Man, I can’t wait to finally go back outside
and do things, like breathe fresh air, go
to the shops without being paralyzed by, more
fear than usual, and of course -
*concerning sounds of society's institutions
violently silencing mild criticism*
On second thought, I heard they put Trigun
back on Netflix -
How are yous, folks?
My name’s Traven, and today, I wanna talk
about my Top Things of Summer 2020!
For anyone new to the channel or just unfamiliar
with the concept, this is a seasonal series
inspired by SuperEyepatchWolf’s “My Favourite
Things”, Clemps’ “Things I Loved”,
and all the other semi-regular merch and media
round up videos that can be found across this
hellscape of a site, in which I review, ramble
about and recommend some of my favourite stuff
from the last few months, with the occasional
out of season straggler.
And if I don’t mention something, it probably
means one of a few things:
I didn’t get around to it by the time I
started making this video - because jesus
christ there’s so much shit -
I just didn’t like it
I generally enjoyed it, but have too many
caveats and criticisms to recommend it
I don’t have a lot to say about it, beyond
“I liked it” or “it was fun”
Or, I’m hoping to eventually cover it in
a proper video and want to save as many of
my thoughts on it for that as I can, but even
then I still sometimes try to give it a quick
mention . . . on an unrelated note WATCH DOROHEDORO
IT’S SO GOOD
So, with all that setup out of the way, I
think it’d be good to start this off with . . .
Alright, so I’m not sure how to categorize
these so I’m just gonna lightning round it.
Cool?
Cool.
Considering the view counts, I’m sure most
people are at the very least aware of this
series, but for those who’ve been stuck
staring at the ceiling with an ever growing
sense of dread over the last few months, Razbuten’s
“Gaming for a Non-Gamer” series follows
his explorations and experiments in getting
the lady he lives with, someone with little
experience playing games, to, well, play games,
and in the process makes a lot of fascinating
insights about how we approach the medium,
both as players and designers, whether it
be in the counter-intuitive nature of what’s
now considered standard game design, how people
develop a sense gaming literacy, so to speak, in the first
place, the role cooperation and guidance play
in helping someone get into gaming, and how
even the most novice of players quickly learn
the kinds of secrets it can take even the
most dedicated scholars years, if not decades,
to discover . . .
"My team's so bad."
My buddy Infinite Thoughts recently dropped
a thematic breakdown of the manga series
Komi-san Can’t Communicate and how it deals with
the struggle of making and maintaining friendships
that I think is well worth a watch, along
with his channel generally, since he makes
a lot of cool video essays dense with edits
and insights about all kinds of things, from
product design to narrative structure, and
if you’re a fan of that kind of thing, I
can’t recommend his channel enough.
Speaking of editing - a while ago, camhcom
posted a mashup music video combining the
absurdity of Tenacious D with fucking Evangelion,
and its tonal whiplash almost works too well,
both visually and musically, and the amazing
thing is that the channel just dropped a second
one that takes it all to another level
"Be you angels?"
"And we said 'Nay . . . we are but men -
R O C K!'"
*world ending melodies*"
In a similar vein, the twitter user @enjoy_rottmnt
threw up not one but two videos a while ago
setting the insane spectacle of animation
that is Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
against the opening music for Gurren Lagann
and The Irregular at Magic High School respectively,
not only giving the show the kind of anime
bullshit treatment this production deserves,
but also acting as two of the strongest arguments
to watch the series that you can find, and
considering how it recently just came to an
end (potentially because of some executive
meddling cutting it a little short), there’s
no better time than now to try and catch up.
Brian David Gilbert does some cool stuff,
whether it be through his roleplay persona
as the cyberpunk streamer Wango Bango and
his whopping audience of, 3 - or as the man
cursed by his hubris to UNRAVEL his sanity
by obsessing over video game questions, no
one was asking - and he recently added to
that long list of stuff I didn’t know I
needed with a shitpost pilot script for a
Star Wars pod-racing series that gives the
concept an underdog narrative full of over
the top characters, quippy one liners and
a good ol’ dash of fast and furious nonsense,
and I am not joking when I say I would genuinely
love to see this developed into a proper series,
disney, you COWARDS -
Oh and speaking of art -
Bigtop Burger is an animated web series created
by Worthikids that follows the misadventures
of the crew of a clown themed food truck,
Billie, Penny & Tim, and their eccentric boss, Steve.
Steve: Hmph -
Steve: Four aces.
Steve: YOU LOST THE MOMENT YOU ENTERED THESE  W O O D S !
To say this series is chaotic would be an
understatement, and I absolutely love it for that.
