I knew about this campaign since it was announced but I forgot that it existed until when it was happening. For one day only on July 9th, if you ordered from the McDonald’s app, you could snag some Jujutsu Kaisen themed Special Grade Garlic Sauce. Why it is garlic-themed? No idea, but when I realized that today was the day it went live, I thought “Why not?” I had vivid memories of the Szechuan Sauce fiasco and I expected a similar rush to grab this sauce, so I expected nothing to be available at my store.

So to my surprise, they had plenty. My girlfriend and I went onto the app, saw it was available at our store, put in an order, and then grabbed it. I know that may sound banal, but after dealing with the hellscape that was collecting Amiibo, I was prepared for the worst. But no, we ordered a burger, fries, some nuggets, got our sauces, and then drove back to our home.

After we sat down (and after my girlfriend tricked me into thinking that my burger already had two bites taken out of it because I’m gullible as hell), I was ready to try it. After separating the Gojo-themed label, which I got a laugh out of, I was surprised at how dark the sauce looked. It didn’t look like a garlic sauce but more like a BBQ sauce. It was about as thick as a BBQ sauce too, but that may just be the consistency of all McDonald’s sauces. I could easily see the black pepper chunks in it and it smelled like pepper more than anything else, but it was the taste that mattered to me.

My goal was to try the sauce with each of the three main McDonald’s staples and see how they stacked up. After taking a single bite of a nugget drenched in this sauce, the first thing that hit me was pure garlic. It overpowered everything about the nugget to the point where it didn’t even taste like one of their nuggets. McDonald’s nuggets have a specific taste I could only taste oozing garlic. As for the pepper that I smelled, I weirdly didn’t taste any pepper. I guess there was a light tang at the end of each bite when I let it sit for a while, but it was less peppery and just tasted like more garlic.

The same situation happened with the fries. The saltiness of the fries helped to weaken the garlic, but the garlic had complete and total control over each bite. And look, I like garlic a lot, so I wasn’t too upset by how potent the garlic was here, but those who are only mild fans of it may be immediately turned off by it. What was universally a bad idea was putting the sauce on the burger. I don’t know if anyone normally puts McDonald’s dipping sauces on their burgers, but after securing a part of the burger that my girlfriend didn’t bite, I spread some sauce on, took a bite, and instantly regretted my decision.

I know that there are people who will mix mayo with ketchup, but the garlic sauce didn’t blend at all with any of the ketchup, onions, or pickles that were on it. It was like mixing oil and vinegar and the ketchup and garlic fought in my mouth but never came together. It just left a bad aftertaste, but considering I’m probably the one person in the world who thought to put Jujutsu Kaisen Special Grade Garlic Sauce on a burger, I don’t think anyone else will make the same mistake.

Look, I can’t say that I approve of the method McDonald’s took to make this marketing stunt work but at the end of the day, I didn’t care about any of that. I just wanted to know if the McDonald’s Jujutsu Kaisen Special Grade Garlic Sauce tasted good. For what it’s worth, it was pretty alright. If it was available on their menu normally, I’d probably order it, though it wouldn’t replace my beloved sweet and sour sauce. My curiosity was satisfied, and now I can sit back and watch people try to flip these sauces on eBay for ludicrous sums of money. Because of course people are already doing that.

ZZZ is a feastful affair full of pop, color, and awe—a free-to-play mobile game with a buffet platter of complexity for you to chew on that puts most other mobile games on the market to shame. And as I slid my way through the game’s first chapter, I increasingly kept thinking, “Wow, I’d happily pay tens of dollars for this, actually.” Unfortunately, at the same time, it also became abundantly clear to me that if I wanted to play the game the way it seemingly is meant to be enjoyed, then I’d have to play developer MiHoYo’s game of slots—a dangerous, money-siphoning game that rarely ends with little more than a brain full of frustration and an empty pocket.

Don’t get me wrong, the money-grubbing aspect doesn’t put me off. Zenless Zone Zero is free-to-play, after all, and it’s not really doing anything different than other gacha games. In fact, it’s downright standard. But it feels as if ZZZ’s gacha mechanics rub against the game’s finely-tuned, character-driven gameplay with a friction that can spark a dumpster fire. Simply put, the game’s too well made for its primary feature (team building and monster smacking) to be driven by random-chance collection, which essentially amounts to a dull time at the casino.

Now, I’m no stranger to gacha games. I wouldn’t say I’m the most ardent player, but I’ve dedicated years of my dumb little life to dumb little mobile games like Fire Emblem Heroes, Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia, and Pokemon Masters EX. None of their gacha mechanics disappoint me the way ZZZ’s does. And that’s largely because most other gacha games I’ve played have shallow, bite-sized gameplay that mostly serves as a playground to place all your collectible characters and admire their cutesy glory. They’re one-or-two button-tapping near-auto-battlers that you can futz around with for a few minutes before getting on with your life. You can happily pull new characters endlessly because, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what you get. They’re all ultimately the same anyway, and you’re just trying to amass a collection.

In contrast, ZZZ’s sharp gameplay, which feels closer to a tag-team fighter, is far from brainless button tapping. Characters all have their own unique fighting style, all hitting with satisfying impact; they all synergize with one another differently; they’re each attributed with elemental aspects that may be better or less suited for particular enemies. The game begs for you to build well-synergized teams while rotating out characters to adapt to fluctuating situations. But that’s hampered when you have little to no control over the characters you unlock and your ability to level them up is limited by various stylings of far-too-many premium currencies with hard-to-conceive names.

