The UGREEN x Honkai Star Rail Yao Guang Collector’s Box includes a 65W USB-C charger, a 10000mAh magnetic power bank, a 3.3ft retractable USB-C cable, and a FineTrack Mini2 tracker. For the Yao Guang collectibles, they include the tin badge, chibi acrylic stand, power bank pouch, and holographic ticket.

Check out our unboxing video below to get a taste of what’s inside the collector’s box.

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The UGREEN x Honkai Star Rail Yao Guang Collector’s Box is now available on UGREEN and Amazon.

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Initial Thoughts

I used to love Gunpla when I was younger and have a few Gundams that I built a while back. That’s what caught my eye with this game. Again, this game isn’t necessarily about building the models themselves, but about selling them and making sure your model-selling business keeps you afloat and consistently profitable.

Open For Business

You’ll start your shop in an unknown location in Asia somewhere. I’ve personally been to Japan several times, and I do think the location is in Japan since it has the same streets and architecture. A quick look around the area will immediately make you think this if you’ve been there.

I named my location Osaka Supreme Kits (I know it sounds corny) and got to work. The game’s tutorial is direct and to the point. Since the shop you start with has basic shelving, a checkout counter, and business PC, you can immediately get to work.

The management app gives you the options for managing the shop and its licenses. It will give you access to types of models and paints you can buy from the wholesaler, the option to expand your shop, hiring employees, etc. You won’t be able to touch the other options until later in the game, though.

You’ll start by ordering the base model kits and the paints, then set the prices. Setting the prices is up to you, but the game does give you an initial market price that you can start from. Since I wanted my business to flourish, I just added 25 cents more to the market price so I could reel in some profit. You have to make money somehow, am I right?

Inventory Placement

Placing the store stock is very important in your shop. Make sure to keep the paints and models near each other, especially with their specified tags; for example, Basic or Military. It will make the customers more likely to buy your inventory and, in turn, make you money.

I placed the basic paints right next to the basic models, while also placing the military paints right next to the military models. Because I did this, my store has had a massive amount of foot traffic and constant customers every day. I’m not sure if this is just part of the initial first several days of the game, but I don’t seem to be losing customers no matter what.

Money Money Money

I personally work with point-of-sale software when I’m not writing for Nerd Reactor, so actually helping the customers pay for their items in-game was familiar to me. They will either pay with a credit card or cash. It’s that straightforward. However, you have to pay attention to inputting the correct amount on the credit card payment device or calculating cash. Make sure to know basic mathematics when counting change for the customer, because if you input the wrong amount for the credit card or cash, you’ll lose valuable XP to level up your store. Also, if you set the prices too high, you won’t get any customers, and you’ll see their dismay. Stay frosty as a seller!

Final Reaction

This game has a lot of potential as I lost myself managing everything within the store for a few hours. My only main qualm at the moment is that they need a higher variety of NPC models that buy from your store. I saw the same woman buy from my store about seven times in one day. I guess I shouldn’t complain if they still give me money. I’ll be waiting for the full release as I haven’t been disappointed yet!

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The cast features an eclectic mix of actors, especially if you’re a fan of J-pop boy bands or classic yakuza movies. Daisuke Sakuma, best known as a member of Snow Man, plays Daiya with an easygoing charm that makes him instantly likable. Yuta Nakamoto of NCT 127 brings a cooler, more guarded energy to Kiryu. Neither performer is just there to attract music fans. Their experience as idols helps during the dance sequences, and both understand the film’s playful rhythm and know when to let the veteran actors steal a scene.

And steal scenes they do. Kippei Shiina, Renji Ishibashi, and Hitoshi Ozawa have spent years playing tough guys, gangsters, or authority figures. So, it’s a delight to watch them parody these roles. They still carry themselves like people who command the screen, then they’re asked to dance. The contrast stays funny, especially because Uchida treats their frustration with just enough sincerity.

