Jade City

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 20 – Deltajuly in the Summer of Kenny Omega

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

There have probably been four or five of these in my drafts since April, when I last updated, maybe more, nearly fully written, but a combination of things has taken my attention away from finishing editing. The Knicks in the NBA playoffs and winning the NBA Championship, the weather is finally getting warmer, and my carpal tunnel in my right hand is acting up. So in the different sections, I’ll give a brief summary of my April through June before I get to the main events of each section. I’m writing this one somewhere else rather than in front of my computer, which sometimes helps me focus through my ADHD. Let’s hop right into it before this becomes another draft I don’t publish. It’s been so long that I originally got the volume number wrong.

Books – In Between Several Books

Summary – Shadows of the Daemon Realm manga, from the author of Fullmetal Alchemist, Hiromu Arakawa, is excellent, though I’m only on Volume 5 so far. I got all my cohosts to read The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson; they enjoyed it, and we’re going to do an episode on it, to my delight. I have an ARC copy of The Thrice-Bound Fool by Christopher Buehlman I’m working through, and it’s nice to have Kinch as the main narrator again even though I loved Galva in The Daughters’ War

I’m usually reading two books at once, but besides The Thrice-Bound Fool, which I’m making through slowly, I’m actually in between books. For my birthday, I was gifted a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time manga just in time for them to announce the remake, so I’m thinking of starting that. It’s always interesting to see how game stories are changed in manga versus how they stay the same, such as in the Persona 5 manga adaptation.

Also, since Alecto the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir’s publishing date is nowhere in sight, we’re starting our series on the Green Bone Saga for the podcast, so I’m excited to do a close reading of Jade City and the rest to really get into the nitty-gritty of that series, which is far different from A Chorus of Dragons and The Locked Tomb. It also allows me to read the special editions I bought last year that are so nice. I am expecting some big book mail this summer from Backerkit and Kickstarter so I’ll probably post about those as soon as I receive them. The whole *gestures to everything happening in the world* of it all has delayed a lot of that stuff but I’m hoping it comes soon.

Wrestling – A Kenny Omega Summer

Summary – Despite my misgivings of Darby Allin’s promos, person, and character work, he had an excellent title reign with some of the best AEW TV matches. I usually switch between Knicks in the playoffs and AEW TV the last couple of years, sometimes watching both of them at once, but this Will Ospreay and the Death Riders story and MJF’s third title reign has been so fucking boring to me that I skipped most of the Dynamites and Collisions before Forbidden Door to watch the NBA. The Swerve/Ospreay interactions were the most I’ve enjoyed Ospreay since his return. Despite all that, Double or Nothing was an all-timer and Forbidden Door was an excellent show, as most AEW PPVs not named World’s End are.

A JJ Williams photo

Kenny Omega, The Cleaner, The Belt Collector, The God of Pro Wrestling, and The Best Bout Machine is once again AEW Men’s World Champion and it feels so good. I woke up the next day bright and early for someone who works overnights and was productive the whole day. You can probably thank Kenny Omega for winning the Men’s World Champion for this post right now. Let me be perfectly clear, I do not like MJF and probably never will again, and will not waste time with the details of why. However, he was excellent in this AEW Dynamite main event, keeping a lot of what I normally find frustrating with his matches now to a minimum. The idea of having this match here rather than on AEW Redemption has opened up a lot of possibilities for a Kenny Omega defense there that I’m excited for. I saw Rich Latta of One Nation Radio and the Social Suplex Network post an idea I can really get behind.

I think the match from All In: Texas was great, but it didn’t quite reach the heights I thought the two of them could, so the idea of running it back with a Kenny Omega victory in Canada sounds good to me. My ideal defenses if Kenny is going to have a short reign before dropping it at Wembley Stadium to Ospreay would be Kevin Knight, Andrade, and Bandido. We’ll see what happens, as I often say about wrestling.

On top of the Kenny Omega win, we got the Willow Nightingale return from injury after she had to drop the TBS title and bounce from the Owen Hart Tournament which was disappointing. Now she’s won the Casino Gauntlet and is going to face Thekla at AEW Redemption. It’s time to give Willow that big top star babyface push. That’s right, I think not only should Willow Nightingale beat Thekla at AEW Redemption but she should then go on to beat Mercedes Mone at All In. I can see the pathways they might be heading towards, Willow having the same struggles she had as TBS Champion. She wins the big belt, loses to Mercedes, then gets her redemption later on, and if they go that way I won’t be mad or upset because I do think Mercedes is up there with Manami Toyota as one of the best women’s wrestlers of all time, but lets switch it up with Willow as the victor before we eventually put the Women’s World Title on Mercedes.

