Our ongoing Batman on Film series reaches perhaps the single most iconic and influential film the Caped Crusader has yet starred in with 2008’s The Dark Knight . 13 years later, neither of us quite feel the way we do at the time, and find the movie ripe for reevaluation in a lot of ways. There are plenty of inarguably great elements on display here, from Heath Ledger’s epochal portrayal of the Joker to Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard’s incredible score, but there are also a lot of structural...
Jun 28, 2021•3 hr 23 min•Ep. 408
Two years ago today, our sister series podcast project Weekly Suit Gundam was born, and what a wild ride it’s been! Just as we did on its first anniversary, we’re using the show’s birthday to take stock of everything we’ve reviewed up to now. With a particular focus on the “Year Two” shows – namely G Saviour, 0080: War in the Pocket, 0083: Stardust Memory, The 08th MS Team, Gundam SEED, Gundam SEED Destiny, Gundam 00, and MS IGLOO – we rank the best mobile suits and best songs from the series we...
Jun 24, 2021•3 hr 4 min•Ep. 407
We’ve got two big topics this week, starting with a wrap-up of E3 2021, which we mostly covered in last week’s show, but wrapped up on Tuesday with Nintendo, by far the best showcase of the event. With big surprises like Metroid Dread, welcome new entries in the WarioWare and Mario Party series, our best look yet at Shin Megami Tensei V, and our first gameplay footage from the Breath of the Wild sequel, it was a great show that put everyone else at E3 to shame. After that, we dive deep with Inso...
Jun 21, 2021•2 hr 53 min•Ep. 406
After being cancelled in 2020, E3 – the Electronic Entertainment Expo, aka “That Week With All the Video Game Trailers” – is back, sort of, for 2021, in entirely online form. And as we’ve done since the beginning, we’re covering all of it, with today’s episode going over the shows from Ubisoft, Microsoft/Bethesda, Square Enix, and the Summer Games Fest, with Sean’s traditionally exhaustive and/or obsessive notes as our guide! It’s not a particularly good E3 so far, but with looks at Elden Ring, ...
Jun 14, 2021•3 hr 17 min•Ep. 405
Our BATMAN ON FILM series starts catching up to the modern age of superhero films this week with Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, the 2005 franchise reboot that marked a new degree of seriousness – not just in theme and tone, but also in production value, casting, and direction – for films about the Caped Crusader, and set the stage for Batman’s biggest moments of mainstream global popularity in the years to come. The movie was undoubtedly a refreshing, impressive change of pace at the time, b...
Jun 07, 2021•1 hr 58 min•Ep. 404
After going through some big pre-E3 video game news – including events about Dragon Quest, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Horizon: Forbidden West – and some other odds and ends, we dive into Part 7 of our BATMAN ON FILM series, with the 2000 direct-to-video feature Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker. Produced by the same team behind the classic Batman: The Animated Series (and earlier film reviewed in this series, Mask of the Phantasm ), Batman Beyond broke bold new ground for the caped crusader on tel...
May 31, 2021•2 hr 11 min•Ep. 403
It’s another dive into the world of Mobile Suit Gundam this week with MS IGLOO, but before that, you’ll also hear some big personal news from Sean, more discussion of Jason Schreier’s fantastic new book Press Reset, and more Resident Evil talk, including Jonathan’s experience playing Resident Evil Zero for the first time. Then we’re off to one of the most obscure corners of Gundam animation, with the 6-episode CGI OVA MS IGLOO and its 3-episode sequel series MS IGLOO 2: Gravity Well. Originally ...
May 24, 2021•2 hr 1 min•Ep. 402
This week’s super-sized podcast offers two in-depth video game reviews for the price of one, as we break down this month’s outstanding Resident Evil Village and last year’s Yakuza: Like a Dragon – which we’ve both finally finished! – in long spoiler-filled discussions. A fantastic balance of the terrifying and the silly, Resident Evil Village hits the absolute perfect sweet spot for both of us when it comes to this series, and is a total joy to discuss in this format, given how many surprises ar...
May 17, 2021•3 hr 26 min•Ep. 401
It’s a fun grab-bag style episode this week as we discuss several pieces of recent news, from the results of the One Piece World Top 100 poll to Sega announcing Yakuza spin-off Lost Judgment to Toei finally confirming a new Dragon Ball Super movie for 2022, before moving on to our first, largely spoiler-free impressions of Resident Evil Village. It’s an outstanding game so far, building on what Resident Evil 7 did so well while also harkening back to entries like Resident Evil 4, and proving its...
May 10, 2021•2 hr 7 min•Ep. 400
After a bit of a delay due to Sean and Jonathan being extremely reluctant to watch the actual movie, our ongoing Batman on Film series is back with the last Batman film of the 90s, and one of the worst movies ever made: Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin, a flop that’s just as terrible if not worse than Batman Forever in a whole host of ways, while offering a few improvements thanks to Arnold Schwarzenegger and especially Uma Thurman that can’t counteract the awfulness of the main Batman story...
