The End of Bobo Pony

You’re flying now

You see things much more clear than from the ground

It’s all okay, it would be

Were you not now halfway down

Bojack is over. After the crazy 6-season ride, we got our final 8 episodes on January 31st 2020. As you can tell by the date of this post, I didn’t have any initial thoughts - or rather, I did, but I wasn’t jumping to share them with the world. It was a long, drawn out story and it actually feels good to finally put it to rest. Maybe the decision to split this season into two halves helped? The first part built the tension and left us hanging at one of the most suspenseful moments for the series, and then asked us to wait 3 months before finally diffusing it. And that last part has thrown everything it could at us - relapse, redemption, reflection, restarts, literally everything that could go wrong for Bojack did. Meanwhile, his friends slowly started to push their own respective boulders up the hill, proving that it can be done, but leaving their horsefriend behind as a result.

Ending on the 6th season seemed like a good call. The show was in a really good place at this point, hasn’t overstayed its welcome quite yet, but it felt like it already said everything it needed to, and all that remained was to write the closing chapter. But here’s the thing - one of the series’ stronger themes was that real life isn’t like TV, it doesn’t follow storytelling rules, you can’t expect to find meaning or closure in everything. While the show still tried to weave an interesting narrative as a work of fiction, it consistently broke through dramatic structures and subverted the expected tropes to support that message. So you just had to wonder - what would be a proper finish to the Bojack Horseman story? Is there any way it could be satisfying in the classic storytelling sense while staying true to the aforementioned motif?

[Spoiler Warning: I’m gonna talk about a lot of the events from the second half of the season rather specifically, including the last two episodes.]

Top 20 Albums of 2019

According to albumoftheyear.org catalogue, there were over 17.000 EPs and LPs released last year. Out of these, I’ve listened to a laughably small sample size of 300 records. And I’m pretty sure this is the highest number I’ll ever get to for any single year - it was way, way, way too many albums. I managed a good pace until around June, monitoring new releases and checking them out as they came, but then I kinda burned out and wanted to spend more of my listening time on favorites and exploring various artists and genres, and before I noticed it was December and I was binging entries from end-of-year lists to catch up on the last 6 months (as well as stuff that flew under my radar before). And for a long time it seemed like for every album I’d file away, I’d discover two new ones I was interested in.

Spring 2020 anime impressions

As a fair-weather seasonal anime viewer who usually only checks out a few entries here and there, I was suprised to see just how many interesting offerings this Spring had for me. And even after my most anticipated series such as Oregairu or Digimon Adventure: started getting indefinitely delayed thanks to our friend COVID-19, there were still shows abound for me to pick and choose from. I’ve dropped quite a few of them very early, and I still ended with 10 offerings that are way above average of what I’m used to in at least some aspect. I won’t write about the ones I dropped because I don’t think there’s any point in me talking down something that others might be enjoying - instead I want to focus on spreading the good word about just how many joyful shows this crunched industry was able to entertain me with. And to pique your interest a tiny bit, I’m gonna order them ascendingly in just how much I like them, meaning that my top recommendation is awaiting you at the end. And now let’s start with…

[GO10s] #1: Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3

Traditionally, whenever I considered making a top games list, I would ask myself “how do I rank these multiplayer games which I’ve put hundreds or thousands of hours into, where my experience depended on how good I was, who I was playing with, and other community circumstances, rather than just the game itself?” I couldn’t come up with a good answer - I felt like I viewed those competitive titles just completely differently from anything single-player-focused at this point. Not as works of art (or entertainment), but as playing fields, the same way I never thought whether Basketball or Football is a better designed game, I just played whichever one I had the best opportunity to, and I tried my best at it. That’s kind of the thing - when you intentionally try to break the game to get the biggest advantage over your opponent, it’s hard to say whether the manner in which you’re able to do it is “good” or “bad”, I’m thinking in terms of “does it help me win”, not “do I enjoy this”.

The last part is especially crucial when it comes to fighting games in particular, because by design, there are periods of the game you will not enjoy. As the enemy scores a knockdown or otherwise locks you down in their flurry of offense, your gameplay is often limited to testing your reaction time and prediction ability, and if you succeed, then the reward will often be just the return to neutral state, not scoring any “victory points” or gaining any advantage, just denying the opponent theirs. I think Pat Miller put it right when he said that your goal as a fighting game player is to make the game as unpleasant to your opponent as possible, and it’s a tug-of-war where players try to snatch the fun away from one another. As such, your mileage will absolutely vary based on the pool of competitors available to you, your own talent, experience, and willingness to work at getting better.

But in recent years I’ve had plenty of opportunity to look for words to describe what I think makes one fighting game “better” than another, as titles such as Street Fighter V and DragonBall FighterZ have thoroughly disappointed me. It really didn’t feel like matter of personal preference at this point, but of design choices that, in my opinion, significantly reduced the gameplay complexity in crucial areas, allowing for less diversity of playstyles and focusing on just the superficial flair, when the genre’s history is full of titles that were able to achieve both. And one example of such is what I now realize has been my favorite game for many years now, 2011’s Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3.

[GO10s] #2: Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

Ah, here it is, I finally did it - the cardinal sin of arbitrarily deciding to put only one entry out of the series on the list, when if I were to be true to my feelings, then I would probably bump the bottom 2 and just put the three Danganronpa games on #2-#4 spots. But I can’t help it, I just don’t think that would look well - so Danganronpa 2 and V3 get the shaft, and my favorite of the series, the original “Trigger Happy Havoc”, gets the glory of being my second favorite game of the decade.

Danganronpa seems to be the third visual novel-ish series that broke outside the constraints of the genre’s niche audience, at least here in the west. Just like Ace Attorney and Zero Escape, it features other gameplay elements than just making choose-your-adventure selections, which I bet is the actual biggest reason for why people would even check it out. But weirdly enough, it shares a lot more with the previous two series - investigations and court trials from Phoenix Wright’s adventures, and the premise of life-and-death games in enclosed areas, unsure of what the world outside of their confines is like, very much in spirit of 999. However, it’s completely different tonally from the other two, and in fact, it’s quite unlike anything else I know.

[GO10s] #3: The Last Guardian

With most of the games on this list, I initially got into them either excited, or at least with no preconceptions. That would be very hard for The Last Guardian, a game surrounded by controversy, polarizing reviews and near-universal agreement that one of the major functions of the game, commanding your animal companion, is bad, and if anything, the game succeeds despite it, not thanks to. However, a friend’s praises towards it made me decide to check it out for myself, and with each passing minute it became more and more clear that I’m playing an absolute masterpiece.

So this will be a short entry because I already wrote about this game once and I definitely stand up by everything I’ve said back then.

[GO10s] #4: The Last Of Us

Lost Legacy might be the closest entry in the series to recapture Uncharted 2’s lighting in the bottle, but there’s no doubt in my mind that The Last of Us is the best Naughty Dog game of the decade. It’s interesting to see a lineage in their entire studio history - starting with pure platforming games, introducing more action-adventure elements into the Jak series, then focusing on that in Uncharted, and finally cutting back on the large, bombastic action, and giving us a less athletic protagonist who can’t climb and jump quite like Drake, in order to tell a more solemn and human story. And boy did “less is more” work here.