Well, uh, everything is pretty fucked up right now, buuuut I feel like I'm not going to benefit the dozen or two people who read this journal by hollering about it. But I can at least validate your parking: the amount of cruelty, greed, and chaos in America right now is absolutely off the chain, and if you're feeling stressed about it, IMO that's rational and normal. I don't have anything to suggest that you haven't already heard, tho.

What I DO have that you haven't heard are some recs of rad stuff to read, so that's what I'll go ahead and post.

Sylvan Migdal — Carboniferous (comics)

May 17, 2024

Readable online!

This (completed, GN-sized) sci-fi comedy webcomic is an order of magnitude smarter than it looks, while still being exactly as fun as it looks. A squishy galactic federation nepo-baby blunders into a backwater lost-colony planet and instantly re-inflames a botched first-contact detente, an infinite number of local power struggles, and a weirdly lethal AR game that no one remembers signing up for.

I almost never saw anyone talking about this one, and I think it's heinously underrated! Peak webcomics, tbh!

Heads-up for workplace comic-readers: this series is perfectly SFW, but it shares a domain with a whole bunch of good-natured porn by the same author, so be careful where ya click.

Zito Madu — The Minotaur at Calle Lanza

Nov. 13, 2024

A mostly realistic memoir with a lone surreal episode. A brutal practice of self-knowledge? Traveling “wrong” in order to claim a place more thoroughly? The meaning of labyrinth for its denizen?

^^ That was meant as notes for a later expanded review, but on reflection I don’t think they can be improved, so I present them as-is. No refunds.

Valerie Halla — Curse/Kiss/Cute, episode 0

Jan 27, 2025

Readable Online!

If you do everything I tell you to as a matter of sensible policy, then you may remember Valerie Halla as the cartoonist of Goodbye to Halos, a gentle and queer fantasy webcomic that looked fresh to death, seemed like it wanted to go somewhere real exciting but didn’t quite know the way yet, and eventually ran aground and wiped out. (By the way, a halted-unfinished webcomic is never a true failure, in my book. It was always worth sharing that thing shouting from your heart, and for us it was always worth watching. Every wipeout expands the possibility space and teaches us something new to want.) You might also be aware that she was the colorist on the last 1/4 or so of Octopus Pie, speaking of looking fresh to death.

This is not a comic; it’s the “pilot episode” of a horny urban fantasy illustrated prose serial. But formally speaking, it does a couple real interesting things that draw from the modern English-language strain of “visual novel” video games, which in turn are heavily influenced by the formal/narrative tendencies of 00’s–10’s webcomics. So it’s not a hard break, if you get me.

Ok, listen: it feels a little risky to push this on even my treasured gayer-than-baseline readership. It is ever so slightly closer to the furry lane of the freeway than most people vibe with, and it’s not porn but it is kinda rowdy and rude. But I formally recommend that every one of you take a chance on it anyway, because!

ITEM 1: It’s plain fucking good!! It’s witty and sly and cute, the characters are fun as hell, the prose is a delight, and I love the illustrations.

ITEM 2: It’s formally interesting! Give that sound-cue feature a try, see what it does to the scrolling-fiction experience and see what it makes you feel. IMO it’s part of a unified whole with the distracted and evasive narrative voice, contributing to a particular ludo-mechanical reading experience that feels fresh and raw.

ITEM 3: In its own soft and oblique way, this might actually be the most inherently and irreducibly transgender thing I’ve ever read, and IMO that is good and urgent and intensely exciting all on its own. The central themes of “monstrosity” and self-answering questions are incredibly potent, and the whole thing is suffused with the joy of expanding possibilities and the removal of constraints. I trust you to already know why someone might be desperately thirsty for that in this present historical moment; I'd like to suggest that maybe you'd benefit from it too, even if you weren't actively looking for it prior to reading this.

Sarah Webb — Kochab (comics, re-read)

Feb 10, 2025

(readable online! Or, grab the book.)

Previously reviewed, this is a standalone (web-serialized) graphic novel about a free-spirited village girl and an immortal ifrit imprisoned by her own memories (girl-by-force-of-will) who tentatively fall in love while traversing the wreckage of a dead arcology-palace in the arctic.

This re-read was via the beautiful Hiveworks paperback edition that kickstarted a while back. The story benefits greatly from the collected format; I remembered it feeling a bit circular and oblique during the middle, but it turns out that was just the serialization delay, and everything feels clear and speedy without it.

