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chainsaw man: reze arc, black ops 6 and plucky squire. Another set of short thoughts this time, well, short-ish, i used to consider the short coverage their own seperate series but these have very quickly spiralled into being every other page i post and they're so long that calling them short doesn't even feel right anymore, funny how that works out, anyway this time is 2 okaygood games and one of the best things i've experianced all year, let's start with the latter first for some much needed positivity. I very recently saw the chainsaw man movie: reze arc on the day of its release and of the three things talked about here it is by far the best and it's something that's stuck with me in ways I didn't really expect going in. it's a movie I've thought about at least once a day since I saw it on the day of release. it's showy and cool, it's emotional and fun and it's one of the best looking anime movies, well anime period, of the past decade. for an anime movie it's really the complete package. actually getting to see it though was a real test of "just how bad will this screening be" but i have to say, at least at the one i went to, which admittedly was a cinema in the countryside at a dead mall, was pretty respectful despite being packed. There was even a guy in a denji cosplay with chainsaws and everything which was rad! it was a much better audience than demon slayer, perfect blue or JJK hidden inventory had anyway, plus we even got given posters which was nice. i even hung it up. the animation is amazing too. the movie has the best fights I've seen in a long time, including the demon slayer and JJK showings I also went to this year. there's so much creativity to it and it's so consistently impressive and colourful, like the way they did the bombs here was a real sight and 10000% worth going to the cinema for. The entire last half of the movie is just a huge fight with the bomb devil over Tokyo and the places it goes are such a cool sight. the less bombastic scenes are great too, like the colouring in the pool scene or the rooftop rain or *seeing angel devil in lingerie* which like my god wow i'm being catered to so hard with this. between this and all the gojo/toji/naoya in the JJK movies i was eating *good* this year. it's a beautiful movie. The character designs are great, too. reze is one of the coolest looking members of the cast and i love the form the shark fiend takes here, too. every action scene he's in is a serious highlight especially when denji rides him like a jockey like HOLY SHIT THAT WAS SO RAD. rad is the best word to use here. it's just rad, every part of it. and beyond all the big dumb fights and gore and sex, there's just so much emotion here. the scene near the start where denji and makima go on a movie binge, seeing a bunch of different movies all at different theatres, most of them fairly inane but coming across one special movie and that movie bringing them both to tears. I felt that. it's one of those times a movie really did feel like it got me and my experience with art as well as how the people around us don't quite see it that same way. you see this in how the dumber, less meaningful pieces of art, the more cynically produced stuff has packed theatres but that really truly special piece of art is empty, with only the people who really get it in attendance. It managed to bring me to tears even despite being a pretty small scene. art means a lot to me. it's practically my reason to exist and it made me so happy to see something, something this popular no less, really understand how it feels to see art this way. art is the most important thing that we as a species have, now moreso than ever in an age of shitty ai garbage polluting what it means to be art and indeed people falling for said pollution (like how billboard is full of ai songs now), which Is a metaphor you could read this scene as having if you wished so. real meaningful art is what separates us from the machines that tech bros want to replace us and a machine can never and will never make anything as meaningful as even this small scene. this was important to me. that isn't the only scene that got to me though. *spoilers* here but the scene with the angel devil and aki had me in tears. my ship is real and that's enough for me. the movie right there was already sealed in as one of the best of the year—one of the best, period, maybe—and the later scenes at the end with reze and denji also got me something bad. the beach and outside the cafe with her and makima both had me bawling. It's fantastically directed and written and just heartbreaking. i love reze as a character and her romance with denji is one of the best parts of the whole series, especially the smaller scenes like the phone booth or all the cafe scenes (that cafe looks so cozy, too. i love its atmosphere). all of the characters that get more of a spotlight here are great, sure. the serial killer guy and the tempest devil are a little lame but reze is great and i love the spotlight the shark fiend gets. he's adorable and a total ray of sunshine, we didn't deserve him, same with the angel devil. i love him so much and i'm sad my plushie of him wasn't there in time to take to the movie (i brought my makima instead which ended up being kind of funny in retrospect) and the violence devil gets a little bit of screentime too, makes me hope we see a little more of him in future to see what his deal is, the movie even managed to make denji more likable for me, which the base series