Just saw Godzilla x Kong, and it was a ton of fun! I think, coming off of Godzilla -1, it would probably feel pretty dumb. But honestly, I think it's really cool that Godzilla is dynamic enough of a character that he can headline an introspective, emotional story full of allegory, but also lead up a dumb-as-hell action romp.

Well, "lead up" might be the wrong phrase, since this is very much a Kong story with Godzilla as more of a special guest role. Fortunately for me, I actually like that dynamic... Kong works as a more relatable Kaiju with human-like traits that can actively communicate with the human characters, while Godzilla feels almost like a force of nature that everyone else needs to desperately try to point in the right direction. Kong actually gets a lot of really good moments in this... he gets a lot of screen time, and you learn a lot about his character through his interactions with the other characters, despite him being a giant ape who can't talk. I think his relationship with Diddy Kong (or whatever his name is... it's not said out loud in the movie) is one of the highlights. I honestly thought the character would be annoying, since the little kid sidekick in these kind of things tends to be, but honestly I was excited any time I saw the little guy on screen.

It's definitely one of those movies that falls apart if you think about any aspect of it too deeply. I think a major part of this is the collateral damage these monsters create. It's honestly true to the classic depiction of Kaiju, where they'll stomp through buildings or throw vehicles as weapons... but in classic suitmation, it's often pretty obvious that the characters are just stomping through largely empty cities full of miniatures, but with modern technology we get a lot more street-level shots full of human beings fleeing for their lives, and even the "Good Guy" kaiju will still just stomp through. There's one scene where Godzilla is leaving a location, and in the process he swims under multiple bridges that are destroyed by his back spines, and those bridges are very clearly heavily laden with cars that explode dramatically, and it would be a hell of a stretch to pretend those cars are all empty and abandoned. The movie doesn't dwell on any of that, and it's clearly meant to be a more light-hearted story which never dwells on such things, but especially after seeing minus one so recently, it can feel a bit jarring to have such wanton destruction on display with barely any repercussions.

This definitely fits in perfectly with the Monster-Verse movies that have come out so far. If you liked King of the Monsters or Godzilla vs Kong, you'll like this movie just fine. But if you like your spectacle media to be more elevated or feel like it's happening in the real world, you'll be left wanting by this movie. But for me, as a life-long Godzilla fan who is just happy to see the Big G on screen kicking ass, I was giddy in my seat whenever he was on screen. In some ways his reduced screen time (compared to Kong) actually made it more exciting whenever he did get in on the action. But make no mistake... Kong is the star of this story, and I think he proves he's got the chops to take the lead.

The Crits for Breakfast crew is going to be streaming more D&D tonight! Come join us at 9pm EST at https://www.twitch.tv/afterdisbooty or https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTFRYGP68sWs6WRw-Y6ODQQ

I'll be really surprised if this is where you learn this, but Akira Toriyama has passed away.

When I first started drawing comics, they were simple, childhood drawings on lined paper telling very basic stories, and every character was named after someone I knew in real life, even if they didn't look or act anything like the person they were named after. If anything, they looked and acted more like the characters from Chrono Trigger.

it wasn't just the in-game sprites, but obviously that was a big inspiration, but those amazing watercolor illustrations in the instruction manual and on the front of the SNES cartridge. I remember staring at them for hours, looking at all the little details hidden in every aspect. The creativity in the designs that were simultaneously so complex, yet also simple and iconic. The main character of my comic wore a headband over spiky hair and wielded a katana. One of the other characters was a giant frog for absolutely no reason.

At the time I was already aware of Dragonball, since some of the original series had aired briefly on my local Fox station, but I didn't really make the connection between the two until Dragonball Z started airing on Sundays on UPN. It almost felt like a secret club... this amazing show full of backstory on a channel that practically nobody was watching on the morning when most people were sleeping in. I remember getting a Dragonball Z shirt at an import store and getting teased at school for wearing a shirt that said "BallZ" on it.... it made it feel all the more special when I met others who recognized it and knew exactly where it came from. A secret club of weirdoes and nerds where the password was "Kamehameha".

The thing about Dragonball was that the world it inhabited felt so fresh and creative. I loved American comics at the time as well, but the ones I was aware of were basically all set in New York City, or some ficitional equivalent. They endeavored to appear as though they're taking place in the Real World, with only the superhero shenanigans differentiating the two. But here you had Dragonball... mixed among crowds of people there are just dog people, because why not? Cars and buildings were these stout, rounded little things that felt real enough to accept, but had personality all on their own. Anything could happen in that world and all looked Just. So. Cool!

American comics made me intimidated. I didn't know anything about New York City, or crime, or how Radiation works (although, in retrospect, apparently neither did anyone working at Marvel). But Dragonball felt freeing. The world can be whatever works for the story. A character can have powers just because they figured out how to do it... they didn't need to bitten by a radioactive animal, or fall in a vat of chemicals, or get exposed to gamma radiation (again... nobody knew how radiation worked). And there's always a convenient giant empty field where the hero can battle the villain and have cool, earth shattering energy blasts go off without constantly thinking, "Hey, shouldn't that have killed like... a whole bunch of innocent people?"

I think one thing that I've seen a lot of other creatives bring up following this tragedy is appreciation for how there was just something about Toriyama's work that wasn't just entertaining... it was inspiring. He created works that made others want to create as well. You'd have a lot more trouble finding an artist on sites like this that weren't inspired by Toriyama than those who are, even if it was only a little bit. The world has changed because of him in ways we're only beginning to understand... I know so many people today who I met because of a shared love of something Toriyama created. He brought people together. He created a legacy that will outlive all of us. He changed the perception of Anime in the West... of cartoons, of comics, everything. But, in the end, there's one thing he did that stayed with me beyond anything else he ever accomplished...

