Part 2 »

i watched Power Rangers a lot as a kid but then for some reason stopped watching any kind of tokusatsu for 22 years... this was a huge mistake! After a single episode of Kamen Rider, an intense obsession took hold, and now i gotta write about it.

so first, some general notes! It's not a show about superheroes beating up monsters. It's always a surprisingly thoughtful character-driven drama with intricate interlocking character arcs spanning the entire season, and also they beat up monsters for 5 minutes as a way to viscerally show character development! They always get their power from the same source as the monsters, which i really like as a way to not just have "inherent good and evil". All the screencaps here will be of the Riders because that's the most visually interesting, and they're awesome, but... now i mostly watch it for the out-of-suit stuff! I wasn't expecting all of them to have such well-written characters and incredibly fun drama, but i wouldn't have it any other way 😄

each season is unrelated to all the others, so you can start with whatever one looks cool. Honestly they're all winners, so there's not much point in giving them "full reviews"! I'll just go through all the ones i've seen so far and talk about them a bit, i just wanna ramble. This account on archive.org has all of them english-subbed, so just grab one if it looks cool! [edit: they're all gone now ]

⚠ Big Post Incoming ⚠

Kamen Rider Kuuga (2001)

Kuuga isn't the first one i watched but i wanna write these in release order because i'm autistic. This is the EoSD of Kamen Rider, where it's the first one in a notably new style after a hiatus, marking the beginning of a new era, while still having some of the crust (positive) of the old style. I haven't seen any of the super retro ones yet, maybe i should! This doesn't make sense in the writeup order but it's really funny how edgy this one is in comparison to all the newer ones, it's like a slasher film where the monsters are all keeping detailed kill counts and competing with each other to see who can do the most stylish murders! It's one of those special pieces of media that's right on the edge of what i usually watch, so i can feel my tastes expanding in realtime 😆

It starts with the premise of "ancient evils get unleashed because archaeologists were messing with some ruins, but also that uncovered an artifact that people can use to fight them"... and then handles everything with complete realism from that point on, it's incredible. My favorite part is Kuuga having regular checkups with his doctor to discuss the medical ramifications of his new abilities that are slowly coming to the surface. Yeah, that's totally something important you'd need to do, but i've never seen media actually acknowledge it! So i really love the vibe here 😄

Kamen Rider Den-O (2007)

I started watching Den-O with a plural system i know, and it turns out... this is the plural one! It's the adventures of the world's most pathetic boy, and his ever-increasing squad of troublesome headmates. Their headspace is a time-travelling train where they all argue with each other for who gets to front today, and they all have different powers and weapons. It's also the funniest thing ever omg, the writing and acting is SO GOOD. You might've seen this gif before, this is where it's from! (The red one just got back from fronting really good.) I absolutely love this one and i can't wait to continue it!

Kamen Rider WDouble (2009)

WDouble is the first one i saw (at the recommendation of a friend), and it left a heck of a first impression! It's about two very hot, very gay dorks who combine into one Kamen Rider to solve crimes as a detective agency. Each gay dork represents one physical half, so they can swap out their GaiaMemories individually to mix them in interesting ways! The villains in this are hilarious too, they're a rich mafia family with a lot of infighting and some very surprising and nuanced developments.

One thing that particularly stands out to me is the worldbuilding in this one. The wind-powered city of Fuuto is beautiful and detailed, it really feels like a place that deserves to be protected. The city itself feels like a character – monsters attacking the city have the same amount of gravity as if they were attacking a named, beloved person. It's really inspiring as a writer!

Kamen Rider OOOO's (2010)

Oh man, i love this one! OOOO's can copy the powers of all the monsters that he fights, and then combine up to 3 at a time into creative combination attacks. The main character is extremely good as a person too, just... i want to be Eiji, it's been a goal of mine ever since i saw this, and i've been trying my best.

The character drama is particularly heated in this one, with a lot of tough situations that need serious introspection on everyone's part to come to an agreement. This applies to all factions, i can hardly think of any two characters who unconditionally get along, no matter what side they're on! Ankh is really hot, and Kougami might be the best supporting character of all time.

the powerup system is Core Medals, which are used by the Rider and all the villains. Generally, whoever loses the fight loses a few Medals too, so everyone's available forms and powers naturally shift over time, and there's a lot of improvisation with whatever they happen to have. There's a little tally screen at the end of each episode showing Eiji's current inventory so you can keep track!

