Month: March 2026

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, The Weekly Orbit

Your Anime Orbit: OSHI NO KO – Season 2, Episode 9

Yeah, I think this show has just fully lost me.

The problem with finally formally introducing our main villain last week is that it makes all the showbiz stuff feel deeply trivial. If that was on purpose, I’d respect it. Unfortunately, it is still portrayed with the same monumental importance it’s always had in this show. Now more than ever, even, now that the movie about Ai is getting off the ground.

Speaking of which, hoo boy.

At what point does something cross the line from tragedy into comedy? How ridiculous does it have to get? How contrived must the situation be? Aqua has some kind of Epic Revenge Plan we are not presently privy to the details of that relies on this movie being a big success. Hence his acting in it as one of the leads—this is probably also a weird pyschosexual thing but the show is weirdly shy about actually saying that—and hence caring so much about how well it does. This much makes sense, but the arc it is trying to set up is short on anything actually worth watching so far.

What this setup means instead is that we get to do the stage play arc from season two warmed over, but with a movie this time and with less visual panache despite the higher stakes. (This might be the first episode of Oshi no Ko that I would say kind of looks so-so overall, in fact. It’s not horrible or anything, but there’s a noticeable lack of dazzle compared to most of its episodes.) You’d be forgiven for forgetting this, but there was a time not that long ago when Hoshino Aqua did in fact care about acting as something other than a means to an end. The fact that he doesn’t anymore isn’t inherently a problem, but as with everything else in this season the real issue is in the execution. There’s something to be said for the pure, granite cynicism of essentially having your lead seem like he’s going to walk into an open grave, but it’s absolutely no fun to watch at all, and it isn’t really that compelling as drama, either. The Aqua I cared about is already dead, so I don’t much care if this guy lives or dies. He says it himself in this episode, he’s given up on living a happy life. Why should I care if he lives one or not?

God bless MEM-cho. She is one of Oshi no Ko‘s vanishingly few characters who might be called “a normal person,” and as such she is totally unequipped to handle Aqua’s whole mess, but at least she’s trying.

Then there’s the whole blind acting contest thing that closes out the episode. Essentially, Frill—yes, more on that in a second—challenging Ruby and Akane to a pseudo-audition where they will vote among themselves for the best actress between them. In principle this is actually interesting, but in practice, it’s the same thing I’ve been saying about every problem I have with this season. It’s not that it’s bad on paper, it just isn’t handled well. Also, I don’t care how true to life it is, contriving the situation such that neither Akane nor Ruby have any idea what they’re actually auditioning for just makes the entire thing less interesting. I want to see Ruby torn the fuck apart by grappling with what she’s going to have to portray if she lands this role, and I want her to do it anyway. I’m sure we’ll get to that eventually but what point does holding off on it serve? Other than being yet another example of the show handling Ruby with kid gloves? (Because god forbid a girl be a tragic heroine while her brother is doing exactly the same thing.)

Right, it serves to reintroduce everyone’s favorite character, Shiranui Frill.

Yeah, you know, Frill. The living piece of trivia who was initially created solely to bridge this series and Love is War!, since she’s related to a character from that manga. That Frill. Are there a lot of Frill stans in the audience? Are the Frillnatics (presently my headcanon for what Frill’s stan army is called in-universe) popping for this? If you are out there and you are reading this, please reply to this post telling me why you like Frill. I’m genuinely curious. Before this episode she was barely a character at all, and hey, to her credit, she makes a solid showing here (it is never a bad idea to add more weirdos to the cast). But it all just seems like such cruft. The anime is apparently cutting quite a lot, and it still feels like it’s paced glacially and is just generally way too decompressed. I want some fucking urgency, man! There’s a killer on the loose! And frankly the contrivance just makes her look like a terrible person! Frill knows that Ruby is Ai’s daughter, surely? The idea that she’d not tip her off just for the sake of being professional strains credulity. Actors break the industry’s unspoken rules for much less in both real life and fiction all the fucking time. (It would be an entirely other matter if she was doing this on purpose in order to give herself an edge in the contest or to mess with Ruby for some other reason, but there’s no real indication that that’s the case.) All told it’s a surprisingly sloggish episode, despite there being, theoretically, quite a few things that happen here.

