I love the whole Harbor City project. These shorts convey character depth through a non-linear story that manages to be funny and quirky without becoming overbearing. And all that with a presentation that's nostalgic and made with skill. Just an extremely solid multimedia project.

The character writing here is beyond excellent. I feel it achieves a fabled "impecable simplicity," where characters aren't complex in individual words or actions but make their depth clear when looked at as a whole. Everyone speaks in a silly way that's funny while capturing where their personalities converge and diverge. To my shock, it achieves a high-level quirkiness without coming off as cringey or excessive. And what makes it truly remarkable in my opinion is how it doesn't even balance said quirkiness with more ordinary dialogue; Harbor City just know how to wield its silliness that well.

The story revolves mostly around Ted and Toby, who appear to be a classic case of how opposites attract. Toby is a walking pile of anxiety who struggles with meeting the expectations of adulthood while Ted is so easygoing he thinks he'll fail upwards through life. However, the series offers more than its fair share of inferences of how these may be closer to a yin-yang. The anxious Toby has loving parents and lives in world that doesn't quite expect of him as he does for himself, being able to only slow down properly in the presence of his boyfriend. On the other hand, we get hints Ted has a past with such pressures but never seems to bothered by them, only spurred to "grow up" by his boyfriend. These characters are made to be simple to grasp while also inviting us to question their simplicity and read between the lines by offering only inferences and hints of such depth.

Harbor City is also very distinctive in its presentation. Using the base of a pastiche of poligonal point-and-click games as a springboard, this project launches itself into an identity of its own. The artists fill the gaps of limitations of the aforementioned medium with cohesive animation made to enhance the comedy and add even more character. The 2D-animated faces are a good example of this, complementing the character's intentionally limited physicality with sillier smoothness.

I must also point the laudable way this project handles a non chronological story. It's rare that we ever get where in time any single story is taking place, but hints organically show up throughout each short allowing us to internalize a timeline and manage expectations in regards to the story. Ted and Toby's relationship status, familiarity and housing situation are the most obvious of such well-placed clues.

For this and more reasons, Harbor City is one of my favorite ongoing multimedia projects in this fandom.