Bon anniversaire!

Merci!

So Who’s the Queen?: A Chess of Blades Review (Part 1)

A gay male dating sim with a recurring motif of chess references and not once are any of the guys likened to queens. How positively appalling.

That missed opportunity aside, this quick little indie visual novel caught my attention about a week ago and got me invested enough to generate two posts’ worth of discussion. Admittedly this is only the second visual novel I’ve actually played through – the first being the delightfully raunchy Coming Out on Top – but I’ve picked up a bit of other examples of the genre from fandom osmosis and watching playthroughs on YouTube so I’d like to think my reference pool is at least a little larger than that. Despite the apparent lack of a fanbase a few of my followers expressed interest in hearing what I have to say on the game, so here we are. Note that as this is one of the very rare occasions where I’m not presuming that I’m writing for an audience already familiar with my subject I’m going to do my best to avoid major plot and characterization spoilers in the event that anyone wants to check this game out on Steam. I will be talking a fair bit about the lategame sex scenes, but given the nature of Chess of Blades I don’t think anyone will be spoiled to learn that the main character gets up to an assortment of naked sweaty fun with his various love interests. This will be a review in two parts – this one covering my general thoughts on the game’s overall story, themes, and presentation, and the second one on the love interests and their individual routes.

Protagonist Rivian Varrison is a young nobleman of an unnamed kingdom modeled after a vague blend of early modern European nations. The son of a celebrated military strategist, Rivian is sent on his own to attend a week-long celebration for the king’s birthday at a remote royal castle despite his mildly antisocial tendencies and lack of familiarity with court life (and sex, because of course he’s a virgin). During his time at the castle he becomes embroiled in one of several plots by antagonistic forces that threaten to destabilize the kingdom’s foreign relations, and with the help of a collection of men who want to bone him Rivian has to avoid getting murdered, save the day, and also figure out what and who he’s going to be doing with his life once the party’s over. Oh, and there’s a quick handwave in dialogue near the beginning of the game establishing that homophobia is not a problem in this setting. Arbitrary sidestepping of serious real world obstacles, yay!

However, from my limited understanding of traditional yaoi homophobia is not often as much of a concern in the genre as might be expected, and this is one of several elements of CoB that give me the impression that, like yaoi/BL, the game is written with a female audience in mind. Rivian hits all of what I assume are defining traits of an uke intended to be identified with by a female player; he’s a waifish and inexperienced sub bottom with flowing hair and sensitive nipples, all of which come into play in some way for every sex scene. I don’t mind it though, because I just so happen to also be a waifish sub bottom who can find him quite relatable. Not the bits with hair pulling and nipple play perhaps, because I get next to nothing out of either, but I can use my imagination. Suffice it to say that CoB is clearly inspired by the conventions and dynamics of yaoi even if it isn’t always entirely beholden to them.

I wouldn’t even say it’s the sex or those particular dynamics that comprise the main draw of the game, because both the political and romantic storylines offer enough enjoyment on their own to encourage multiple playthroughs in order to see everything. It helps that the main conflict differs depending on the romantic route, and each comes with its own antagonist(s). Characters – love interests included – who act in a certain role in one route may serve an entirely different one in another, or they may not appear at all. At the heart of all the nefarious goings-on lies a shadowy organization presumably modeled after the politically divisive Jesuit order of the Catholic Church minus the religious motivations (the fact that the organization appears to be named after their founder St. Ignatius of Loyola is a dead giveaway), although there’s enough variety in the specific antagonists to allow for more than one reading of what’s really going on with all these murders and kidnappings and such. The distinct but interwoven nature of the four storylines manages to do a lot with a small cast and a compressed timeframe, and while I don’t think you’ll find anything truly groundbreaking in terms of narrative I feel like it would be rude of me to spoil the particulars.

Gameplay is…well…

…just that, really. It’s a series of fifteen or so questions with two choices each that determine which storyline and romantic route you’ll follow and then eventually whether you get the good or bad ending for that route. That’s a bit sparse even in comparison to other visual novels I’m familiar with, but it works well for what it is. The algorithm for determining the romantic route especially is less obvious than you might expect, as it’s impossible to favor one man exclusively at the expense of the others. Moreover, if you don’t favor one man to at least some degree Rivian gets murdered before the plot even gets properly started in a generic bad ending that’s almost comical in how unexpected it is.