With clever casting, energetic choreography, and memorable brawls, The Specials transforms a ridiculous premise into crowd-pleasing entertainment.

The premise also gives the film room to explore emotionally guarded outsiders who don’t know how to work as a team. Their rehearsals become awkward, quasi-group therapy, and Urara adds warmth without making the story sentimental. Yuzuki Hirakawa brings a welcome presence to a film otherwise crowded with psychologically damaged men. By the time the team performs their routine, the retro soundtrack and choreography become more than punchlines. You want them to win the whole competition.

Despite being a playful parody of yakuza films, The Specials has a surprising number of fantastic action sequences. The film mixes clean choreography with flashes of genuine brutality, and Yohei Tateishi’s cinematography gives the daytime comedy a polished brightness before shifting into grimier textures whenever the fists come out.

Overall, The Specials is a film that seamlessly blends comedy out of dance-floor antics and underworld chaos. Better still, its warmth never dulls the danger or makes the characters untouchable. The Specials takes that basic appeal and scales it into a crowd-pleasing ensemble piece. It’s silly, stylish, heartfelt, and far more effective than a movie about dancing hitmen has any right to be.

Rating: 4/5 atoms

The post The Specials (Fantasia International Film Festival 2026 Review) appeared first on Nerd Reactor.

At the center sits Eiji Tsuburaya. The documentary repeatedly returns to the punishing labor behind the original’s production: miniature cities, creature suits, optical effects, detailed designs, and weekly television deadlines that called for movie-scale imagination at an unforgiving pace. Archival footage from the shoots and clips from iconic episodes reveal the handmade ingenuity involved. By the end, The Origin of Ultraman feels as much like a tribute to Tsuburaya—the “Father of Tokusatsu”—as it does to Ultraman himself.

Still, anyone expecting a chronological account covering every Ultra hero, production shift, or major era will leave with gaps. Directors Yu Nakamura and Kazutaka Yoshida are more interested in passion than documentation, and it’s easy to see why. Their interview lineup is remarkable: Guillermo del Toro, Hideo Kojima, Hideaki Anno, Hirokazu Koreeda, and Nicolas Winding Refn—just to name a few. Together, they approach Ultraman as a mythology, childhood memory, religious symbol, design object, and creative trigger.

The interviews are terrific because every interviewee openly talks about how much they love the character. Refn discusses Ultraman with pure excitement, like a kid talking about firetrucks, while Kojima describes believing in Ultraman almost as one might believe in God. That kind of enthusiasm becomes infectious.

The Origin of Ultraman honors Eiji Tsuburaya and six decades of tokusatsu history through archival footage and deeply personal interviews.

The conversations become even richer when they move beyond nostalgia. Del Toro and Koreeda compare Catholic and East Asian religious traditions while discussing why they believe Ultraman connected so strongly with audiences in Mexico but never became equally embedded in the United States. Original Ultra Q and Ultraman star Hiroko Sakurai gives a more intimate connection to the people who built the phenomenon. Taken together, these perspectives turn the documentary into something larger than franchise promotion, and it becomes an exploration of how popular art travels, changes meaning, and settles into people’s inner lives.

Unfortunately, the filmmaking rarely equals the quality of its material. This is an official Tsuburaya production distributed by TOHO NEXT and Tsuburaya Productions, yet it often looks strangely amateurish. Onscreen text changes style and position without much logic. Names can be difficult to locate, subtitles occasionally compete with other graphics, and transitions between speakers feel clunky. Classic footage and archival material are welcome, but clips sometimes begin or end at awkward points, interrupting thoughts rather than extending them. The problem is not a lack of access. It’s a lack of polish.

That becomes frustrating because the raw material is so strong. A cleaner edit could have created a sweeping cultural history worthy of the anniversary. Instead, the production occasionally resembles an excellent collection of bonus features assembled without enough attention to rhythm. Even so, the film’s affection shines through, and the images, memories, and thoughtful comments help explain why Ultraman has lasted so long.