May 03, 2021•2 hr 57 min•Ep. 399
After reviewing the first season of the anime in last week’s show, we’re back to review Demon Slayer ~Kimetsu no Yaiba~ The Movie: Mugen Train, the highest-grossing film in the history of Japan, and one that’s already making waves after its debut in North American theaters this weekend. It was both of our first trips back to a movie theater in over a year, since the start of the pandemic, and we couldn’t have picked a better film, because Mugen Train is an outstanding movie, not just as an ongoi...
Apr 26, 2021•3 hr 5 min•Ep. 398
We’re talking about anime again this week, but for once, it’s not Gundam! It’s Kimetsu no Yaiba, also known as Demon Slayer, the most popular anime/manga franchise in Japan right now, and increasingly one of the most discussed around the world. With the record-breaking movie, Mugen Train, making its way to North American theaters next week, we go in-depth with the first season of the anime from Ufotable, based on the first 6 volumes of Koyoharu Gotouge’s best-selling manga. It’s a spectacular 26...
Apr 19, 2021•3 hr 45 min•Ep. 397
After touching base on the games we’ve been playing – including the original Diablo and 2016’s Ratchet & Clank remake – and discussing this week’s Bloomberg report about a Last of Us PS5 remake and the state of Sony’s development priorities, we move on to another Weekly Suit Gundam topic, rounding out our triptych of Gundam 00 reviews with Mobile Suit Gundam 00 the Movie: A Wakening of the Trailblazer, the 2010 feature-film follow-up/finale that brings a close to the world of Gundam 00 and i...
Apr 12, 2021•2 hr 58 min•Ep. 396
The great Kaiju showdown of our time has arrived in Legendary Pictures’ Godzilla vs Kong, the fourth film and grand culmination in their ongoing ‘MonsterVerse,’ and to celebrate, we’re not just reviewing this movie – we’re also going back to Round 1 of this particular match-up, discussing the original Toho King Kong vs Godzilla from 1962! And that’s not all! We also dive into the other Legendary Pictures monster movies to recap our thoughts on the entire series, and we discuss the original Toho ...
Apr 05, 2021•2 hr 39 min•Ep. 395
After covering a few pieces of recent news – including the trailer for James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad and reports that Sony might be sunsetting digital game sales for PS3 and PS Vita – we dive right into our latest Weekly Suit Gundam discussion, this time on the second season of the fantastic Mobile Suit Gundam 00. The show has a lot to live up to in its back half, and we find it more than rises to the challenge with an incredibly smart, exciting, affecting, and entertaining second season, bring...
Mar 29, 2021•3 hr 25 min•Ep. 394
Better late than never, this week is our annual ‘Year in Preview’ episode, where we look over all the video games and movies coming in 2021 and assess what looks good ( New Pokemon Snap, yay!), what looks bad (oh God, Disney’s Cruella movie is real), what baffles us (who the hell thought Six Days in Fallujah was a good idea?), and what’s likely to even come out (is Halo: Infinite ever gonna be a thing?). Before all that, we also give some quick updates on Genshin Impact and Yakuza: Like a Dragon...
Mar 22, 2021•1 hr 57 min•Ep. 393
After a little break, we’re back with an episode full of exciting topics, from first impressions on the outstanding Yakuza: Like a Dragon (now out on PS5, and which we’ll definitely do a full episode on soon), thoughts on the demise of Anthem at Bioware, and most importantly, another Weekly Suit Gundam discussion, this time on Mobile Suit Gundam 00, the series that brought Gundam into the era of HD, widescreen, and 21st century geopolitics. It’s a terrific show that’s wickedly smart, wildly exci...
Mar 15, 2021•2 hr 42 min•Ep. 392
Sean couldn’t be here this week, so Jonathan gets on mic and answers some listener mail, talking about his favorite recent music and most anticipated upcoming games and movies, giving recommendations for getting into classical Japanese cinema, and reflecting on Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk by reading/making fun of a review he wrote in 2008 at age 15. There’s also a bevy of Gundam -related questions at the end, and a little bit of chat on the recent Pokemon announcements on the top of the show, all to tid...
Mar 08, 2021•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 391
This week brought our first full-length Nintendo Direct since September 2019 (!), but was it any good? Do a few far-off announcements for 2022, a Mario Golf game, and a low-effort Zelda port make up for Nintendo’s months of erratic communication? We discuss all this and cover a few pieces of exciting Diablo news from BlizzCon, before diving into our main topic, another Weekly Suit Gundam discussion in which we tackle a curious oddity in the history of Gundam: Yoshiyuki Tomino’s Mobile Suit Zeta ...
Feb 22, 2021•3 hr 10 min•Ep. 390
This week brought one great new video game in Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury –a Nintendo Switch package including a Wii U classic and, in a wonderful surprise, a brand new 3D open-world Mario game – and two high-profile stories of bad behavior in Hollywood, with a number of accusations against Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon and Disney disinviting The Mandalorian co-star Gina Carano from future Star Wars productions after a series of anti-trans and anti-semitic posts. Today’s ...
