[EXPRESSO] Umamusume: Pretty Derby iOS | Equus Focus

Finally, the horsing can begin on global scale, with the worlwide release of Umamusume: Pretty Derby, the original smarthphone free-to-play game (though it launched here alongside the PC version on Steam) that launched this popular anime multimedia franchise.

The deal is “simple”: horse girls exists, inheriting funny names from famous racing horses of our real world, and they compete in specific footrace championships…. and since it’s a japanese anime multimedia niche franchise, they also do idol show performances, because why not?

It’s a “pretty derby”, after all.

The game itself it’s – fitting enough – basically an idol-athlete raising simulator, where you act as a Trainer and manage an Umamusume career, gameplay being a lot of micromanaging of the talent in order to have her prepared/fit to run and win races, with story and events (affected by the selection of support cards) playing out VN style, and specific set goals to achieve within the given amount of turns, otherwise you fail the career …though that will just happen, and it’s kinda necessary since you can pass down “legacy boosts” by selecting characters that already attempted (or completed) a career.

Suprisingly, the game doesn’t pester you into the gacha to have you favourite umasumume improve and eventually win, so it’s pretty generous, even though some of the characters…are just better, which will matter for the competitive scene long term, for now the PvP consists of a single asyncronous mode.

It looks pretty dang good, the soundtrack is great, the micromanaging is not too overcomplicated, the races themselves are actually pretty fun to watch, and it remains engaging even if the gameplay loop is repetitive and so are the way events/scenarios shuffle during the career/story, thanks to the fun characters and the well written mix of slice of life and sports drama.

Kangadawa Jet Girls [ANIME+OVA REVIEW] | There Is More To Racing Than Tits

There are many of these niche multimedia projects in the “anime sphere”, and sometimes they do get fairly big and well known even if they are still dedicated to relatively fringe, very specific audiences, like Girls Und Panzer, but most often than not these are fanservice heavy, borderline soft porn-adjacent… and while some of you might have thought of Valkyrie Drive (we’ll get to that, eventually), yes, i can see why, but this is NOT that Marvelous project.

This is the one with the jetskis anime girls, again a Marvelous co-produced multimedia affair, and unsurprisingly Senran Kagura’s producer (well, ex-Senran Kagura producer, nowadays) Kenichiro Taniguchi, is involved with Kandagawa Jet Girls too, there are anime boobs involved, after all.

I planned to review both the anime series (with its OVA) and the PC & console videogame, but due to schedule woes, we’ll have to tackle the game at later date, maybe next year.

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[EXPRESSO] Ado Special Live “Shinzou” in Cinema (2024) | Much Ado

After liking her songs in One Piece Film Red, i was curious enough (and lucky enough) to go see the film/cinema version of her Shinzou show that took place at the National Japan Stadium in late April 2024, released here now as limited special event screening.

It was a shot in the dark for me as i’m not really familiar with her much… but holy fuckin shit.

If i was a fan prior this… i would likely have tried to go the concert in question, but reasonably couldn’t and had to “settle” for this, well, i would have been ecstatic.

First, the concert itself was pretty damn good (no fuckin wonder it sold out in a flash), just a great spectactle in general, with the pyrotecnics, background visualizers, lightshows and setpieces beinggreat, the tracklist (which as expected included some of hits heard in One Piece Film Red) was fairly big (being a 2 hours and 20 minutes long concert) and varied.

Second, this film-cinema version is actually pretty well directed, finding the right angles to show at different times (and take advantage of this being), the editing having a good rhythm to alternate between the performances, the setpieces, the pyrotecnics, the audience reactions, without distracting itself with some “behind the scenes” but just taking time to make quiet for Ado’s heartfelt speeches (in which she brings up some honestly heavy stuff).

Not that it was already impressively handled in terms of handling the lighting, since Ado is often on stage but you just see her figure, her silouhette, and you never see her face, which tracks since i’ve heard she was “V-tuber” levels shy/reserved.

Speaking of which, we also get (perfectly fitting Ado’s Vocaloid-utaite background) a song collab with the inventor of Minecraft herself, the leek enthusiast extraordinarie, Hatsune Miku.

