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I started watching Frieren because it was gaining a lot of attention and reputation. I've done this with many anime, but this time around I felt disappointed. I'll go ahead and warn you that I haven't finished the series and made it around half way through. Still, I feel like an anime of this supposed caliber definitely shouldn't be this difficult to stay interested in. I realized the problems are simple. The show doesn't really do anything new or interesting. The fantasy world is filled to the brim with cliches: mana, mages, spells, demons, dwarfs, elves, dragons, and so on. The messages that the story contains has no need for the fantasy world and would have been better if it were grounded in reality, so the fantasy world ends up feeling superfluous and a scheme to lure people in. The biggest problem has got to be the uninteresting characters. Both Frieren and Fern are quite stoic and their characters are written in uninteresting ways. Frieren acts more like an emo teenager than she does a person who's seen a thousand years, and Fern, while making more sense for her age, is still a boring character. Frieren feels like a character who's designed to be relatable to older teenagers and young adults, and it's more in a negative way. Frieren and perhaps Fern reflect the lack of gratitude in life, and a lack of experiencing hardships. They are not expressive characters and don't have anything fun or unique to say or do. As stated before, quite a stoic teacher and stoic apprentice. Stark is here too, and I do like that he has humility despite his strength, but I gotta say that's about all I have to say about him. Both Fern and Frieren show little struggle on their journey and kill high caliber demons almost without breaking a sweat or suffering moderate to severe injuries. The pacing is quite inconsistent as in one moment, the plot is developing, and in the next, it plummets into it's usual slice of life pacing.

This anime has great animation and music, and the messages are generally decent. I just find nothing intriguing from the main cast or world building. Frieren: Beyond Journey's End feels unimpressive as an animanga consumer for the past 5 years. The anime isn't widely appealing like Fullmetal Alchemist or Attack on Titan and it doesn't have the thrill of discovering a niche anime story. While there is a plethora of animanga I enjoyed more, here's a list of widely acclaimed manga that had more meaningful stories and better written characters: Real, Vagabond, Hajime no Ippo, Monster, Violet Evergarden, Vinland Saga. There are many more, but these come to mind seamlessly.

So I guess I'm stuck trying to figure out why the anime is hyped as much as it is. I've come to the conclusion that it's due to some type of bandwagon, given that this anime is quite a bit newer and seasonal anime tend to have TONS of bandwagons that die out after a while. There have been numerous reviews from content creators and high scores that provide the needed praise and hype for such a thing. That said, there's nothing wrong with liking it - and I believe there is a lot to like for those who enjoy cliche fantasy, good animation, meaningful messages, and relate to the characters. But it certainly is not among the best, as many reviewers will want you to believe.

The game starts with randomly selecting roles for the player. Each role does something different, for example sheriff finds out if someone is evil, and tavern keeper (escort) will prevent someone from using their ability. The problem with this game mostly comes out to balancing and randomness. There is a strategy employed by players called "vote for role". Players will vote you onto the platform to confess your role which is typically based on your number placement (i.e 1-15 or 15-1). It's random whether you'll get voted up, all though you could fake a claim early and that might or might not work out for you. It's random whether a townie will find you guilty in the night, whether evils will attack and kill you or find out you have armor, random whether you get roleblocked, random whether you die to vet, random whether you get jailed or killed by a vigilante. The game has way too much randomness to be considered competitive or even fun for that matter. It's essentially a board game at heart. There is some skill involved, but it's gotta be mostly random. Town is overpowered because there are many roles specifically designed to shut down evil roles. Neutral Killing is terrible and an instant loss, and neutral evil falls victim to the randomness issue. The game just sucks, and I've been playing it off and on for around 7 years now.

Smash Ultimate is a fun game with a lot of characters to choose from. There are characters from plenty of games both Nintendo and non Nintendo. Overall, there's not a lot to complain about when it comes to the base game and casual play.

The problem is that the online and some features seriously harm competitive play and limit casual play. Online doesn't have a whole lot of interesting or fun game modes - you are simply limited to FFA, 1v1, and teams. This is kind of okay and not really the main issue, but I think it's worth mentioning that most modes on local play are not available online. Competitive play is a mess online. First of all smash offline already has 99.6ms of input lag. So when you play online, the lag is being increased even more. There is no rollback and so moves that you input can be completely eaten by inconsistent connections. Input lag online would look like around 150ms or more. This makes the game pretty much unplayable competitively because different, non skill moves and strategies take hold of the meta. This is personally the worst online experience I've had with any game period (not that it is the worst ever made).

Another sad part is that there is no practical solution to this. You can play on emulators but it's seemingly against Nintendo's wishes and the matchmaking communities are monopolized by toxic and stereotypical discord mods.

Not only all of this is an issue but the fact that Ultimate has features pandering to less skill such as 50% or more characters having easy inputs and game plans, exploitable strategies (even some on a top level), macros, untechables, and broken DLC. The DLC is the worst offense. In Ultimate, every DLC is either a broken high tier or a boring mid-low tier. Steve is currently dominating the meta, Pythra are super strong, and Joker is quite strong as well. The DLC in this game aren't even that cool either. Almost all of it is either JRPG characters pandering to niche audiences or #AD nonsense. The meta is miserable, and you can know this since the top 3 are Steve, Sonic, and G&W. If you didn't know, Steve is super broken as I've mentioned with crazy frame data allowing for 70% true combos that don't require much practice, super good kill moves and throws, and highly exploitable neutral B. Sonic is a camping character - he gets 1 stock and he runs for the rest of the match. Game and Watch is a baby mode character - anyone could play him and get good at the game. He has a lot of annoying and boring moves that will frustrate you endlessly.

Playing competitively won't earn you a living. Nintendo doesn't want their players earning money off of smash competitive. So you're wasting your time with this game unless you really love it and are a good content creator.

Ultimately Smash Ultimate kinda stinks competitively. It's a great casual game, but for competitive, there are better games like melee (although kinda bad character balancing), rivals, and the soon to come out rivals 2. Save your sanity by playing something else or sticking to casual on Ultimate.