Also, the heavy-handed Ruby/Ai parallels are a bit much. But honestly if that was my only problem with this season we’d be doing alright. One thing they do genuinely have in common—a much bigger similarity than the contrived “they’re both liars” thing that the show keeps trying to set up—is that they’re dumbass goofballs. For example, we learn about a pair of video letters Ai had Gotanda hold on to (another contrived element), and when he asks her why have him do this, her response is this.

And back in the present, Ruby’s best guess as to what the audition will entail is…this whiteboard doodle.

(This is also something both of them have in common with Frill, who goes on a bizarre rant about her taxes and submits a comedy skit about the actual like from-the-fairytale Boy Who Cried Wolf as her audition, which includes her howling like a wolf. It’s one of the episode’s highlights.)

I’ve said this many times, but it’s so ridiculous to me that Akasaka Aka clearly wants to write Dark And Serious material, because he is so much better at simple comedy and relationship stuff. Kana is a bright spot in this episode when she shows up in its first third. She has a nice little exchange with Aqua and another with Ruby, and exits the episode early on with this line. I would not be surprised if she is the only major character who makes it out of Oshi no Ko with something resembling a happy ending. (Not inherently a better thing, but something Akasaka is far better at writing than whatever the fuck else he’s trying to do here.)

And honestly, that’s the main thing right? I didn’t hate this episode. It has its bright spots! But overall? In aggregate? It’s just a mess and a bore. I don’t respect what Oshi no Ko is doing anymore. Not because it shouldn’t try to have tragic elements or be serious, but because it is simply bad at both of those things.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, The Weekly Orbit

Brief Thoughts on: IKOKU NIKKI – Episode 10

Something I greatly appreciate about Ikoku Nikki is its intentionally screwy chronology. Asa walks home disappointed when one of her friends suggests they all try out for a lead vocalist position. We then get to see why she’s upset. All of those friends pledged at some point to write a song together, a promise treated as sacred in some genres here dissolves into nothing in the span of just a few months. As she walks, melancholy, a piano melody drifts her way, and it’s suddenly years and years ago, when she was much younger and singing in a choir competition, something her biological parents seem to have encouraged. Later, when she loses, her father stutteringly tells her that her singing “stood out.” In this way, there is a through-line. The immense weight of that reaction, likely not even intentional, is something that can utterly sledgehammer a child’s sense of self. This isn’t the thing that sets Asa a-wandering, but it is one such thing.

This methodology pairs well with the collage-like approach that Asa takes to her notebook itself, the central object of Ikoku Nikki on the whole. Her writing in it is, like her memories, patchwork, a scrawled quilt of quotations from the adults in her life, doodles of UFOs, short exclamations of feeling and so on. In this way, Ikoku Nikki is very good at marrying form to function; we are living inside of a notebook not unlike Asa’s as we watch it, because everyone’s life is like this.

And indeed, Asa’s not actually the only character to have this privilege. We follow Emiri for some time here, time spent waiting for her friends, fixed on a length of telescoping pencil lead, washes away into a daydream of the seaside.

When one of those friends arrives, she vents about feeling like she could never stop being friends with Asa even if she wanted to ever since the accident. That feeling, tense and heavy, melts away. The person Emiri is venting to is a gentle newcomer to the narrative, one Shouko [Hanazawa Kana], who wraps her pinky finger around hers, the implicitly romantic nature of the gesture made explicit when Emiri blushingly says that she likes this girl. Without this insight into Emiri’s own point of view, it would be easy for the viewer to condemn her at arm’s length. Walking alongside her, we can see that her feeling of burden isn’t borne of cruelty. It’s the shifting unease of someone who feels she is rapidly growing apart from her childhood friend, in ways she’s not sure how to confront. This sort of tempering is what drives Ikoku Nikki’s emotional logic, it’s what makes it feel “real.” The emotional verisimilitude holds up a mirror to every similar selfish decision we’ve ever made for ourselves. It doesn’t judge, but it does reflect.

