It’s a listener mail extravaganza today as we answer a big batch of questions from YOU, including: our thoughts on the rumored Persona 3 remake; the ongoing Writer’s Guild Strike and implosion of athe streaming business model; learning Japanese; the dumbest things we’ve ever done; what media we would save if we had to leave earth with just one VHS tape; the best/worst movie sequel titles of all time; and much, much more! Enjoy! Support the show at Ko-fi ☕️ https://ko-fi.com/weeklystuff Subscribe...
May 30, 2023•1 hr 45 min•Ep. 499
The biggest video game launch of 2023 is here with Nintendo’s highly anticipated The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for Nintendo Switch, and after a little over a week of playing, we’ve got thoughts! Jonathan was a big fan of Breath of the Wild, while Sean was much more lukewarm on it, but we’re both greatly enjoying this shockingly expansive sequel, which builds and improves upon the previous game in countless surprising and delightful ways. Before the Zelda talk, though, we hit some oth...
May 23, 2023•2 hr 6 min•Ep. 498
The second season of our anime podcast, Japanimation Station, is coming to a close tomorrow night with a jam-packed season finale, and we’re bringing you a big chunk of that episode today with our deep dive discussion of Witch on the Holy Night (aka Mahoutsukai no Yoru), the visual novel based on Kinoko Nasu’s first unpublished novel, originally released in Japan in 2012 and released worldwide in a 2022 remake. The remake landed right as we started recording this season of Japanimation Station, ...
May 09, 2023•1 hr 45 min•Ep. 497
After a few weeks off, we’re back with a jam-packed smorgasbord of stuff to discuss, including (deep breath): first impressions of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor; reactions to WB’s idiotic and immoral decision to remake Harry Potter for Max; thoughts on the Microsoft/Activision merger drama; Jonathan’s thoughts on the incredible Spirited Away: Live on Stage that played in theaters this month; Sean’s thoughts on The Last of Us Part I remake for PS5 and his feelings after revisiting Part II as well; and...
May 02, 2023•2 hr 49 min•Ep. 496
Last year, we recorded an episode entirely devoted to the original Resident Evil 4, easily one of the greatest video games ever made, and this week, we’ve got an episode entirely devoted to the recent Resident Evil 4 remake – which also happens to be one of the greatest video games ever made. Flawlessly expanding upon the foundations of its classic predecessor with fleshed out combat, heightened challenge, increased exploration, and a richer, more character-driven story, 2023’s Resident Evil 4 d...
Apr 04, 2023•2 hr 24 min•Ep. 495
‘4’ is our lucky number this week as we have the pleasure of not only reviewing the outstanding action masterpiece that is John Wick: Chapter 4, but also giving first impressions on Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 remake, which is, through what we’ve played so far, an incredible experience that’s much better than either of us expected when this project was announced. We give spoiler-free thoughts on the opening hours of the game before diving into this week’s main event, which is our overwhelming love ...
Mar 28, 2023•2 hr 38 min•Ep. 494
Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us is one of the oldest topics on this podcast – we reviewed the original PS3 game, when it was brand new, 10 years and over 400 episodes ago, and have followed the series ever since – so it’s probably inevitable we’d cover HBO’s 9-episode TV adaptation starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. What’s not inevitable is what a wonderful show this turned out to be, respecting but also expanding upon the source material to tell the story in a way that stands tall all on its ...
Mar 21, 2023•3 hr 11 min•Ep. 493
Illumination Entertainment’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie is opening in theaters next month, and is looking like a surprisingly faithful, entertaining adaptation of the beloved video game characters. But it’s not the first time Hollywood has tried this – thirty years ago, there was Super Mario Bros., a live-action adaptation starring Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, and Dennis Hopper that wound up having almost nothing to do with the video games, bombed spectacularly at the box-office, and was weirdl...
Mar 14, 2023•1 hr 45 min•Ep. 492
After a two week break to finish production on Japanimation Station Season 2 – shameless plug! – we are back with a jam-packed episode featuring a smorgasbord of stuff! First up, Jonathan talks about seeing Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – To the Swordsmith Village, the special theatrical event featuring the hit anime’s upcoming season premiere, and gives his thoughts on Michael B. Jordan’s excellent Creed III. Sean talks about the recent games he’s been playing, including the Xbox breakout hit ...
Mar 07, 2023•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 491
Nintendo didn’t just drop a surprise Nintendo Direct on us this week, but delivered an event chock-full of surprises and a huge number of immediate releases – most notably the long-rumored, much-anticipated Metroid Prime Remastered, a terrific release that is pretty much the platonic ideal of a video game remaster. But we also got GameBoy and GameBoy Advance games on Switch for the first time via the Online service, got new demos for imminent releases like Octopath Traveler II and Kirby: Return ...
