Call of the Night, aka Yofukashi no Uta (Twilight but inverted genre and more romcom)

 PR: Some 14-year-old dude is wandering the streets at high night, walking around and laughing out loud while playing on the swing. Creepy bastard, if you ask me; I wouldn't let my daughter near him.

Not that he'd do anything, since apparently he's either gay or, as he puts it, has "a problem creating emotional attachment to others," especially the romantic kind. Earlier at school, he rebuffed some hot chick flat without even reading the love letter. You dropped this, my king (kidding).

Anyway, after a long day of doing nothing, my dude, whose name I'll never forget, felt like cracking open a cold one. Just when he finished having this overly long moral questioning about whether he should drink alcohol as a minor or not, some pink-haired chick creeps up on him and whispers, "Hey, you drinking beer?" And that's how it begins.

Nice Rollex, queen.

As it turns out, vampires are pretty chill in this world, so instead of doing the usual jump, kill, vanish moves, Nazuna starts talking to the guy, and they become friends with blood benefits. She even takes him to her house, a basic flat with bare bones, so much for rich vampire, I guess.

 
 When the dude says, "Yo, Nana, I want to become a vampire like yourself," allegedly to "enjoy the night," which in my dictionary means he digs the whole flying around, superhuman strength, and immortality, and Nana tells him back, "For a human to become a vampire, they both need to fall in love," while blushing and making weird faces; I was 99% sure she was fucking with him (metaphorically; the guy's a eunuch). And the guy actually believed it, like no questions or anything. Not even a sarcastic, "Oh, so every single piece on vampires is wrong; do you also happen to sparkle under sunlight?"

 As the plot progresses, which is basically one very, very immature 40-year-old vampire and some sexless, clueless teen getting to know each other and their feelings, the picture of Nana laughing at the stupid mortal who actually swallowed the "fell in love" crap started to fade, and when the Volturi show up and pretty much demand the guy turn into a vampire in less than a year or else, it became apparent that it was no joke.

"See, man. We can't just have unaligned people knowing about us vamps (though it's literally an open secret). Chill though, you got like a year to make your mind."

 Though it seems a bit blurry, the line between "falling in love" and simple plain lust, especially since the "cultural loving techniques" look a lot like pickup lines, and all the vampires are skimpily dressed for some reason.

 This makes the whole deal with the vampire hunter/private investigator pedo chick even more confusing, since vampires aren't really a plague to man but more like glorified hookers who work for blood, not even a lethal dose. (Edit 11/24: Why are you booing me? I'm right!)

 Which also makes the whole deal with the "cursed soul" teacher-vamp, who didn't want to drink blood even more confusing, like, yeah, it's a bit disgusting, but dude, you don't have to kill them, you know?

 Anyway, the plot has a bit of a deviation every now and then to show us that the other vampires have the sex worker syndrome and can't really tell the difference between love and physical relationships. At some point, the dude, whose name I'll never forget, points out that the other guy who's been text spamming Seri (Vamp 2) every few minutes, followed both of them for God knows how long, and even went as far as to bang on the door of the karaoke room like a mindless zombie while mumbling, "Seri-chan, Seri-chan," isn't creepy. No, he's the normal one. The creep is Seri, who wanted to have a male friend but can't due to being so sexually alluring. Yeah. Well, at some point, the plot doesn't really progress much anymore, and the faults of a family-friendly rom series start to show.

I'll be honest and say that roms aren't really my thing, but being as objective as I can, I'd say that the series has ways to go. The visuals (mostly the backgrounds, since characters are mold-based) are their strong suit. In particular, I'd like to address the problem of vampires being a completely underwhelming force. Even if, for some reason, they're pacifists and don't like violence, they could leverage their hypnosis-like charm to build their place in the world instead of working as part-timers like a bunch of college students. Obviously, there's also the problem that moe-type formatted personalities are basically crippling characters. I won't be able to take seriously your little sister or school dropout type character as much as you want to convince me that there are other facets. Also, the intro song is like a drill to my ears, awful, and the rest is meh-ish. So, to conclude, I'd say passable anime, mostly thanks to the animation, but mediocre story and terrible characters that could be better if they eased up on the so-called comedy. 5/10.

The tribe must survive ("lovecraftian" game. Or rather "Love-Crap-Thing" game)

Get it?

 The idea was sort of interesting.

 Expectation: You have to make a tribe survive some kind of supernatural siedge by embracing the legacy or power of one or several evil Gods, said influence also activates more facets of the game that make survival more difficult since evil gods do their evil thing. As the game progresses you meet more interesting deities, events, curses and further as you explore a land covered in darkness.