Games – Deltajune becomes Deltajuly

Summary – The Wind Waker and Tears of the Kingdom are still excellent. I think I like Tears of the Kingdom even more now than when I originally played it in 2023 because that year was so stacked with games that I felt I had to finish it before all the other games came out. The Wind Waker is still my second favorite Zelda of All Time and having never experienced the HD version on the Wii U I’d be willing to pay for it on Switch 2. Star Fox (2026) adds a lot of great character development to the main characters, not in the original game, plus Star Fox 64 has always been excellent, hope this leads to more Star Fox games in the future. I’m really excited for the Ocarina of Time remake and Persona 4 Revival, but I want to see more of the Ocarina of Time remake.

Deltarune‘s Chapter 5 has been released one year after Chapter 3 and 4 and it is equally excellent. It has some of the best gameplay in any chapter yet. Emotionally, it doesn’t quite hit as hard as Chapter 4, but to say it has none of those hard-hitting story beats would be lying. Some of the reveals are devastating, but Toby Fox really sold this as the Fun Gang’s (The $!$? Squad in my save) So we’ve finished watching a movie, show, wrestling, etc and I ended up streaming the end of Chapter 3 to them one night. It was compelling enough that my friend wanted to see it from the beginning. So that’s what I’ve been playing in July, allowing them to choose most of the choices that Kris will get, which has led to me seeing scenes and dialogue I’ve never seen before, as I tend to make the same choices over and over again. Hearing the excitement about the story from someone else has been so much fun. We are at the beginning of Chapter 4 now, my favorite chapter, and I’m looking forward to them seeing even more of the game. I’m ready for Chapter 6 to wreck me with heartbreak, and if I have to be devastated, so do they. Until next time.

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 3 – The One About Hollow Knight Silksong.

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

Hey, it’s my website, I’m changing the order this week with Silksong as the main event.

Books – Green Bone Saga Gold Edition by Fonda Lee

I’m still reading through those two Anthony Ryan books from last week. I won’t like, I’ve only had Silksong on the brain since it released.

Not only that, but I will say, I splurged a bit and bought these fancy hardcover editions of Fonda Lee’s Green Bone Saga that just came out. Jade City was a book I’ve owned since it came out, but kept putting it off to my to-be-read pile until, I recall, 2021, when the final book in the series, Jade Legacy, came out. Urban Fantasy is not usually the flavor of fantasy I’m into, but this is one of those series, like A Chorus of Dragons, The Murderbot Diaries, or The First Law, that instantly clicked, and I knew instinctively, “Oh, this is going to be one of my favorite series ever after this.”

It’s a family crime drama with magical Jade that gives you superhuman abilities that result in some of my favorite fight scenes in fiction. The characters are beyond flawed, to put it more bluntly, they’re fucked up, and you’ll love them even when you hate them or the decision they make.

Wrestling – Third Stretch is the Charm for Kenny Omega

All the complaints about the closing angle for Kenny Omega this week on AEW Dynamite, I read, were fairly on point about not having good payoffs. The Elite sent him home last year, with Jack Perry bragging about it. Kenny returns and doesn’t immediately retaliate against the Elite. Jack Perry is also nowhere to be found. Okada and Don Callis attack him again before their match at All In brutally, with blood coming out of his mouth, Kenny ends up losing and taking about a month and a half off. Last week, it was hype city for a Hangman and Kenny reunion. Now, the Don Callis family, namely Kyle Fletcher, beat the shit out of him, and he’s stretchered off with Hangman distraught. I am unsure of where this is leading for Kenny Omega, and yet, I must admit, I still remain invested in this one, probably because Hangman was involved, to be honest. Will it have a proper payoff? I’m not sure, but if All Out ends up being AEW World Champion Hangman Adam Page vs TNT Champion Kyle Fletcher, it’d be a funny little parallel to last year’s AEW World Champion Bryan Danielson vs. TNT Champion Jack Perry. I think, if they had set this up maybe a week or two before the reaction, it might have been better because more time for Hangman and Kenny to really be seen together, maybe more than one match with some talking segments, whether backstage or in the ring, would really have had people on the hook. If Kenny comes back and does not interact with Hangman upon his return, I’ll likely be more critical of this whole scenario. We will see.

