“The Hellwood Inheritance” is a story with a great premise and four episodes to tell it, but somehow “Jurassic Park with ghosts” falls apart in the middle and its second half just feels flat with little to do with the concept (beyond ghost-like beings anyway). Ah well, it’s been a little while since we’ve had a just Fourth Doctor / Leela story and both were on good form at least… Let’s take a look!
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While I do plan on covering a Gundam series next in the older anime reviews bit (once I’m done with the first batch of DBZ Movies anyway) a new Gundam show has aired, so let’s quickly dip into that before anything else (Also: why has Seed Freedom still not arrived on UK shores?! I really am going to have to pirate / VPN it at this rate…) “GQuuuuuuX”, pronounced “Gee Qwucks”, is a Gundam show created by the Evangelion team that’s set in an alternate Universal Century Timeline where Zeon won the war, but about halfway through the series it takes an even weirder turn continuity-wise…
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It’s time for the “post new TV series Big Finish audio catch up” once again, starting with the return of one of my favourite ranges, the “Lost Stories”. Admittedly “Genesis of the Cybermen” is another one of the Lost Stories that can’t really be slotted into regular continuity thanks to a lack of knowledge as to what Cybermen were by The Doctor’s companions in Adric’s final story “Earthshock”, not to mention having to get rid of the superior audio Cybermen origin story “Spare Parts”. Still though, in a “imagine if instead of Earthshock we got this” way it works well, and seeing original Cyberman creator Gerry Davis’ take the origin was historically interesting, even if it wasn’t, um… that great. Let’s take a look!
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Another May 4th went by (a while ago now, admittedly) and with it was another pack of six animated shorts that fill in continuity gaps! This time we answer “how was Asajj Ventress alive in the Bad Batch?” and then throw in “What is Cad Bane’s origin story?”, which is admittedly not a gap that needed filling in, but it was a fun 40-ish minutes so why not? Let’s take a look!
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Well, to use the old Krusty the Clown meme: “What the hell was that?!”. There’s a lot to digest here but so much of it was visual spectacle over any actual sense of plot or well-written dialogue and the return of Omega was absolutely awful for this long-time fan. The Rani was wasted, more heavy-handed social commentary and then we get the final 10 or so minutes and suddenly it was actually well written and interesting… until the last shot. Yes, there’s no point in hiding it, this was Ncuti Gatwa’s regeneration story, and boy that was some cliffhanger… Let’s take a look and try and make sense of it all…
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Believe it or not, we actually got some review discs sent to us at Anime UK News, so I’ve dusted off the old AUKN template to tell you my review of the 80s OVA “Riding Bean” can be viewed by clicked HERE.
It’s a fun homage to cheesy 80s action films… well, given it was made in 89 I guess it was trying to cash-in on the current trend of cheesy action films… Either way, it’s good fun!
I was cautiously optimistic about ReBirth (yes the B is capitalised for some reason) of Souls going in as the presentation looked spot on and the combat seemed fresh and exciting, but at the same time it was a modern Shonen-anime based fighter released by Bandai Namco, a lot of which has been bare-bones and subpar to say least in the last 10 years. The truth has ended up somewhere in the middle, where it plays better than most of its contemporaries and the presentation is indeed spot on, but it’s far from perfect. Still, it’s a brand new console Bleach game, something I literally assumed would never happen again, so I’m just happy it exists at all! Let’s take a look…
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Doctor Who’s latest season continues and manages to deliver a fun episode at last, though one that wasn’t without its usual issue of being subtle as a brick about an important message, so we’re not golden here or anything. Still, some big continuity things / callbacks and The Fifteenth Doctor actually showing a range of emotions other than happy and crying lifts the episode up quite a bit! So let’s take a look…
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Andor’s second and sadly final season somehow managed to keep up the momentum from its stellar first season and keep that going all the way up to connecting to the already-great Rogue One film, making for a hell of a run of stories and moving Cassian Andor way up the chain of “great Star Wars characters”. Perhaps beyond all that though is it showed masterfully how you can blend real world messages and allusions into a great fictional show without jamming it in people’s faces, no guesses as to what show I’m referring to there… Anyway, let’s take a broad look, which means yes there will be some scenes and characters I don’t mention… I don’t have all day you know…
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“The Story and The Engine” is another episode of this Doctor Who series that tells a good story, is well acted and has some positive messages at its heart but once again I find myself longing for something a bit more… Doctor Who-y. I’m happy episodes like this exist but I would prefer not to have so many of them in a row is what I’m saying, throw in a few base under siege / generic alien invasion stories here and there to break things up maybe… Well, anyway, let’s take a look!
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Hogan Reviews 