Presentation is a bit of a mixed bag. The artwork is serviceable and even quite good at points. but there’s a fair amount of stylistic variation and the NSFW art in particular doesn’t impress me very much. The soundtrack is excellent for an indie game, with fourteen original pieces that all do a great job of matching the tone and atmosphere of the scenes. I have no complaints about the writing apart from the odd typo or awkward phrasing choice, although there are a few quirks I couldn’t help but pick up on. For instance – Rivian, all of the love interests, and several of the side characters get compared to animals at multiple points. In exactly one scenario there’s the implication that this might lead into some offscreen pet play, but aside from that it’s just a rhetorical device. Maybe Rivian is secretly a furry? The chess motif is also less prevalent than I was expecting; it’s actually more prominent in the names and icons of the game’s Steam achievements, rather than in the game itself.

Then there’s the matter of the voice acting. While I appreciate the ambition of an erotic visual novel with multiple routes having full voice acting, the execution often leaves something to be desired for a number of reasons. The most common is that the VAs affect noticeable accents for many of the characters, usually to make them sound posh and refined, and either because of inexperience or because of just how strong the accents can get some of their line reads can come across as stilted or unnaturally paced. Rivian is unfortunately one of the more notable offenders. He’s the character with whom the player is meant to identify, and yet his voice is so obviously affected that it took me some time to stop thinking of him as a parody of a nobleman designed purely as comic relief. I found his voice less distracting in major emotional scenes thankfully, although on that note I also have to point out that the sex scenes are fully voiced as well. This doesn’t help anyone on the whole, not least because of how difficult it can be to authentically vocalize getting your dick sucked or taking a cock in your tight virginal hole. Also…there are sound effects for some of the kissing and blowjob scenes, and I really wish there weren’t. In all seriousness, if you’re audibly slurping that much while doing either of those things you’re either being intentionally sloppy because your partner’s into that or you’re extremely slow on the uptake about what to do with a penis or someone else’s tongue in your mouth.

I suppose I should be thankful that we’re spared tonguing sounds during the rimjob scenes or the slapping of balls on ass. It’s worth noting that the option to mute some or all of the voice acting exists, but I stuck it out because there were some performances I genuinely liked and because I was determined to get the full experience – for better or worse.

Whether what I described above justifies the rather steep price tag for an indie visual novel (because of the voice acting, possibly?) is a personal call, but for what it’s worth I enjoyed my time with the game in spite of those shortcomings and do recommend it for fans of period M/M romance, particularly the kind you’re likely to find in Japanese properties like the ones from which CoB clearly draws inspiration. I feel like I’m getting ahead of myself, though, as this post is going to have a second part. Next time I’ll be critiquing each of the four love interests both in and out of bed, which will undoubtedly make for a fun and extremely filthy bit of writing.

This might have been the most uneventful birthday I’ve had in years. I imagine that that’s a good thing.

In other news, I’ve finished with Chess of Blades and came away with opinions, both positive and negative. There doesn’t appear to be a fanbase for the game as it’s a relatively short and obscure project so I’d be mostly writing for my own sake, but I’m curious to know if any of my followers would be interested in reading me ramble on about a period M/M visual novel with graphic sex scenes that I absolutely will be scrutinizing based on my years of experience with taking it up the ass. I have stuff to say about the rest of the game too, of course, but for this genre there are certain priorities.

I Liked Fates Before It Was Cool!: Master Post

Here’s all the links for this series gathered in one place for easy viewing. This is now the longest single project I’ve ever worked on for this blog – can’t say I was expecting that, but so it goes.

I Liked Fates Before It Was Cool!: A Coda

My half-joking aim for this project was that, come next summer when the fandom is collectively dissecting FE16 and scrutinizing its every flaw, I could get the jump on the inevitable re-evaluation of Fates by linking the master post for this series and showing everyone that at least I’ve already put in my work on making that argument. I would be lying if I said that this replay got to rethink any of my earlier opinions on the game in a big way, but it did help me to recall bits of the experience that I’d forgotten, for better or worse. FE14 is still a game with some major shortcomings, but here’s the thing: in my considerations of Fire Emblem as a franchise I rank Fates alongside the Jugdral and Tellius settings as flawed masterpieces, and while Fates may be the only one of that group to be inarguably more “flawed” than “masterpiece” that’s still saying a lot.