Anyway, I love this comic.

Another batch of reviews. And!! Finally!!!! The last crumbs of the 2023 backlog! 🙌🏼

Bonus Level: Cosmo D — Tales from Off Peak City, vol. 1

Nov. 11, 2023

Hahaha oh my god this ruled.

This is a berserk free-jazz shitpost of a game. It's a first-person walk n talk with charmingly gross graphics, some really nice uses of dynamic musical soundscapes (important objects mutate the music when you approach!), an intricate pizza-making minigame, and a surreal story about androids and mind control. I named my character "Yonkers."

Anyway, watch the trailer — this game is exactly what it looks like (positive).

Martha Wells — Witch King (reread)

Jan. 2, 2024

I just recently reviewed this, so nothing new to say.

Martha Wells — System Collapse (Murderbot #7)

Nov. 22, 2023

This was great.

Plot-wise, it directly follows Network Effect, with everyone still figuring out how to extricate themselves from the planet and ART's crew working together with the Preservation gang.

Character-wise, this is maybe low-key the big one! The climax is such a big turning point in Murderbot's sense of self and conception of agency!

This is maybe an esoteric way to say this, but I feel like this is the Finder: Talisman of the Murderbot series. If you know, you know.

Ada Hoffman — The Outside

Feb. 23, 2024

This was decent, and had an intriguing spacefaring take on Lovecraftian cosmic horror. I liked it enough to finish it, but probably not enough to read the following books in the series.

qntm — Ra

June 17, 2024

Readable online.

This was really good! And had an incredibly pessimistic (but very satisfying) ending.

It starts off as a meandering and curious exploration of a world that very much resembles our own, except that magic is a real branch of physical science that was discovered in 1972. And then it Fucking Goes Places. Gonzo hard SF with a dizzying scope.

Bonus Level: Anthology of the Killer

Jul 14, 2024

This rules. It's a compilation of nine short comedy/horror walk-and-talk games, about a zine-writing gal trying to get by in the city (and having to constantly evade serial killers). The art is delightfully rough and scrappy. The camera behavior is comically bad, possibly on purpose. The writing is brilliant and hilarious and surreal. This is a game where an antagonist says:

I realized that we needed to go back, to rejoin that sacred continuity of force, severed from us by revolutionary turmoil.

Back to violence sanctified by myth, when one could be a Gilles de Rais upon a holy quest instead of just some asshole strangling kids in the parking lot behind the Stop 'n' Go.

And where, under totally unrelated circumstances, the protagonist/narrators say:

"A tasteful plaque acknowledges tax-deductible charity donations from the Zacklerz, of opioid industry fame. Wait, that can't be right. Zacklerz?"

"They changed their name to seem relatable to younger juries."

The first two games are a little rougher than the others; in my opinion, Drool of the Killer is where it really started firing on all cylinders.

Most of the games take a single sitting, maybe 30-40m; my routine was to play one in the evening as I was winding down for the night. (The last one is longer, but it lets you resume from the act breaks.)

Ann Leckie — The Raven Tower (re-read)

July 31, 2023

Hey guess what, read the fuckin Raven Tower. This must be the third or fourth time I've read it and it's 100% as good every time. My favorite Hamlet riff combined with the triumph of the World's Strongest Spinny Rock.

Graydon Saunders — Under One Banner (re-read)

Aug. 5, 2023

Hey guess what, the Commonweal series is still some extremely good strange fantasy. This is the one about a scholar who built their personality around doing fiddly stuff with material science, but is coming to realize their true calling is maybe in horrible violence instead.

Graydon Saunders — A Mist of Grit and Splinters (re-read)

Aug. 21, 2023

Once I re-read book 4, I kind of just rolled into book 5.

Martha Wells — Between Worlds: The Collected Ile-Rien and Cineth Stories

May 10, 2024

I think only a couple of you have read the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy, but anyway, Ile-Rien was also the setting of two of Wells' earlier books, and Cineth is the other main setting in that final trilogy.

The thing about Ile-Rien as a setting is that it's kind of inconsistent and busted, and the stories set there work in spite of it, not because of it. There's reliable scholastic magic that operates as basically a branch of physical science, but then there's also literally the Fae... and then there's also real-world technology based on physical science (gaslight, gunpowder, steam engines and steel railways and ocean liners), but it doesn't cross-breed at all with the equally scientific scholastic magic. And then there's distinctly Christian-flavored religion in the background in various places (largely ignored by the main characters and doctrine wholly unclear), but if there's no Judaism and no Rome in the setting, then why's it shaped that way? Etc. etc.