This is my personal favorite! It just has so much fun with its characters and powers, it's one of my favorite things of all time. ❤

Kamen Rider Fourze (2011)

Fourze is incredible. I'm rewriting this since i was in a bad mindset the first time around, and i was watching it with TV-Nihon subs which were awful for this one. I came back a year later to re-watch it and finish it though, and... oh my god, i forgot how good Gentarou is, he might be my favorite person in anything? All he does is want to be friends with everyone and he's 100% genuine about it, just an unstoppable shining beacon of positive vibes. If everyone had a Gentarou in their lives then there would be no conflict in the world.

You know how at the end of some stories, the hero's in big trouble, but then it starts cutting between all the different places they've been, with everyone cheering for them and sending them energy? The final movie for Fourze does that for six uninterrupted minutes. 8% of the movie's entire runtime is the friendship powerup sequence. And it is incredibly genuine, and Gentarou earned it.

The transformation belt is pretty incredible in this one! It has 4 slots for different Switches, with each Switch controlling one limb. So there's one that turns your right arm into a rocket, there's one that turns your left leg into a drill, etc, they all get swapped out and the only limitation is "enabling too many means it's really hard to move"! Each Switch is physically unique too, like being a flip-switch, or a crank, or a mad scientist lever, or whatever else. I want this as a stim toy.

Kamen Rider Wizard (2012)

Wizard is self-explanatory from the title! He gets 4 different elemental forms with different powers, plus a lot of miscellaneous spells. The spells are all in the form of "Flame Please" or "Small Please" because that's the magic word. The main character is nonverbal-ish and non-emotional and just kind of along for the ride, which is funny and super relatable for me.

An evil warlock and their minions are trying to drive people to despair to turn them into monsters, and Wizard has to stop them. Sometimes this doesn't even involve a fight, it's just... helping someone with depression! If someone is on the brink of shattering though, Wizard can travel into their subconscious and use his dragon which is also a motorcycle to fight a monstrous incarnation of their suicidal urges, which is sick.

The donut shop owner is a trans woman! Her appearance is probably "intended to be funny" since she probably hasn't started hormones yet but it's never actually brought up, she's just a well-respected and well-liked character by everyone, and uses she/her pronouns and everyone respects that. Absolute legend. [edit: i found out the actress is trans too!]

Wizard is Cleru's favorite.

Kamen Rider Gaim (2013)

Oh man, Gaim is something. It's about competing teams of street dancers who fight for turf by summoning tiny monsters from a dimensional rift to engage in pokemon battles. But then, a mysterious dealer from Yggdrasill Corp sells one of them a powerful belt, and so the hero transforms in order to just hit the monsters with a sword and win every time. This innovative new battle strategy kicks off an intense rivalry, and leads everyone into an enigmatic forest...

Okay, i can't say much more than that without giving stuff away, but after seeing the whole thing i found out it shares its lead writer with Madoka which definitely explains a lot. It has a ton of different Kamen Riders all fighting each other and teaming up as alliances shift, there's like ten Riders total! They're all different fruits and one of the powerups is a smoothie belt so they can mix different ones together. This also has an openly-gay character, actively dating men onscreen as a major plot point! Hell yeah. 😄

Kamen Rider Drive (2014)

In a strange alternate universe where cops are cool, sentient computer viruses unleash a devastating pulse that slows down time for the entire world. And Kamen Rider Drive is the only one fast enough to fight back! Somehow, despite featuring cops and cars, my two least favorite things, this one's amazing. There's even a prominent subplot about the value of nonhuman friends, featuring a very hot autistic rival!

The protagonist Shinnosuke is so understated and boring-looking that i kept forgetting who was Kamen Rider in group shots early on, which i thought was dumb at first but it's 100% on-purpose, since this is the only one (out of the ones on this page) with a relevant secret identity! There's very important named characters who interact with this person every day without knowing he's Kamen Rider, and that's a really fun setup that i'm surprised doesn't show up more. He also wears a trans flag tie sometimes which i don't know if it's intentional but i'll assume he's had a very successful transition. This might be the most "standard" one i've watched, but i mean that in a really good way, it's right in the middle of "all the things Kamen Rider can be" so it's probably a great entry point!

The main character's partner is a sentient seatbelt who talks in the Copy Kitty menu font in the tv-nihon subs.

