The Professional Gamer - January 18, 2019

Hello, readers! And welcome to another week with the Professional Gamer. A technical error with NPR podcasts this week led me to finally switch from download podcast to my computer via iTunes and transferring to an iPod classic, to listening to things directly on my phone. Surprisingly, this setback led to me catching up on my podcast to such a degree that I typically only have my daily podcasts plus one or two additional episodes to listen to every day. And, this has honestly been pretty nice. I don’t feel panicked about trying to listen to podcast every waking moment, and I can actually switch between podcasts and music at work depending on why type of task that I’m working on. Enough about that, let’s discuss some geeky stuff.

First up, gaming, which honestly hasn’t been much at all. In fact, all that I’ve done myself has been a little more exploration in Elite: Dangerous. Other than that, I’ve spent a fare bit of time halfway distracted by other things while Crystal has played Dragon Quest XI. I have to say that it went from a relatively lighthearted adventure to much more epic stakes rather quickly. I don’t really want to spoil anything, but once she hit about 40 hours into the game, things got really dark. She’s now going about fixing said dark things, but it feels like she probably has a lot of game left to play. I’m really surprised by just how much there seems to be in this game.

In the world of anime, all that I got to this week were new episodes of That Time I got Reincarnated As a Slime and Mob Psycho 100, plus the first dub episode of Konosuba, and a few more episodes of Avatar (yes, that’s an anime, fight me). Let’s take these one at a time.

In Slime, our main character, Rimuru, manage to defeat the Demon Lord Orc Disaster by eating him. Which is probably what Rimuru ought to be doing in the first place when dealt these types of high level threats. He decides to bring the remnants of the orc army under his wing as well, and by the end of the episode has formed a small nation of monsters. So, this is starting to feel less like an RPG-based show and more like an strategy or nation building type of show. Like, more Warcraft III, less World of Warcraft, but it’s still fun.

Mob spent this last week chasing after various urban legends: most of them fake, but one deadly real. And we learn what Mob might actually be afraid of. I gotta say, this season has jumped a little more quickly towards more serious confrontations with baddies, but I think it still presents a similar level of comedy. The end joke of this episode was absolutely great.

Lastly, Konosuba. The dub is pretty good so far. Casting and acting seem to be pretty good. And it’s nice to watch the series again without having to read all of the dialog. So far it seems pretty good, but I’ll wait to give it a full recommendation until we have all of the main cast assembled.

The Avatar is still in Ba Sing Se, so I will hold off talking about that for a few more weeks. But, given the fact that I’ve said that, you can already expect that the plot feels a bit like it is dragging.

That’s all for now though. I’ve got a race tomorrow, and want to make sure that I get some good sleep. Have a great week and game on!