The Professional Gamer - July 27, 2018

Alright! I'm back from taking a week off for my brother's wedding, but I just spent a week away from home as well. I did fit in a little bit of fun time during my trip too, but I was definitely away from my home base. So let's talk about things a bit.

In video games, I spent a few evenings playing Final Fantasy XIV. I'm still just messing around in the free trial, rather than putting down any real money for the game. I'm pretty tempted by it, but haven't committed to it yet. Later, I decided to spend an evening getting back into Breath of the Wild, which I never had a great chance to play when it first came out (Crystal kinda monopolized the Switch for a few month's there). And I have had a hard time training myself to use the controls again! Man, not having the introductory section to teach me when I'm doing makes it hard. I notice it most with combat, where decisions need to be made quickly. But I'm also not doing things like riding horses and moving stuff around with magnets very well. I'm sure I'll get back into practice fairly quickly, but I've already had one inglorious death and several other close calls.

While I was on my trip, I read the first omnibus collection of Dragonball by Akira Toriyama. The original publication date for the manga was 1984. So...it's a bit of an older property. But I'd never read it, and even though I grew up in the era of Dragonball as a Saturday morning cartoon, I never watched the whole series in actual episode order. I blame part of that on Fox for not airing episodes consecutively, but also have some blame for myself since I wouldn't consistently wake up on time to watch it. This, then, is my first time to actually experience the whole story.

How is it?  Really good. Toriyama's backgrounds are whimsical and full of cool details, and his expressions are delightful. The translation and adaptation team did a great job adapting the humor into English. Some of the jokes are a bit crude and chauvenistic, but pretty tame by some standards. 

And that's all that I have for now. I bought a bunch of other manga to read, so you should see some more discussion of them here soon. Have a great week and game on!