Staff Writer; Fadzai Nyamande

A South African who brings her love for fiction, manga, and storytelling into every piece she creates. Her writing is shaped by imagination, curiosity, and a true appreciation for the worlds stories can build.

Feel free to drop a note at; FadzaiN@AfroGamers.com.

Think back to 1998, when the original hit the Nintendo 64. None of us were out here counting square miles. What stuck was the feeling of stepping out of Kokiri Forest into your first sunrise over Hyrule Field, or realizing a few notes on a little clay flute could drag the sun down into evening. Nearly three decades later, the rebuilt version arrived on Switch 2 on November 5. The gutsiest call the team made might be all the fat they refused to add.

Somewhere around the Skyrim years we all started measuring these games by the acre. You know the loop by now. Climb the tower, watch a dozen icons bloom across the map, go dust each one off, and sixty hours later you could not tell a soul what any of it meant. Some of those giant open worlds really are special. A lot of them are just chores wearing a pretty coat, though, and we kept calling it freedom because the brochure said to. Then this thing shows up, a rebuild of a cartridge that once fit on 32 megabytes, and it has the nerve to act like less was the point the entire time.

Look at who actually lives in this place. Navi in your ear going on with that chirpy nag every veteran can still quote. Saria sitting deep in the Sacred Forest Meadow, pressing a song on you that you will somehow still be humming decades on, like an old tune from a relative. Malon out there singing to the ranch horses. Darunia, huge as he is, throwing his whole body into a dance that rattles the mountain. None of them had a glowing exclamation point hovering over their head. They were not errands with faces stapled on. Give each one a handful of lines and the whole cast still rents space in your skull years later, which is kind of wild. Ganondorf, meanwhile, got more menace out of one smirk and a creepy organ solo than a lot of today’s villains squeeze from forty hours of cutscenes.

Then it drops Sheik on you. That one still gets me. This hooded stranger shadows you through your adult years, feeding you riddles and new songs. When you finally learn who is really under that wrap, it knocks the wind clean out of you. A script three times the length could not manufacture a turn that good. Getting attached to a character has nothing to do with how much screen time they get. It comes down to somebody paying attention to the details.

The magic lived in those dungeons. Bring up the original Water Temple to anybody who beat it and watch their eye start twitching. Raising and dropping the water level, constantly swapping the Iron Boots, and wandering back through flooded halls broke a whole generation. It also quietly taught us how to think in three dimensions. The remake eases some of that old frustration, but the puzzle underneath remains a serious test. The Forest Temple twisted back on itself like an Escher sketch. The Shadow one went straight up nightmare fuel, with floating coffins, grabbing hands, and plenty of other horrors. Every room was its own little lockbox of a problem. Not one of them got stuffed with filler just to pad the clock, and you felt that. Even when a puzzle drove you crazy, there was a reason for being there.

Stack that against how it usually goes now, a dungeon smeared across half a province with its puzzles spread so thin you lose the plot halfway in. The N64 version bet that one sealed room and one smart gadget could land harder than a whole countryside of waypoints. Turns out it had that read dead on. Nintendo producer Eiji Aonuma even had the remake team experiment with adding new warp points around Hyrule. Once they realized those shortcuts were robbing players of the little discoveries made along the journey, out they went. Imagine that. A developer removing a convenience feature because the wandering mattered more than getting there faster.

Here is the thing craft alone never covers. Good puzzles buy a game respect. They do not explain why this particular one has stuck in my chest since I first played it. For that you have to talk about the sadness folded into it. At first, you’re the one boy in the forest village with no fairy, the odd one out everybody clocks. Then comes the sword, pulled loose from its pedestal, and just like that, seven years are gone. By the time you wake, Hyrule has fallen into ruin. The market town you once tore through is now crawling with those moaning ReDeads that scared the daylights out of half of us. That hole in you, that mourning for a boyhood you never got to live, is a gut load most big budget games have not touched since. And the goodbye at the end, Zelda handing those years back so you can be a child again, it quietly takes you apart. You save the whole kingdom and you grieve anyway.

The new polish looks nice enough, sure. Fresh visuals, fully voiced cutscenes, expanded dialogue, plus motion aiming for weapons like the bow and Hookshot. But the piece that had me grinning is the instrument itself. You can now hum or play a familiar ocarina melody into the Switch 2 microphone, and Link performs the tune in the game. Back in 1998 you mashed buttons and filled in the rest with imagination. A kid firing this up right now can literally hum into the hardware and watch the sky answer back. You only chase an idea like that when you love the original enough to grow it instead of smothering it under gimmicks.

And no, none of this is me yelling at the clouds about big games. Breath of the Wild and its follow up proved a wide open map can be packed with real wonder, long as honest curiosity is pulling you forward instead of a checklist. Size was never the villain here. The villain is size propped up to cover for thin ideas, all that square mileage painted over a hollow core, acreage somebody mistook for substance.

What that old Hyrule understood, and what the new version is gambling you still want, is that nobody walks away remembering the biggest dungeon. You remember the moments that got to you. Trading a melody with a girl with green hair deep in the trees. Your horse clearing a fence while the ranch theme swells up behind you. The second a mask comes off and the floor falls out from under you. A grown warrior carrying the weight of a boyhood he lost. You cannot grind your way into a feeling like that. Somebody has to place it there on purpose, one careful piece at a time.

If this one sells like crazy, some reviewer will probably pin it on nostalgia, like loving something great calls for an excuse. Fine, let them write that. Meanwhile the rest of us boot it up, catch those opening flute notes, and feel the chest pull tight. It quietly reminds us of a lesson this business keeps forgetting. Polish fades fast. What gets made with real heart just does not, no matter how many teraflops the next console is slinging around. A place built with love never really gets old. It sits there patient as a stone temple, waiting on whoever is brave enough to step in next.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Elder Scrolls and Changing Things Up in RPGs 

Both Morrowind and Oblivion are my favorites of the Elder Scrolls games but Skyrim truly modernized the mechanics of the franchise to where you could actually do things and shape a character even if you’re new to action RPGs or RPGs in general.  

