Le Journal

Fantasy is a dominant genre in the tabletop RPG space. From Dungeons & Dragons to Pathfinder to Daggerheart, if players go to the local store and ask about playing an RPG, they’re probably going to be sold on big, epic fantasies about heroic characters in ruin-filled, magical worlds. The indie space is just as fantastical, with games like Mythic Bastionland and Dolmenwood taking their own unique turns at responding to the big fantasies with smaller, weirder ones. But what happens when players want to make fantasy worlds as much as they want to play fantasy characters? And what if they’re interested in post-fantasy—taking all the assumptions of fantasy and turning them on their head, playing with the influences, and injecting some friction into the typical swords-and-sorcery, plains-and-mountains worlds? They should probably play A Land Once Magic. Viditya Voleti’s A Land Once Magic, five years in development and recently released in both a regular and a prestige format by More Blueberries, is a world creation game for two or more players. It asks players to use a standard deck of cards to make a fantasy world from the ground up, and it provides a number of prompts and tables to ensure that those players make their fantasy weird, or at least outside of the standard fantasy usually found in the average D&D core rulebook. Veteran designer Voleti is explicit about this in the opening of the rulebook: the game is, in essence, a provocation to the genre, asking “how do we move fantasy in a new direction?” This movement is guided very directly by the game itself. It first asks players to create a palette of tones and flavors (paints) that can be invoked in the game. These are the things that will be returned to repeatedly in order to justify the shape of the world and to think through the implications of the cities and cultures that players place into it. The rulebook suggests things like raw, jagged, and cluttered, all adjectives that feel very different from the influence of fantasy stalwarts like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. An engaging idea, the palette does some interesting parameter-setting that’s more purposeful than the assertion-based game mechanics of worldbuilders like Microscope or The Quiet Year. Creating a palette is creating a series of purposeful limits about the aesthetic space of a world, and it’s easy to envision doing it in a profoundly limiting way that would produce some off-kilter fantasy: dead, unmoored, or drained, perhaps. In addition to the palette, the game explicitly asks for players to come up with touchstones that are outside of fantasy. It’s commendable when a tabletop game recognizes players are all coming to it with their own assumptions about the world. They’re chasing Conan, Earthsea, or whatever their favorite fantasies are, and most games are content to provide a list of films and books with the right vibe for the game and call it a day. A Land Once Magic mechanizes the contexts players bring to the game, and more than that, it encourages them to import entire aesthetic packages and translate them into the fantasy frame. The rulebook offers “Cowboy Bebop’s Jazz and Bluegrass soundtrack” as a touchstone, for example, and thinking about it for a few minutes can produce a host of delightful, nontraditional fantastical setups: “Heat’s crowded, amoral landscape” or “a lush, full sense of being hunted by a Predator.” Maybe “the smirking nihilism of a Vince Staples album.” Figuring this out, and getting everyone at a table to agree about it, might be the hardest thing to do for a random group of people playing A Land Once Magic, but also figuring it out, and applying it judiciously, is the thing that makes this game unique and grippy over some of the other worldbuilders in the tabletop space. The rest of the game plays predictably for anyone who has experimented in this space. Players draw cards from a deck, and they use those cards to produce prompts that players have to respond…

Since its creation, Studio Colorido has been one of the rare anime studios almost entirely focused on standalone films, putting out a run of pleasant, visually impressive pictures that largely fail to coalesce into anything particularly lasting. After adapting author Tomihiko Morimi’s Penguin Highway (probably their best film thus far), the animation house delivered a run of originals distributed on Netflix, including A Whisker Away, Drifting Home, and My Oni Girl. The studio’s latest effort for the streamer is Cosmic Princess Kaguya!, a music-focused film that mixes one of the oldest Japanese folktales—The Tale Of The Bamboo Cutter, about a princess who comes from the moon—with the contemporary, VTuber-fueled, cute-anime-girl industrial complex. It’s a strange combo, delivered in an all-out charm offensive. Ultimately, it makes for an agreeable watch that’s bolstered by fluid character animation, fantastic vocal performances, and a likable group of characters, but it also falls victim to Studio Colorido’s persistent problem: It lacks the dramatic propulsion required to fully crack through the stratosphere. The by-the-numbers opening of Cosmic Princess Kaguya! gives way to a bonkers second half that’s missing a critical piece of romantic clarity, coming so close to something otherworldly that it winds up being more frustrating than if it simply exploded on the launch pad. Cosmic Princess Kaguya! centers on chronically overscheduled high schooler Iroha Sakayori (Anna Nagase), a straight-A honor roll student who excels at everything she does. She’s popular, gets great grades, and is a skilled musician. But despite her outward composure, she’s just barely keeping it all together. She’s estranged from her mother and living alone, meaning that, on top of her studies, she works a part-time job to pay rent and save for college. Things get even more complicated when a cosmic baby suddenly materializes inside a bamboo shoot-like telephone pole (a reference to the original folktale). Iroha begrudgingly takes care of the kid, who grows up so fast that she doesn’t even have time to file a police report, and names the alien Kaguya (Yuko Natsuyoshi) after that fable’s lunar princess. Much like her namesake, Kaguya escaped the moon to live a more eventful life on Earth. Obsessed with getting the “good” ending that the original princess never had—in her story, the lunar denizens descend, defeat the humans, and take her back to the moon—the chaotic Kaguya tries to live every day to the fullest. Eventually, she teams up with Iroha to win a streamer competition that will allow both of them to play in a concert alongside the AI idol Yachiyo Runami (Saori Hayami), whom Iroha hopelessly crushes on. Despite the implicit tragedy at the heart of the source material, Cosmic Princess Kaguya! begins in a largely bubbly mood as its central pair attempt to become the biggest VTubers around (sapphic undertones and all). That high energy starts with the music, and the soundtrack of this film about e-idol culture is largely up to snuff. Smooth dance choreography and earworm melodies sell a sparkly atmosphere filled with aesthetic razzle-dazzle that will have otaku waving glowsticks for their oshi. A series of buoyant pop jams don’t quite appear often enough to call this a musical, but they’re still a worthy payoff for all the hype behind these in-universe artists, each performance further sold by impressive character animation. Kaguya is relentlessly energetic, so happy to have escaped from her birdcage that she’s all rhythmically swinging limbs and gesticulations. Meanwhile, Iroha is much more reserved, her tension and stress expressed in baggy eyes and furrowed glances at her extraterrestrial tormentor, confirming her status as a teen who probably somehow has a stomach ulcer. It’s rare for a scene to pass without at least a few impressive bits of ostentatious character animation, often in ways that skew comedic, making for plenty of moment-to-moment…