This one is a bit late, like three weeks late. I’ve been trying to collect my thoughts more in these pocket notebooks I carry with me before I transfer them to this site. I already have my September one written out on those notebooks, but I didn’t want to skip over what I felt were, well, important isn’t quite the right word, but significant observations about my hobbies in July and August. The subject of Retro devices, RetroAchievements, FromSoftware games, and the build to All In are subjects I could write extensively about and may do individual posts on here separate from this format. For now, here is the latest from me on books, games, and wrestling once again.
Games – RetroAchievements and FromSoftware
I’ve been playing the original Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door on my Retro Pocket 4 with RetroAchievements, a platform that provides achievements for classic games you legally own by purchasing them. This is one of my favorite video games ever (landing at #11 on my ongoing and ever-evolving Backlogged My 100 Greatest Games Ever list), and it has been so fun unlocking achievements for this game as I did with Super Mario 64 and Super Mario World previously. The game still looks and plays amazingly, to the point that I underestimated how much of a visual upgrade the remake is, so I couldn’t help but boot it up again on my Switch 2 just to compare them. As a wrestling fan, Chapter 3 is my favorite, and Vivian/Goombella are my favorite companions in that game. I eventually moved my save from the RP4 to my new Retroid Pocket Nova with an OLED screen, and it looks amazing.
The first time I beat Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition on PC was during a Steam Sale, so wanting to satiate my FromSoftware need further without going into New Game+, I bought Dark Souls II at a reasonable price. I hated it almost immediately. Nothing about Dark Souls II felt right to me, to the point I bounced off it fairly quickly. Over ten years later, after finishing Dark Souls Remastered this year on my PC and purchasing Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin because it worked on Steam Deck, I decided to give it another chance thanks in part to this Chris Person editorial on Aftermath, which I thought was excellent and pretty convincing.
https://aftermath.site/dark-souls-ii-is-good-actually
I can now say I’ve upgraded it from a game I didn’t like and bounced off of to one that’s pretty good but not my cup of tea. I still think it’s the worst of the FromSoftware Soulsborne games. The combat and the hit boxes feel off, the sound direction is not great, and some of the bosses are poorly designed visually and mechanically compared to their other games. Yet after playing through it, I think it’s still better than most action games. It still has a lot of bullshit, like adaptability as a necessary skill for dodge rolling being a near deal-breaker for the game, and they do not take the opportunity to balance it out with good shield mechanics. Most of the time I was playing Dark Souls II, I really wanted to quit playing it to play a different Souls game, and more than any other, it’s the one I’ve needed a guide for the most, not to find specific items but to just figure out where I was supposed to go next. It’s not that the game was overly frustrating; failing and learning is part of the fun of FromSoftware games, but it just doesn’t feel fun to do a lot of things in it. That being said, I do think a lot of the criticisms toward it are ill-conceived. The story is fascinating, Majula is an all-timer hub world, and Drangleic Castle is one of the sickest locations in this series of games. While I did technically beat it, I didn’t beat it in the way I would normally play one of these games. I rushed through it just to say I did it. I don’t really feel the want to go back, but Dark Souls II is definitely not a bad game, as most have said.
A feeling that could not be even more apparent when I immediately started playing Dark Souls 3 from the beginning afterwards. I do think so many hours of playing Elden Ring have made me better at these games because both Aldrich, Devourer of Gods, and Lothric & Lorian bosses I’ve struggled with in my last four or five playthroughs I fought with relative ease this time around. My latest playthrough may be the fastest I’ve ever gone through Dark Souls 3. I’m right at the end, about to fight the final boss and play the Ringed City DLC, when I had the intrusive thought of “Yeah, this game looks just as good as Elden Ring,” only to boot up Elden Ring to confirm my suspicions.
Yeah, I’m playing Elden Ring once again. Maybe playing too much, in fact, as not only was I wrong about Dark Souls 3 looking just as good, but I’ve got three playthroughs I’m switching between: my very first character when the game came out, a Dexterity build in NG+, a new playthrough on PC that is a Strength build with Greatswords, and after glowing reviews and some extra digital currency lying around, I picked up the Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition and am playing that all comfortable on the basement couch on my Switch 2. Playing through their previous games has given me a new appreciation for not only the scale and size of Elden Ring but also how they contained the magic of Souls gameplay into such a large, expansive world. Also, man, the game just looks so beautiful that you can really miss it when you’re fighting for your life and the runes you want to keep. There are still so many builds I’ve never done in Elden Ring before that’ll eventually lead this game to trouncing the original version of Skyrim as my most hours played on Steam.