Ile-Rien is a hodgepodge, is what I'm getting at. My read is that she had things she wanted her characters to do, and spaces she wanted them to move through, and she threw stock elements into the setting as needed to enable that. Fair enough!

Cineth, on the other hand, feels solid. I fucking love Cineth. Everything in that setting (the lifestyles, the technologies, the family structures, the gods and magic, the cultural conflicts) feels much more organically intertwined, standing toe-to-toe with the settings of Wells' later works. So, I see the trilogy as sort of the key bridge work between her early and later novels, and it's kind of funnily symbolic of that when Tremaine from Rien decides to stay in Cineth at the end.

Wow, what a massive digression that was! Anyway, this is a collection of short stories about existing characters from Wells' novels — one story for Kade Carrion, one for Nicholas Valiarde and Reynard Moraine, and four for the boys from Cineth.

As I might have mentioned before, I think the novel is Wells' natural format; her short stories aren't especially notable on their own, but they can work really well when she's using them to add more depth to characters she's already rounded out at novel-length elsewhere. Which is exactly what's on offer here, in the four Cineth stories. Actually, that one about what originally happened to Ilias is kind of haunting me; I thought that story was great, mostly for the way it refused to dress up an unforgivable crime with any tidy answers or closure.

(The Kade and Nicholas/Reynard stories are more just about dusting those characters off and taking them out for a short romp; fun enough, but they won't stick in my memory.)

So tl;dr, read this collection if you like those wizard-huntin' boys from the Fall trilogy, who are basically my faves. 👍🏼

I've got a pile of reviews in the hopper from the past year or so, so I'm kind of shuffling the chronology to come up with nice "optimum handful of trail mix" posts. Anyway, here's a book I just finished plus a few things from last year.

Alaya Dawn Johnson — The Library of Broken Worlds

June 7, 2024

Holy shit this was good. I got it from the library after watching Ruth’s reactions to it in real time, and was not disappointed.

This book seems to be packaged as romantic YA SF. Don’t fucking believe it! Much in the spirit of the book’s own themes and preoccupations, that is a kernel of truth fueling a massive misdirection. This is psychedelic SF of the highest intellectual potency. Ruth said it reminded her of a mix of the Locked Tomb books and the good parts of Garth Nix’s Lirael. I’d also compare it to Jeff Noon’s Virt, Slone Leong’s Prism Stalker, and maybe that last part of Kalpa Imperial where time finally collapses entirely and it turns into the Iliad but with everyone’s face replaced by tenth-generation photocopied glamor shots of early 20th century Hollywood stars.

It’s an exciting story with superb momentum, but it also demands some significant work to keep up with the action — you are expected to continually devise and test your own explanations for things that are deliberately left underexplained, which feels a bit like sprinting at 40mph to keep up with a car so you can carry on a conversation through the rolled-down window. I found it very rewarding!

...This one time, at a reading we attended, Kelly Link was asked to define the “young adult” “genre” within the artistic domain of genre traits (as opposed to the strictly commercial domain of market segmentation). Her answer was that a YA story absolutely must be about a person doing something (probably several things) for the first time. That’s pretty squiggly and porous, but I feel like it does actually get to the core of something useful. If you stand there and squint, then yeah, The Library of Broken Worlds' core thematic and emotional concerns absolutely situate it in YA. It's just that the reading experience is wildly perpendicular to what you'd expect if you went out looking for some YA to read. For a fun illustration of this, go check out the wave of confused and dismayed reviews on the book's Goodreads page.

Amaduyu Tatsuki, Mitsumi Misato, Wakaki Tamiki — 16-bit Sensation (comics)

Nov 24, 2023

A fun little fictionalized memoir about... makin' porno video games in 1990s Japan.

What I thought was most interesting about this was its focus on the texture of the period technology. Honestly I learned a lot about the pre-Windows Japanese PC ecosystem (like, the pc98 and friends), both from the text and from the bit of research I did after it piqued my curiosity.

Laurie J. Marks — Dancing Jack

July 18, 2023

An earlier work by the author of the Elemental Logic series. (1993, and only recently back (?) in print as an ebook.) I greatly enjoyed this.