never fully managed to do for me, i've came around on him a lot especially here. the music is also good here. some of the tracks in it like the song that plays during the roof or the pool scene are excellent and the two original songs made for it, "iris out" by kenshi yonzeu and "jane doe" by hikaru utada and yonezu are both solid, though i don't think iris out is as good as kickback even though i think the OP animation is even better. jane doe however is on par with any of the series' best songs, up there with the likes of ano's ED and kickback. hikaru always kills it and this is no exception. half the cinema was tearing up during those credits. i'd really recommend it if you've seen and liked the first season of the show anyway. it's required viewing for this since this is the next canon arc of it, but i think both are absolutely worth it which feels weird for me to say since i used to really dislike the show. the initial impression it made on me was really poor and it's fans had annoyed me long before i came to the realization that caring about a fanbase is stupid and letting that control how i feel about a thing is some silly, terminally online BS that i did not need in my life, and so now i'm here and i love the show. i even bought some plushies and figures and i'll probably throw down a preorder for the blu ray for this the moment it goes live. it's that good and it's easily among the best movies i've seen this year, alongside the likes of summer wars, project sekai and kamikaze girls (coverage on those coming soonish). Now the next thing is a game that I had zero real intention to play , like, ever. the fact it's chock full of GEN-ai being the biggest part of why, and it's not in ways that's easily ignorable because it's *everywhere in the game*. add that to how it's physical release is a stub disc without an offline mode and you have a game that’s just really morally unappealing to me and not worth my money. the thing though is that I didn't end up needing to pay for it, not even a penny. a short time ago they did a free week, opening the entire game (bar private matches) to anyone and everyone, campaign and zombies included and so I decided to at least give it a try mostly as a curiosity and a cautionary tale on why you should start to avoid a lot of modern AAA releases, though with the admission that it's not entirely all bad. the game’s strongpoint is it's campaign. it's the one part of it i'd genuinely really recommend checking out and it's actually one of the best campaigns I've played from the series so far. it's ambitious, varied and very fun. It’s telling a story that's actually pretty interesting and really going out of its way to give you fun and creative missions. It's excellent. every mission is very different in gameplay, tone and mechanics. some are stealthy imsimmy investigations at a Clinton rally (where you can finally game in the clinton years) or a soviet outpost, doing different objectives for info before eventually devolving into huge big money shootouts. you have casino heist missions, horror segments with a grappling hook and zombies as well as a later horror segment taking place inside someone's head, siege missions (both sieging and being sieged), more standard military setpieces like a desert convoy and an airport mission and even a whole MGS5'y open world with sidequests and waypoints and even some hitmanny assassination missions. the variety is wild for the kind of game this is and I really respect it. all of it is centred around a cute little hub house full of secrets with characters to talk to, puzzles and wings to add to and upgrade. it's really cool. it helps that it all just plays well, too. the stealth is basic but fun and you have things like being able to move corpses. little gimmick mechanics like the grappling hook are great. the shooting is great as usual and being able to choose between stealth and shootouts is pretty nice. the locales are super varied and really pretty. the Russia area, the lab for the horror mission and the casino are total highlights for me. you do some real globetrotting here and each location is super detailed and fun to explore. now it's also not perfect. I like the characters a lot with the whole “ragtag team of outcasts taking on the government" thing and they play off of each other really well, but the story just isn't that great and a lot of it just goes nowhere, especially with how it ends on an anticlimax non-ending that's leading into a sequel that i'm not sure is even happening, which major time sucks. that's really its only issue though, it's nice and long at about 7 hours and it's not too hard either since you can make missions easier on yourself by taking the time out to do the side stuff for better gear and assists like killstreaks which can all be kept and used at any time with a cool weapon wheel. all in all it's just a great campaign that I do think is worth playing the game for, especially since as far as I can find It was exempt from all the gen ai garbo. the zombies is the first area I begun to notice said garbo, a mode that's been hit and miss for me for years. I love a lot of the early maps but when it started focusing more on lame easter egg gimmicks and a focus solely on multiplayer objectives to do even basic things I kind of stopped clicking with it, which for me begun with black ops 2 but solidified into "super not for me" with black ops 3 and its maps that had complicated multi stage mechanics for things as simple as turning on power and maps that were damn near impossible solo