When Rito announced a couple years back that they were going to do everything, literally everything, all the time, I was like, "Damn, that's a lot of things." You're trying to beat CS and Hearthstone and Street Fighter and also, like, Dota again somehow, which is sorta funny because this last one kinda brings the company full circle.

The next few paragraphs should be about how pride cometh before a fall. You know? It should be about how they tried to do way too much shit way out of their ken and natural law itself had to step in to tamp man's hubris. We could detour into some wild theorizing about heat-resistant wing compounds. But the card game was, and is, incredible. And, at least when I played it, incredibly generous by genre standards. Valorant is dope. And now they made a show so good it tempts even the casual observer to install one or more of these things. Again.

And I sorta thought Ruined King was gonna be a reskin of Battle Chasers, that woulda been safe, or even good. Shit, it coulda been a reskin of Darksiders Genesis and I'd still be down to clown. It would have been beautiful and cool in either case, "sweet," in that nineties way - a way mothers abhor! - with a few giant, exposed skulls here and there to let us know malevolent forces truly mean business this time. But it's got all of my favorite JRPG shit in here, with overworld exploration and legitimate twists in the classic initiative bar. They could have engaged in incredibly mercenary behavior here, as they could have with every one of these excursions of theirs, and it still would have worked in a purely business sense. Instead, they tried to earn it every time, and then did.

(CW)TB out.