aew men’s world championship

In this week’s volume, I talk about Orange Cassidy becoming AEW Men’s World Champion one day, share my progress and a review of Blood for the Undying Throne, and talk about Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Team Cherry’s Samus Aran, and the worst order to play the Yakuza / Like a Dragon games.

Wrestling – Orange Cassidy as AEW World Champion: Important to AEW’s legacy

In the main event of AEW All Out 2023 Orange Cassidy defended the AEW International Championship against Jon Moxley and lost after 326 days, in one of the best matches in AEW history. I already believed he could be before this, but in this reign, Orange proved himself as a main eventer, a regular TV wrestler, a member of your roster you can count on, and get behind. Since he lost the International Championship the first time, his booking has been kind of stop-and-go due to injuries and, to be honest, not capitalizing on the hype of this run. After the match with Moxley, though, Orange stood in the ring with Best Friend members Chuck Taylor, Trent Beretta, and Kris Statlander as the crowd gave him a standing ovation and thanked Orange for this incredible run. The Best Friends are no longer together as a faction, but this photo of them at the end of All Out will live on forever.

Someone posted this photo in a Best Friends channel in a Discord I’m in, and said, “Honestly, this reunion will be so sweet though when OC wins the Men’s World Championship. That had me really thinking about it. AEW has a lot of amazing talent that would make great world champions, but I’ve never been of the belief that every one of them needs to be a world champion, except Orange. There is a list of people who will definitely be the men’s world champion or repeat champion. A lot of them are inevitable.

These three will be the men’s world champion multiple times.

I think Orange needs to be the men’s world champion sooner rather than later. It feels important to All Elite Wrestling‘s legacy to say yes, the man who weighs whatever from whenever should be the guy, no matter how long a reign he has. By mainstream wrestling standards, before AEW was founded, Orange as a top guy would be unconventional, but with his International Championship run, he proved he could be that guy who carried the company on his back to everyone that mattered, and even some who disagreed. Orange Cassidy is a foundational piece of All Elite Wrestling, and to have him in the lineage of one of your top titles is, in my opinion, essential.

Books – The Blood for the Undying Throne Review from Christina

I’m still working my way through The Blood for the Undying Throne by Sung-il Kim, translated by Anton Hur. I haven’t made much progress, but it is the main book I’m reading this week, and by the time next week’s edition of BGW comes out, I will likely have finished the book. In the meantime, you should read my podcast co-host Christina’s review of the book. I haven’t read it yet, just in case of spoilers, but Christina’s reviews on GeeklyInc are always smart, thoughtful, and entertaining. She edited my reviews for a long time, and when we were done they were always better than my earlier drafts.

Blood for the Undying Throne Review: Empire of Death and Death of Empire

Games – Paragon Path, Hollow Knight 3, and the Worst Like A Dragon Order.

A friend got me talking about Mass Effect because he started playing the Legacy Edition, and somehow I’ve been sucked into playing it again, and rather than continuing where I left off in Mass Effect 2 from 2021, I started a brand-new Shepard in Mass Effect 1, and I am already into the same Shepard in Mass Effect 2.

Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption, Mass Effect 2, Street Fighter 4, those were my all-timer Xbox 360 games for a long time. Back then, I thought Mass Effect 2 was a perfect sequel, adding new elements that improved the game and taking away a lot of unnecessary elements from the first. Now, maybe it’s because I’ve played so much more RPGs since the early 2010s, I see it a little differently. I wish some of those elements weren’t so stripped away, the different weapon attachments that change your ammo type, the different armors, and weapons. I miss all of them now in Mass Effect 2. The way they do powers in the second game, either the biotics or the tech powers, is much improved.

Back then, there was this code at the bottom of the 1st game for your custom Shepard that I wrote down because I didn’t quite like how my Shepard looked in Mass Effect 2 when I transported it over, so I kept a .txt file that I used to do this. I still have that .txt, so the Shepard I had back then is the Shepard I’m using now, over fifteen years later. That’s kind of amazing to me.