In common with those two settings in particular, Fates is both foundationally unlike anything else in the franchise and makes a strong – if not always well-executed – thematic statement that resonates with what Fire Emblem at its core is about. Every game in the series to one degree or another advances the idea that war is an inevitable result of fallible human nature, and as a result the games’ endings are not happily ever afters so much as temporary resolutions before someone else screws up all over again. On a Doylist level this is a great position for a long-running, messily interconnected game series to take, but I also appreciate it as a realistic take on human nature despite the supernatural trappings of the setting(s). FE14′s basic premise plays into this idea in indirect but intricate ways, as suffering and death result from Corrin’s choice regardless of what it is. The way in which other characters react to the route split highlights the individual shortcomings of people who would be in other games either unambiguous allies of the protagonist or sympathetic but doomed anti-villains. The Camus can be a loyal older brother, the Jagen can be a self-interested traitor, the asshole archer can be a genuine antagonist, and prime secondary protagonist material can turn into a manipulative villain depending on the circumstances caused by a single but significant decision. The route split with its myriad consequences is not only the high point of the game but most likely its greatest contribution to the series as a whole.

And yes, for the most part in these posts I’ve been glossing over the more obviously cringeworthy elements of Fates. Everyone knows about the localization gaffes, the fanservice, the present but highly questionable queer representation, and the various holdover mechanics from FE13 that see the two being frequently lumped together in derision and declared signs of all that is wrong with modern FE…despite, of course, being modern non-remake FE. It’s not feasible to disregard Fates’s status as the followup to Awakening, a game that was designed as a capstone on the series but met with unexpected success and the need for a (spiritual) sequel. I’m obviously glad that the developers decided to continue from that point with such an original concept, even if the game by necessity had to carry over a lot from its predecessor in order to appeal to a similar player base. And even though I’m not the biggest fan of Awakening for a number of reasons, throughout this replay I made note of many of this game’s failings that are entirely its own – writer bias, poor pacing, bizarre contrivances, and so on. Just like Jugdral and Tellius, Fates trips over its inability to invest itself for as long and as thoroughly as needed to suit its own concept, and that’s a much deeper problem than face touching or microwave child soldiers.

But it tries, which continues to be my biggest takeaway from FE14. Sometimes in spite of itself, but it tries. Referring back to my ranking of the games and how FE tier lists used to be argued in the fandom, I’d have a hard time bringing Fates up a slot. It’s right under FE8, and it would be incredibly difficult to compare the ambitious mess that is this game to the well-crafted, self-contained textbook FE that is Sacred Stones. My biggest hope with regard to Three Houses is that the game tries – and succeeds – even more such that I won’t have to make that call ~~because then I might have to ask myself why almost all of the less experimental FEs leave so little impact on me~~.

I Liked Fates Before It Was Cool!: Revelation Finale

It should be quite obvious by now that I’m not very fond of Revelation. I’d even go so far as to say that it’s a more flawed experience overall than Conquest, and I get the impression that that’s a somewhat unpopular opinion. It’s easy to rag on Conquest’s contrivance-laden story and conversely hold up its gameplay as its sole redeeming feature, but the case against Revelation’s story depends more upon what it lacks than what it actually offers.

I think a major reason people are slower to outright condemn Revelation is that it delivers exactly what it promises. It is indeed a golden route where almost everyone is recruitable, only two playable characters die and one can’t be supported (and all of those are among the chronically under-developed group of Corrinsexual units), and the player gets to bring together both the Hoshidan and Nohrian royal families and their entourages for maximum warm fuzzy friendship moments and/or cross-cultural eugenics shenanigans. Arguably more than any other story campaign in the series it encourages taking the time to stop and grind, not through an unreasonable enemy level curve as in many grindy games but by giving you far more resources – units, items, and supports – than you’d ever have any use for in a no-grind playthrough. In a drawn out run it’s harder to notice all the narrative shortcuts and unearned emotional moments, and it’s less likely that the player will take the time and mental energy to separate what they know from Birthright and Conquest from what Revelation!Corrin has experienced. Perhaps it even makes the many tedious maps seem less so when they’re broken up with skirmishes and child paralogues and DLC.

That’s not to say that I consider Revelation to be irredeemably awful. There’s a good story buried somewhere in here if the player cares to fill in the gaps for all the underdeveloped characters (all the royals except Azura, Ryoma, Xander, and maybe Leo, everyone in Valla except possibly Arete and Mikoto, etc.) and assumes information from the other routes and relevant DLC. I sincerely believe that the route would have been greatly improved had it been allowed to be longer than the others, with extra chapters in both the pre-Valla and Valla sections of the plot to better develop the important conflicts and give major character moments time for appropriate impact. The wish fulfillment ending might be the least defensible aspect since it glosses over so much of the political situation to give your self-insert a crown, but I suppose that’s where fanwork comes in to stitch together the pieces of the three routes into a cohesive whole where almost everyone lives and puts their differences aside to create a better world that might actually make logical sense.

