Tag: video games

Nioh 2 Yokai, Loosely Ranked by How Much I Hate Them

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

SHUT UP I’M ON SPRING BREAK

I was loosely keeping track of how many times I said “God, I hate these things,” while I was playing Nioh 2 yesterday. It was … a lot. I love the game, but I have some serious enmity toward some of the monsters. Let’s do an absurdly detailed post about it!

PART ONE: YOKAI I DON’T ACTUALLY HATE ALL THAT MUCH:

DWELLERS: Most of this first category is yokai that frankly should never, ever kill you. Are they going to? Yes. Yes, they are. But dwellers, both of the smaller and larger size, are usually pretty harmless unless they’re throwing firebombs at you and you haven’t noticed them yet.

SKELETON WARRIORS: Again, either size, neither of them should be killing you. The ones with spears can be kind of dangerous because that spear usually hits harder than you’re expecting it to, but it’s easily dodged. No biggie.

SPIDERS: I mean, they’re spiders. Don’t attack them from in front, you’ll have a bad time. Other than that … eh.

ABERRANT SOLDIERS: Can be highly annoying at range, but they’re still cannon fodder and they’re generally pretty fair. Slightly more annoying than skeleton warriors and dwellers because they block.

KAPPA (NORMAL): Damn near harmless on their own, but they run away and chasing them down can lead you into other trouble.

SNOWCLOPS AND ONE-EYED ONI: They hit like a truck but their movesets are predictable and they can be blinded. These can be dangerous in smaller rooms, especially if the camera goes nuts on you, but they shouldn’t be a problem unless they’re surrounded by other enemies.

YOKI: Man, these were trouble early on in Nioh 1. Now only the kusarigama variant should even be hitting you, although the new four-swing move they’ve given the ones with the katanas can still catch you if you’re too close when they start attacking. They feel pretty defanged now, though.

ONI-BI AND BIWA BOKU–BOKU: Not dangerous, really, but the Biwa Boku-bokus are always hidden and an endless stream of Oni-bi can be trouble if you’re fighting something else. Plus, in Nioh 2, the fire ones explode after you kill them sometimes, which teleports both way higher on the I Hate You scale.

ENKI: Basically a Yoki but in the shape of a gorilla and with longer-range moves, the Enki are actually kind of fun to fight but their damn grab and stomp move is so fucking disrespectful that I kind of hate them but only a little.

YAMANBAS: Actually, these aren’t that bad. You don’t want to get caught by surprise by them but they’re usually not too much of a threat unless there are other monsters around.

PART TWO: THESE THINGS ARE ALL ASSHOLES:

FLYING BOLT: An enemy that was significantly scarier in Nioh 1, so I have left-over enmity from that, but they’re much rarer in Nioh 2 and I tend to have flame available most of the time so it’s not as big of a deal. Still hate ’em though. (Also, I can not get this image to cooperate, and I’ve used two different pictures of these damned things. I don’t know why it’s being weird.)

GAKI: Properly fought, a Gaki can be disposed of in a few seconds. Which is why there are usually several of them, and they’re hanging from the ceiling to drop down on you and eat your face, or they eat each other and become Super Gaki, or they’re high up on a ledge throwing shit at you. Fuck them.

MAGATSU WARRIORS: I probably should hate these more than I do, but they’re pretty rare, and while they’re tough every one I’ve fought so far has been in a position where I could bring everything I had to bear on them and in a one-on-one fight they’re not that bad. I think if they were around more often I’d hate them more.

MUJINA: Damn near harmless except for the fucking heart attack I have every time one of these bastards jumps out of a Goddamned treasure chest.

WAIRA: Not especially tough, especially considering their size, but their grab attack is bullshit and they can tunnel underground, and they’re much faster than they look.

NAMAHAGE: I hated these a lot more in Nioh 1, where they didn’t show up until the DLC, and I feel like they’ve been defanged a bit in this game, but they can throw shit at you now, and I never remember they can do that until there’s a hatchet protruding out of my Goddamned forehead. Plus I still have leftover Nioh 1 trauma from these things so I always forget they’re mostly easier to handle in this one.

ONYUDO: My single most-feared opponent in Nioh 1; Onyudo and their stupid tongues are pushovers in Nioh 2. Hang back, wait for burst attack, Brute counter, seeya. Still hate ’em a lot, though, but it’s maybe a bit less warranted in this game than it was in the previous one.