And that’s nothing to say of its impact on the narrative. ZZZ’s meaty combat is intercut by flashy, comic book-styled visual novel segments (fun!). However, the fact that it’s a never-ending gacha game means that the full narrative will likely never come to a satisfying conclusion, and most characters will inevitably have little story relevance. As such, you probably won’t really get to know most characters in a meaningful way (not fun!). For a character-driven game, that’s a huge flaw.

The most frustrating part is that the fixes for many of Zenless Zone Zero’s problems would be clear as day if it were an average premium experience. You need only to make all characters unlockable through the story and/or through optional side quests, slap a traditional leveling system in there, and call it a day. When fleshed out, you’d have a fun, addictive game that fully comes together as a cohesive whole, with lovable characters every fan could get to know and want to die for. There doesn’t have to be much more to it than that.

I keep thinking back to Fire Emblem: Awakening, a game that featured nearly 50 unlockable characters throughout its main story and side content. And most of its characters, including the optional ones, are all memorable and quite lovable, helped along by the game’s support mechanic, which saw characters get closer to each other and progress in unique dialogue the more they’re paired together. If Zenless Zone Zero were to adopt such a system, it would surely be something special.

Perhaps I’m just being nostalgic for the days before rampant microtransactions when video games had a plethora of unlockable content. But I don’t think so. Character-driven games need you to be able to access and interact with their characters, especially when the primary gameplay revolves around team building.

 Unfortunately, I don’t think MiHoYo will ever stray from the HoYoverse gacha games they’ve become known for. Not implementing a gacha mechanic into their games would probably feel like money left lying on the table. And for Zenless Zone Zero, it’s too late. The game’s already out, and it is what it is. But who knows — maybe one day we’ll get a proper, premium HoYoverse game that I can feel good about slamming some money down for. One can only hope.

Zenless Zone Zero is available now.

With Zenless Zone Zero, however, it looks like HoYoverse has finally found a way to capture the attention of that smaller subset of players. Unlike its predecessors, ZZZ doesn’t feature any sort of open world. Instead, the game is broken down into smaller, bite-sized zones with activities to do and NPCs to talk to.

The main hub — Sixth Street — is small and cozy, and getting a coffee or a bowl of noodles for your daily buffs is only a few seconds away from the protagonists’ videotape store. It doesn’t take too long before you’ve become completely familiar with everything Sixth Street has to offer. And, in fact, I’d argue that the coziness it evokes also helps to bring about a sense of familiarity and connection to Zenless Zone Zero‘s world — a feeling I was never quite able to experience in Genshin Impact or Star Rail just because of how vast those games are.

Zenless Zone Zero is also structured like a more conventional gacha game. You’ve got a list of missions to choose from, and each one comes with star ratings that will yield more rewards if you’re able to nab them. The much-maligned TV mode also helps to break things up, as its structure makes for very clear starting and stopping points, allowing you to quickly jump in and out of a stage without feeling like there’s so much more to see and do after finishing a mission.

This is especially crucial for players who generally enjoy being more casual with their mobile games, as there isn’t any pressure to continue playing for hours on end when everything has been broken up into neat little chapters for you.

This isn’t to say that ZZZ isn’t a game you can binge, either. If I’m making this game sound simple and far too easy, rest assured that there are way harder challenges waiting for you as you make your way to the endgame portion. Reckless Challenges and Hard Mode missions help elevate the game and bring the combat to the next level. While you could largely get through the early stages just by spamming buttons, Zenless Zone Zero offers much more challenging game modes later on for players who really want to learn the intricacies of the combat system and get good at it.

There’s plenty to grind for in the endgame too, with weekly boss runs to do, as well as the classic HoYoverse resin mechanic (it’s called Battery Charge in this one), time-gating you slightly so you can’t just power level all your characters in one sitting.

With Zenless Zone Zero, it’s clear that HoYoverse wanted to focus on creating an immersive environment with top-notch character designs rather than creating yet another massive open world for players to explore. While it’s obviously been scaled down quite a bit, it’s safe to say that I’ve never felt more connected with a pair of HoYoverse protagonists than I have with Belle and Wise. Their casual sibling bickering and rivalry are endearing, and it’s heartening to see that each character has so much time to shine in the story.

The vibes of ZZZ are immaculate as well, with the soundtrack being one of the main highlights here. Everything about New Eridu, from the coffee-making robot to the retro videotape store, just screams style, resulting in one of the most well-realized worlds HoYoverse has ever created.

Not everything needs to be a huge open world that takes hundreds upon hundreds of hours to explore. Sometimes there’s satisfaction to be had in just being static, chilling with a cup of coffee as you bask in the comfort of familiarity, and that’s what Zenless Zone Zero does.

Zenless Zone Zero is available now.

Related: Doctor Manhattan’s Big Blue Package Is Still the Ultimate Litmus Test for Zack Snyder’s Watchmen

That’s not a knock on Watchmen Chapters 1 & 2‘s cast and crew. You can tell from the trailer that everyone involved worked hard to faithfully recreate the comics (to a fault, if anything). All the dialogue we hear is lifted directly from Moore’s scripts. The character models, framing, and color palette emulate Gibbons’s artwork and layouts. Indeed, chances are Watchmen Chapters 1 & 2 will be a solid set of superhero flicks when they finally arrive.

But here’s the thing: it’s 2024. We’ve spent 38 years (and counting) watching the Watchmen already. It’s time we all moved on.

Even A Story as Deep as Watchmen Has a Bottom

Admittedly, Watchmen is a famously rich text that rewards multiple readthroughs. Whether it’s noting the symmetry between panel layouts or clocking a key clue to the mask killer’s identity buried in backmatter, you’ll want to thumb through Watchmen more than once. But eventually, the well runs dry and the story and its characters have nothing left to say. Comic book scribe Grant Morrison touched on this in a 2015 interview, while discussing his Watchmen pastiche Pax Americana.

