Xator Nova

  Microtransactions, archetypal anime girls and an overload of monetary systems are enough alarm signs that the game should be nothing more than a product to shamelessly steal the money from the average otaku. Though since a game is not what it seems to be, but rather what it actually happens to be, a small peek at the mobile game "Gothic Wa Mahou Otome" immediately reveals its quality as an action game, where the tactile control in combination with shooting game mechanics gives birth to one of the greatest exemplars of the aesthetic capability of movement in the genre. The key of its success is in the scoring system. To obtain points, naturally a player has to hit the enemies in a stage. However, numerous variables are added that let the player increase their score. Firstly, the avatar is surrounded by a visible ring for the player, which extends its radius if they keep shooting down enemies. If the target is within this circle, the power of the shot is increased, and with t...

  The game presents itself as a story of a broken heart, with a path to self-realization and self-love, but immediately turns itself into psychedelics as soon as it gives the player the control. It decides to become a rhythm game, except there's no real sense of tempo because the visual cues are treated more as quick-time events, as environmental obstacles in the story, than the player having to immerse themself in the music, like Tetsuya Mizuguchi's "Rez", or having the challenge feel in flow with the story at hand, like Keiichi Yano's works such as "Gitaroo Man" and "Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!". It is a fast-paced chase sequence, except that the presence of checkpoints at every corner and an unlimited amount of attempts reduces the weight and intensity of the tracks, as if the game couldn't stand the player losing, unlike high velocity games such as Toshihiro Nagoshi's "F-Zero GX". The psychedelic stylization with rapid camera ...

  An autobiographical story of a transgender woman and her traumatic experiences with sex work.  Personal and intense in its prose, abstract in its presentation.  Defamiliarization and impersonation as representation of the coping mechanism. The game portrays the victim as not herself but other abstract being, a shapeless ghost, as a representation of the mind distancing itself from trauma. A  melancholic, surreal sea of consciousness brings life to fuzzy, drowned memories because it is so difficult to face trauma that repressing it is the instinctive reaction to get as distant as possible from those events. And a fitting pixel-art aesthetic - not just a stylistic choice born from lack of resources but the representation of the raw feelings of an innocent mind. One of the best games of the year so far.

In this post I compile many of my favorite LGBT media, stuff that has been impactful to me, so that others perhaps get to know works that may interest them. I've also probably forgotten a few works, I will update whenever I remember or get to know something new. This is also open to suggestions - I'm also trying to broaden my own horizons since it is new territory for me as well. Books: - Den lille havfrue ("The Little Mermaid", Hans Christian Andersen, 1837) - Carmilla (Sheridan Le Fanu, 1871) - The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde, 1890) - Der Tod in Venedig ("Death in Venice", Thomas Mann, 1911) - No se lo digas a nadie ("Don't Tell Anyone", Jaime Bayly, 1994) - Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Gregory Maguire, 1995) Films: - Ang Tatay Kong Nanay ("My Father, My Mother", Lino Brocka, 1978) - In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden ("In a Year of 13 Moons", Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978) - Senjō no Merī ...

Here I did a podcast on the anime Shoujo Kakumei Utena (Revolutionary Girl Utena, Kunihiko Ikuhara, 1997) alongside the American critic and writer Tevis Thompson, in commemoration of the show's 25th anniversary. There was another question asked after the podcast was made, this time by @BeetBeatBit from Twitter, which I felt worth responding as an addendum, since it also includes further thoughts on the director. Spoiler alert on the endings of Penguindrum , Yurikuma and Utena : Q: "What do you think of Mawaru   Penguindrum (Kunihiko Ikuhara, 2011)?" I like Penguindrum , but I feel that I felt it backwards as you did because so many episodes dedicated to the stalker girl in the first half are in fact my least favorite aspect of the show, or at least made me wonder why we spend so much time with this activity that I don't feel adds that much - even when it is revealed why she behaves the way she does, I remain unconvinced. We already understood that she is a messed up...

There is something strangely beautiful about the end of the world in art and the reaction that it draws from its characters, particularly the feelings that it gets from the people facing the inevitable demise, because it is then that you see them at their rawest. Robotron 2084 fits that category as an abstract portrayal of the collapse of civilization by the hands of machines, and to that purpose it sets the player as a survivor in the middle of the catastrophe, surrounded by robots chasing down the remnant humans. You can opt to save them, but the main challenge is to get past the waves of machines. The aim of the developers is that the player feels panic in an apocalyptic scenario, and to that purpose there are two sticks, one for movement and the other one to shoot in a direction, as the survivor's defense mechanism. The repercussion this has on the player is that there's a need to coordinate betwen two forms of reaction: To dodge and to shoot, and these two draw your atten...

In Adventure of Link , the protagonist (Link) is already an adult, and this has certain implications in the context of the genre, filled with heroic adventures of teenagers that leave their home to fight evil and grow up during the journey. With the protagonist already having grown up and the victory against the enemy having already been reached before the events of the game, what comes after?  Adventure of Link focuses itself in adulthood instead, and its subversion comes from being a "post-RPG", a story that would come after what would happen in other RPGs, similarly to (and in certain ways a successor of) Quest of the Avatar . What this game does to accentuate this effect is the perspective shift, where the field of vision moves away from the avatar in a top-down view, blurring itself with less details, whereas the emergent events move closer from a lateral angle. This navegation system allows encounters with visible enemies on the map, trespassing caverns or discovering ...