Just a short post this month to announce the latest edition of the toatali media empire; "the toatali review"; a substack addition to the main blog. I've been thinking about doing something like this for a while, but only finally worked up the effort. The idea is to have a place for more frequent, more …
Elden Ring
This post contains full spoilers for Elden Ring, as well as minor spoilers for Dark Souls, Bloodborne and Sekiro. Thanks for reading! I think any proper review of Elden Ring has to take into account, at least in some way, the writer’s relationship to the previous games of FromSoftware. This is because, as I will hopefully convince you …
Red Rocket + Notes on the Current Cinema
This post contains full spoilers for Red Rocket, as well as minor spoilers for Uncut Gems & The Wolf of Wall Street. Thanks for reading! Earlier this year, filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson generated conversation with his latest film Licorice Pizza, a love story between an older girl and a younger boy. The film, which depicts …
The Pillow Moment
For years, I’ve been trying to think about what makes certain moments in games work. Part of the joy of criticism is that kind of self-reflection; why does x scene, film or video game work for me where another one doesn’t - and what does that reflect about what works for me about media? Sometimes …
toatali’s best films of 2021
It’s been a good year at the cinema – following the stall of 2020, when films found themselves delayed by the pandemic, this year truly feels like a revival. Being able to watch films on the big screen again is a welcome relief, but it does bring back one annoying thing – country-specific film release …
toatali’s best games of 2021
I was finally in the position earlier this year to get my hands on a PS5, finally making me a true "next-gen" gamer. Only one game exclusive to that console actually ended up making my list though – mostly I used it to play old PS4 games or surf Netflix. Instead, the Switch made a …
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
This post is about the 1984 film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, and I would recommend watching that before this. This post contains full spoilers for that film, as well as for the film First Reformed. The contents of this post were originally written as my university dissertation, and have been minimally edited here …
toatali @ LFF 2021
For the first time in 22 years living in London, I have been able to attend the BFI London Film Festival. Waking up at 6am everyday so that I can queue up for hours to pack into press screenings of new films is a tiring privilege, but completely worth it - even just to say …
The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles
This is the surprise twelfth post in a series of Ace Attorney reviews, and I recommend reading the others before this. This post contains spoilers for The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles and all other Ace Attorney games. Thanks for reading! Table of Contents: IntroductionPart One: A History Class & The Adventure of the Great DeparturePart Two: Sir Arthur Conan …
toatali’s musings Vol 2.
Bloodborne, the brain-child of From Software and Dark Souls creator Hidetaka Miyazaki, is well known and cited for its incredible labyrinthine story, detailed through NPC interactions, environmental storytelling and lots of encyclopaedic item descriptions. Following in the footsteps of Dark Souls and Demon Souls, which also told their stories in similarly obtuse ways, Bloodborne is …
Toatali Reviews 