Image by desfunk.

Ash and I don’t watch a lot of anime, but we’ve watched enough to fill an hour’s worth of podcastery. If you’ve got a soft spot for Cowboy Bebop, or if you absolutely hate Azumanga Daioh, you probably won’t like us very much at the end of this week’s episode.

[Art by Ashley Davis.]

So, I was watching Up the other day – and by “the other day,” I mean roughly three months ago – and I was thinking about how the majority of the plot progresses entirely independent of  Carl’s actions.

I mean, yeah, he injures the construction worker which leads him to flee to South America, but if you think about it, what was his ultimate end game? If Russell hadn’t gotten stuck on his porch, and if he hadn’t gotten Kevin to follow them, and if Dug hadn’t led the rest of the dogs to them – if Carl, without distraction or interruption, had just made it to Paradise Falls – what would have happened?

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I recently wrote/shot a few editorials about Mass Effect 2 for Destructoid. I took a pretty fatalistic stance on the ending, and the fact that the entire game was one hundred percent winnable if you cared about your team enough. Rather than being able to simply get everyone out alive by choosing your team correctly and getting everyone loyal, I argued, it would have been less dramatically self-defeating if people had to die — if you had to make choices that, directly or indirectly, resulted in the deaths of NPCs whom you loved.

It wasn’t until I rewatched this great video that I fully understood why I felt that way. (Vague spoilers for Fable 2, Mass Effect 2, and Dragon Age.)

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Image by munnyman5.

Anyway, the new episode is up, and — surprisingly — people really seem to like it. As I said at PAX, we really have no idea which episodes people are going to enjoy and which they aren’t. Given how dialogue-heavy and visually unspectacular the episode is (not to mention how its poorly hidden pro-gay rights agenda), I fully expected the GameTrailers crowd to meet it with hostility or indifference.

I’m glad to be proven wrong.