Crusader of Centy (Nextech / Atlus, 1995)

    I didn’t catch it when it premiered, but Chris Kohler’s episode of Complete in Box that focused on Secret of Mana is the place where I first heard of Crusader of Centy. In the comments on the original article, he was naming a desire to play other 16-bit action RPGs, and someone chimed in with this game and Beyond Oasis. Both games appeared on the Nintendo Classics service in 2023, but it took me until this month to play them both. It’s a forced comparison because of that comment section and the release date of both games but Crusader is much better than Oasis.

    For another forced comparison, I would say that this game feels like it shares DNA with both Secret of Mana and Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest. There’s a simplified version of the combat and action that reminds me of the latter game, while the action-focused nature of the combat and puzzling recalls the former. I do appreciate the way the overworld is simply a map (à la Mystic Quest) because that cuts down on a lot of traversal that would have otherwise been annoying. There are minimal interactive moments in it, too, such as when you activate a switch deep in a dungeon or cause a cyclone to appear on the map. So, it’s not the same look the entire time.

    The action plays out with you as the hero, swinging and throwing a sword as you explore various climes in the world around your hometown. You’ve got mountains, beaches, volcanoes, glaciers, deserts, and towers. All the locations you are used to seeing in games. The cool twist on all of this action is that you get animal companions throughout the game. You can have up to two of them on screen with you at any given time. They do things like attack enemies, turn into platforms, give you fire or ice powers for your sword, transport you to safety, make you run faster, make you swing your sword faster, or let your sword ricochet off of walls. Because you can have two at a time, some of these effects can be combined. It’s a lot of fun exploring the different combinations to see how to best or most easily pass through a given dungeon. Some even have interaction effects when working together that give you more than just the combined powers of each animal. As a plus, they are also cute.

    You eat apples to regain health, which means your hero probably has awful tummy troubles during the adventure. Let’s not dwell on that. There are cool boss battles that help you become more powerful by increasing your hit points. So, leveling up is gated behind these specific encounters, which means you can’t get overpowered at all. Except for a few mild platforming moments, there’s not many times where hit points become an issue (though if I was playing more conservatively because I didn’t have access to rewind or save states, maybe I’d think differently).

    So, what distinguishes Crusader of Centy from Secret of Mana or Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest or the other game it’s commonly compared to, A Link to the Past? For one, the music is incongruous and great. The songs are catchy and memorable but belong in a mascot platformer or much simpler and less serious adventure game. I say less serious because in addition to that music, the story itself is interesting. As you might expect, there are monsters on the loose in the game world and you have to figure out what the deal is. Turns out the monsters were there to help all along and it is humans who were the evil ones that slaughtered these creatures needlessly. A nice twist on the expectation I had of there being an evil sorcerer or mad king behind all of it. 

    It’s in a weird spot where it’s popular enough to be preserved via Nintendo’s emulation service but not to have been subject to a retranslation or other text edit via fan-made hacks. The dialogue formatting and misspellings throughout are consistently bad. This game is not perfect by any means, but it is entirely serviceable and worth 5-10 hours of your time.

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NIKKI NAIR Violence is the Answer (Future Classic, 2025)

    Hey so I try to show that I have wide-ranging, even eclectic tastes in music and maybe even pop culture more generally through my reviews in this blog. It’s a way of capturing my thinking at this point in time. That means that sometimes I’ll speak from a place of authority on the book, album, single, movie, or episode I’m reviewing. Sometimes, I just want to record my reaction to one of those cultural artifacts and share it because I’m excited about engaging with it more than passively. This NIKKI NAIR EP is something I’m excited about but don’t have a lot of authority to discuss. I know I’ll find it helpful to wrestle with why I like it as I continue this review. Maybe you’ll find it interesting to read as I grapple with it, too.

    At this point in my life, I should know better than to declare that I don’t know the history or style of a genre of music. All of it is at my fingertips. I can learn about scenes and trends with the greatest of ease. Yet, I still don’t know much about what I usually term dance or electronic music. Let’s blame the Spin article from 1996 that popularized the term electronica for people living in the U.S. I can already tell that some of you reading this are having a conniption fit because I am lumping together disparate sounds such as jungle, house, techno, drum & bass, trance, electronic body music, intelligent dance music, etc. into a single mass. I’m sure I would be just as annoyed with someone who reviewed a punk record but couldn’t tell the difference between hardcore, youth crew, powerviolence, d-beat, emo, crossover, and NYHC. Given that I have spent most of my life listening to guitar-forward music, anything that doesn’t feature live players of instruments working together in person falls into the catchall term of electronic. So be it.

