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Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 23 – Mastery, Mysteries and Omega

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / 1 Comment

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.

Dark Souls II still rocks and the haters can suck it. aftermath.site/dark-souls-ii-…

— Aftermath (@aftermath.site) 2026-08-01T01:01:24.171660+00:00

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.

Books, Games Wrestling Vol. 12 – Henceforth, I Claim Them As My Own!

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

There is a strong possibility that I will skip writing one of these next week and be back with the next one with some of my favorite books, games, and wrestling matches of the year, but I have a lot of work to do in other parts of my life, so one week off will have to do. AEW’s Full Gear is tomorrow, and I wrote down my predictions for the show, which takes up the bulk of this week’s entry.

Books – Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders

I don’t know how I feel about the current book I’m reading. Is it possible for sections of a book to both bore you and fascinate you at the same time? I’m forty percent in, and the intensity of the situation is just starting to rise. Jamie and Serena make a decision that feels like it’s going to have a ripple effect on the rest of the book, but I’ve grown used to seeking out fantasy books with more snappy beginnings. The best parts of the book so far is the backstory of Jamie’s parents, Serena and May, how they met, how they decided to have Jamie, the rough patch of their relationship, and how they came to a resolution to mend it. The parts that bore me and fascinate me at the same time are the parts too familiar to my own former academic life when I was writing a thesis.

The book Jamie’s paper is on has passages that appear in this one, where you can see, upon reading, what Jamie is seeing as it relates to her thesis. The academic life of Jamie made me think of working on my own thesis both the good and the bad but the problem for me is that style of the fictional book Jamie is writing her paper on is the kind that I was bored to tears of in College so while it is interesting to see what Jamie sees my eyes also glaze over imagining sitting in the library trying doing a close reading of this and finding other sources. I can sense a growing tension between Jamie and her wife, Ro, as Jamie and Serena grow closer as it relates to witchcraft and magic, but I need the book to begin pushing that snowball down the hill instead of packing it tightly at the top, trying to make the perfect snowball to keep me hooked on Lessons in Magic and Disaster.

Addendum: Ten minutes after writing this, I’ve reached an inflection point in the story that really has me turning pages, but I wish we had gotten here a bit sooner. Sometimes that is just how books roll.

Games – Chrono Trigger on Steam / Steam Deck

In 2018, when Chrono Trigger was announced, it was coming to Steam. I had no computer to play it on when it came out. I just would have to wait, but it was something I’d have to look forward to. Upon release, it was like looking into the window of people opening a Christmas present we all wanted and finding out their parents had bought a knock-off version instead. Of all the versions they chose to port to Steam, the publisher’s choice to port the mobile version with some weird upscaled resolution was one of the worst options they could have chosen. By the time I got to play it, though, Square had done everything they were going to do to fix the Steam version of Chrono Trigger to make fans happy, but the damage was done, and the fixes shouldn’t have been needed on the first play. They had an easy golden opportunity to not fuck up, and they royally fucked up. It’s still not the best way to play Chrono Trigger today. The fact that there haven’t been any ports of it since then is strange as well, when it could have easily been put on the Nintendo Switch like many past Square games before.

Now, years later, I am playing this version of the game with the classic resolution on my Steam Deck. I know I don’t have to play it this way. There are many other ways to play Chrono Trigger, even on Steam Deck, but I decided to see this version of Chrono Trigger to the end. It’s still Chrono Trigger, one of my favorite games and one of the greatest games of all time. Now, this may just be my perception, but Square Enix’s reputation for getting it right is much improved since February of 2018, even if some people didn’t like everything about Final Fantasy Rebirth or Final Fantasy 16. If, after the positive reception of Octopath Traveller 1 and 2, Live A Live remake, and the remakes of Dragon Quest I-III is a green flag at Square to release an HD-2D remake of Chrono Trigger, I hope they’ve learned their lessons from Chrono Trigger for Steam and pull off the once again golden opportunity for Chrono Trigger HD-2D on multiple platforms.