“We all know those moments when we’re sitting with friends, and we’re really enthusiastic about something we all love,” Morrison said. “And we keep wanting to talk about it. We keep wanting to get further and deeper, and there comes a moment where you go, all we’re left with is the pieces here [laughs]. It doesn’t seem very palatable anymore. I think there’s an inescapable thing when you do dissect something down, the dissection is always done from a point of enthusiasm and excitement or a need to engage with something a lot more. What you’re doing in a lot of cases is ending up with something dead in your hands.”

Related: Watchmen Is Still the Best Superhero Movie

And that’s the problem with Watchmen Chapters 1 & 2. By aiming to replicate the comics as closely as possible, it’s bound by the same constraints as its source material. There’s no room for additional plot beats or themes for long-time fans to grapple with. It’s just the same old stuff they’ve spent years picking over already. Watchmen Chapters 1 & 2 can’t serve up anything truly new. Which begs the question: why should it even exist?

Heck, it’s not even the first attempt at an ultra-faithful Watchmen adaptation. Zack Snyder’s 2009 live-action version takes that honor (unless you count 2008’s Watchmen: The Motion Comic). True, Snyder tweaked aspects of Moore and Gibbons’ story – and DC devotees still debate the overall impact of these changes today. But giant squid notwithstanding, Watchmen Chapters 1 & 2 is essentially just Snyder’s movie, in animation form. It’s hard to get excited about.

Watchmen Chapter 3 Wouldn’t Be Any Better Than 1 & 2

That’s not to say Warner Bros. should’ve produced an animated Watchmen sequel, instead. Not only have we seen Watchmen follow-ups before, but the results have been mixed, at best. DC’s 2012 Before Watchmen line of prequel comics was wildly uneven. 2017 quasi-sequel (and DC Universe crossover) Doomsday Clock was downright bizarre. 2020 DC Black Label limited series Rorschach was compelling, if unnecessary. And HBO’s Watchmen was good TV, but arguably never felt like a “true” continuation of Moore and Gibbons’s narrative.

Ironically, what ultimately hurt all these projects (even the more successful ones) is one of Watchmen‘s biggest selling points: its standalone nature. Watchmen is designed to have a definite beginning and end. It’s not supposed to have prequels or sequels and wasn’t built to sustain either (especially sequels). So, no matter how clever the creators involved are, whatever they add to the Watchmen canon paradoxically subtracts from it. Like the folks behind Watchmen Chapters 1 & 2, they’re damned if they do something new, and damned if they don’t.

That’s no doubt why the HBO Watchmen series’ showrunner Damon Lindelof opted not to make another season. He presumably understood how lucky he and his team were to get away with stretching Watchmen‘s inflexible mythos as far as they did the first time. Anything further was almost certainly doomed to fail, with a level of inevitability Doctor Manhattan would appreciate. As such, a “Watchmen Chapter 3” animated feature wouldn’t have fared much better.

Related: Watchmen’s Alan Moore Is Donating All His Screen Royalties to Black Lives Matter

Warner Bros. Knows We Won’t Stop Watching the Watchmen

That’s ultimately what it boils down to: the exploits of Rorscharch, Nite-Owl, Silk Spectre, and their fellow Crimebusters (yes, I know “Watchmen” isn’t a team name) aren’t evergreen or unending like those of, say, Superman or Batman. Sure, new readers will always discover Moore and Gibbons’ story, and existing fans will (and absolutely should) revisit it from time to time. But it’s not something we should be focusing all our energy on. Neither should Warner Bros., for that matter. Think of all the other, never-before-adapted DC tales they could’ve turned into an animated movie.

But instead, they went with Watchmen, because they know we’ll watch it – even though it’s high time we stopped.

Watchmen Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 do not yet have release dates.

Between seminal works like Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, FLCL, Gurren Lagaan, and of course, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Gainax was an institution. They pumped out some all time classics and were defined by their absolute love of the weirdness that was anime. And yet, their closure wasn’t a surprise in the slightest to me. In an era where more and more anime titles were being pumped out each season, Gainax became a relic of a bygone era.

While it may be somewhat easy to just point at one thing and say that was the sole reason why Gainax collapsed, the truth is a lot more complicated. I do think most of their problems stem from one singular event, but even then, there wasn’t a singular moment it all went downhill for the company. Then again, as someone who has followed anime for most of my life, it’s not too hard to see how Gainax slowly died. Here’s the story of a company that started off as a passion project between a group of devout animators, only to eventually lose that drive and become a walking corpse.

Make no mistake, when Gainax began, it was full of nothing but drive. The original founders of Gainax, before forming the company, all cut their teeth making shorts that violated all kinds of copyright laws but they made them because they just wanted to create anime. Their most famous short from this time was probably the short they made for DAICON IV, which illegally sampled Electric Light Orchestra and featured an anime girl fighting Darth Vader and more or less forced their way into the market. But that’s just the kind of company they were. They didn’t care about measly copyright laws because they had a passion to just make solid anime.

Because of the quality of their animation for these shorts, they were able to establish Gainax in 1985 as their own company. For the better part of a decade though, they were in flux. Sometimes they would create profitable works, like Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and Gunbuster, but other times they would produce commercial failures like Wings of Honneamise, despite how nearly all of their titles were critically acclaimed.