Revelation feels like a necessary element of Fates despite its technical status as DLC, though not in the way I was initially expecting it to be. It’s not in the worldbuilding, which generates more questions than it answers. It falls to the Hidden Truths DLC to explore the full story behind Anankos’s relationship to Mikoto and Corrin as well as the nature of Vallite magic, and the interdimensional portal tied to the skies over Hoshido and Nohr is just tension added for its own sake. Instead, what feels like the most important addition of Revelation comes back again to the route split. Corrin – and the player – are allowed to reject the clean division of the setting and pursue an alternate third route, albeit one in which the world still faces the threat of war and people still die. Golden route it might be, but there are unavoidably some characters who come off worse in Revelation than they do in either Birthright or Conquest, and the political situation at the end of the game is inferred to still be a precarious one (thanks mostly to the Leokumi moment in the last cutscene, but still). I’ve unfavorably compared Fates’s premise and setup to World of Warcraft in a few posts before, but I can definitely appreciate the idea of Revelation better when I consider that no such third option exists or is ever likely to exist in that game. In both cases the smaller conflicts over land and resources and retributive cycles of violence are going to exist regardless, but there’s a bigger force at work that can only be addressed when the two sides work together. WoW occasionally does this for specific moments in its storylines, but FE14 actively allows the player to choose to upend the board and go after the real threat.

And ultimately, your self-insert gets a kingdom and the biggest possible harem out of the deal so it’s in your best interests to be indecisive.

Next time: final thoughts on FE14 as a whole. I’m not doing a separate post on the plot-heavy DLC because I have little to say about them. Hidden Truths is mostly exposition that would have been better appearing in the main campaigns, and Heirs of Fate is just The Future Past from Awakening with less impact like everything else involving FE14′s second generation.

A bit random, but as I wrap up my FE14 playthroughs and still have a little over a week before I can get into Diablo III I’ve been poking around Steam looking to refill my library after I lost it all back in June. Through a post on here discussing M/M visual novels (including Coming out on Top, one I got a few years ago and very much enjoyed in all its raunchy tongue-in-cheek glory) I was inspired to look into Chess of Blades, which promises to be of a similar bent in a pseudo-early modern European setting that I’m already predisposed to like. I’ve read that it’s more like yaoi in the traditional sense than CooT or something like Dream Daddy – still haven’t played that one, by the way, for its premise annoys me – but since in this case that mostly means the PoV character is a bottom in all scenarios I can roll with it. After all, I myself am a bottom on the hunt for socially advantageous dick, so I can absolutely relate.

Brief commentary possibly to follow.

I Liked Fates Before It Was Cool!: Revelation Part 3

Chapters 20-Endgame, in which the Fire Emblem is a chainsaw.

Chapter 20 + 21

I bet this scene looks wonderfully silly if Takumi is promoted to kinshi knight.

I’m going to be combining many of the chapters in this post, because even though they take a while to play through there’s not much to them in terms of story. Of course Anthony is evil and Corrin has to kill him, although not before Anankos turns him into a Faceless (or was he one all along?). I think I would have preferred the humor of fighting him as a village with ludicrous stats over the sympathy grab they go for with him. It’s also worth pointing out that it’s the three older Nohrians who call out Corrin for trusting Anthony first, putting some of that healthy distrust they show off in Conquest to work again. I don’t like that we’re apparently meant to find Corrin’s endlessly trusting nature endearing because it’s what brought this group together and not, you know, self-insert narrative privilege, but whatever. None of FE14′s routes could go forward at certain points if Corrin didn’t occasionally grab the idiot ball, and at least this time they had the foresight to come up with a backup plan.

And I am actually glad that they did so with Anthony, because while Chapter 20 is more standard Valla fare the trap they fall into in 21 comes with a clever premise that’s fun to play around. I dislike how the chapters continue to be loaded down with entirely too many drops and chests as I mentioned last time, but I find that as long as you plot out routes for your units before you start the size of these maps isn’t a problem.

One final question, since I didn’t bring it up in Birthright: why is the S rank naginata, which is obtained in Chapter 20 in Revelation, called a Waterwheel? Just…why? I have never found an explanation for this.