Kamen Rider Ghost (2015)

Ghost is about a kid who dies in the first episode, and also his two partners: a scientist who thinks nothing is ghosts, and an onmyoji who thinks everything is ghosts. The kid befriends the spirits of great luminaries, such as Miyamoto Musashi, and transforms into powerful new forms with them! One of his supermoves is Thomas Edison Omega Drive and i have never stopped thinking about it.

The ghost world is really cool, there's no curves so everything's straight lines and cubes. I always love seeing the humans react to the ghost world and the ghosts react to the human world. This show also has the best costume designs of any Kamen Rider as far as i'm concerned, it's absolutely the highlight! This is spoilers but check this out, omg! Absolutely fantastic 😄

This one's strange! It's one of those pieces of media where i was always noticing a thousand things that bugged me, but all in all i have nothing but good memories in the end once it had time to settle a bit! Such is the power of headcanons. If your headcanon isn't as powerful as mine though then you probably won't have a good time. BUT, either way, the Ghost x Drive crossover movie is one of my favorite single pieces of Kamen Rider media, so if you wanna start with a movie instead of a full series then make it this one, even if you don't intend to watch either of these riders afterwards! It's an amazing standalone that has a lot of fun with everything.

Conclusion

Go pick one and watch it!

They're all right here, just pick the one that sounds coolest! [edit: they used to be on archive.org there but then people started uploading currently-airing ones so they all got nuked... oh well, you're all resourceful, i'm sure you know a few other places to look!]

Part 2 »

After making my little blog i kinda fell in love with the graphics and layout, so i've merged it with the main site and updated everything to match. I think it's really comfy here now 😄

The rest of the post is the email exchange. The original asker's quotes have been reworded and all potentially-identifying info has been removed.

first email:

Hello, I hope this isn't too much to ask, but can you teach me how you did the special effects in Copy Kitty? I'm trying to get a game done by the end of the year, so I wanted to ask you about some visual things. I've been a fan of Copy Kitty ever since my childhood and I've always liked how it looks. Thanks in advance if you can help!

hey, thanks for asking! Someone saying they've been a fan since their childhood definitely makes me feel old though 🤣

i don't have anything written up about the effects anywhere though, and it's way too complex of a topic to cover in an email, since it's just so broad with a thousand different layers. A lot of it is me just having like 15 years of practice by the time the game released, so don't expect anything crazy if you're just starting out. There's no specific program i used to make the effects either, it's all programmed from scratch (although there's better/quicker ways to do a lot of it with modern tools). I can try to give you a quick overview though, and i've attached a few gifs and things that i made a while ago.

a lot of the effects are done with particles, which are basically just groups of small objects that all move independently (but don't do anything except look pretty). "effects.png" shows most of the particles used by the game, with the top row being the most common by far, particularly the 3rd-5th ones (the sparkle, ring, and circle). A very simple explosion might be something like... "create 20 of the circle particles at the same position, at random sizes and speeds, starting out white, changing to red/yellow and slowing down to 0 speed and 0 size over the course of random 10-20 frames." Try randomizing different parameters, stretching them in different ways, creating them in different patterns, making them curve or distort... it's really loose, there's tons of different ways to approach it! "glow2.gif" is probably the best demonstration, literally everything about the enemy's attack is done with particles on effects.png. Most modern game engines should have a particle system built-in that you can mess with, or you can grab a plugin for it.

one particluar particle trick i do a lot is lightning/laser particles, which stretch between two points that can move independently. The lightning particles randomize their graphic every few frames (out of the graphics in the second row of effects.png), and randomize their width/color at the same time i think, so it's flickering a bit. You can see a lot of them in glow3.gif, where the two points are orbiting the core of the shot at slightly different rates so there's a cool stretching effect. The core of the shots are particles too – it's making a new one every few frames, with a random color and slightly random size. All the core particles follow the shot exactly, so it's easy to tell the shot's exact position and size even with all the other effects going on.

a lot of the aesthetic is additive blending on the particles (and other stuff), where overlapping graphics kind of meld/glow together against a dark background. You have to be careful with it though, or it all just turns into a blob and you can't tell where the hitbox is anymore! In cases where it's occasionally against a light background, i usually have a semi-transparent black blurry circle behind the whole shot so the additive blending doesn't blow it out.