By the mid 90s, Gainax was on the verge of shutting down. The studio needed money to stay afloat and needed a big hit. Then Neon Genesis Evangelion happened and you better believe that Gainax made bank off of it. Hideaki Anno, the studio’s founder, apparently didn’t want to make the series at Gainax give how strained the company’s coffers were (something that could easily be seen in the last few episodes of the series). But with Eva’s success, Gainax was ready for a whole new era of production to begin from the ludicrous amount of money they now had.

But with that came a double edged sword. Sure, the company was able to put out a lot of great anime and hire new talent like Hiroyuki Imaishi, a lot of shady corporate dealings were taking place. Thanks to the massive influx of money from Evangelion, the head of the company, Takeshi Sawamura, was arrested for tax fraud due to the money earned from Evangelion. Basically, because Gainax was financially unstable in the early 90s and there was no telling how long Evangelion would be profitable, Sawamura saw this as an opportunity to secretly stash some of that money away for a rainy day so to speak in case the company needed it. That’s the charitable reading of the situation, mind you, since the uncharitable one is because Gainax finally had a hit, Sawamure wanted to cash out before the company went belly up when the Eva horse was beaten to death.

Throughout the 2000s, while Gainax was producing critical hits, none of them ever reached the same heights as Evangelion. Titles like Gurren Lagaan and Mahoromatic were successful, but they weren’t Evangelion. In a somewhat lucky stroke of fortune around this time, Anno wanted to remake Evangelion, only this time as a film series. Given how the original series faced production issues, some from budgetary constraints and others from Anno facing several bouts of depression, Anno wanted to create a new version of the series, not dissimilar from what remakes like Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood or Hunter X Hunter did. But, in a move that began to spell the end of Gainax, Anno opted to do the remakes at a new company that he would create, a studio called Khara.

Anno opened up a few years ago about why he did this. First of all, he thought that if he did the series at Gainax then all of the artists would just be yes-men to him and not challenge him whatsoever. More importantly, due to the heads of the studio’s previously shady behavior, as well as the fact that most of the animators working at Gainax were hardly getting a salary, he wanted to ensure that the staff working on the film would receive fair compensation for their work.

And with that, Anno was gone. Gainax would still profit from some of the merchandise produced in relation to Evangelion, but Khara would get the royalties. Combine that with a string of failures like *checks notes* The Mystical Archives of Dantalian and talent like Imaishi leaving to create companies like Studio Trigger, Gainax was in a pinch. They were back to being unprofitable and producing fewer titles than ever before. By the early 2010s, anime streaming became more prevalent around the global and Gainax simply didn’t have the manpower, talent, or money to keep up.

And so came the begging. Gainax begged Khara/Anno for money in order to keep the company afloat, which Khara did, only for Gainax to then sell off the rights to many of the series like FLCL to other companies, as well as selling original concept art, storyboards, and production materials of their earlier series for profit. This resulted in Khara suing Gainax for not paying back the initial loan, which Anno was originally going to ignore until he learned about the the production materials being sold off. Plus, the negative publicity that Gainax was receiving from everything happening at the time was damaging the Eva brand, which only reaffirmed Anno’s actions to make it clear that Khara was now the home of Evangelion, not Gainax. Khara won that lawsuit, plunging Gainax even further into debt.

By this point, Gainax was hardly producing anime. The last series they ever made was in 2015 and it was an anime collaboration with Suburu of all companies. Shock of all shocks, it was a financial failure and Gainax struggled to find funding ever since. They made a second company called Fukushima Gainax and sold it off to another company for quick profit, but without a steady stream of money coming in from anime productions and merchandise, the money dried up. The death blow came in 2019 when a member of the board of directors had “indecent acts” against an aspiring voice actress, permanently blackening the name of the company in any investor’s eyes. And from there, it was only a matter of time until they declared bankruptcy.

Obviously, there’s a lot of things that I didn’t really get into here, but understanding Gainax’s collapse isn’t simple. This was a company that struggled to survive even in its early days, hit it big, then slowly began to make a lot of shortsighted and greedy decisions that ruined the goodwill that it had earned in the anime community. Of course, not making an anime in nearly a decade definitely didn’t help matters, but that was only systemic of the larger instability the company eventually developed. However, if you were to ask me what the really caused the death of Gainax, it all comes back to Evangelion.

It’s hard to not look at everything that happened to Gainax and not trace everything back to Eva. I don’t begrudge or hate Evangelion – it was the hit that Gainax needed to survive – but it’s success led to the numerous poor decisions to try to replicate its success. It’s what made Anno leave Gainax. It’s what led to Gainax selling off production materials and cutting off the financial support they needed from Khara. It’s what led to the tax fraud. All of their problems, in one way or another, all come back to Anno’s magnum opus.

Gainax certainly has a place in anime history, but its relevancy was almost nonexistent even a decade ago. The passion that made Gainax the hub of animation that it was still lives on in studios like Khara and Trigger as they become more and more preoccupied with financial gain. When the quality titles dried up, that was it. Their last notable hit was Panty & Stocking With Garterbelt in 2010, but even then it was a polarizing title that not everyone loved. Gainax has a place in anime history, but that time passed decades ago. It’s not shocking at all to me that Gainax died. It’s been a walking corpse for a while.

Unlike other games, Elden Ring doesn’t spoonfeed you its story while adventuring; instead, you must seek out the information yourself to learn what is happening, or why you are doing the things you’ve been tasked with. This might seem like a chore, but it’s the only thing that makes sense for the player in this world.

While you are primed to become the Elden Lord, at the time of starting Elden Ring, your character is not a key player in The Lands Between, which traces back decades before your arrival. Unlike other great games like God of War where you play as an already established character in the world of gods, in Elden Ring you’re just a Tarnished. Tarnished are warriors summoned back to life to restore the shattered Elden Ring.