without paying for exorbitant consumables. some, like infinite warfare zombies were better for this and the last cod I played, cold war, was somewhere in the middle, with maps that weren't the best but were usually doable and fun solo. this one is not that, though, and it’s a downgrade in basically every possible way. for a start some maps like the castle are *covered* in ai art garbo with the stage graffiti. it was bad in some others but this is the big one that stuck out for me and it made an already bland map totally garbage. the maps themselves are more hit and miss than ever. "liberty falls" is great. It has easy objectives and fun layout and the best theme in the game with a cool small town complete with things like a comic store and a church and it also has a cool gimmick where you can zipline across roofs to get across the map easier. though it's worth saying even in the game’s best map its issues start rolling in, like some noticeable ai art and an *awful* difficulty curve that throws way too many bosses and gimmick enemies at you constantly in a way that feels super unfair. "terminus" isn't as good but is still solid. the theme isn't as cool but i do still love the rainy prison island a lot. Terminus has an even worse difficulty curve (alongside worse train routes) that make it super hard to play after even round 15. it is, however, saved by its gimmick. since it's an island setting the game gives you a boat and lets you swim around, which is great. you can explore little islands and find cool hidden stuff and the boat itself makes for a great break point between how relentless the zombies can be. i loved this, even if i do find the islands and wreckages can be *super* baren and not worth visiting a lot of the time (unless you do the easter egg i assume which is what they're mainly there for). "citadel des mortis" is the next one up and it's the first one i don't really like. it just feels like a lot of already tread ground, but lesser, with something similar to the town from the starting map of WW2 zombies and a castle reminiscent of der eisendrach but not being as good as either of them. it's full of AI art garbage and its mechanics are boring. it's one of the easier maps admittedly but it's just not interesting. it has some neat siege traps but none of them really do much and it has a shoot that transports you to the start of the map which, again, is just a lot of nothing. it's a map that feels pointless and i didn't enjoy it all that much. "the tomb" has similar issues. it just feels so nothing and like a rehash of better maps. in this case being shangri-la without the gimmicks or the charm and it throws in the space themed pack a punch room from the nacht remake in cold war for good measure. it's too hard, boring and just really bland. this might be the game’s overall worst map. it has AI voice work too and that can fuck off and die. "shattered veil" is next and it's solid. i like the theme of the map with the nice mansion, even if it does feel a little "done that" considering the map is from black ops 4, but it's fun, easy enough and pretty varied and probably the game’s second prettiest map. i liked this one. "reckoning" i'm more mixed on. these kinds of lab maps never do much for me but i like the "catapulting to get around" stuff which reminds me of die rise a lot which is a personal favourite and i do like the 50s style but too much of it feels bland and it's way too difficult with its bosses. All of these maps share similar issues too—an overt focus on boring easter egg sidequests, overly difficult waves full of bosses and DPS checks, weapons becoming downright useless far too fast after even multiple upgrades and just a real lack of charm and personality. this just might be the worst zombies I've played and that's just kind of sad. this was very disappointing for what was meant to be a "return to form". the multiplayer is at least a mild step up. mechanically it's fun enough. the weapons are fun and killstreaks too even if i find they're weirdly hard to get in this one and the maps can be pretty varied. personal standouts for me being "derelect" which is set in a really cool abandoned and overgrown train yard, "gala" which is set at the Clinton rally from the campaign, "lowtown" which is set in a disaster-struck Amsterdam, "protocol" which is set in a lighthouse town, "payback" which is in the base for the campaign, "red card" which is set in a soccer stadium, "rewind" which is set in a video store and its surrounding areas including a burger king, "stakeout" which is set in a small apartment block over a few apartments, "bounty" which is set in a fancy hotel at night, "Bullet" which is on a bullet train, "dealership" which is set in a car dealership, "exchange" which is at a small market, "eclipse" which is set in a nightclub, "jackpot" which is set in the casino from the campaign and just outside it, "runway" which is based on the airport mission, "gravity" which is a base map with a cool gravity sphere in the centre that can turn off gravity, "rig" which is set at a small gas station and "mothball" which uses the zombie chapter from the campaign. there isn't a lot to say beyond that. varied modes like infection and kill confirmed are great but the MTX's are full of ai garbo and are very in your face. i hated being advertised to with all the brand collabs. it wasn't super bogged down with the movement mechanics of the earlier ps4 titles. it's overall pretty solid and i had a good time with it, but there isn't much more you can say about a cod multiplayer