#I was surprised to find that the anime had swapped the order and characters involved in some chapters

[not-that-debonair]

reading the code black manga and uhhhh I am having many thoughts about caw code black

[porta-decumana]

Zadnor & Bozja’s Ending

I know it’s been the bandwagon to hate on Werlyt and I’ve been critical of that plotline in the past as well.  But Bozja may have just taken the cake for unsatisfactory storytelling, in my opinion, while also skirting into the same realm of “we’re gonna give imperialism a pass because maybe the Empire isn’t that bad uwu”.  Obvious spoilers for rank 25 quests, the Dalriada raid, and Bozja’s story ending under the cut along with screenshots.

This is a pretty critical look at Zadnor specifically so if you don’t wanna read that then feel free to bypass this post.

Bajsaljen’s Constitution was probably the first part that really made me scratch my head and question the entire plot.  I was convinced at first I was too sleepy to process what Bajsaljen was saying but then I went back and... yeah, he really did say that.

To which, Marsak calls him out on, a fact that I appreciate because my response was pretty much the same level of “wtf” as him and the nameless/dialogue-less NPCs in the room.

If you haven’t played Bozja in its entirety yet, you may not understand why I felt like this dialogue was incredibly appalling.  The instances are filled with horrific encounters, some of which are:

Dabog, a former Resistance soldier who was experimented on in order to become an expert warmachina pilot and later shows back up in Zadnor as a model swap for the final boss of Gyr Abania.  In other words, mutated beyond recognition.

Lorvo, another former member of the Resistance, who was tempered by the Queen.  You fight alongside his student, who is trying to save him.

Shemhazai, a death spirit summoned with auracite and the sacrifices of Garlean soldiers.

Delubrum Reginae’s 2nd boss (I believe?) are a group of former Blades who have been tempered and their bodies have mutated.  These are former comrades you, as the WoL, personally fought alongside in the early parts of the Southern Front.  Named characters with backstories.

Fabineau quo Soranus - a brutal commander that is known to torment his subordinates and use men and animals both as test subjects.  

And this is just a fraction of what I can think of off the top of my head.  So understand that when I saw Bajsaljen say the above parts, I was questioning what parts of the Empire he was talking about.  And I know he tries to use Misija as his reason for this but it still just doesn’t quite sit right with the literal everything else that happened fighting for Bozja.  Because you can make the argument that Misija saw the Imperial way of life better but also you can make the argument that she was enacting a revenge plan that transcended multiple generations.  Misija’s issue with Bozjan society was the mistreatment of her and her family as well as the murder of her ancestor-- classism.  And while her hatred of Bozja and its high society (the Blades) might be understandable, I think it does little to excuse the rampant death and cruelty the IVth legion goes on to do.

I think what Bajsaljen is trying to say is that he does not want to create another society that would create more Misijas. But in doing so, it feels like he’s giving the IVth legion a pass after all the atrocities they’ve done (even calling the occupation “peace” and that... hnghhh is it peace when people are being used as experiments, Bajsaljen?  And they’re being oppressed?) and it just feels really, really tone-deaf.  Especially given that Bajsaljen’s top soldiers were all, for the most part, tempered and then put to death.  That just adds an extra ouch factor.

I don’t wanna spend too long talking about this bit so I’m gonna move onto the next offender, which is Gabranth, or more specifically, what happens to Gabranth (or... how it happens, rather).  Honestly, I was uncomfortable with the Bajsaljen stuff but the Gabranth field notes absolutely floored me.  It feels as though there was either scrapped content here or... the team decided they could not continue the plotline with Gabranth any longer and decided to write him out in a note that only a handful of the playerbase will probably read because otherwise, there’s no indicator that Gabranth’s tale is over.  Here are the bits of the field note in question:

And you might go, “Wow, that’s a wild way to end the Bozja tale” to which I would agree and remind you that none of this is shown in-game, it’s all just in a field note that could be easily skipped over.  Yes.  That’s right.  Dalmasca’s freedom, Gabranth’s fate, Lyon going full mutiny... it’s all in a field note.  The ending Bozja cutscenes actually have dialogue like this:

In another scene, with Lyon and Gabranth in Valnain, Dalmasca.

Note: this is an allusion to Noah having the same terminal illness as his father.

The scene ends with Lyon looking surprised at the weapons and Sicinius and Gabranth go to discuss the findings.  The scene then cuts to this photo and the questline ends.

So to put it mildly... I’m mad.  Why are we supposed to find out the fate of Dalmasca-- something that’s been in and out of the story since Stormblood-- through a field note?  Why is Lyon��s betrayal also found out this way?  And Gabranth’s alleged demise?  I’m incredibly iffy on the choice to do this in the plot but I would be considerably less mad if any of this was indicated in the cutscenes.  I happen to really like Gabranth’s XII’s iteration and the fact that we got a field note on him made me excited.  I only found out about Dalmasca being freed, Lyon’s treachery, Gabranth’s death because of that.  And that was incredibly jarring to read given the cutscenes I had just watched.  There’s no indication that any of that would happen and I can’t help but feel as though that is a bit of lore that is often going to be overlooked by players who simply don’t think to check the field notes for important lore bombs.

I want to reiterate: I'm not specifically mad at the story decision to kill Gabranth (even if it’s a fake death), I’m mad at how this was all revealed to the players.  Particularly the bit about Dalmasca.  It discards the age-old rule of storytelling-- “show, don’t tell”.  I could forgive them for having to cut certain bits of Bozja’s story because of the pandemic severely hampering development but... there had to have been a better way than this.  Maybe redo some of the cutscene dialogue?  Maybe add in a little bit more to the final scene?  I was excited to face off against Gabranth.  I was excited to go help liberate Dalmasca, especially after the Return to Ivalice plot really set us up for that in the future.  This... just feels incredibly unfulfilling.  And I hope that this is not how they decide to end things with this section of the story.  The build from Return to Ivalice and the continuation of those plot threads in Bozja were great!  Having it unceremoniously ended in a field note?  Not so great.  

Two honorable mention things that I don’t have the energy to talk about at large

Mikoto’s visions don’t feel significant enough to the story.  This is particularly egregious in Zadnor’s arc, where she has a vision where she falls off an airship and then tells the WoL to not say anything because she “doesn’t want people to worry” instead of, idk, trying to find a way to save herself.  She only sees herself fall, she doesn’t see herself land.  But she insists there’s “nothing we can do about it anyways”.  It... felt like they didn’t really matter in the end?  Fran ends up deus ex machina-ing a rescue anyways so like... what was the point?

Misija's “redemption through death”, a tired trope that is even more tired in FFXIV.  I know there’s two different endings to this quest but Misija being executed after being mortally wounded by the Diablos Armament is the ending I received.

Going to harken back to the criticisms of Werlyt.  I’ll maintain my stance that I still think Werlyt had some glaring issues with it... but I will give it this.  It didn’t kill off characters from a side plot that had been going on since Stormblood in a field note.  And it didn’t involve the Werlytians being like “Hey let’s base our new constitution off of the VIIth legion... that is a great idea.”

Anyways, I still recommend doing Bozja if only because the Dalriada is a good instance with a very good final boss theme.  I did enjoy aspects of the questline but the ending really soured my opinion of it.  

[bookofjudith]

I received this LOVELY ficlet set in the same AU as ‘a cardinal hits the window’, and it made me cry. thank you so much anon for sending it to me!

                                                 _________

Hi! So. I love your fanfic so much. And I was reading through the comments/threats posted on “Cardinal” and saw one that made a suggestion for a fic set in the same universe that involved Zuko. And the plot bunny attacked. So here it is; self-indulgent and un-edited. Please don’t feel obligated to post this at all! It’s just a thank you for all you’ve written. On the other hand, please feel free to throw this up wherever you want, and to make any changes at all to it. From this point on, it’s fully, 100% yours to do with as you please. May your weekend be lovely!

Warnings: Brief mentions of past character deaths, mentions of injury, mentions of surgery and other hospital things, mentions of child abuse.

It always took long enough for Iroh to register that he was hearing his own mobile phone ringing – there was just always so much background noise in the Jasmine Dragon that he had learned to tune everything but the landline and the words ‘excuse me’ and his name out completely – that it stopped before he got to answer it. Usually, when that happened, he let it be; there was no point dropping things to dive for a call he’d already missed, anyway. But, that afternoon, the phone started up again almost as soon as the last call had died down, and the ringing was close enough to the first that he noticed. Still, by the time he’d carefully set the trays down and fished the device from his pocket, it was silent again. Iroh peered at the screen and felt his eyebrows raise even as his heart clenched suddenly. He had no fewer than eleven missed calls – four from Sokka, and seven from Katara.

The landline rang, but Iroh called for Jin to please answer it, his fingers slow but determined on the phone screen before him. Something was wrong; he could feel it in the very blood his thudding heart was pumping around his body. Something was wrong, because Katara and Sokka wouldn’t be that adamant to get hold of him if it wasn’t. And, oh, hadn’t he had a premonition of ill omens the evening before, when Zuko had asked him to swap out his shift at the Dragon last minute but then had been cagey about why? He should have pressed for more information; should have forced Zuko to tell him why he couldn’t meet his eyes as he mumbled out weak excuses. Meeting somebody who can only make that time Zuko had said. Katara’s coming with. Iroh shouldn’t have let that appease him; shouldn’t have been mollified by the young woman’s presence just because she and Zuko had made such surprising, strong friends in the past few years after their initial rocky start. He should have done more than warn Zuko to take care of Katara, not yet fifteen and therefore more Zuko’s responsibility than any of his other friends, and should have not been so easily reassured by Zuko’s offence at the insinuation that he wouldn’t do all in his power to ensure all those he cared about were safe, but especially the younger ones. He should have –

“Iroh!” Jin stuck her head around the door. “The phone’s for you. It’s Katara. And it sounds urgent.”

Iroh abandoned his attempts to call one of the siblings back and instead half ran to the phone. “Katara?”

“Uncle,” Katara sobbed, her breathing harsh and full of tears. Ice began filling Iroh’s veins as sweat broke out all over him. “Uncle you – you have to come quick.”

“Katara, what happened?”

“You have to get to the h…hospital,” Katara sobbed. “It’s Zuko.”

Iroh’s heart nearly stopped beating on the spot, and he hung up without a proper goodbye.

***

Iroh’s heart didn’t stop beating. But Zuko’s had. If Katara, with her first aid certification, hadn’t been there… If the ambulance hadn’t arrived before he’d crashed a second time…

He’d promised himself, when he’d lost Lu Ten, that he’d never take for granted the spaces a beloved son filled inside his heart and his chest. Never again would he only notice how full he had been because there was suddenly emptiness there. But, despite his promises, he must have still forgotten, because sitting in an uncomfortable waiting room chair while Zuko’s life hung in the balance of the spirits’ and the doctors’ hands, all he could see was the approaching emptiness. What life would be like without Zuko. And he was too numb to even cry.

From Katara, he’d learned this: Zuko had made plans to meet with Azula, to try and convince her to leave Ozai to come to stay with them. He’d been hopeful enough to drop everything to see her, but wary enough that he’d brought Katara along with him as backup. It had started out almost hopeful; Azula had swung between scorn and doubt, between spite and near-broken uncertainty, and Zuko had seemed to really be getting through to her, for once. And then something had changed, and she’d gone on the offensive, dragging Zuko into a fight that had grown worse and worse until Zuko had firmly chosen to walk away. He had told her, out loud, that he was not going to be the person Ozai had tried to make him, that she could contact him if she needed anything or if she was ready to talk, and had begun to walk away. Azula hadn’t liked being left behind. Something in her seemed to snap, and she kept trying to force Zuko to stay. Katara had stepped in, realising it would be easier for her, an outside party, to respond to Azula than it would be for Zuko. Azula had been merciless with her, but Katara had stood her ground. And then Azula had, so quickly Katara still couldn’t understand how or why, brought out a Taser. Zuko had done what he always did – what Iroh had known he would do without thinking about it even as he’d reminded Zuko to take care of Katara: he’d stepped between his friend and harm.

Zuko had gone down, and hadn’t gotten up again, and Azula had zapped him once more in her rage. Katara had shoved Azula off and somehow disarmed her and then fallen to Zuko’s side and had found him unresponsive but panting. And then… then there had been nothing. She couldn’t tell Iroh exactly what had happened after that, but somehow she’d called Sokka on autopilot, and he and Suki had dropped everything to rush over, calling the ambulance as they came. Azula had… disappeared. Katara thought she remembered yelling at Azula to call somebody, and seeing only a face white with shock and horror, staring at her brother’s fallen form. But she couldn’t be sure what had really happened in those moments.

From the doctors, Iroh had learned this: much of Ozai’s complaining about how Zuko was never as fast or strong or energetic or full of endurance as Azula was down to a congenital heart defect. Nobody had picked it up (or so they said, but in Iroh’s head rang Ozai’s voice spitting that Zuko had been lucky to be born) and it had steadily worsened over time, never getting bad enough that it was more than an inconvenience. He would have had mild heart palpitations from time to time, the doctors said. Probably not painful if Zuko had never said anything, the doctors said (but Iroh knew better, he knew his nephew he knew and, oh, Zuko, what more suffering had been kept a secret?). They couldn’t know for sure without a diagnoses, but the worse symptoms would have been that he tired easily, got breathless and/or lightheaded occasionally and had a slightly more rapid heartbeat. Inconvenient, but not truly dangerous. Not until the Taser had been applied directly to his chest.