Given that you’re not a key player in this story upon arrival it only makes sense that you begin with little context. Through the guidance of Grace, you’ll discover where to go next and along your way, NPCs will provide useful information about where you’re from, what has happened, and what to do next.

From a gameplay perspective, the storytelling is a big driver for multiple playthroughs. You may find something you missed initially, or choose a different path with new alliances to learn about other characters that frequent The Lands Between.

Again let me reiterate: there is plenty of story to uncover for those who seek it, but it isn’t built around you, you’ll need to insert yourself within it. The player is just another Tarnished with the potential to become the Elden Lord. Through exploration, questing with NPCs, and collecting items you’ll soon get a grasp on this complex world where alliances can flip on a dime and motivations tend to constantly clash.

Outside of the game itself, the vagueness of Elden Ring’s story has spawned a dedicated fanbase and community that many other games can’t imagine curating. Here, lore is explored and questioned, and through teamwork, the big picture of Elden Ring is pieced together. This community has spawned careers for many content creators like VaatiVidya, SmoughTown, and other prominent creatives and that’s what makes this style of storytelling so incredible. Elden Ring is not just a one-time experience, it’s a journey that you can choose to explore alone or seek guidance from others.

It’s completely understandable if this style of storytelling is not for you, but Elden Ring wouldn’t be half as compelling as a game if you were given all the answers. If you take the time to learn about the world and its characters through exploration you will be rewarded with one of the best stories gaming has to offer, and the lore has only gotten deeper with the release of Shadow of the Erdtree.

Such is the case with Alexander, the Warrior Jar of Elden Ring. Often referred to affectionately as the pot boy or the jar boy by the Elden Ring community, Alexander is easily one of the most popular characters in the game, right up there with Ranni. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that there’s a dark side to, well, his entire existence. The whole giant jar aesthetic is pretty adorable, sure, but shortly after completing the Radahn Festival, it’s revealed that Alexander has to gather corpses into his jar to heal up and restore himself.

Not much else is known about Alexander and the other jar beings you come across in the game, but it’s well established that these jars are probably filled with corpses. But you know what? Alexander’s a good guy. So who cares if he needs to stuff himself with dead bodies to literally function?

With the release of Shadow of the Erdtree, however, it seems that FromSoftware is intent on making you see every last gory detail of what makes these jars tick.

You can reach the Belarut Gaol dungeon fairly early in Shadow of the Erdtree. It starts off as a rather unassuming dungeon. Just another ol’ gaol in the Shadow Realm, filled with shadow enemies you get to kill while making your way down. But before long, Belarut Gaol turns into a horror movie. It starts when you pass a corridor with a large jar at the side. Next to it is a spirit that you can interact with, and all it does is beg for its life. “Anything but the jar,” it says. “This is a fate worse than death.”

As you continue moving through the dungeon, you start encountering a new type of enemy: Mutated Prisoners. I don’t really know how to describe them, as they’re literal walking lumps of flesh. They’re humanoid, with a large, bulging flesh-colored pus bag on their backs, and they look absolutely grotesque. Not to mention the fact that they have a terrifying grab attack where a tentacle-like thing bursts through their chest (or their mouth hole; it’s a little hard to tell) and drags you towards them, almost as if they want to add your body to its own bulbous mass.

It’s not long before the game assaults you with terrifying sight of these Mutated Prisoners moaning as they crawl out of the living jars they were sleeping in. They drop a new crafting material called Innard Meat when you kill them. It’s the stuff of nightmares. And when I think about these things writhing inside Alexander’s large jar body, I shudder.

The development team at FromSoftware have always been masters of body horror and creating new abominations that leave their fans grimacing in disgust. And while the Mutated Prisoners certainly aren’t the most terrifying thing they’ve ever created—that honor goes to the Winter Lanterns from Bloodborne, pardon my French, but fuck those things—knowing that they exist within the body of Elden Ring‘s most likable character makes the whole affair feel extremely unsettling.

Shadow of the Erdtree is a tremendous DLC in many ways. The amount of new content stuffed is staggering, but it’s also yet another showcase of FromSoft’s design chops. Elden Ring had far and away surpassed anything the team’s ever put out before, and Shadow of the Erdtree elevates the game to new heights. This is thanks in no small part to the morbid fascination they’re able to spark from fans with their creative design decisions, and the Mutated Prisoners are just one small part of that. And if it had to come at the cost of me never being able to look at Alex the same way ever again, then so be it.

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is available now.

For the video game nerds out there, the words of Kazuhira Miller from 2015’s Metal Gear Solid V have never resonated more with me than in last week’s episode of The Boys. We’re now well into the fourth season of Prime Video’s popular TV show, and still, we’re stuck rehashing the same story beats of Frenchie’s past. And as someone who just wants the best for our poor, tortured, romantic French boy, this needs to stop.

In its first three seasons, The Boys has fleshed out Frenchie’s past and backstory quite a bit. The show has spent a considerable amount of time dealing with his Lamplighter trauma and his failure to protect Mallory’s grandkids, and we even see him confront his past when Little Nina comes back into the picture.

These story beats were handled well. The Lamplighter incident was wrapped up nicely, giving Frenchie the opportunity to face up to what he’s done, while also confronting Lamplighter himself. The Little Nina arc was perhaps a little less interesting, but it was still an important point of growth for Frenchie as he needed to reckon with his past and also accept that he was no longer beholden to his trauma.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention Kimiko’s part in all this. Through the first three seasons, the two have been inseparable especially as they’ve helped each other through their own trauma and ghosts of their past. I didn’t even mind that Kimiko ended up friendzoning Frenchie because y’know, boys and girls don’t all have to fall in love with each other. Sometimes they can just be best friends. Both characters have shown immense growth, but with The Boys season 4 and the introduction of Colin, it feels like the showrunners have just taken Frenchie right back to where he started.

Colin is a new character created for the show. He serves as Frenchie’s new love interest in season 4 but there’s a catch: his entire family was murdered by Frenchie while he was still working for Little Nina. And to make matters worse, Frenchie has relapsed and gone back to drug use again. And not only that, he’s also pushing Kimiko away yet again.

And I guess my question is, why? Why do we need to see Frenchie hit rock-bottom yet again?

While the season’s first four episodes have certainly been entertaining and I’m very much glad to have The Boys‘ comical crassness back on my screen again, I can’t help but feel like Frenchie’s storyline, in particular, is just meandering. It’s clear that this is meant to be an emotionally heavy season for the main cast; Starlight’s dealing with her own faith, her past mistakes, and being a Supe; Hughie’s dealing with his dying father and the return of his estranged mother; Kimiko is struggling with getting her speech back and facing her past in Shining Light; MM’s just trying to hold everything together; Butcher is just straight up dying.

And Frenchie? Well, he’s been dealing with his trauma for three seasons at this point, and I guess the showrunners couldn’t just have him be well-adjusted and mentally healthy while everyone deals with their own problems. And so the solution is to just rehash his past, once again.

It’s honestly a pretty sore point in an otherwise fun season. As of episode 4, Colin has since learned of Frenchie’s true identity and has proceeded to beat the crap out of him before leaving. It’s worth noting that actor Elliot Knight is only credited for the first four episodes of season 4, which means that we may very well never see Colin again. And if that’s the case, then what was the point of it all?

After three and a half seasons of pain and trauma, Frenchie’s more than paid his dues. The boy deserves to finally be free of his past, and fingers crossed that he’s finally able to put all that to rest by the end of season 4.

While most fans are too busy debating whether the new live-action Star Wars series is breaking the canon (no, the Legends stuff isn’t canon anymore) or fully embracing it, I’ve been quite frustrated by the choppy editing, plenty of awkward bits of dialogue, and the ‘movie-cut-into-short-episodes’ structure that’s (more often than not) barely worked in the past for neither Marvel Studios nor Lucasfilm.

Mind you, I firmly believe The Acolyte’s close examination of the Jedi Order and the dark forces plotting against them roughly one century before The Phantom Menace is far more engrossing on a conceptual level than the middling Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi series, yet it fails to avoid some of the pitfalls that made those disappointing in my eyes. For example, it very much doesn’t look like it cost $180 million in spite of the impressive sets and rad costume designs.

I want to focus on a more widespread problem though: it’s a TV show that doesn’t feel like a TV show. While The Mandalorian learned to walk the line between an episodic and serialized format from the get-go (though we might argue it’s noticeably weaker when it zeroes in on the main plot for too long), all other live-action Star Wars series have had bigger ambitions, offering us the kind of stories we used to watch on the big screen not that long ago, but over several weeks instead. That sounds like a sweet deal, and it kinda is… as long as the writing and editing feel adequate for TV.

Dave Filoni, who’s now also wearing the Chief Creative Officer hat at Lucasfilm, is no stranger to telling big stories that also feel episodic, and his tradition is alive and well with animated shows like The Bad Batch. In Ahsoka, however, he chose to tell a story that, under different circumstances, could’ve been a killer movie. I really liked what he did there, but it’s hard to deny the whole thing felt like one big adventure forced to fit the eight-episode mold that so many streaming services love nowadays.

More than a few comparisons have been established since The Acolyte’s two-episode premiere between Leslye Headland’s series and the Tony Gilroy-captained Andor, which turned out to be the best live-action Star Wars we’ve gotten so far on Disney Plus. For the most part, they’re surface-level similarities, such as the creatives staying away from the tricky Volume tech in most cases and shooting on location as much as possible, or the tone being much darker than the average Star Wars tale. Only Andor appears to understand it’s a TV show first and foremost though; some of its episodes felt ‘incomplete’ or too transitory, yet there were well-defined arcs that made the 12-episode season format make sense. The Acolyte, meanwhile, feels cut at random.

Even the people who’ve been openly loving the (admittedly refreshing) series will admit the cuts to credits have been pretty bad so far, like the episodes are hitting an unavoidable time limit which doesn’t respect where the unit of storytelling is at. It’s the kind of annoyance that many viewers find hard to describe despite the impact it has on their enjoyment of the entire thing. A half-solution would’ve been to allow the episodes to breathe a bit more, maybe taking the count down to six from eight. 30-ish minutes simply aren’t enough to build up and pay off the suspense every week. The Acolyte is supposed to be a thriller, but its jumpy pacing and incredibly tight runtimes don’t let it fly and truly get into our heads.

We can predict that, unless the story completely crumbles apart in the back half of the season, The Acolyte will flow much better in one or two binge sessions, as its chapters don’t feel distinct at all, with only the third episode having a bit of an identity due to its flashback nature. Many viewers and disgruntled fans (of the type that still enjoys Star Wars) won’t give the season a second watch though, so this first impression isn’t as good as it could be. You’re free not to buy what’s being sold here, but it’s far more frustrating to enjoy something that’s actively fighting to be worse because of some made-up structural rules.

In a way, The Acolyte and other flawed Star Wars shows highlight we (as in everyone involved) need to get back to theatrical releases as soon as possible. As fun as getting new Mando & Grogu adventures every week for two months has been, Star Wars thrives on the big screen, and new live-action installments need to feel like cultural events again. That said, I’m of the opinion the franchise has also found plenty success on Disney Plus and learned some positive lessons about its flexible limits and what it can do to survive for many more decades thanks to the ‘freedom’ the lack of box office hauls allows.