Prior to and beyond Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, RPG mechanics such as skill trees, allocation of points, building towards skills, and understanding your character’s stats had been simplified over time to accommodate new players while keeping genre veterans engaged. Of course, you’ll have some complaints of the game being dumbed down early on but this was one of those cases where I welcomed it. 

Some games simply play as if they’re from a different time in gaming. Morrowind is a prime example of this. As player (and for developers themselves), I feel that you want that big leap in gameplay between games. Especially if they’re released years apart. Sure, you have players that don’t mind a game playing almost identically to the previous installment, just look at sports titles in general, but you to feel like “Hey, maybe this new entry is worth picking up”.  

A new experience is great but I’ve always enjoyed a new take or new ways to navigate and interact with a new story in a familiar setting.  

Oblivion 

This brings us to Cyrodiil, the setting for Oblivion. A very different locale compared to the mostly grim setting of the Morrowind province. While I spent most of my time either in the Thieves Guild or Dark Brotherhood but I’ll dabble in the Magic Guild and Arcane University. I might get busy with the Fighter’s Guild. 

Actually, in every playthrough, I get busy with the Fighter’s Guild. They’re hard to avoid. Occasionally, I’ll get into vampirism. Oblivion is my first introduction to vampirism in Elder Scrolls and it’s pretty basic. You get the dark gift and that’s pretty much it. Sunlight wreaks havoc on your health but you get bonus and spells which are fun to use. 

While it can be a hindrance to your adventuring, moving at night or when night is getting ready to fall is an immersive way to include vampire gameplay in a game with a day-night cycle. The sun is treated as one of your character’s greatest foes. Or rather, it’s your most unbeatable foe. 

The problem I have with the mechanic (which is solved in a Skyrim expansion) is that there’s little much of an overarching storyline that comes with being a vampire. There are adventures that part of larger storylines involving a few vampires but nothing that centers the vampires. This could simply be down to vampire hunting efforts in Cyrodiil being especially effective and the existing vampires mostly having their sh*t together to where they can exist among the living. 

Skyrim 

That isn’t to say that vampire hunting is a lost art in the northern province of Skyrim. Vampires seem more plentiful but that’s aided by stronger hardware, better writing to explain why they are so many still around, and a larger world to explore. Vampires in Skyrim exist similar to their kin in Cyrodill. 

They dwell in caves, abandoned forts…anywhere not frequented by the living outside of adventurers. At their sides are usually their thralls, living henchmen who are pretty much equal to any bandit or ne’er-do-well you might encounter in the world. What Skyrim does differently with vampire mechanics is focus more on of vampirism is a virus that can be contracted by the living. 

From there you have mechanics that are easier to utilize such as feeding (thanks to improved stealth in Skyrim) and the sun not being as much of a foe. It weakens your character but it doesn’t attempt to actively kill your character off.  

I was mixed on this when I first played as a vampire in TES V but I remembered how violent the sun could be in TES IV and figured “I can actually do adventures during the day, at least.” It was that simple, folks. Quality of life from the sun. Being weakened during the daytime presented its own challenges but they were manageable. 

It made being a vampire and interesting path to explore. Yes, it could get boring quickly but that’s where the Dawnguard expansion comes in. Dawnguard presented a storyline centered on becoming a vampire and joining an ancient clan of the night stalkers or joining the Dawnguard, an order of vampire hunters. Each had their advantages and you could join the Dawnguard as a vampire. 

Now, you couldn’t stay a vampire the whole time in the DG but you could use some cool silver weapons and they had my favorite faction armor in Skyrim. Meanwhile, you could join the vampires and wield vampire lord powers. 

But that’s a lot of talk about bloodsuckers, what about the murder mutts? You can be a werewolf in Skyrim but I always found being a werewolf boring after a while. I mean, it’s fun initially and it ties into The Companions storyline and career line but I just found playing as a vampire more enjoyable and beneficial when playing as a thief or assassin. 

Did you enjoy playing as a vampire or werewolf in TES? Did you enjoy Dawnguard? Let us know in the comments.

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.

You have a series like Persona where talking and hanging out with teammates is a matter of bonding. However, it’s in western RPGs where you see the social game having some actual importance. 

Fallout 

In Fallout, being a charismatic character varied by the game. At its core, being a better talker usually resorts in better reactions from NPCs. The player is able to loosen some lips or avoid conflict at times. That’s in a game like Fallout 2 or the third title. When factions came into play in New Vegas, you got an extra layer to that part of the gameplay.  

Also, your alignment or how the main character is perceived hinged on your actions in the game. This also included how you talked with NPCs but not as much. I always felt that the Fallout games could’ve done more with Charisma and the Speech skill to make it more important to your character overall.  

The skill definitely sees use in the Fallout titles but you could get just as far much more quickly with a plasma rifle or a good ol’ Power Fist and some VATs. If you’re looking for a post-apocalyptic series where Charisma and Speech have a little more use in gameplay, check out Wasteland from inXile entertainment. 

Mass Effect 

In the original Mass Effect trilogy, your conversational choices could tilt your perceived alignment towards either being a Paragon or being a Renegade. ME, like Dragon Age and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, lean heavily towards story. How your character moves through the galaxy and deals with the different characters you encounter on missions and adventures is influenced by how your Spectre is perceived. 

That perception is influenced by how iron-fisted or velvet-gloved you are in different social situations. I won’t say it’s peak “Your actions have consequences and can shape the world”, something developers love to tout when including this element of gameplay. However, BioWare (gone but not forgotten) did heavy lifting on building a world and characters where it was worth actually putting some consideration into how you interact with NPCs. 

I’m sure we’ve all played games where it was done much better but the Mass Effect was an introduction to how social mechanics in a game world work for gamers who didn’t get to experience Star Wars: KOTOR. 

Shadowrun Returns and Cyberpunk 2077 

I love Shadowrun Returns, it’s pretty much a better version of the SNES/Sega Genesis version of Shdadowrun complete with expected improved mechanics and graphics. One thing it also improved upon is the use of social interaction and charisma. In the default game you have some interactions which rely on your charisma and etiquette (their background or culture). 

It’s similar to Cyberpunk 2077 where being nomad or corpo can get you far in certain interactions. Given the setting of both games being a messed up, dystopian future being familiar with certain groups and cultures in the city and knowing how to talk to them makes perfect sense and is implemented well. 