You can see some of Elemental Logic’s preoccupations making themselves known ahead of time here: squirrelly and symbolic magics, the flash of insight as story-derailing superweapon, curses inflicted by an alliance of your enemies and your inner doubts, redemptions and second acts, bein’ generally just gay as hell.

There's a particular spell in the story woven around the titular dancing jack, and its nature is acknowledged but never explicitly identified. I had some kind of summary of it in my head soon after reading this, developed as I was backpacking, and I neglected to write it down. But I think it had something to do with cutting you free from the illusory obligations of sunk costs and self-image, or inflicting a knowledge of how wide a range of choices you actually still have. Nightmare-tier power level tbh. Just imagine.

Bonus Level: Sea of Stars

Oct. something, 2023

I loved the traversal and combat and aesthetics in this game, but the story and character writing left me cold. The heroes were just too abstract, you know? I played both demos and had high hopes, because in that short format they gave off a vibe of two people who've known each other for a really long time and who get along really well and support each other, and I feel like that's a dynamic that's underexplored in RPGs. But they didn't turn out to have a whole lot in the way of preferences or inner life, alas. Same for most of the rest of the cast.

Well: okay, actually there's one bit of character writing I really liked —

(END GAME SPOILERS AHEAD.)

( Read more... )

I've still got a backlog of 2023 reviews to write, so for the next little while I'm gonna end up breaking the boundary and posting a mix of stuff from this year and last year.

( Three book reviews and two video games )

Tamsyn Muir — Gideon the Ninth

Jan. 10

This book is amazing.

Like with most fiction lately, it took me a little while to get properly into it, but at a certain point it grabbed onto me for real and I blazed through the rest. (Had the same experience on my late-2022 re-read.)

The reviews I've seen for this were pretty polarized, and the primary split seems to be on whether you can stomach 1. highly stylized and anti-naturalistic dialogue that 2. operates on levels other than or in addition to what seem to be the literal circumstances of the setting and 3. is also used in the service of comedy. At least, that's how someone who loved the book would describe the split; if you hated it, you'd probably describe the bone of contention as obnoxiously self-conscious post-Homestuck memelord bullshit. But I, as I may have mentioned earlier, did in fact love it, and I found its use of language playful and a delight. The dialogue snaps, and it serves its story superbly.

In addition to really liking the character dynamics, I also want to give a big shout-out to the setting -- a grieviously damaged undead solar system sloshing with mystery, chaos, and menace.

Anyway, IMO this is a must-read fantasy adventure.

Tamsyn Muir — Harrow the Ninth

Jan. 11

I dropped into this right after finishing Gideon and smashed through it in like two days. It is also good -- actually, if anything, it's much better.

On the worldbuilding and overarching plot front, it answers a ton of baffling questions that dangled off the end of the first book, while simultaneously raising like three other much more troubling questions for each one it ties off.

On the character dynamics and relationships front, I think this book used a formally adventurous and confrontational structure to say legitimately fresh and interesting things about grief, memory, and the ways we engage with fiction.

Also, I quite liked all those unbelievable assholes aboard the imperial flagship.

I'm greatly looking forward to the last two books in this series.

Hiromu Arakawa — Silver Spoon 13 & 14 (comics)

June 17

I can’t remember what I would have said about these two volumes in particular, but it’s a great series and I need to finally go get the last of it from the library.

John M. Ford — The Dragon Waiting

Aug. 17

What the fuck!!!

This book was a really remarkable achievement on a whole lot of levels at once, including levels I’m simply not well-read enough or clever enough to say anything useful about. Ford was truly on another tier, and I can see why this was considered a lost classic. (It’s not lost anymore, btw! It got a reprint like two years back! Though, the ’80s paperback cover I own is vastly superior to the new hardback one.)

This is an engaging and surprising fantasy novel that does really strange things with history and then doesn’t really say anything out loud for the first 3/4 of the story about the stuff it fucked with. It’s sort of mostly about vampires? Vampirism ends up being the hinge of the plot. It’s also sort of mostly about imperialism. And it’s also about magic, but the threads that are about magic are also about futility. Also it’s all about Richard III.

It’s all over the place, and it’s really good.

Katie Mack — The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking)

Sept. 8

I was in A Mood and some acknowledgement of cosmic doom was exactly the business. Anyway Mack is a good popular science writer, you’ve seen her tweets and stuff, throw this on your library catalog stack of pop nonfiction for when you’re in A Mood.

Got a handful of reviews sitting in the bin, so let's do a bookpost!