Chapter 22 + 23

~~Well of course she has, just look at those growths.~~

I find Arete intriguing as a character, though not so much either version that appears on screen – the brainwashed servant of Anankos or the sentimental dying mother – but rather the idea of her as she existed against the backdrop of the volatile Nohrian court. That element of her has to pieced together from inferences and bits of information in supports, but it’s clearly there. I fully understand why Revelation includes characters like Arete and Anthony. They have to convey over only a few chapters the nature of Anankos’s rule over Valla and its dominated subjects as well as make for credible threats to Corrin as they trek through the kingdom. This is the main reason why Arete’s real characterization is, much like Garon’s, extremely minimal, because the pain it inflicts on Azura is meant to demonstrate how Anankos operates. It’s a natural lead-in to the antagonists inside Gyges, certainly.

Kind of a shame though that the most lasting impression Arete leaves on the player is that of a boss who just will not give up, seeing as you have to fight her three times. I can’t think of another antagonist in the series who’s fought so often over such a short span of chapters. What’s worse, neither of these maps is very engaging; the first borrows the forest-burning Dragon Veins from Midori’s paralogue without the gimmick of chasing down the boss, while the second demonstrates something everyone already knew, that turn-based platforming is not fun. Scarlet’s return as an enemy leaves no impact unless Corrin or Ryoma fights her, so that’s not working too well either.

Chapter 24 + 25

Chapter 24’s gimmick may not be original, but an optional stealth mission works substantially better here than it does in Path of Radiance’s earlygame since Revelation is already well-established at this point as being one long experiment with gimmicks. I also like how the door mechanic plays into Corrin’s desire to trust Mikoto – and that the last door rewards players willing to go against the desperately trusting personality of their self-insert. Plus, it’s not a complete cheat; one of the first things Mikoto tells Corrin in the chapter is the blue doors are the correct ones, so her contradiction at the ends rings false even on the level of a simple puzzle. For what it’s worth mentioning I never bother with the stealth option here just as I don’t in FE9, because it’s tedious and requires a very specific setup and execution for a reward that’s not really worth it.

I find Mikoto difficult to engage with on an emotional level however, for much the same reason that her death didn’t resonate very strongly with me. It helps this time that all of the Hoshidan royals verbally react to seeing her again, but for Corrin this feels like a less substantial meeting than Azura’s reunion with Arete. Azura and the Hoshidans have memories of these women and the positive influence they played in their lives, whereas Corrin has, what, a few days’ worth of interactions with their mother and some very hazy memories from before their capture? I do like how Mikoto reveals at the end that Corrin is Vallite royalty, not because it adds even more to the super special Avatar status or because it establishes that Corrin and Azura are cousins (surprise sort-of incest, yay!) but because it re-contextualizes their place in the world both connected to and apart from the other royal families. It does absolutely do those two other things and is rather awkward on that basis, of course, but Vallite Corirn is able to comfortably exist in between their two families while still having a place to call their own. A ruined, empty place, but that’s for the epilogue.

At first I was planning on doing Chapter 25 as a separate entry, but then I played through it and realized that it’s just more moving platforms and hard enemies with another family reunion boss that’s nowhere near as emotionally affecting as the previous two. We see nothing of Sumeragi prior to this chapter aside from his brief death scene flashback, and unlike Arete his role as a parental figure overlaps significantly with someone else’s. I don’t get a strong sense of how important this reunion is to anyone except maybe Ryoma, and half of that comes from remembering their one-on-one back in Chapter 5. Come to think of it, the disguised Sumeragi has that quick cameo on the Birthright ship map, right? I suppose that’s technically the only appearance of anything from Valla on that route, although in retrospect it’s even more random for him to have shown up there. So, yeah, harder chapter, but can’t really compare to what came just before as a story moment.

Chapter 26

Betrayed by a Jagen! Who’d have thought we’d ever see the day…unless you consider Orson in FE8 a Jagen, that is.

As big twists in FE go Gunter’s doesn’t quite measure up to some others, like the Belhalla barbecue or Nasir in FE9, but it took me some thinking to properly parse out why this isn’t as effective a climactic reveal despite adequate use of foreshadowing and setting. It actually ties into one of the overall problems I have with Revelation and another time it compares unfavorably to Radiant Dawn (and I’m sorry to keep bringing it up if you hate FE10 or haven’t played it, but the parallels really are apt). One of the biggest genuine criticisms of that game’s plot, particularly near the end, is that the story gets too big for itself and spends all of its final chapters throwing at the player numerous major reveals about the plot and setting, many of them not directly related to each other and only immediately involving some dozen or so of a cast of playable and/or named characters about ten times that size. Like Revelation the pacing is utterly frantic, and moreover it gives the player the impression that in order to understand the Tellius setting as a whole and what themes the developers of that duology were aiming for you have to be intimately familiar with the content of Radiant Dawn’s endgame specifically, which…yeah, you kind of do. How that could have been better handled would be a subject for another post, but suffice it to say that the apparent conclusion that Sephiran did every bad thing (except racism) ever in Tellius as a means of tying everything together rings hollow even in-universe.