A big part of what makes the graphics look good is making sure everything has a very sharp and readable center. Having a ton of particles and glows around it is fine, but the core needs to stay sharp! All the example gifs show this off pretty well i think.

the other big class of "specifically Copy Kitty special effects" is a big use of shaders, which are basically little mini-programs that run for every pixel on an image, so things can distort or color-shift in cool ways. The circuitboard ground effect all over the game is probably the most prominent example of it. "energy2.gif" (used for curse effects in world 11) is done with shaders too – the only graphic file it's actually using is "cloudstwirl.png" but with a ton of filters and math, but going into how to make that kind of stuff here would be way too much! If you wanna learn that stuff, searching for "shader art", "programmatic art" etc might get you started (just watch out for modern neural-net stuff taking over a bunch of similar keywords, that's obviously something different). It's tons of fun but it requires you to have a really strong grasp on graphic fundamentals and math functions, since you're basically doing math on the color values directly.

okay, so one more really important thing... when you're just starting out with effects work, keep everything really simple! All your graphics should just be squares and circles, to let you focus only on the basics – positioning them, shifting their colors, fading them in or out, moving them in interesting ways, overlapping them to create more complex patterns. You can do some seriously rad special effects with only squares and circles, i'd recommend having your entire game look like that honestly! Fight the urge to overdo things, too... always keep the core of the graphics sharp, which i keep saying, but that's because it took me 10 years to really internalize it. Like if an enemy's exploding, there should be a big spiky graphic that only lasts like 5 frames before vanishing into nothing, and all the long-lasting particles exploding outwards should be way smaller and subtler. Copy Kitty has a slow-mo button somewhere in the modifiers i think, you can mess around with it for a closer look at the effects if you want.

most of what makes Copy Kitty look unique are things that are at the exact intersection between art and programming, so if you're not confident with one or the other, it'll be hard. There's a program called "Processing" which is specifically made to give you a playground to mess around with math-art stuff, so resources intended for Processing might be useful even if you're not using it directly. I haven't checked it out in like 10 years though so i have no idea if any of it's still up.

okay, i said it'd be quick and still ended up with this much, even though it's like 0.1% of everything i could say... i hope it's useful though! 😄

-Azure

second email:

Thank you so much! Can you go more in-depth into the shaders, like the main menu background and the phoenix yoggval effects?

a lot of the shaders in the game are based on the same technique, i think it's usually called a "plasma shader". You take two perlin noise layers (clouds.png) moving at different speeds, and take abs(tex1-tex2) to get a lightning-y effect, and then you can put a colormap on it or do whatever else you want. Try replacing the noise layers with other stuff like gradients to see how it affects the shape. The main menu, a lot of the stage backgrounds, and stuff like the Yoggval wings all use this! In CK's level editor, you can set background type sky, background shape flat, bg effect electric, and both textures set to clouds to get a good look at its "base form", with a lot of the other settings being small tweaks on it.

The title screen gif uses it in a lot of different ways, but the purest form there is the yellow lightning inside the letters – and if you look around the rest of the game you can probably see variants of it on literally every screen. You'll see it in tons of other games too if you're looking for it... if there was a periodic table for modern game FX, then "perlin noise plasma shader" would be one of the base elements 😆

for fire effects like phoenix yoggval's, it's mostly applying a fire colormap (black-red-yellow-white) to an image, and then scrolling the colormap itself so it gets the cool "shifting" effect (fire.gif, zoom in and look at the enemy's feet for the clearest example). This technique for fire (and sometimes water/poison/lightning) actually goes way back, you can even see it in NES games like the end of the Dust Man stage in Megaman! (Although they did it with a different method, the result's the same.) Shader work is basically all about finding cool new math functions to combine the different layers, and being comfortable doing math on both color values and texture coordinates. If some of these things don't make sense then don't worry too much, there's lots of ways to do similar things if you play around a lot.

good luck with your game! 😄

-Azure

Download!

Book of Star Mythology is an excellent touhou fangame i ran into about a year ago, and it had a mostly-complete English patch but not quite – it had really bad translations for some parts and it was missing the endings and other stuff like that. I became kind of obsessed with this game, so i was disappointed the patch was incomplete... and then i realized it's made in danmakufu, so i could finish up the patch myself! All that time spent playing around with that program as a kid is really paying off. I did this in June 2023 even though i'm writing about it much later. (And realizing that i missed some minor things, oh well...)

i didn't do any of the actual translation, it was all on the wiki already, i just updated the existing patch to use the most recent translations, and then i filled out the endings, rank screen images, and stuff like that. It took about a day of programming/graphics work, and another day of data entry and testing.

you can get the patch (or rather, the full pre-patched english version, since the original is free) up above, and i've uploaded it to touhou wiki page for the game. The rest of the post is just me talking about the game itself.