Reading – Ana and Din Mysteries
My co-host Christina on No Page Unturned has been ringing the Robert Jackson Bennett bell for a couple of years now, but his books have never really drawn my interest. Then, when my other co-host Steph started reading The Tainted Cup just as Christina was reading the third book, A Trade of Blood, I decided fuck it and started reading the first book just as Steph was getting to the second one, A Drop of Corruption. I’ve been intrigued by the genre mixing of mystery and fantasy for a while, and was enthused with The Justice of Kings by Richard Swan and the characters of Sir Konrad Vonval and Helena solving mysteries before the books became about something else. The Ana and Din Mysteries are more of what I wanted in that. The world is fascinating to me; it’s walled in like the world of Empire of Exiles by Erin M. Evans, but with the threat of giant leviathans rather than changelings. Din as the Dr. Watson type but far more active with enhancements that give him perfect memory, plays off well with Ana, easily overstimulated due to the enhancements she was given that give her beyond-human deductive reasoning over the cases they solve throughout the empire.
I quickly devoured all three of these books, which is unusual for me. Often if I read too many books in a series back-to-back, I get restless partway through the second or third book and have to put them down. Now I’m highly anticipating the next Ana and Din mystery, which often start out with cases that seem like small incidents Ana can easily solve but quickly unravel into information that could have dire repercussions for the whole empire. Meanwhile, the worldbuilding around the empire as more information is unravelled points to a larger narrative arc and mystery that Ana and Din are slowly racing towards. Their dynamic does a lot for my enjoyment of the series starting out in that more familiar everyman dealing with an eccentric genius like Watson and Holmes, but Din’s character blossoms into more than just being the narrator telling Ana’s story. He gets exasperated with Ana’s proclivities, she gets annoyed at his disobedience with his free-time activities, and they both grow closer over the actions of the empire they live in. I could read one of these every year, and more fantasy authors should take the investigative approach for the plot.
Wrestling – ALL IN 2026
Let’s talk about builds. Kenny Omega vs. Will Ospreay was amazing, maybe one of the best AEW matches of all time, and because of that, no one is going to remember how weird and messy the build was, and it’s a damn shame that this is not the only instance of that happening. The character of Will Ospreay in 2026 has been weird all year since his return. I straight up have not liked his character, nor have I liked his story with the Death Riders, ranging from stupid to not making any sense to a waste of my time. When they dropped it after Redemption, I was enjoying the callout that Kenny Omega did to Ospreay’s behavior and was hoping for some kind of reckoning on that front, but Kenny was making too much sense and was risking getting cheered at Wembley, so they made him the Green Goblin once again with the belt. I hate that this mess is not going to be remembered and we’ll have to deal with the ebbs and flows of AEW sometimes having great builds and sometimes poor ones, with resulting PPV quality not being affected by the poor ones.
I hate that, but goddamnit, though, it was such an amazing match. Kenny Omega’s intro with You Say Run, and the Japanese voice of All Might from My Hero Academia brought tears to my eyes. I knew Ospreay was going to win, we all did, but I wish I could have gone into the match with more enthusiasm for him like I did in 2024 and 2025. What’s even more frustrating in just one promo leading up to All Out that Ospreay cut on Jon Moxley, he seemed back to that guy I cheered for in previous years. I’ll forever be frustrated with everything leading up to the All In main event from Kenny Omega’s loss to MJF, Ospreay riding with Moxley and the Death Riders, the title win not being at Redemption because [redacted], and the overcomplication of the Omega v. Ospreay build to get Ospreay cheered. That being said, I too am getting old and may also forget all about this in lieu of how great the match was.
Meanwhile, Mercedes Moné vs. Willow Nightingale killed it. This had a fantastic build that really made it clear these two are tied together in AEW history, but also that they don’t like each other for good reason. They certainly showed it in their match because these two women beat the shit out of each other. If it was anyone else besides Will Ospreay and Kenny Omega, I would have said this should have been the main event (like, for example, if it had been MJF in Omega’s place). These two are going to be eternal rivals in AEW. I will say, it does feel kind of bad that this has happened to Willow twice, one with the TBS title and now with the World Championship. Still, I am pretty confident Willow will get her time as the top babyface of AEW sooner rather than later.
The less said about Cope & Christian beating the Young Bucks, the better. Once again, old timers are going to find their way out of getting pinned, and if you’re aware of the Tag Team Championship match at All Out, they’re still not going to get pinned. So far in AEW, Cope has been pinned or submitted by three people in singles action: Jon Moxley, Christian Cage, and Dax Harwood. That’s it. I can’t wait for these two to retire now. That’s all from me, until next time.
