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Chainsaw man, FIST: forged in shadow torch and night in the woods. So this time we have one game i thought was okay and a game i really hated but i do like to balance a lot of these out by throwing in a thing i like a lot, love even, and this time it'll be an anime series and one that i did not at all expect to love: Chainsaw Man and before i get into the less positive stuff i'd like to talk about it a little. it's an adaptation of the manga by Tatsuki Fujimoto (an author i'm not super familiar with, he's done tons of short stories, look back which i do plan to check out and fire punch which i don't think i'll ever read. it's just not one i feel i could handle) and animated by mappa (of punchline, yuri on ice, jujutsu kaisen, banana fish, dororo and mr love queens choice, among others. they do fantastic work). when it first aired back a few years ago i did try it and i honestly hated it. I thought denji was creepy and annoying and i wasn't a big fan of the CG or the style in general and while i liked things like makima and the OP (i only got 2 eps in) i was just annoyed by it and dropped it hard, i think part of it was just being offput by denji which is a wholley valid reason and it's something i see a lot as to why people struggle to get into it, i don't think the series puts its best foot forward with him and while i understand him now enough to deal with it. I can't deny he can still seriously get on my nerves sometimes and he's probably the worst of the show’s core cast (my other reason was bitterness over shoujo anime getting the shaft in favour of shonen, which is something i still feel strongly about but I've learned to live with it and enjoy shonen series alongside shoujo, plus shoujo seems to be in a better place now than it was a few years ago). So what changed? It wasn't my run-ins with fans, that's for sure, who made sure to put me off the series even more over those years but that's something I've also came to terms with though, not the fans themselves, they're awful, but just ignoring them and learning to never interact with terminally online people who like the things i like and to disconnect enough that i never have to see their BS–that goes a long way let me tell you. i also saw a gif from the show of a twinky angel character who i instantly fell in love with, enough so that while hanging out with a friend (who also loves the show and had defended it to me often) i ended up picking up a copy of the DVD in a local store, determined to at least get to see more of that angel character and maybe even enjoy the show along the way. there's a lot to like about it once you get beyond the initial hurdles. for a start the music is fantastic, from the original OST of the show which has a few great tracks too, especially the one that plays during the end of the show's final episode. there's also it's killer opening with "kickback" by kenshi yonezu which has been one of my most played songs for weeks now and *So many* good endings including one by personal favourite artist ano-chan. these change every episode and while not all of them are hits most of them are fantastic and they all have unique animation that shifts style from Ep to Ep. the best ones for me were "chainsaw blood" by vaundy, though it is one of the ones with he worst visuals since it's just episode clips. "time left" by zutomayo is also up there. The song is a shoe-in for my top 3 favourites and the animation style here is beautiful. "tablet" by tooboe is great too, a killer song and some really cute animation. you love to see a focus on power too. i wish we saw more of those outfits in the series though because she looks super cool in them. "In the Backroom" by Syudou is another great one. It’s one of the best songs and probably has the most striking visuals of any of the ED's, which fits the infinity hotel arc super well. this is up there with my favourite anime ED's for sure. "Rendezvous" by Kanaria is also great, fantastic song and some beautiful visuals, the entire hotel arc is killer in this department since the one after this, "Chu, Tayousei" by Ano, is my favourite. It's a great track by one of my favourite artists, paired with one of my favourite episodes and it has a really pretty visual style, probably the second best visual style at that with a retro game and VHS anime on a CRT aesthetic how can it not be? "Deep Down" by Aimer is also excellent, the most emotional ED and one with some downright stunning animation. It made me cry at least once. the last ED, "fight song" by eve is great too, as is every eve song and seeing the gang chilling after everything that happened is just a perfect ending to things. not all are super my thing though, like "Hawatari Niku Centi" by maximum the hormone which is just a little too heavy for me, but it's one of the better looking ED's for sure so i do still like it and the second half of the song i like a lot more. the same goes for "First Death" by TK from Ling Tosite Sigure which has some great animation and a fine song but not one i'd find myself listening to much. "Dogland" by People 1 is probably the only one i outright don't care for. the others i can enjoy but this is the main one that just doesn't do much for me, from the animation to the song. just not my thing. “Violence" by Queen Bee is a lot better, though still low for me, as pretty as the monochrome ED is. it's a pretty show, too. It handles the CG a lot better than i expected and i love how all of the action scenes flow super well, though the character designs are my favourite part of it. it has what might be the best designed cast of any of the major recent shonen. makima looks perfect, i love power's design and her cool looking powers, the angel devil is literally perfect and probably my favourite of the designs, himeno