so yeah, this game's amazing. I've been recommending it even to people who haven't played touhou before, i think this is a great entry point! The characters are all super cool, and the bullet patterns are really unique and interesting while still being intuitive to dodge. It's really well-polished and has a few cool twists you wouldn't expect! It even has an infinite-lives mode if you wanna just chill.

this is the first time i've really gotten into a touhou game's scoring system. It basically comes down to "get close to as many fairies as you can" (which is great advice in general tbh), since you get Wish items based on how close you are to enemies/bosses that you're attacking, with extremely satisfying SFX whenever you get one. Wish items are big for score and they're what unlocks the bonus Last Spell for each boss. It's not the first time that touhou's had an enemy-proximity scoring mechanic, but this has definitely been the cleanest implementation i've seen – just stay as close to them as you think you can handle! And you get a Star Rank at the end of the game with cute descriptions based on how well you did, so there's an end goal to shoot for.

oh, and the extra stage is rad as heck, you gotta play it!

For quite a few years, i'd make some 3D skeleton gifs every october leading up to halloween.
I haven't been able to keep that up lately, but here's all the ones i've made so far! These were always so fun

Happy Halloween!

CrossCode is one of my favorite games! It's a top-down action RPG about playing an MMO with your friends. Me and Raibys played it together around when it came out, and it's one of my best memories. Give it a shot if you haven't!

But you know what'd make it even better? Modding the game to make the main character look more like Boki. So i did!

To use it, install the mod loader, open the Options menu ingame, click "Mods" at the top and find it in the list. I've also made a few others, like expanded difficulty options (change enemy HP, speed, etc) and a more basic set of recolors for Lea that make her hair change colors based on element. Nobody had made a conditional recoloring system before that, it was surprisingly tricky!

Even if you're playing for the first time, i'd recommend Elemental Hair, Party Element Effects, and El's Tweaks (the latter for fixing some oversights in the Arena and letting you more easily track crafting recipes). The game is amazing even without mods of course, but those are all great!

I should make a post with all of actual Boki's palettes sometime. I wonder if people even realize how many there are?

Delila

The Three of Gears. Delila can create simple mechanisms to easily fix stuff... as long as you're okay with it breaking again at sunset. This was a fun character with a great outfit!

Character by Zemyla.

Binary

The Seven of Shades, can strike a cool pose to toggle the visor up or down. Cyborgs are very far outside the technology level here, but i guess a space traveller passing by can have some fun with these weird animals for a bit as long as they don't leave anything behind!

Character by Binary.

If you wanna turn your own OC into a fluff, check the commissions page. I plan to keep these open as long as i can, and i'm surprised i'm still getting new ones even as of today! Thanks to everyone who's supported me, and i hope you all enjoy being small and puntable.

in the meantime though, i've been getting a lot of work done on Sunfluffs at least. There were a lot of really intimidating cutscenes and events that i've been dreading for years that are completed now, so i'm glad! We finally have a logo now too. Things are pretty close to the actual release of the first 2 chapters, although there's still a lot of stressful business/marketing stuff i need to do before i can get the Steam page up, and then afterwards there's still a bunch of playtesting and other "finalizing" work to be done.

outside of game work, most of my free time has been spent watching tokusatsu as always. I've also been playing Sonic Unleashed with the trans mod, and i finished up Bobo the Cat which i definitely need to write a lot more about someday!

i'll be trying my best to keep making it through this. Stay strong, everyone.

setting things up on Steam and getting gender euphoria from taking 3 tries to get past the captcha. Look, pretending to be human is hard, okay?!

it's finally happening

we've both been going through some really rough times for the past year, so thanks for your patience. The first two chapters are releasing July 14th, about a month from now. You can get it on Steam or itch.io!

we have very little reach on our own, so every boost you can give us is extremely helpful. You can wishlist it on Steam to let them know you're interested, or share the trailer around. I've also made a bluesky account, although for mental health reasons i'll be keeping my use of it to a minimum.

i'm really bad at marketing, i just want to make this gay animal game. This world is basically my whole life — but with my severe social anxiety and other brain problems, it's very difficult for me to put myself out there, so please help us out by spreading the word if you're in a position to do so. If you're a review channel and want a key, let me know.

thank you for sticking around despite our silence. I love you all.