mode, really. there was apparently a new system called "omnimovement" which let you dive in more directions but i can't say i ever really noticed it. i imagine it's the kind of thing that only higher level players will notice much. all in all do i recommend BO6? by default i'll say no. for as great as the campaign is it's also a game with no offline mode, a stub disc and it's full of the most abhorrent, immoral shit possible on top of wild MTX. if you can play it for free, sure. that campaign is again great and raven software continue to kill it, but it's just too caught up in really disgusting practices for me to ever recommend it to anyone. also worth talking about is the plucky squire. I ended up giving this a try on ps plus since it was a game I was a little bit unsure of. I liked its art style with the real world and the book being mixed, but the game is a Zelda clone, probably my least favourite kind of rpg, and it has a very noticeably british sense of humour, which were both huge turn offs that made me avoid picking it up even when it did get its physical release, but for the price of free and the fact it was leaving the service ended up pushing me to give it a try. it was pretty okay. I liked the Zelda elements a lot more than I expected to and loved the puzzle design and 3D platforming segments but the game being *even more* british than it seemed was enough for the game to begin to grate on me very fast and it did have me wanting to drop it at a few points, so I came away from it very mixed. I did like some things a lot. the aforementioned art style is great. the 2D art is really cute and the animations are really well done and charming and full of character. the environments can be really nice looking too and the places you go are really varied with cool beaches, swamps and forests being the highlight and the 3D sections look even better with the room changing as time goes on and it all looking genuinely like it was made by a kid. it's so cool looking and the amount of variety they get out of the place is really impressive, with castles and jungles, spacey bits, your usual arts and craft desk, dollhouses and even cool dinosaur themed level. the exceptions are a pretty unfun metal mountain and the industrial last chunk of the game, which are super boring areas that dragged on too long for me. Overall, as far as indies go, the game is a real standout in the looks department, even though I do think that "RPG time: the legend of wright" does its look a little better. I love also how it goes into different genres a lot. you have those Zelda puzzle dungeons and the 3D platforming but you also have defender segments, punch out parts, 2D platforming, rhythm games and even a really cool puzzle bobble boss fight and they're all integrated perfectly into the game. they're usually the highlights of any given chapter I find other than the 3D exploration. I love how you can go in and out of the book to solve different puzzles. you can jump between different pages and go back and forth and how you can tilt pages to move things around or how you can find items from outside of the game to help inside the game. they even have a cool system that looks like that game "baba is you" where you can change words in the book to make outcomes different and it's always fun to find secrets with that. those 3D adventure bits are great, too, and there are some fun levels and really enjoyable platforming and even the combat here is a lot more fun with the basic combo string you get plus being able to throw the sword and do some jumping and charge attacks (which you can do in 2D as well but they're a lot more fun to use in 3D). I found this to be the game’s overall highlight and I think it'll for sure be the part of the game that sticks with me. the music too is pretty good. it gives me big "ps2 licenced game" or XBLA energy, very like a stuart little 2 which is I think the closest analogue to the game with those 3D segments for me. though yeah the elephant for me along all this was just, the style and humour. it's based heavy on british kids books and I just find it really grating. The humour isn't as cruel and mean spirited as I find most british media is but I dislike how a lot of it is worded. I dislike the words it uses and how everyone is characterized and I find the character jokes really unfunny. moonbeard and the metal trolls were the worst for this and the latter felt like the one time the game gave me that "judgey and mocking" vibe that I always get from british media. it's still very much noticeably written in a very british way that I just cannot engage with in a positive way. I just never got invested in it at all despite liking the message. it has WRT creativity, though I can't say I really enjoyed the story showcased around that message or any of the characters. This is really just a very specifically me hangup since I assume most people don't have this seething hatred for british media like I do. I grew up around this stuff and it all just left me very bitter and entirely unable to engage with any of it in good faith, so take my writings about this game with all that in mind. the game has a physical release and it's pretty common, though since it's a relatively recent release it's still pretty pricy, running you about £25-30 for it which I don't think is worth it, but if it looks appealing I think it would be worth that much for you, especially since it's a relatively lengthy game at about 8 hours and it's easy enough that just about anyone can finish it without any real issue.