Each episode is only a few minutes long, but
they are dense with nonsense, filled to bursting
with so many snappy lines, blink and you miss
it micro reactions, and the kinds of over
the top shots I’m surprised didn’t get
cut for being -
- GOD DAMN IT -
- CRAP CRAP CRAP -
- I'LL GET YOU FOR THIS STEEEEEVE!
And if you haven’t noticed already, the
animation’s got a really nice look to it.
It’s a fascinating process to learn about,
since, despite the 2D influences, it’s actually
done in 3D - more specifically, in Blender . . .
I think.
Worthikids has done a lot of unique stuff
with the programme, including this
I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Actual-Stop-Motion
animation, and not only goes to show his creativity
as a creator, but also just solidifies in
my mind that we’ve only really scratched
the surface of what can be done with CG animation.
Big Top Burger is a frantic series of shorts
I absolutely adore.
Nami yo Kiitekure, or, Wave, Listen to Me! in English,
is an anime series directed
by Tatsuma Manimikawa, produced by Sunrise
and based on the manga of the same name by
Hiroaki Samura about Minare Koda, a restaurant
worker who, after a bad breakup and a drunken
conversation with a radio producer at a bar,
gets dragged into the world of radio hosting
and broadcasting when her natural talent for
talking off the cuff catches the attention
of the station’s audience.
It sounds like a mundane concept at first
that might make for a chill little show . . . then
I started watching -
- and that’s just how it
STARTS
The show has no qualms about diving
into the most bizarre ideas it can muster
as soon as possible, whether it be in the
unique way it presents Minare’s radio dramas
or in the situations she stumbles into trying
to get material for the next episode, and
it’s a great ride seeing what kinds of places
it ends up in as it goes on.
And I gotta say, for a series all about radio,
this show looks fantastic.
The designs are nice, the direction is captivating,
and the animation is stellar, not just in
the obviously extreme scenes, but in the little
moments I wouldn’t have expected to be given
so much attention, like the way clothes fold
and fire burns as someone lights a cigarette
to the tremble of rage in Minare’s fingers
when she rips her ex-boyfriend a new one live
on air, something that’s backed up by the
fantastic voice work for the show generally
and especially from the voice actress for
Minare herself, Riho Sugiyama.
Everything about the presentation of the show,
both visually and aurally, is continually
and impressively solid throughout, giving
this story of a woman lost in adulthood slowly
figuring out her true calling in life that
much more to work with.
That said, I do have to question the decision
to depict the one gay character in the series
as a pervy creep, but, I guess it doesn’t
come up, too much, ha ha,
*sigh* for fuck's sake . . .
But even with that in mind, Wave, Listen to
Me! is an outrageous comedy I think deserves
a lot more attention.
Derry Girls (or the first season at least
- thanks netflix) is a comedy series created
and written by Lisa McGee, directed by Michael
Lennox and produced by Hat Trick Productions
about, well, some girls - Erin, Orla, Clare
& Michelle - and one guy - James - living
in, well, Derry, in the 90s.
The show builds itself around the well worn
formula of a cast of lovable assholes butting
heads, from the divas and rats trying to get
into and out of trouble respectively to the
dicks and weirdos caught in the middle, but
makes it feel fresh by giving its characters
an Irish twist - and it doesn’t just apply
to the show’s main quintet, but also to
everyone around them, whether it be the grumpy
grandda picking on his son in law to the mammy
of questionable-at-best ethics.
"- Toto - and we'll get back to you as soon as we can."
Erin: You gave Toto, to Maureen Malarkey?!
Mam: Wee Tigger had just passed . . . she was lonely.
It’s a comedy driven by its characters,
and the varied extents of their abrasive personalities
quickly become clear as they’re forced through
situations rooted in the cultural quirks of
the time and place they’re stuck in, with
my personal favourite being the episode where
Erin’s family takes in a student from Chernobyl
and their reactions to the culture shock that
comes with it but also just the very blunt
way said character points out their bullshit.
Erin: It's class, isn't it?
Katya: It is much how I imagine.
Erin: Oh, because of my letters? Well descriptive narrative has always been a strong point -
Katya: No not your letters, I see on news.
But what I find most interesting is how, for
as much fun as it finds in that setting, it
also brings with it a constant sense of dread,
since it takes place right in the middle of
the Troubles, a time of intense violence across
the island but especially in Northern Ireland
whose history is just a bit too long to get
into here, but suffice it to say, it was a
terrifying time to live through, and it’s
one that’s left a deep scar in Irish history.
The daily threat that came with it is tangible
in nearly every episode of the series, as
school buses have to be inspected by military,
the main family, being Catholic, have to leave
town for a week as a massive Protestant
Parade kicks off, and the main characters’
reunion of friendship is intercut with their
family watching a report of a bombing in the city.