( Seven game/comic/book reviews )

Oh hey, it's been a minute since I posted anything. Well! Here's the half-handful of reviews I had sitting in the hopper. I'm recovering from a cold and feeling somewhat faded/unreal, so I don't have too much else to say right now.

Adrian Tchaikovsky — Children of Time

July 30

I read this in a single day on my phone in a series of airports, planes, and busses, en route to Mammoth Lakes so we could start acclimating to elevation for the John Muir Trail.

I really enjoyed it! Good thinky SF about intelligent spiders trying to keep a civilization up and running. And I kept thinking about it for a long time after finishing.

I was reading Graeber's Debt at the same time as this, and it definitely called my attention to the fact that the somewhat-egalitarian society the spiders have finally come to around the final acts of the book is only possible via free labor from the ants. The characters talk about it like biotechnology or computerization or robotics rather than slavery, and the ants themselves don't appear to have much in the way of a sense of self, but the setup definitely reminded me of Graeber's depictions of ancient Greece and Rome. Not really sure what to do with that, just something I noticed and pondered on.

Content warning: SO MANY SPIDERS, OMG

Bonus Level: Get in the Car, Loser

Oct. somethingth

This was fantastic. I'd had an eye on it in development, just because I was very intrigued when Christine Love said she was building a playable thesis on why FFXIII's Battle System Was Good, Actually.

Mechanically, it lived up to my expectations and then some — the battling was fun and tricky, and I think it had several genuinely novel and cool ideas for how to streamline various elements of an RPG. (The lane-change thing! Burning outdated items to upgrade new ones! The item stories!) The visuals and audio were also really cool and enjoyable.

Story-wise, this honestly hit much harder than I expected it to. I feel like most of us are generally in the mood these days for a story about a trans girl and her friends fighting nazis, but also I was a little wary — like, I feel it's easy for self-consciously on-the-nose media to be slight and flimsy in certain ways. But this felt honest and raw while still being of-the-current-moment, and it even did some formally interesting stuff (like, the whole chapter where Sam's just stuck in her own shitty thoughts was done in a really cool and tense way).

Anyway, this is actually free, weirdly. There's one DLC out right now, which goes for $10 and doesn't feel like $10 of content at all, but I bought it and am perfectly fine with that — the way I read it is, the main game is a bargain at $10 and you just post-pay if you liked it.

Bonus Level: The Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye

Dec 20

This is DLC for one of my favorite games of the last year, and it truly rules. I was really skeptical that there was room for something like this in that universe — the main game was so complete and coherent! Where were they even going to shoehorn more lore in?? But it works really well — better than well, it even manages to improve the coherency of the main storyline. (Via... not really a retcon, more just some added context and a valid answer to a particular question that the Nomai eventually concluded was unknowable.)

Mechanically speaking, this adds one very large additional environment to the solar system... plus something sort of else. I feel like I ran into some slightly more frustrating roadblocks in this than I did in the main game; definitely had to look up a nudge for one puzzle in the tower. I'll just chalk that up to it being a more claustrophobic environment — in the main game I could always just blast off to some other corner of the universe if I got annoyed at something, while here I'd eventually hit a point where I just couldn't get around whatever I was blocked on. If you're thinking of playing the game for the first time, I think I'd recommend just buying the DLC before you start and exploring it in parallel with everything else; you'll want to avoid doing the final Echoes segment (you'll know when you're coming up against it, believe me) until you're pretty sure you've sorted out what was going on with the Ash Twin Project, but otherwise it should weave in pretty well, and having more stuff to explore elsewhere will give you some buffer against the more frustrating puzzles.

Also, fair warning, this has some spookier content than the base game and also includes some stealth/evasion challenges.

Time for a bookpost again! Well, past time, really.

I'm catching up with the 2021 reviews pretty quickly, because I plain didn't read very much this year. (Looks like around 33 books so far, here at the tail of December.) Didn't have the brain for it; I did have the brain for some other think-y pursuits, but fiction was just too difficult to process for a lot of the year.

Martha Wells — Murderbot Diaries: Fugitive Telemetry

April 28

The sixth Murderbot book! (Fifth chronologically, though.) Murderbot is still great, and I loved this book. I don't have anything really smart to say about it.

all the graydon saunders commonweal books over again

May 9

Apparently I was feeling stressed and just wanted a comfort re-read.

Robert Nystrom — Game Programming Patterns

May 17

Available online! (Reminder that I made a thing that's very nice for reading technical books on the web.)

