Genshin Impact: This Dad's Early Morning Solace When the Baby Won't Sleep

I've been playing Genshin Impact since 2020, just a couple of weeks after launch date. I remember seeing buzz about it on Twitter (before the platform became X), and so I downloaded it for PS4. Although I don't have a lot of time for it now, I still play on the occasional morning when I wake up at four o'clock because of the cats or the toddler yelling. The game is still one of my favorites.

I think Genshin does a good job of making gaming very accessible to the non-competitive player. Genshin has a beautifully designed world with multiple continents, countries, and landscapes. The musical score is orchestral and changes according to what region of the map you're in, even from village to village. According to Gemini (I’m sorry, guys), the Chinese words for my feelings are 恬淡 (tiándàn) and 境 (jìng), which I believe reflect the peace I feel forgoing daily pressures and competition in favor of quiet serenity and beauty. I spend most of my time in Genshin ignoring the main storyline to complete character quests and special events, especially the annual Lantern Rite. This put me forever behind on current online discourse, but the art of "not caring" does wonders for making this game evergreen. 

I remember playing the original Animal Crossing on the Nintendo Gamecube (because I'm that old). Walking around an open world, foraging, and maintaining a simple cabin feel like weekend plans for modern hipsters, but it's also something many people can't do in the nonstop rush for productivity inside our concrete jungles. Genshin transports me to wide European-style plains, Japanese-like mountain ranges, and Liyue's beautiful golden trees. All I need to learn is hilichurl combat and I could be a character in this world, too.

To be honest, I don't spend much time in the other nations of Fontaine, Natlan, or Nod-Krai. The combination of locale and missions don't excite me as much. Maybe the nostalgia of the first few locales is what I stick around for; the introduction of Varka made me excited to be in Monstadt again. There's a new town just beyond Stormterror's Lair that I'm exploring now, a little port that makes me miss the bop of Port Ormos' music in Sumeru. 

I haven't talked much about the characters yet, but I'm also nostalgic when it comes to my original Monstadt and Liyue crew. I don't have many characters from the other continents; the most prominent ones are Dehya and the almighty Raiden Shogun. I'm not a meta player by any means, so the imaginary bonds I forge with these characters--combined with some consideration for element pairings--are all that matters for my team composition. If there's one complaint I have about gacha games like this, it's that there's too much catering to character releases and new content instead of tending to the rich story that's already available for deeper mining. That's why I always return for Lantern Rite: I love Liyue, and learning more about its history is a treat...even if it's a convenient excuse for devs to make up more characters for purchase.

In summary, some nights I'm tired and I want to return to well-tread ground. Genshin Impact is charming in that way, especially when the screaming kid and cats don't give a shit about whether or not daddy needs to work in the morning.

January 2026 Anime Roundup

Now that I'm a full-time professor, the holidays and New Years season comes with a lot of free time. I have to prep for spring semester of course, but it's important to recover from grading last-minute assignments and final reports and such. I made sure to catch up on a lot of otaku media this January.

Fate/Strange Fake is finally releasing episodes after the teaser film released last year. Fate/Grand Order did something like this years ago, but the release schedule for that FGO spinoff is decidedly all over the place because Aniplex resumed with Absolute Demonic Front Babylonia and the Final Singularity, then the Camelot films. 

Strange Fake feels closer to the Apocrypha series with precisely how...strange it is. There's a grail war in what looks like Arizona or some other Southwestern region of the US, and the war is a front for an actual summoning that needed the first war as a catalyst? Vampires are also in this universe, a subject straight out of another Type-Moon vehicle, Tsukihime. Strange Fate is undoubtedly cool, so I'm along for the ride anyway. But is the plot easy to follow? Hell no.

There's also Jujutsu Kaisen Season 3. I'd love to stop watching this series, as it's terribly depressing, but I can't. The animation is too good to look away. Episode 3 of this season almost brought me to tears with unpalatable mounds of exposition. Episode 4, though? Sheesh, I had to watch it twice because it was so flashy. One of the coolest fighting episodes of anything I've ever watched. Apparently, JJK manga die-hards were upset about it in Japan because the content in Episode 4 wasn't treated with enough gravitas, but they're insane. Anime should tell stories in the best way anime can, full stop.

Now, I engaged with two dark fantasy shows recently, Clevatess and Sentenced to be a Hero. I watched the former in Spanish, so I relied a lot on visual cues for context and missed out on some plot nuances, but Clevatess wasn't as good as I'd hoped. When they introduced a protagonist who resembles Claire from Claymore, and the story took place on a darkened continent surrounded by monsters and divine beasts like Claymore... Even forgetting about Claymore for a second, Clevatess is a weird experience. 