GC controllers are the canon control scheme for Sunfluffs. I didn't realize this until more than 5 years into development, when i plugged one in to test a new input library, and... experienced what i guess you could call gender euphoria? Like "this is how things were meant to be all along, but i just didn't know"

they're a somewhat overlooked controller type in indie/gamedev spaces so support for them is uncommon, and i had to use a few tricks to get them working properly.

• if you have an adapter for using real GC controllers on a WiiU/Switch, it'll work perfectly here, though you'll need to check "how to get the adapter working" below to install a driver first.


• if you have an adapter/controller meant for PC use then it'll likely work fine out-of-the-box, though it might be missing rumble (check the first section below to fix it, if there's a mode toggle on your adapter) or it might have incorrect button glyphs (email me if that's the case and i'll work with you so i can patch it).

the game wasn't out yet when i first wrote this, but i figured i'd put it up ahead of time since someone wanted to know what adapter to buy. I'm honored that people care so much about getting the perfect experience here!

just 5 days left until the game's out... i'm really excited but also nervous, i keep thinking of all the things that can go wrong somehow, and all the ways my life might have to change afterwards. let's hope it all goes well.

Steam

itch

chapters 1&2 are finally out

you can get it on Steam or itch.io!

i'm really excited to put this out into the world. We've been working on this since 2018, which is wild to think about... these have been the hardest years of my life, but this game, and all the people who care about it, have kept me moving forwards. I'm thankful i got to reach the perfect audience for this on cohost, as brief as it was.

please help us out by spreading the word if you can! Tell all your queer friends. I have severe anxiety issues and it's difficult for me to have any reach on my own. If you're a review channel and want a key, let me know. If you're in a bad spot yourself and can't afford the game, you can email me about that too and i'll send you a key with no questions asked — anyone who wants to play this should always be able to!

i love you all. Thank you for being here, and i hope you all enjoy being a silly little animal for a while.

thanks for playing! Remember to love yourself.

Camerata

the Eleven of Sparks. she can poof out your fur with static electricity just by looking at you.

character by Camerata Robinson.

Kaleiko

the Four of Spectra. she can make really pretty lights!

character by Kalei.

Fedor

the Jack of Diamonds. i don't know what his trick can do but it's probably horrible.

character by Antiévêque.

if you wanna turn your own OC into a fluff, check the commissions page. thanks to everyone who's gotten one!

« Part 1

i'm back! i've watched a lot more tokusatsu and i'm here to tell you why you should too. it's really fortunate that motorcycles are still the exact same amount of cool as they were back in 1971 when they decided to make a motorcycle superhero that they didn't know would last for at least half a century afterwards.

Kamen Rider Black (1987)

Black is the oldest one i've watched, and the only one from before the hiatus and reboot (Kuuga in 2000). Kotaro and his brother Nobuhiko are captured by evil cultists at their birthday party, then turned into cyborgs and brainwashed... but Kotaro escapes right before it's complete! and now as Black Sun, he needs to find a way to save his brainwashed brother, Shadow Moon.

this show mixes serious storytelling with very goofy monsters. with the distance of time, i'm not sure how much of it was meant to be silly and how much is just that old shows are really funny by default? what makes it work though is that Kotaro takes everything 100% deadly-seriously and i love him.

most Rider shows post-reboot are very serialized (every episode has major permanent developments) but Black is very episodic, which i assume is probably nromal for the old ones? but then right when it was starting to get repetitive, this asshole shows up and steals the show for the next 30 episodes, oh my gosh! so, my favorite thing in Kamen Rider is when there's multiple Riders and they're constantly arguing with each other — but Black here is the only one i've seen that inverts it? once Bilgenia shows up, he's openly planning to usurp the other villains, and they're always arguing and fighting, but then they have to put aside their differences and join forces whenever Kamen Rider shows up. makes me feel bad whenever they lose, even if they are evil cultists.

my favorite thing in this show is that Black's motorcycle Battle Hopper is a sentient grasshopper, who can't talk, but gets treated with love and care like a pet. lots of good scenes of Kotaro musing about current goings-on while giving his steed a nice wash.