Some games that are more fantasy-heavy (Shadowrun Returns mixes fantasy and cyberpunk) you did get something similar where characters might need to learn or know the tongue of different races or cultures. It’s something I’d love to see in more fantasy RPGs. Like yeah, taking an artifact to a scribe to translate an ancient language is fine but it’s stock. 

Speaking of learning or knowing a tongue. 

Kingdom Come: Deliverance  

KCD is an RPG series based in the 15th century Czech Republic. You don’t play a nobleman, princeling, or chosen one but the mostly illiterate son of a town blacksmith. A quest for vengeance basically makes a man out of young Henry as picks up swordsmanship, archery, and horseback riding. 

The combat can be daunting if you’re used to more responsive combat that is mostly block-attack-and-dodge in nature. While Kingdom Come: Deliverance’s combat is very much this, there’s also attack direction and types tied to your weapon and shield combination. 

It’s a whole thing that is extremely rewarding when you get it down and use a little a strategy in combat. But this isn’t about the combat in KCD, social interactions in the game are tied to your character’s natural charisma, the cleanliness, condition and style of their clothes and whether your character is drunk or sober. Also, if your character is just clean in general and smell nice can factor in to how well interactions go and what you can get out of people. 

I’m big on trade in games with good mercantile mechanics and being able to haggle or pay more goes a long way in the game. That’s in addition to how well-received you are in a town. I like that becoming more literate and learning to read helps as well in the game.

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.

So it reads as more than a correction when Netflix rolls out a gunslinger on November 3 who was flesh and blood long before he was ever a cartoon.

Bass X Machina is the kind of swing you take only when you have something to prove. Studio Mir, the South Korean house behind The Legend of Korra and Devil May Cry, runs the animation. LeSean Thomas created this one, same as he did Cannon Busters and Yasuke, so the pedigree is not in question. Brian Tyree Henry, an Oscar and Emmy nominee, voices the lead while serving as a producer. Every episode drops at once. No weekly wait, no stretching the suspense across two months. Netflix clearly wants folks to binge the whole thing and start fighting about it before anyone’s had a chance to cool off.

The setup is simple, but it carries weight. You take one of the wildest real lives the 1800s ever produced and drop him into a busted, retrofuturist version of the frontier. Outlaws everywhere. Machines built for war. And something worse than either, waiting in the dark.

Now here is what most people never learned in school. He actually existed. Bass Reeves walked this earth, and the facts of his life beat most of what a writer would dare invent.

He was born into slavery in Arkansas, somewhere around 1838. When the war broke out, accounts say he seized his chance to escape, disappearing into Indian Territory for years. He lived among Native communities, learning the languages and customs of several tribes. Their ways stopped being foreign to him after a while. So did the country itself, every creek bed and low rise committed to memory, because out there a man who did not know exactly where he stood did not last.

Judge Isaac Parker needed deputies with the nerve to cross into the badlands past Fort Smith and ride back out alive. Reeves fit. A Black man carrying that badge and that much authority west of the Mississippi was close to unheard of at the time.

Then you get to the numbers, and they sound made up. Reeves reportedly made over 3,000 arrests during his career, though historians caution that the exact total remains difficult to verify. Decades on the job. He could shoot straight with either hand, walking out of more gunfights than anyone could count without ever catching a bullet. Disguise was his favorite trick. Sometimes Reeves showed up in an outlaw camp dressed as some busted saddle bum or a passing preacher. The wanted man rarely recognized the lawman until the cuffs were already on. One warrant had his own son’s name on it. He served it anyway. You will also hear that the Lone Ranger got borrowed from his story, a theory nobody has ever nailed down for certain. Does not much matter which way that one falls. The fictional cowboy in a white hat became a household name, while the country filed the actual human being under forgotten, on purpose.

That erasure is what this story keeps poking at. The deck was stacked against him twice over.

Here is what Thomas seems to understand in his bones. You do not honor a life like that with some solemn, museum quiet biopic. You crank the volume. His vision mashes anime into the old cowboy picture, running the whole mess through a punk amp. The teaser plays that out. Boiler steam, brass fittings, a blade meeting a six shooter, and a hero who moves like he made peace with his own funeral a while back. It looks like a tribute with the volume knob snapped off, and you watch thirty seconds and nod.

The voice work goes deep on talent. Tati Gabrielle carries an edge she has sharpened across film sets and game booths. Cree Summer shows up too, and her voice basically raised a generation of kids without most of them realizing it. Janelle Monáe does double duty, voicing Glory and performing the original theme song, “Honor Killing,” the kind of extra mile that tells you nobody on this project was phoning it in.

Step back far enough and you can see the pattern Thomas has been laying brick by brick. An android who looked like a young Black girl drove the anime road trip in Cannon Busters. An African samurai, pulled from a real historical man, anchored Yasuke inside feudal Japan. This makes three. One quiet argument stated three different ways: a form that Black viewers have loved for ages while rarely catching their own reflection in it, finally handing the spotlight to faces that match the crowd.

Animation built for grown people fits this story like a tailored coat. The deputy walked through blood and gray choices during a brutal stretch of history. Any version softened for the whole family would have to lie about half of it. Keep the violence honest, leave the morality tangled, and you get a lead heavy enough for prestige drama, minus the live action price tag. Ink and paint can follow a soul anywhere a mind can picture.

Underneath all the gunsmoke sits a heavier question about who gets to become myth in the first place. That old frontier formula was never just entertainment. It whispered to the whole country about who counted as a hero, whose dirt was free for the taking, whose days rose to the level of something worth retelling. The guest list stayed short for about a hundred years. Blue Eye Samurai cracked that door recently, pulling an overlooked perspective into the light through striking animation, and this show walks through the same opening wearing different boots.

The strange machinery is doing real work too, not just looking cool. Brass gears and patched together contraptions turn the backdrop into a question with teeth. What is left of a man’s soul once every gear around him was bolted together to break him? Hang a badge on him and the whole thing twists tighter, since the nation that handed him that authority had only recently stopped allowing men to claim him as property.

