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.