    You can probably tell that I didn’t hear about NIKKI NAIR from my usual means of learning about music. Admittedly, I have slowed way down over the years in terms of how frequently I keep up with music scenes or new sounds. At the same time, I can’t let myself be someone whose musical tastes are stuck in my teens or my 20s or even my early 30s. That feels gross. Luckily for all of us, Hearing Things exists. Just like Defector arose from the ashes of Deadspin and Aftermath came from Kotaku, Hearing Things is a worker-owned music website that pulls together writers formerly of Pitchfork, Spin, The Fader, and Jezebel, and other sites and zines. It’s an incredible resource and you should support it. I do.

    In his review of this EP’s “Smooth,” Ryan Dombal focuses on the title track, with its hook “my brain gets smooth when I think about you.” There’s more to the song than that line, but I think it’s incredible, so let’s hyperfixate on it for a minute. The idea of the smooth brain meme is that one is unable to think about anything in any depth, for any length of time. Scientists and people who have passed high school biology will tell you that the size of the brain is less important than the number of folds or wrinkles it has. So, the common understanding is that a person with a smooth brain has no worries; they are pure id. In reality, it’s less cheerful, but let’s focus on the literary implication here. NIKKI NAIR is saying that thinking about his beloved is enough of a comfort that he has no bad feelings. No bad vibes. Good vibes only. Good wife only. Good wife. Goody. Goody gumdrops. Good, good things. Good. It’s romantic in a childish way. As Homer Simpson once told Marge after a dark night of the soul, the one thing that only he can give her is “complete and utter dependence.” Marge replies, “that’s not a good thing.” It’s not at all. Still, NIKKI NAIR captures that fleeting feeling of pure joy that comes along with contemplating one’s beloved and giving yourself over to them in total devotion.

    In a much more mature sense, “IRS Love” speaks of a deeper commitment in a completely absurd way. For most of the song, you hear “I know that you want me / You know that I want you, too / Baby, I just wanna file my taxes with you.” The vocal effects make the chant sound much more childish than it is. Think about some of the other songs you know that have to do with “just wanting” someone or something. Most of those songs are by four dudes from Queens who really liked bubblegum pop. This accidental RAMONES song is incredible. Think about it. Instead of wanting to sniff glue or be someone’s boyfriend, Nair wants to have a stable enough relationship with someone that they’d file taxes together. It’s hardly romantic, but speaks to the kind of closeness and communication that is part of a lasting relationship. Unlike with “Smooth,” there’s a sense that the feelings are reciprocated. As he continues to repeat “just wanna file my taxes with you,” he layers in the lines “going to work I want to walk right into traffic / But I know if I did that then you’d have to file alone.” He’s saying he knows his partner also wants to file taxes with him. It’s mutual. You need the smooth brain moments and the roughness that creates the rough brained wrinkles to make a relationship last. The grooves that NIKKI NAIR puts down on this EP’s tracks are enough to deepen the ones that already exist in your brain, even if you sometimes wish it would just stay smooth.

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Stranger Things, Season 5, Episodes 1-4 (The Duffer Brothers, Netflix, 2025)

    Up until the final minutes of episode four, this season of Stranger Things seemed to lack a reason for existence beyond serving up more ‘80s nostalgia. What it was saying with its cultural references throughout the seasons seemed to be that nerds and other outcasts make their way through and beyond adolescence with texts and practices that are opaque to adults and other peers. Socializing through playing Dungeons and Dragons or reading fantasy novels and watching sci-fi movies with friends is an alternative to small-town heroics involving athletic prowess or being part of a steady couple that practices husband-and-wife roles. This message would have been fine, even if it is a bit pedestrian.

    Instead, Will’s ability to reconcile his feelings for Mike with his own identity development as a young adolescent is what makes him truly Will the Wise. He avoids becoming a villain like Vecna / 001 / Henry Creel because he is able to integrate his desires into his persona. The evilness that led Creel to become Vecna was the rejection of any tendency toward (social or sexual? we’ll find out soon enough…) difference that might have been developing in his young heart and mind. His inability to resist social mores led him to want to destroy anyone else who would challenge those same norms. He’s not OK with being weird, so he wants no one else to be weird ever again.

    If nothing else, the scene where Will is able to prevent three demogorgons from harming his friends makes the entire series more intriguing than a mere coming-of-age tale. The tension is high between the characters in these first few episodes. Dustin is alone in his grief for Eddie, which costs him dearly in the form of physical pain. Lucas and Mike and Will are trying to just get along with each other and their peers in high school. Steve and Robin are working at the radio station (an upgrade from the scoop shop and the video store) to play music and spread the word about the latest raids happening in The Upside Down. Joyce, Jane, and Hopper are trying to make things work in their own way with those raids. Everyone still gets along and smiles, but with gritted teeth. They’ve been through a lot of shared trauma and no one has the sense to call a therapist. The feeling of “here we go again” comes through strongly. They are going through the motions and the show seemed like it was as well.