From the kind nurses he would have flirted with, slightly, if his world wasn’t on the brink of ending, he learned the following: they were doing all they could to fix the underlying damage as well as the damage the Taser had done. They’d tried doing a non-invasive route, first, but had had to resort to opening up his chest. They’d tell him once they heard any other news, they promised.

Katara, Sokka and Suki had been there for an undetermined bit of time at the beginning. Katara, despite being tear-swollen and devastated, hadn’t wanted to leave until she was sure Zuko would be okay, despite the nurses trying to gently but firmly tell her only family was allowed. He is family, she’d snarled at one point, and Iroh had almost had the energy to side with her against the nurse, who hadn’t understood just how true Katara’s words were. Eventually, it had been Sokka who had convinced his little sister to leave. Iroh hadn’t seen it at the time, but sitting in the aching, black eternity of waiting, he suddenly put together the clues he hadn’t recognised before: this hospital haunted that young man in a way that was still viscerally painful. Too much time with his friend who had only recently passed. Too many ghosts, and far too much pain, and his inability to stay, even for Zuko, had finally broken through his little sister’s stubborn fear-love enough for her to agree to leave for the time being. Iroh might have imagined it, but they could possibly have said they’d gather the whole group together in order to wait for news.

It was one of the most coherent things Iroh thought about in that ceaseless agony. The rest of his thoughts were far more incoherent, with only brief flashes of lucidity. No, don’t call his father, I’m his guardian. I will not let his father near him, was the longest sentence he said out loud. The rest were monosyllabic responses coaxed out of some automatic part of himself while his true nature hunkered down like a wounded animal, believing that if he was just quiet and still enough the pain wouldn’t find him a second time.

That wounded animal also had teeth, however, and it bared them in his mind. Why hadn’t a single doctor in the burn unit picked up the heart problems? Zuko had been in their care for months. Why hadn’t Ursa? Why hadn’t Iroh himself? Why hadn’t Zuko just said something? How often had he said I’m tired and meant that his body was unable, unable, unable to do what the world was demanding of it? Why had Zuko gone to meet Azula in the first place, with only Katara with him? Zuko should know by now what a poisonous woman Ozai had made his daughter into. A Taser. Her own brother. Could he arrest her for it? Could he make sure that Azula never again hurt another person? Could he punish her for what she’d done, the way Ozai had punished Zuko so many times?

Shame made him lucid. Shame and guilt and a bowed head of silent apology to his niece. But, even as he meant it, he also did not. There would be time to truly repent for the things he felt toward Azula in those long moments, but that time would come after. He simply… did not have the capacity to forgive and see reason and compassion for his as-abused niece while his nephew – his son, his Zuko – possibly lay dying. Those moments turned him back into the man he’d spent years growing away from after Lu Ten’s death, because, as much as he’d genuinely changed and fought for that change, he was only human. More than that; he was Ozai’s kin.

That shame in him made him think, as the tired doctor walked toward him, that the universe would punish him the same way twice. And all he could think, distorted and desperate, was, please don’t kill him for my transgressions. Nor for Ozai’s or even Azula’s. Please. You’ve done enough. He’s paid enough. He’s done enough reparations for himself that he doesn’t deserve this.

From the tired doctor, Iroh learned this: he was still allowed to keep this son.

Crying loudly in the middle of the hospital was not one of the things Iroh would feel shame about in the days to come.

***

Sweet talking and bribing all the nurses not only meant that Iroh could stay past visiting hours but that he could sneak Zuko’s friends in past the family only rule. Zuko would only be kept in the hospital for a week before being discharged to heal at home, but the kids couldn’t wait that long to see him, and Iroh understood their anxiety. They’d been told to limit it to two at a time, and Katara was almost always one of the two. Some of her tenacity being at Zuko’s side was born of guilt and processing the trauma she’d been through, Iroh knew, but most of it was that near-nameless understanding that had dropped between the two of them, sometime Iroh hadn’t been looking. Suki was second most frequent, Aang and Toph were tied and Sokka… Sokka barely came. Iroh was nearly as anxious to get Zuko home for Sokka’s sake as he was for his own and Zuko’s, because it was obvious that Sokka wanted to be there for Zuko, but just as obvious that the hospital killed him inside.

“It… smells the same,” he’d confessed to Iroh, looking haunted and on the verge of tears.

Zuko whispered something similar to Iroh when he was most inhibited; when calm and focus couldn’t stop the memories of the burn unit from encroaching. That morning, Iroh had found his nephew in one of those moods – anxious enough he was making the nurses frown at his heart rate and anxious enough to snap and snarl to try and get them to stop poking, stop demanding, stop keeping him there – and so he’d made a big show of going to get Zuko his favourite food. It hadn’t helped, much, but it had helped Zuko get his tongue under control a little bit more. Iroh returned with the food to hear murmurs from inside Zuko’s closed curtains, and so he paused and took a peek inside before entering.

Katara was on Zuko’s hospital bed, curled carefully on his left side so that she didn’t jostle or lean on Zuko’s still very broken sternum. One hand was in his hair, and Iroh realised that she was guarding his weaker side as Iroh himself had subtly tried to do countless times. Having somebody trusted there helped Zuko to relax more, and she knew this. Sokka was the other one in the room, and, although he was still in a chair, it was pushed so close to the bed his knees were up to his chest. He was holding Zuko’s hand, and looking utterly unperturbed by that fact.

The most surprising thing was that Zuko was the one speaking; murmuring reassurances and comforts to both of them in a voice still weak and breathy and more raspy than usual. It’s fine. I’m fine. Everything’s going to be fine. You’re both okay. Thank you, Katara. Sokka, buddy, hey… Hey…

Iroh backed away. It wasn’t for him to see. It tasted bittersweet in a sharp way he wasn’t sure he’d ever really experienced, before; Zuko reassuring a friend who had saved his life and a friend who hated hospitals because he’d lost love slowly, painfully, inevitably inside of one. Zuko, surrounded by so much love, this time around, when the first time he’d been so alone and small and quiet and heartbrokenly enraged in a similar bed. That young boy hadn’t even had the pieces to comfort himself, let alone others. And here Zuko was now, being comforted and giving out comfort. Without tripping over himself, without second-guessing, without embarrassment, because that love had become second-nature.

In that moment, Iroh truly began to repent for what he’d thought about his niece. Because he understood all too well why Zuko had gone to meet Azula, and why, even after all this, he’d never stop trying to coax his sister into a proper home.

***

The tense, anxious mood relaxed slightly when Toph began to cackle out of nowhere. “How much does this suck, eh?” she giggled at Zuko.

Zuko rolled his eyes, even though she wouldn’t be able to see it, pinned between Suki and Sokka, who were each gripping an elbow, and hemmed in by Iroh and Katara in the front and Aang at the back, ready to catch him if he fell.

“If I ever coddle you like this, push me down these stairs,” Zuko grumbled at her.

“It’s a deal,” Toph said, cheerfully, even as Suki gently – very gently – flicked Zuko with her free hand.

Katara put her hands on her hips. “Say that without panting or wheezing and when you don’t look white enough to pass out and it might have more weight,” she said, primly.

But they did all ease up some as they continued to slowly shepherd Zuko to Iroh’s apartment. There was no elevator, and the stairs were steep, and despite the fact that they might have been a little over-protective, it was hard going on Zuko’s broken chest and still-healing heart. And so they all stuck close, and caught him when he staggered a little, very careful of his broken bits, and finally managed to ease him down onto the sofa. Zuko’s eye widened a little as he looked up and caught them all looming over him, very close, all huddled together.

“Holy shit, you guys – ” he started, sounding exasperated.

“Okay, okay, yeah, back up and give the dude some space.”

Everybody shuffled maybe a step or two away. Suki kept her eyes carefully on Zuko’s face, noting the things Iroh himself was picking up. Suki met Iroh’s eyes and pursed her lips a little before venturing forward with, “Hey… if you want us to rather go and come back tomorrow…”

Zuko blinked at her. “I thought we were watching shitty movies,” he said, in confusion.

“Yeah, but… if you’d rather sleep,” Katara said, catching on.

Sokka let out a rude noise. “Then he can sleep. But, dude, Movie Night Rules apply to you, too, so if you’re the first to go you know you’ll wake up with a Sharpie ‘stash.”

“As long as Toph doesn’t draw it,” Zuko said, and Toph happily flipped him the bird.

Still, Suki met Iroh’s eyes one more time, seeking permission. Iroh smiled warmly at her and made a gently, slowly motion with his hands where Zuko couldn’t see. And so the group arranged themselves, snacks and extra pillows – most of them for Zuko – and set up Toph’s state-of-the-art laptop. Sokka sat to Zuko’s one side, Suki on the other with her leg casually over Zuko’s, both of them as close as they could be without hurting. Toph and Aang sprawled on a futon nearest the laptop, while Katara had a beanbag chair set up so that her back could press against Zuko’s legs while her legs could be used for Aang to lounge against.

Iroh persisted until he captured a great photo of the moment, because he wanted to remember what quiet, strong love looked like for many days to come.

“Who wants tea?” he called as the opening credits started, and he knew their grunts enough to know who had answered and what, exactly to get each of them.

He, just like Zuko, was also no longer alone.

[the-awful-falafel]

Rick and Morty - S4E6 "Never Ricking Morty" Podcast Summary/Breakdown

So y'all probably expected this based on how often I've been talking about these official companion podcasts. I recommend listening to them yourself either on the official Adult Swim YT channel or the official website, but I thought I'd go ahead and make bullet point breakdown of some key points for this particular podcast, because trivia and behind-the-scenes knowledge really appeal to me. And this episode is pretty divisive in the fanbase, so I think this podcast will assuage some fears even if you still personally dislike it in the end.

For some reason, the title of the podcast calls this S4E7 instead of episode 6. It wasn’t commented upon, so I assume either it was a typo or it was 7 in the production order and got swapped shortly before release.

The interviewed staff involved in this episode were Carlos Ortega (character design lead), Erica Hayes (director), James McDermott (art director), and Jeff Loveness (writer)

The idea of this episode was conceived in October/November 2018 as a "one-up" of anthologies and clip shows. They didn't want to do a straight anthology because many other TV shows had already done that, so they tried to go more experimental and bold and basically went balls-deep with the metanarrative as a result

It was a substitute for Interdimensional Cable (which they were going to do instead but it fell through for unknown reasons)

"We had to go so far up our own ass, because if we didn't go far enough, people would be mad that we didn't."

The writers intentionally mocked themselves as much as the fans, pretty much, and it was meant to be all in good fun

The artists really enjoy designing all the weird aliens in the show, as well as getting to reuse/repurpose them when applicable. Apparently next episode (Promortyus) is going to be reusing a lot of designs for something (but they obviously can't say due to spoilers)

Compared to other episodes, "Never Ricking Morty" went pretty smoothly once it got to the art stage. That doesn't mean it was easy, but there weren't a ton of revisions they had to do

There was a joking spoiler about Rick becoming pregnant later this season. At least I think it's joking.

While writing this episode, the writers came up with a huge whiteboard list of complaints about the show, misconceptions about the show, etc. to consult for the meta jokes. Loveness later clarified that it wasn't quite about attacking "complaining" though, and it wasn't meant to be mean-spirited

The Bechdel test skit came from them realizing they hadn't done much with Beth and Summer this season, which definitely can be considered a flaw. Therefore, as part of their self-mockery, the writers decided to force them crudely into the episode as a joke, while also making fun of men who write women characters poorly and reductively.

The Jesus Christ / Rick suddenly being Christian part was written in response to the writers asking themselves "what would kill Rick and Morty as a show?"

Jeff Loveness said this in the "Inside Never Ricking Morty" video as well, but he really loved the "old man is really ripped and ready to kick your ass" trope and is partially responsible for it becoming a running gag this episode along with "cum gutters". Apparently cum gutters return in season 5 (also said jokingly, so who knows)

One of the Q&A callers called multiple times, with different phone numbers, and kept asking about potential crossovers for some reason

"A lot of people are saying that the show is fucking with their fans. Is that accurate?" "I think some of those fans deserve to be fucked with a little bit."

They point out how some fans feel entitled to the idea they should be pleased by the show all the time, and the writers feel like the show should ideally surprise the viewers in a good way, but you still may not like every episode and that's alright

At the same time, the episode wasn't meant as an attack on the fans, it was more of a "we'll do this our way, be experimental, and push the envelope of what we can do" message they were sending. Jeff Loveness promises that there's "good stuff coming up" that he thinks the fans will be happy with, presumably in late Season 4 or even Season 5

"Just because we showed it this way and you'll probably never see it this way again, that doesn't mean we're dropping these storylines completely." There you go, everyone! The ongoing story threads are still happening at some point, and the message of the episode wasn't about dropping continuity or mocking people for caring about it. Although if you were hoping for resolutions similar to what was shown in this episode (Evil Morty w/ a giant army, Tammy VS Summer with lightsabers), those scenarios are almost certainly not going to happen canonically based on this statement. Let's hope that what they do come up with is both unexpected and awesome.