The narrative approach of the Valla chapters is similar, but most of its big moments are clearly aiming to be character-driven, fueled by the relationships between the royals and their loved ones forced into fighting them. As I brought up earlier in this post however not many of those moments land because of another major problem Revelation shares with Radiant Dawn, that there’s been almost no time to develop any of those relationships with the plot moving at such a speed. You’d have to have seen Gunter’s supports – which aren’t even accessible on this route – to be able to appreciate at all his history with Corrin, since from the story text of Revelation and Conquest too for that matter there’s little to suggest anything beyond a straightforward master-servant relationship until the very moment when Corrin is pleading with Gunter to resist Anankos’s possession. Without that context the most relatable emotional moment of this chapter comes from Ryoma’s anger at learning the identity of Scarlet’s murderer, which we’re clearly not meant to dwell on much ~~because that might imply Ryoma is capable of holding a grudge~~. It doesn’t help either that Gunter’s genuine hatred of Garon gets muddied by the Anankos possession angle, something that didn’t come into play until years after he began grooming Corrin as an instrument of his revenge. At least Takumi didn’t go off the deep end until after being possessed.

As for the chapter…ugh, I’m just so tired of this route. Mikoto’s ward actively discourages you from splitting up your forces to go after the absurd number of chests that line this map, and this late in the game there’s almost no reason not to just rush Gunter. Funny that’s he’s pretty underwhelming for an endgame boss – that’s a Jagen for you.

Chapter 27 + Endgame

A question I’ve never seen anyone else ask before: why is Anankos wearing a Buddha mask anyway? It’s apparently just a wall fixture in the castle that he’s hiding behind, and while I get that they wanted to conceal his true size and cosmic horror features for Endgame in the fashion of JRPG bosses with multiple phases the mask is entirely unexplained. Is it meant to be ironic that a dragon styling himself as a god is wearing the face of the major figure of a religion/philosophy with no deities?

I will say that the mechanics of the final battle match the concept of Revelation perfectly. You’re strongly encouraged to split up your forces into three groups to attack all of Anankos’s weak points quickly, which matches up well with the route’s theme of Corrin (and Azura) + Hoshido + Nohr. It’s also not one of those final bosses that’s easier than what came immediately before, so additional kudos for that. Also, Garon’s death on this route is mercifully swift, ripe for even more trauma for the Nohrian royals that no one’s got any time to dwell on.

Aside from those remarks…bleh. The story may conclude faster thanks to lacking the near-death sequences of Birthright and Conquest, but that pace just pushes forward to the very end with Corrin being crowned ruler of a kingdom with no people…except Hoshido and Nohr both cede territory to Valla so that they can have some citizens, because that’s reasonable and won’t cause any confusion or hard feelings. I even took the trouble to S rank Azura, believing incorrectly that it would in some way be reflected in the ending as the only instance of supports in Fates affecting the main plot. Nope, Azura still rejects the rule of Valla and passes it off to her husband as if nothing were different. Then everyone hugs and it’s a little bit gay and the series main theme plays and oh God I’m just glad this route is over. But hey, a chainsaw Fire Emblem is bizarrely badass if you’re into that kind of thing.

PS: Chapter 10 is still The Worst.

Next time: ending and final thoughts on Revelation

Considering I don’t remember you ever mentioning it (or any other anime), I assume you haven’t watched Yuri!!! on Ice. Do you have any “bystander” thoughts or observations to share on that series and/or its fanbase (or, if I’m wrong, just regular opinions on it)?

You’re right, I’ve never really watched any anime or that one specifically. I’ve just never been much interested in the medium, even though some of the games I play are definitely anime-esque. From what I gather it’s a story about ice skating, there’s a canon gay couple and that’s about it. One of them is a Russian, I think?

Can’t say anything about the fanbase, though they seem quieter and less prone to fanwank than some others I’ve seen…something with Hero Academia in the title and a character named Deku? (which I remember just because I can’t help but think of the species of sapient plant creatures from the Zelda series)