Everything hangs on one bet: whether the show can hold both halves at the same time without letting either slip. The dumb fun of a sharpshooter cutting down monsters, next to the ache of a figure the real nation worked hard to erase. Stick the landing, and Reeves gets handed the kind of larger than life treatment the frontier myth kept locked away from him. Outsized. Hard to turn away from. Written down to last, not scrawled in something that fades.

November 3. The whole run in one sitting. A legend returned to us, and charging interest.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

And that rider is exactly why Vampire Hunter D keeps outliving every fad that was supposed to bury it. It first hit screens back in 1985 and somehow it hasn’t aged a day.

Most anime curdles. You go back to it years later and the art looks stiff, the story crawls, whatever scandalized folks at the time barely registers anymore. This one dodges all of that. Hideyuki Kikuchi wrote the novels it springs from, Yoshitaka Amano gave its central character that unforgettable look, and together they made something that flat out refuses to feel dated. Picture a world where a castle gone to ruin sits in the shadow of dead cyborg machinery and nobody around thinks that is strange. Where ancient bloodsuckers lord over crumbling estates powered by lost tech. Where a cross might save you, or might do nothing at all, because most of the rules you learned from Western myth got rewritten ten thousand years back.

Go to the first picture and the texture tells the story. Directed by Toyoo Ashida, the 1985 original is rough around the edges the way only vintage OVAs can be. Grainy color. That analog hiss baked into every frame. Doris Lang, a farm girl out on the fringe, gets marked by Count Magnus Lee, a Noble pushing ten thousand years old who wants her as his bride. Her options look grim. So she hires the drifter nobody trusts, the pale loner carrying a sword as long as he is tall.

What hooks you here is the pulp. This version leans hard into grindhouse instincts. Magnus Lee’s castle works as a funhouse of trapdoors, snake women, and horrors lurking around every corner. His daughter L’Armica sneers at the drifter precisely for what he is, a mongrel holding the blood of her kind and the frailty of ours. A mutant named Rei Ginsei covets Doris too, and his ability to twist space around him makes the fellow especially dangerous. Then there’s Greco, a mayor’s brat slobbering after her from the human side. Everybody wants a piece of her. Our quiet killer stands in their way, barely wasting a syllable.

And then the hand talks.

There is a face living in his left hand. A wisecracking little symbiote that talks trash and chews up whatever scene it lands in. Every so often, the little rascal saves the day by swallowing a blast of energy, a mouthful of dirt, or even a whole windstorm. On paper it reads ridiculous. In practice it works, and that smart mouth ends up being a big reason the movie doesn’t sink all the way into gloom. People have been quoting that gremlin for forty years now.

Jump a decade and a half forward and the ambition explodes. Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival in 2000 before reaching American theaters in 2001, and brother, it’s a different animal. Yoshiaki Kawajiri, the same mind behind Ninja Scroll and Wicked City, took the helm. The man doesn’t do restraint when spectacle is on the table. Adapted from Kikuchi’s third book, Demon Deathchase, this feature trades grime for grandeur. Every frame looks painted. Character designer Yutaka Minowa builds on Amano’s haunting vision, giving the film a beauty that feels almost unreal. Shadows pool thick as ink. Light spills through cathedral windows in a way that makes you forget you’re watching animation rather than a moving gallery.

The emotion cuts a lot deeper here. A wealthy family hires our wanderer to retrieve Charlotte, their daughter, taken by a Noble named Meier Link. Simple bounty, right? Except she went willingly. She loves him. He loves her back, truly, and the chase stops being a rescue and turns into a tragedy you watch coming and can’t halt.

That is the genius move. Bloodlust asks whether the monster is actually the monster. Meier isn’t drooling over a victim. He is a being out of time trying to hold one honest thing before the dark claims it. Meanwhile a rival crew, the Marcus brothers, hunts the same prize for coin, and among their company travels Leila, the lone soul with real warmth in her chest. Her slow thaw toward the quiet swordsman, two outsiders recognizing each other, gives the picture its aching core. The moment she asks him to visit her grave someday wrecks people to this day.

The ruined keep they race toward belongs to Countess Carmilla, a legend soaked in Bathory lore, scheming to rise again through Charlotte’s veins. But getting there means surviving the deadly Barbarois warriors hired to protect Meier Link. Benge slips into shadows. Mashira becomes a monstrous werewolf. Caroline takes on deadly plantlike forms. Together they turn the journey into a gauntlet of nightmares. Kawajiri stages each clash as a music video from hell, gorgeous and vicious at once.

So which earns the crown? Depends on what you came for.

The original is comfort food for the horror head. It is a mess, and proud of it. Lurid, full of fangs, carrying the grain of an era when the medium was still testing how strange it could get away with being. The movie wants a scream, a flinch, maybe both at once. It won’t apologize for any of it. It stalks, slashes, and heaps on the body horror, basically daring you to look away first. Nobody puts it on for restraint. You put it on because some madman had the nerve to toss Dracula and Mad Max in a blender decades before the genre figured out that was even on the menu.

Bloodlust is the fancy one. Put it on for the friend who swears up and down that cartoons cannot make him feel a thing. Then the love story at its center does precisely that, aching in a way this medium almost never has the guts to try. Its visuals embarrass most of what gets called animation now. And the sadness of it just settles in your chest and refuses to leave. The 1985 one goes for your pulse. This one goes for your throat and takes its sweet time squeezing. If the earlier outing plays like a haunted carnival, the follow up plays like a requiem. It is not a continuation of the same story, but a separate adventure that finds something even more heartbreaking in the same lonely hunter.

Here is the thread tying both together, the thing that drags new folks to these movies decade after decade. It is him. The dhampir who fits nowhere.

Think about it. People fear him for the fangs he hides. Nobles can’t stand him either, put off by the human weakness in his blood. He guards the very folks who would drive a stake through him the second they figured out what he really is. And on he goes, chasing the monsters tied to his own bloodline across a dying planet, one century bleeding into the next. He doesn’t rest. The girl is never his to keep. That one place that might feel like home? Always just out of reach. That loneliness is written into his very bones, and it lands different when you have ever felt caught between two things that both reject you.