I’ve never played Mass Effect 3 since I finished it for the first time the year it came out. To be honest, I don’t remember how I feel about the ending, but I do know that I played through Mass Effect 2 all the way through at least 7 or 8 times before ME3 came out, and after finishing the third game, I never played any of them again. I don’t think I was angry or disappointed by the ending. I just kind of felt empty about it. I remember thinking the father telling the story of “the Shepard” to his son, which meant to show how the story of Commander Shepard became a timeline myth, was just corny and poorly done. My point is, I think this time I will play Mass Effect 3 again, this time with all the DLC I missed the first time, and see how I feel about it. I’m sure I’ll write about it.

I was thinking about this. A lot of people have been making fan art of what could be the next Hollow Knight protagonist, and it had me thinking if there was another Hollow Knight game, Team Cherry should just make Hornet their Samus Aran. Hollow Knight as a series doesn’t need a new main character; they’ve already got the best one. In Silksong, Hornet felt like both an established character and developed throughout that game at the same time. In fact, she reminds me a lot of Samus. Hornet speaks with a dignified air of someone who is long-lived and is compassionate to those in Pharloom who deserve it, and shows her prideful warrior side to those who deserve that. So, like Samus visiting new planets, Hornet can go to new kingdoms, gain new powers, and continue on in as many Hollow Knight games as they like to make.

One of my favorite gaming podcasts, Into the Aether did a special episode all about Yakuza 0. One of the co-hosts Brendon Bigley has said and maintains on this podcast that the best order for three of the Like a Dragon games that star Kiryu is Yakuza Kiwami 1 to Yakuza 0 to Yakuza Kiwami 2, and I agree! Kiwami 1 is much more of a breezy introduction to the series than 0 which is a fine introduction to Kiryu and the world of Like a Dragon doesn’t exemplify exactly what you’ll be getting out of most of the Kiryu games or what Kiryu is like as a character. 0 is amazing, but Kiwami 1 is a better introduction.

Do you know what order you shouldn’t play these games in? The order that I played in them, which was pure chaos. Here is the order in which I played the games. In 2018, I played Yakuza 0 and Yakuza 6, you know, the prequel game and what was going to be the finale of Kiryu’s story. To this day, I don’t know why I did this. I think I might have picked two I had the money for at the time during a sale, and was like Oh, surely these two will be a good introduction to the series. What was I thinking? You might say, Josh, you knew about Yakuza: Like a Dragon coming out in 2020 with a new protagonist? No, I did not, but that was the game I played next. Then, when they announced Infinite Wealth would have both Kiryu and Ichiban as dual protagonists, I played Yakuza Kiwami 1 and The Man Who Erased His Name. Infinite Wealth basically took up the last quarter of 2024 because it is that damn good. This year, I played Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, followed by Yakuza Kiwami 2. So here is my Like a Dragon order in all its chaos

Yakuza 6
Yakuza 0
Yakuza: Like a Dragon (Yakuza 7)
Yakuza Kiwami 1
Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
Yakuza Kiwami 2

A list of pure chaos, but I had fun nonetheless. The thing about Like a Dragon is, whether you know the story or not, you just have to buy in, and even if you don’t know the details, you’ll get what is at the heart of the stories, no matter which one you start at.

This is the second week in a row that I’ve released this on Thursday instead of Wednesday, but unlike last week, I purposely delayed this one because I wanted to compare my original thoughts when I wrote this on Monday to what I thought after AEW Dynamite‘s 6th Anniversary episode. If you get the reference from the title, congratulations, you’re old like me.

