for this movie and for me that's really rare, it takes a lot for me to hate anything and even more for me to write about it.

I think part of my hang-ups with the movie might come down to one simple thing, while the movie is animated in China by a fairly talented staff. it was directed, written, scored and cast like a British movie for the most part, a British comedy, at that, which might be my most hated kind of media. I find it insufferably annoying and when I see something as sincere and pure as this turned into something this crass, stupid and mean spirited. it lacks any sense of humanity for it's characters or the source material and at times even seems to hold a sense of contempt for the latter, disregarding any messages or sincerity the original might have had in favour of poop and fart jokes and mocking people in an especially uncomfortable way only British comedy ever can be. a perfect example of this being how it takes what was a fairly nuanced take on the rights of machines from the original. it's something portrayed with a lot of heart and tact in the original but here it's played for a weird joke about how crazy and silly revolutionaries are for.... wanting rights?. it's a miserable watch and it's only further harmed by the movies just, awful voice cast. some people here do fine, it's nice to see Nicholas cage as dr tenma and Kristin bell does a fine job with what she's given. But on the other hand you have *matt lucas* in here which throws all goodwill the movie might have had out the window in an instant, the man turns any project he touches into an instant red flag. you have Donald Sutherland here giving less than zero care for his role and Freddie highmore as Astro just, trying his best and really not managing with the accent. it's boring and bland and mean and miserable and the worst part is how it thinks it's elevating the material into something more palatable for people while being far more fucking boring than it ever was. other adaptations do this too but in this case, with this movie with this cast and this style, it just feels all the more gross, like someone came in to try and adapt angel beats by turning it into little Britain.