Overall, The Origin of Ultraman might not be the ultimate documentary as its official label suggests. Still, it does capture something special: the joy on someone’s face when an old hero makes them feel like a child again.

Rating: 3/5 atoms

The post The Origin of Ultraman (Fantasia International Film Festival 2026 Review) appeared first on Nerd Reactor.

The story centers on Madoka, a playwright who sits down to watch a movie about Kazuma, a musician. Inside that movie, Kazuma goes to see a film about Madoka. Before long, they find themselves looking at each other through the screen, sharing different stories but the same movie world. When they start talking across this divide, their films go off script, and that is when You Are the Film becomes most enjoyable.

Even though the story might seem complicated, Ueda makes the rules easy to follow. He doesn’t spend much time explaining things. Instead, he sets up the idea quickly and trusts viewers to follow along. At just 68 minutes, the film moves quickly through a theater and a nearby shopping area, making the most of its small budget.

Makoto Ueda’s You Are the Film blends science fiction, comedy, and heartfelt drama into a fast, wildly inventive celebration of cinema.

The film’s small scale actually helps it. Unlike Ueda’s earlier, more complex scripts, You Are the Film feels personal and crafted with care. The theater is filled with posters and nods to his past work, but the love for movies goes beyond these details. Madoka and Kazuma both come hoping to escape tough moments in their lives, and the movies instead push them to see their problems differently.

Ueda makes sure the science-fiction idea never overshadows the film’s emotional core. Madoka and Kazuma come first, before any clever plot devices. Each of them can see something in the other’s life that the person themselves can’t. This turns the movie’s main trick into a unique way of showing why it’s important to accept help. We aren’t just lone heroes who have to fix everything by ourselves. Sometimes, we need someone else to spot the answer for us.

However, not every idea gets enough time to grow. The short length is refreshing, but it means some parts of the story feel sketched out instead of fully explored. Sometimes, the film’s simple style makes it feel like a student project or a proof of concept to build upon later. Compared to River or Rewrite, it’s less impressive in how it’s made and doesn’t hit as hard emotionally.

Overall, You Are the Film is a smart, warm, and delightfully odd first feature that knows experiments should be enjoyable, not just impressive. It explores what movies can do and uses that sense of fun to make a clear point. Stories might keep us stuck in the same roles, but someone else can help us change what happens next.

Rating: 4/5 atoms

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The setup follows Suzuki, a seemingly pathetic drunken vagrant, who is brought in for questioning. After using his (supposedly) psychic abilities to predict tragedies, he becomes linked to a series of bombings across Tokyo. Most of the film unfolds inside a cramped interrogation room, where officers try to determine whether Suzuki is a legitimate psychic or the person behind these bombings.

That might sound boring on paper, but Jiro Sato is the reason it works. His performance begins so understated that Suzuki almost seems harmless. Then, little by little, the mask slips. Before long, the man who looked barely capable of standing begins studying the shadowy aspects of everyone around him. Sato moves between desperation, smug amusement, wounded pride, and genuine menace so easily that it becomes difficult to tell where the performance ends and Suzuki’s manipulation begins.

Suzuki=Bakudan transforms a largely static interrogation into a white-knuckle thriller filled with manipulation, uncertainty, and escalating chaos.

The film contrasts these mostly static interrogations with the frantic movement of Tokyo outside. Police race through crowded city areas as the bomb threat expands, while the two officers who arrested Suzuki begin their own investigation. These scenes provide a welcome release from the interrogation room, yet never reduce the pressure. Instead, every cut back to Suzuki feels like returning to the source of these problems.

What begins as a contained mystery steadily snowballs. As the stakes rise, Suzuki’s riddles become harder to solve. He may be a psychic or a terrorist, and the film understands that explaining him too neatly would make him less frightening.