These aren’t the only lives this show has explored, but all those it has are considered similarly. (Makio, most notably. Both here and elsewhere.) Notebooks, connected by only the whims of their writers, emotions and events blending together with no regard for time or space, are the perfect metaphor. We are, perpetually, searching for the unifying thread at the center of it all, the reason we write in the first place, no matter what form our stories take.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, The Weekly Orbit

Your Anime Orbit: OSHI NO KO – Season 3, Episode 8

In this week’s Oshi no Ko, it feels like the house of cards is fully falling apart. Aqua revealed his and Ruby’s parentage at the end of the last episode. In doing so, he’s completed the alienation of everyone he cares for at all; Akane rightly told him off for putting trackers on her last week, here, Ruby chews him out for posthumously ruining their mother’s reputation, and even his surrogate second mom, the agency head Miyako, is clearly quite upset about the entire thing. Kana is really the only person here who still gives him the time of day, and it’s partly out of feeling she owes him for burying the scandal about her and that director, whether he meant to or not. Aqua spends this episode looking for all the world like a man already dead, and to the show’s credit, that much is definitely intentional, and it’s largely well-executed. There is also this line from Kana, who reveals that she plans on quitting the idol business in the near future. That much is not a surprise—we’ve always known that acting is her real passion—but combined with the rest of the episode it ends up feeling prescient, and not in a good way.

More than ever, Oshi no Ko is two different anime fighting each other for dominance. On the one hand, the showbiz stuff that took up most of the story when I last wrote about the series a couple weeks back. On the other, the psychological thriller aspects that have defined Aqua as a protagonist this entire time. I’ve thought about what the anime be like if it just picked one or the other, but ultimately it’s impossible to know. (And there’s no guarantee that such changes would make Oshi no Ko a better story. Or even a more coherent one.)

I’m sure to longtime readers it must seem like I keep going back and forth on this show. That is because I do keep going back and forth on this show. It’s trying to walk a very delicate tightrope, and because of that, how much this show succeeds at what it’s trying to do is going to come down to its final moments, be those moments counted in episodes or mere minutes I am not yet sure. For most of this season, and even most of this episode, I was willing to entertain the idea that it could still pull it off. Now, I’m not really so sure. I would like to be wrong, but we’ll get to why my opinion’s changed yet again.

First, let’s talk about a favorite storytelling technique of the series. One of Oshi no Ko‘s recurring tricks has been to have a character explain how to extract a certain feeling from the audience in some in-universe context while, at the same time, the series is doing that metatextually to its audience. Often with that same character. It’s been consistently fantastic at this, most notably so during the second season but as recently as just a few weeks back. Here, it makes its biggest play yet. This part of the story will be divisive, and perhaps sensing that, Oshi no Ko seeks to quell some of that division by returning to the one character that every fan of the series almost universally still has positive feelings for.

Yes. Via flashback, this is the first episode since the premiere of the series where Hoshino Ai [Takahashi Rie, if you’ve forgotten] herself is a major character.

At this point, I was already getting a bit worried. That is a big play, and it’s not one you want to make carelessly.

On the set of a film, she bothers Gotanda Taishi (the director who served as Aqua’s mentor) into filming a documentary about B*Komachi—the originals, recall—that her agency has wanted to do for some time. This is to be a grandiose thing, with shooting wrapping up on the day of the Tokyo Dome concert for B*Komachi that never actually came to be. Gotanda is serious about making this a truthful, genuine documentary of the B*Komachi girls, including Ai herself, and he doesn’t want her putting up her usual front. Despite warning Gotanda that the footage might be unusable if she isn’t “lying all the time”, Ai acquiesces to his request.

