RWBY: A Gem In Progressive Character Development

original character designs by einlee

There are a lot of awesome things on deviantART. While browsing about a year ago, I kept finding fanart of these four characters. Naturally, I looked up what they were from and found out they are the main characters of a show called RWBY (pronounced “ruby”). When I first started watching the series, I thought the writers were going to abuse the fact most of the main characters are female and oversexualize them. To my relief, they don’t. The characters are treated like human beings, and they’re respected for their fighting prowess. Even when the characters seem to be modeled from female archetypes! Not only that, but the writers avoid using the nice guy trope, or in this case how no decent guy ever gets a date. The character progression is well done, and I couldn’t be more excited to see where this series goes!

Spoilers after the jump!

Dark Souls: A Game You Should Care About

The time has come for me to talk about Dark Souls. It has been on the market for consoles for months, but the PC version only just dropped. Also, it became my new favorite game ever after several hours of play-time back in late April. Dark Souls is an action role-playing game developed by From Software as the spiritual successor to Demon’s Souls, 2009 Game of the Year. I believe Dark Souls is, more than just another great game, a significant and special game which all gaming fans should appreciate even if they don’t play it. It is aptly described as a massively multiplayer, online, single-player game. It is so challenging that its website is preparetodie.com, yet many fans impose progressively more constricting restrictions on themselves to make it harder. Although its Wikipedia page calls the plot minimalistic, Dark Souls features a highly complex and deeply developed plot which continues to generate spirited discussion. It’s a dark fantasy RPG that often feels like survival horror, yet it’s not trendy (maybe that one won’t make sense to anybody else, but I’m so sick of the topical dark fantasy and crappy survival horror that’s been everywhere recently). Because it is easy to describe it in such contradictory and complicated ways, what may be most surprising about Dark Souls is how simple and approachable it really is.