Binge Report 1: West of Loathing, Castlevania season 3

It may sound like a dream for every person with a ripe backlog to get a shelter in place order or a quarantine. It was certainly mine.

No, really. I certainly don’t want to diminish the mortal danger many people are in right now, but I was coincidentally extremely well-prepared to weather an extended unpaid staycation. So now I have to get over some conflicted feelings on not actually getting one (natch) thanks to a heroic effort by my employer to find a way to keep rolling with 99% of the staff and customers getting everything done from home.

But that’s enough bellyaching from me over something that probably saved everybody else’s butts. And besides, I know I won’t make any progress on anything with a bad attitude. I’m trying nonetheless to make some progress on the binge list, even if I’m only knocking off the less time-consuming items.

Plus, I was planning on having 10ish movie reviews for spring and summer, so I need to find other things to write about. Last week’s demo impressions is probably the real first edition of Coronavirus Binge Roundup.

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West of Loathing

I was finally going to give the Animal Crossing series a go with its new entry, but Gamefly sent me this instead.

And, despite not having put a bow on the final game in my #4iF… in April, I played this to (mostly) completion. There’s some mutually exclusive content and a few puzzles and items I never got around to.

West of Loathing is a somewhat nonlinear yet plot-heavy spinoff of one-time Internet sensation Kingdom of Loathing. West parodies its setting more so than its RPG genre (though there’s some fun to be had there as well) with a lot of laughs (and puzzles) packed in if you don’t mind sitting down to some reading.

I had a blast with this game right from the word go. I had never played Kingdom of Loathing back in the day, and I now realise that was a mistake. From the ridiculous high school notebook doodle visuals of the world to the high-effort written narration to the genuinely interesting exploration, this game really ticked the boxes for me. And it left me wanting more.

I think I’m going to add another playthrough of it to the streaming list. There are a few paths I can go down to make it a very different experience, and I think you’ll have a lot of fun coming along for the ride.

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Castlevania season 3

Here we are, three years into this show and I’m still surprised it exists. I’m thankful Netflix will try anything, even if its original content budget is probably going to bankrupt the company.

The season’s length has been extended one again, lasting 10 episodes (though to be fair, the first season was only 4 episodes because it was a split-up movie). And it needed the extra space considering it’s trying to follow four separate plots, each with multiple points of view. Yet with all this, they still didn’t find the time for an already belated appearance of Grant Danasty.

Trevor and Sypha’s plot takes up the most screen time and is much more self-contained that the others. The two take an unexpected break from monster hunting to investigate a cult in a small village, along with some other odd fellows there.

I suppose you could call Alucard’s small plot self-contained as well, as it’s merely there to chronicle his loneliness as the sole occupant of his family castle with a brief interruption by travelers seemingly just to give him something to do and push his woobieness a little further.

The other plots are all about the other team dealing with the outcome of season 2. We get a lot of backstory and world building for the vampire Carmilla and the Devil Forgemasters Issac and Hector. Unlike the heroes, their plots merely set themselves up for Season 4, though they do climax on significant milestones in the mean time.

The series is having a hard time getting Hector’s character to where he should be for Curse of Darkness. I’m not sure if that’s a priority for the Castlevania fans in the audience, given it was one of the 3-D games. That being said, Season 3 introduced Saint Germain and got him into position for Curse, so who can tell?

I’m not sure, though, how the store as it is developing now is going to bring the diverging threads of the protagonists and the antagonists back together. At present, they’re not just in different parts of the world, they not even aware of each other.

Perhaps that’ll be the arm twist to get Season 5 approved. The creative team could always say that without one more season, they would need to do a Game of Thrones job on the ending. And we wouldn’t want that, would we?