aew revolution | FourofFiveWits

Wrestling – AEW Revolution

Overall, I think last weekend’s AEW Revolution was entertaining, but some weird choices overall. I’m not even talking about the main event as the possibilities in Hangman’s story going forward are interesting to me. I imagine this will likely be the story for Hangman the rest of the year, considering it was basically a verbal/handshake agreement to not challenge for the men’s world championship again. There are going to be multiple temptations to break his promise, and we’ll see how he navigates that.

The Young Bucks losing in front of their family to FTR, whose title run has been carried by this match and the Brodido match, just to set up the return of Adam Copeland and Christian Cage doesn’t feel great. However, the possibility of FTR dropping the titles to Cope and Christian, then C&C choosing the Bucks to retire against instead of FTR once again, will be hilarious to me as an FTR hater. Plus, even as an FTR hater, I have to admit that the match was incredible (thanks to the Young Bucks).

It’s Jon Moxley beating Konosuke Takeshita for the Continental Championship that really makes no sense to me. What the fuck are we doing with either of these stories? So Don Callis Family and the Death Riders have a feud where the Death Riders are the tweener babyfaces, and the DCF are the heels, setting up the Takeshita v. Moxley match, where Moxley wants to make up for his loss in the C2 and the time limit draw. Takeshita wants to beat Moxley without ganging up on him before the match, a fair fight if you will. The path of this story is clear to see. Kazuchika Okada screwed over Takeshita at World’s End, but loses the C2. He remains International Champion, so obviously, after screwing Takeshita, Takeshita would win the Continental Championship, then face Okada to unify those belts again. Oh, what’s that? Takeshita lost and looks like a nerd now? Jon Moxley just won clean?

At the end, Mox and Takeshita shake hands, then Will Ospreay returns looking for revenge on Moxley from his attack at All Out. Moxley and Death Riders allignment since the C2 has been confusing. Moxley himself has been more of a babyface, while Claudio, PAC, and Danny have been more like tweeners then Marina and Yuta have been leaning more heelish. So now what, with this Ospreay feud, is going to happen? It is unclear in a kind of negative way, as while Hangman’s future seems unclear with many possibilities, the future of the Death Riders seems unclear in a what-the-fuck-are-we-doing-here? kind of way.

Everything else on the card went pretty much how I thought it would. I do think everyone should check out Bandido vs. Andrade El Idolo. Since returning to AEW, Andrade has been incredible and this match is no different. I’m excited for where this Swerve Strickland / Kenny Omega feud is going with them having their rematch on AEW Dynamite next week already. I suspect Kenny is going to win but who knows?

Book – Super Nintendo by Keza MacDonald

I heard about this book on the Aftermath Hours podcast the author was on. It made me realize how different video games are to my age versus nearly everyone younger than me. The NES came out just six months after I was born. I basically grew up with Nintendo, so some of the events detailed in this book I just experienced as a part of video game history. There is an extensive chapter on the struggling development of The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, whose delays is my first experience with getting video game news and might have been my first online message board experience discussing the delays on America Online’s video game channel. Back then, a game getting delayed for three years was an astronomical delay, and Zelda 64, as it was called in the beginning, kept getting delayed over and over again. I learned about this through issues of Nintendo Power, which my grandma had gotten me a subscription to as a birthday gift. The book provides more details about the causes of those delays, including quotes from developers I had never seen before. That’s pretty much the balancing act of the book I’m experiencing as someone deep in the weeds of Nintendo knowledge; the book reiterates a lot of what I already know or have lived through, but also new insights. I’ll have more to say when I finish it.

Games – A Hodgepodge of Switch games.

I’m reaching a wall in Pokémon Pokopia where I’ve done all the regions and am near the end of the story of the game, but don’t want to quite finish it yet. There are still some habitats in the city area I’ve yet to devolop and the enviromental level there is still kind of low. I don’t want to rush to the end now that I’ve been in each biome so I’m taking my time.

Pokopia has made me go back to other Switch 1 & 2 games I’ve been meaning to play again. It’s the 40th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda, but I likely would have been playing Skyward Sword HD, Wind Waker, and Tears of the Kingdom regardless. I really hope by the end of Switch 2’s lifecycle that all the 3D Zeldas are on it.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is a weird one for me. It came out just days after Skyrim and felt like the beginning of Nintendo’s worst period to me, where their games were constantly hand-holding in games with menus and pop-up instructions that interrupted the flow of games on both the 3DS and the Wii. It was also the first Zelda game that I’ve ever DNF’d before. Wii Motion Plus just did not work well for me at all, whether it was my distance from the TV due to my poor eyesight or something else, playing Skyward Sword just felt like a chore. It was the last game I ever bought for the Wii, and I pretty much played exclusively on Xbox 360 after that until 2016-2017 when I bought my first gaming PC and the Nintendo Switch.