NURIKABE: Most of the time, fights with Nurikabe can be avoided since you can usually gesture your way past them. Nurikabe are high on my hate list because they usually have shit hidden behind them, and the last thing I do before finishing any main mission is spend a month looking for the one damn wall in the entire level that has Goddamned eyes on it. Plus, if you do have to fight them, they’re tougher than they ought to be.

UBUME: Ubume aren’t actually that dangerous or hard to kill, but the central conceit of the damned things is that they’re yokai that were formed from grieving mothers, and about half of them are carrying around a baby-shaped chunk of spirit stone that you have to shoot if you want to actually fight them. I’m all for the occasional dead baby joke but man this is bullshit.

LESSER UMI-BOZU and TOXIC SLIME: Sneak-attack ass motherfuckers, all of them, and I hate them, especially since I should be smart enough to look for the sonsabitches by now. Slightly lower on the list because pretty much any fire attack will kill them; they’re a huge pain in the ass if you happen to be out of fire, though.

ONE-EYED IMP: Awww, isn’t he cute? NO, he’s not fucking cute, he’s going to swat you with his goddamned tongue and then jump away toward fifteen other enemies and then while you’re dealing with those he’s going to turn into a goddamned One-Eyed Oni and mudboot-stomp your ass when you’re not looking. Fuck these things.

MITSUME YAZURA: Sure, he’s all heads and legs, and that’s fun, but I hate these things just because they look so much scarier than they actually are until you get complacent, which they have a magical power to make happen, and then they grab you with their feet-hands and hold you over their many heads and rip you in half, and fuck these things.

KARAKA: Not terribly hard to defeat, since their distance attacks can all be interrupted, but their habit of masquerading as fucking torches is really Goddamned annoying and they tend to pop up at the worst possible moment. These things raining fire on your ass while you’re trying to deal with something more immediately dangerous is hellaciously annoying.

PART THREE: FUCK EVERYTHING ELSE ON THIS LIST, THESE MOTHERFUCKERS ARE ALL ASSHOLES AND SERIOUSLY, FUCK THEM:

MOTHERFUCKING WHEELMONKS: I hated these motherfuckers in Nioh 1, and now they can jump. They move at the speed of light, they are the only enemy in the entire game who can hurt you just by touching you, and half the fucking time when I get killed by these bastards I hadn’t even seen the fucking thing yet and it just buzzsawed me into a corner and killed me dead before I knew it was there.

GODDAMNED ROKOROKUBI: I’m not even sure these assholes are supposed to be top-tier enemies, but something about them makes them impossible for me to fight, and a single rokorokubi can take me down under damn near any circumstances at all if I’m not either incredibly careful or using massive overkill. Their grapple attack sucks, occasionally mistaking one for human sucks, their range sucks, they suck. Fuck rokorokubi.

PIECE OF SHIT TESSOS: They fucking fart on you and then you can’t heal properly. Another fast-as-fuck enemy, they’ve also got this bullshit Sonic the Hedgehog spin around like a crackhead move that I hate, and they even have the fucking temerity to have a weak spot in their tails that I can somehow still never take advantage of. I think these are my most hated of the enemies new to Nioh 2.

PUNK-ASS FUCKING KARAKASA UMBRELLA MOTHERFUCKERS: Yes, that’s a fucking umbrella standing on a foot with an eye. These goddamned things have no excuse to be as annoying as they are because they’re tiny pieces of shit and oh also they’re umbrellas and if you don’t know how personally insulting it is to be killed in half a second by a fucking possessed demon umbrella then imagine how mad you get when it happens twice in a row.

GARBAGE MONSTER RED KAPPAS: Neither harmless or as useful as the regular kappas, no, these assholes jump on your back and break your spine when they aren’t Koopa-ing around on their goddamned shells faster than you can keep up with them. Dicks, all of them.

THESE FUCKING KARASU TENGU BASTARDS: I hate them. I hate them I hate them I hate them I hate them I hate them. I hated them in Nioh 1 and I hate the assholes now. This game is set up poorly to be able to manage monsters that can fly, and the fact that if they look at you crosseyed you lose 2/3 of your health does not help. Fuck fucking tengus. They’re assholes, all of them.

MOISTENED BINT NURI-ONNA: Wait, did I say tessos were my least favorite new enemy? No, fuck that, there are at least two that are worse: Goddamned Nuri-Onna, for starters; these assholes can hide on ceilings, under water, have long range, a grab attack, eat your face, and God help you if you miss a burst attack and get hit by their fucking paralysis vision. Fuck that. These can be handled if you know they’re there, and don’t tend to have a ton of stamina, but that just makes it more frustrating when they kill the shit out of you.