Kamen Rider Agito (2001)

there's been a series of strange deaths: people drowning on dry land, getting embedded in walls, or being completely mummified in the middle of driving. the police trace this to monsters called the Unknown, who seem to be related to some mysterious artifacts. amnesiac Kamen Rider Agito, police exo-suit Kamen Rider G3, and freakish monster Kamen Rider Gills all set out to defeat the Unknown and figure out what's going on.

yeah, this is what i meant earlier! there's three Riders here and they all have very different ways of doing things. none of them know who each other are, which is really fun! like, all the Riders run into each other a lot, and all their unmasked forms run into each other a lot, but nobody realizes it. i never get tired of stuff like that! Shouichi (Agito) and Hikawa (G3) in particular are perfect foils for each other, where Shouichi acts really dumb but is actually really smart, and Hikawa is the opposite. the supporting cast is great in this one too, especially Ozawa and Mr. Misugi.

as an aside, it took me a long time to realize that the first Kamen Rider was supposed to look at least somewhat like a monster-of-the-week, not a hero. he is a monster, but one who consciously chooses to fight for justice, and that's been a really important recurring element throughout the entire franchise. i'm bringing it up here because... Gills is amazing, i love when a Rider gets to be really freaky like this! check out that face close-up with the mandibles!

there's one episode halfway through (with a guest writer i think) where everyone's extremely stupid for no reason, and i always think about it.

Kamen Rider 555Faiz (2003)

certain people who die come back to life as a powerful Orphenoch, "humanity's next stage in evolution." the Smart Brain corporation, led by them, has been trying to take over the world... but mysteriously, the same corporation also created a powerful flip-phone to fight the Orphenoch, and loser protagonist Takumi is the only one who can use it, to transform into Faiz!

this one really stands out to me, because there's a big focus on the monsters as people, and what they choose to do with their new life. Takumi doesn't even show up until like 12 minutes into the first episode — the start is entirely focused on Kiba, the horse Orphenoch, who immediately murders someone in petty revenge. it's really rad that one of the main characters is just a centaur sometimes. all the Orphenoch characters are amazing and i love how they end up forming their own little group that's given just as much attention as Takumi's.

it's hard to talk about the plot of this show without major spoilers, but i can say it has maybe my favorite moment in the whole franchise? if you've seen it then you know what it is! one warning though is that this show is strangely really sexist, and don't expect any girl to ever be a Rider even if they hint at it like ten times. it's not a dealbreaker but it's worth a CW there.

Kamen Rider Ex-Aid (2016)

he's a doctor... but also a gamer! Ex-Aid fights against the Bugster virus, which infects people and makes them manifest a video game monster — if the monster's allowed to exist for too long, then the original patient disappears. of course because it's a non-video-game piece of media about video games, it's very obviously written by someone whose only experience with games is second-hand accounts of someone else's vague memories about 80s arcades. this bugs the heck out of me but i think other people might find it really endearing!

in general i could poke a thousand holes in Ex-Aid's extremely flimsy plot and characters, and it does many things i disagree with, but it's definitely a turn-your-brain-off show and it's fun like that. the suits and the general visual design are perfect, and it has some of the most fun action sequences i've ever seen. the soundtrack is all really hype Gamer Music, and villain Kamen Rider Chronos is so cool, omg! this is still pretty low on my list of ones i'd recommend watching, but it's some good stupid fun with high highs and low lows.

Kamen Rider Build (2017)

10 years ago, Pandora's Box was discovered on Mars and brought back to Earth... and opening it caused all of Japan to erupt into civil war. Genius physicist Kamen Rider Build and his idiot pro-boxer boyfriend are out to put a stop to it! (they are extremely gay and i'm so proud of them. )

this one's really good in general but i want to focus on one specific aspect of it. so, the transformation/special narrator callouts have gradually gotten more and more obnoxious over time, because kids love that stuff. so there's this really interesting contrast where, even during serious or heartfelt scenes, it still happens. it's all canon, but nobody finds it silly — that's just how fighting sounds like in this world. A named recurring character can be dying on the floor with soft piano music playing, and a weeping, grieving Rider runs in in slow-mo to fight the villain responsible, ROBOT JELLY! (tin-can crunching sound) ROBOT IIIIIIN GREASE! (guitar riff) to transform and then the scene continues with 100% sincerity as if nothing strange just happened.

it's incredibly inspiring as a writer actually, because... again, that's just how it works here? the world you're writing can have the strangest rules or the stupidest mechanics, but if you take them seriously then your readers will too. even if your main character's supermove is a physical, solid ballistic trajectory graph which shows the exact path of your kick, if you treat it with the same sincerity as Goku firing a Kamehameha, then there's never anything to be ashamed of. if Kamen Rider can do it then you can too.

Conclusion

Kamen Rider is really good. they used to all be on archive.org but then the uploaders flew too close to the sun and got them all removed. there's other places to get them if you know where to look, though! i've also spent a lot of time recently watching Ultraman and a bit of Super Sentai, so i should do a spinoff post soon.