                                       

 Reality: You get tossed in some kind of 4x4 forest, everything else is covered in war fog that doesn't clear even if you build thirty exploration outposts, then you "manage" a bunch of low-res tribesman that are so stupid that get killed by random stuff all the time, which make them scared, which makes them not being able to gather wood which makes them even more scared, spiraling forth until you lose the game.

Trying to race this shit mechanics you build preset buildings as you realize there's a rather railroad straight progression despite being an "open world" game.

 You eventually figured out that to "embrace" the "Dark Gods" you need to gather mushrooms, but you can't really choose what deity to follow since that's defined by RNG as to what mushroom you have near. 

But THEN you realize that harvesting mushrooms is so damn slow and that the upgrades have costs in the hundreds, and THEN you realize after gathering mushrooms for hours that those upgrades are literal SHIT. As in, "You have 1.25 more speed at gathering specific shrooms" , "Your faithful get less hungry during mass (mass last less than an in-game hour)" so you go to the wiki dare I say outraged at how bullshit these "gods" are, since they all have the same effects, and find out that the only worthwhile upgrade would be the very last one, and even then it's pure fucking bullshit is what it is. Like "The blessing of the mother: Your faithful is no longer scared or hungry, but dies shortly after". Did the developers made some mistakes? Yes. Did the developers ONLY made mistakes? Also yes. 

13/6 Voidigo (Action roguelike game)

Since there's an in-game hour counter, my time-pointing is accurate. I have 30 hours in the game, and if I had made this review with only 20, this would have been a much better review. Why is that?

Voidigo lacks a plot. I have never felt compelled to defeat the Void, an entity that shows up for no reason and starts killing people. The first playable character was from a special type of folk that worshiped the anti-void, so it kind of makes sense, but the other four don't have anything to do with the Void. They have no slideshow either. No special skills, just a specific starting item that can be acquired by other characters.

Voidigo is very repetitive. Despite having two hundred more or less unique guns and more than a hundred skills that can change your gameplay, these numbers pale in comparison with having just twelve bosses that recycle each run and seven small, randomly generated zones. By the time you finish the third run, you've seen them all. Maybe even multiple times.

Voidigo has lousy bosses. By hour thirty I've defeated the same bosses dozens of times, and it's not thrilling or anything of the sort. It's a chore. Other users describe them as "bullet sponges" I concur. You'll learn to dodge the three attack patterns they have in less than a minute and spend over ten just kiting the boss until it enters in "second phase" which means they do the same thing but faster and in purple, all this while chasing after them because they're very cowardly. They always cluster when there's more than one and flee when things get hairy.

All in all, it's a good game, excellent even for its genre, but because of these defects, you need to stop in time. Did you defeat the void twice? Just look for a new game. 7/10

The Primal Hunter (LitRPG about a guy hunting high-leveled monsters and basing his whole personality on that, vol 1-8)

6/24-7/24 

 I would like to start by pointing out that being "primal" is not a good word. It basically means being primitive, ape-ish, crude, rudimentary. So I don't get why Jake aka "The Primal Hunter" (all caps) is so proud of the title. Though, to be fair, his best godly pal "The Malefic Viper" also seems proud of his title despite not being malefic, like at all. 

 In fact, most characters don't seem to mind much about, well... Anything. Since the system arrived, people basically forgot they were once normal and either embraced being a bunch of bloodthirsty savages or became some spineless cowards that refuse to violence even in self-defence, which we later find out is encouraged if not even demanded by this "system" through what Zogarth named "Paths".

 What are paths? Finding out what you're good at and only doing that, become obsessed with that and mind nothing but that until you reach godhood. Whatever that thing might be, simply growing in size, bootlicking gods, fricking prostitution or pure rampaging. After Casper has a very shameful display and yells to another character "THIS IS THE POWER OF EMOTION" while self-imploding in a ball of death affinity mana, I think that cringy power ranger might also be a Path to godhood as well. Anyone can be a god in the Multiverse, in fact there are innumerable gods, including some buffoon named Yip of Yore who pretends to battle and then pretends to lose all to "better build the legendary tale".

 Also, the author is a fan of tropes and has the audacity to call it a trope and then doing it regardless, such as making all female characters fall for the protagonist, have the MC attend to friggin' Hogwarts and even giving him an elf slave. There's also an evil "Holy church" like all fantasy books worth their dime should have. Tips in case you ever find yourself in a fantasy setting: stay away from anything resembling a traditional church. They're evil.

