Matthew Magnus Lundeen is a writer, critic, and aspiring cinephile trying way too hard and simultaneously not enough. He writes anime features for Game Rant when he isn't trying to write fiction.

In The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the final boss is placed enticingly within your reach from very early on. You can fight him basically as soon as you finish the tutorial regions. But ...

Without sound design, film would be a bland medium. A character would walk into a room, and you wouldn’t hear footsteps. Crickets wouldn’t chirp on a summer night. The patter of rain in a forest would ...