Jump to 2021, everyone was flabbergasted when they announced a Skyward Sword HD for the Switch, and no Wind Waker or Twilight Princess HD. I wanted to give the game another shot, and I remember July being pretty barebones. I’m going to be honest, I don’t remember my original thoughts on the game when I first played it, except for the fact that I liked it, I finished it, and then immediately accidentally saved over my completed game. I hadn’t touched it since then, not because of that, but simply because there have been a lot of great games from 2021 – present coming out. The pandemic might also have something to do with it.

Now, as I’m playing it, I’m thinking about its role in the connective tissue between Ocarina of Time and Breath of the Wild. Majora’s Mask, Wind Waker, and Twilight Princess are, in a sense, spiritual successors to Ocarina of Time, building on the foundation that the original 3D Zelda started, but Skyward Sword feels like balancing the line between trying something completely new and continuing what has always worked with 3D Zeldas. Also, this version of the game looks beautiful. I don’t remember the original looking this good. I think perhaps because I’m playing on a screen with a higher refresh rate, I can actually notice the consistent FPS the game has now.

Metroid Prime Remastered is also another game I’ve returned to. I didn’t finish it when it came out because I was so annoyed by the Chozo Ghosts constantly respawning when I leave and reenter a room. Now I’ve returned to it progressing to my first encounter with metroids in the game, getting the power bomb, grapple beam, and the plasma beam. I don’t know how mucb more of the game I have left. I believe there is maybe two more powerups I need to get and all of the Chozo artifacts that unlock the final boss.

I’m doing something a little different and writing about all books, games, and wrestling together, rather than in separate sections, for a particular reason; you’ll see why in a moment.

I don’t know if it’s SAD, depression, or just the state of the world, but I’ve found myself retreating into games more and more over the past year. Recently, though, since about January, I’ve found myself less excited to read or watch wrestling, and I’m struggling to figure out if it’s me or not. I’ll watch a great match or an exciting turn of events on AEW Dynamite, which my brain will register as a great match or a good part of a feud or story, and I’ll just feel no excitement when I think about it.

Two examples I can think of are this MJF/Hangman Page feud going on. I feel like it’s going well. Hangman has set stakes that feel important while giving me a stipulation that I actually want to see MJF in. On the other side, MJF feels like he has been on his best behavior, avoiding anything too edgy or obnoxious. I’m curious to know what MJF in a Texas Death Match is going to be like and how violent it’ll actually get compared to Hangman’s previous TDMs with Swerve and Moxley. Yet, I’m feeling just like, not excited for some reason. If Hangman loses, which I think he might, I’m very intrigued where they could go from there and how they can write themselves out of that corner. Yet when I sit back and think about it, I’m just kind of feeling nothing. Everything leading up to AEW Revolution 2025 is feeling similar. I am anticipating Jon Moxley vs. Konosuke Takeshita to be a killer match, and the possible fallout if Takeshita wins, within both the Death Riders and the Don Callis Family, has story threads I’m interested in. Yet, that usual feeling of anticipation isn’t really there.

A more recent example just happened on Dynamite this week. Speedball Mike Bailey and Kyle Fletcher have this unbelievable chemistry in the ring, and the match they had this week was incredible, and I knew it was incredible. I even said to my friend in the voice chat, “Oh my god, this match rules,” but it didn’t really hit me like I knew it should. This has been happening to me a lot. My brain is saying, “I like this,” and then basically not feeling kind of neutral about it. My attention span has also taken a massive hit somehow. Fingers crossed it is just how fucking cold it has been here in New York this winter.