CHEAP, LYING, NO-GOOD, ROTTEN, FOUR-FLUSHING, LOW-LIFE, SNAKE-LICKING, DIRT-EATING, INBRED, OVERSTUFFED, IGNORANT, BLOOD-SUCKING, DOG-KISSING, BRAINLESS, DICKLESS, HOPELESS, HEARTLESS, FAT-ASS, BUG-EYED, STIFF-LEGGED, SPOTTY-LIPPED, WORM-HEADED SACK OF MONKEY SHIT IPPON DATARAS: Eh, maybe they’re not that bad.

6:53 PM, Tuesday April 7th: 387,547 confirmed infections, 12,291 Americans dead.

April 6, Status Report

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized2 Comments

…because everything lengthy I might want to write fills me with horror, have a Random Bits post:

  • HEALTH UPDATE: I have not taken any medicine for the last several days and woke up this morning without having a coughing fit. I also made it through last night without getting up and having to blow my nose or wipe anything disgusting off of my face. I’m still coughing occasionally so I’m not 100% yet but my going-on-five-weeks-long Upper Respiratory Thing appears to be on the wane, finally.
  • So I’ll have COVID-19 by next week.
  • Speaking of: I left the house today for only the second time since March 16, to take some stuff to (and have lunch with) my dad and then to get some banking stuff done that could not be done over the phone or the Internet. The last time I left was also to see Dad. He’s only leaving the house once a week to go to the grocery, so we have lots to talk about.
  • That was sarcasm. I never have anything to talk about anymore. I play Nioh 2 and read books. That’s it.
  • SPRING BREEEEEAAAAAAAAKKKKKKK!!!!!
  • Gas was $1.23 a gallon. I’m going to put the boy in the car tomorrow and drive to Kokomo and back just for the sheer hell of it.
  • I was wearing this shirt the last time I posted a picture of myself to the blog. That was not intentional.
  • I never mentioned it here, but school is officially E-learning-only for the rest of the school year, so the next time I will be expected to “go” to a “job” will be in August. Which is insane. I am actually planning on spending some time over this week trying to figure out how to make my lessons more engaging for the kids who are still bothering to tune in.
  • Obligatory reminder: I am incredibly lucky in that between my job, which can be done from home, and my wife’s job, which is in the health care sector, we are reasonably well insulated from the utter carnage that the job market has turned into. I was planning on spending the summer at least casually looking around; that plan is no longer in effect. I will return to my current job this fall unless I am actively prevented from doing so, which given my seniority can be reasonably described as unlikely.
  • CURRENTLY LISTENING TO: Billie Eilish. Her *first* album, which tells you that I own her first album.
  • SPEAKING OF MUSIC: You may recall me being super happy about the new Pearl Jam album that came out … recently. How recently? I think it was in March, so somewhere between seven days and seventeen years. I haven’t mentioned it since. I won’t quite go so far as to say I was disappointed, but I was disappointed.
  • Wait.
  • Damn.
  • Gigaton is, so far, an intensely forgettable album, which is not a word I’ve used to describe many Pearl Jam albums. It deserves a couple more listens but I do most of my music listening in the car, notwithstanding the current playing of Billie Eilish, and I haven’t been driving much.
  • There is a song on the album called Comes Then Goes, which sounds so much like Parting Ways, released in 2000, that I’m actually weirdly angry about it.
  • I am listening to old Billie Eilish instead of new Pearl Jam, though, which probably should tell you something.
  • Related: I’m way behind on my podcasts, and I even found a couple of new ones to look into that I haven’t found time to listen to, because my “listening to things” time is disrupted.
  • VAGUEBOOKING: If you’re going to write speculative fiction, your world needs to have some rules to it, even if the characters don’t necessarily know what they are. You gotta spend some time on worldbuilding. Anything Can Happen At Any Time isn’t a plot, it’s a 12-year-old’s power fantasy.
  • UTTERLY UNRELATED: I have said good things about Daniel Ford’s Jack Dixon detective series, which I’ve read the first book from and am eagerly anticipating the release of the second. I recently finished the first book of his epic fantasy Paladin Trilogy, which is already interesting just because who the hell writes both detective novels and epic fantasy? and is also interesting because, well, it was interesting. I liked ORDINATION a lot and you should check it out.
  • The Billie Eilish album is over so now I’m listening to Pearl Jam. The back half, specifically, because why not.
  • I miss Bill Withers.
  • I keep almost writing a post about Tara Reade. If you know who Tara Reade is, you can probably guess why I haven’t written the post yet, because it’s going to be a damned tricky thing to write one way or another.
  • I would like to remind everyone that I wanted to vote for a woman.
  • Indiana still doesn’t vote until fucking June, which is still two months away. So my opinion about Tara Reade, regardless of where I land on it, may not be relevant anyway.
  • As of right now, 5:41 PM on Monday April 6: 356,942 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the United States, and 10,524 deaths.
  • AN HOUR AND TEN MINUTES LATER: I finished Gigaton and have been listening to Binaural. My god, what a fucking amazing album Binaural is. Also, an additional 257 people have been reported dead in America while I’ve been sitting here listening to music.
  • If you happen to have noticed the headline change, it’s because I popped over to Scalzi’s site and saw this, and feel like since I saw the article yesterday I accidentally stole the post title. So it’s different now.

