The Other Side of the Fourth Wall

I've enjoyed playing the Diablo games since I was young, and having heard about the bad press about various issues with Diablo II's remaster(which doesn't seem as disastrous as Warcraft III: Reforged), I decided to do a review of the original Diablo, which I purchased through GOG.com some time ago and played for the first time in years. It's a fun game, even if you can tell that it has many noticeable differences from its two sequels.  Story At first glance, the story of Diablo is rather simple- you must kill the eponymous demon that lurks at the bottom of the labyrinth beneath the town of Tritstram' cathedral. However, subsequent games, works in the expanded universe and even the manual of the original Diablo reveal that Sanctuary is a surprisingly deep setting in which angels and demons go to war and humanity is caught in between. Much of the plot-related dialogue is optional. When you talk with the residents of the town of Tristram, some of whom you never need to

 You may recall the time when I retold Persona 5's prologue in AI Dungeon . This time, I will do a retelling of the interrogation scene, one that starts strange and gets weirder from there. Again, the bolded part is the prompt, and the rest is what the AI came up with. This time, I'm mostly letting it speak for itself, but continued until I arrived at a good stopping point. You are Ren Amamiya, leader of the Phantom Thieves, a group of criminals bent on reforming society. During your last heist, someone betrayed you and leaked your plans to the police, resulting in you being arrested. You were taken to an interrogation room beneath the police headquarters, beaten, drugged with truth serum and threatened into signing a false confession, but to the best of your knowledge, none of your friends have been caught yet. After the police finished questioning you, public prosecutor Sae Niijima arrives in the detention center to question you. "I'm Sae Niijima of the prosecutor

People often stress the importance of first impressions, but often, people aren't quite what they seem at first glance. This post will examine how Shinta Fukuda, Takuro Nakai, Yuriko Aoki and Eiji Nizuma are introduced in Bakuman, and how their introductory scenes subtly establish their true characters. Fukuda and Nakai Moritaka Mashiro, an aspiring manga artist, agrees to work for his long-time rival Nizuma as an assistant in order to hone his skills and improve himself enough to launch his manga in Shonen Jump. At the door to Nizuma's studio, Mashiro meets Nizuma's assistant Nakai, who is close to twice Mashiro's age. Nakai politely greets Mashiro, introduces himself and explains some of Nizuma's quirks. After Mashiro tries to introduce himself to Nizuma, who's too busy to notice that his rival has just decided to work for him, Fukuda chimes in, noting that Nakai doesn't need to be so respectful to someone much younger than him. Fukuda advises Mashiro to f

Star Fox 64, by allowing players to set their own route through the Lylat Systen, allows for some rather interesting possible results. I will include the title of each route, the levels involved(if I don't include the endgame, it doesn't matter) and notes on what makes each route unique. Route YXZ Route : Corneria->Sector Y->Katina->Sector X->Sector Z This route allows the player to go through all three Sectors, albeit not in alphabetical order. I don't know why they put X for Level 4, Y in Level 1, and Z in Level 5; maybe they started counting with the easy levels before heading to the harder ones. Star Wolf Lives Twice Route : Corneria->Meteo->Fortuna(complete mission successfully)->Solar or Sector X->Macbeth->Area 6->Venom(Hard) You fight Star Wolf on three separate occasions- Fortuna, Bolse and the hard version of Venom. Ordinarily, any Star Wolf members you shoot down on Fortuna will not be present on Bolse, but this does not apply if you

Super Cub is a slightly unusual concept- a group of high school girls who ride scooters- told in a rather unusual style for an anime adaptation of a light novel series, but the anime does quite well on both counts. Story The series stars Koguma (known only by her surname), a lonely girl who has no family or friends and little spending money. She ends up buying a Super Cub scooter for an extremely low cost, and ends up befriending fellow scooter enthusiasts Reiko and Shii. The anime is a slice of life series that covers the first year since Koguma's purchase of the Cub. Without spoiling too much, there isn't much of an overarching plot, although it ends on a relatively climactic note with a hint of what is to come. There isn't a lot of action in the anime, since Koguma and her friends don't race on their scooters or go many places. In fact, with one exception that I won't spoil, they mainly use their Cubs for their daily commutes, going shopping or part-time jobs(for

Over the past year and a half, I've done all sorts of blog entries, from opinion essays to in-depth analysis, and now, I'm going to branch out to reviews. These will be similar to the "Gaming Oddities" entries, but will focus on more mainstream games, as well as other media. For starters, I will begin each review with the title of the work, and, when necessary, the medium in parentheses, to distinguish between works with the same name and to clarify whether I am reviewing the original or an adaptation. Here are some examples. Bokurano(manga) vs. Bokurano(anime). The latter is an adaptation of the former, but many elements of the plot, including the ending, are different. Frozen(Disney film) vs. Frozen (2010 live action film). The two have absolutely nothing to do with each other- the former is a Disney film and the latter is a thriller- despite sharing the same name. Kino's Journey(light novel) vs. Kino's Journey(2003 anime) vs. Kino's Journey(2017 anime)-