    A key moment occurs when Will is at the hospital where Vickie, Robin’s partner, works. He spies them kissing and then runs off when they noticed that he noticed. He speaks to Robin about it later and they discuss how she was able to come to terms with her attraction to Vickie. Robyn tells Will that it took a moment of self-reflection for her to realize she was denying the truth about who she was. A bit of artifact-mediated recall in the form of re-watching a home movie featuring her younger self is what allowed her to realize it’s more important to be honest with herself about her feelings for other girls than try to fit into society’s mold. Will isn’t explicitly asking her for advice about how to come out but she gives him the roadmap anyway. In that climactic scene of episode four, we see that he has a similar moment of accessing faint memories of his earliest interactions with Mike.

    Through the years, Will’s desire to be more than just friends with Mike has been difficult for him to put into words. When Will brought it up indirectly to Jonathan, his older brother seemed to understand, but did not have any pearls of wisdom for him. Will haltingly brought up the same feelings to Mike directly, yet Mike remained oblivious. Only through Robin’s words of support was he able to envision a different future for himself that did not compromise any parts of his identity for anyone else’s comfort. By being able to integrate his social and sexual identities into the cognitive, emotional, physical, and psychological developmental changes he’s also experiencing, he can tame the literal demons that are plaguing his town. That is a more interesting explanation for the monsters’ existence than an evil government or corrupt corporation that is trying to control minds for unstated purposes. I’m excited to see how they’ll handle the explanation and impact of this moment of self-realization for Will in the episodes to come.

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The Amplified Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana Michael Azerrad (HarperOne, 2023)

    Although you and I might be familiar with the main beats of the NIRVANA story, we can still learn from this version of the book because it brings to the table nearly 30 years’ worth of additional analysis and perspective. I did not read the original version of this book. Those new elements are interwoven with the original text and set in a contrasting font, so the whole thing reads fluidly. There are some spreads where all the text is precisely that new writing and it serves to give a fuller context for the events in the original narrative. For example, Azerrad claimed in the initial version that no NIRVANA songs end with a fade-out and the annotation reminds us that “Negative Creep” ends with one. This fact isn’t important in itself, but by calling attention to the mistake, it gives the reader a moment to reconsider the initial claim—how cool of an idea it is for all of a band’s songs to end so emphatically.

    On a related note (i.e., complete tangent), the best thing about WOUND UP is that all their songs begin without stick clicks but with all instruments and vocals hitting at once. That is fucking cool. Props to Mike from The CATBURGLARS (I think it was him) for pointing that out on the Chicago Hardcore message board years ago. Another cool tangent this book led me down was the January 1994 interview Nardwuar did with Kurt. It’s interesting to see a young Nardwuar for sure, but the fact that he mentions the fucking NEOS at one point is utterly mind-blowing. It’s taken for granted at this point that Nardwuar is talented at asking these kinds of questions about band members’ influences and past experiences, and of course, there’s nothing of the sound of The NEOS in NIRVANA’s music, but it’s still incredible that he brings up that band in this interview.

    Reading through some of the smaller moments in the text also gave me the space to recall memories of my experience with NIRVANA before I’d actually started listening to them. A few months after Kurt died, a couple kids at my school had come up with a song about it to the tune of the Notre Dame fight song. The first line was “Cheer cheer for old Kurt Cobain / he shot himself while high on cocaine.” It sucks that there’s no such thing as an Internet search for my memories because I wish I could remember more of the song. My first experience with them as a fan and not just someone who was vaguely aware of them is from reading glossy magazines like Hit Parader or Circus and some probably European import that was a special issue all about them. I say probably Euro because there were guillemets instead of quotation marks.

    Though this is the definitive history of the band, there are moments of true insight to go along with the day-by-day descriptions of the band’s life. Even better, these insights travel beyond the band to help us understand what we might like about music more generally. Consider his recent analysis of their most famous song: “When Kurt sings ‘a denial, a denial,’ what does that mean exactly, or have to do with anything? We don’t know but we feel it really deeply. And that’s because of the way words—not just their meaning but their sound and their melody—go with what’s happening musically at that moment. Kurt did this all the time. It’s one of the reasons his songs are so powerful” (p. 345). He gets at the idea that lyrics don’t need to be particularly meaningful to be powerful. It’s kinda like how I pump my fist and sing along when Alec MacKaye sings “permission granted / permission denied” on the HAMMERED HULLS record. Kurt absolutely had a way with words and not in the deep-insight-on-current-affairs way or even the trenchant-insight-about-human-foibles way either. He knew how to put cool sounding words and chords together and that was enough, until it wasn’t.

(This review originally appeared in issue #3 of the zine Anxiety's False Promise, published in March 2024.)

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