Nioh 2: Halfway Done Review

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

I’m in the neighborhood of a third to halfway through my first playthrough of Nioh 2, and to a very real extent I don’t even need to write this review, as it doesn’t take long to say “Other than the inventory system the game is damn near perfect, and I’m used to the inventory system by now.” Like, that’s the review. Nioh is one of my favorite games of all time– it’s kind of amazing how many of those games I discovered during this console generation– and the sequel improves on the original in damn near every way, adding a ton of new enemies, a few new overlapping systems, a couple (not as many as I’d like, which might be my only complaint) of new weapons, and other than that just keeps everything rolling. The original game’s horrifying, punishing, kill-you-in-a-second-if-you-stop-paying-attention difficulty is still there, for sure, and the boss fights so far have been really satisfying. About half of them I’ve managed to pull off within a couple of attempts, and the other half have been those great kind of boss fights that start off with getting obliterated in seconds without laying a finger on anything and then you just keep learning patterns and getting better until you win. The fact that I don’t have to be back to work for five weeks and I still wish I had more time to play should tell you something. I suppose it’s always possible the back half could go repetitive and dull, but I doubt it; everything’s been amazing so far.

Finally getting around to wiping the hard drive on my old iMac– or, at least, I’m staring at it as it slowly reformats itself. The computer has been replaced long enough that the computer I replaced it with has been paid off, but is still sitting, forlorn, on my desktop waiting for me to do something with it so I can have it recycled. I need to get the office under control– my wife pointed out that there was a litterbox clearly visible in the background of one of my instructional videos the other day, and I actually started one of them with the words “Welcome to my filthy office!”

That’s gotta stop, and the first step to getting that done is reclaiming the desk so that I can take everything else that used to be on the desk and put it back, which will, along with some heavy decluttering, go a long way to making the room look a lot better. Again, I’m off for weeks. It’s not like I don’t have time.

And we’re off!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching, video games1 Comment

School will be open on Monday, as apparently they’ve decided to break from past practice and send computers home with the 3rd-5th graders, requiring a whole lot of people to spend time disassembling computer carts today. Starting Tuesday, we are closed for “at least” two weeks, and seeing as after the third week we have Spring Break anyway I suspect we will not be returning for it. So there’s a very good chance that I’m about to be off work for a solid month, expected only to produce e-learning assignments and lectures for students who will not do the assignments and not view the lectures. I’m considering making one of them a profanity-laced tirade just to see if anyone notices. Since my kids don’t need to come to school to pick up Chromebooks, and since no one with any sense is going to send their kids to school under these circumstances (one single day followed by two weeks off, in the middle of a pandemic?) I expect to have less than 25% of my students in the building and I have no plans to actually provide any instruction. Pretty sure it’s going to be completely pointless to even try. I’ll spend Tuesday at home recording lectures and putting together simple assignments, and that’ll be that until April.

I guess it works out for me that Nioh 2 came out today, then.

The original game ate my goddamn life when it came out. Ate my goddamn life. I think I’ve got … 200 hours in it right now? More? I’m scared to look, but it was the only thing my PS4 was for for months after it came out. I put about three or four hours into it today (note that today was the last day of the 3rd quarter and a teacher record day, so the kids weren’t at school and I ducked out early once I finished everything I had to do) and I see no reason to believe that it’ll be of any lesser quality.

Oh, right, and I’ll have the boy with me the whole time too, because he’s also off until April. I have to feed them every day, right? That’s how that works, with kids?

In which here we go again

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, video gamesLeave a comment

Warning: video game nerd content higher than usual in this post. Please avoid if necessary.