As always, it’s a matter of telling the right story and finding the right balance and voice for it. But it’s safe to say that Disney and its star studios need to better define what a TV series actually is before putting certain projects through the streaming machine (which is undoubtedly showing signs of fatigue). Marvel Studios appears to be now aware of the power of ‘traditional TV culture’ over prestige shows that are ran like movies, but I’m fearing that Lucasfilm might never learn this lesson before inevitably shifting back to theatrical releases. May the Force be with us, I guess.

In the last couple of months, Kaiju No. 8 debuted worldwide on Crunchyroll. I’ve enjoyed the catchy music; I’ve also been impressed by the kinetic battles. However, what impressed me the most about it was how the lead character, Kafka Hibino, was handled within the narrative.

Kaiju No. 8 and the Art of the Everyman

What Kaiju No. 8 and a rare few other anime/manga excel at is the continuation of the narrative of everyday hero Kafka. Though incredibly powerful, he’s not excelling in his career because of his powers but because of his knowledge, experience, and gumption. Kafka (at least up until the latest episode) has not been anything more than a wonderful team player.

Kafka hasn’t hijacked the narrative in the sense that the whole series revolves around his power. He gets by with his smarts, experience, and understanding. When the moment comes though, as we saw in the final moments of the latest episode, he will step in unflinchingly. It’s a more realistic depiction of a protagonist, even if that protagonist becomes a monster man to save the day.

Unlike his contemporaries and forebears, Kafka is a simple human who may have been chosen by sheer accident.

Related: Kaiju No. 8 Defies Expectations in the Best Way Possible

The Legends and the Loser

Anime, especially Shonen anime, is incredibly popular. Everyone falls in love with anime because of the underdogs who become legends — legends like Naruto, Luffy, and new up-and-comers Tanjiro and Deku. What has become a lovingly expected trope, however, is how each of these individuals eventually becomes a “Chosen One.” Even in shows like Black Clover and Mashle: Magic and Muscles, supposed nobodies like Asta and Mash eventually become “The Chosen One.”

What drew me to many of these characters was their underdog stories. Asta had no magic, Naruto had no skill as a shinobi, Deku was quirkless. The short of it: they were losers, and I, as another loser, formed a kinship with them. Now, as they grew throughout the course of their respective journeys, they became more powerful, usually ending up as the most powerful character in their world (the jury is still out on Asta, but that’s an incomplete story).

That’s great and all until you realize the premise their stories were built on got lost along the way. One example that always pops into my head is when Naruto defeated Neji. It was an iconic moment because, at the time, it was a boy fighting against an ideal, fate. Neji believed that fate decided everything and that no one could escape it. However, Naruto wanted to show him that a failure like himself could rise up and defy the odds. It was beautiful.

Flash forward to the conclusion of Naruto: Shippuden: The audience has learned Naruto is not just the son of the legendary Fourth Hokage, he’s part of a legendary clan and is the reincarnation of the the shinobi world’s co-creator. On top of all this, he is destined to save the world. In retrospect, it detracts from the appeal of who Naruto was. This is what makes Kaiju No. 8 so compelling. We are watching a hero born in the moment. His coming wasn’t foretold. He’s not a reincarnated legend. He’s just a guy trying to make something of himself. It’s all too relatable.

Related: Who Animated Kaiju No. 8?

I’m Too Old To Be Pulling Stunts Like That

As a man in his 30s, much like Kafka, who has given up on all his dreams, I find Kaiju No. 8 surprisingly aspirational. Watching Kafka use his experience, without relying on the gimmick of his kaiju abilities, to help those around him is impressive.

I’m not up on my sports terms, but I believe Kafka to be an exceptional coach. He gives out the perfect plays to help his team. In most anime/manga, he’d be the experienced teacher helping the plucky hero become even greater. He’d be Jiraiya or Rayleigh helping the protagonist to become the mythical savior.

By allowing Kafka to be an everyman who just so happens to be one of the most dangerous creatures on the planet, mangaka Nayao Matsumoto has created a very different kind of hero — one that all the losers can look up to.

The Boys Season 3 hinted at it, and Season 4’s first three episodes have now confirmed it: we’re not going to see the comics’ big twist adapted in live-action.

Related: How Is The Boys’ Joe Kessler Different in the Comics?

If you’re unfamiliar with Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s The Boys comic book series, said big twist sees Black Noir out himself as a deranged clone of Homelander. He’s the real baddie, and secretly responsible for many of Homelander’s most depraved crimes. That’s not the case in the Prime Video show, though. Here, Black Noir is an African American Supe named Earving unrelated to Homelander. What’s more, after Homelander kills Black Noir in Season 3, another Supe replaces him – and this guy is also obviously not a copy of Homelander.

As such, there’s really no way for The Boys show to run back the comics’ climactic gut punch. When the show’s fifth and final season wraps up, Black Noir won’t swoop in and claim Homelander’s main villain mantle. That’s a drastic deviation from the canon laid out by Ennis and Robertson – but is that really such a bad thing? Or would The Boys comic book’s twist have ruined the show?

The Boys’ Big Twist Works Great in the Comics

Suggesting The Boys‘ Homelander/Black Noir rug pull could’ve hurt the Prime Video adaptation isn’t the same as knocking this narrative beat altogether. For the record, it works brilliantly in the comics.

Ennis and Robertson’s story leans even harder into the shock-oriented storytelling sensibility that’s made the show so infamous, and this is the biggest shock of all. For most of The Boys‘ 72-issue run, we’ve viewed Homelander as the epitome of evil, only to learn he’s not the real villain at all. Even the awful stuff he did do was mostly brought on by Black Noir messing with his head.

