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wotakoi and a bunch of online games. so while much of this page will be less than positive coverage of some not-great games, let's talk about something i loved first. wotakoi is one of my favourite manga, it's one of my favourite anime too and it's something I've been getting back into. I bought some physical volumes and started rewatching the anime, but I'd never gotten around to checking out the live action movie, so when i remembered it existed i had to watch it and I'm so glad i did, it's not as good as the manga or the anime but it's still an amazing time and a really unique take on what wotoakoi is. so the movie takes the basic premise and the cast and tries to tell a much shortened version of some of the manga's mini arcs, though with much less of a focus on the series' second couple, yanagi and kabakura, and mostly on the main couple, hirotaka and Narumi. this did rub me the wrong way at first since yanagi and kabakura are super integral to a lot of the humour and storylines, but i was able to get over it at first, given the movies runtime it makes sense why their roles had to be shortened and changed. it also makes it a musical now, which really excited me. i love musicals and i love wotakoi so it seemed like a match made in heaven and it really was. the songs are funny and catchy and the scenes for them are really pretty, especially the bar song, the song in ikebukuro and the rooftop dance with kabakura! i love the casting. Narumi especially kills it with how well she nails the expressions and jokes and kabakura too really nails how his character acts during the crying scene especially and with how he generally just looks menacing. hirotaka and yanagi are great too, especially with how they look. everyone fits their parts absolutely perfectly, even down to yanagi's actress pulling off the mitsutada cosplay she ends up in. i love the scene's shot in ikebukuro and Shibuya (special shoutout to the appearance of the main ikebukuro animate, i got an amnesia artbook there once). i love all the mentions of otome road, too, and there's some really cool scenes shot at comiket for the arc where they sell yaoi there, which is one of my favourite bits from both the anime and the manga. there's just so much to love about it. it's still just as funny as the manga and it knows its audience well with all the little references and shoutouts like the touken Ranbu cosplay, all the cosplayers in the first musical number (double shoutout for the guy in the sengoku basara mitsunari cosplay), things like Narumi's room being filled with enstars and bungo stray dogs merch and it throws out some otome references, too. They know their target demo and i feel very well served by it. there's even references to and a full song based on monster hunter so non fujo's will still feel like they get something out of it. plus the bits where they outright show gameplay are cool too. this happened in the anime and it happens here again. it's just a cute touch and it makes the movie feel so much more authentic to the culture it's trying to portray (also the bits with niconico comment style subtitles were always really funny). though some bits i am iffy on. I don't like how the chunk of the movie with hirotaka and Narumi falling apart goes all that much, though i do like the musical numbers in there and again i do wish we had more of the side cast. there are characters thrown in there that could absolutely have been replaced by yanagi and kabakura and they don't really add much, but i do like some of the other additions, like narumi's boss or the bartender, both were super funny. I'm happy with the movie overall though. it's cute and funny. the movie is shot super well in several areas of Tokyo that all look amazing. the costuming is great, the acting and singing is great, the movie is consistently really funny and sweet and it's just good time. I've watched it 3 times in the past month and i even went and bought it on blu ray, which i think is a real mark of quality. you can watch it online subtitled super easily on places like bilibili so really all you have to lose out on is your time. if you like the source material or even just like shoujo and josei manga, then i really think you'll get a lot out of this, oreven if you just like musicals because you find the idea of an otaku musical to be super novel and charming. it's a really unique experience and even beyond that the movie handles its romance so well. it constantly had me just, all over the place but in a good way? it's hard to really describe how i felt but it got me like only the best romantic media can, they pull off the couple perfectly. it's quickly found its way into being one of my favourite romcom's and honestly just favourite movies, period. okay so now onto the games with blacklight retribution. now this game is sadly as generic as they come, but it has something about it that attracted me to it. maybe it was the bot mode options or the fact it was actually one of the first games released for the ps4, one of the first free to play games on the system too, and i think it's something of a miracle that the game managed to survive this long, not that it's bad or anything just that it's not got a ton going for it to really differentiate itself from other games of its ilk beyond a slightly more interesting theme and a single gimmick i really liked. it doesn't play the best with it's lack of guns and very samey maps—samey maps that granted do look nice since the game has a cyberpunk theme and some really nice looking maps, even a few very unique ones like a cool port or a subway or a snow level, though it does often fall back on "neon lit street" and "base" too often i think. it's also got really poor quality bots that are both way too good and way too dumb and some of its support items you can buy like the flamethrower are a little useless. despite all of this i didn't really have a bad time with it. the gimmick of wallhacks you can turn on every once in a while is really cool and i love how it makes you chose in the moment beyond situational awareness and your ability to shoot, since during the wallhack gadget use you can't shoot. it makes things really fun and tense and it was always a jumpscare turning it on and then seeing an enemy beeline around the corner to you and i like the ingame item shop you can buy health and items at. i especially loved the mechsuit you could buy that let you really go wild with a railgun and a minigun. it also has a big gun customisation system which tries to make up for the lack of variety, and while it is neat, it's also seemingly very grindy and pay to win. You can *rent* gun parts if that tells you what kind of game this is. I don't think it's really enough to save it. i didn't dislike the gameplay either. It had some good maps and as far as call of duty style multiplayers go it's not a bad one; though it's hard for me to really think of much about it that stands out. dayz is really not any better and in fact is probably my least favourite game of this lot which is a shame because it's the one I've seen the most love for here. it's my first real foray into