The episode is intended to be non-canonical, similar to past once-a-season clip show episodes like Interdimensional Cable

Story Lord was inspired by characters like Mysterio and Q, and the writers created him late in development as a type of villain they hadn't done before. Dan Harmon also put a lot of self-mockery into the character with how much he loved narrative structure and the story circle. The character artists even initially asked if Harmon could be the design for the character but that received an immediate "no", as it was perceived as being too on-the-nose.

Jeff Loveness was surprised the Rick/Birdperson musical made it to the final episode since it seemed like the sort of thing that would be cut or lost in development. He was also surprised the Jesus thing stayed in mostly untouched

The Story Train was intended to be an actually purchasable product by the time the episode aired-- the writers were emphatically excited about that being the culmination of the joke in the writers room-- and they were surprised that it didn't go through by the time the episode aired. They guess it's due to the coronavirus pandemic interrupting merchandising plans, but they're ultimately unsure because the decision isn't discussed with them

The artists do receive some limitations on how much gore they're allowed to depict, but they can show as much blood as they want, so for the most part they can still be creative with gruesome violence (like the Tickets Please guy ripping in half in this episode)

The artists are credited for elevating most of the fight scenes in the show, sometimes with only vague script direction which they use to be very creative

In response to a viewer calling in and asking the question about whether Pickle Rick will return: "I think there's a conversation to be had about: do we want these things to return or it better to do a one-off story?" So my take on this is that not literally everything will factor into the continuity-- they put thought into what ideas have more long-running potential and they build those up. Which is kind of obvious but the question was silly anyway. (They're still ambiguous about whether or not Pickle Rick will come back, by the way)

They aren't going to do an outright Star Wars parody in Rick and Morty because other shows have already done that, but they can still parody what Star Wars represents rather than doing a "branded commercial" for it. Apparently there is a lot of that specifically coming up this season (although indirect in the way they're describing). I assume this is referring to the upcoming "Star Mort Rickturn of the Jerri" episode, so I’m curious about how they’ll reference Star Wars in that one.

The COVID-19 reference this episode was thrown in last minute, presumably with just alternative dubbing and changing the lip sync animation. They say that sometimes episodes are still being worked on up until the moment they release on television. Referring to a previous episode as an example, the character of Shadowjacker from the dragon episode was thrown in last-minute

With the exception of James McDermott, most of the staff interviewed had no control or participation over the commercial product placement work, such as the Wendy's/Pringles commercials. They don't mind them for the most part and find them funny

The writers try to avoid being too topical because the scripts take so long to turn into animation that any references will become outdated by the time it releases. Therefore, they try to be "timely" in the sense that they're writing about things that are happening in the world, but in a more abstract/thematic sense. Jeff Loveness implies that the next episode Promortyus will have a lot of that

In response to another viewer Q&A: There is no Rick and Morty movie currently planned. They wouldn't mind one, but nothing is really in development at the moment

The staff say they're excited for the next batch of episodes and seem pretty proud of their work on this season

They don't plan on making a Rick and Morty musical episode at the moment, as they feel like other shows like South Park and the Simpson have done it excellently and don't feel like they're capable of doing it better. The Rick/Birdperson bit in this episode was the most we're going to get

The code inside the broken-off throttle lever was intended to just be a bar code decal (to show it's a toy) and doesn't actually mean anything. James McDermott jokingly said it's "where the bodies are buried"

The Rick army / Evil Morty scene was huge from an animation standpoint and they almost couldn't do it due to how ambitious the shot was. They were going for a "Lords of the Rings", faux series-finale vibe, where they "give the fans what they THINK they want". Justin Roiland insisted they do it

There are definitely more big animation setpieces planned for the future

And that’s it! I’ll probably do more of these for the future episode podcasts, if anyone is still interested.

[sparklyjojos]

THE SAIMON FAMILY CASE recaps [7/13]

In which we talk with the yakuza side of the family, learn about strange mountain hermits running around, and meet the Obligatory Kodansha Editor Character.

--

PART 5

Chinese legends speak of a man called Xu Fu. The ruler of Qin Dynasty ordered him to sail to the land to the east and find the elixir of immortality. After a long journey, Xu Fu arrived at a beautiful mountain as wondrous as Mount Sumeru that he called Fushizan, “the mountain of immortality”. One theory claims that it was the same place we know as Fuji-san.

Well, certainly it wasn’t Mt. Fuji he found… although the mountain indeed was located on the legendary Penglai, the Island of Immortals—Japan. On Mount Penglai lived its God, and looking from the top one could see the entire Country of Gods stretching down below...

--

When Ajiro and Kirigirisu are still up at 4 AM talking about the case, Soga Tensui makes yet another sudden entrance and shows them a written request:

The other Soga Tensui is with the rest of the family right now. Voices carry far, so please keep on talking as if I’m not here. If you want to discuss something with me, please write it down.

The three men talk in this way until dawn. Since the magician doesn’t say a word, Kirigirisu isn’t sure if they’re actually talking with Tensui or maybe with Gensui.

Ajiro has no qualms about telling Tensui he and his brother are among the most likely suspects, and the man doesn’t seem upset in the slightest.

We have already considered the possibility. Neither I nor the other Soga Tensui is the perpetrator. We may not have a solid alibi, and I realize that it’s a weak proof of innocence, but the idea to ask you for help came from both of us. We wouldn’t make the request, was one of us the culprit.

It appears Tensui has already made his own little investigation through Miku, who asked everyone in the family (with a promise not to blame them for the deaths) whether or not they swapped the curtains or took Yuuta to Tottori. Either no one from the family members present did that, or the culprit stays quiet. The investigation hit a dead end.

It seems the case is unsolvable as of now. I don’t think the investigation will be able to progress any further unless another incident happens on the 19th next month.

Soon after that Tensui leaves them, probably to hide before everyone else wakes up.

--

Once the family sits down to eat, Ajiro asks everyone to watch each other’s moves throughout the next month, just in case.

“You think one of us killed him?” booms the man looking like a mountain (Kirigirisu looks into his notes… right, Fujita Daisen. The non-yakuza son of the yakuza old man.) “If the culprit is really among us, then listen up! On the 19th next month, I’m gonna be patrolling Mount Daisen together with my buddies from the mountaineering club. If you’re gonna attack someone, better try me then! You can be sure I’m gonna turn the tables on you!”

“Calm down, no one’s going to attack you,” says the man more similar to a tall tree (notes, notes… ah, Fujita Hyousen. Daisen’s younger brother, the current yakuza boss. If Daisen seems like a furious animal in his demeanor, this guy’s more like a sharp blade).

“What, Hyousen, are you saying I’m not gonna be attacked next?”

“Even if I was the culprit, I wouldn’t want to target you.”

“You still dare say that? I’d say it’d be just like you to attack me!”

Everyone else looks on in awkward silence as the two brothers have a heated exchange.

“Whatever,” Hyousen says after they calm down a little. “If you do go into the mountains on 19th, better take care not to get into any accidents.”

“Oh, don’t you worry. I’m not gonna die until I meet the Mountain God.”

“Do you seriously still believe all those tales…”

“I’m gonna see the Country of Gods from the mountain!” Daisen yells nonsensically.

--

On December 19th, Fujita Daisen (44) is found dead while patrolling Mount Daisen with his climbing club friends. It seems he slipped on the stairs of a mountain shelter and hit his head, eventually dying from blood loss.

Mount Daisen—probably the inspiration for the man’s name—has been an object of worship and awe since ancient times. One legend speaks of a proud god from Korea who wanted to prove one of his mountains was in fact even grander, so he loaded it onto a boat and took to Japan to compare sizes. As soon as he arrived close to Mount Daisen and realized how big it truly was, he left his own mountain next to it and left in a huff—that’s where the neighboring mountain Koreizan came from.

Mount Daisen can be dangerous to climb in winter, so patrols of experienced climbers are sent out to ensure safety on the snow-covered trails. One such patrol of ten men under Fujita Daisen’s lead embarked on duty on December 19th. They all took a brief rest in a small concrete hut serving as a shelter. Eventually Daisen asked everyone to leave the shelter and follow him, now constantly staying in front of the group, heading straight for the peak without looking back at them even once—something very unusual for him.

When they arrived at the peak, strangely-behaving Daisen was the first to enter the big lodge located there, but once everyone else walked in, they couldn’t find Daisen inside. Instead, someone else had been waiting for them: a corpulent thirty-something man with curly hair bringing to mind a reggae artist.

“I’m… Saimon Takayoshi,” he mumbled out, giving off the vibe of a troubled introvert. “I’m from… Daisen’s family. He asked me to… from that shelter to here… to switch places with him. Daisen should join us... any time now...”

Before the rest could fully shake off the surprise, they heard two other climbers call for them from outside, yelling that they had found someone dead at the shelter below. Everyone rushed back and discovered the corpse was Daisen, lying in a pool of blood by the short stairs outside.

According to Takayoshi, Daisen had anticipated that someone would try to attack him that day. Takayoshi thought it was probably just baseless paranoia, but agreed to serve as bait during the climb, so that Daisen could walk behind them, spot the assassin and catch him. Daisen planned to leave the hut only when the others were at a certain distance so they wouldn’t suspect anything. It seems that he fell from the stairs when trying to follow them.

Since Daisen’s father Kyuuzou was once called Saimon, this incident means a fourth member of the Saimon family in a row has died on 19th day of a month.

--

As the previous boss of Fujita-gumi, Fujita Kyuuzou inherited a splendid residence in Tsuwano, on the opposite side of town than Kami-Saimon. He lives there along with those who served him the longest. His son Hyousen and the rest live in another house, closer to the town’s center.

On December 21st, the day of Daisen’s wake, Ajiro and Kirigirisu head to Kyuuzou’s residence and talk with Takayoshi.

As we may remember, Takayoshi is one of the three sons of Akiko, the second victim. (The other two brothers are Taishi and Akio, who play the two clowns in the show.) Though in his thirties, Takayoshi is single, apparently never having even dated before… and no wonder, because his entire demeanor screams that he doesn’t like any contact with other people. Was that why he left the family?

“I wasn’t as talented as my brothers…” Takayoshi mumbles out an explanation. “I’m from the main family, so I would perform in shows since I was small… but no matter how much I trained, I had stage fright and always made mistakes. Akio was always nice to me, but… Taishi would beat me… others turned a cold shoulder…”

Young Takayoshi would often leave his house to find shelter and understanding somewhere else: in Fujita-gumi led by Kyuuzou, who treated the boy on par with his own children. Takayoshi became a full-fledged member after graduating middle school and moved to the Fujita residence. He quickly realized that the rest of the main family still acts cold towards him, though for much different reasons now. Afraid that his presence could bring Fujita-gumi trouble, he left Tsuwano in high school.

After many misadventures he was found passed out in the mountains and brought back to the main family’s house, where he once again became the object of pestering. Daisen and Hyousen helped him get out of there, and Kyuuzou’s recommendation allowed him to stay for three years with a friendly yakuza group Nagasaki-kai (written 長先会 rather than like the city’s name). During that time, Takayoshi managed to learn enough magic to later be able to travel around Japan making a living through street performances. Maybe it wasn’t an easy life, but still better than staying with the Saimons. He kept in touch with the Fujitas and knew about the mysterious deaths going on, but only decided to return a few days ago, to help Daisen.

“He didn’t tell me much, but… he said that the real target isn’t the Saimon family, but Fujita-gumi. And now he’s dead… I made a horrible mistake again…!”

Takayoshi may have been a prime suspect so far, but the conversation makes Ajiro and Kirigirisu doubt he’s involved in the case. On the day of Tamako’s death he was far away in Hokkaido, attempting to get some money by talking to a journalist about his experiences on the road. The journalist was called Uyama Hideo and worked for Kodansha.

[Uyama Hideo is an actual Kodansha editor. The author’s note at the end dedicates the book to Uyama and reveals that it was in part written as thanks for everything he did for the shinhonkaku / new mystery genre.]

Takayoshi and Uyama eventually moved to the Kanto area, where he got a call from the Fujitas about his mother Akiko’s death. He was still in Kanto when a month later he learned about Yuuta’s death and Daisen’s plan. And so, he decided to help and headed to Mount Daisen.

“Magicians don’t reveal their methods, but I guess I’m not a true magician anyway…” Takayoshi mumbles. “And it’s for the investigation, so I’ll tell you what we did... When a magician performs instant transportation, it’s practically always achieved using a double… Either a twin sibling, another really similar person, or at least someone with the same body shape hiding their face… but you need a good excuse for the last one. If you see a magician getting shot out of a cannon towards a suspended cage, he will be wearing a helmet saying it’s for safety… but it’s actually to hide his face… the double is already hidden at the destination, they just need to use blind spots effectively to switch…”

Kirigirisu realizes that he has already seen an “instant transportation” like that before: the torn business card that seemed to have teleported inside a mandarin orange.

Takayoshi explains that while not being that similar to Daisen, the right clothing and time to prepare made him able to serve as his double. Having experience with illusion helped.

“And what do you personally think about Daisen’s death?” Ajiro asks. “Was it an accident?”

“Daisen was… definitely murdered.”

--

After listening to Takayoshi, the detectives move rooms to have a conversation with Hyousen, Daisen’s brother and the current boss of Fujita-gumi.