looks great, even more lowkey characters like kobeni, aki and Kusakabe all look great, plus i mean, pochietta is amazing. who can hate that little guy? for all my issues with him even denji looks rad with his shark teeth and the admittedly really rad chainsaw form. the characters are great even beyond their designs. i'd even say of the most recent wave of shonen shows it has one of the best casts of any of them. makima is, a lot, but i love her even with all of the moral issues that come with that. I can forgive a lot and i will make excuses for anything she does, even god cannot stop me. the angel devil too, is great. he doesn't get much screentime here beyond sharing a really cute scene with aki but the scenes he's in are great and he *shines* as being the best part of the reze arc movie, which i'll talk about another time. power too is a lot of fun. her VA's in English and Japanese both give her an amazing energy and i love her blood weapons a lot. she has probably the show's best fight scene with the training scene later on with Kusakabe, too. kobeni is another highlight, just a total wreck and i like her as an almost audience surrogate to how anyone would actually be in this world, every scene with her is just really funny and a little heartbreaking. aki too is great, though he takes a little bit to grow on you, his relationship with himeno is really cute too. i love himeno a lot too, another favourite character of mine who just has so many great scenes and i love her role in both the series best arcs and i just enjoy how much of a mess she is. the arcs do range in quality but they're all really solid. i do think denji's introduction is very memorable and got me a little emotional my first time. the power arc is great too but the show really shines in its last two of the season, the infinity hotel and the himeno arc, both of which are full of amazing characters and fun moments and some heartwrenching scenes that got me to tears sometimes multiple times an episode. i liked the show before these but i fell in love with it here. the infinity hotel is less emotional on the outset but it's got a great cast with a fun dynamic. it tells the kind of "looping space and time" setup really interestingly and the devil that shows up is seriously worth the buildup, plus it has a great payoff in its last chunk and the episode wrapping it up is easily one of my favourites of the whole season. the himeno arc is probably the overall best. it's got great villains and some cool action, but the emphasis is on the characters dealing with a lot of heavy stuff and it's so well handled. its cast, directing and storytelling are damn near unmatched in most shows I've seen and *SPOILER* himeno's death still hits me hard even now and the scene where the yakuza start executing people always is such a shock, it comes out of nowhere and hits like a truck, plus you get to see a lot more of makima at her best, which is a nice thing in my book. the quality of each ep combined with the bespoke ED's almost make each ep feel like an event, a self contained piece of art rather than another ep of a tv show and i think that's really impressive. this is as good as series come and it's one of the best i think I've seen. it's easily accessible, too, at least if you want the DVD or blu ray any anime store is bound to have it. i only paid £10 for mine in person and i'm really happy with that. I'm excited to grab the reze movie on dvd eventually too! FIST forged in shadow is the next thing i'm going to talk about. it's a metroidvania that stood out from the crowd a little for me. it's got a cool 3D art style with a cool looking hub town, it has a really in depth combat system and it's also a game out of china–all 3 things that are usually enough to make me at least a little interested in a game, though I always held off of playing it right away on release because of how fatigued I can get with the genre. even an interesting Metroidvania is still just a metroidvania, and its a genre that very much has a "been there, done that" stigma to me now. but the question is, does FIST break that? not really. the things that drew me to it do make it a little more unique than average, but it's still very much another metroidvania, for better and for worse, though it is a very solid one that I do ultimately still recommend. as far as gameplay goes it's a standard metroidvania, albiet one with marginally deeper combat. you have few combo strings which i do like, 3 weapons with a fist which has a grab similar to guacamelee and a drill which was my favourite. it gives you a glide and a few very fun extended combos involving using the drill almost like a sawblade. it also has absurdly high damage. you also get a whip which can be used to swing around and can autotarget enemies. it's good for small groups and enemies with no health but its damage is too low to be used for anything larger than that. all of these have their own finisher animations on enemies that you can use when they start to glow, which is very cool. it feels super 7th gen. they tie into the platforming well with things like an uppercut, punching doors open and the other aforementioned moves. it's fun to see them actually being useful outside of combat. the platforming itself is fine. I like the moves, though the combat does get boring a little into the game, and the level design isn't interesting enough for the platforming to be all that fun, mainly because the levels just are a little boring to look at and explore. the game is good enough looking. The environments look great and I've seen that people are super fond of the character designs, though this kind of furry character design just doesn't do anything for me. it's not really my style. Like i said though, the levels are a little boring. I like the little jazzy hub city and