This was really interesting and useful! Isaac recommended it.

I've been learning some stuff about game development recently, and doing some experiments with the hope of building some little games for myself and others sometime soon. And while tutorials and stuff are nice, I also really like getting a more systematic view of a problem space — it's not really a good way to truly internalize knowledge (that just takes practice, alas), but IMO it IS a good way to build up your instincts about where to look for something once you need it.

Megan Whalen Turner — The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, The King of Attolia, and A Conspiracy of Kings (re-reads)

May 17 through July? Somethingth?

These books still rule! This was only my second reading of these, and they're perhaps even better on re-read than on initial read.

There's this thing Eugenides says only rarely, when he's well and truly lost his temper and is 100% not playing anymore — "I can do anything I want." Just in absolute terms, it's an excellent line for a tantrum, but there's also a very specific subtext to it that I didn't really gather until this re-read. He's not saying that he's immune from consequences; gods know he doesn't think that. He's saying: if I ever decide I care more about winning this than I care about the consequences, there's no one alive who can intervene in time to stop me.

Megan Whalen Turner — Thick as Thieves

July 16

Right, here we go.

Ruth had a very ambivalent reaction to this one when it came out, which made me decide to put it off until the final book was out. (Luckily that was only like a two year gap, unlike the customary seven years or so between the others!) I actually liked it a great deal, but I can absolutely see why she was a little turned off by it.

The thing is, this book is an extended detour about as far away from the main action of the series as you could practically get. It somewhat serves as setup for a couple of subplots in the final book, but for the most part what it seems to be is, Megan Whalen Turner wanted to write a big old digression of a road trip novel, and she therefore did so. May as well sit back and enjoy the ride!

Now that I think about it, I think it has more in common with The Thief than it does with the other four books in the series. And both this book and The Thief were great! But it's definitely the lull before the storm, and doesn't move the story forward more than a couple yards.

Megan Whalen Turner — The Return of the Thief

July 20

And then this one was the full-force gale.

This book, against all possible odds, flawlessly sticks the landing for the entire Queen's Thief series. It's one of the better fantasy novels I've ever read; certainly in the top 20, probably in the top 10, possibly nibbling at the heels of the top 5.

It's SO FUCKING GOOD. It resolves a huge number of threads and questions, in tremendously satisfying ways, and if you've been waiting because you didn't want to get sucked into another unfinished series, definitely stop waiting.

Kimmy Walters — The Faraway

Sept. 24

This poetry collection has no copyright date printed in it, and I can’t remember if it’s post-pandemic or just prophetic, which is an extremely Kimmy Walters mood. Anyway, it’s excellent. I just ordered a replacement copy, because I let Ruth give my original copy to a friend for Christmas.

It's been a minute, but I finally bothered to wrap up my reviews of stuff I read/played in 2020. Here's the last of them!

Isaac R. Fellman — The Breath of the Sun

Oct 16

This was really good, and it did some things I haven’t seen much (if ever) in a fantasy novel before. It also had an excellent narrative voice and some genuinely hair-raising climbing, and I’m still chewing on some of the questions it was asking about faith and truth. Solid and unique addition to the genre of non-Euclidean and symbolically authentic mountaineering adventures.

I read most of this on my phone while we were hiking the Wonderland Trail, which was an excellent setting for it. (We were going around a mountain rather than up one, but still.)

Especially recommended to anyone who was never able to get the back third of The Left Hand of Darkness out of their heads, the part with Genly and Estraven walking across the ice in the endless polar twilight.

Catalogue note: The author transitioned at some point after publication but not long enough ago for everything to finish reorienting itself, so depending on the edition you run into it might be listed under his old name instead ("Rachel Fellman").

Bonus Level: Ikenfell

Oct 31

I liked this a lot! Cute art, good characters, solid pacing and plot, really good soundtrack, and a really engaging and challenging battle system.

I kickstarted this project back in... 2016? 2015? And forgot about it for a long-ass time, and was entirely startled when it suddenly shipped.

I liked a lot of things about the story in this, but I don’t have much to say about that — well, either that, or I have a bunch of things I could talk about but I'd rather just leave you to encounter them on your own. It’s good! It goes to a lot of effort to be kind. I particularly like how the person who's initially set up as a Draco Malfoy analogue ends up being one of the most sympathetic people in your party.

