By Shelley Pallis. Kenichi is a gamer suffering from that common modern malaise, a frustration with games that make life too easy for him. He’s just spent three years playing a prolonged online fantasy saga, secure in the knowledge that he can just fling money at loot boxes and power-ups if it ever gets too […]
Feb 24, 2023 • Subscribe
More like this
Hell Mode Novel 1
Hell Mode does play a few isekai tropes a bit differently, but it also clearly wears its influences on its sleeve. So yes, this is another one of…
Hell Mode Novel 1 Evaluate
Are you sick and tired of isekai light novels that feature a protagonist reborn in a fantasy world that operates very similarly to an MMORPG, complete with
Hell Mode ~ The Hardcore Gamer Dominates in Another World with Garbage Balancing, Vol. 1
By Hamuo and Mo. Released in Japan as “Hell Mode – Yarikomi Suki no Gamer wa Hai Settei no Isekai de Musō Suru” by Earth Star Novels. Released…
Hell Mode ~ The Hardcore Gamer Dominates in Another World with Garbage Balancing, Vol. 2
By Hamuo and Mo. Released in Japan as “Hell Mode – Yarikomi Suki no Gamer wa Hai Settei no Isekai de Musō Suru” by Earth Star Novels. Released…
Hell Mode ~ The Hardcore Gamer Dominates in Another World with Garbage Balancing, Vol. 4
By Hamuo and Mo. Released in Japan as “Hell Mode – Yarikomi Suki no Gamer wa Hai Settei no Isekai de Musō Suru” by Earth Star Novels. Released…
Hell Mode ~ The Hardcore Gamer Dominates in Another World with Garbage Balancing, Vol. 3
By Hamuo and Mo. Released in Japan as “Hell Mode – Yarikomi Suki no Gamer wa Hai Settei no Isekai de Musō Suru” by Earth Star Novels. Released…
Demo mode: Tevi
It’s Next Fest time again at Steam. Nuts to Valve, as usual, but where else are indie devs going to post their games for sale? I love itch.io,…
Books: Orienting
By Jonathan Clements. “My stay here has been so short,” said Rabindranath Tagore to Japanese students in 1916, “that one may think I have not earned my right…
Books: Sexiled
By Shelley Pallis. Tanya is twenty-five years old. She’s got half a decade of adventuring behind her, looting treasure from dungeons, spell-casting to protect her friends from goblins…
Books & Sake
「高円寺古本酒場ものがたり」狩野俊 Story of Koenji Books & Sake, by Suguru Karino The “Story of Koenji Books & Sake” is Suguru Karino’s account of how he started a bookstore and…
Books & Sake
「高円寺古本酒場ものがたり」狩野俊 Story of Koenji Books & Sake, by Suguru Karino The “Story of Koenji Books & Sake” is Suguru Karino’s account of how he started a bookstore and…
Books: Ghibliotheque
By Andrew Osmond. The Ghibliotheque podcast started in 2018, and soon became an institution. It offered a journey through the films of Studio Ghibli, presented by Michael Leader…
Hell Baby
A horror manga about a hideous newborn who is thrown away by the father. After spirits possess her dead body she revives as a monster who must constantly…
'Pleasurable Hell'
The memories of a veteran of British animation.
Demo mode: Hookah Haze
Sorry for the stream-of-consciousness posts lately. This site used to feature reviews of games and music and anime if you can believe that. Now it’s just a place…
Japanese “Cat Books”
Anyone who reads Japanese literature has surely noticed the overwhelming number of books about cats. It’s not just a phenomenon of fiction in translation—there are a lot of…
Books: Reading Murakami
By Jonathan Clements. Almost everything that is written about fiction is either reception (what the reader thought of the book) or production (an occasional making-of about the author…
Books: Combat Baker…
By Jeannette Ng. The light novel series The Combat Baker and the Automaton Waitress follows Lud “Silver Wolf” Langart, a former captain and mech-operator who retires after a…
Books: Spirit Chronicles
By Shelley Pallis. Yuri Kitayama’s Seirei Gensouki: Spirit Chronicles has several different beginnings, and to be frank, I am not sure that it has stopped beginning yet, even…
Books: Hayao Miyazaki
By Andrew Osmond. Hayao Miyazaki, published to tie in with the current exhibition about the director at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, is a whopping big book.…
Books: Studio Ghibli
By Jonathan Clements. Producer Toshio Suzuki was entertainingly underwhelmed when he was approached by agents for the pop stars Chage and Aska, who asked if Studio Ghibli would…
The Best Books
Buying books, especially old books, is a fascination and my biggest weakness. I love the old wear and tear on antiques, and sitting and pondering where the scraped…
Books: Monster Kids
By Jonathan Clements. In his lively new book Monster Kids: How Pokémon Taught a Generation to Catch Them All, Daniel Dockery talks us through the original plans in…
Books: Kyoto Stories
By Jonathan Clements. “Riding on public transportation in Japan makes you feel a part of the general population,” writes Steve Alpert in Kyoto Stories. “One of the people.…
Books: Tearmoon Empire