[EXPRESSO] Opus (2025) | Modesto, Cult Of The Damned

A horror movie where John Malkovich plays a 90s super popstar coming back after 20 years with a new album and inviting a clique of media personalities (and a young journalist willing to make her mark) for a special preview event on his very Jonestown looking comunity/cult…

It sound promising, but honestly Opus it’s pretty frustrating, for the feature debut of Mark Antony Green shows clear ambition in wanting to tackle the modern theme of the “cult of celebrity”… but it does so quite badly, mostly rehashing stuff already done notably better before, for an uninspired popstar take on The Menu crossed with Midsommar, for example.

I’d complain it’s a thriller devoid of thrills as you know exactly that some culty shit is gonna go down… but it doesn’t really play like a thriller, going for a comedy angle of sorts that doesn’t quite work, as they don’t committ fully to that either. They do deliver a Chuck Norris joke (i kid you not), but mostly you’re left wondering how stupid are these people to not notice they’ve entered “Elton Jonestown”.

Aside from the main protagonist-final girl, whose actress seems unable to gel with the direction… but then again the film isn’t really sure what to do with itself, often contradicting its own set-ups for cheap sholc, the villain plans becoming increasingly stupider and the plot somehow even more senseless, making for a pretentious yet half baked, incredibly stupid mess.

What saves it from being as bad as Blink Twice is John Malkovic go full ham as the villain, basically “Elton Leto”, he commits perfectly that his performance alone makes it kinda worth a watch… but boy it’s a dud, frustratingly so, and maybe – MAYBE – a sign that this type of modern horror-thrillers its running on fumes. Just a bit.

Daimaijin (1966) [REVIEW] | #giantmonstermarch

Told you we were gonna talk about Daimajin sooner or later!

Nevermind it tooks at least 4 years, but we’re at least giving sense to the old announcement wish i did about reviewing Arrow Video releases, because they did release the entire Daimajin trilogy in a cool boxset some years ago, and i highly recommend it, but for time constraints and to make space for other entries this Giant Monster March, today we’re just gonna look at the original 1966 film, simply called Daimajin, which translates to “Great Demon God”.

Back before they went bankrupt and death-farted themselves out of business with the final Gamera film, Daiei Films did compete with Toho in the “big frigging monsters” market and were pretty aggressive/active, as they pretty much commissioned and filmed all three Daimajin films back to back and released them in the span of mere months in 1966, which is impressive.

But also probably why they did eventually go bankrupt, to some extent, since they were pumping out tokusatsu features and Gamera films like there was no tomorrow… which eventually got them there, but hindsight makes everyone sounds wiser, so whatever, but the Daimajin did start out as the first foe to battle Gamera, inspired by 1936 Le Golem, but obviously that idea didn’t pan out.

While the crew was the same for all 3 films, the directors were not, and also due to this insane schedule, it’s not surprising they have similar plots involving the titular kaiju, the Daimajin, this kabuto clad stone golem demon god, to whom people come praying he saves their village by some invading warlords or something along these lines.

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Demolition Girl PS2 [REVIEW] | Attack Of The 50 Foot Dutch Wife

Tamsoft today might be working on big licenses like the Captain Tsubasa game they did for Namco Bandai, or the upcoming new Bleach fighting game, but i will never forget that they cut their teeth and for most of their career they were hacking out a lot of budget games for D3 Publisher, eventually making franchises with Oneechanbara, curating various hack n slash spin-offs of series like Neptunia (also, the cancelled Hinomaruko project, i remember) and working on pretty much all Senran Kagura titles in some fashion, even the later spin-offs.

But today we’re reminiscing (this is a rewrite, FIY) about one of their absolute worst titles ever, with Demolition Girl, one of the many titles they cranked out for PS2 in D3’s Simple 2000 Series, some already reviewed in these pages like Shogun’s Blade, others that might be worst revisiting and talking about again, as with the horrendous Deep Water (AKA The Daikaiju) and Zombie Attack, or freshly feature here, stuff like “Taxi Rider” or “Pink Pong”, i feel like i should clarify yes, they were brought over in NA and-or PAL territories with those titles for real, i’m not altering them for a lark.

As to why this one over so many shitty games from that era of the company… you’ll soon see.

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The Spooktacular Eight #24: Mother Joan Of The Angels (1961)

Let’s conclude this year’s Spooktacular Eight by reviewing the 1960 Polish classic Mother Joan Of The Angels, also known as The Devil And The Nun.