Hyousen states that it’s Fujita-gumi that’s being targeted. Two other groups may be at fault. One is Nagasaki-kai; they may have been friendly once, but after their boss got assassinated a bit before Hyousen took over Fujita-gumi, the relations between them worsened, and who knows, maybe they’re just waiting for the right moment to take over Tsuwano. The other enemy group is Karyuu-kai (華隆会), also hungry for their turf. Hyousen claims that Fujita-gumi are the ones keeping Tsuwano peaceful and happy, and if they were to fall, the other groups would probably bring in a giant gang war.

Fujita-gumi is mostly a tekiya group selling shady goods at festivals and getting protection money from Tsuwano’s stores. Another source of income for them is “industrial enterprise”—by which Hyousen means Soga Tensui Troupe’s Circus of Magic.

The group fell into some financial difficulties lately. The yakuza structure have changed a lot throughout the years; many small groups have merged together into big ones, creating an oligopoly. The thing about Fujita-gumi’s tekiya business is that they can’t exactly go sell things in another group’s territory, but many groups allowed for an exception when their yashi (peddlers) were tagging along with the Circus of Magic. This new yakuza oligopoly means in practice that Fujita-gumi can’t go many different places anymore, and neither can the Circus. Even the recent show in Yamaguchi was only possible thanks to a brief change in what yakuza group controlled the turf at the moment. Right now the Circus is pretty much limited to touring between towns by the old mines, where the Tsukumos and Tousens still have many friends.

The cost of the magic show is nothing to sneeze at, what with all these outsiders it employs, and combined with territorial limitations it made the Circus face tough times. Daisen was able to help them a little financially as the owner of a yakiniku restaurant chain in Tottori, and Hyousen set up a bunch of pachinko parlors with help of (then friendly) Nagasaki-kai. Then the new boss of Nagasaki-kai announced severing their ties and all the pachinko parlors were slowly being taken back. Their only remaining parlor in Yamaguchi is receiving harassment, and even Daisen’s yakiniku restaurants have been under attack recently.

Considering all this, it wouldn’t be weird if one of the enemy groups started attacking Fujita-gumi indirectly by assassinating members of their family. Hyousen is fully convinced that the four dead Saimons were all murdered.

Ajiro and Kirigirisu can see the point, but something doesn’t add up. If Daisen believed another yakuza group was at fault, why would he stand up at a family gathering and challenge the culprit among them to target him? Why would he get so heated with Hyousen?

Hyousen does realize their conversation made him look suspect, so he explains it. Daisen got heated because he thought there was an enemy group’s spy in the family. It’s true that Daisen acted like he fully expected Hyousen to target him, but that probably stemmed from when they were young and fought constantly. When Hyousen said that even if he was the culprit, he wouldn’t want to attack Daisen, he meant that Daisen as his brother likely wouldn’t be targeted by the other groups, as they would fear Fujita-gumi’s revenge… and revenge they will get, as soon as Hyousen figures out who exactly is at fault for his brother’s death.

This leaves one question: what was that strange thing Daisen said about the Mountain God and the Land of Gods?

“The mountain is Mount Daisen, and the Land of Gods is Izumo stretching to the west. As for the Mountain God… I think it’s nothing more than idle gossip, but I’ll tell you. Our father claims that decades ago he met the Mountain God while climbing Mount Daisen. I never believed him, but Daisen did. The truth is, who my father met was not a god, but a hermit living in the mountains. I and my son Hyousai were even named after him. You see, volcanic Mount Daisen was once called the hikami (火神) mountain, hikami meaning “the god of fire”. That hermit was also called Hikami (氷神), although with the first kanji meaning “ice” rather than “fire”. And since he was a sennin (仙人), a mountain hermit, and was gifted with appropriate genius, sai (才), his full name was Hikami Sensai (氷神仙才). Only my father has ever met that man.”

So that’s where the names Hyousen (氷仙) and Hyousai (氷才) came from.

--

The two detectives move rooms again to speak with Fujita Kyuuzou, the previous boss of Fujita-gumi, elderly father of Daisen and Hyousen.

Immediately after entering the room, they notice a black Noh mask portraying a smiling old man—kokushikijou—displayed as decoration. Kyuuzou invites them to sit down with him on the tatami. As soon as they do, Kyuuzou suddenly yells out in a frightening manner, causing Kirigirisu to fall on his back in fear. Ajiro doesn’t even flinch.

“It’s been forty years since someone was able to withstand my kiai,” Kyuuzou says with a smile. “You truly are Soujin’s grandson.”

“Do you know my grandfather?”

“Know him? We’re sworn brothers, we drank from the same cup of sake! As his grandson, you too are like my family.” Kyuuzou’s eyes are kind as he looks at Ajiro.

“I… did not know about that. My apologies. If I could contact him, I would have brought him along...”

“Don’t worry. No one could ever shackle that man down, not even his grandson, not even I, his sworn brother. He’s not a yakuza, a man that would feel bound by family events; even if I was the one to die, I’m sure he wouldn’t attend my funeral.”

Ajiro’s own grandfather shared sake with a yakuza boss… Kirigirisu is shocked, but starts to understand why exactly Soujin gives others that dangerous mafia boss impression.

The detectives ask more questions about the case, but learn nothing new. Kyuuzouu does remember meeting Hikami Sensai decades ago, but the memory is fuzzy. He doesn’t have any proof that another group is pulling the strings behind the scenes, but Daisen was definitely murdered and they probably have a serial murder case in progress.

--

--

Kirigirisu’s life began anew in 1973, when he was a suspect in a murder case and had lost all his memories due to hitting his head. He could only vaguely remember suddenly falling off a cliff into the sea and trying to swim to the shore. It seemed like he had been solving a case as a private detective under the name Kirigirisu Tarou—or at least the few clues they found said so.

Nihon Tantei Club was founded a year later, in 1974. Though it hasn’t seen many cases so far, certainly their popularity is rising—well, a little. In this uncertain era, many businesses are facing financial difficulties. Kirigirisu wants to help Nihon Tantei Club as he can, not only because of his loyalty to both Ajiros, but because one of their investigations led to his first meeting with Kano.

But no matter how much they try, 1977 swiftly becomes 1978 without the Saimon Family Case coming anywhere near to being solved.

--

On January 18th, Ajiro and Kirigirsu visit Tsuwano once more in anticipation of another death the next day. The town is still full of snow, and the family members still have a grim look on their faces.

Daisetsu, late Daisen’s son, asks them to go with him and Takayoshi to the local bar at 10 PM so they can talk. When they meet there, an unknown man shows up to drink with them.

“This is…” Takayoshi mutters, “the journalist I told you about… Uyama…”

Uyama Hideo is a short man with curious eyes. He welcomes them with enthusiasm that makes it obvious he’s already somewhat drunk. His business card gives his first name as Hideomi (日出臣), apparently an older nickname of his.

“Oh…” Uyama sighs strangely. “You know, I have this astrologer friend, a man of many talents who wants to become a mystery novelist lately. I believe his name will become famous. Oh… he incidentally has the same first name as you, Mr. Ajiro. Shimada Souji.”

[The narration confirms that he means the future author of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders.]

The group sits down for a drink. It’s a pretty small place, as expected from a quiet town. The friendly owner is apparently one of Daisen’s friends from the mountaineering club. Looking around, the detectives notice a few posters of celebrities: the actor Matsuda Yuusaku, the karate master Ooyama Masutatsu, the pro-wrestler Rikidouzan, baseball stars Harimoto Isao and Kaneda Masaichi… Kirigirisu truly has no idea why all these different people have their faces plastered around the bar. Maybe the owner is a fan.

Daisetsu says that it’s not actually him that wanted to talk to the detectives, but Uyama.

“Oh… that’s right,” Uyama agrees with that strange sigh of his. “When Mr. Kirigirisu called me last month, I learned from him that Kira was staying with Fujita-gumi…”

“Kira?”

“That’s how… he reads my name…” Takayoshi explains [貴良 can be read as both Takayoshi and Kira]. “Even Daisetsu picked it up from him…”

“Oh… I wanted to talk about how those four deaths look like a murder case to me.”

“Exactly!” Daisetsu shouts. “At least my father’s death was murder! There’s no way a true man of the mountains would just slip and fall! I asked Uyama to help us investigate.”

“Oh… I’m going to look into the case more. Maybe interview the Saimons.”  Uyama adds that Taishi didn’t want to let him bother anyone from his house, so they should split forces: Uyama will focus on Fujita-gumi, while Ajiro and Kirigirisu take care of the Saimons. “I’m not doing this for a scoop, but just to help Kira. Besides, I’m something of a mystery fan, so I’m interested in seeing a strange case myself…”

The group talks some more before parting ways. Takayoshi and Daisetsu (and very drunk Uyama carried on Daisetsu’s back) head to the Fujita residence, and the detectives return to Kami-Saimon for the night.

As midnight strikes and January 18th becomes 19th, the anticipation of things to come hangs heavily in the air.

--

[>>>NEXT PART>>>]

[eggoreviews]

E3 2019 Nintendo Direct - BREAKDOWN

Oh wow. That big ol direct sure was something. So now I’m here to break down everything that happened in unnecessary fashion and give my personal reaction to everything that happened with my tried and true Excitement Rater. Want to see my heavily scientific and not at all arbitrary process? Then click down to see the deets.

Before we kick off my (very very scientific) breakdown of this year’s packed direct, I thought I’d briefly go over how I rate things:

A random string of letters/numbers = Immeasurable excitement

YEEHAW BABEY = Big excitement

Heck Yeck = Vague excitement

Yeah! = Not really excited, but still could be good

Sure, why not? = I’m more confused than excited but sure

Oh = The excitement isn’t there

Oh no = Used on the rare occasion I really don’t like what I’ve seen

The Hero from the Dragon Quest series in Smash!

After a brief montage of some games that already came out I guess, the direct jumps straight into an ominous shot of World of Light baddie Dharkon, followed by a seemingly hopeless fight between Link and one very possessed Marth. Then the Luminary turns up gloriously on his horse. With all the leaks that had been flying around for so long, I think pretty much everyone had accepted the presence of Dragon Quest at this point and I was totally stoked when this happened! I love Dragon Quest! And my boi from 11 is here, along with a few other DQ veterans as alt swaps and a pretty awesome looking stage overlooking what seems to be the land of Erdrea and the World Tree. Now to wait until summer and hope the Smash team have some sick ass remixes for us when the time comes!

Excitement Rating: YEEHAW BABEY

Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age - Definitive Edition

In a move that makes it a lil obvious that DQ’s Smash addition was more than a little commercially minded (not that I really care I’m still big hyped), a trailer for the expanded edition of the series’ latest installment follows. Seeming as I’ve already played this, I doubt I’ll be picking it up again but I still heartily recommend the game to any JRPG fan. Admittedly, the fact you apparently get to explore worlds from past games is pretty exciting.

ER: Heck Yeck

Luigi’s Mansion 3

In a way I thought was surprising, Nintendo’s first proper focus of Luigi’s Mansion 3 actually took up more time than Animal Crossing, but I guess that’s because it’s further along in development. We now know that the game is set within a haunted hotel and had some new gameplay features shown off, including the various ways Luigi can succ a ghost. Most exciting I think for me was the various multiplayer aspects, such as the local co-op option to play as Gooigi and the seemingly challenge and minigame-based ‘Scarescraper’ which I think incorporates online co-op too. Overall, this is looking to be a creative and well thought out entry in the series and I’m here for it.

ER: Heck Yeck

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance - Tactics

A licensed tie-in game for a thirty year old film feels a little odd, but I suppose stranger things have happened. This looks to be a sort of top-down tactical thingy involving the various characters from The Dark Crystal and for some reason Netflix is involved, I don’t know, but I guess it could be interesting.

ER: Sure, why not?

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

The adorable remake of this classic Game Boy title seems to be coming along great and this direct’s extended trailer gave us a good look at what we’ll be exploring come September 20th. The overhaul Koholint Island has had is phenomenal, giving us designs for Link and various other characters that we’ve never seen before and that makes this remake look especially unique. Another very exciting aspect for me was the dungeon builder that looks like great fun! You collect different dungeon parts as you go and then you can build and explore your own! Am I a goblin child or does that sound like the best thing ever?

ER: YEEHAW BABEY!!

Trials of Mana / Collection of Mana

I’ll admit I’m not really familiar with the Mana series, but from what I was shown in this direct, it looks to be a fairly standard JRPG. That’s definitely not a bad thing, as most JRPGs are amazing, but nothing in this trailer really stood out and came into its own. That being said, the gameplay and graphics look pretty solid and I’m sure the Mana fans have been fairly starved for content for a while so that’s something to look forward to. On top of this remake/new game with the same title as an older game (I really don’t know), the Collection of Mana containing the series’ first three games is being released real soon on the eShop.

ER: Yeah!

The Witcher III: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition

Following a few scattered rumours, we finally have confirmation that a Witcher 3 port is in fact in the works, coming packed with all the game’s DLC. This basically legendary RPG is not one I personally had a great experience with, but I’m sure a lot of people are gonna be happy to play this in handheld. I’d keep expectations tempered however, with the likes of Assassin’s Creed 3 and Saints Row the Third proving that these ports don’t always function brilliantly on this platform.