So I’m playing through Nioh again. This game got months of dedicated play when it first came out, and improved my skills to the point that after I beat it I was able to go back and play through the entire Dark Souls/Bloodborne sequence and beat all four of them as well. Nioh is, to my estimation at least, easily the hardest of the five games. You may recall me devoting a post to the day I finally beat Yuki-Onna after literally respeccing my character twice and an unprecedented several months of attempts. And it turned out that the ninjutsu tree was absolutely necessary to get through the rest of the game– the bosses in this game are stupid hard, and I was only able to beat most of them by cheesing the shit out of them with shuriken and kunai. It’s not unfair to say that I didn’t beat a single boss after Yuki-Onna without at least a little bit of blatantly exploiting the game mechanics.

Well, this time ’round I’m using the goddamn odachi, because I’m a glutton for fucking punishment apparently, and I’m reaching the point in the game where I run into Yuki-Onna again and where I hit a wall. The kusarigama/ninjitsu combo I used to finally get past her is all fast burst damage and long-range stagger, and the odachi is … not either of those things. The complete opposite of those things in fact. I’ve managed to blow past three of the bosses in the early game– Hiro-Enma, Umi-Bozu and the Goddamned raven tengu— who gave me hell the first time through, so hopefully I can actually beat her for real this time.

We shall see. I’ve got shit to do this weekend, so I don’t have a lot of time for weeping and gnashing of teeth and throwing controllers. Somebody’s going down, dammit.

EDIT: Got ‘er. Took maybe 10 minutes, half a dozen attempts, and during that time she one-shotted me at least three times. This may be the greatest day of my life.

In which I need a gas mask

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, life, video games1 Comment

A true fact about this cat, who suddenly figured out laps this afternoon and spent about an hour cuddling with the boy, who has been home sick from school for a couple of days: his shit stinks worse than the shit of any other pet, of any species, that I have ever had, and it not only fucks up huge chunks of my house to the point where I feel like we’re going to have to renovate our HVAC system to provide for greater air movement where we’ve got the litter boxes, it clings to him afterwards for a while, so if he uses the litterbox and then runs into the living room to demand scritches you will be able to tell where he has been. It is monstrous and terrifying and we are well beyond the point where I can chalk it up to him having been an outdoor cat and eating rats to stay alive. Dude’s been in the house for like two months now, there ain’t nothing in there but kibble and Fancy Feast. The other cats don’t stink like this. Not even close.

(The other cats are also female? I’m not sure if that matters. He’s fixed, at any rate.)

Today was the first day of this semester that I would characterize as a bad day. Not, like, by historical standards, or anything like that, and I mean a bad teaching day, as opposed to a bad my-mom-just-died-and-I’m-fucked-up-about-it day, but it’s actually surprisingly good news that it took this long. That’s all I have to say about it; there aren’t any interesting stories, really, but I thought I’d mention it.

In other news, in addition to fantasizing about writing another book (a short story! a microfiction! Fucking anything!) at some point in the future and fantasizing about eventually doing a podcast, a desire I have had for a couple of years now without the slightest inkling of a good idea for a podcast crossing through my brain, I have now decided that I want to do Let’s Plays for YouTube. I will never do this; to do it the way I want (discrete episodes, not livestreaming) requires far too much investment into equipment– I am fairly certain I’d need an entire new computer, for starters, because I don’t think there’s a good way to do video capture through my iMac, although I could be wrong– and frankly there is absolutely no demand for 43-year-old video game streamers. So I’m not going to do this, but it’s fun to toss it on the pile of other random creative bullshit that I’m not working on and watch it fester.

Meanwhile, I’m playing through Nioh again, because my career as a YouTuber should definitely start with games from four years ago, right?

Sure.

In which my priorities are screwed up and I don’t care

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, video gamesLeave a comment

I go back to work tomorrow, and I’m surprisingly unstressed by it, although I do have a little bit of work I need to do tonight. No, it’s every other thing in my damn life that’s causing all my stress right now; work this week is going to be a Goddamn refuge.

(Yes, I plan to pivot from that into complaining about a video game; brace yourself accordingly. Talking about anything Real is beyond me at the moment.)