Amano’s designs make the ache visible. Those long limbs, that androgynous grace, the costume somewhere between samurai and funeral. He looks like sorrow wearing a hat. The far future around him, with its crumbling tech, feudal terror, and mutant wildlife, stays fresh because almost nobody else commits to that exact recipe. Other shows explore apocalyptic ruins. Vampire tales have been told a thousand times. This saga fuses both into one bleak, beautiful dreamscape and refuses to blink.

That is why newcomers still fall hard. That is how the old heads end up guarding their discs. You can see the influence reaching into later Castlevania games, where producer Koji Igarashi acknowledged Vampire Hunter D as one inspiration for Alucard. That blend of otherworldly beauty with deadly loneliness became part of a larger gothic tradition spanning anime and gaming. And the story is still finding new audiences. In August 2026, GKIDS announced that Bloodlust would return to North American theaters in a new HD presentation, with a wider theatrical and home entertainment release planned for 2027. More than twenty five years after its original premiere, that beautiful nightmare is getting another chance to haunt the big screen.

So if you have yet to ride out past the edge of the map with the quietest killer in the wasteland, handle that soon. Put on the grimy 1985 cut first for the jolt of it, then let Bloodlust go ahead and wreck you proper. Run them back to back and watch the art form evolve. Two different adventures built around the same haunted soul, one rowdy and raw, the other quieter, more heartbreaking.

Out there the sun is still a threat. Those old castles have not fallen. And some solitary rider is moving along that road with no end in sight, going on forever, close enough to human that it hurts.

That is the magic. That is why it lasts.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

First, the basics. Trapstar Games developed and published this sequel, bringing its street shooter formula from Detroit to Chicago. This ain’t some sprawling story about a young brother trying to survive the neighborhood. It’s a multiplayer first-person shooter built around rival gangs, customizable weapons, and six competitive game modes. Turf War has players fighting for territory. Hit A Lick sends crews after the other team’s bag, while Chain Snatch turns collecting chains from fallen opponents into a scoring opportunity. You can shoot it out downtown, battle through the suburbs, or take the fighting inside Chicago Mall. The developers have taken the familiar multiplayer shooter formula and wrapped it in exaggerated street culture. Depending on who you ask, that’s either the joke or the whole problem.

Here’s where the comedy comes from, and I’m not gonna pretend it isn’t real. For a lot of us, pieces of this world feel familiar, even through all the exaggeration. Not the violence part, the texture. The neighborhood setting stirs up memories of aunties yelling across the block, along with that one dude who sells loosies and knows everybody’s business. Then there’s the barbershop that doubles as a courthouse on Saturdays. Those memories are part of the world its imagery calls to mind. When you grow up somewhere the industry usually ignores or sanitizes, seeing a familiar environment rendered in a video game hits different. It’s recognition. Representation, even when it’s exaggerated, scratches an itch that decades of fantasy castles and space marines never touched.

And the jokes? Some land genuinely sharp. The comedy we make among ourselves has always been a survival tool, the thing that lets us laugh at the absurd so it doesn’t crush us. We clown our own circumstances because we lived them, and that laughter belongs to us. When one of mine riffs on the chaos, I’m cracking up too, because we both feel the ache underneath the punchline. We earned the right to laugh. That’s the difference. Still, Hood Warfare 2 pushes that humor into uncomfortable territory. Turning street violence into killstreaks, complete with snitches spotting enemies and drive-by attacks, raises questions about what exactly we’re supposed to find funny. The joke might land differently when somebody remembers the real families who have buried loved ones because of that same violence.

But flip the camera around. Picture a 19 year old in Ohio who’s never set foot south of his own cul-de-sac, controller in hand, treating that same block like a safari. He’s not necessarily thinking about the people who actually live there. Dude might just be laughing at a cartoon somebody sold him and labeled authentic. That’s the part that turns my stomach, and it should make anybody paying attention uncomfortable. Context changes the way humor lands. The identical joke can feel like catharsis to one person and cruelty to another. It depends on who’s holding the sticks and whether they see human beings or NPCs wearing our faces. I’m not saying everybody outside the culture is incapable of understanding the humor. I’m saying there’s a difference between recognizing the humanity beneath a joke and enjoying a stereotype because you believe it tells the whole truth.

This ain’t new, by the way. Gaming has danced with the question for ages. Def Jam: Fight for NY handed us hip-hop royalty throwing hands, and we ate it up because the whole thing carried swagger, personality, and a genuine affection for the culture it borrowed from. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas still gets debated to this day. CJ’s arc means one thing in my house and something else two doors down. That game gave its central character family, loyalty, betrayal, ambition, and a complicated relationship with the streets that raised him. Hood Warfare 2 isn’t trying to tell that kind of story. It’s selling fast matches and outrageous humor, which is a different creative goal altogether. So the real issue with this release was never whether street life can show up in a game. Course it can. The harder ask is whether this game actually believes in something, or whether it just borrowed the aesthetic for a weekend and plans to give it back.

That belief part matters way more than folks give it credit for. Satire punches with intention. It knows what it’s critiquing and why. At its best, it has something to say about the systems that shape these neighborhoods and then blame the folks trapped inside them. Caricature just gawks and giggles. One honors your intelligence, while the other hands your worst days to a stranger as a toy. Trapstar Games makes clear that Hood Warfare 2 is fictional entertainment and doesn’t promote real gang violence. Fair enough. But a disclaimer doesn’t automatically settle the question of racial stereotypes or cultural responsibility. From what I’ve seen, Hood Warfare 2 keeps slipping between humor that feels familiar and exaggeration that feels careless. The arguments surrounding the game reflect that tension. That’s exactly why the discourse refuses to settle.

Then you got the money, and money always deserves a closer look. Hood Warfare 2 sells for $5.99 on Steam, so we aren’t talking about some expensive blockbuster trying to squeeze seventy dollars out of everybody’s pockets. But a small price tag doesn’t erase the bigger question. Who gets to profit from this version of Black street culture? Trapstar Games is publicly listed as both developer and publisher, yet the identities and lived experiences of the people behind the studio aren’t clearly established. I’m not about to assign anybody a race or background without evidence. Still, representation behind the scenes matters. If the people creating these games understand the communities they’re portraying, that’s one conversation entirely. If they’re simply turning stereotypes into a product because controversy brings attention, now we’re talking about a different beast. Follow the dollar, ask who’s telling the story, and pay attention to how the people being portrayed are treated along the way.

