English Dub Review: Let’s Play “Ruminate Journey”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Marshall continues his second playthrough of Ruminate and learns interesting lessons. Sam attends her first meeting with Charles as his assistant. Angela thinks about her friendship with Link and considers if she wants more.

OUR TAKE

Oh, I didn’t know that Marshall was still going to be playing the game into the next episode, but I guess it makes sense considering we didn’t really get a solid look at it from just that. It’s certainly an interesting way of seeing how he visualizes the game, given that we know the actual game seems to go for a more 16 Bit art style. It’s totally possible that he’s imagining Sam’s friends in the place of the NPCs, though maybe the aesthetic also allowed Sam to design them that way deliberately. Also Marshall is pretty sick so he could just be hallucinating from the high fever. And it turns out he’s not the only potential love interest taking a crack at Ruminate because we see Charles playing it too and making considerably different choices, which both shows the versatility of the game and helps highlight the differences between these two guys. Now we just need to get Link to play it so we have the trifecta! I imagine he’d take to its pacifist style storytelling a lot better considering his own non violent nature, but I guess he also doesn’t seem like that much of a gamer?

Speaking of Link, we once again check back in with Angela who is continuing to see Link in a different way. Or, as it turns out, the way she did when they first met and she had the hots for him right away, though I guess benched those feelings when it was clear he was into Sam. The supportive friend suppressing a crush on someone into someone else is its own well worn romance trope (and personally I’ve been on both ends of it), and with Link’s accidental calling her of “Angel”, it seems her mind is gonna keep looking for patterns to justify these feelings. And as mentioned, Link seems like he’ll be out of the race eventually so at least he has someone waiting in the wings. As for Sam herself, she has a productive meeting with Charles and a client where she learns a bit about selling their software and effective methods of a sale (which I wonder if that came from the author’s own experience). And Marshall and Monica continue to have hints of being on the outs, but we only have two more episodes in this season, so I’m guessing we’re headed towards at least some sort of status quo shift in the coming weeks.