Hero Alicia is immediately defanged by Clevatess, one of four beast kings that humanity is trying to overcome so they can expand their territory. She is turned into a corpse-slave that lives thanks to Clevatess' blessing, and helps the beast king look after the infant heir to a kingdom he absolutely wrecks in the first episode. The earlier violence yields to some misunderstandings about breastfeeding, so Clevatess goes to find someone (other than the non-lactating Alicia) to feed this baby, and then the team actually finds a slave who happens to be lactating... Look, some stories just exist to satisfy a creative itch, I suppose. Not mine, to be clear.

Sentenced to be a Hero, on the other hand, successfully mixes dark fantasy with pathos in a non-creepy way. In this story, "heroes" are ironically named because they commit terrible crimes and are brought into an infinite-reanimation cycle to serve the state; in other words, more anime slaves. Xylo is one such slave, but instead of managing a royal child and searching for tiddy-milk, he accidentally bonds with an ultra powerful goddess who sees the good inside of him. Said goddess is naturally in the vessel of a child, but it's not weird, I swear! The story reminds me of other long-term revenge plots like Tales of Berseria and, dare I say it? Nah, you already know the anime I'm thinking of.

And then there's Frieren. Need I say more? If you liked the first season, you'll like the second season. I loved this story as it was released in manga (which is now in HIATUS, damnit), so the show manages to do it justice with more of that contemplative silence, serene countryside, sprawling fantasy music, and the occasional combat sequence. Just watch it, y'all. 

Know what I don't recommend? Tune into the Midnight Heart anime, which looks stiff at times and wonky at others. The manga's hilarious, so read that instead.

Chivalry of a Failed Blogger, or How Fictional Fighting High Schoolers Make Me Feel Young Again

I just learned that "gray" is the American English spelling of the color we all know, while "grey" is the spelling all those other former English colonies and territories use. Although I prefer the latter version, I'm obliged to use the former. Guess I'll stop drinking Earl Grey tea while I'm at it. 

Anyway, for a blog titled The Anime Guardians, I write a lot about anime-adjacent hobbies. Let's at least start out with an anime as I write about what I've been up to this fall/winter.

Chivalry of a Failed Knight

Because I'm old, I remember seeing Chivalry of a Failed Knight floating on my Hulu home screen for ages and never watching it. Or did I watch it? The banner always reminds me of The Asterisk War, which I definitely tried to watch once but couldn't get into it. The premises seem kind of similar in any case; maybe pink-haired heroines and fighting schools were the craze in 2015. 

I watched (rewatched?) Failed Knight earlier this year when I was still a new dad and between power naps. It's good stuff! Protagonist Ikki Kurogane is the titular "failed knight" who, despite his superhuman swordsmanship, is considered bottom-of-the-barrel because his mana use isn't flashy or scary or something stupid like that. His family hates him save for a way-too-clingy younger sister who cockblocks the lad as he bumbles into a relationship with Stella Vermillion, the cool transfer student.

Failed Knight keeps a lot of action at the forefront while making the romance genuinely worth the screen time. (I mean, there's some ecchi stuff cuz it's 2015.) Ikki is the over-analytical type, which  works for his perpetual underdog characterization. Think Dr. Stone's Senku or Death Note's L with sigma-male swag. Like any good fighting school anime, our cast ultimately competes to enter the Seven Stars Battle Festival, a tournament which has global repercussions not fully explained in the show. These details made me read the light novels to continue where the anime leaves off. If you're interested in reading after watching, volume 4 is where to start. I'm really digging volume 5 right now. 

Fate/Hollow Ataraxia Remastered

I recall ending the Switch version of Fate/Stay Night Remastered with a strong feeling of emptiness. Heaven's Feel route was a doozy! Do I think Shirou and Sakura belong together? I get the appeal, but if I were Shirou, loving the person who threatened to wipe out my entire town and to swallow her sister into eternal damnation wouldn't be my first choice. Anyway, I jumped into Hollow/Ataraxia because of a sunk-cost fallacy: why not continue feeling strangely empty and anxious if it means I find out what happens after the Holy Grail War?

The good news: There's a lot of wit and humor to the strange world our characters occupy. The servants are still around. Rider gets a lot of screen time for anyone who likes her; I've come around now that she's an enticing yet menacing recluse who reads all day. The other characters seem to grow jealous of this Shirou x Rider pairing. (This explains a lot of the fan art I've seen.)

The bad news: not enough Tohsaka. She's at the Mage Association abroad, but our central cast talks about her with apprehension, as if she'll appear and crush them with her oppressive attitude. 

I'm also haunted every time Ilya shows up onscreen. I liked her Heaven's Feel incarnation, but Hollow/Ataraxia keeps reminding me that she also wants to shackle Shirou's soul to a stuffed animal toy. I don't understand the brother-sister complex that shows up in otaku fiction. These people need to stop.

Alright, that's what I've got for the end of 2025. I get a month off from school to prepare for next semester, so maybe I'll rot on my couch and catch up on some anime instead. I should probably do some fiction writing as well. Happy holidays, everybody!