 I think that the book started way better and on book six Zogarth ran out of creative juice. The strong suit of the novel is not the characters or the world building but the character progression and action, even if sometimes it doesn't make much sense for other characters like the Sword Saint to be at the same level as Jake having not gotten through half the dangerous situations he has. After book two, the stats cease to matter, after book four the equipment cease to matter, and by volume six the only thing that matters is the rarity of the skills. One of the most entertaining things was the skill selection part, but gets skipped or becomes boring at some point, same with the loot he gets out of the enemies and generally The Primal Hunter shifts from classic RPGlit to more combat focused, action movie like story with some slice of life here and there.  All the dramatic build-up for C-Grade was for nothing since at race evolution he didn't even got any options, at profession evo. he picked the same one he had before and in class he didn't even got any good options, more on the same line as the previous evo, which was very frustrating. All in all, an entertaining an easy read, not as outstanding as "1# best seller in RPGlit" would indicate, but certainly worth the first five volumes. 6/10

(edit 16/9/24: I was just reading about "altruistic  suicide" and remembered that old guy with sword has a backstory about about soldiers walking to their deaths into the cold winter so that Old man could have a shot at getting to see his family again. This all very touchy-touchy, but, really? Two young, healty soldiers decided to willingly renounce to life so that some dude who allegedly had a family could have extra rations?)

All the dust that falls (Roomba Isekai novel, vol 1)

Kickass coverart. How not to read?

 A literal roomba, not a human spirit in a roomba or anything like that, gets teleported into a game-like, medieval fantasy setting. He/she... It? It starts gaining mutations that enable it to do things that not only a roomba would not be able to, but that even the high-leveled humans in that world are incapable of, such as fighting and vanquishing an ancient demon commander that was sealed in the basement of the mage's tower where the roomba was summoned. 

 The novel does a perfect parody of the genre, it's funny and innovative while tapping on that good old resource of the "misunderstanding"  to propel the plot onto the craziest of the situations. The only part I'm not a fan of it's the interior decoration expert that sometimes take the narrative 8/10

Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill (Salt-peppering Monsters)

 While looking for another Isekai about cooking, which I didn't find, I came across this very funny sounding Anime. 

 A man gets summoned into another world alongside three other people, presumably classmates or something of the sort, and while they get your usual overpowered otherworldly skills, the character whom I'll name "the cook" only gets "online shopping", which in spite of its apparent convenience it's quite useless when regarding direct combat.  (edit 11/24 It would've been a force to be reckon with if it was american online shopping imagine ordering guns from Walmart, how's that for an anime?) 

 The king obviously fails to see the potential in the skill since he's cooking up some sort of conspiracy (heh) that isn't adress at least in this season, and decides to shush him with twenty gold coins and send him on his merry way so that he doesn't intervene in whatever he's up to.  

 After the king suspiciously declares that no travel is permitted within the kingdom (totally nonsensical)  the cook is forced to hire a party of C-ranked adventurers to escort him onto the frontier kingdom, and while enjoying an otherworldly meal courtesy of the absurd skill, a legendary monster Fenrir interrupts the party and demands a tribute of food. The cook obliges since the adventurers can't hold a candle to the mythical wolf and silently nod while cowering in a corner behind some bushes. I had expected a bit more valiance after they charged him so handsomely for an escort that barely affected them. Anyways... Fenrir is satisfied with the "offering" and forms a familiar contract with the cook, in which as I surmise he offers guidance and protection, plus whatever he hunts along the way in exchange for food. The cook agrees and god that was so much a better deal than the one those paltry adventurers extended. I won't be missing those suckers! 

Fen-boi makes short work of pretty much every monster in existance

 The anime progresses in a more or less even way after that, with small adventures and intermissions, generally comedy ones in-between cooking segments and long descriptions on how the food tastes. As I see it, it's an all-or-nothing: either you love it, and like me always wondered how different monsters tasted like, perhaps you've even watched a few gourmet shows before, or you absolutely hate it for being in all other aspects slow-paced and rather dismissive towards story and character building. 

 While Campfire Cooking is an Adventure-Isekai it's so only technically and when compared to others of the sort you'll see that cooking is what holds the story together and pushes it forward instead of some imminent danger to the world or some demon lord creature looming over. There's even the distinct lack of an evil church and the other (presumably OP) heroes have no other mention after their 20 sec segment at the very beginning. 

 As I said, I applaud the creators for being so daring and I admit to look forward to more monster-cooking experiences. I hope that the cooking segment becomes even more detailed since some parts are a little confusing due to many steps of the recipy being rushed. 8/10