It's been a bit, hasn't it? The last time we were here, I fired off an almighty something or other out of my brains that had to do with magical girls and hope and all that stuff. Then the world went to absolute hell and kind of messed with my writing motivation. We'll get back to the magical girls, believe me, as there's a whole lot of shit to talk about. As a preview: Mirror girls, and Symphogear actually getting a leg up on Sailor Moon. In the meantime, a funny thing about my procrastination over my year. I keep tabs on every game I beat over a year in a little Notepad file, for my own reference in December when I do a Games Of The Year list. January through April are fairly sparse; I only played either one or two games for each of those months. Some of those are big games, like April's sole venture being the Final Fantasy 7 Remake (and oh, the things I could say about that experience). All of this is to say that, in the first week of May, I cleared as many games as I have throughout the previous third of the year. How is this productivity possible? Easy. I started playing a bunch of FIGHTING GAMES. Four of those six games I cleared in May are SNK fighting games, and they're what I'd like to talk about today (For reference, the other two were Streets Of Rage 4 which is fighting-game adjacent, and my friend Thom's RPG Silus which is not fighting-game adjacent but you should still check out anyway). The clearing of these fighting games creates a strange little narrative arc for me, one that's still in progress but that I feel confident in talking about. So, you know, let's do that. THIS IS GOING TO BE ONE HELL OF A WRITEUP! ROUND 1, FIGHT!