Feb 14, 2023•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 490
We’re already one month into 2023, but with eleven months still to go, we thought now would be a good time to look ahead to what’s shaping up to be a surprisingly busy year in video games. While there are plenty of titles that will likely get delayed into 2024 or beyond, even the first half of 2023 is full of titles Sean and Jonathan are both extremely excited for, from the Resident Evil 4 remake to Respawn’s Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, to the June triptych of Diablo IV, Street Fighter 6, and Fina...
Feb 07, 2023•1 hr 36 min•Ep. 489
Hosts Sean Chapman and Jonathan Lack give you a special look at Season 2 of Japanimation Station, premiering Valentine's Day 2023. This season is called UFOTABLE/MOON WORKS, and we'll be reviewing all of anime studio extraordinaire Ufotable's adaptations of Type-Moon stories, including Fate/Stay Night and The Garden of Sinners (and in this preview, we tell you where you can watch everything we're reviewing!). The new season, which will run 13 episodes uninterrupted, begins February 14th, 2023. V...
Feb 01, 2023•4 min•Ep. 488
It’s coming a little later than usual, but it’s finally here! Our countdown of the Top 10 Video Games of 2022, an annual tradition here at the Weekly Stuff Podcast, where Sean and Jonathan both rank their favorite games of the past calendar year. Our #1 for 2022 is probably pretty obvious – we spent several months gushing about it this Spring – but there are lots of surprises along the way, from an extremely obscure fan-made indie game to a wonderfully boring game about power washing to a visual...
Jan 31, 2023•2 hr 58 min•Ep. 487
The Weekly Stuff Podcast returns for its 12th season and a big 2023 with a long-awaited Weekly Suit Gundam topic, as Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury has wrapped up its fantastic 12-episode 1st season. We’re here to dive deep on every facet of this so-far wonderful show: from our first female Gundam protagonist in Suletta Mercury, to the complex and seemingly sinister motivations of her mother/resident Char-clone Lady Prospera, to Suletta’s surprise fiancée Miorine Rembran and all the ...
Jan 24, 2023•3 hr 34 min•Ep. 486
It’s our final podcast of 2022 before we take a little hiatus to work on other projects, and it’s a supersized episode featuring three video game reviews for the price of one! First up is Sonic Frontiers, Sega’s new 3D Sonic game combining open-world exploration, collect-a-thon objectives, and linear platform levels, a weird but compelling package that may well be the best 3D game the blue hedgehog has ever enjoyed. Next is Pokémon Scarlet & Violet, the technically troubled but creatively su...
Dec 06, 2022•3 hr 15 min•Ep. 485
Today, November 28th, marks…well, it marks nothing, but October 8th marked the 30th birthday of our very own Jonathan Lack, and to celebrate, Sean agreed to let Jonathan surprise him with any podcast topic, which Sean would then have to see through to the end! But we had some scheduling difficulties with our special guest, Jonathan’s brother Thomas, who needed to be on this episode to make Jonathan’s very weird podcast idea work, so this one’s a little bit belated! But like last week’s 30th birt...
Nov 29, 2022•1 hr 54 min•Ep. 484
Today, November 23rd, marks the 30th birthday of our very own Sean Chapman, and to celebrate, Jonathan agreed to let Sean surprise him with any podcast topic, which Jonathan would then have to see through to the end! In this case, that meant an entire month of work and additional recordings, as Sean decided to jump Jonathan into a very weird corner of the internet and make him stay there for several weeks. The result is this week’s episode, recorded over 4 weeks as we chart the journey Sean made...
Nov 23, 2022•2 hr 6 min•Ep. 483
This week saw one of the highest-profile video game releases of the year with Sony’s God of War: Ragnarok for PS4 and PS5, a direct sequel to the outstanding 2018 God of War reboot. We give spoiler-free first impressions on the opening hours of this extremely ambitious game, from the jaw-dropping graphics and presentation to a story that’s immediately rich in character and world-building. Before that, though, Jonathan shares a piece he published over the weekend with his take on what films const...
Nov 15, 2022•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 482
It’s a very special Halloween episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast, as we’re here on this very spooky day for a deep-dive retrospective review of one of the greatest films ever made: HALLOWEEN, the original John Carpenter classic from 1978 that introduced the world to The Shape, to Jamie Lee Curtis, to one of the most iconic film music themes of all time, and to a hilariously unwieldy franchise that has only gotten stranger over time. But this original film stands very tall on its own as one of t...
Oct 31, 2022•3 hr 10 min•Ep. 481
After giving initial impressions of the campaign for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II – Here We Go Again! and Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, we give a live reaction to the latest regeneration on Doctor Who and discuss the series’ exciting future now that Chris Chibnall has returned to the chasm from whence he came. Then it’s time to finish our series of Fullmetal Alchemist reviews by rounding up the remaining theatrical feature films. First, there’s 2011’s The Sacred Star of Milos, an animated ...