ER: Yeah!

Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Yet another and probably our last Fire Emblem trailer was shown in this direct, giving us a better look at how the story might play out and what our villains are going to be. With most of the gameplay features explored in the previous February direct, it’s good to have a slightly better idea as to what’s actually going on in terms of story and, to me, the results seem pretty damn good. Definitely one to keep an eye on!

ER: Heck Yeck

Resident Evil

In a slightly unnecessarily convoluted advert, we were given a two minute reel of two teenagers playing the original RE in tabletop mode in an abandoned house (??), along with the kind of less than exciting announcement that we’re getting the two weakest entries in the series for Switch, RE 5 and 6. I probably wasn’t the only one who felt a little passive about this whole thing. That being said, definitely not complaining about 1 & 4 being ported over.

ER: Oh

No More Heroes III

After the very slightly disappointing Travis Strikes Again, I really wasn’t expecting them to drop a trailer for the series’ third mainline installment so soon after. What we’ve seen looks pretty much like classic Travis, with a smidge of gameplay seen that looks just a bit more like what we’re used to. Of course, with this being the first reveal, there’s still a lot to find out but this looks very promising.

ER: Heck Yeck

Contra: Rogue Corps / Contra: Anniversary Collection

I’m not gonna pretend to be familiar with the Contra series, but this doesn’t at all look like what I’ve seen in the past. Honestly, this seemingly tactical shooter didn’t elicit much excitement from me and neither did its rushed character drops or its oddly rough textures. I’m unsure of actual fan reactions to this, but in my mind this one kind of sits in the ‘guess this exists’ category. As well as this, we got a shadowdrop for the Contra Anniversary Collection, whereas Rogue Corps comes on September 24th.

ER: Oh

Daemon X Machina

In what seems to be almost a mainstay in Nintendo directs, we’ve got another vague trailer for this mech shooter that finally has a confirmed release date of September 13th. The gameplay looks harmless enough, with the mechs seeming to be a blast to pilot, but beyond that, I can’t really see a lot of substance that would draw me in beyond the cool robots. I’m sure it could be good, but not really one for me.

ER: Yeah!

Panzer Dragoon

I was completely unsure of what this one was, but it looks a bit like a cross between The Last Guardian and those bullet hell sections from Kingdom Hearts 2. They’ve certainly nailed the smooth graphics and the cool looking creatures, but this one is mostly a case of needing to know more.

ER: Yeah!

Pokemon Sword & Shield

This one’s obviously a title so monumental that it consistently needs its own directs, but there wasn’t any *real* news about it in this direct. We were given a brief explanation as to how the Pokeball Plus works in conjunction with the games (something to do with taking your Pokemon for a walk) and the fact that we’ll see more gameplay during Nintendo’s Treehouse streams. Still, excitement remains pretty high for these titles.

ER: Heck Yeck!

Astral Chain

This game, to put it bluntly, looks awesome. The newest Platinum Games IP seems to be set in Blade Runneresque futuristic city with an alien threat and some cool ass looking fighting police people. Our second proper look at this game has cleared up a few murky doubts as to what exactly is supposed to be happening, so now we’ve got a much better idea of what this game is going to be. The story seems pretty full and polished, the gameplay looks like brilliant fun and I’m definitely not mad at the cool monster designs. This is one I’m definitely watching.

ER: Heck Yeck!!!

Empire of Sin

I know very little about what this game is supposed to be, but it looks to be a 40s gangster XCOM, substituting alien fighting marines with gun toting mafia dudes. The trailer went for style over substance, giving us an edgy visual thing of some burning playing cards and broken bottles, but the little gameplay we saw looked decent enough and may just end up injecting more variety into this genre.

ER: Yeah!

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order

An obvious pick for any Marvel fan, this hack-and-slash is jam packed with various heroes and villains from the comic series’ rich history. Ghost Rider and Elektra were among those revealed to be playable, while the likes of Mysterio, Hela, the Destroyer, Doctor Octopus, Surtur and MODOK are seemingly part of growing cast of villains. Looks like a good bit of fun if nothing else, though the immediate presence of a season pass is a tiny red flag.

ER: Yeah!

Cadence of Hyrule

In an unexpected but greatly welcomed crossover between Nintendo’s RPG titan Zelda series and the indie developed Crypt of the Necrodancer, a new rhythm based dungeon crawler with some brand new Zelda remixes and the presence of Link and Zelda as playable characters. This game’s retro graphics look totally adorable and the addition of the Gohmaracas were a definite highlight.

ER: Heck Yeck!!!!!

Mario & Sonic at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games

Tell you what, this definitely looks like a Mario and Sonic Olympic Games game. There looks to be a decent amount of variety in terms of what sports are involved and with its online multiplayer, there’s no shortage of vaguely cartoon sportyness to be had with friends both real and virtual. I’d be lying if I said I was totally disinterested because it does look a bit fun, but we all know it won’t be anything groundbreaking.

ER: Yeah!

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

In a fairly drastic formula change, Nintendo have decided to strand us on a desert island rather than move us innocently to another village, but Tom Nook is still here and oh yes he’s coming to collect his bells. From this surprisingly brief trailer, most of Animal Crossing’s core gameplay seems to be intact, with the return of craftable items from Pocket Camp, and the sudden bombshell that the game has been pushed back to March next year. Never going to be a bad thing if the finished product is all the better for it, but I guess that just means more info is to come!

ER: Heck Yeck

Highlight Reel

In what looks like a list of honourable mentions, Nintendo gave us a laundry list of other titles coming to the system:

Spyro Reignited Trilogy is joining Crash on the Switch with his acclaimed remaster trilogy.

Hollow Knight: Silksong, the prequel to the original game, looks just as charmingly dark as its predecessor.

Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is showing up I guess, but I’ll come out and say I know nothing about it except that it looks cute.

Minecraft Dungeons looks better than it has any right to be and looks a bit like blocky Diablo I guess

The Elder Scrolls: Blades sure exists and I’m unsure of what it’s trying to be, but whatever quells off the need for Elder Scrolls 6 I guess.

My Friend Pedro, another strangely unique title from Devolver Digital, looks like it somehow incorporates banana peels into its combat system.

Doom Eternal looks like Doom always does, but a distinct lack of gameplay may put its dual release with the other consoles into question.

The Sinking City with its Lovecraftian inspiration looks totally brilliant and looks to be a unique experience for sure, so eyes firmly open for this one

Wolfenstein Youngblood definitely looks all Wolfenstein-y, but rumours of Dishonored-like sandbox levels has definitely piqued my interest.

Dead by Daylight still looks unfortunately a bit eh, with its slightly not great graphical quality from what we’ve seen in the trailers.

Alien Isolation was an extremely odd one, but I’m not gonna say no to more good horror content on the console.

Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles seems to be continually delayed, but they’ll probably get round to it eventually.

Dragon Quest Builders 2 looks adorable and I’m very into the idea of Dragon Quest Minecraft, so sign me up.

Stranger Things 3: The Game looks a little more SNES-like in terms of graphics than its 8 Bit mobile predecessor, which is definitely a decent step. An obvious pick for fellow fans of the show.

Just Dance 2020 is definitely a Just Dance game. Yep, sure is. I even checked. And it is.

Catan is a tabletop game of sorts, but I really couldn’t figure out what kind from that few seconds of vague footage.

New Super Lucky’s Tale looks like Bubsy, but actually good and worth real money

Dauntless looks like a bit of a Monster Hunter clone, but you know, doesn’t look terrible.

And lastly, Super Mario Maker 2 was tacked on the end there to remind us all that Nintendo is taking our money in 2 weeks.

Banjo-Kazooie become Smash Ultimate’s 3rd DLC Fighter

Just when we all petering out a little and the hype seemed all but dormant, they go and drop this on us out of nowhere. While I personally don’t have an attachment to the bear and bird, I’m fully aware of their significance and how much they mean to a lot of people out there. And that excitement ended up being contagious, so this fact coupled with a pitch perfect reveal trailer has got me hugely hyped to see these guys join the fight come autumn.

ER: YEEHAW BABEY

Sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

And now, dear reader, for the reveal that removed my scalp and cut out my eyeballs. At first, I was totally confused as to what this could be. And then I recognised the symbols, and then my perfect lil Hyrule eggs come on the screen and it’s all spooky and there’s dead Ganondorf and I don’t clock the fact that I’ve just screamed out loud. A direct sequel to my absolute favourite game of all time is happening and it’s real and I get to live another adventure in the best game world ever crafted all over again. I think it’s safe to say I have transcended the definition of hype when it comes to this one.

ER: AAA!!! AA!!! GFFGF!!! THIS!!! ZELDA!!!! HGGGG!!!!

So there’s my probably a little stupid breakdown of everything Nintendo bestowed upon us this E3. Guess I’ll jump in after the next direct to give you yet another heavily scientific analysis of its events. Or I’ll babble at you until I start punching the keyboard. Either way, happy trails my dudes. Don’t let the hype bugs bite.

[ganymedesclock]

So did you see the "ice popsicle" teaser? It's supposed to be foreshadowing one of the darker moments of Season 7. Do you have any theories on what it could mean? There are people who think it's foreshadowing that Pidge will betray the team, but I can't bring myself to believe that's true.

I saw the ice pop thing, and the version I saw was hypothesizing that Pidge would be captured, which I find far more likely than Pidge turning traitor.

Let’s just, for the moment, take every other reason Pidge wouldn’t- solidarity and teamwork and friendship and how much Pidge loves her friends and loves her family and would have every reason to resent anybody still fighting for Zarkon’s cause- clear the table of all that, and just poke at the practical.

What’s the empire got right now that Pidge wants bad enough to sell out her second family for it?

‘Cause just from where I’m sitting... not much.

Earth’s safety? Oh, pshyeah, like Sendak and Haggar are gonna actually keep their word and not get itchy fingers for the keys to Voltron. Pidge specifically has been around that song and dance especially when it comes to her family, and what she learned from that was that Zarkon is a dirty liar and it’s fair to assume his lovely wife and the person he practically raised as his own are gonna be about the same.

Heck, that kinda puts a damper on Pidge even seriously considering any olive branch Haggar or Sendak might wave at her- because the last time Pidge even considered taking them up on an offer, it was baited with probably the most valuable thing Pidge could ever imagine, and they burned her, bad. That makes me pretty sure the only time Pidge would really go for an offer Haggar would seem to make would be if she’s also seeking to fulfill an unspoken term of “and in return you will conveniently put your back in my taserin’ range”

Especially if the empire tries to pull a hostage situation with Earth... that’s not gonna be surprising or shocking to any of the team. They’ve been taking it as a given since season 1 that the empire is factually going to come for Earth. The word Allura uses in the very first episode is “inevitable”. Pidge hugged her dad goodbye and sent him home because everybody’s on the same page that the empire’s gonna attack Earth. And if they try to suggest hostage swaps... again, Pidge is the last person who’d look seriously at that bait because s5e2 is basically a case study in “Zarkon is a double-crossing cheat”.

And Sendak? Sendak’s literally named his faction the most blatantly white supremacist sounding bullshit ever- the “purity” he’s touting is no non-galra, no mixed race galra- and definitely no galra who ideologically disagree with Sendak’s game plan, either. There’s nowhere in this ideology that even the most fawning sycophant who’s not a “pure” galra could survive. And Pidge is the furthest thing from a fawning sycophant. She’s done a lot of damage to the empire and to Sendak personally- he’s not going to forget for a second how much of a threat she is. Even if he had any intention of genuinely negotiating, he’s not going to be satisfied until Pidge is muzzled and defanged in every conceivable way.

Pidge betraying the team isn’t a plot twist, it’s a stupid mistake. Her selling out Lotor in s5e2 was understandable because Zarkon was demanding someone she didn’t trust or care about and threatening the safety of someone who’s been half her driving motivation since the first episode in exchange- and that made her desperate enough to overlook how obviously likely it would be that Zarkon would double-cross them. If you’re not convinced she wouldn’t make the same mistake twice, I’d rewatch s5e2 and the way Pidge screams when she passes through the hologram of her father.

Pidge is going to do things that work or that at least seem reasonable from where she’s sitting. She’s gonna do something that she has a reason to believe or at least hope it’ll work out in her favor.

Right now? Empire’s got nothin’ on her.

Now, it is possible Pidge might cut an under-the-table deal with someone else, however.

The generals can nicely dodge a lot of the problems that Pidge would have with the main empire- namely the one where “I have no reason to believe you’re not immediately gonna double-cross me within point five seconds because you hate my entire existence and I’m your number one enemy.”

The whole of Team Sincline dances an interesting line of antiheroics- unlike Zarkon, Sendak, and Haggar, Sincline is able to prove reasonable to the heroes’ sensibilities, and depending on how the situation is, and where everybody stands? We’ve seen that long-term alliances between members can hold pretty strongly- at least, strong enough Allura, who’s nobody’s idiot, actually tried to start a relationship with Lotor.

And the Generals actually have some pretty good rep at this point- because when Lotor went hog wild attacking the paladins, the Generals disengaged. They backed off where he didn’t- and that’s something they could point to, if they had to thaw the heart of someone holding Lotor’s actions against them.