Based on the real, documented case of demonic possession (or mass hysteria, let’s be real) that affected the nuns and took place in 1634 at a convent in Loudlun, France… well, indirectly, as it actually based on a novel of the same name by Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz (which would later by adapted by Kent Russell for the infamous The Devils), itself loosely based on the aforementioned Loudlun possessions.

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[EXPRESSO] Immaculate (2024) | Mary on a cross

I’ll be honest, i kinda forgot this was even gonna be released here, i guess that counts as a “surprise” summer horror release, something to watch before M. Night’s Trap comes out in August, it’s another religious themed horror film, as in it’s about nuns without guns and catholicism and such.

This one is about a young religious woman that moves from Detroit to a rural convent Italy in order to take the votes and become a nun, Cecilia, and is welcomed quite warmly. A bit too warmly, she sees some weird stuff, then she becomes miracolously pregnant (it’s called “immaculate”, it’s not really a spoiler), and then things becomes even weirder and more suspicious, as dark secrets arise and all the hubba you can honestly predict from a movie like this.

So, the short version is that this is – by accident or not, i’ll let you pick because it doesn’t actually matter too much in the end – a lesser version of the Omen prequel that released last year, The First Omen, but this actually amounts to a decent flick, in spite of the aforementioned “similarities” and overall predictable ensemble of situations, events, reveals and twists, even when they’re not pulled straight from the Omen series. Characters fair about as much, with the doe eyed soon-to-be-nun, the strange mother superiors, the crazy old nuns that reside there as the place there is kind of a hospice..

By and large, the concoction here should be just mediocre, professionally shot and produced, but all already been done (and then done again some more) and better, yet the reveal is kinda interesting in the variation/spin it does, there are some decent-to-good practical gore effects, and overall the execution elevates it to being decent, with some extra points for the ballsy ending.

One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 – DLC Pack 5 PS4 [DLC REVIEW]

Before the final reveal in december, i honestly hoped this would have been a One Piece “Film Villains “DLC packs, but nope, the “reveal” (the silhouette gave it away since we knew of the this second Season Pass existing in trailer announcement form) of Uta was simply to indicate this was gonna be a One Piece Film Red DLC characters pack.

Which makes sense, since Film Red was beyond successful at the box office, it was arguably the goddamn best One Piece film since Film Z, and it also big a vehicle for j-pop singer Ado helped it making it the 6th grossing anime (and japanese) film of ALL TIME so far, so yeah, you bet your ass the production committees and suits were gonna push it into related One Piece products.

Still, it’s a shame because i do think a One Piece film villains DLC characters pack would have also sold really well if it picked some fan favourites like Zephyr or Shiki, but alas, this is not the case. Maybe in Pirate Warriors 5, whenever will that materialize.

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[EXPRESSO] Snowbreak Containment Zone iOS/PC | TOF: The Trinity

Despite every reason not to, let’s brave the gacha waves once again in search of some new distraction that may or may not be the time investment, let alone the monetary one.

Today we have another anime styled gacha free to play game that seems like a proper TPS action-rpg or something along those lines, from chinese developer Seasun Games (also behind Girls Gun Cafè and Dawnlands), let’s give it a punt.

The plot starts vague enough, set in a dystopic ice & snow world where you play as an Adjutant to the Heimdall Force, the first assault group created to fight the Titans in the snow ridden and polluted Contaiment Zones that were formed after the mysterious cataclysm know as The Descent.

A lot of borrowing from Norse mythology for the names and the various boss enemies, designs of the ever popular “sci fi anime cyberpunk-esque” ilk with side of post-pandemic apocalypse and grim overtones, but still, the art direction (alongside the icy setting) is strong enough to make it a bit more distinguishable from its peers.

In terms of gameplay, it’s a cover based third person shooter affair, and while the virtual controls schemes available can fiddled with to and can be usable… i’d honestly recommend syncing a PS4 controller anyway (or playing it on PC via the dedicated client), since, while functional, the virtual controls are a bit too clunky to be optimal for a third person shooter.

That aside, gunplay is quite satisfying, designs are nice if a bit “tame”, the levels are short but keep introducing new enemies and obstacles at a decent rate, presentation and technical performance are rock solid, and honestly i do think it’s pretty good, still a gacha but monetizion is not particularly aggressive or manipulative, so it’s worth a try.