There is a guilty pleasure in watching a truly magnetic villain—or possible villain—operate. Characters like Suzuki embody impulses most people would never voice, frustrations that civilized society demands we bury. He exposes those feelings in others and appears delighted by what he finds. That makes him more than a puzzle for the police to solve. He’s a mirror they would rather smash.

Overall, Suzuki=Bakudan is a white-knuckle psychological thriller that’s intimate and explosive at the same time. It’s held together by Jiro Sato’s fearless performance and the unnerving possibility that the most dangerous bomb in Tokyo may be the most confident person in an interrogation room.

Rating: 4/5 atoms

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At the center is Lord Murashige Araki. A real figure from 16th-century Japan, Murashige has broken with the powerful warlord Nobunaga Oda and sealed himself inside his fortress. His authority appears absolute, but that image begins to shatter when a series of strange crimes occur that suggest someone or some people inside the castle are working against him.

Murashige turns to Kanbei Kuroda, a brilliant strategist held prisoner beneath the fortress. Masaki Suda plays Kanbei with lively, mischievous energy. His conversations with Murashige contrast sharply with Murashige’s heavy stillness. Kanbei rarely offers direct answers. Instead, he gives riddles, questions, and inconvenient observations. The setup resembles The Silence of the Lambs more than a conventional war film: a powerful man repeatedly descending into confinement to get advice from someone he cannot fully trust to solve a mystery.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s The Samurai and the Prisoner trades swordplay for psychological warfare in a tense, intelligent tale of power and deception.

The story unfolds across four chapters, each bringing a fresh mystery for Murashige to solve. Kurosawa patiently builds paranoia, letting glances, rumors, and partial conversations carry as much danger as Nobunaga Oda’s incoming forces. This framework gives the film an engaging rhythm at first. Unfortunately, the deliberate pace and repetitive chapters become sluggish after a while.

Thankfully, the film is gorgeous. Kurosawa carefully arranges interiors and striking outdoor compositions that make the castle feel both majestic and oppressive. There are also large-scale images of armored men assembled across the landscape.

As Lord Murashige Araki, Masahiro Motoki plays him with commanding restraint. His Murashige has unquestionable authority yet an unexpected approachability, expressing the character’s pacifist instincts. When his stoicism slips under pressure, brief flashes of anxiety and irritation hit hard. Suda is more openly expressive, and his warmth makes it easy to see why even his keeper begins forming an odd connection with him.

Overall, uneven pacing aside, The Samurai and the Prisoner is an intelligent, beautiful film with spectacular performances by Motoki and Suda. Once you realize the film is not about history’s grand events so much as the people forced to interpret them from incomplete evidence, then you’ll begin to appreciate what Kiyoshi Kurosawa is building.

Rating: 4/5 atoms

The Samurai and the Prisoner hits theaters on July 31st.

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I was able to play four hours of the game at a recent preview event, and it has many of the ingredients of a creepy Silent Hill game, including the eerie monsters, a quiet town transformed into a dark world, a protagonist willing to enter a nightmarish world, and strange puzzles.

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Motoi Okamoto is the Silent Hill series producer, and he wanted to make sure that gamers are getting something different for each new game, as fans can see with games like Silent Hill f and Silent Hill Townfall.

“The types of narratives being told in those games are becoming a little repetitive and a little too similar to one another,” Okamoto said in a roundtable interview we were a part of. “We don’t want players to get bored with the types of experiences we can provide. We wanted to try to change things up and provide some fresh new takes, which is why we started venturing towards new horizons; for example, going to Japan, and this time over to Scotland.”

Silent Hill: Short Message helped to push the world of Silent Hill globally.

“In Short Message, I think we introduced the concept of the Silent Hill phenomenon, where similar types of psychological experiences and phenomena take place, and not just within the titular town of Silent Hill,” Okamoto tells Nerd Reactor. “But we introduced that concept to show that similar types of experiences can take place across all parts of the world.”