There’s an intense contrast between the
levity it finds in poking fun at the weirdness
of the 90s and the harsh reality of Northern
Irish life at the time that, for me, pushes
it from sitcom to almost black comedy.
Derry Girls is a funny show that pulls a lot
of jokes and drama out of its characters and setting.
Dweller’s Empty Path is an rpgmaker style
game developed by Temmie Chang set in a world
besieged by beasts and magic about Yoki, a
monster-like inhabitant of a mountain village
as she goes about her day and gets lost in
all kinds of meandering misadventures.
It’s a nice follow up to the developer’s
previous game, Escaped Chasm, that greatly
expands on the mechanics and world, with more
detailed environments to explore, more quirky
characters to get to know, more art and designs
to get obsessed with and some fantastic music,
developed with the help of Toby Fox and Camellia,
to get lost in the melody of while wandering
through this gameboy coloured world, one that
likes to play around with and poke fun at
the tropes and clichés of top down rpgs,
whether it be in characters getting confused
by the names and descriptions of common game
mechanics or stumbling into the middle of
someone else’s boss battle.
And as mentioned before, there’s a lot of
neat little self contained adventures to find,
and as a result, lots of different endings
to finish the game with depending on how many
you manage to discover, and each of which
gives you just a little more perspective on
the many sides of this wholesome world filled
with sinister secrets.
It’s just a nice little game to chill with.
Helltaker is a puzzle game / dating sim developed
by vanripper where you play as the Helltaker,
a dood with a thing for demon girls who decides
to do what all of us can only dream of and
goes to hell to build a harem of demonic cuties.
And I cannot get enough of this game.
The art and aesthetic?
Popping.
The music?
Slapping.
The demons?
Banging.
Judgement?
Best girl.
Fuck you.
Fight Me
But more specifically, even if I did have
a lot of trouble figuring it out half the
time - it’s a fun game that plays around
with its mechanics in neat ways.
At its most basic, it asks you to navigate
mazes of kickable objects and enemies in a
certain amount of moves or get fucking obliterated,
and quickly introduces new twists and turns
with each level, like obstacles that take
extra moves to get past, levels full of red
herrings and secret items, and even a bullet
hell style boss battle, and I really enjoyed
making my way through it - the same goes for
the dating mechanics, as you have to make
sure to say just the right thing to get each
girl on your side, lest you get horribly murdered,
or worse - rejected - and each branch of personality
infused dialogue is just fun to read through.
It does a lot of cool stuff in its incredibly
short run time of, like, an hour at most.
Altho, it has made me realize how little demon
boy stuff there is in media, and I'll be honest,
I don't know how I feel about that.
Yeah, well who’s
gonna buy a game about bishounen devils and
oni himbos?
- ME, THAT’S WHO!
It’s short, sweet, to the point, and free,
so there’s really no excuse not to at least try it!
Carrion is a reverse-horror game developed
by Phobia Game Studios and published by Devolver
Digital in which you take on the role of what
I can only describe as a lovecraftian wet
dream after being accidentally awakened by
human scientists as you rip and tear your
way through their facilities to freedom.
There’s nothing quite like playing a monster,
and I don’t mean metaphorically like being
bad in Infamous or whatever, I mean like playing
Venom in Ultimate Spider-Man, and Carrion
hits that same sweet spot for me.
There’s something almost addictively fun
about slithering through vents and squirming
through caves, of gathering mass in the most
destructive way possible and getting revenge
on the mortals foolish enough to think they
stand a chance against - AW FUCK SHIT GOD DAMN IT
But the main fun of the game for me lies in
the structure of its gameplay.
It’s very metroidvania in a lot of ways,
dropping you into the middle of a complex
map that sees you collecting power ups to
progress to new areas and backtracking to
old ones to open up new paths to build up
nests that increase your reach across this
military labyrinth, and each ability in itself
provides a whole new range of options with
which to navigate and attack - but they’re
each locked to certain size ranges, since
in the game, you can increase your size by
devouring biomass, and your size is also directly
tied to your health.
So throughout the game you’re forced to
pick and choose between tanking your way through
enemies and obstacles at a slower pace, or
zipping through halls and catching everyone
off-guard with stealth at the risk of getting
one-shotted.
It’s a fun balance to play around with as
your repertoire of nightmarish abilities expands
and especially, for me at least, in the moments
of panic when I suddenly drop a size and have
to switch tactics to survive, and end up only
scraping by an encounter by the, skin of my,
tentacled, teeth . . .
That said, I did find that the controls, at
least on Switch, the version I played, could
get quite fiddly the bigger you get with how
difficult it becomes to coordinate your entire
mass, and the lack of a proper map makes it
quite easy to get lost toward the end, but
I guess even those details could be argued
to be part of the eldritch beast experience, so . . .