this kind of multiplayer survival sim, a kind of hardcore PC-centric style of game that I've seen around (admittedly entirely from DNSL clips) and always been a little interested in but i always felt very intimidated by. they seemed complicated and harsh. the fact you could lose everything in an instant from a cheapshot is very offputting and their lack of any real aesthetic quality was a downer too. substance over style kind of games but in a way i find a little bit off-putting. a lot of PC gamery games tend to be like that and it's one of the reasons why i tend to avoid those kinds of games. They're gamery in a derogatory sense. what got me to bite the bullet was actually the game being free on PSN via ps plus, which for someone like me who mooches off of someone else's sub is great. it meant i could try it with no real consequence if i disliked it and i was at least glad i did so i knew this kind of game was super not for me. i really did not enjoy my time with this game. the game is a hardcore survival game and i mean *hardcore*. bullets are rare, health is low, dying happens all the time and even a lone zombie or player can very easily take you down if you don't take them seriously. it's also got stuff like hunger systems and PVP always turned on. what this means is that it is a very in depth experience which for some will be the coolest thing. it's a realistic simulation of surviving a zombie apocalypse, but for me i just couldn't get into it. the controls are awkward on console and the game doesn't signpost much, which i guess is part of the appeal. there's no story or objectives and the playerbase is very hostile and difficult to deal with. in fact one of the few times i found a player it resulted in us fighting, me killing him, me reviving him as a show of peace before he tried to kill me again and i somehow bumbled my way into eating him, which is a funny story admittedly and it feels like a game that's tailor made for that kind of emergent gameplay, but for me that's just not enough to keep me interested. that was the highlight. the rest of it included me stumbling around failing to find supplies because items are very small and hard to see. the controls are not made to be used on console and it's very noticeable and most buildings were just empty. you'd search 5+ buildings and find zero items, no food or weapons or anything, and don't even think about finding a gun any time soon. This isn't that kind of game. i found one once in my runs and it had almost ammo in it. it's just a very boring experience, confusing and more than a little bland. the environments are very boring and samey. even for a game like this, there just isn't much in the way of redeeming qualities here. even the music is bland, though that's the case for more or less every game i talk about today. I also played mordhau, another game in a subgenre that i was always steered away from, first person medieval melee PVP. it's a genre I've seen from the outset here and there in funny clips and bits but the PC focused nature, very bland aesthetics and..... less than friendly userbases in this case one infamous for their sexism, all PC staples by now, turned me away massively even when some of them did come to console. the devs of this game taking 26 entire patches and multiple years to add female characters was also side-eye worthy, though to their credit they did eventually add them, unlike perma-shitlist sitters who can go eat shit and die. I'd only really tried it because my roommate decided to make a night of it when it came to ps plus and when you're offered pizza and snacks to play a game with someone it's hard to say no. i didn't enjoy the game much. it's a siege action game with whacky attack physics, a seemingly large amount of depth in its combat and some very impressive player numbers. i thought the horde mode was pretty neat as an addition though i do have to say it's probably the weakest horde mode I've ever played. the combat doesn't feel suited to it. it's very slow and things like defences don't really come into it and in the demon variant you spawn with no weapons and die in 2 hits. it's just not fun and i didn't last long in it before giving up. it does have bots though and i will give it credit for that. every game should have bots, but i just didn't really see any appeal in the game overall even with its cool bot mode. it's slow and easy to get steamrolled as a new player and it feels too easy to one shot. progress feels like it's always at a snails pace and the controls feel a little awkward on console and just not fun to execute and the game is just kind of charmless. It feels very clinical, much like dayz did and it's got so little to make it stand out that you could post a picture of it alongside chivalry 2 and probably not be able to tell which is which. it looks nice though and some of the siege stuff i do quite like, but it didn't hold my attention for more than 2 hours. i enjoyed my time with warlander a lot more. it just had more to it and a better energy. the game isn't bad or anything but it just did nothing for me. the pizza we had while playing was the best part. lastly in this online game extravaganza is FBC firebreak, the remedy online shooter, as you might otherwise know it. it's basically a first person multiplayer mode for their other game "control", a game that it has to be noted i have not played yet, though i do very much plan to. this is, and you can hear me sighing as i type this out, a 3 player menial labour simulating co-op class based PVE horde mode extraction shooter, like a mix of every big streamerbait game all in one but made by people who can do better, know how to do better and honestly should do better. This game is as weirdly cynical and heartless as these kinds of games come and i really did not like my time with it. it's a game that feels like it was made under both gunpoint and out of contractual obligation, it has almost no content as of the time at launch i played it, and by no content i mean i finished everything there was to do in just over an hour, and what content that is there is just not very interesting, fun or engaging. the game throws you and 2 other players, who can be one of 3 classes with the engineer, the cleaner and the electrician into a zone with an objective. maybe its cleaning the floor of notes, getting items or fixing a furnace to name a few examples before you have to rush out to the elevator for extraction while waves of enemies spawn in and attack you. there's some status effects like fire or the stickynotes and you need to take ammo into account since its scarce. there's also showers to douse fires and the game does have water mechanics and stuff, but there's just not a lot to it. none of the objectives are all that fun and even when you do get into the later levels it doesn't open up enough or become interesting enough to stick with it to get the game’s many, many unlockables. this one was just kind of lame, though to its credit the lore here is probably great. it's a very good looking game and i did think the writing was funny, but it just isn't worth the price. I'm pretty happy to have played it or free via a plus sub