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Of Gods and Myths: a Review of Blood of Zeus and Hades Game
These past couple of weeks I have immersed myself with reacquainting with my love for Greek mythology. Netflix has just dropped it’s new animated series, Blood of Zeus, made by the same people who did the Castlevania and of course, it had peaked my interest enough to give it a go.
The first season of Blood of Zeus introduces us to Heron, a young demigod, who as you may have guessed is the son of Zeus. Predictably, him being yet another product of Zeus’ infidelity earns the ire of Hera. In turn she unleashes a sort of civil war up in Olympus. Also, there are daemons involved — an inspiration seemingly taken from Castlevania because as far as I can recall, there are no such beings in Greek mythology.
Liberties/reinterpretations from the source material aside, I find the show to be lacking in terms of character development. Heron is too bland of a lead hero and his main source of angst? anger? daddy issues? rings stale. It’s really something we’ve seen before. Barring Hera, hardly any of the other goddesses were given lines and just served to be background characters in the pantheon. There was a brief moment with Apollo in bed with a woman and who I’m guessing to be Hyacinthus, maybe the show could give itself a pat in the back for the blink-or-you’ll-miss-it representation bingo.
For all its faults, I found the soundtrack to be quite decent and the animation for the fight scenes to be great. While it’s on it’s first season, I’m inclined to give the show some leeway for setting up the world and the span of eight episodes feels too rushed of a pace. One think I liked though was how each ending featured storyboards and samples of character design. Really makes you watch through the credits instead of skipping to the next episode.
Blood of Zeus is good enough as a time filler. I feel it has potential for a second season at least and for the characters and their motivations to be more fleshed out.
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And speaking of motivations, well, my current obsession has plenty of it.
Hades is a roguelite dungeon crawler in an isometric view. You take the role of Zagreus, son of Hades, who is trying to escape the Underworld to reach the surface. As you delve deeper into the story, you get to find out the reason why he is doing so. Along the way, you’re helped by the Olympian Gods who grant you temporary power-ups called boons. There are six weapons in the game which can be upgraded permanently.
This is the first time I have played a game of this genre and I thought I would end up being frustrated by having to return at the very start and lose all my progress. As it turns out, I am having quite a lot of fun. Each death means I go back to House of Hades where a lot of plot points get revealed and Zagreus gets to up his relationships with the other characters. It’s not just about escaping but it’s also a dating/counseling sim rolled into one.
If I have to nitpick, I gotta say the dungeon rooms design is pretty limited and does get to be limited. Aside from that I love everything about this game. As of this typing, I managed to get as far as facing final boss for the first time. Maybe after more than a hundred more deaths I’ll finally manage to beat him.
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Relaunching
Just a day after making my first blog post in half a decade, I somehow ended up impulsively purchasing my own domain name. So, here I am with the nth incarnation of my blog and personal site. It’s really been a longtime dream and this is pretty much the first time I had the chance to do so.
A lot has changed since. For one thing, I hardly use my laptop anymore (ancient beast that it is) and I’m mostly on my phone anyway. Unfortunately, this is gives me a number of limitations in what I can do as I don’t have access to things like an ftp client and Photoshop. Which is fine, I guess, because I hardly have the patience to create my own themes from scratch.
What I found challenging was having to tap out basically walls of text. And so I ended up also getting a wireless keyboard for myself. It’s pretty decent except I didn’t account for how large it is 😂 It does make things a bit easier at least!
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And We’re At It Again
A few days ago, I was hit by a wave of nostalgia over the yonder days of personal blogging which I was very much into during my early 20s. Before all these huge social media platforms had taken over and changed how we interact at the Internet – more for the worse, I daresay. But I got to meet some great people along the way so there is that.
I am not one for frequent updates. Oftentimes, I get far too caught up with the design and organising aspect of my blog that I inevitably lose momentum, focus, and drive to jot the churning whirlpool that goes on in this brain of mine. I’ve been used to typing out things on a laptop using a keyboard but these days, all I have is a my smartphone (first one I had actually!) Also, for the past decade or so, my Twitter have been subjected to my constant stream of thoughts to the point of obsession – something to reexamine at a later time. Perhaps. But thing is, even with the increased character count and threaded posts, there’s still that limit. Here I can ramble continuously and observe how far my English actually deteriorated from misuse hahaha.
That’s it for now. I need to sleep soon and focus on the week ahead.