’Tis the season for end of year lists! Since I am always “untimely” with my media habits, instead of just listing the titles that happened to be released in 2019, my list will chronicle the games, podcasts, movies, and television that I most enjoyed this year. I am breaking my year in media into two parts. This first part will detail the video games and podcasts I have enjoyed this past year. The second will discuss the movies, television, and books that influenced me in 2019.
Let the listing begin!
Video Games
Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate (3DS)
In 2019 I met two of my desert island games. Both were older games on a system that most people have abandoned for the Switch; both I turned to after acquiring a habit on the next-gen iteration of the series. My first desert game was Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. All winter I played pretty much nothing but Monster Hunter World. My life was not going so great at the moment, and something about Monster Hunter’s grind gave a structure and meaning to my life that it lacked in reality. But once I began to run out of things to do in World, I turned to one of the previous entries in the series, Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. During the spring I was inseparable from my 3DS, so much so that my hands began to hurt from holding the large and unwieldy Circle Pad Pro. Monster Hunter World is fantastic and in most ways an improvement on the series. But the challenge and expanded bestiary of Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate made me fall in love with it. As someone who has soloed every one of the Arch-tempered monsters in World, multiple monsters in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate completely destroyed me. Pink Rathian on High Rank made me cry; Brachydios managed to blow my sorry ass up too many times to count; even routine fights on Low or High Rank with the likes of Zinogre and Tigrex threatened to become deadly. And despite the quality of life improvements in Monster Hunter World, old-school Monster Hunter still has its charms. I was happy to return to a game where you have to periodically throw paint balls at your prey and if you forgot something crucial you have to start the hunt all over again. Yes, the controls are rough, especially when it comes to ranged weapons, but I’ll be playing Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate long after I tire of the Monster Hunter World DLC, Iceborne.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Switch)
It’s well known that video games don’t do politics well. Politics often becomes nothing more than scenery to a game, the theme for the murderous amusement park ride you are embarking on. “Look how dystopian this is!” you are supposed to coo as you butcher hundreds of grunts like a psychopath. Politics in video games often serve no other purpose than to provide flavor to the mindless killing.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses does not do politics perfectly either, but unlike the Bioshocks and Far Crys of the world, it takes its politics seriously. It wants the player to actively engage and think about the game’s politics, to ponder the respective merits and drawbacks of each leader’s vision for Fódlan. And this political landscape is occupied by some of the richest, most complex characters ever written in a video game. As I have written before, Fire Emblem: Three Houses has such rich characters because it allows them to be human and messy. In a story about forging bonds with other people, Three Houses lets you experience those connections in all their complexity.
Shameless plug: I have written about Fire Emblem: Three Houses multiple times, including the article I linked above. You could say it has been on my mind.
Fire Emblem: Conquest (3DS)
Like what happened with Monster Hunter World, once I finished Fire Emblem: Three Houses, I still had a strategy itch that needed to be scratched. So I turned to some games I already owned that were just sitting on my 3DS, the Fire Emblem Fates games. I started with Birthright, and the game seemed to confirm the internet’s low opinion of Fates. But then I started Conquest, and to my surprise, I found a game that I absolutely loved.
Let’s address the elephant in the room. Conquest’s story has plenty of faults. It’s convoluted, melodramatic, and clichéd. Some plot threads go nowhere, and having them resolved in Revelations is not a good enough justification. But even as the overall outline of the narrative in Conquest seems lukewarm at best, it deals with some interesting thematic issues that more competently made JRPGs do not discuss. In Conquest we see someone trying to change an evil empire from within, and we witness a dysfunctional family deal with an abusive, malevolent patriarch. It’s powerful stuff, and elevates Conquest’s story beyond standard JRPG fare.
But the narrative would not make Conquest stand out it wasn’t for the campaign itself. I played Conquest on Hard/Classic, and it was one of most memorable experiences of my gaming career. The brutal difficulty, permadeath, and inability to grind sent me into spirals of failure, despair, and eventual victory, the likes of which I have not felt since Dark Souls. And the maps! On one level winds will blow your party all across the stage; in another you have to use switches to control hordes of ninjas converging on your party. In one of the nastiest levels ever made, Conquest takes away your principal healer and forces you to navigate a maze of breakable pots, some of which will heal your party, others will poison it. This campaign makes Conquest a desert island game for me, even though Fire Emblem: Three Houses has the far superior writing. I want to play the campaign again sometime and see how many characters you can lose before the run becomes unsalvageable. How much can you fuck up? And how do you recover from fucking up badly?
Podcasts
2019 was the year that I discovered podcasts.
I had always looked down on podcasts. Why would I waste my time listening to people babble about some nonsense when I could listen to music? You know, real art? God, my opinions about podcasts were fucking insufferable. Especially since, instead of some avant-garde album, I ended up listening to my gym playlist of the same hundred or so pop songs of questionable artistic merit.
My hot takes about podcasts got considerably less bad over the summer. During this period I had to care for a sick cat that needed to be caged and played with several times a day. With all this extra downtime, I decided this was the moment to give podcasts another go. And I discovered what was obvious to most people for over a decade: podcasts are an amazing way to get a sense of the overall cultural conversation, to hear critics riff on thoughts and ideas outside of the confines of an article or a review. I fell in love with podcasts this year, and I have spent untold hours listening to them.
These are some of my favorite podcasts.