And then, somewhere between that conversation and the day when the concert was supposed to happen, Ai died. Gotanda has been sitting on this script, which he’s rewritten into a lightly fictionalized account of Ai’s story, for some time. Actual parallels in the real world to this are in very short supply. In theory, it’s an interesting idea. And depending on how much you pop for minor characters returning, you’ll be interested to know that in addition to the usual suspects, New B*Komachi, Aqua himself, and Akane, the film’s producer, Kaburagi, also wants to cast Melt and Shiranui Frill, as well as a completely new character in the role of Ai herself. For a minute, it might seem like the final arc of Oshi no Ko will be about immortalizing Ai’s story on the big screen, essentially an in-universe version of Oshi no Ko itself.

And, unfortunately, for the first time, I think Oshi no Ko‘s usual bag of tricks fails it here. Pretty much completely, in fact. It is wonderful to see Ai again, no matter what side of her we’re seeing, don’t get me wrong, but pushing Ai back to the center of the story as an actual character as opposed to just an idealized ghost haunting the narrative and everyone’s minds shines a very harsh light on OnK’s own complicity in the exact pop media machine it’s trying to critique. This has ramifications mere minutes later in the episode, but let’s talk about that in of itself first.

Do you know how many commercials Ai, the character, is in? Not fictional commercials within the world of Oshi no Ko, real ones.

Hint: More than you’d assume.

There’s a couple of these, although sadly not that many seem to have made it on to Youtube. Even if it were just this one, the point would remain; it’s weird that you’d use a dead person for this, right?

She’s not really dead of course. Fictional characters exist outside linear time, they are alive when they’re alive in the story and dead when they’re dead in the story. Vague, wobbly, out-of-universe stuff like a commercial is even less committal. Someone decided it would be funny to have a dead girl hawk this stuff, or even maybe just that she was so charming that it didn’t matter that she was dead, so there she is. I’m not stupid, and I’m well aware that this is far less of a problem than it would be if Ai had been a flesh and blood human being. But it’s still a little weird, right? There’s something a bit off about that?

The same is true of Oshi no Ko‘s endless barrage of merch. Look in any of these merch sets and there she is, frozen in eternal youth right alongside her children, who are of course represented as also being their teenage selves and thus roughly Ai’s own age. There is no explanation for this, because why would there be? It’s character merch, essentially just an art board put on some kind of collectible good. And in any other series I’d completely agree with that assessment, but the problem is that Oshi no Ko is in part a critique of fame. Ai isn’t real, but the systems she was written in part to criticize certainly are, even if they’re intangible, and this cuts against those ideas in an offputting way. I don’t know how much control original author Akasaka Aka has over the series’ merchandizing, but I’m criticizing a work of art, here, not one guy in particular. (And even if I was, I think the bit about figure rights in the cosplay episode several weeks back would put me entirely within my rights to do so.)

This has always been a problem with the series, a kind of deep-baked hypocrisy that’s never truly been absent. Until now, it’s been easy to ignore it if you were so inclined, the storytelling was good enough to warrant that. The Drama was worth it, if you ignored that it would have to build up to something at some point. Unfortunately, we’re now at “some point”, and it’s consequently become much harder to avoid the elephant in the room. The hypocrisy really hits a fever pitch toward the end of this episode, where we’re finally properly introduced to our main villain.

I strongly suspect that in the future, if I am asked to point to a single moment where Oshi no Ko just falls off for good and never recovers, it will be this sequence.

In the closing minutes of the episode, we are introduced to two characters. One is Katayose Yura [Hasegawa Ikumi], a red-hot superstar actress. She’s Kaburagi’s choice to play Ai.

Introduced alongside her is some mysterious and obviously-sinister blonde guy. They talk a bit as she drinks her stress away and she mentions her love of hiking. The blonde guy makes the deeply weird comment that she should be careful on her hiking trips, since if anything happens to her it’ll look like an accident. Hilariously, she doesn’t think twice about this, and either he or some accomplice of his promptly murders her the next time she’s on a hike, shoving her off a cliff, into a ditch where she dies painfully.