The generals could also have an easier ratio of offering Pidge something she couldn’t otherwise get, something really worthwhile- because they’re all about procuring unusual resources through sneaky channels.

Of course, the other side of this is it could be the Generals involved... but they might not be asking. Or offering.

It’s canon that magical entities, like the Black Lion, to save someone from death by taking their spirit into themselves. Presumably Black could do this for Shiro because he was right with them when he died and they had a mind-to-mind connection.

When Narti was killed, the camera lingered heavily on Kova, to the point that it returned to showing him next to Narti’s body at a point when every other character had abandoned the cruiser and was far away from it.

Kova also has a mind-to-mind connection with Narti and was right there with her when she died.

Narti is pretty clearly Pidge’s opposite number out of Team Sincline- the infiltrating, stealth-based “hacker”. This is something I’ve found suspicious for a while- since they obviously went out of their way to invoke her with Sincline’s final assembled form, and set her up parallel to a paladin, but her arc “seems” incomplete- which I don’t think is a testament to bad writing since no other dead character in the series, even ones who could have had interesting potential like Trigel, Gyrgan, and Blaytz feel unfinished in this way.

Especially because, again- Shiro’s return raises significant implications on Narti.

Double especially because the ships that shoot tethers at the paladins in the s7 trailer are a specific, recognizable party: both the opening that fires the grapple, and the tether itself, are obviously from the rotating-wing fighter ships used only by Lotor and the Generals.

Since the four surviving members of Team Sincline took the Sincline ships with them when they fled in s4e3, they left those ships behind on the cruiser. We haven’t seen them since- just like we haven’t seen the cruiser, implying it wasn’t retrieved.

This would imply that in order to get those fighters again, the generals would have had to return to the ship, finding Kova.

Kova, who has a decent chance of being a living phylactery for Narti, now that we know that’s possible.

So, okay, you might be saying, but what does this have to do with Pidge?

Well, I’ve already aired my theory the generals are going to be trying to steal the Lions and use them to enter the rift to retrieve Lotor. This would be emphasized if they’ve got Narti back- because Kova was specifically shown reacting with what looked like kitty concern to Zarkon declaring Lotor an enemy of the empire. If Narti’s in there, the implication is she’s worried about Lotor, even after he cut her down.

Pidge loves little cute animals. Her dog at home, the bunnies on the Green Lion’s planet, the fluffballs from the trash yard- she even adopted a few of them! She’d at least be likely to drop her guard around Kova.

And in s4e2, a repeated emphasis was placed that the Holts trust their minds, more than anything else- because as Matt smugly tells Pidge, you can hack a computer, but not a mind.

This always stuck out to me as a piece of dramatic irony... because before that episode, we’d seen Narti do just that.

Throk didn’t have the passwords for the Ulippa system base written down anywhere, or stored in a computer. He kept them in his mind. Narti used that. Because as Pidge’s counterpart, Narti is the specialist of Team Sincline when it comes to getting information- but she cracks brains the way Pidge cracks computers. And all she needs is a touch.

The paladins, of course... have no idea Narti can do that. During their allegiance, Lotor would have no reason to warn them about the powers of a woman who he personally knows died, and we don’t have much evidence he talked about the Generals at all.

It’s fair to assume if Narti escaped death by fleeing into Kova’s body, then she took her powers with her. So you have a cute, harmless looking cat, you have Pidge who is unlikely to look an unexpected friendly kitty in the mouth, and- just that easily you could have a paladin controlled. Which I think would be a much more effective shock because rather than “oh no a paladin’s being Tempted To The Dark Side” which they’re not really gonna get far on because these guys are basically tethered together to the waist by the Power of Friendship and there’s only so far you can toddle away from the group before you get bungee’d back, it’s “oh no our heroes are not as invincible as we’re comfortable believing they are and we have no idea how generous the responsible party is feeling.”

[murasaki-murasame]

I wasn’t entirely sure if I wanted to do entire posts about each episode of :re season 2, but episode 14 was really good and I have a lot of things to say about it, so here we are, lol.

It still might crash and burn later, but for now I’m still enjoying it, even though I’m clearly in the minority.

Anyway, the rest will be under a cut since it’ll be long and also spoil the entire series.

In a lot of ways, I ended up being pleasantly surprised by this episode, even though a lot of it technically went the way I expected. Like how they decided to end on the note of Arima slitting his throat. But a lot of the stuff in-between was interesting.

I was kinda surprised that they actually included Yomo’s entire backstory flashback about how Hikari and Arata got killed. I kinda figured they might cut it out, or at least heavily condense it, but they kept it pretty intact. I’m glad they did, though, since it gave this arc some much-needed thematic content.

On a more minor note, I appreciate that the anime doesn’t bother with some of the little things the manga did in order to set up chapter by chapter cliffhangers. In the Yomo-Arima fight in the manga, there was a whole cliffhanger where it looked like Yomo got killed, but that doesn’t really work at all in an anime when you don’t have to wait a week to see how the scene progresses, so thankfully they don’t even bother with stuff like that. On the one hand, it probably contributes to the overall feeling of the fights being less ‘intense’ than they were in the manga, but on the other hand, I very quickly got burned out by the constant, unnecessary cliffhangers in the manga. So this is much more pleasant in my opinion.

The other big change, from what I remember [beyond the fact that this episode just focused on continuing the Cochlea arc instead of swapping between it and the Rushima arc like the manga did], is the stuff with Hide. I feel like I’m gonna need to sit on it for a while to sort out all of my feelings about it, and in general I’m very curious to see how they handle his character later on once he actually returns to the main story, but my immediate reaction is that I think I actually prefer this to how the manga handled it.

As much as I love Hide as a character and basically everything surrounding his relationship with Kaneki, I never actually liked how Ishida handled the whole plot point of how Kaneki ate part of Hide’s face at the end of the first series. At the very least, it was executed very haphazardly, and a lot of it felt kinda clumsy and unplanned, with the flashbacks that Kaneki had to it at this point in the manga being some of the more glaring examples of it. It still to this day bugs me that, in the manga, we never got any clear answers for why Hide knew to find Kaneki there, why he knew to lead him to Arima, why he was willing to let Kaneki eat him, etc etc, and I feel like even once he came back into the story, there was no real impact to it, and the story spent absolutely zero time exploring the concept of how Kaneki’s feelings of guilt would change after knowing that Hide’s actually alive. And the specific way that the initial flashback to the sewers was handled always felt like a blatant retcon in general, and it just didn’t really cleanly fit with how the scene was initially portrayed in the first series.

So honestly I can totally live with the anime heavily changing how it handles this entire plot point. It’s always been a bit of a thorn in my side, so I’m glad they pretty much cut out the stuff that annoyed me the most, and kept the really nice stuff.

And also, I think that the whole detail of Kaneki being suicidal in this arc still makes total sense even without the whole lingering thread of him thinking that he murdered Hide. It’s pretty consistent with Kaneki’s personality in general to be suicidal and want to throw his life away to protect others, so I think it still works totally fine. And it also avoids the kinda awkward dissonance the manga had where the idea of Hide’s self-sacrifice got unironically glorified by the narrative and never criticized or explored at all, but it was used to say that Kaneki’s self-sacrificial attitude was bad and stupid, which still feels kinda hypocritical to me.

I wish the hallucination scene could have been a little longer, but it was still really nice and effective to see Kaneki finally open up about how severely he misses Hide. I still think that it’s a very effective scene even if you remove the context of him thinking that he killed Hide in the first series. Also, the :re character designer’s take on Hide is cute as hell and I can’t wait to see more of him later on.

We’ll see how it goes, but I’m really hoping they change things a bit later on so that he shows back up again a fair bit earlier than he did in the manga, since it felt like by the time he became relevant again, he was immediately overshadowed by everything else going on, and there was no time to do anything with him. So I hope they bring him back into the main cast a fair bit earlier, so they have more time to work with.

I’d actually kinda forgotten about it at first, but I guess they also skipped over Kaneki’s flashbacks to being kept prisoner in Cochlea, and how he lost his memories. To begin with, it’s entirely possible that they’ll just bring it up later, like during Arima’s whole dying monologue or something, but honestly I don’t think it’s a huge deal. It doesn’t tell the audience anything that couldn’t be easily pieced together. It also put an even more overtly off-putting slant on Kaneki and Arima’s relationship. It reminds me a little bit about how the manga outright spells out that Akira is intentionally acting as a mother figure to Kaneki because she was told to do so by her bosses to manipulate him more effectively, but I prefer how the anime cut it out and just let the audience think on their own terms about Kaneki and Akira’s relationship.

Other than that, I don’t think there’s too much to say about this episode itself. Although I did quite like the choice of translating that one line from Furuta as ‘teeth-hee!’. That was pretty good.

I know this post is mostly just about episode 14, but I’ve been thinking a lot over the last week about the writing choices made in episode 13, in terms of how it dives straight into the Cochlea/Rushima arc, and the more I think about it, the more I think I really like it. It’s not completely perfect, but still.

I think people forget that the overall start of the whole Cochlea/Rushima arc in the manga was where the pacing of :re in general started getting notably unbalanced and wonky, and a lot of things just kinda happen or get introduced with very little set-up. For example, the manga doesn’t exactly give much more of an explanation for how the CCG found out about the Aogiri base on Rushima. We just kinda find out soon after the time-skip that they’ve already started their raid on the island. And even the introduction to the second generation Qs was basically just ‘here they are, here’s their names and a few personality-establishing lines, OK now we’re going to do other stuff now and forget about them’. It basically ended up being a running joke that the Qs got more and more unimportant as more of them were introduced.

I’m at least assuming that some of the details like the way that Urie and Mutsuki in particular feel betrayed by Kaneki abandoning them will get touched upon once we properly go back to the Rushima arc, but that’s really most of the relevant stuff that episode 13 skipped over. It was also a bit sad to see them cut the dinner party scene with Urie and Matsuri, but honestly I’d prefer the anime not do anything with Matsuri at all as a character, if the alternative is them handling him as badly as the manga did in the long run.

Also, another important detail is that the manga also intentionally took us out of Kaneki’s head for a while after the time-skip. There was a good like eight or nine chapters or so where he was basically just being moody and we had no idea what was going on with him. So it’s not exactly a surprise that episode 13 also involved us not getting a look into his head.

I also really like that the anime is way more focused in how it’s just showing one arc at a time, whereas the manga was a lot more liberal with how it kept jumping between Cochlea and Rushima. And as someone who was reading the series as it came out by that point, trust me when I say that it was pretty agonizing. This is WAY smoother. To put it into perspective, Kaneki’s hair turns white at the end of :re chapter 75, but after that it doesn’t really return to his fight with Arima until around chapter 82, which ends with Arima slitting his throat. So the pacing here really does feel WAY more satisfying.

It’s also part of why the anime probably feels faster to people than it actually is, since it’s front-loading the Cochlea arc much more heavily than the manga did, and pushing back the Rushima arc to later.

And on that note, it looks like we’re actually going to have a Rushima arc episode next week, which is a little bit surprising, since I thought they would go through the entire Cochlea arc at this rate before going to the Rushima arc. But this is fine. We left off on a pretty satisfying cliffhanger with this episode, so I’m down with the anime shifting to an entirely Rushima arc-focused episode now.

I’m curious to see exactly how much of the arc they cover in the next episode. Considering that about half of volume 8 and all of volume 9 of the manga was focused on it, I think it’d take some substantial cuts for them to cover it all in one episode. The preview/synopsis for it seems to focus mostly on the Suzuya-Kurona fight, and the Tatara-Houji fight, but it also looks like it’ll also include some of the stuff with Takizawa, and at least some of the Mutsuki-Torso stuff. But even aside from that, there’s still stuff like the flashbacks to the time Amon and Takizawa spent with Aogiri, the raid on Kanou’s lab, and the whole scene where Marude assassinates Yoshitoki, so I don’t exactly think they’re going to get through all of that in one episode.

So after the next episode, I suppose it’s just a question of if they can wrap up the remaining threads of both arcs in one episode, or if they’ll need two. I guess we’ll see.

In the long term, I still have no idea exactly how the anime will be paced after this whole arc ends, but either way it looks like we’d effectively be left with seven or eight episodes to adapt the last seven volumes of the manga, so I’d expect there to be some substantial cuts and changes to make it work. Hopefully it’ll work well.

[imthepunchlord]

Adrien, the best to the least fit miraculouses

One of the fun of miraculous swaps is to always consider how someone works with a miraculous, if it can be pulled off well, what new ideas and realizations come, and now I have some new thoughts on Adrien, what works with him best and what actually doesn’t work with him. And miraculouses are given to those with matching traits, and another factor is kwamis, who appear to have matching traits with their holders; and this little thing was started because I wondered if Adrien really could pull off being LB. 

So, best to least fit miraculous wise for Adrien (the rest undercut if anyone’s ready for this character study and speculation).

Black Cat (best of the two)

The most important trait to BC is acting without regard for self. This miraculous comes with an intense power, one that allows a holder to be involved and deep in a fight and can turn the tide of the battle easily. It should go to someone selfless, who will rush in to help without thought or regard of their own loss.

