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Genshin Impact version 7.0: The initial goal in Genshin’s story was to visit each of the world’s seven nations; with this patch, we’ve arrived at the seventh. There is no chance that the game will end anytime soon given its continued success, but it does feel as though the story is reaching a climax. Perhaps this version, or the next, will resemble Destiny 2’s The Final Shape in retrospect: a satisfying enough narrative conclusion to provide an offramp for long-time players.

Hobonichi Techo 2027 Preview Forest: I’ve filled out a page of a Hobonichi planner every day for more than a decade now, and watching the new crop of covers and accessories roll in is still one of my favorite August traditions. Despite the increasing push towards big-name brand crossovers—this year features Hello Kitty, One Piece, and Moomin, among others—they’ve so far managed to evade the cynicism I feel towards similar trends in, say, Magic: The Gathering or Fortnite.

Arsenic and Old Lace: Working through more classics! Luckily filling in gaps in the film canon is not as terrifying a prospect as with a longer-form medium like video games, even if those gaps are numerous. The only Capra I’d seen before now was It’s a Wonderful Life so I don’t have enough context for any far-reaching claims, but this was a good one. Cary Grant’s hapless overwhelm was great, but it was Josephine Hull and Jean Adair as the Brewster sisters who really killed it, so to speak.

Tokyo Xanadu: I’m continuing my Falcom run from last month by replaying this oddball in preparation for its sequel, Kyoto Xanadu. On paper it seems like a marriage of Falcom’s strengths; in practice the combat is not quite Ys-quality and the narrative not quite Trails-quality, and it’s all held back by a surprisingly mediocre localization. The bones are still good, but I suspect it’s for the best that Kyoto Xanadu is attempting something significantly different; Ys and Trails have already converged enough that there may not be room between them for a game like this.

Fargo: Yes, the original Coen brothers film from 1996, not the television show! I hadn’t seen it since catching bits and pieces on TV as a kid, so all I had were hazy memories of specific scenes. (The wood chipper scene is admittedly hard to forget.) Turns out it’s still good! Macy and McDormand are both tremendous, there’s a steady stream of Coen-brand jokes and other slapstick nonsense, and it’s fun to bask in the accents and the “Minnesota nice” vibes. I’m not surprised that they wanted to do more with the setting, even years later and with different characters; it feels like a rich vein.

The month of Ys: I’ve been gradually picking through my backlog of unplayed or unfinished titles from Nihon Falcom’s Ys series, and this month I got into a groove and hammered through four games in a row (!) to complete the set. Based on my rough sense of fandom preferences I think I’m lower on The Oath in Felghana and higher on The Ark of Napishtim than average. All have their sharp edges, and none of them reach the heights of my favorite Trails games, but I’ve broadly had a good time. I’ve actually rolled straight into replaying Ys VIII, still my favorite in the series (perhaps because it’s the most Trails-like), so maybe the month of Ys is on its way to becoming the summer of Ys.

Will There Ever Be Another You: Man, no one writes like Patricia Lockwood. Following on from 2021’s already enigmatic No One Is Talking About This, an autofictional account of internet poisoning and grief, this sequel is even harder to pin down. I suppose you’d say it’s broadly about long COVID: the protagonist becomes ill in the opening scenes, and the structure of the book begins to unravel almost immediately. From then on, you’re in brain fog territory: confusion, murky insights, borderline incoherence. (“I wrote it insane and edited it sane,” Lockwood said in a New Yorker profile last year.) The effect is like catching glimpses of an oil painting through the dangling bits of its torn canvas.

Titanium Court: I admit I found the prerelease hype-building for Titanium Court to be a little insufferable; it was a lot of winking and nodding from the IGF crowd who wouldn’t even mention which game they were praising. Still, enough people whose opinions I value were into it for me to give it a whirl. And hey, it’s pretty neat! The gameplay is a clever hybrid of match-3 and tower defense, and the story wraps self-aware humor and ironic pageantry around a core of earnestness, like Undertale by way of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It may be the sort of game that’s more interesting than fun if match-3 and tower defense aren’t in your genre wheelhouse, but it definitely is interesting.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie: I don’t think I was hit by the full force of this movie—I hadn’t watched anything from these guys aside from the ubiquitous (in my circles) “update day” sketch, and I don’t have the Torontonian context to appreciate the local humor. Even so, I thought this was fantastic. It knows exactly how hard to lean on the fourth wall, how much to press on the awkward candid interactions, how far to take the Back to the Future parody without wearing out its welcome. For as goofy as it is on the surface, there’s a lot of careful craftsmanship here. It made me want to go back and check out the show (or perhaps shows).

Ichiko Aoba’s Across the Oceans 2026 Tour: I’ve mentioned on here before that if I can see a live Ichiko Aoba concert, I will. It’s taken me across the country, over the border into Canada, and now, appropriately enough given this tour’s title, across the ocean to London. It was a treat to see Aoba play with both the 12 Ensemble and with Taro Umebayashi, who helped compose, arrange, and produce her latest two albums. I followed London up with a couple more shows in California; I had previously seen Aoba open for Japanese Breakfast at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and less than three years later she was the headliner! Next time, though, I hope she comes back to the East Coast…

Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted: Olmsted is one of those names I seem to come across all the time since he’s touched so many parks I’ve visited—obviously Central Park in Manhattan, but also Prospect Park in Brooklyn, the Capitol Grounds in Washington, the Emerald Necklace in Boston, and on and on. I knew nothing about the man himself, though, so I picked up this biography by Justin Martin. It’s a good read, detailing both his work on major projects like Central Park and his surprisingly multifaceted personal life (I didn’t expect to learn that he was an abolitionist!). It’s made me interested in learning more about landscape architecture, and also in applying its practices to level design in video games as some folks do with theme park design.