He made me feel like I could be an artist too.

We're going to be playing tonight at 8:30 PM EST on Twitch and Youtube! Last week's session ended on an explosive cliffhanger, so stop by as our heroes face their darkest night yet

The hiatus is over! for Crits for Breakfast, the D&D Actual Play group I play with. Work schedules are still a bit up in the air, so we can't guarantee a dedicated schedule, but the goal is still to play on Sundays as much as possible. Speaking of which, we'll be playing again tonight! Come join us on Twitch or Youtube at 8:30 PM EST as our heroes make their way back into town after their explosive conflict with the Slavers of the Black Market.

We're playing again tonight! It's actually my birthday tomorrow, so come hang out and wish me a happy birthday! We'll be playing tonight at 9pm EST on Twitch or Youtube. The adventurers have gotten themselves into a dangerous situation in the sewer beneath the city of Pennington, and they're only getting into more danger as they continue their quest to find the man who wants them dead.

The CFB crew is back! We took some time off last week for the Holidays, and also needed to reschedule this week's session because of New Year's. We finally took advantage of the fact that this is an adults-only and our heroes visited a brothel in our last session! What kind of shenanigans will we get into this week? Come join us tonight at 9:30 PM EST at Twitch or Youtube and follow the adventure!

I don't really actively engage with Pokemon games... I kind of treat them more like idle clicker games. They're incredibly easy, the story usually doesn't particularly matter, and so I end up mostly half-paying attention to them while doing something else. Like watching TV or listening to a Podcast.

So the new Pokemon DLC is a sort of "big finale", where the random trainer battles you find around the map use actual tactics and build smart teams, which I could kind of get into except that, on top of that, all the battles in this DLC are Double Battles. Double Battles require a completely different technique than single battles, and allows for some clever comboes with Pokemon. But also this is the end of the game, and I've built my team entirely around single battles. So now if I want to play and not deal with annoying nonsense in every fight, I need to take the time to completely rebuild my team with a focus on attacks that synergize with each other. And I just don't care enough. The plot is boring, the interesting characters from the main game aren't here, and all of the new characters are really, really annoying. There's this truly awful brother/sister duo that the entire DLC revolves around, and they're both insufferable losers who I don't want to spend any time around.

I think for a better game I might be excited at finally getting some real technical challenges or take on a new area that operates in a refreshing way. But I just don't care. I didn't even mention that the DLC introduces these dumbass "missions" that you have to complete in order to build up points that you need to spend just to complete the adventure. Mostly they're annoying but doable... stuff that you'd probably be doing anyway. But there's also stupid stuff like requiring that you catch wild pokemon with a surprise attack (which is something the player character has always been able to do, but was never mechanically useful enough to justify bothering with). Or requiring that you take pictures of wild pokemon, which is something I completely forgot you could even do in the game, since there's no mechanical reason to do it, plus the controls really suck. Worst of all are the ones that require you to be in specific places... like requiring you take a picture of any random pokemon in a specific area, or one swimming (which is a huge pain if there's no bodies of water nearby), or requiring that you build a TM, which can only be done at pokemon centers. So if you're not in that area, you either just can't finish your mission, or you have to spend the points you get from these missions to get a fresh mission assigned, and just hope that it's one that's not sending you halfway across the map to complete.

What really got me to realize I didn't care enough to bother finishing this DLC was when I got an assignment telling me I had to make a specific kind of sandwich. A fairly common thing in Pokemon games for a while has been some form of food making... usually it involves a minigame, and it's never useful enough of a feature to bother with if you're not just a completionist trying to finish all the minigames the games offer, or if the usually pretty minor benefits that food provides would be useful for some specific thing you're doing at the moment. I probably could have just rolled my eyes and went along with that, but sandwich making sucks ass. It's easily the worst food-making minigame in Pokemon yet. The "minigame" is just selecting each individual ingredient, and dragging and dropping them one at a time onto the sandwich. And I do mean each individual ingredient... if you're putting tomatoes on your sandwich, you have to drag and drop 3 separate tomato slices onto your sandwich. And the ingredients have weird, stiff physics, and the drag and drop mechanic isn't entirely clear where the ingredients will drop when you let them go, since the perspective is a little unclear. So you have to pile a bunch of weirdly stiff, awkwardly shaped ingredients in a slow, boring minigame in order to achieve extremely minor and niche benefits. I think what somehow makes this even worse is the fact that you don't really find a lot of sandwich ingredients through regular gameplay. You have to go out of your way to visit ingredient shops in the world to purchase ingredients... and I never bothered, because why would I?

So, yeah... I just feel kind of like a schmuck because I paid real money for the DLC mostly because I just wanted to have more casual idle gameplay to distract myself with occasionally. And it's weird to say that I lost interest because what I got was "too hard", but I think the real problem is that none of it is interesting enough to justify the extra attention I would have to pay to it in order to get what I want out of the game. I should reiterate that it's not really "hard", it's still a kid's game, after all, but rather it's just all more difficult in a way that's frustrating and uninteresting, and I just don't care enough to engage with it the way the game seems to want me to.

We're playing tonight! Come join us on Twitch or Youtube at 9pm EST

Just a heads up... my D&D Actual Play group will be streaming live tonight on Twitch and Youtube! We're in the big city as part of our ongoing Western Steampunk campaign, and it seems there's some kind of shootout in the police station, and we're about to get caught in the crossfire! The stream will start at 9pm EST