My biggest gripe isn’t even the exaggeration. Every genre bends reality, and cranking the dial is what these things do. What gets under my skin is the flattening. Reduce an entire people to one setting, one hustle, one way of ending up in a body bag, and you’ve erased everything else we are. We got scientists. We got preachers. We got some teenager up the way who’s writing code in three languages before his momma calls him for lunch. Now, I don’t expect a multiplayer shooter about gang territory to suddenly become a documentary about Black achievement. That would be ridiculous. But when games repeatedly draw from the same narrow collection of stereotypes, the larger picture starts looking mighty small. Pain moves units. Complicated don’t. That kind of repetition can do quiet damage, shaping how outsiders see us long after the computer shuts down. One game doesn’t carry responsibility for every negative portrayal that came before it, but that doesn’t mean it gets a free pass either.

Still, I won’t sit here telling grown adults they’re wrong for enjoying it. That’s not my place, and it’s kinda rude honestly. Plenty of players are having a good time with Hood Warfare 2, and the positive reception on Steam makes that much clear. Enjoying a ridiculous shooter doesn’t automatically mean somebody endorses every stereotype wrapped around it. If you look at this game and find something funny, familiar, or entertaining, I’m not about to take that from you. Telling a grown man how to feel about his own experiences is disrespectful in its own right. What I will say is this: hold two thoughts at once. You can treasure the recognition and still side eye the packaging. Finding something hilarious and calling out what’s rotten inside it aren’t opposites. They’re part of being a thinking person who refuses to be flattened into a single sad sprite.

So where do I land? Right in that uncomfortable middle I mentioned up top. This sequel isn’t pure celebration, and I don’t think every joke deserves to be labeled pure slander either. It’s a mirror held by hands I don’t fully know, reflecting something familiar through a lens that sometimes turns real hardship into an easy punchline. One moment, the humor feels like an inside joke. The next, you’re wondering whether the people behind it understand what they’re asking everybody to laugh at. That uncertainty is part of the problem. We can appreciate the energy of a game without pretending every creative choice deserves applause. We can question its intentions without declaring everybody who enjoys it some kind of traitor to the culture. Grown people can handle that kind of conversation, and we deserve the respect of being trusted to.

The move isn’t to ban the thing or crown it king. Better play is staying loud about what comes next. More studios with us in the room, not just on the screen. More Black creators getting the opportunity to build games around their own experiences. Stories about neighborhood struggles, science fiction, fantasy, or worlds nobody has even imagined yet. More characters who get to be complicated human beings instead of walking collections of familiar stereotypes. Let the block be the opening chapter of somebody’s arc instead of the whole tragic ending. Until that day comes, laugh if it tickles you. Rage if it stings. Just don’t let anybody tell you those two reactions can’t live in the same body. They been sharing space in us a long time. Maybe that’s the most Black thing about this whole mess.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

To understand why that question won’t leave me be, you’ve got to ride back a minute. 1998. The television I played it on wasn’t even mine, some hand-me-down set wrapped in that fake wood paneling every house down here seemed to own back then. That cartridge, though, I guarded like it was gold. The title screen would fade out, Link would take off galloping across Hyrule Field, and I swear the whole room would go dead quiet behind me. My nephew froze mid-sentence. Open space stretched wider than anything we’d touched before. Z-targeting rewired how a generation swung a sword. Turning night into day with a tune, calling a horse, unlocking the Door of Time with a melody, all of it read as straight witchcraft to a boy raised on side-scrollers.

Here’s what nobody young enough to miss it truly grasps. That adventure wasn’t merely good. It rewrote the rulebook. Countless 3D action titles that followed owe it a debt, whether the designers cop to it or not. Combat, puzzle rhythm, the sense of a place that breathes while your back is turned, every piece helped shape a blueprint that developers would study for years. People still argue it’s the finest ever made, and I won’t stand here calling them fools.

Which carries me to the sweaty part. Nintendo says they’re rebuilding the whole thing. Richer models, lighting that behaves like actual sunlight, and the bold gamble of performers lending voices to characters who spent decades communicating through text boxes. My eyebrow climbed the second that last detail hit.

Think about our boy in green for a beat. Link still isn’t talking, and that’s important. His silence lets you pour your own breath into the adventure, your own grit, your own reason for storming the final castle. A champion who stays quiet becomes a mirror. You slip inside him. What has changed is the world surrounding that silence. People who once lived inside dialogue boxes now have performers giving them voices. Maybe that makes Hyrule feel more alive. Maybe it crowds out some of the imagination we supplied ourselves. That’s the gamble that worries me, and if you were there, odds are it worries you too.

Then again, picture Navi shrieking in my ear every twelve seconds, and a slice of me wonders whether a genuine performance might sand down some jank we all quietly tolerated. Nostalgia lies to us, fam. We cling to the wonder and conveniently bury the aggravation.

The controls, though? Right there sits my hope. That old three-pronged controller was an alien relic, a gadget dreamed up by someone who’d never shaken a human hand. Camera movement amounted to a prayer. Aiming a slingshot meant wrestling plastic that fought back. Proper sticks, responsive buttons, and a camera you can actually steer without cussing, none of that tampers with a landmark. Nintendo is even adding dedicated jump and dash commands, giving players more freedom to move through Hyrule. It finally hands the thing the body it always deserved.

History hands me reasons to exhale, if I’m honest. The company has walked this stretch before and mostly treated us right. Wind Waker in high definition looked like a canvas come alive. Twilight Princess got its flowers. Ocarina of Time itself received a remarkable makeover on the Nintendo 3DS back in 2011, complete with improved visuals and updated controls. Even that Link’s Awakening redo from 2019 spun a Game Boy gem into a toy box you wanted to crawl inside. These creators know the material carries weight. They’ve brought enough classics back to life over the years to earn a sliver of faith.

Faith, though, isn’t a blank check. See, a gulf separates polishing a jewel from swapping it for a flashier fake. A redo can pile on resolution and misplace its spirit. More pixels, less heartbeat. I’ve watched cherished properties get the glow-up and limp out the far side resembling a wax dummy, technically dazzling and stone dead inside. Nobody craves a Hyrule that gleams yet forgets why we fell for it.

The word better keeps shifting on me the deeper I dig. A fresh wave of Black kids who never gripped an N64 controller is about to meet the hero for the very first time, and they’ll meet him through this window, not mine. For them, voiced scenes and silky movement won’t register as betrayal. They’ll read as the floor, the baseline, the norm. The weight of my memories means nothing to a twelve-year-old discovering the Water Temple raw. Maybe that’s the actual point. You don’t restore a monument for the crowd already in love with it. The rebuild exists for the next wave, so they get to tumble just as hard as we did.

I keep settling into an odd spot, somewhere between a believer and a bouncer guarding the door. One half of me wants to shield what we held, to protect the 1998 version like a family recipe nobody better touch. The other half knows art frozen in amber eventually quits breathing. A song gets covered. Stories get retold. Each generation earns its own doorway into the greatness we take for granted.

Will this one clear the bar? Honestly, I can’t say, and anybody swearing they’re certain is peddling something. Every piece looks right on paper. Nintendo knows this world better than anybody. But the soul of that original lived in more than its components, in a current you can’t bottle or patch in later, and that current is exactly what I’ll be hunting the moment I press start.

Come November, I’ll be posted up with the lights dimmed, just like ’98, ocarina within reach. Should my chest tighten the way it did when that open plain first unfurled, they’ll have done the impossible. If it plays like a stranger wearing my childhood’s face, well, we’ve got our answer right there too. Either way, I’m copping it day one. Some legends you simply have to witness again, flaws and all.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Sunrise put this out in 2002, and a whole lot of heads slept on it. You get twenty-six episodes with no glowing transformations and no tournament bracket. What sits in their place is atmosphere. Taku Iwasaki scored it with strings, horns, and a smoky church organ dread that hangs over each scene like haze in a late-night jazz room. Shukou Murase ran the direction with the calm of somebody who knows a strong story never has to sprint.

Peep the setup. A fifteen-year-old named Robin Sena arrives in Japan from Italy, raised inside a convent, carrying the ability to ignite targets with her mind and grief behind a flat stare. The girl joins STN-J, a secretive Japanese unit that tracks down witches whose supernatural abilities have made them dangerous in the eyes of the organization. Some members of the team offer a measure of kindness, while others keep their distance. Amon, in particular, makes it clear that trust isn’t something a newcomer gets handed on arrival. That uneasy reception tells you plenty about this world before the real trouble even begins.

I won’t front about why people drop it early. The hesitation is fair. Its pacing asks for patience. Those early chapters move almost like case reports: a gifted person snaps, the squad investigates, somebody ends up hauled away to a cold site called the Factory. Then the cycle runs again. If you clicked play hungry for Dragon Ball voltage, you’ll check out by the fourth episode and miss the entire reason it exists.

The reward hides in its slow unfolding. Somewhere near the middle the floor gives way beneath you. What posed as a monster-of-the-week procedural twists into something sadder and far more political, a meditation on who gets stamped as a danger and who holds the stamp. Our lead stops being the fresh hire and turns into prey. The agency she leaned on bares its fangs. Through all of it, nobody ever raises their voice to announce that a big moment arrived. Tension simply piles up, quiet and heavy, until you notice you’ve been holding your breath.

Sit with that premise long enough and it starts to itch in a familiar way. People born different, tracked by an institution, sorted into useful or disposable, hunted by the same system that claims to protect the public. Black folks reading between those lines won’t need the subtext spelled out. The show never preaches it, which is exactly why it lands. Fear of the other, dressed in trench coats and protective pendants, is still fear of the other. A cartoon said plenty about power and paranoia without ever reaching for a soapbox.

Sena herself anchors the whole mood. The girl isn’t a screamer or a one-liner machine. Robin watches everything, patient and sharp, revealing more through her silence than most characters manage with words. When she finally acts, it hits twice as hard because you sat in the stillness first. In an era when so many anime leads announce every feeling the second it arrives, a hunter who keeps her cards close to her chest feels almost rebellious. That restrained energy is the point of the character. Hand this role a motor mouth and fireworks, and the spell snaps clean in half.

Can we rap about Amon for a second? Sena’s partner spends most of the run wrapped in black, jaw set, eyes doing the talking. Whatever runs between those two never blows up into a big romance beat or a shouting match about trust. It just sits there, in the looks they trade and the long stretches where neither one says a word on some late drive across town. A modern writer might cram in flashbacks and a tearful speech to spell it all out. Murase trusts you to feel it without the footnotes, and that is why it sticks.

Can’t skip the way it looks either. Trench coats and washed-out grays, streets always a little wet, and those small pendants carrying green Orbo liquid, designed to help protect hunters from supernatural attacks. Everything feels pulled from a detective paperback that wandered into a cathedral. Blerds who caught it during those late-night Adult Swim runs know the vibe I’m painting: you half expected a saxophone to start wailing while somebody sparked a smoke in the dark. Few shows from that era committed to such a feeling and stayed loyal to it from start to finish.

Does it stumble? Sure. A couple of midseason chapters spin their wheels, and the finale leaves threads dangling that a second season never came to tie. Some viewers will always call it too chilly, too withdrawn, too slow for their blood. That’s a fair gripe. Art built on restraint asks something of you, and not everybody arrives ready to give it.

Here’s my whole argument, laid flat. Not every anime needs to pop off every eight seconds to earn your respect. There is so much spectacle out there now, and don’t get me wrong, I will throw on a good fight scene any day of the week. The thing is, flash by itself leaves you hungry an hour later. A story that makes you sit up and actually wrestle with something uncomfortable accomplishes what spectacle alone rarely manages. This one bets everything on patience and comes out richer for the wager.

Funny thing is, the culture finally caught up to that kind of patience. People binge moody prestige television now and call deliberate pacing sophisticated. Put the same energy in a 2002 anime and half the fandom still writes it off as dull. The double standard always cracked me up. Give this series the same grace you hand a slow crime drama and it pays you back the exact same way, with dread that earns its keep and payoffs you actually feel.

Still, more than twenty years later, this one aged like good vinyl. While noisy franchises blur together in memory, a slow burner like this carves out its own lane. Go back and let it simmer. Watch Sena move through smoke and sorrow with her chin level and the fire banked. Feel the quiet tighten one notch at a time. You might walk away convinced, same as me, that the stillest head in the room was holding the sharpest blade the entire time.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

Crunchyroll brought Black Clover back earlier this month, more than five years after the original anime ended in 2021 with episode 170. Fans waited through a whole presidential cycle for this. Now Hage’s favorite screamer is on screens again, anti-magic swords at the ready, his voice already cracking the speakers.

Here’s what gets lost in all the hype about who could beat who. Most shonen leads are born into something. Yuno pulls four-leaf luck out of the sky. Other franchise darlings inherit a bloodline, a cursed eye, a sealed beast in the gut, or a dead mentor’s technique waiting to bloom. They open their eyes one morning, and the universe has already picked them. Asta got handed a big fat nothing.

No mana. Zero. In a setting where your worth gets measured by how much magic you carry, he registered as empty. That’s not a temporary weakness he eventually grows out of. It’s the floor he builds everything on.

When his grimoire finally showed up, it wasn’t some radiant blessing from the heavens. What appeared was a battered, five-leaf black book carrying anti-magic, the power that cancels everybody else’s spells instead of casting its own. That power comes from Liebe, the devil residing inside the grimoire, but Asta still has to develop the strength and skill to wield it. Think about how backwards that is. Dude’s greatest weapon is basically a giant eraser. He can’t throw fire or freeze a lake. Instead, he swings steel and negates what his enemies bring. Everything beyond that depends on muscle, timing, combat experience, and a stubbornness that borders on ridiculous.

This is where the sword work matters, and where the series quietly separates itself. He trained his body like the magic lottery owed him nothing, because it didn’t. Picture a scrawny orphan out in the sticks grinding through pushups, situps, and endless physical exercises until his muscles screamed. He did that day after day, long before he ever received his grimoire. Nobody handed him that strength overnight. Every improvement came through exhausting practice, repeated failure, and a willingness to keep pushing. By the time the Magic Knights examined him, he’d already turned himself into a physical problem. Those arms got built rep by rep. Nobody gave him that physique. He earned the whole thing.

And look at the squad that took him in. The Black Bulls are a band of rejects, washouts, and weirdos nobody else wanted, led by a captain who saw value where the rest of the kingdom saw trash. That’s its own quiet thesis. Greatness tends to grow in the rooms that polite society overlooks. A loud nobody running on empty, surrounded by misfits, helping turn a disgraced squad into one of the kingdom’s most formidable teams. If that arc doesn’t resonate, check your pulse.

Anybody who grew up being told to work twice as hard for half the credit feels this on a different frequency. The sermon is old, and the folks who raised plenty of us preached it from the kitchen table. You will not always be the gifted one in the room. Fine. Outwork the gifted one. Show up earlier, stay later, want it louder. That blueprint sits right inside a cartoon about wizards, which is why this little dude hits home for a Black audience in a way some of the chosen ones never quite manage.

Then there’s the hollering. People clown him for it, the way he shouts his catchphrase about never giving up like his lungs count as a second weapon. Watch what happens in the fights, though. He gets folded, bones rattling, body pushed past the breaking point, and the mouth keeps running because the mouth is the engine. Surrender simply isn’t loaded into him. Rivals reach for some buried reservoir of power when they’re cornered. He reaches for whatever strength he has left and decides that’s plenty.

There’s a specific texture to his comebacks that sets them apart from the usual anime adrenaline spike. Plenty of shonen leads seem to win because the moment demands it and the script obliges. Asta fights like somebody who flat out refuses to accept the math. Bruised, bloodied, and running on fumes, cornered by somebody stronger, faster, and blessed with advantages he lacks, he lands on the same answer every time. Get up, fire back, make the bigger man tired of hitting you. Everybody who ever watched an aging boxer dig in on heart alone knows that ache in the chest.

So why does Asta so often get overlooked whenever fans debate the greatest shonen protagonists? Part of it is the noise itself. Loud reads as dumb to a certain kind of viewer, and the stat-crunching crowd would rather crown somebody who looks better on paper. Part of it is the company he keeps, since the roster is stacked with flashier personalities who look better in a highlight clip. Brooding rivals, elegant captains, and villains with tragic backstories all pull focus. Meanwhile, the engine of the whole operation gets treated like comic relief who wandered into the lead role.

That blind spot is exactly why the comeback matters. The new season moves deeper into the Spade Kingdom conflict, with Asta and Liebe training to master Devil Union while the Magic Knights confront the Dark Triad. The stakes are climbing, and the enemies are no longer playing games. Creator Yuki Tabata wrapped the manga earlier this year after an 11-year run, so readers already know how the larger story ends. Studio Pierrot is back, with Ayataka Tanemura directing after overseeing the original anime’s closing stretch and the Sword of the Wizard King film. Asta’s Japanese voice actor, Gakuto Kajiwara, also returns, bringing that unmistakable intensity. WANIMA handles the opening theme, Kienai Riyuu, giving the comeback the kind of energy this series deserves. For longtime fans, it feels like a reunion. For newcomers, it’s another chance to discover what makes this loudmouthed underdog worth watching.

Give the orphan his flowers before the bandwagon fills up. He didn’t inherit magical greatness or arrive with the kind of natural gifts that made Yuno stand out. Yes, the five-leaf grimoire and Liebe’s anti-magic gave him extraordinary weapons, but those powers alone never guaranteed him a place among the kingdom’s strongest fighters. Everything else required discipline, sacrifice, and the willingness to get back up when staying down would have been easier. He built himself the long way, yelling and bleeding and climbing one more time than anybody expected. In a genre crowded with chosen-one bloodlines, that kind of determination deserves recognition. And maybe that’s what makes Asta special. He was never supposed to be the strongest person in the room, but he refused to let that decide how far he could go.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.