BOOTLEG BLOG

Review: Totono (short for the full title) was my proper gateway into reading eroge, previously being afraid of getting into reading them as I still had a tiny part of my brain that was worried I'd be seen as some weirdo if I did. But getting over that I read Totono and now it's one of my favorite pieces of media, ever. You follow Shinichi, a general nobody who finds himself in a love triangle with his childhood friend Mizuki Sone, and the strange girl Aoi Mukou, Mizuki being the most popular girl in school while Aoi seems socially inept and disconnected from reality, to the point that she constantly claims that all of them are in a game. This visual novel is best experienced as blind as possible.
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Totono's way of meta story-telling was something I had never seen previously, I've read works like Doki Doki Litrature Club do something similar but I had never read anything so involved. Down to having to grab a code in the manual itself in order to get the true ending, said code being different in every copy. Miyuki is also an extremely compelling antagonist, being a girl who perfectly crafted a facade of the perfect girl just to find out that all her agony never mattered because she herself is just a line of code and her entire memory of life experiences never happened. Saying that, I did choose Aoi lol.

CONTENT WARNING LIST: several sex scenes, references to bullying, cuckolding fetish content, several scenes in which characters are covered in blood, descriptions of people being beaten to death, acknowledgement of the player's existance, and several themes that could trigger someone who suffers from conditions that could make telling the difference between fiction and reality difficult

Review: Coming right after the amazing Endwalker expansion, Dawntrail had extremely large shoes to fill, and sadly, on a story standpoint, it falls extremely short. In my personal opinion however, the flaws in Dawntrail's story is woefully ovrexaggerated by the FFXIV community, which I believe this is a byproduct of how amazing both Endwalker and Shadowbringers were. HOWEVER, Dawntrail still has a lot of problems, mostly in how boring the first half of the story is, it's pacing issues, and the fact that the story follows a character who isn't interesting enough to carry the story. Thankfully, on a gameplay level, all of the extra content that Dawntail has introduced so far has been extremely fun.
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Wuk Lamat is an incredibly middle of the road character, and though if she was more on the sidelines like most expansion exclusive characters she would be just fine, Wuk Lamat takes up an overwhelming amount of screentime that she is just not interesting enough to handle, along side the fact that it feels like she never goes through a proper character arc. This also in particular screws over Krile and Erenville, who both were set to get major focux in this expansion, and though both of their arcs conclude and what we do get is great! It feels unfulfilling. But, on the bright side, there is some good, Sphene is an excellent antagonist and the twist of Zorral Ja being the actual threat was genuinely shocking and cool!

CONTENT WARNING LIST: Political topics, war, and death.

Review: Wonder Egg Priority is an anime with a lot on it's mind and has it's heart in the right place, but is aggresively held back by strange pacing, questionable plot decisions, and a cliffhanger that'll never be fulfilled as it did not do well enough to get a 2nd season. We follow a girl named Ai Ohto who while grieving the loss of her only friend who took her own life, she finds herself in the midst of a program in which she can purchase Wonder Eggs, and said eggs allow her to meet other girls who have taken their own life and help them be freed from their demons and move on to their afterlife
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There is a lot that Wonder Egg Priority does right, for example; the entire character arc of Rika Kawai is fucking amazing. Rika being a former idol both struggling with a terrible family life and riddled with guilt over directly causing one of her biggest fans to develop anorexia leading to her own death, along with one of the best handlings of self harm I've ever seen in any media ever. Another amazing one is Momoe, a character heavily implied to be a trans woman who started presenting as male again after the trauma of the only girl who ever saw her as a girl forcing herself upon her, along with Momoe helping an explicit trans man move to the afterlife after helping him face his terrifying trauma of being raped after attempting to come out to his teacher.
Unfortinately, the stories inconsistencies, strange pacing, and extremely questionable stuff such as falling into the "trans suicide" trope, the fact that it's never actually confirmed or not if Momoe is a trans woman, constant need to vitimize it's female cast and never punish it's male cast for everything they do, and much more, make it hard to recommend.

CONTENT WARNING LIST: bullying, suicide, self harm, violence towards a trans man, rape, sexual assault, forced impregnation from rape, and a lot of scenes involving subject matter related to sexism

Review: Menhera-chan is a very simple (primarily) yonkoma manga about 3 people; Menhera-chan, a girl who suffers from mental illness, Byoujaku-chan, a girl who suffers from physical illness, and Kenkou-kun, a completely middle-of-the-road boy. This manga is a very big comfort read for me as someone who struggles with mental health, finding comedy in it while very much still taking it's subject matter seriously.
Rest in Peace Kotoha Toko, you made art that brought comfort to many.

CONTENT WARNING LIST: Dark humor relating to suicide, mental, and physical illness.