It’s probably obvious, but this blonde guy is in fact Kamiki Hikaru [Miyano Mamoru]. The twins’ father, the man who orchestrated Ai’s murder, and so on and so forth. This is our main bad guy, and while we’ve seen him from the shadows and briefly in passing a few times, this is our first opportunity to spend any real time with him. While he’s definitely intended to be unpleasant, the unfortunate reality is that this guy sucks in precisely the wrong way. In his brief few lines here, he comes off as the kind of supernaturally-competent murderous dickhead who riddles essentially the entire output of seinen manga magazines. Accordingly, his first impression is that of a character who is not only unpleasant, but corny and really boring. God bless the team at Doga Kobo, because they really try their hardest to make this guy look properly sinister, and Miyano Mamoru delivers his lines with as much malice as he can muster, but there’s a deeper problem here, and it’s on the writing level.

Look, I’m not saying every character necessarily needs the most realistic motivation in the world. Hell, even if they did, serial thrill-killers are a real thing. My problem is not that this is unrealistic, or “too dark”, or anything like that. My problem, to put it in the only way I can really think of, is that it’s stupid. And it is stupid! It’s corny! It’s cheesy, and not even in a fun way! Worse is that her death is framed in basically the same way that Ai’s was. What’s the term? Once as tragedy, twice as farce?

Honestly this might’ve worked more if it was darker. Part of the reason this is so out-of-nowhere and scans as so ridiculous is that we have no idea who this girl is! She’s alive for all of five minutes of screentime, and it’s clear that the reason she exists is that the show wanted to kill a character similar enough to Kana to make the similarities obvious but was either too chickenshit to actually kill Kana herself or was prevented from doing so—editorial intervening in the manga writing process? Who knows. Either way: eat me, this blows.

If you want to defend the show, it’s easy to try to offload responsibility onto the viewer: “Well, you’re still watching, aren’t you? Clearly the fact that you are means this kind of lurid shlock works on you!” The problem of course is that I didn’t write this. In defaulting to not just this kind of plot but this execution of this kind of plot, the show’s undercurrent of hypocrisy boils over into something rank, ugly, and nasty. Earlier in the episode, on the set of the movie he’s filming with Ai, Goshanta says you can’t half-ass emotion, not even for the sake of plot. This is one of many bits of pithy wisdom about the arts that Oshi no Ko has put into the air over the years, some of them more meaningful than others. Yet, here we have the show doing exactly that, killing a random one-off character for no reason other than to establish a villain’s bad guy cred. We are given nothing to latch onto, and the entire sequence inspires no emotion but annoyance. Commit to the dark shit or don’t do it in the first place, you cowards. There is nothing worse than a half-assed tragedy.

Is it possible for the show to recover from this? Possible, yes. If you want to, you can read all of those comments people make to Aqua in this episode, that he’s ruining his mother’s reputation and basically digging up her grave, as comments the series is making about itself. I acknowledge that, and if it somehow pulls this off in a way that feels worthwhile then I’ll look like a naysayer. But that’s a risk I’m willing to take, because if I’m being asked if a righting of the ship is likely? Not at all. A fuckup this dramatic is usually the sign of an incoming plane crash of an ending. I am of course aware that Oshi no Ko‘s manga already has a reputation as a story that fucks it up in the final stretch, so I am not optimistic. We’ll see what the remaining three weeks bring.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Games, Magic Planet Arcade, The Weekly Orbit

Magic Planet Arcade: Somewhere Above The Earth in the CICADAMATA Demo Disc

Magic Planet Arcade is a once-in-a-great-while column where I take a break from writing about cartoons to write about video games instead.

The flashing text of a bootup sequence gives way to a run-and-jump through an ominous, empty structure. Thoughts flash on-screen, whether they’re ours or someone else’s is not immediately clear.

As the portentous omens come to a climax, we are reunited with our right hand, the [?handheld_assistant/;bestfriend/;gun] JOYEUSE, the first of many allcaps nouns we’re going to meet here. An AI named AEGIS, in a friendly, feminine voice, informs us that due to circumstances in our previous life, we have been drafted as a “Cicada”, broadly outlined as a sort of immortal robotic (or perhaps cyborg?) supersoldier. Our name is FAWN-A2, callsign The White Rabbit. Without more than a moment to get our bearings, AEGIS informs us that we are to be dropped into environs called SPHERES, somewhere in the CASCADE—the very nature of what the CASCADE even is is not explained to us—where we will retrieve sets of objects labeled CORES. Standing in our way is a variety of THREATS, named in broad terms that gesture at their form or function; SHOOTER, BOUNCER, CRAB, ESPER, etc., and rendered in a Superhot-esque red. Our instructions are very simple; get the CORES, get out, and if anything gets in our way, rip and tear.