So, yeah. Hollow Knight. You might remember my review of Salt and Sanctuary from a couple of months ago; this is a similar game both in style and structure and in that I downloaded it forever ago, took a shot at it, then walked away, and now I’m back and playing it again. I’ve put about 35 hours into it over Winter Break and right now my main feeling about it is Jesus how is this game so big how can I possibly not be done with this by now, combined with a weird sort of completionist impulse that is keeping me from simply beating the damn thing and being done with it. No, I want to be finished, but I want to 100% the sumnamabitch before I do that, and oh Christ there is so much to do. Don’t get me wrong, I’m having fun, but I’m having the kind of fun that is at least 25% I need to be doing twenty other things right now while I’m having it.

Guilt-laced fun is the best kind, of course.

You may get a book review later, since I haven’t posted much in the last few days. I finished this yesterday and am still sorting out my feelings about it. Pay no attention to the fact that Amazon inexplicably thinks the release date is next summer; I assure you, the book is available.

In which I watched The Witcher

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, Television3 Comments

When did I watch it? Wecently.

Shut up I get to have my fun.

I’m coming at this show from sort of a weird angle: I had not read any of the source material (but I ordered three of the novels after watching, and am about a fourth of the way through the first one right now) and I have played one of the three video games and didn’t like it very much. So it’s kind of difficult for me to explain why I jumped at watching the show, particularly since I’ve never really been a fan of Henry Cavill either.

tl;dr you should probably watch this if you’re into This Sort of Thing, but don’t pay for a Netflix account for it or anything like that.

Good Stuff:

  • The show mostly dispenses with the rampant sexism and PoC erasure of the game, at least– I don’t recall a single use of the C-word, which is everywhere in the game, and the cast is reasonably diverse;
  • Henry Cavill is having the time of his life playing a man whose only emotion is exasperated— Geralt of Rivia is so over all of this shit, all the time, and it’s hilarious; I never thought I’d use the word “adorable” to describe Cavill but it’s entirely accurate through most of the show;
  • Anya Chalotra as Yennifer of Vengerberg also does a fantastic job in what is probably the show’s best role. Yen is a complicated, meaty role, and she digs deep into this character;
  • The majority of the smaller roles are well-acted as well. I don’t know any actor in this program outside of Cavill himself and I don’t know where they found all these folks but they’re great. Definitely worth singling out are Joey Batey’s Jaskier and Jodhi May’s Queen Calanthe, who I want to get a show all on her own;
  • Fun fact about Jaskier: this is the character who in the games and the English novels is called Dandelion. Turns out jaskier is the Polish word for “buttercup,” and the books and games made the decision to render the character’s name as a slightly less feminine-sounding yellow flower in English, but the show just stuck with Jaskier, which in English scans perfectly well as a fantasy name;
  • Netflix went all out with budget and FX; there’s a suspect mask early in the series but in general the show looks really good, and it’s well-directed across the board, with good action scenes.

The not as good stuff:

  • I’m willing to be patient with Ciri’s story while she becomes the character I know from the third game, but she basically just runs around in the woods uselessly for the entire season. She’s getting Sansa’s character arc from GoT right now without the endless, twisted speculation about when she’s going to get raped, and we’re very much in the “young and whiny and mostly pointless” phase at the moment. Hopefully this gets better quick in the next season;
  • Costuming is generally pretty good, but two exceptions are Henry Cavill’s wigs and the Nilfgaardian’s utterly ridiculous, impractical, please-stab-me armor;
  • The show follows three timelines separated by at least several decades, and wants you to figure that out rather than making it clear, and while I don’t mind TV that rewards the viewer paying attention it’s not at all obvious what the show gains from making all the time-jumping effectively a background detail. They also hurt Yen’s storyline quite a bit with this; she goes from a novice to someone who has spent three decades as a royal advisor between the earliest storyline and the middle one, and those three decades change her character quite a bit– it would have been nice to see some of it;
  • It’s possible that Cavill’s bad wigs are a timeline hint, but even if they are– I think one of them might be blonder than the others– they’re still terrible;
  • Related to the timeline issue, the show isn’t great at explaining things in general, and my wife spent most of the season asking me questions I couldn’t answer with my limited background knowledge. You’re asked to take quite a bit on faith and I think the show works much better for people with deep background knowledge, but it’s hard to say, since I don’t have it. One of the best things about GoT was the opening sequence, which effortlessly laid out the entire map and let you know where everything was without wasting show time on it. This show could have used something along those lines. At least sprinkle some maps into the background somewhere.

So, yeah: if you’re one of the ten Netflix subscribers who hasn’t checked this out yet, you should probably think about it. If you don’t have Netflix and are a big fantasy person, maybe think about it. If you’re neither, give it a pass. I’m in for Season Two and at least the first of the books, but I’m not gonna lose any sleep waiting for it either.