Spot Reviews 10/24/25
Oct 24 2025
Once Upon a Crime (2023) [+] Japanese detective fantasy movie. Little Red Riding Hood (Kanna Hashimoto) enters, Claire de Lune, a kingdom that prizes beauty. She meets and befriends Cinderella (Yuko Araki) and after two witches give them fancy ball gowns and crystal shoes and a pumpkin carriage with mouse attendants they go to the royal ball. On the way they run over Hans the royal hairdresser (Masaki Kaji). Once at the ball the body is discovered and due to how he died one of the guests must be the murderer and even the handsome Prince Gilbert (Takanori Iwata) is suspect. It's up to Red to use her excellent memory and deductive ability to eventually solve the crime… It's a clever take on Cinderella mixed a good amount of comedy for family audiences.
Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft (2024) [/] Animated half-hour series with season 1 being 8 episodes and ending setting up season 2. Lara Croft (Hayley Atwell) has returned home to inherit her father's estate and sell off everything due to grief. But one her artifacts is stolen by Charles Devereaux (Richard Armitage). Along with her friends Lara first aims to recover her artifact but then she learns Devereaux is trying to get four gems and activate a power that could destroy the world… It's nice animation and action. Not a particularly interesting story — young Lara Croft who makes mistakes is not my thing: I prefer Angelina Jolie's Lara Croft who started out as a badass from the first time she was introduced.
Lotus Chess - Opening Trainer (2025) [/] "Lotus Chess is a personalized opening trainer that enables you to quickly perfect your chess openings." It will load your chess.com or Lichess games then analyze your openings and recommend improvements or teach you where you went wrong. Subscription based $10 per month or $70 per year. I like that it integrates with the top two web-based chess platforms and it's not just trying to be a chess game app.
Episode - Choose Your Story (2014) [-] Episode is Episode XOXO's big brother. It's an engine where creators can make visual novels and people can download and play them. Good customization of characters, ok cartoony graphics with some animation, and with so many stories many of them are pretty good. It does have a free-to-play model where you buy gems and in turn many story choices (the good choices) require gems. That's the major drawback — I'd rather have gems pay for stories rather than story choices as even with a discount a good choice costs like $1.50 and with many choices in a story it will be very expensive. I guess overall then I would not recommend Episode because in practice it's a very expensive game.
Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft (2024) [/] Animated half-hour series with season 1 being 8 episodes and ending setting up season 2. Lara Croft (Hayley Atwell) has returned home to inherit her father's estate and sell off everything due to grief. But one her artifacts is stolen by Charles Devereaux (Richard Armitage). Along with her friends Lara first aims to recover her artifact but then she learns Devereaux is trying to get four gems and activate a power that could destroy the world… It's nice animation and action. Not a particularly interesting story — young Lara Croft who makes mistakes is not my thing: I prefer Angelina Jolie's Lara Croft who started out as a badass from the first time she was introduced.
Lotus Chess - Opening Trainer (2025) [/] "Lotus Chess is a personalized opening trainer that enables you to quickly perfect your chess openings." It will load your chess.com or Lichess games then analyze your openings and recommend improvements or teach you where you went wrong. Subscription based $10 per month or $70 per year. I like that it integrates with the top two web-based chess platforms and it's not just trying to be a chess game app.
Episode - Choose Your Story (2014) [-] Episode is Episode XOXO's big brother. It's an engine where creators can make visual novels and people can download and play them. Good customization of characters, ok cartoony graphics with some animation, and with so many stories many of them are pretty good. It does have a free-to-play model where you buy gems and in turn many story choices (the good choices) require gems. That's the major drawback — I'd rather have gems pay for stories rather than story choices as even with a discount a good choice costs like $1.50 and with many choices in a story it will be very expensive. I guess overall then I would not recommend Episode because in practice it's a very expensive game.