I’m in a similar situation with books. I have a lot of great books on my plate right now, I know, a great problem to have. Oh no, Josh has a lot of books that are good before they come out, but besides what I’m reading for the podcast, I’m struggling to sit down, read, and stay reading. Maybe now that spring is practically here, that’ll change soon, fingers crossed. One thing I am reading and simultaneously listening to is the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. It’s one of the okayest series I’ve ever read, basically how I feel about it. I can feel an underlying righteous anger in Carl, the titular character, over the entire dungeon-crawling system and the corporations in charge of it. Brief aside, that is another reason I’m struggling reading books as gigantic mega corporations controlling society and making it horrible for everyone seems to be an ongoing theme in a lot of new books recently, and it doesn’t exactly feel great, don’t know why, hmmm. The jokes, specifically the jokes in the achievements Carl and friends unlock, are so fucking bad. Each time they pop up it makes me want to stop reading the book or turn off the audiobook for good. I’m trying to stick with it cause it’s what I read or listen to at work, but I don’t love it. It’s pretty okay and has some fun moments and fight scenes.

I finished Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth on PC right before Resident Evil Requiem came out. It’s basically my second playthrough, even though I stopped at the temple on PS5, but this second time around, and experiencing the final act has me completely reevaluating not only how I feel about the remake trilogy. When I finished it I felt an emotional gut punch that left me unable to play any other game with any enthusiasm for a day or so. Not the way I was talking about earlier, but sort of the residual emotional drain afterwards when something impacts you deeply. It made me really want to go back and play the original again, though, as the first time I experienced it was sneaking into my sister’s room when she was out to quickly play it on the PlayStation her then boyfriend had gotten her (which she hardly ever played) at an age where I didn’t really appreciate the story.

Finishing Rebirth also has me reevaluating where it sits on my top 2024 list. I’ve edited my backlogged list to put it above Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth now at #2, just below Metaphor ReFantazio. This year, I hope to finish my second playthrough of that game, and then we can reevaluate if I still believe that was my number one game of 2024. Less on that and more on 2026, though. Let’s start with the negative. After all the drama around Yakuza Kiwami 3, I returned my preorder to Steam and used that money to buy Resident Evil Requiem instead. Maybe I’ll play Kiwami 3 in three years when I buy it for fifteen dollars on a Steam sale, but right now, not spending my money with RGG is the only real power in this situation I have. It was the right choice because if not for one other game, RE9 might be my game of the year.

Requiem feels like a love letter to a lot of the previous Resident Evils. Grace’s section feels like they included a lot of what was best from seven and eight. Now, while I don’t hate Ethan Winters, Grace might be the best Resident Evil character in many iterations, and her as a protagonist in the more survival horror section was excellent. As someone whose first Resident Evil game was four, I’m a huge Leon fan and was excited to see him return in the action-oriented sections. The Leon sections feel like a combination of the remakes of two and four. My one criticism of the game is that just as I’m getting into the groove of one character, it switches to the next. I wouldn’t want a Resident Evil game to ever be long, but maybe an extra half-an-hour to an hour for each character would be good. The way it ends has me really curious about both the direction of the story of DLC they have planned and where the next game is going, as this feels like closing the book on a lot of the series’ past.

The game that supplants it and has been eating all my time, my surprise game of the year so far, Pokémon Pokopia. Combine Dragon Quest Builders, whose team worked on this game, Animal Crossing, and Viva Piñata with Pokémon. There is an element to this game that I think is missing in the main games. There is always a mini game that has you interacting with your Pokémon in the main games that is supposed to increase your bond with them. They’re not really characters or your friends, though. In a away the Pokémon are more like toys or tools that you use. This game makes them into real characters, since you’re a Ditto transformed into a human, you can talk to them. The premise is quite sad. All the humans have disappeared, and the Pokémon are missing. As a Ditto, you wake up and miss your trainer, so you transform into them and go around restoring Pokémon habitats where all of them seem to have been sleeping for a long time. A lot of them are talking about natural disasters hitting certain areas and humans running out of food or having to leave. I don’t know quite how it ends yet, but I get the feeling it’s not going to be one hundred percent a happy ending. I don’t think the humans are coming back, to be honest. It’s up to the Pokémon to rebuild the world, and rebuild the world I have been doing so for many hours. It’s now my most-played Switch 2 game, not counting the upgraded versions of Tears of the Kingdom, Breath of the Wild, and New Horizons.

The one thing I will say about it is I don’t know if I feel the pull of creativity with it as much as I did with New Horizons. Everything I do is to facilitate getting more Pokémon or putting my favorite Pokémon in a house I built. Once that is over, I don’t know if I’m going to want to just keep building and editing the towns for hours like I did with Animal Crossing. The effect both Resident Evil Requiem and Pokopia have had is to make me want to play the other games in the series. I interact with the Pokemon and I want to battle again. I visit Racoon City as Leon and want to be young Leon again on the first day on the job.