September 2024 media
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Celebrating 40 years of Dragon Slayer: In this month-long series of features, Retro XP writer Marc Normandin covers the history of the seminal and multifaceted action RPG franchise. There’s a lot to cover; games as diverse as Xanadu and Sorcerian and The Legend of Heroes all are or were grouped under the Dragon Slayer umbrella, and all get their due here. There are plenty of influences to trace as well, from internal titles like Ys to external ones like The Legend of Zelda. This was a fun read for a late-era Falcom fan like me!
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The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom: After Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, it was oddly refreshing to return to a more modestly-scoped Zelda game. And Echoes of Wisdom is a great one! To be honest, I’m glad they’re still making space for smaller, weirder things like this and not attempting to build one enormous generational masterpiece after another. My two complaints: performance is pretty rough, and I wish they’d made a more thorough break from Link and eschewed the “swordfighter form” business.
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Set!: “An inside look at the world of competitive table setting,” reads the subtitle, and that alone was enough to send my mind reeling. The competitions feature the meticulous utensil placement you’d expect, but they also have themes, and the entrants have big personalities. We meet a woman who wants her table to be a commentary on animal poaching in Africa, and a man who enters a cosplay competition in hopes of winning prize money to fund a Dr. Seuss homage. If this were a Christopher Guest mockumentary, I’d think they laid it on too thick.