Handled the wrong way, this revelation could’ve been underwhelming; switching out villains late in the game so often is. Yet Homelander is (by design) a thinly sketched character in The Boys comics. We get glimpses into his psyche (including his slowly deteriorating mental state) but he’s not a character we’ve invested in like, say, Billy Butcher or Hughie Campbell. It’s okay for Ennis and Robertson to reframe him as an overpowered patsy, because, frankly, we just don’t care.

Related: The Boys Season 4: Which A-List Actor Voices Ambrosius the Octopus?

Undermining Homelander’s Big Bad Status Would Break the TV Show

The same doesn’t apply to The Boys TV show and its characterization of Homelander. Unlike the comics, we spend a decent amount of time with the Seven’s leader. Homelander’s a fully developed character, and – psychopath or not – he quickly earns our full emotional investment. No matter how demented his arc gets, it’s fascinating and we want to see it through. Yet as showrunner Eric Kripke noted in a recent Variety interview, the Black Noir twist would invalidate that arc and hurt the show.

“In the comics [Black Noir’s] a clone of Homelander this entire time and is actually the one doing all these horrific things,” Kripke explained. “And again, it’s a hell of a twist. But it’s like, well wait, the villain I’ve been following isn’t really the villain. And mileage varies, and I’m sure fans are mad I’m not going that way, but that felt not as satisfying to me. I’m like, if I’m going to follow this villain, I want this guy to be the villain. So I was never really into the clone idea.”

Then there’s the technology of it all to consider. While The Boys comics ape many of the more far-out trappings of the superhero genre, the Prime Video series takes a more restrained approach. Superpowers? You betcha. Human cloning? Not so much. So, a Homelander clone randomly entering the fray simply wouldn’t jibe with The Boys adaptation’s established universe. It’s one fantastical element too many, as Kripke pointed out in the Variety interview.

“[C]loning feels like too – I’m going to sound silly – but cloning feels too magical for the show,” he said. “We try to say that superheroes are the only slippery banana, and that everything else we try to make as grounded as possible.”

Related: The Boys: Is Season 4’s Shocking Sauna Scene in the Comics?

The Boys Doesn’t Need the Comics’ Twist to Capture its Spirit

So, The Boys comics’ twist ending wouldn’t work in the show – but does that even matter? I’m not so sure it does. The ultimate goal of any adaptation is to capture the source material’s spirit, not slavishly hit every plot beat and arc. Black Noir unmasking himself as Homelander’s clone in The Boys show would be an example of the latter, not the former. It’d be superficially faithful to Ennis and Robertson’s original tale, without reinforcing its deeper message.

On the page and screen, The Boys is an exploration of power (of all kinds) and its corrosiveness. Admittedly, there’s some of this in Black Noir’s big moment in the comics, yet it’s secondary to the shock value involved. There are other, better ways to communicate the “absolute power” theme in live-action (like Homelander’s focus on the political arena in Season 4) than putting a superhero spin on the many “evil doppelganger” yarns pop culture has served up over the years.

Because, while that twist would’ve been shocking (and no doubt fun) it wouldn’t have served The Boys overall – in fact, it would’ve ruined it.

The Boys Season 4 is currently streaming on Prime Video, with new episodes dropping Thursdays.

It’s rough out there for introverts and lone players. And it’s a damn shame, especially since the raids have always been the most impressive part of Destiny. I’ll never forget my first foray into the Vault of Glass, where the only thing you had to go on with was “Raise the spire.” Or the times I spent staying up till 4 a.m. on the verge of giving up on taking down SIVA in Wrath of the Machine, only for everything to finally come together in the last, cathartic attempt.

Destiny raids are very special, which is why I wholeheartedly recommend at least giving the new Dual Destiny quest in The Final Shape expansion a go, especially if you’ve never had the chance to check out a raid.

Dual Destiny is a new quest in Destiny 2 that became available after the world’s first completion of the new Salvation’s Edge raid, and it’s a repeatable quest that allows you to farm for your Exotic class item. Starting the quest itself is already a bit of a puzzle, but once you get in, you’re in for a real treat.

To start, this quest requires you to take it on with one other player. No more, no less. As someone who generally enjoys playing solo, this is an annoying requirement, but it’s not terrible.

The mechanics of the entire Dual Destiny dungeon are extremely raid-like, with cryptic objectives and hints that you and your partner need to figure out on your own. We’re talking seeing random floating symbols in the air and having to get the other person to go into another room to shoot the symbols in order to progress. We’re talking strange clock-like structures with orbs lit up in a pattern with seemingly no rhyme or reason to them and having to figure out which ones to activate.

Dual Destiny demands teamwork from you and your partner, and coordination is key to getting through the puzzles and making it through to the end. This isn’t a quest that you can just brute force through by over-leveling, and that’s the special ingredient that makes Destiny’s raids so rewarding.

I won’t spoil the mission for those who have yet to tackle it, but Bungie also caps off this mission with a very poignant final decision that you and your partner have to make together. It’s unlike anything else we’ve ever seen in Destiny, and while it ultimately doesn’t have any bearing on the overall gameplay experience, it’s still a fun moment that makes this quest all the more special.

If you’ve always shied away from raids because you’ve never been able to get a group together, Dual Destiny succeeds at replicating a similar sense of accomplishment you’d get from doing that activity. It’s well worth checking out, and who knows? Maybe it’ll even inspire you to start reaching out to fellow introverted players online to get a little raid group together.

Destiny 2 is available now.