This is why Adrien passed, without thought or hesitation, he went to Fu to help him and was surprised to see that he had lost his chance to go to school, but has no regret for it. Same goes for him saving LB from Timebreaker; he did it without thought or regret. He is someone who does care, who likes to be involved, and likes to be apart of a fight. He acts as needed to save the day, will be there as he’s needed. 

And he matches with Plagg through recklessness, both of them are sooner doers than thinkers. Another factor is that both can be dodgy and selective about their responsibilities. 

Through the ring, Adrien gains freedom, a power to break free of his cage. 

Butterfly (best of the five)

The biggest key trait for butterfly is pushing others to solve problems for themselves, helping others move forward. This is a trait we’ve seen in Adrien a few times, specifically with his friends (Marinette and Nino). Adrien is more than happy to reassure and help push his friends forward (Marinette to her uncle when she was unsure, and Nino with her crush on Marinette). With the butterfly, Adrien would gain connections, getting personal with people, making friends as he wanted (that was his biggest reason for wanting to go to school, making friends). 

Additional traits are flexibility, agility, expression, and keeping to the background. Adrien likes to move in battle, to be fast so he can hit hard; now that we know that butterfly can be a lot more combative (a sword in the cane), he’d be right at home with it, able to move and hit. He’s expressive, able to show his true colors as himself, but not overwhelmingly so that’d it’d feed into his ego. 

And finally background. Adrien is a character that likes to keep to the background, likes to be an observer and help when he is needed; he doesn’t like keeping focused and is more inclined to let someone else make a decision and act instead. Another solid butterfly trait, letting the Champion have their time to shine and helping as needed, even more so since butterfly is best not keeping focus in battle, despite being able to fight. Butterflies in nature like to keep out of the heat of a situation, which matches with who Adrien is. 

On Nooroo, a little tricky since we don’t know the kwami well yet, but there are two big details I can see that match with Adrien: an eagerness to work with others (Nooroo was happy explaining the powers to Gabriel, eager to inform him how butterfly worked) and being easily shut down and contained. When Gabriel takes control, Nooroo bows his head in acceptance, something I don’t see Tikki or Plagg doing if they were in his spot. This behavior we see in Adrien with his father, bowing his head and letting things be, going along with his orders. He even does so with Chloe and Lila, getting dragged around and going along with them. 

This looks like a flawed trait that both Adrien and Nooroo share, just as Marinette and Tikki can share a flawed trait of worrying over small stuff, or Adrien and Plagg both being pretty selective about their duties and reckless. 

Peacock and Fox

These two are also kind of tricky not knowing too much about them, especially peacock. We have an idea on fox’s possible power and how it can be in battle, but nothing on peacock. But with speculation, I find these two about in the same spot on the list. There are traits in Adrien that I can see matching with both and that it can go either way on who can work out best for him. Both would provide to his wants, peacock more expression, getting comfortable with who he is, fox an escape from his home, to be out of sight of pressuring views. 

He has the expression and charisma for peacock; while Adrien isn’t something that stands out in a crowd, actually prefers to be an observer, supporter, and follower most of the time, he is someone that likes to grab attention, does like to be flashy, though usually in a silly sense. Another factor is his fowardness, Adrien isn’t shy about showing his interest in someone, he’s eager to be blunt about his feelings, eager to show off and impress. Very peacocky. 

Duusu is another factor that points to Adrien’s peacock potential. She’s a kwami that was shown in concept with a wide range of expressions, calm, laughing, crying, explosive anger; this suggests she’s a pretty expressive and animated and emotional, the last is what resonates with Adrien most. Where Marinette works and excels with logic, Adrien works with his heart, his emotion, what he feels. Duusu looks like she’ll work based on what she feels, just like Adrien does. 

Biggest argument to peacock over fox is that Adrien likes to be flashy to a few, in particular with people he wants attention from (like LB or Marinette). Peacocks, as I see it, likely are those that draw in attention from all, not just a few. There’s also a matter that peacocks stand their ground and face their adversary, Adrien isn’t someone who stands his ground enough and most of time is pulled along with what others want. 

Now with fox, Adrien has the cunning and craft for it. He can lie easily and naturally in Copycat (though for the wrong reason), he was able to get away with Chloe’s bracelet and made it seem like he didn’t have it at all in Rogercop; and fox for sure will be able to match with how he moves in battle, being flexible, fast, and energetic. This miraculous (if power if illusions) can be flashy and a brilliant distractor; which is one of Adrien’s strengths in battle that Marinette will make use of. And on Trixx, who looks coy and calm, probably mischievious too if she lives up to her name, can match Adrien with that calmness. A few times where LB will stress about the situation, Adrien is more up to roll with it, knowing it will work out. I can see them both matching with a slight devil-may-care view. 

The biggest issue on Adrifox, which keeps fox being a better fit than peacock, is that this miraculous will likely rely on cunning and cleverness. Adrien is someone who relies more on doing than using his wit. Another factor is that he is flashy, a little too flashy for a fox that is a more stealth related holder meant to manipulate from the shadows. 

Writing this, between the two, peacock may be a better fit due to the expressiveness and how foward he can be with his feelings, fox likely relying more on wit and not having the focus on themselves (at least, speculating so far).

Bee

The biggest trait Adrien has to work with bee is that he’s a team player. He will follow orders, he will play his part to help reach the objective. He’s also self-sacrificing, willing to take one for the team to see the objective secured (like saving LB, though it was more her life he had in mind than saving the day). He likes to work with others, is eager and open to working with others (like Volpina who just appeared, fine with working with Chloe despite her more focused on herself). He’s very community oriented and that is a big bee trait, teamwork and working with others. Much like butterfly, bee would help him make connections, become friends with others, just like he wants. 

As for Pollen, we’ll have to see since we don’t have much on her aside from smiling softly, but potentially, on how they match, is both of them being as sweet as honey (if she is a true honey bee). Both will also share an eagerness to act and be involved with akuma attacks. 

But there’s a big issue for bee!Adrien, something he’d struggle with and something Pollen will likely get frustrated with: responsibility and efficiency. One big issue Adrien needs to work on is his responsibility as a hero, how seriously he takes it. One of the reasons why it seems like he has the short end of the stick is because he doesn’t take his task as seriously, he doesn’t care enough to pay attention to his surroundings (Dark Cupid he ignored the akuma, Princess Fragrance he didn’t check to see where she was, Collector almost got him because he wasn’t paying attention to where the book was). He’s also more inclined to goof off than get serious, he’ll be serious when he needs to be but otherwise isn’t. I can see Pollen scolding him quite a bit for this behavior. Bee can be doable, but him being goofy on the job goes against bees and their symbol of diligence and being productive. 

Turtle

Another hard one since we don’t know too much, but there’s speculation! And looking at Fu to get some ideas, and by looks of it, by the 5, turtle is the least fit for Adrien. 

Trutle is likely the most defensive of the 5, and may have a power resolving around healing when looking at turtle symbolism (the most prominent, longevity). Turtle is a miraculous that like requires patience, stillness, and planning. 

Those traits aren’t any of Adrien’s strengths. He is someone who lacks patience, not listening to Plagg in Origins and just ready to go, he’s not a still character, he likes to move and act, and between the two heroes, he’s not the planner. 

Wayzz is also a kwami I can’t see Adrien having too many traits shared with him, at least the little we’ve seen. While Wayzz is quick to act and can be silly, he is cautious and wants to be sure of their course of action when the situation is grave. Adrien throws caution into the wind and just wants to go, just wants to do. I see that rubbing Wayzz wrong and him constantly reminding Adrien they need to be sure. 

Adrien can match turtle with a want to protect; but if this miraculous does resolve around patience, being cautious, and planning ahead and mainly being a protector instead of a mobile fighter; of the five this would be a great challenge for Adrien. 

Ladybug

The least fit mriaculous for Adrien is the ladybug, biggest reasons can be seen on his issues with bee and turtle, and slightly fox. 

What makes a solid Ladybug is being able to plan and act. Ladybugs are tacticians, they are aware of their surroundings and what they’re facing, they figure out what to do and act accordingly, making use of all that’s around them, from the place, the items, to the people. They aren’t reckless and just rush in. They take a step back and conider their situation. Leadership also looks like a strong trait in LB, able to command and direct others to do what they need to so they can succeed. 

With who Adrien is, he doesn’t have any of those traits. He is someone of action, he doesn’t plan, he doesn’t pay attention enough to his surroundings, he is reckless, lacks patience, isn’t a planner usually just leaves that to his partner, and it is usually his downfall in battle. If Adrien was Ladybug, on his own, he would not be lasting long, he would for sure need a parter or two to help direct and reel him in, secure that he makes it and does what he needs to do.

He’s also not a good leader. He can rally people to his side (Refleckta), but otherwise, doesn’t have the resolve or calculation for it. He caves too much to others, and again, there’s the matter of planning and being aware of what he’s facing and knowing how to make use of other’s skills to help succeed, which a good leader should be aware of. And as we see in Animan, he didn’t do a solid job directing Nino on how to approach Marinette. 

And Tikki, I see her having a lot of frustrations with Adrien and him with her. Tikki is a kwami that stresses caution, that wants to do logical approaches, and can be very direct with what she thinks is is right. For Adrien, that can be restrictive, and wear him out. He isn’t someone who likes to plan, he just likes to do. Also, as we see in Copycat, he is more than fine to brush off and ignore his kwami when they say something he doesn’t like, and unlike Plagg, Tikki would not stand to be ignored and such forcefulness can shut him down. Actually in general, he isn’t good at listing to his kwami, especially since he didn’t fully listen to Plagg in Origins, just went ahead and trasnformed, ready to just move. His lack of caution would be another big issue for them, in how he is in a fight and his view on keeping identities secret. 

They can match in a care for others, but as of now, I see a lot of issues that would come up between them, a good few arguments that can happen. I think their relationship would be lot happier as friends than kwami and holder. 

I find ladybug would be the biggest struggle for Adrien out of all the seven, he lacks the caution and planning for it, which are big key traits to LB; and this being the biggest struggle is what makes ladybug the least fit for Adrien. And for miraculouses that are meant to be given to those who match most, to flesh out their strengths and who they are so they can be an immediate help with the least amount of struggle, ladybug is the least fit for Adrien, it’s the opposite of who he is and how he works. And with this situation with a good LB needed who won’t struggle with the power so they can save the day quickly, Adrien is not the one to turn to, he is a far better black cat than ladybug, or butterfly as a solid second miraculous for him. Those two will play off his strengths very well and flesh out who he is. 

[phantom-le6]

Film Review - Chaos

Ok folks, time for another film review before I start tackling my TV series reviewing backlog (which may be delayed depending on when my latest Amazon order arrives).  Sticking with the films I got for Christmas 2020 but shifting away from superhero animation to a live-action film in the action genre, this review is going to take a look at yet another action film headlined by British action star Jason Statham.  Ladies and gentlemen (and anyone outside of those two options), please enjoy my review of Chaos…

Plot (adapted from Wikipedia):

Seattle PD Detective Quentin Conners and his partner Jason York are implicated in the death of a hostage taken by a carjacker named John Curtis. After a fellow police officer, Callo, testifies against them, Conners is suspended, and York is fired. In reality, York tried to shoot John, but accidentally killed the hostage. John in turn fired back, but Conners killed John in self-defence.

Sometime later, Lorenz and four other criminals take hostages in a bank. Lorenz has only one demand, to negotiate with Conners. Conners is reinstated but put under the surveillance of a new partner, the recently-graduated Shane Dekker. Conners is given control of the negotiations, and after a bank teller is shot, he orders a SWAT unit to cut the building's power and go in. During an explosion, the criminals flee during the ensuing panic and chaos. 

Dekker and Conners learn more about each other at a local diner, slowly building a friendship, but Dekker disapproves of Conners' "cowboy cop" methods. Dekker explains that during negotiations, Lorenz was making many cryptic references to chaos theory. As they leave to examine new evidence, Conners puts a ten dollar bill on the table for his share of the bill. Dekker swaps the ten for a twenty of his own. A TV camera caught a shot of one of the criminals, who is arrested together with his girlfriend at her home, where banknotes are found with a scent used to mark evidence collected by the police. The banknote serial numbers did not come from that day's robbery, but had been placed in police storage and signed out two weeks earlier by Callo. He is found shot dead in his home, together with incriminating evidence linking him to the heist. 

When reviewing video footage from the bank, Dekker notices one corner of the bank is deliberately shielded from view. In that corner, they find the bank regional manager's computer. Fingerprints on the keyboard reveal the identity of a hacker that Conners himself had arrested, but whose conviction was overturned after the shooting on the bridge. Conners and Dekker want to question the hacker, but he is shot dead by Lorenz, and a gunfight ensues, during which Lorenz manages to escape. Dekker questions the hospitalized bank robber identified in the news footage and finally breaks him when he casually explains the impact of a massive overdose of morphine while slowly injecting something into the suspect's drip. An amazed Conners watches and later calls him a hypocrite. Dekker responds by explaining he only injected more saline solution.

The suspect reveals Lorenz is Scott Curtis, the brother of John shot earlier, and Conners leads a stakeout at an address where all the gang are to meet that night; Scott's house. Forced to go before Scott arrives, a shootout results in both suspects' deaths, and a bomb blows up the building while Conners is inside. Dekker is devastated but realizes that Callo's signature requesting material from the evidence storage was forged by the evidence custody officer, who reveals that Scott is actually York. In a flashback, York stands on the bridge and fires the first shot, killing the hostage in the opening sequence. Tracking Lorenz/York's mobile phone, Dekker surprises York at a diner, and York takes a woman hostage in a reversal of the standoff on the bridge. Dekker chases and eventually kills York. 