Games – Hollow Knight Silksong

It’s finally arrived, Hollow Knight Silksong is real, it’s finished, it’s released, it’s everything I wanted from a sequel to Hollow Knight, and it’s difficult as hell. I thought, hey, I’ve played a fuck ton of Hollow Knight, how hard could the sequel be? The beginning of the game does not ease you in but throws you into the deep end. I really don’t want to go on and on about the difficulty, because that is what so many people are talking about. Act I is difficult because you start with basically nothing, but you get new upgrades and new abilities and learn the patterns of the enemies as well as your own combat. It’s kind of like learning a fighting game in that way. Bosses doing double damage, something only late-stage Hollow Knight bosses did in the first one, was rough, as well as those rooms that were basically a gauntlet of dudes. In fact, I find those gauntlet rooms far tougher than the bosses. I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s my horrible eyesight, but I’ve always had trouble seeing the whole screen. It’s why I have such trouble with that piano mini-game in Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. Wait, no, it’s probably not an issue of seeing the whole screen but having to be closer to the screen because my vision is not great. The platforming, though, specifically the red flowers in Hunter’s March, that’s the kind of thing in Hollow Knight that I loved. Sure, you might mess up and die, but once you find the rhythm, especially with Hornet’s diagonal down attack, it’s really fun. I’ll tell you now, you’d better learn to do it because you’re going to be doing it a lot and in far more treacherous areas than Hunter’s March.

“This is probably my game of the year,” he says about Silksong, like he said about Deltarune Chapters 3+4, Donkey Kong Bananza, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves. The First Berserker: Khazan, Monster Hunter Wilds. I probably would have said it about Shinobi: Art of Vengeance too, if I hadn’t already known SIlksong was coming out. However, I will say, more than any other game I’ve just mentioned, except for maybe Donkey Kong Bananza, Silksong has caused me to lose time in the joy of playing it. I’ll sit down and be like, I’ll just play for an hour, and suddenly the sun has gone down, and my stomach is rumbling for some reason. People hate this, but like Dark Souls, both Hollow Knights have this atmosphere of melancholy and a society decaying that draws you in, but the bugs are all so joyful, cute, and bring a smile to your face plus, and I love the stories of FromSoftware games don’t get me wrong, the stories of both games are much more straightforward with all this lore underneath you can choose to what level you want to engage in. Silksong‘s plot is basically Hornet gets kidnapped, taken to this far-off land called Pharloom, and has to find out who and why by ascending to the Citadel above. It’s much more complicated than that, but that’s basically all you need to know to start the game. The NPCs in this game, I love them, all these little bug friends of mine, especially Sherma, whom I just want to make all their dreams come true. His little song for the gate I will never forget.

I love them.

— Josh M. (@fouroffivewits.pizza) 2025-09-05T01:39:51.761Z

Metroidvanias (No, I will not nor will I ever call them Search Action games) have to be one of the best genres of video games, top 5 easily. The satisfaction of finding a secret, beating a boss, getting a new upgrade, discovering new areas you didn’t know about before, and going back to areas with secrets you couldn’t get before is one of the most satisfying things in video games. Games are all about the illusion of achievement, and Metroidvanias nail that to a T. I know that now that I said Hollow Knight: Silksong is my game of the year, I just know Supergiant Games is going to announce Hades 2 is coming out of Early Access and into version 1.0 before the year ends. Still, I think, as of right now, Hollow Knight Silksong might be one of my favorite games I’ve ever played. No doubt, I will still be playing it and talking about it next week.

If you want to see my current Games of the Year + games of 2025 I want to play, you can check out my full Backlogged list here. My Top 10 is as follows

  1. Hollow Knight: Silksong
  2. Donkey Kong Bananza
  3. Deltarune: Chapter 3+4
  4. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
  5. Shinobi: Art of Vengeance
  6. Doom: The Dark Ages
  7. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
  8. The First Berserker: Khazan
  9. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4
  10. Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii