I have to say that I wasn’t all that excited about “Agatha All Along” going into it, in fact I didn’t start watching it until a few weeks in, but suddenly the last three or four episodes really pulled me in, and by the time it finished it was one of the better MCU TV efforts in general. Go figure! Let’s take a closer look…
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I don’t normally post the join “look at this season / review this season” articles we do at Anime UK News as it tends just to be a paragraph or two on stuff I’ll end up reviewing fully any way, but for Halloween this year we all picked something to cover for one article and I picked the old “classic” Wicked City… sufice it to say I doubt I’ll be giving it a proper full review any time soon, so if you want a couple of paragraphs of my thoughts on the film, plus some great picks from other staff members, click HERE.
Happy Halloween! … Remember that year I had enough free time that I reviewed all the Hammer Horror Draculas in a row? *Sigh*… those were the days!
“The Trials of a Time Lord” is the latest in a run of overly-long boxsets where to celebrate a milestone since a Doctor’s first TV appearance Big Finish decided to throw literally everything into a blender and see what happens, and once again it’s just not very good. It’s thankfully better than the Seventh Doctor’s “Last Day” duo but that’s damning with faint praise if I’ve ever heard it. Featuring the Cybermen, Davros, Daleks, Androgums (yes, Androgums!) and The Master, with a plot that’s basically just Vengeance on Varos again it could have been a fun ride in expert hands, maybe, but instead it’s just a “remember him?/them?” fest with little going for it… So, let’s take a closer look! Yay?
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Sparking! Zero has finally arrived after months of hype thanks to a great marketing effort and my own nostalgia for the Budokai Tenkaichi series this is a sequel to, and I’m relieved to tell you the game lived up to that hype, and then some! It goes without saying that if you want a more serious, competitive fighter then this isn’t the game for you, but if you want a fun Dragon Ball game then you can’t get much better. Let’s take a look!
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It’s time to, well, bring an end to my look at the original Evangelion series with the big film finale, not that it was ever actually planned to exist (Hideaki Anno was happy with the more… unconventional ending of the TV series) and frankly that shows. While it has the visual spectacle and great soundtrack you’d expect from the series it also doubles-down on the more downbeat aspects of the series, especially putting poor Shinji through the wringer, as if Anno said “You want a different ending?! Well here: have THIS!” and projected how unhappy he was onto his own characters (he apparently tried to take his own life at one point, so… yeah.) It makes for interesting, if uncomfortable viewing, but does it make for good viewing?
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The next War Doctor set has arrived, and somewhat annoyingly it’s also sort-of a sequel to the “Dark Gallifrey” series I’ve yet to buy (thanks to work schedule and extremely frustrating Big Finish app issues…) but only in the setting up of how Morbius is alive again and in a regular, if disfigured, body. Once you just accept that fact and brush off references he makes to what happened to him in that story you can focus on a fun showdown between him and the War Doctor. Let’s take a look!
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Well, given I have a couple of other on-and-off game review series going I wasn’t planning on starting another one, but while I knew it was always in the cards the sudden release of the Castlevania: Dominus Collection has shifted my priorities a bit as I’ve been waiting to play these games with a comfortable controller and on a big screen for many years. Sadly I’ll have to say that “Dawn of Sorrow” isn’t the massive hit I was expecting, in fact I think its prequel “Aria of Sorrow” was far better, that doesn’t mean this is bad by any means, just not up to that standard. Intrigued? Read on!
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In terms of “Lost Stories” that are left to adapt Deathworld was a big one as it was the original planned 10th Anniversary story featuring all three Doctors at that point in the show, but William Hartnell’s failing health meant it was scrapped early on and The Three Doctors was created instead. It always sounded really odd based on what we knew and getting to hear it adapted hasn’t changed my mind there, I have no idea how this would’ve worked at the time, but whatever. How does it work now, as an audio drama with four of the six regulars being recasts? Let’s find out!
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My review of the first half of the series can be found HERE.
The second half of Neon Genesis Evangelion is a hard one to crack. It has several episodes that are a bit more “introspective” which some fans try to spin as completely intentional but the creators themselves have admitted it was born out of necessity due to running out of budget and time. The most obvious example of this is the final two episodes, which when I first saw it back whenever it aired on the Sci-Fi channel I was pee’d off at how… nothing it was, but what about now? Has mentally maturing and being armed with the knowledge of what the ending was supposed to convey made me go easier on it? Let’s find out, with once again a “warning” that this is a very surface-level review, so no deep dive into religious themes and analysing every scene, I’ll leave that to those more engrossed in the series…
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After a sudden return of the Novel Adaptation range we now get to the first of two returns to the Lost Stories range! “Operation Werewolf” was partially pencilled in for the Second Doctor era before, I believe, it was scrapped because it was considered bad taste to do a story set during WWII as it hadn’t been that long since its end (which is a weird thought really) but here in 2024 we have no such worry, in fact Doctor Who especially is if anything overran with the time period. It’s for that reason I wasn’t super excited for this release (at least not compared to the next one) but I am a fan of the new Michael Troughton Second Doctor so I was looking forward to a non-Season 6B story featuring him, and I got that at least! Let’s take a look.
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Hogan Reviews 