Feb 15, 2021•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 389
Our BATMAN ON FILM series continues with the film all you sadists in the audience have been waiting for us to suffer through: 1995’s BATMAN FOREVER, the third and, thus far, worst film incarnation of the Caped Crusader, marking a shark break from the dark and stylish Tim Burton films in favor of the garish colors, wild tonal inconsistency, and porn-quality cinematography of Joel Schumacher, terrible qualities only matched by the abysmal failures of Akiva Goldsman’s horrible writing. A hit in its...
Feb 08, 2021•2 hr 32 min•Ep. 388
It’s a loose and laid-back week on the show as we catch up on life events, cover one weird and frustrating piece of news, and discuss a few really great games, including our first spoiler-free impressions of Hitman 3, the triumphant capper to IO Interactive’s outstanding ‘World of Assassination’ trilogy, which has been one of our favorite series to discuss on the show ever since this incarnation launched in 2016. We also gush over the many wonders of Genshin Impact, and Sean tells us about comin...
Feb 01, 2021•1 hr 53 min•Ep. 387
Ranking at #2 and #5 on Sean and Jonathan’s respective Top 10 Games of 2020 lists, Vanillaware’s 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is undeniably one of the most singular gaming experiences of the last year – an incredibly compelling, blissfully confusing, wickedly intelligent mix of the visual novel, adventure game, and real-time strategy genres into one unique package that is absolutely unlike anything we’ve played before. A mecha and kaiju story with aspects of just about every anime genre under the sun...
Jan 25, 2021•2 hr 19 min•Ep. 386
Continuing our ongoing BATMAN ON FILM series, we arrive at the fourth theatrical Batman feature, the first animated one, and quite possibly the single best Batman film ever made: Batman: Mask of the Phantasm , a standalone feature based on the classic Animated Series, considered by many to be the definitive portrayal of The Dark Knight. Starring Kevin Conroy as Batman and Mark Hamill as the Joker, with a new love interest and antagonist in the form of Dana Delaney’s Andrea Beaumont, Mask of the ...
Jan 18, 2021•2 hr 20 min•Ep. 385
Today’s episode is another Weekly Suit Gundam extravaganza, this time on the controversial Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny, but before that, we also discuss this week’s abhorrent Presidentially-ordered insurrection at the US capital, and – in a lighter topic – Jonathan becoming infatuated with Genshin Impact, Sean’s 2020 Game of the Year. Then it’s on to Gundam SEED Destiny, a show that tries to be two different, contradictory shows at once: a challenging sequel questioning the assumptions and c...
Jan 11, 2021•4 hr 11 min•Ep. 384
Our 10th year of podcasting kicks off with a look back at one of the very few things that was truly good in 2020: Video Games. While the world was falling apart, gaming, at least, delivered one of the best, broadest, and deepest years on records, with scores of titles we loved playing and reviewing throughout 2020, and today’s episode is our chance to look back on the best of the best, go deep with ones we haven’t discussed much before, and share memories of our favorite gaming moments from the ...
Jan 04, 2021•4 hr 37 min•Ep. 383
For part 3 of our Batman on Film series, we move into the 90s with Tim Burton and Michael Keaton’s second outing with the character, the amazingly bizarre, deeply silly, and profoundly psychosexual Batman Returns. It is one of the wildest, weirdest mainstream movies to ever come out of Hollywood, and also one of the best and boldest Batman films ever made – a gothic, expressionist, Freudian nightmare with one of the best sets of villains comic book movies have ever seen, in Danny DeVito’s Pengui...
Dec 24, 2020•2 hr 6 min•Ep. 382
Disney+’s outstanding Star Wars series The Mandalorian brought its second season to a bold, surprising, and spectacularly satisfying conclusion this week, and we dive deep not only with this amazing episode, but also what it portends for the future of the series, where the saga of Din Djarin could go from here, and all the possibilities for Star Wars TV moving forward. Before that, though, we also talk about the games we’ve been playing – including 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, One Piece Pirate Warri...
Dec 21, 2020•1 hr 50 min•Ep. 381
Today’s episode is absolutely jam-packed with entertainment news, after Warner Bros. decided to blow a hole in the theatrical market by announcing all their 2021 films will be released on struggling streamer HBO Max, and Disney held a 4-hour investor conference in which they announced or detailed 100+ TV series and movies, the vast majority heading to their (decidedly not struggling) streamer Disney+. Breaking down all this news forms the bulk of the episode, but we also review the latest two ep...
Dec 14, 2020•3 hr 32 min•Ep. 380
This week, our 10-part critical retrospective BATMAN ON FILM continues, as we revisit each of the theatrical Batman features in advance of Matt Reeves’ upcoming The Batman with Robert Pattinson. For Part 2, we’re looking at the birth of the modern superhero film genre with Tim Burton’s BATMAN from 1989, starring Michael Keaton as the caped crusader and Jack Nicholson as the Joker. It’s a fascinating film, one that’s full of things to praise – Burton’s direction, Danny Elfman’s score, the incredi...
Nov 30, 2020•3 hr 14 min•Ep. 379