If you’d think this sounds like the noun-heavy setup for a pretty simple FPS game, you’re half-right. Mechanically speaking, Cicadamata is part of the “go fast and beat ass” lineage of ‘movement shooters’ typified by something like Ultrakill. It’s an imperfect comparison, as Cicadamata‘s level layouts are generally a bit less enemy-focused and the visual aesthetic is very different (a future-retro “vectorheart” art style vs. Ultrakill‘s neo-Playstationy look), but they’re in the same ballpark. Cicadamata‘s weapon selection is very stripped-down compared to most FPSes. There is no “selection” at all, in fact. You have just one gun, Joyeuse itself, who functions as a cross between a shotgun, and, when the aim button is held, a sniper rifle. Joyeuse at your side, you can jump up to three consecutive times and dash once (thus really earning the “rabbit” part of your name) to hop about the levels, obliterate THREATS, and get to the exit. You also have a “stomp”, a diving downward drop that lets you step on enemies Mushroom Kingdom-style, should that be your preference.

Describing it in text does not really do justice to the kinetic feeling of actually playing Cicadamata. I’ve played a number of other games in this genre, and, to reveal my hand a bit, I tend to only get so much out of them. I’m simply not a competitive, top-of-the-leaderboards kind of player, it’s not in my nature. But Cicadamata‘s relatively stripped-down visual style—not a lot of complex textures here, for instance—lets it throw a lot of individual elements at you at once, which, combined with the twitchy movement and disassembled, surreal level geometry, makes the whole thing feel overstimulating in a good way. It’s properly buzzy, in fact, and AEGIS’ robotically gentle voice telling you that she’s proud of you when clear a level gives the entire thing a decidedly praise kink-y undertone. (Not the lone example of horniness. More overt, for instance, is the fact that one sees White Rabbit’s ass on the level results screen. But if you are expecting me to list that as a negative, I have bad news for you.) I am not normally the sort of person who’s inclined to try for S-rank clear times or the like, but Cicadamata tracks that, and I found myself aiming for Diamond (its highest rank) more than once, playing levels over and over despite the Demo Disc only having five of them. “Addicting” as an adjective in a video game context is beaten to death, and has a bit of a sinister cast to it. So I’ll just say I really, really enjoyed the 3 1/2 hours I managed to squeeze out of the demo, and plan to pick the game up when it releases.

Even more compelling to me than the gameplay however is the impressive amount of intrigue Cicadamata manages to build about its world in the demo’s short runtime (my first complete playthrough took perhaps 30 minutes) and lack of anything akin to cutscenes, normal dialogue, etc. If you linger around the dropship that starts each level, you’ll sometimes hear AEGIS deliver a bit of exposition about the SPHERE you’re in. (She’ll also encourage you to use the affirmation phrase “I am okay, the air is just heavy today” if you get scared or nervous. There is absolutely no sinister undertone to this whatsoever, I am assured.) There are also text terminals one can find in a few levels, something that greatly excited me in general.