Carrion is a fun twist on horror games that
takes a lot of creative turns.
Umurangi Generation is a photography simulator
developed by Origame Digital and published
by Playism where you play as a courier in
a world on the verge of the apocalypse just,
tryna get by.
And I have to say, I didn’t expect to end
up having as much fun with this game as I
did, but the further I got into it the harder
it got to put down.
It’s the kind of game that speaks to my
creative side, by just letting me do basically whatever.
As the tutorial explains, there are few proper
lines along which the game itself judges a
“good” photo, and so beyond the things
it asks for pictures of and the kinds of lenses
it wants them taken with, it gives the player
free reign to go nuts, and with every level
unlocked it provides even more options to
play around with, in lenses and in filters,
to get just the right picture - here are some
of my personal favourite pics I’ve managed
to get.
You might notice a pattern with my fondness
for bloom and contrast.
It gives players a lot of freedom in how they
go about picturing this world, one that, in
itself, is just fun to explore.
It’s like a low poly diorama filled with
all kinds of details just begging to be discovered,
and a big part of the fun comes from finding
those tidbits and lining them up for a good shot.
And as a fun side note, the game’s synthy
tunes happen to be done by the youtuber
ThorHighHeels,
which was quite a surprise to discover for
me, since I’d only started to get into his
videos just before I ended up playing this
game.
Anyway, in the process of exploring, you’ll also
slowly uncover the overarching narrative hidden
in the game’s world, since it’s story
isn’t explicitly spelt out to the player,
but instead hinted at through the power of
“environmental storytelling”, from things
as obvious as newspaper clippings and satirical
graffiti to more subtle stuff like memorials
and the way npcs interact with this world,
whether they be soldiers coated in blood leaning
against admittedly on the nose posters or
citizens lining up for food rations or maybe
the first train out of this soon to be hellhole,
and a lot more stuff that I think is better
experienced blind.
But those world building details also give
it a fascinating perspective.
Without spoiling too much, the specific shittiness
of this game’s envisioned future involves
a grand threat to humanity that, in a lot
of ways, feels quite relevant to a lot of
current real world issues, whether viral, viral, or en-vira-mental, and which seems especially critical of the
apathy with which many react to such things,
and how that sort of disconnect lets it fester
to the point of potentially no return.
For as much as fun as the game provides in
its mechanics, the overall throughlines of
its world give it a bittersweet undertone,
since to me, the message that comes through
feels like its saying that when the end does
come, knowing the limited power that we have
the best we can do, as individuals, at least,
is document each painful step of the process
in the slim hope that there’ll be someone
or something left to remember to put the pieces
back together when it does finally fall apart.
It’s kinda depressing, and maybe more than
anything else it just shows how much the last
year has fucked my perspective on things,
but that message just struck a chord with
me, and I’m sure it’ll do the same for
a lot of other people for whom the world,
due to recent events, has started to feel
like too much, even if they aren’t too interested
in the photography side of things.
At the end of the day, Umurangi Generation
is a game I just can’t help but appreciate.
And yeah, those are my thoughts.
The last few months have been going by so
quickly, I’m surprised I actually did manage
to get around to anything.
Time has just sorta, felt meaningless lately
. . . even more so than usual.
Also, I fiddled around with some structure
stuff for these Top Things videos, mainly
in just organizing each section based on length
- it’s just always been a weird nitpick
for me that the videos would constantly flip
flop from a 5 minute ramble to a 30 second
quick shot back to 3 minutes and so on.
I thought it might work better if it
built up, for the most part, from shortest
to longest, so it can have a better sense
of pacing and almost like it’s building up
momentum for the video as it goes on, if that
makes any sense?
Anyway, hope yous are staying safe, keeping
your distance, washing your hands, wearing
a mask, and so on, let me know what yous think,
if yous agree, disagree, what your top things
of Summer 2020 were, what you’re looking
forward to in the next few months - personally
I can’t wait to finally get around to the
Great Pretender - etc, and thanks for watching!
If yous enjoyed this and wanna see more, then
check out my last video, where I talk about
Vinland Saga’s Askeladd and what I think
makes him work so well as a villain in it’s
viking-drenched world.
Or, watch me talk about all the weird details
of Oban Star Racers’ intergalactic narrative,
and why, for me, they make it worth coming
back to!
And don’t forget to like, comment, share
and of course, subscribe, to Come Fly With Me!
Hit the bell to stay notified, follow me on
twitter for more updates, ramblings, and poor
attempts at humour, and hopefully, I’ll
see yous later!