By Jonathan Clements. Then she woke up, and it was all a dream. Or was it? The teenage princess Mia Luna Tearmoon vividly recalls being eight years older,…
Books: Rediscovered Classics
By Zoe Crombie. Anime has taken inspiration from Western cultures throughout much of its history, from Astro Boy’s Disney-inspired aesthetics to the gorgeous European locales of films like…
Books: Anime’s Identity
By Jonathan Clements. Stevie Suan’s new book, Anime’s Identity, cannot resist telling a story from the production of King’s Avatar (above), a 2019 Chinese animated series that subcontracted…
Books: Otherside Picnic
By Shelley Pallis. Sorawo Kamikoshi is a loner, a twenty-year-old nerd studying cultural anthropology at a Saitama university, whose hobby is exploring spooky places. Nor are these randomly…
Books: Japanese Cinema
By Jasper Sharp. There are many paths one might take through the vast and varied terrain of Japanese cinema. Peter Cowie’s addition to the ever-expanding range of publications…
Books: Tatami Galaxy
By Tom Wilmot. Any mention of The Tatami Galaxy usually brings to mind Masaaki Yuasa’s much-loved 2010 anime. The charming series has become something of a modern classic,…
Books: Infinite Dendrogram
By Shelley Pallis. Infinite Dendrogram is the best game ever invented, a “virtual reality massively multiplayer online game” but not a crap one like all the ones that…
Books: Leiji Matsumoto
By Jonathan Clements. For all the passion and excitement that the contributors bring to the new collection Leiji Matsumoto: Essays on the Anime and Manga Legend, their subject…
Books: Terminal Boredom
By Jonathan Clements. “There is something wrong with our present society,” Izumi Suzuki once wrote, “and I can’t stand SF written by people who don’t understand that… Even…
Books: Rebuild World
By Jonathan Clements. When we first see Akira, he is gripped in the jaws of a mutant dog. Nafuse’s Rebuild World ditches the tiresome induction scene of many…
Books: Japanese Drinking
By Shelley Pallis. Masaaki Watanabe’s anime series Bartender is part of a long tradition of TV shows about smart loners who help others in secret. Its leading man…
Spiraken Manga Review Ep 205: Switch Girl (or Off Mode On Mode)
In this long awaited episode, Xan returns from his hiatus to review a rather familiar shojo series. While there are similarites to a manga we reviewed back in…
Hell Warden Higuma
Can you make a character based on only using the Dungeons and Dragons spell Mage Hand? This episode we, and our guest Zane, creator of the Jonathan Frakes…
Hell Warden Higuma
Can you make a character based on only using the Dungeons and Dragons spell Mage Hand? This episode we, and our guest Zane, creator of the Jonathan Frakes…
Wonder Egg Priority #04 — Boy Hell and Girl Hell
…What? Impressions: The idol stuff didn't get any better this week. It may have actually gotten slightly worse with the sacrifice being shrugged off as nothing, the…
Demo mode: Another Next Fest
In my last post, I mentioned I’d only played one demo for Steam’s latest Next Fest. In the very short time since then, I played two more that…
134: MinovskyArticle Goes Guesto Mode
The Sickos are amazed to find that MinovskyArticle, one of the posters of all time and our spiritual leader, has gone guesto mode! We talk about the posting…
49: Dylan Goes Guesto Mode
The Sickos welcome Dylan, a true homie and big time sicko. We discuss Dylan's inexplicable love of fighting games, his incredible cog stories of having an actual murderer…
27: Isa Goes Guesto Mode
The Sickos put on full plate armor in a futile attempt to protect themselves from being Roasted, because on this episode, an ACTUAL TEEN goes guesto mode! Tom's…
Synduality Noir #12 — Dark Mode
Boy, what a threatening antagonist inert rock that was. Impressions: I had assumed this broadcast was continuing right on into fall because… its broadcast is continuining into…
25: Marquez Goes Guesto Mode
Fellow Sicko Matthew Marquez (call him Marquez) goes guesto mode! We discuss Marquez's strange addiction to superhero comics, his burgeoning career as an anime boy, and the time…
Square Enix Manga & Books Reveals New Books Coming Spring 2023
The good folks from Square Enix Manga & Books have sent us their upcoming release slate for spring 2023. Headlining their releases is the Ch...
Books: The Apothecary Diaries
By Jonathan Clements. It is the ultimate in blood-sports – hundreds of the most beautiful women in the world, locked away in a palace where their sole chance…
Books: Approaches to Eva
By Jonathan Clements. Anime Studies: Media-Specific Approaches to Neon Genesis Evangelion is a delightful collection of fresh scholarship on all sorts of intriguing aspects of anime, as revealed…
Books: Holmes of Kyoto
By Jeannette Ng. Now also an anime, as the title aptly implies, Holmes of Kyoto by Mai Mochizuki began a light novel series about a pair of amateur…
March 2023 Backlog Books
Let the backlogging continue! This month I finished a series and tried out two more titles that I know from their anime adaptations.