Oct 25, 2022•3 hr 4 min•Ep. 480
It’s a Very Special Episode this week as Sean & Jonathan answer a series of questions all about our day job: Teaching! Sean is a high-school English teacher and Jonathan teaches at the college level as PhD student, and while we’ve touched upon all this before, we haven’t yet done a deep dive on the profession, our thoughts – positive and negative – about it, how our two teaching roles differ, and so on. It’s a fun, informative discussion fueled by some great listener questions, and while we’...
Oct 18, 2022•2 hr 31 min•Ep. 479
Our journey through Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood comes to an end with the second half of the second anime, now in fully uncharted territory as it adapts the final stretch of Hiromu Arakawa’s original manga. Diving deep into the Briggs and Promised Day story arcs that conclude the series, we discuss all the many ups and occasional downs of this last run. The manga is probably at its most uneven during this portion, but Brotherhood fully comes into its own as an anime, its pacing finally relax...
Oct 11, 2022•3 hr 38 min•Ep. 478
We were planning on a very elaborate podcast for Jonathan’s 30th birthday this week, but some unforeseen travel problems led to us breaking glass in case of emergency on a topic we’ve been keeping in our back pocket for over a decade now: ranking the Top 10 Video Game Controllers of all time! From the NES to the PS5, we go through several generations of gaming consoles to pick out the best controllers from over the years – and make fun of the worst – to determine which are the best, most influen...
Oct 04, 2022•1 hr 59 min•Ep. 477
After a trip to Sean’s Beta Corner to review the recent betas for Team Ninja’s Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II – Here We Go Again!, Sean and Jonathan hop over to Pandora (the planet, not the music app) for a deep dive on Avatar (the James Cameron movie, not the Nickelodeon show). It’s been 13 years since the film took the entire world by storm, becoming the highest-grossing film in history, and the film’s reputation hasn’t aged very gracefully. We haven’t...
Sep 27, 2022•2 hr 58 min•Ep. 476
With the Tokyo Game Show going down this week in, well, Tokyo, there was an avalanche of gaming news and gaming events, with Nintendo, Sony, and many others showing off new games for 2023 and beyond, and we break it all down on today’s episode! Starting with Ubisoft’s event last week to show off the appropriately convoluted future of Assassin’s Creed, and continuing on to this week’s Nintendo Direct – where we saw a new Fire Emblem, Octopath Traveler II, and got the title reveal for The Legend o...
Sep 20, 2022•2 hr 23 min•Ep. 475
It’s another packed episode as Jonathan gives first impressions of Splatoon 3 on the Nintendo Switch, reviews the Star Trek: The Motion Picture – Director’s Edition on 4K UHD Blu-ray, and we commiserate over the ever-growing avalanche of Disney/Marvel news from the weekend, before jumping into the next phase of our Fullmetal Alchemist review series! This time, we’re talking Brotherhood, the 2009 anime that starts fresh to adapt Hiromu Arakawa’s original manga in full. With a new crew, a new anim...
Sep 13, 2022•3 hr 30 min•Ep. 474
It’s a ridiculously packed podcast today filled to the brim with great topics, starting with Jonathan’s thoughts on the year’s two biggest American TV premieres – HBO’s Game of Thrones spin-off House of the Dragon and Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series, The Rings of Power – before he and Sean devote a very silly segment to pitching several different Lord of the Rings spin-offs to Amazon. Then we break down the news surrounding Halo Infinite, which is maybe in the most dire shape we’ve ever seen f...
Sep 06, 2022•3 hr 26 min•Ep. 473
Nearly 4 years after Broly, Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero – the 21st Dragon Ball film overall, and 4th of the modern era – opened this weekend in North American theaters, playing in both English and Japanese for the first time in franchise history, and with the widest opening for an anime film ever in the United States, playing on nearly 4,000 screens! It’s also the first Dragon Ball film to be produced completely in 3D CGI, with a new team led by director Tetsuro Kodama bringing Akira Toriyama’...
Aug 23, 2022•2 hr 30 min•Ep. 472
Before continuing our journey through Fullmetal Alchemist, Jonathan and Sean catch up with a very loopy opening segment in which Jonathan asks many increasingly silly questions about Sean’s experience teaching in Texas; Sean reviews the game Sifu for PS5; and Jonathan talks about his impromptu deep dive into the works of Orson Welles. And then it’s back to the world of Fullmetal Alchemist for the 2005 feature film Conqueror of Shamballa, a narratively messy but beautifully made movie that showca...
Aug 16, 2022•2 hr 17 min•Ep. 471
This week’s show starts off with the baffling news about the newly-merged Warner Bros. Discovery shelving a completed Batgirl film for a tax write-down, and then continues into the first big topic from our new anime podcast, Japanimation Station, where we’re diving into the world of Hiromu Arakawa’s Fullmetal Alchemist, starting today with the 2003 anime that partially adapted the then-young manga before branching off into an increasingly divergent anime-original story. While it was a huge and a...
Aug 09, 2022•3 hr 41 min•Ep. 470