Earlier, I compared this game to Ultrakill, perhaps the most successful of the movement-shooters that Cicadamata positions itself alongside. I love Ultrakill, don’t get me wrong—I’m transgender, it’s in the signup forms—but Ultrakill‘s religious saga about blood-fueled robots in an eschatological post-armageddon is a fairly different vibe than what’s going on here. To me, the text terminals seal the less immediately obvious, but perhaps more instructive, comparison. Despite having less in common with Cicadamata on a gamefeel level, the spectre of the original Marathon trilogy looms large over this game. (And the art direction brings to mind some trace of the Marathon reboot, as well.) Not just the first game, Marathon itself, but also Durandal, and Infinity. Cicadamta‘s story, if the Demo Disc is any indication, will be told in sputtering, half-remembered fragments, sometimes from the text terminals, and sometimes from stranger sources, be they hidden or randomly triggered. This very appropriate for themes of trauma, transformation, and the inherent fallibility of perception, all of which are present in the five terminals scattered across the demo. Each of these is brief, but they’re incredibly evocative, making use of cryptic phrasing, unknowable imaginary technical jargon crammed into crucial reports we have only some of the context for, diary-esque framing, and a [?bracketed word/synonym/evocative_third_word] writing trick that I’ve seen in a few places before but which never fails to delight me.

That you have to actually keep an eye out for the terminals might seem to scuttle the Marathon comparison a bit. After all, those games had plenty of hidden terminals, but most were right out in the open. But it brings most to mind a specific stretch of the series in particular, the so-called “Dream” levels in Marathon Infinity; the transitional “Electric Sheep” levels, “Where Are Monsters in Dreams“, “Eat The Path“, some of the most striking and surreal spaces in the entire trilogy, where the games’ otherwise linear storytelling begins to break down and it is made obvious to us, via heaps of surreal textual scenes, that our own player character is not necessarily an objective witness to events. Cicadamata even seems to be cognizant of this similarity, the first hidden terminal you can find makes mention of “Onaeire”, a name used vaguely but seemingly in reference to the location of the SPHERES or perhaps the entire setting in general. “Onaeire” is a fictional place-name, whatever its significance, but it seems to deliberately call to mind the adjective oneiric. Dream-like.

The Marathon comparison exists on an even more obvious level as well. Our [?shotgun/;handheld_assistant/;bestfriend] Joyeuse is named after one of Charlamagne’s swords. This is a naming convention directly borrowed from Bungie, who named the main AI companion in their first sci fi FPS trilogy Durandal and the same in the second Cortana. (Now, the one actually talking to us in our mission briefings and such is AEGIS, but given the tutorial, and some other factors, such as the talk that Joyeuse gives you little one-liner pep talks any time you zoom in with it, I do think the homage is intentional.) So this is clearly a reference Cicadamata is deliberately invoking, something being reached for.

Note Joyeuse talking to us in the bottom right. They have dozens of these quotes, some of which are just cute references and some of which seem to actively develop the relationship between Joyeuse and FAWN-A2. It’s very easy to completely gloss over this if you’re not looking for it, but I hope it remains and is expanded upon in the full game.

This would be meaningless if it weren’t a great game in its own right, of course. I do hope I made the fact that I think it very much is clear farther up this page. In addition to all that can be said about how the game looks and feels, what themes its story might eventually unpack, the main thing that impresses me is just how fresh it feels. The familiar toolbox of the movement shooter is there, to be certain, but gameplay, art, story, even audio intersecting in such a specifically compelling package makes for a game that is just absolute catnip to me and people like me. Not for nothing has the demo alone attracted a fair bit of attention (I’m not the first person to write about it, and I certainly won’t be the last). If I can peg all of its success on one thing, it is that sense of newness. Aspects of Cicadamata may be familiar, but it’s hard to name anything that’s put them together in this way before. There’s something new brewing here, and that’s genuinely exciting.

The only bad thing about all this is that, as of the time of this writing, you can’t actually play the demo anymore! I’m not really a games journalist, as the existence of just two other articles on this site about video games attests to. And by the time I’d heard about Cicadamata, played the demo, and had the thought to write about it, the timelocked demo was already just a half-day out from expiring, and by the time you read this, it will have run out entirely. (If I can levy any real criticism here it’s that I find that entire practice frustrating, though even there, I’m not sure if it’s a choice of the developers’ or some kind of requirement for being involved in Steam NextFest.) So if any of this sounds interesting to you, you will have to wait until the release of the game proper. Waiting can be frustrating, for sure, especially for something that doesn’t have a concrete release date yet. But you won’t wait alone; something else also waits in the heavens, and that, precisely, is why Cicadamata is so interesting.

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