MECHA

"What if Revolutionary Girl Utena had mechs?" "What if Char was your mom?" "What if piloting a Gundam was really bad and it killed you?"

At the time of writing (Dec. 31, 2022), the season finale has yet to air, and the second half won't air until April. It may be foolish to recommend the show before seeing how it ends, but I'm feeling optimistic. It's pretty good! I don't know where it will go with the questions it raises, but the journey so far has been interesting. My biggest complaints are that Miorine's arc has been a weak misinterpretation of the message of Utena and that the Aerial is kind of ugly. There's still a whole season left to figure out the whole Miorine thing.

So... I've been playing the Gundam-branded Overwatch clone. I used to play Overwatch a lot (even joining my college's competitive team for a semester), but I stopped playing to get away from the noxious parts of the playerbase. Overwatch used to be the one exception to my lack of interest in competitive shooters, so I was surprised by how much I've enjoyed this one. The maps could do more to highlight that you're piloting giant robots, but it's still pretty fun to jump around in a Rick Dom.

Last I checked, the North American server is pretty dead. I waited something like an hour for a ranked match before finally giving up and switching to the Japanese server. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to understand any strategizing happening in the chat, but almost every game I've played has been devoid of a single message. Marking locations on the map and hitting the "Nice!" button is enough for some level of team coherence.

I've had a nice enough time with it, but I hate battlepasses so I'll probably drop it soon.