Another day, another brilliant animated pilot with a genuinely original art and rendering style that makes me wonder why I still bother to expect even a fraction of that same creativity from risk-averse animation industries, when I could just get it free here and sometimes on YouTube!

...Well, it's not quite "free" for me since I'm a monthly financial Supporter of Newgrounds, but you get the idea.

The pacing could have been a smidge quicker and snappier, especially during the silly/jokey scenes, but overall this is one of the more polished pilots featured on NG as of late! I have to ask for those of us inevitably willing to pursue our own longer animations after being inspired by this--how long did it take for you to complete this whole 15-minute animation from concept to final post-processing and compositing? 2 years? 3 years? MORE??

I genuinely like this better than the previous Hagniss video just because it had a ton of ACTUAL animation combined with the slapstick visual humor that usually comes with much more expressive animation. As this year's animated Oscar Award winners (Flow and Shadow of the Cypress) aptly demonstrated, excessive dialogue is overrated and limitations really do breed creativity--in this case, I got a better vibe of Hagniss's personality just from how she carried herself throughout this short!

I understand this is based on a more-complex and fairly dialogue-heavy comic series of yours and you probably can't do dialogue-less animations all the time, but it's definitely something to consider whenever you get another idea for animation. The medium is uniquely suited for communicating most, if not all things, through body language alone.

Okay, first off, I absolutely ADORE the animation in this, it's the perfect example of not letting "perfect" be the enemy of "good." It is unpolished, even a bit sloppy at times, but clearly the all-important trade-off is that the animation overall is far more expressive and loose than if the animators had spent an excessive amount of time making everything look cleaner and more "on-model." It results in the art style having some bizarre-but-unique vibe cross between Getter Robo, the original Mobile Suit Gundam movies, and even Peanuts or Rocky and Bullwinkle.

I have mixed feelings about the voice acting. Sometimes it's too monotone, sometimes it fits the emotion the animation and movements are clearly going for, and either way the sound mixing overall makes the voices sound way too quiet compared to the background music or even sound effects, similar to the infamous sound mixing in Sonic Adventure 2. That's par for the course for most Newgrounds pilots made with smaller budgets and less polish than, say, Monkey Wrench, but considering how easy and cheap it is to get a decent microphone + edit sounds in Audacity or a free video editor, it would be nice if this pleasantly surprised me on the sound editing and voice acting front. The "FIXit" mechanic guy probably had the best and most consistent voice acting, kind of sounded like Tomar.

Speaking of "pilots"...THE ROBOT FIGHTS ARE SO COOOOOOL PLEASE MAKE MORE OF THESE EPISODES!!!

I am genuinely impressed that this seems to be a 3D game! Didn't even know GDevelop was capable of 3D games. The gameplay is...fine, for a game jam-type game, just obviously gets repetitive after a few minutes without a genuine "end-game" to shoot for.

This is such a cute and cool game, and yet another reminder of the type of indie magic that can happen with only 3 people working on a game they're passionate about (a programmer, an artist and a musician)! Waha's sprites are too cute for words, especially the funny little dance she makes when she clears one of the Tetris puzzle-like levels! I love the music, too, reminds me of the catchy arcade-style music I would regularly hear in the Dreamcast and GameCube era of gaming. The game itself is fun and well above what I would expect from a typical Newgrounds Game Portal submission, although it is certainly a work-in-progress in parts--in the description, it should mention that if you manage to get yourself stuck in a sort of "soft-lock" situation, the simple solution is to press "Esc" to bring up the pause menu and press Retry.

Once the kinks are all worked out and the second half comes out, though, I would love for this to get a proper Steam release--and I say Steam specifically because I recently got a Steam Deck and I would love to play ALL my indie favorites on that excellent handheld device!

This is so much less frustrating than the real MineSweeper.

I have so little understanding about how music theory works that I didn't hate this song as much as the current review average (about 2 out of 5 stars) would suggest. Very Y2K, I would imagine hearing this in a RebelTaxi/Pan Pizza video.

I’m not even remotely an expert on anything music-related, but I’ve always liked this type of music for boss fights. Question, though: is this related to the PSOne classic (well, good for its era) Croc: Legend of the Gobbos? Or the Croc games on Switch? Or something else entirely?

As a lifelong Sonic fanatic, I must know who she is!

...F-for research purposes, of course.

This is so stupid-looking, I love it.

I'M NOT CHILLZO
I'M MY ORIGINAL CHARACTER, BLILLZO!!