« Part 1

the launch went alright! it was very small which is a bit discouraging, but pretty much what i expected, and still gave me a bit more of a safety net money-wise.

if you have any reach then you should be really annoying about Sunfluffs on social media to help us out! and if you do streams or videos then email me and i can send you a free key. you can email me for a free key for any reason actually, don't be shy about it, i just want people to play this.

the next release will have one rather short chapter and one medium chapter, so i dunno if it'll be called 3&4, or just 3 with the short one being numbered as an intermission or something? either way, there's still a ton left to do but there's enough to show a few pics! i've gotten the basic visual design done but there's still lots of stuff to add, and most importantly i need to fill it with lots of nice critters. any suggestions are welcome.

made with Yinglet Creator. you can get all the yingsaves here if you wanna play with them yourself!

depression/artblock hit me pretty hard for the last month, but i've made some slugs. these are dangerous to pet, but it's very tempting to try anyway.

a new song that plays every morning, when you realize you're in the same room as two lovely animals who care about you a lot. i think this came out wonderful.

after cohost's closure, i'm still not quite sure what my relationship is with social media anymore, but i'm cautiously giving it a try. any game updates or fun essays will be posted on this blog too, i mostly just want to passively exist in a space filled with other queer animals to remind myself that i'm not alone. i think everyone else should remember that too.

i got a little handheld gaming thingy (RG40XX H) for myself as a holiday present, specifically because it's the cheapest model that can run Sonic Adventure 2 (dreamcast version). being able to play this game whenever i want, on a device that's the size of a GBA, fills 12-year-old-Azure with excitement and astonishment at the wonders that the future holds.

this event sent much-older-Azure on a wild journey about this game's analog stick readings though, and how every version messes it up in different ways. (except maybe the Gamecube version? i can't find any info, maybe that one's fine!)

i got the dreamcast PAL version because 50hz runs much better on this device. but it had a real weird bug where the stick's inputs seemed to be rotated a bit, so pushing straight forward actually runs at an angle about 5° to the left. i swapped to the US version, suspecting it was a regional difference or a weird emulator bug, but this game's analog stick is just messed up, and my device's intentional analog stick deadzone really magnified the problem. there's a patch file to fix it at least! the patch is for the US version, but it turns out that that one lets you run in 50hz anyway if your region's set to Europe, so it's fine for me.

and of course, the PC/Steam port made everything worse. the analog stick is so garbled that everything basically always snaps to cardinals+diagonals, and rail grind balancing is impossible. there's a fan patch to fix that and many other things (on gamebanana/github) which i'd say is pretty essential if you'll be playing that version. maybe not as essential as BetterSADX for its prequel though, which is one of the worst ports i've seen in my entire life. make sure to enable Dreamcast mode so everything actually has colors and lighting! at least there's dedicated fans putting in tons of work to undo all the damage that Sega's chain of bad ports did to these wonderful games.

so that's "push Up to make sonic run forwards", failed in three different ways. thanks for reading!

moonmouse

these yam-shaped squeakers are bioflourescent in the same way that moonfloofs are. they burrow into the sand and dirt to make a nest, and bring back food to share with their kids.

their ancestors lived in the sky, and you can still see some cute bald spots where they used to have wings.

—Cleru's animal journal, "rabbits" section

it’s all been Almost Done for like 3 months now, just doing endless small tweaks because releasing things is really hard. the Steam spring sale is in a week though, so i think that’s as good of a reason as i’ll get? so we’re planning to release this on March 19th, if everything goes well.

i also took my first dose of HRT today!

you can get it on Steam or itch.io!

if you have either version already, it should auto-update.

i don't actually know what to write here. i think if you're on this silly little blog instead of getting the news from Steam or whatever then you're already excited for this. i love you all, and i hope you have fun with the new stuff!

fig.1: the protagonists remembering a time a decade ago when they carved their initials into a tree, and cringing at how terrible it was to pointlessly harm nature like that.

fig.2: a combat tutorial. you get damage bonuses and extra items proportional to how stressed-out you make each enemy before you kill them.

how come everyone is blind to this? it feels like every video game has you kill animals for no reason, but this one is probably the most obvious contradiction i've ever seen. at least the animals just poof into a cartoon dust cloud, instead of exploding into a fountain of bones like the first few Mana games.

made in Squeakross, a lovely game where you can customize a rodent and then build a little house for them! there's puzzles too.