The battle system was absolutely fantastic, and felt really well-tuned. It goes something like this:

• It’s somewhere between the Lunar games and a more standard tactics RPG, plus a Mario RPG style attack/defend timing system bolted on. (That mechanic seems to be having a resurgence lately; Sea of Stars is going hard on that too.)
  • The battlefields are extremely cramped, which forces you to think really hard about where you're moving to and how to stay out of the way of your own best attacks.
  • The timing bonuses/penalties are large, with sometimes a whole order of magnitude between a "great" and an "oops". Personally, I liked how that forced me to stay on my toes; Persona 5 gave me a taste for swingy battles where shit might turn hard against you if you're careless, and this is definitely that. But if you hate that mechanic or just can't get the timings down, there's a setting to nerf it (no "oops", so it defaults to medium) or disable it (always "great").
• There's no MP or spell charges (and only two or three skills have cooldowns), and there's no "normal" attacks; every character just has eight spells (eventually) that can be used at any time and are all very situational/positional. I loved this, it really encouraged me to use my whole range of powers.
• Somehow, and I have no idea how they sorted out the math on this, there is very little damage inflation over the course of the whole game. You're still doing single- or low-double-digit damage by the end, and although you can withstand a lot more whomping by the time the endgame rolls around, 15 or 20 damage still feels catastrophically massive. I think this really contributed to how tense nearly every battle felt! And also to how significant the equipment upgrades felt — plus or minus 2 damage a pop is a big deal.

And finally, just on a technical quality level, the game just felt really solid and well-constructed.

Strong recommend if you're at all in the mood for a wholesome JRPG that nods to the classics and then does its own thing.

Martha Wells — The Wizard Hunters, The Ships of Air, and The Gate of the Gods (re-reads)

Nov. 19 through Nov. 25

This series remains a huge fave of mine, and also remains wildly underrated. I keep hoping more people will discover it after running out of Murderbot.

Ann Leckie - The Raven Tower (re-read)

Dec 9

This book still rocks.

Bonus Level: Persona 4 Golden

Nov. 9

I'd wanted to play this game for ages, but never had a good way to do so... and then they re-released it on Steam! Hell yeah.

I've got a whole bunch of nitpicks, but first-off, respect where due: I enjoyed this a ton, and wow, playing the original in 2008 must have been incredible. I'm kind of amazed at how much of the Persona 5 formula was already up and running at this point! And the story explanation for how a person's persona emerges is actually more coherent than P5's.

Also, the translation is definitely superior to P5's. The story I heard (from a translator who heard it as gossip from other translators) was that P3 and P4's translations were an in-house team with way more access, context, and iteration time than normal, but they laid those folks off at some point and did P5 in the industry-standard contractor-based style. Boo to that.

That said: today this game is a flawed gem, and Persona 5 improved upon it in nearly every possible way. Still worth a play, but the state of the art has advanced.

• The story dungeons are boring — each one has its own style of corridors, but they're just laid out randomly without any interesting landmarks or distinct areas to traverse. Mementos was like this in P5, but all the story dungeons felt like solid places.
• The mook enemies are also boring! Well, okay, their visual designs do have a certain berserk charm. But they have no particular personality, and just kind of read as mathematical collections of mechanics to be parsed. For P5’s mooks they decided to just repurpose the massive stable of mythological Personae they've spent the whole series cultivating, and it was a brilliant move -- there's so many of them that they didn't need to fuck around with palette swaps or minor reconfigurations, and they all have their own weird personalities, and the hold-up negotiation dialogue, and and and! That also solved the issue of where the fuck your protagonist's personas come from — in P4 they're just awarded to you as cards after battle, because... why??? Who knows.
• The protagonist is a charisma-free pint-sized old man, which is confusing because of how good the rest of the cast is. I mean, yes, I sort of get it — a silent protagonist is a self-insertion vehicle, blah blah. But P5's protagonist was a distinct person with distinct personality traits and some major Byronic charm, and even 13 years prior to P4 you had Chrono Trigger showing how to let the audience project onto a silent hero while still giving him a life of his own.
• ACAB.
• Five or six of the social links were just filler, including the one they added for Golden (who is key to the best ending, but seems extremely pasted-on). P5 did a better job with making the bottom-tier confidants interesting and fruitful. (Like the disgraced politician — I totally overlooked him in my first playthrough, but he turns out to be completely OP!)

Well, still though, if most of my complaints just come down to "P5 was better," that's still a pretty great game — P5 was better than most things.