Wrestling – Full Gear Predictions

Full Gear is coming up, and I’m feeling more excited for the card than WrestleDream, though the Venn diagram of my brain has a larger circle for books and video games right now, and wrestling, plus the looming holidays just over my shoulder. Still, here are my predictions for the main card of the show. On the subject of the Death Riders, I think Pac is going to get a surprise upset over Darby Allin that’ll play into another surprise upset, which is Kyle O’Reilly defeating Jon Moxley in a No Holds Barred match. A stipulation is often used to soften the blow for a loss of one top talent while elevating another, but that’s not the main point. The main point is that Pac will have done something Jon was unable to do recently, and Kyle will have Moxley tapping out once again, ultimately leading to an angle with the Death Riders turning on Jon Moxley. I am unsure if this heel Jon Moxley has completely run its course, but turning him babyface once again isn’t a terrible idea. Who will lead the Death Riders in his absence? I am not 100% sold on Claudio leading the group, but the betrayal definitely feels like it’s coming.

Speaking of both stipulations and Death Riders, I think the Sisters of Sin will get a surprise win in the four-way tag match against the Babes of Wrath, Time Love Bombs, and Megan Bayne/ Marina Shafir to determine their own stipulation in a match against Willlow and Harley that’ll lead to a Sisters of Sin vs. Timeless Love Bombs final. When Kyle Fletcher vs. Mark Briscoe was announced, I was so sure this was the moment Mark would get the win over Kyle and Kyle would enter the C2 to be part of the Takeshita vs. Okada drama, possibly leading to Takeshita vs. Fletcher semifinal. Since Kyle announced that beating Mark would beat the record for most TNT title defenses, I’m not so sure. I’m currently 55:45 on Mark winning, but if Kyle won, it would not surprise me, but it would seem strange to do all that work on the Conglomeration music and video package only to take out one of their core members a month or so later.

What I am sure of is that Mercedes is not winning the world title at Full Gear. She has touched that belt one too many times in the last couple of weeks to be winning it. I like the idea of not only Kris finally showing her growth after a year of uncertainty, after a weird face turn when she lost to Mercedes twice by beating Mercedes, but the women’s world championship being out of her reach from both Toni and the person who beat Toni. Hangman will have a great match against Samoa Joe in a steel cage match and ultimately defeat him. Will Samoa Joe learn his lesson from it? How violent will it get? Will Hangman delve into the darkness within from a year ago to avenge his family against Swerve Strickland? These are the questions I am asking myself leading up to this match. I imagine either MJF or Swerve will return at this match. I’m leaning more towards MJF, which I am not looking forward to. World’s End has been my last favorite AEW pay-per-view two years running, and MJF beating Hangman at it would really put the nail in the coffin for that show for me. I’m still not sure if that is the direction they’re going, but it is an anxiety I definitely have as someone who is not a fan of Maxwell.

You know what else gives me anxiety, and I am not a fan of, but I am more sure of? FTR beating Brodido for the AEW World Tag Team Championships. Two things can be true. I can say I am enjoying FTR as heels so much more than faces, but I also never wanted them to be tag team champions again. Their heel work with Stokely has been far more entertaining, but them at the top of the tag division fills me with dread after their last tag title run, which was one of the most boring tag title runs in AEW history, and don’t quote that match against Bullet Club Gold to me. I am one of the few who actively dislike that match, so them beating Brodido, who has given that tag belts life again after a terribly boring run on the Hurt Syndicate, is not something I’m looking forward to. Especially if it leads to a returning Christian and Copeland feud, which has those two winning the tag belts off FTR. It would be a nightmare for me personally to have them be tag team champions and MJF Men’s World Champion at the same time again.

The only thing I’d have to comfort me is whatever Elite drama is cooking in Kenny Omega and Jurassic Express versus the Young Bucks and Josh Alexander. After a humiliating summer and fall Don Callis has come calling to help Matt and Nick’s money troubles. All they have to do is join the Don Callis Family and beat their former friends Kenny Omega and Jack Perry with one million dollars on the line. Here’s the thing: the Bucks don’t seem thrilled about joining the DCF, nor do they find Don or Josh particularly entertaining, but with Okada trying to encourage them and Don Callis’s bolstering roster putting them in a situation where they might not have a choice, I am not so sure where this is going. Perhaps the Bucks choose to join but lose the match, but Kenny offers the money back to Don to get them out of the Don Callis Family contract. Maybe the Bucks decided Josh Alexcander and Don Callis have given them a bit too much of what the rest of the roster found annoying about the Bucks in their EVP phase, and just choose Kenny by superkicking their tag partner and walk away. I’m not sure where exactly this is going, but I am here for it.