the starting kowloony area, but after that the levels start being a little boring–prisons and sewers and mountains and towers and they're all a little bland. they blend in together and become monotonous; the lone exception being some nice ruins and a very cool snowy area, but they don't do a ton to liven the game's levels up that much. there isn't much of a focus on story either. it's there and i like how its dystopia is handled and i liked the MC and his bear friend a lot, plus i did think the thief cat was rad, but it really didn't grip me at all, same with the music. there's a few good jazz tracks but overall nothing that really sticks out to me, which is a shame. to me these kinds of games live and die by their music and a metroidvania with a bland OST can be one of the most boring experiences you can have. it's a slightly longer game, too–running you about 8 hours if you skip the full exploration, which i'm okay with. it does outstay its welcome a little but it's not RPG length either. physical copies are slightly pricey though. it hasn't went down much in price so you'll be paying between £20-25 for the game, which is a little steep i think, but if you love your metroidvanias or you like furry games a lot, this is probably absolutely worth the cost of entry, but neither of these really do much for me personally. i also played through a game i did not like nearly as much, in fact i kind of really hated it so i'll warn you that this is going to be a seriously negative section, more of a vent really, so if you like this game or you just aren't here for that then maybe skip this one. this is a huge shame since it was one i held off playing for so long expecting to like it. i waited years for night in the woods to finally get a physical release and finally excitedly picked it up from limited run and then.... proceeded to take over a year to finally play it. but still, i was excited to try it. it got so much praise and it means a lot to so many, and i do like similar games a lot, like life is strange. NITW isn't really like that though and i hated my time with this game. i disliked the art style, hated it's cast of borderline irridemable assholes and it's smug "i'm better than everyone around me" energy and while playing it i also thought about how many of the people i had met that loved this game (and noticeably seemed to base their entire image around the game’s MC, down to even the name in some cases). They also turned out to be total assholes and then it all kind of clicked: night in the woods is catcher in the rye for terminally online assholes and it's one of the most unpleasant experiences I've had with a video game. now yeah, not every fan of this game is an asshole and there are some things to like here–a few scenes with bea when mae isn't being a total piece of shit can almost be nice, the OST is pretty and the game can have some nice setpieces and environments and a few minigames i liked. Tthere are some cool ones like how each event will have a bespoke minigame or two to play with like acting out a play, hitting things with a bat, a water fountain turret segment, looking for items and some cool first person minigames where you get to control a paw, but it is balanced out by things like a really bad music minigame that's overly difficult and a pretty boring Zelda clone that has some neat ideas like how your health goes down as levels continue but your dashes get stronger and more plentiful but just isn't interesting to play and much like the music minigame is pretty difficult. plus, the town itself is nice even if there isn't much to do in it. same with some of the other explorable areas like the mall and the historical society and the bar. Though, the art style of the characters i find really unappealing. the simple aesthetic and furry character designs both do less than nothing to me and i find it to be a game that's just not really all that pleasant to look at sometimes. it's not that nice to play either since the platforming is pretty bad and the game is full of overly long dream sequences that take forever to navigate and are pretty insufferable. what nice of a vibe the game does have is really dampened by how much the game itself seems to hate the place, how much it prays for its downfall and seemingly justifies it as being "well those people were shitty". it feels like it think's it's above it all in a way i just can't stand. mae herself does not help this sense of insufferableness. she's an unrepentant asshole to everyone around her, from strangers to family to her "best friends" who she constantly belittles, undermines and treats like shit, and she never really sees any punishment for it. it all gets written off as an "oh you!" character quirk and justified by "but well she's socially awkward" as if that makes up for all of the shitty things she does and how she ruins the lives of herself and the people around her. as a setting with its characters it's just so fucking awful to exist in especially since honestly her friends can really not be much better, especially Gregg who exemplifies the type of person who takes "be gay, do crimes" as their life mantra and excuse to be a total piece of shit, break things and hurt other people. it's not cool and it's all just so grating and one of the worst experiences I've ever had with a video game. it's all exemplified when in a bar scene the game makes fun of some douchey citybro dirtbag left poser types who think they're above the situation, but the reality is that NITW is those guys. it's seattle-core poser gaming at it's worst and the best part of it was the money i got on ebay for selling the damn thing–a physical copy that is still pretty pricey since it was an LRG release that people actually want. It'll run you 40-50 for the privilege generally which is not worth it in the slightest.