Headlong: Running from COPS
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, I think it dawned on us that maybe, just maybe, we underestimated the long-term impact of reality TV. What began as mindless entertainment that everybody knew wasn’t real has metastasized throughout our culture so much that a reality TV star now occupies the White House. Maybe it is time to start taking reality TV and its impact on American culture seriously? Headlong: Running from COPS starts to do some of that valuable work with a series of podcasts that focus on the longest-running reality TV show, COPS. The podcast effectively demonstrates that not only does COPS present copaganda (mainly because the police demand veto power over any piece of footage being filmed in exchange for letting cameraman tag along with them), but also the reality show has affected actual policing. In the finale the show found an instance when a cop framed an innocent victim to secure his own 15 minutes of fame on the show. The podcast shows that reality TV changes the very reality it repackages to the viewer.
You can listen to Headlong: Running from COPS here.
The Sterling Affairs
This podcast is not about Donald Sterling. It is a podcast about another cheap, crass, and racist real estate mogul named Donald. It’s a parable of how the horrible and rich get even richer despite their horribleness. It’s a story of the struggle between the white people who own all the capital and the black people who do all the work. It’s an incisive social commentary for our time, disguised in a podcast about sports.
You can listen to The Sterling Affairs here.
Anime World Order
I decided to get back into anime in 2019, and I discovered the ideal guide in Anime World Order. The founder of the podcast, Daryl Surat, has an encyclopedic knowledge of anime, which he and his co-hosts graciously shares with us listeners. The podcast prizes thoroughness so much that they are currently doing hour to two-hour podcasts about each year of the previous decade. They are currently up to 2012, and I can’t fucking wait until the next installment
You can listen to Anime World Order here.
Shockwaves
There is no genre whose aesthetic I identify more with than horror’s. Campy, meta, low-budget, experimental, and often ridiculous, horror ticks most of the boxes for what I want out of entertainment.
There is only one problem: I hate being scared. I love everything about horror except the whole horror thing. Whether you chalk it up to my OCD or me being an utter coward, I do not like to be frightened
I am trying to fix that, and I am making a New Year’s resolution to watch more horror in 2020. After all, I have overcome much more knotted and twisted phobias than being scared by moving pictures. And Shockwaves has set me on the path. Like Anime New World, this a podcast for people who love compendious knowledge and love to add films to their already too long watch lists. I guarantee you will be frantically scribbling down recommendations. But despite being a genre podcast, the hosts are really well rounded cinephiles. In interviews they are just as likely to namedrop John Carpenter as Béla Tarr.
What a Cartoon!
I have listened to only a few episodes, but when I have tuned into What a Cartoon! it has been wonderful. For instance, their overview of Charles Schulz’s life and career in their episode on It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was smart and well-researched.
You can listen to What a Cartoon! here.
Retronauts
Want to feel old and inadequate? Listen to Retronauts, the best podcast about the games you played as a kid, and the many other games you didn’t. I can’t remember what I had for lunch, but somehow the Retronauts crew can remember the intricate details of games they played decades ago.
You can listen to Retronauts here.
Blade Licking Thieves
This Asian cinema podcast should be more popular. Consistently insightful, good-natured, and funny as hell, Blade Licking Thieves is always a pleasure to listen to. When this podcast covers a movie or TV show, it is bumped up my “watch” list.
You can listen to Blade Licking Thieves here.
Waypoint on Neon Genesis Evangelion
Waypoint Radio needs no introduction; it has been the best gaming podcast for some time. But in 2019 the Waypoint team also provided the most comprehensive piece of criticism I listened to. Even the most detailed podcasts about a piece of media tend to trade in surface-level critiques. They talk about story beats, whether or not the podcasters identify with the characters, some of the broad themes, etc. Very little attention is given to the details of the work in question, the way it navigates the particular codes of its medium. By contrast, Waypoint’s podcasts about the re-release of Neon Genesis Evangelion on Netflix revel in the details. Waypoint is just as likely to launch into a twenty-minute discussion about an individual shot, line of dialogue, or a piece of lore as a story beat or a character. It’s the exhaustive, detailed, and extremely literate criticism that any influential piece of pop culture deserves.
One word of warning: if you are a fan of Neon Genesis Evangelion, you may be turned off by Waypoint’s analysis, since they end up being very negative towards the television show. I suspect it is a lesson in not consuming Evangelion too fast; in the last few podcasts, you can almost feel the show melting the Waypoint team’s brains as they try to just finish the damn thing already.
You can listen to the Waypoint Radio podcasts about Neon Genesis Evangelion here. The first episode of the podcast series is here.
Honorable Mentions in Podcasts:
Did I mention that I listened to a lot of podcasts this year? Here are some of my other favorite podcasts.
Video Games: Bombscast and Kotaku’s Splitscreen are my other two must listen gaming podcasts. Axe of the Blood God is a fabulous podcast about RPGs. No Cartridge is also highly recommended, as it presents gaming news from an explicitly left wing perspective.
Movies and Television: My favorite cinema podcast is The Big Picture. Another great film podcast is /Filmcast. Unspooled unpacks and analyzes classic movies. You Must Remember This provides essential histories of Hollywood.
Anime: Chatty AF has the most consistent seasonal anime overviews as well as very interesting analysis from a feminist perspective. I also like Third Impact Anime and Otaku Generation.
Pop Culture: The Slate Pop Culture Gabfest is my favorite general interest pop culture podcast. Decoder Ring and Spectacular Failures deconstruct the absurdity of late capitalism.