Games – Hades II

Hollow Knight Silksong and Hades 2 are probably going to be talked about together a lot, despite being very different games. Metroidvanias and Roguelikes share some common ground in that they often have a high difficulty scale, they’re both sequels to successful games in the series, and they’re both developed by independent studios. After twenty hours of Hades II, I have to say I, as in me personally, find it more difficult than Hollow Knight Silksong. The thing about Silksong‘s difficulty, to me, is that it is the same level of difficulty as the first game and requires a skill I had to remember in the process of playing it: patience. Most of the time when I would lose to a boss, it was because of two reasons: first, I didn’t have all the information about the boss’s attacks, and second, I would grow impatient and get too greedy with attacks, hoping to end the fight. With Hades II, you get better at it the more you play it. You develop a muscle memory for the attacks, just like with Silksong, but it requires me a lot more luck, hence the fun of roguelike, and a lot more awareness, which I don’t seem to have. Sometimes I’ll take damage in Hades II, and I do not know why.

Let me back up, though, because I don’t want you to get the impression that I dislike this game. I absolutely love this game. Not once has a run made me feel like I’ve wasted my time. No matter how far I’ve gotten, there has always been something, some kind of resource, some kind of story beat, some kind of future unlockable that I didn’t have before. While I miss aspects of the first one, I am absolutely having a ball with the second one. Without any spoilers, I have had five successful runs so far, four going down and one going up (the first chance you get to go up, you should go up), and the weapon I’ve been most successful with is the Sister Blades, but goddamn do I love the Umbral Flames and the Moonstone Axe. I love all but one of the bosses, not because of any difficulty or anything, but I just find them kind of annoying and uninteresting. The stakes of this game are much higher than those of the first Hades, but it has enough callbacks to the first game that it’ll satisfy returning players. It feels like they both upped the ante of the first game while streamlining so much of it. The fact that doors will tell me if that is where I need to go to get the resources I need is a godsend. If this were any other year but the year Silksong came out, this would probably be my game of the year. Currently, I have it third after Donkey Kong Bananza, but I think it’ll quickly rise to second before too long.

This coming out so soon after Silksong has only one little ember of an idea growing in my mind: Supergiant needs to make a Metroidvania. That’s how I know Silksong is my game of the year, because when I’m playing other games that are also great, whether it’s Hades II, Trails of the Sky 1st Chapter remake, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, or whatever else, I’m still thinking about how I want to play more Silksong.

I’ve been removing and redownloading TikTok on my phone a lot this year. Mostly because I will open, and my time blindness will activate, and I’ll lose hours to scrolling videos. Recently, I’ve seen a lot of people reacting to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and I have to say I feel quite envious of the people who love this game. It could be with some of these content creators that they’re being entirely performative but from the ones I’ve seen, I doubt it. I just don’t love the story, especially now that I’m in Act 3, where it feels like, without spoilers, too much Clair Obscur and not enough Expedition 33. It feels to me like two stories duct-taped together in a way that isn’t quite working for me, but I still find the battles so amazing. It just doesn’t move me in that way, but then I realized at work what hits me similarly that I can compare it to. What they’re feeling is what I feel in the climax of the Pacifist Run of Undertale and, more specifically, this year’s Chapter 4 of Deltarune. The story, the music, the characters all hit me right in the gut, where I keep my feelings, and I can say I may not feel the same way about E33, but I understand that feeling.

Wrestling – Hangman’s WrestleDream Opponent before and after AEW Dynamite’s 6th Anniversary

Today, Hangman Adam Page is teaming up with two members of the Opps, Samoa Joe and Powerhouse Hobbs, to take on the Death Riders after Daniel Garcia took out Katsuyori Shibata. I imagine Hangman’s championship defense will develop out of this, and I am worried it’ll be a turning heel Samoa Joe. A lot of the people available to be top heels in AEW are either out injured or have already faced Hangman. Don’t get me wrong, in my opinion, Samoa Joe versus Hangman Adam Page will be a fantastic match, but the setup for Joe’s turn feels like shit, we’ve got no one else right now, rather than organic in any way. What reason does he have to turn besides wanting the Men’s World Championship and being Samoa Joe? I’d much prefer Joe just be like “You know, Hangman, you’re right, I did help you win that belt at All In so do me the favor of facing me at WrestleDream.” I hope they make it work either way.

