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Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter: An incredible remake of one of my favorite games of all time, with combat mechanics cherry-picked from across the series, a light dusting of new sidequests and dialogue, a solid new arrangement of the soundtrack (which can be reverted in the settings), and the most appealing 3D art Falcom has done yet. My only real complaints are localization quibbles; it’s annoying that GungHo changed a bunch of proper nouns and even pronunciations rather than maintaining continuity with earlier releases, as NISA did. But that’s not nearly enough to sour me on it—I’ve played the original Trails in the Sky through to the credits multiple times, and I’m thrilled to do it again.

Hades II: It’s still early, but I’m not as high on this one as I hoped I would be. The characters aren’t bouncing off each other quite as well; combat feels a little overcomplicated now; I don’t know that I wanted a wider variety of resource nodes to mine; I don’t even like the music as much. All that said, the core is still solid and it’s still a lot of fun to play. It’s just a victim of the incredibly high standards the first game set. If things stay as they are and my opinion doesn’t change as I play more, a slightly lesser Hades is not the worst place to be; even if my opinion improves, I can’t help but think I’d be more excited if a studio as talented as Supergiant had opted for something less iterative.

The Magician of Tiger Castle: Pitched as the first novel for adults from Louis Sachar (though personally I think it’s comfortably YA), this is a breezy fable about an immortal magician from a fictional European kingdom. It occasionally evokes Sachar’s magnum opus Holes, particularly in the way the plot jigsaws together, though with its own distinct, slightly sardonic flavor. I read through it in a single afternoon, grinning the whole time.

The Serviceberry: This is by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who you may know from Braiding Sweetgrass. It makes a straightforward and compelling case against the excesses of capitalism, using the reciprocal gift-giving of indigenous societies as her example and the nonhuman natural world as her metaphor. Kimmerer has a real talent for expressing subtlety with plain language, such that her points shine through without the prose feeling overworked.

Donkey Kong Bananza: Before release, my concern about Bananza was that each level would be like a big tub of sand that you’d have to slowly scoop out to find all of its collectibles. And while there is an element of that, they do a good job of minimizing how frustrating it can get with clever design—you rarely find yourself digging aimlessly in practice, unless you enjoy it. And there’s a top-shelf Nintendo platformer in there too! It’s not quite Odyssey or Galaxy, for my money, but it’s very good. This is the “launch window” title that the Switch 2 really needed, I think; man cannot live by Mario Kart alone. I just hope we don’t have another multi-year wait for Nintendo EPD’s next big blockbuster.

Umamusume: Pretty Derby: Yes, the horse girl one. A gacha game that’s themed around horse racing, filled with anime tropes, and also somehow an idol music thing feels like an almost radioactive combination—“a cigarette-themed slot machine,” as Jacob Geller put it. But I’ve been enjoying it so far, in the way that I enjoy lots of things that are probably bad for me, like fast food. I have a tolerance for gacha mechanics, but the fatal flaw for Umamusume will be the high time commitment: once the novelty wears off I’ll resent running its roguelike career mode every day, which is long even when fast-forwarded. When Genshin is fallow, I can do my dailies in five minutes and put it down…

Close to Vermeer: A documentary about an Amsterdam museum putting on a Vermeer exhibition. I know nothing about the museum world behind the scenes, so it was fun to see some of that here: the scale model of the exhibit they use to determine the layout, the staff testing out how far people ought to stand from the paintings, the sophisticated analytical techniques, the politicking required to borrow art from other museums. There was also a great subplot about the authenticity of certain Vermeer pieces that exposed simmering tension between various groups—collectors and curators, Americans and Europeans, scientists and aesthetes. Really enjoyed this one!

Mario Kart World: The game is fine. I’m ambivalent about many of the changes—increasingly so, as I spend more time playing—but it’s still Mario Kart, and it’s still fun. The new Knockout Tour mode is the clear highlight of the gameplay additions, and it feels appropriately chaotic. The real unexpected coup here, though, is the soundtrack. It features hundreds of tracks spanning forty-plus years of Mario’s history, all with fantastic new arrangements. (I especially love the ones that treat Mario themes as though they’re jazz standards.) Forget an $80 game—they could have sold me an $80 CD collection.

Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time: I remember being charmed by the original Fantasy Life, though I never finished it for some reason (Dragon Age: Inquisition, probably). Fantasy Life i has much of that same charm, as long as its grind falls on the right side of pleasant for you—it has a cornucopia of progress bars to fill up, and a variety of enthusiastic celebrations on completing them. It also has a bit of a kitchen-sink design philosophy–in addition to the expected crafting and action RPG stuff, there’s also an Animal Crossing-esque town builder, a lightweight open-world area, and a roguelike dungeon mode. It’s a lot!

Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma: This was my actual favorite game of the month. I’d bounced off of Rune Factory in the past, but here everything came together: the story and characters all clicked for me, the combat was at worst passable, and its basis in Japanese folklore and aesthetics felt fresh compared to the Western fantasy mishmash that many of these games use. I worried that the farming bits might involve too much tedium, but it’s surprisingly incidental–the town-side gameplay is really more of a management thing, where you assign tasks to your villagers and then help out as you see fit. Highly recommended!

BEATrio: A new jazz album—superficially Latin, perhaps, but wide-ranging in practice—featuring Béla Fleck, Edmar Castañeda, and Antonio Sánchez. Fleck was my entry point here, and while I’m used to unusual instrumentation from his projects, the sheer audacity of banjo plus harp still took me by surprise. But as usual he’s gathered virtuosic, world-class musicians that somehow make it all hold together. I think it’s my favorite collaborative work of Fleck’s since The Enchantment with Chick Corea.

Vesper Flights: An essay collection from 2021 by Helen Macdonald, their followup to the excellent H Is for Hawk. I’ve noted before that “nature essays from writers who are also poets” is a subgenre I seem to especially enjoy; see also Mary Oliver’s Upstream, say, or Kathleen Jamie’s Surfacing, or Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders. As expected Macdonald’s particular interest here is birds and she writes beautifully about them, with the title essay a particular highlight.