The game is set in 1996, and gamers will notice it by seeing the types of PCs, phones, and TVs out there in the town of St. Amelia.

“There are other narrative reasons for the time period, but I think the world was kind of on a technology cusp around the mid-90s, where you know the internet was starting to become a thing. But you were too early to have Google Maps in your pocket, right? You don’t have this Magic Bullet for all the problems that might come up. With analog tech, you feel like you can’t quite rely on it. It feels a little bit uncertain.

“And I think that’s a great place to be for horror and a great place for Silent Hill as well. Static radios would not sound quite the same if it were digital radio. You would lose a lot of personality. I think by going to digital, it felt like the right place and time, but narratively, there’s plenty of relevance to the mid-90s in general.”

Silent Hill: Townfall will be released on September 24, 2026, on PlayStation 5, Steam, and the Epic Games Store.

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This year, HBO Max stepped it up for its Lanterns Training Headquarters activation, and it’s easily the top activation during this year’s San Diego Comic-Con. This 30-minute experience really made fans feel like they were training to become Green Lanterns. There were different missions and routes, depending on your group number. In my group, we had to blend in with the locals at a local bar, train at the shooting range, and search for the Lantern left by Hal Jordan.

I chatted with a fan who waited 13 hours to participate in the activation. After having done the experience, he said it was worth it. It definitely left an impact thanks to the sets, special effects, and the actors.

Once we had completed two of our missions, we were all given our very own Green Lantern ring. We got to recite the Green Lantern oath. Once we finished the last line, “Beware my power, Green Lantern’s light!” the rings lit up the room with a green hue. I literally got goosebumps.

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Lanterns will debut on HBO and HBO Max on August 16, 2026.

Stuart Fails to Save the Universe

Stuart Fails to Save the Universe is a spin-off series of The Big Bang Theory. Available now on HBO Max, it follows Stuart as he is tasked with stopping a “multiverse Armageddon” due to accidentally damaging the device. Since Stuart is a comic book shop owner, it was fitting to hold the Stuart Fails to Save the Universe activation inside a comic book shop.

The experience includes going through the shop in search of The Device.

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Instead of turning the film into a non-stop fight extravaganza, the movie focuses more on character development. That makes sense, since Haruka Sakura’s journey functions as the heart and soul of the Shishitoren Arc. The film wants viewers to care about his evolution and the relationships around him. Still, the emotional growth never really gets enough time to feel natural.

The film tries to fit the anime’s first season, about four manga volumes, into one two-hour movie, which is a lot. Sakura starts as a tough loner who thinks strength is all that matters, but he slowly learns to trust others. In the movie, this change feels more like jumping from one step to the next than a steady journey. There are some touching scenes, and a few real moments stand out, but everything feels rushed. Before those moments can really sink in, the movie moves on.

The Wind Breaker live-action adaptation captures the series’ heart and attitude, but rushed character development and uneven fights hold it back.

Sadly, this rushed pace also affects the action. The fights are okay, but they don’t have the same energy or style as the anime. Because the movie focuses more on character moments, the fight scenes often just connect the emotional beats rather than wow audiences. For a story that’s all about street fights, that’s a big loss.

The cast does a decent job. Most main characters look a lot like their manga versions, but that accuracy can be distracting in live action. Some hairstyles, expressions, and costumes work on the page but look a bit odd on real people. That over-the-top style also leads to some exaggerated acting. It’s not terrible, and sometimes the big performances are fun, but overall the acting is uneven.

Overall, the live-action adaptation keeps enough of Wind Breaker’s charm to be enjoyable. The story is full of hardened characters who care more about protecting others than getting stronger. It’s what sets Wind Breaker apart from other battle shonen stories. Even so, while the film might fail to match the anime’s action or pacing, it gets that the series is really about Sakura’s journey.

Rating: 3/5 atoms

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