However, while not as high profile, I’d much rather it be someone else. I don’t like fantasy booking, really, because if it doesn’t happen, people tend to be disappointed when an event that was never going to happen doesn’t happen. Still, I’m going to do it here. The Bastard PAC returned to AEW at All Out to the Death Riders with a fresh, shortened haircut and a shirt on his back, unusual for him, but PAC and Hangman were one of the original feuds in AEW, both of them wanting to be the first person to be All Elite Wrestling’s Men’s World Champion. Today’s episode of Dynamite is the 6th Anniversary, so why not run it back? PAC may not be the top guy we wanted him to be when AEW started due to injuries and the pandemic hampering his momentum, but he’s still an extraordinary wrestler, and Hangman, who was already a great wrestler, has only improved since AEW started. That is what I’d like to see at WrestleDream: The Bastard PAC vs. Hangman Adam Page for the Men’s World Championship. It’s probably not going to happen, so I write it here just to get it out of my head. I will not set myself up for disappointment but find joy in what they’ll actually give me.

So, this is me, post-Dynamite, and I have to say I did like the setup for Hangman vs. Joe at WrestleDream. The setup for this was slightly silly, but to be honest, it was completely realistic in how some people act. A more senior employee feels like they’ve been disrespected by their younger colleague, who maybe has been given a bit more, and suddenly they go off the deep end and completely overreact because deep down they’re envious that the younger colleague has something they want. Essentially, and don’t take this as a comment on Joe because Joe rules, but in this specific scenario, he’s got boomer energy going on. So in a way, I found this quite funny, but I’ve also been on short-form video platforms enough to know people can act like this and be harboring this negative energy that they’ll unleash real quick. Safe to say, I thought AEW Dynamite‘s 6th Anniversary was awesome, and WrestleDream is turning out to be a must-see PPV, and so quickly after All Out? FUCK.

Credit to JJ Williams for this photograph.

Anyway, this is starting to get wordy, but having Hangman Page and Kris Statlander as my AEW World Champions, two of my favorite wrestlers, is amazing. I love Kris’s new gear, which she debuted tonight. The one bummer of the show was how many times ICE was advertised on HBO Max, and I’m not the only one unhappy with it. I left my feedback asking for them to no longer show these advertisements, and you can too in the link below in Hangman’s Bluesky post.

Books – Born of an Iron Storm by Anthony Ryan and Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders

I’m seventy percent of the way through Born of an Iron Storm by Anthony Ryan, and I can already see in my head where the story is going, and I’m excited to see how Ryan subverts those ideas by doing something completely different or going in a direction I didn’t expect. The character Ruhlin is in such an interesting spot as someone who never thought of himself as a leader and has been forced to be one. In fact, now that I think about it, all the point-of-view characters are in that position to some extent. I can see the thread of plot that will lead these individual storylines to interweave where they are forced into an alliance against a common foe, just like in John Gwynne’s The Bloodsworn Saga, another high fantasy series from the past few years that I love.

After getting those fancy hardcover editions of Fonda Lee’s The Green Bone Saga, I have the itch to delve back into that series with a highlighter and a pencil for a close reading of my previous copies. I love both a close reading and a reread, which is probably why I like doing my podcast so much.

I’ve also been reading Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders, and the way it plays with grief, magic, and the kind of academia I wanted to be a part of at one time is really hitting me in a good way. It has been a while since I’ve lost time to reading this year, probably since Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent or Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils in the spring.

Speaking of books, the latest episode of the book podcast I’m on, No Page Unturned, is out now. We’re currently covering The Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir, up to the second book, Harrow the Ninth but we’ve also done all our A Chorus of Dragons by Jenn Lyons, which you can go back to and listen to.

Also check out my co-host Christina Ladd’s review of Daedalus is Dead by Seamus Sullivan.