When Dekker pays for his coffee at the diner, he discovers the banknote Conners used to pay for lunch with is also scented, which means Conners was also involved in taking the money from police evidence. Dekker finds a copy of James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science in Conners' house, showing he had faked an earlier ignorance of the mathematics. On a hunch, Dekker looks for airplane tickets booked in Gleick's name and runs to the airport. 

During a mobile call between the now disguised Conners and the searching Dekker at the busy airport, flashbacks reveal how the seemingly unconnected events in the film form a pattern, just as predicted in chaos theory. Conners reveals that he placed his badge on the corpse of one of York's henchmen before the explosion. Conners and York recruited a group of ex-convicts from their past. Callo was framed for being a dirty cop. Conners ends the call, walks casually to a private jet, and takes off while sipping champagne. 

Review:

One thing I’ve learned about action films like Chaos is that sometimes you can be attracted into buying it for the sake of trying out a new action film based on the cast, and then find you’ve acquired something less-than-brilliant (In the Name of the King being a key example). As such, I didn’t put this film on my Amazon wishlist until I’d had the chance to watch it on TV, and a few months back the folks at Film4 kindly obliged by having it on their schedule at a time when I wanted to stay up and watch something.  Fast-forward to now, and the film is now in my Blu-Ray collection. 

So how does Chaos stand out from other films in the same genre headlined by Jason Statham?  As long-time followers of my reviews will know, I’ve reviewed a fair bit of this actor’s work, including his early days in films like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and its remake Snatch, as well as some of his more franchise-based work like The Transporter and The Mechanic.  The first thing that differentiates Chaos before you even watch the film is the cast that joins Statham as the film’s headliners, namely Wesley Snipes and Ryan Phillipe.  Snipes would certainly have drawn a lot of people to this film when it was originally released back in the ‘00s due to his then-recent headlining of the Blade trilogy, and Philippe was a well-known actor of teenage characters around this time, with films like Cruel Intentions being somewhat par for the course where he was concerned. 

To this trio of well-known actors, Chaos then adds a lot of things that go beyond the basic, obvious kind of action-film tropes. First, it ends up set in Seattle rather than the more stereotypical US locations like the cities of California or the US eastern seaboard, and then the nature of the film itself changes as the story progresses.  What starts out as an apparent hostage stand-off style of action film ends up turning into a bit of a mystery thriller, and for the intellectuals watching, the film ultimately reveals itself as a kind of case study in chaos theory, from which the film’s title is actually derived. 

It’s this combination of intrigue, genre-shifts within the film and the three big-name stars being supported by some fairly decent but lesser-known actors that helps Chaos to stand apart from the other Statham-headlined action films that have been produced over the years. It’s also interesting to see all the instances where the concept of loyalty between police officers arises within the film, now we’re watching it in the midst of the Black Lives Matter activism.  The idea that loyalty to one’s fellow officers surpasses any adherence to the law, and that officer need to ‘bend’ rules when the system ‘fails’ as a means of ‘compensating’ for those failures is part of a culture that has undoubtedly existed for decades and almost certainly enabled the kind of irresponsible use of force that BLM has rallied against.

From this perspective, Chaos can also potentially be seen as a kind of warning sign, showcasing a very dangerous attitude in policing that no law enforcement institution in any nation should allow.  Loyalty and dedication to doing the right thing is admirable, and I can certainly agree that in some extreme instances, laws have to be bent or even broken to do the right thing.  However, when someone is employed with upholding the law, when it is their duty to always do the right thing from a legal perspective regardless of whether the law is right or wrong, that person cannot also take on the role of vigilante.  If the concept of police as enforcers of the law is to retain its value, no officer should take it upon themselves to disregard the laws they are supposed to enforce and uphold.  It’s when we lose sight of this that we get heavy-handed officers acting against the public interest, including discrimination-based uses of excessive force. 

Factoring in this kind of inadvertent relevance to a major societal issue that has existed for a long time before its recent highlighting, Chaos is a mostly great film.  Frankly, though, Statham’s efforts to put a slight Americanisation on his accent and the relative lack of a build-up in action throughout the film (the first act felt more climatic than the third act) make the film fall short of a maximum score.  My end score for this one is a respectable 8 out of 10.

[brokehorrorfan]

Blu-ray Review: The Mummy

Beyond being groundbreaking and highly influential, the classic Universal monster movies inadvertently created the first shared cinematic universe. Long before the Avengers were assembled or Batman squared off against Superman, the likes of Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, and the Wolf Man shared the silver screen. It's only logical for Universal to revisit these iconic characters now that cinematic universes are in vogue.

The Mummy launches the Dark Universe, as it has been dubbed - and it quickly dashes any excitement in the prospect of seeing the classic monsters on the big screen again. Inexplicably, it largely abandons the horror roots in favor of an action movie that happens to involve monsters. It's the first in a proposed series of massive-budgeted, PG-13-rated, summer tentpoles with A-list casts. While none of these are bad qualities in themselves, The Mummy proves that they do not make a good reimagining of a horror classic.

Army Sergeant Nick Morton (Tom Cruise, Mission: Impossible) and his right-hand man, Corporal Chris Vail (Jake Johnson, Jurassic World), refer to themselves "liberators of precious antiquities," which is a fancy way of saying thieving treasure hunters. When an Egyptian tomb is curiously uncovered in England, they're the first to explore it, along with archaeologist Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis, Annabelle). The sarcophagus within, submerged in mercury, houses the mummy of Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella, Kingsman: The Secret Service).

As Dr. Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe, Gladiator) explains in a hacky prologue voiceover, the ancient princess was the heir to the throne of Egypt until the pharaoh had a son. Embracing evil for revenge, she was reborn a monster before being mummified alive for her sins. When Nick unwittingly unleashes her in the modern world, Ahmanet picks right back up where she left off: attempting to bring a demon into the world through a mortal man. Naturally, Nick, Chris, and Jenny get caught up in the madness.

While there's no conceivable need to turn The Mummy into an action movie, I'd be forgiving it were a good one. There are a couple of solid action sequences, but even a thrilling plane crash shot in actual Zero G cannot pull the film above mediocrity. A cool underwater sequence in which Cruise's character is attacked by ravenous, zombie-like creatures set out to the Mummy's bidding is too little, too late. Watching Cruise and Crowe share the screen and duke it out is fun, but Crowe is forced to spout cheesy dialogue between blows.

Despite minimizing the horror elements, The Mummy draws unexpected comparisons to two beloved '80s genre films. Most apparent is American Werewolf in London: a deceased friend intermittently appears to the main character, more decomposed each time, to dump exposition and make the occasional funny quip. Even more unexpected, The Mummy's modus operandi is seemingly lifted from Lifeforce: she literally sucks the life out of hapless victims in order to become whole again. I hesitate to classify either as a mere homage, as they're more like lifted plot points.

This is only director Alex Kurtzman's second film, following People Like Us, but he's written such blockbusters as Star Trek and Transformers. Despite his relative inexperience behind the camera, he teams with cinematographer Ben Seresin (World War Z, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen) to create a fine looking picture. The sun-soaked ancient Egypt flashbacks are particularly gorgeous, as if Terrence Malick made Lawrence of Arabia. The special effects are largely computer generated, but the fine artists of Industrial Light & Magic (Star Wars, Jurassic Park) pull off impressive work per usual.

The script - written by David Koepp (Mission: Impossible, Jurassic Park), Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects, Edge of Tomorrow), and Dylan Kussman (better known as an actor from Dead Poets Society); with Kurtzman and two other screenwriters receiving story credits - is sloppy, to say the least. No doubt the result of too many cooks, the main struggle lies in the film's uneven tone. No one seems to know whether they're making a serious, big, action spectacle (like your average Tom Cruise movie), incorporating its horror roots (a la World War Z), or infusing comedy (akin to the 1999 Brendan Fraser version of The Mummy). Spreading itself too thin between the three, none of the aspects play successfully.

Cruise's character feels like it was written for Chris Pratt. He desperately tries to be the likable, unexpected hero, but he can't shed the typical Cruise action star persona. He's perfectly good at that, but the incongruous goofy bits don't play to his strengths. Crowe chews the scenery as both Dr. Jekyll and his evil alter ego, Mr. Hyde. His character(s) is obviously intended to serve as the bridge between the monsters, similar to Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury in the Marvel cinematic universe.

Boutella isn't given enough to do, but she does well with the material and looks cool in the process. The welcomed gender swap is inconsequential. Wallis is introduced as a strong female character but is ultimately reduced to the token love interest. Johnson is great as the comedic relief - further proving Cruise had no business cracking jokes - though he's forced to play it more broad than usual. Courtney B. Vance (The People v. O.J. Simpson) is wasted as a military superior. Javier Botet (The Conjuring 2) provides creepy motion capture for a ghoulish character.

Special features on big studio movies are almost always fluff pieces full of precisely-edited sound bites, but The Mummy's home video release includes a 21-minute conversation between Kurtzman and Cruise. It's quite interesting to hear them discuss the film from the ground up so candidly. The same can be said about the audio commentary from Kurtzman, Boutella, Wallis, and Johnson. They excitedly discuss their experiences, including Kurtzman pointing out practical vs. digital effects - many of which are surprising. He also reveals that numerous scenes were written at the last minute, improvised on set, reshot, or completely reworked in editing.

The numerous shorter featurettes are more in line with what you'd expect: "Rooted in Reality" finds the cast and crew discussing how they approached a realistic, modern take on a traditional monster; "Life in Zero-G" takes viewers through the fascinating process behind the place crash scene - which consisted of 64 cycles, each with around 22 seconds in Zero G; "Meet Ahmanet" centers on Boutella; "Cruise in Action" explores Cruise and his stunt work; "Nick Morton: In Search of a Soul" is another Cruise-centric piece about his character; "Becoming Jekyll and Hyde" highlights Crowe; and "Choreographed Chaos" details a large action set piece. Special features are rounded out by four deleted scenes and an animated graphic novel, which is essentially a four-minute animated version of the prologue.

There's a line in The Mummy in which Crowe's character refers to Cruise's as "ultimately devoid of soul," which doubles as an apt metaphor for the film. The titular character lacks the sympathy that made the old Universal monsters so effective. There are few things I would enjoy more than seeing the classic monsters back on the big screen, but The Mummy's approach is clearly not the right one. Critics and audiences both seem to agree, so hopefully it's not too late to retool the Dark Universe into something that lives up to even a fraction of its enormous potential.

The Mummy will be released on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and DVD on September 12 via Universal.

[ljones41]

"FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM" (2016) Review

"FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM" (2016) Review After the 2011 movie "HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS, PART II" hit the movie theaters, I had assumed that would be the last film set in J.K. Rowling's "wizarding world of Harry Potter". Her 2007 novel, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" was her last one in a series of seven books. But . . . lo and behold, Warner Brothers Studios, who had released the films based upon her novel, found a way to continue the series. The end result was the release of the recent film, "FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM". "FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM" is based upon a 2001 book written by Rowling. Somewhat. First of all, the book is not a novel, but a "scholarly" book about the magical creatures found in the Harry Potter universe. Second of all, the book was published under the fictional pen name of one Newt Scamander. What Rowlings, who served as the film's screenwriter, did was used the Newt Scamander pen name and transformed him into the movie's main character. In the film, British wizard and "magizoologist" Newt Scamander arrives by boat to New York City in the fall of 1926. Newt has arrived in the United States to release a magical creature called the Thunderbird in the Arizona desert. While listening to a sidewalk speech given by a non-magical (No-Maj) fanatic named Mary Lou Barebone, one of his charges - a creature called Nifler escapes from his magically expanded suitcase, which contains other magical creatures. Even worse, he meets No-Maj cannery worker and aspiring baker Jacob Kowalski, and they accidentally swap suitcases. As Newt struggles to regain possession of his suitcase, Nifler and other magical creatures that have managed to escape; he runs afoul of the Magical Congress of the United States of America (MACUSA), thanks to a demoted auror named Porpentina "Tina" Goldstein, eager to regain her position. Between his search for his missing magical creatures, regaining his suitcase from Jacob Kowalski and the MACUSA; Newt has to deal with a creature called the Obscurus, which uses children as host bodies and is causing destruction around Manhattan and not attract the attention of Ms. Barebone and her abused adopted children - including the adolescent Credence Barebone. When I first saw "FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM", I was surprised to discover that J.K. Rowling was the movie's sole screenwriter. I found this especially surprising, considering that one of the movie's producers happened to be Steve Kloves, who had served as screenwriter for seven of the eight "HARRY POTTER" movies. And I must say that I thought she did a pretty damn good job. At first, I thought Rowling had created a disjointed tale. The movie seemed to possess at least three separate plot lines: *Newt's search for the missing creatures in his possession *The Obscurus' destruction *Mary Lou Barebone's anti-magic campaign But Tina Goldstein finally exposed Newt's magical suitcase to MACUSA, Newt's plot line became connected to the story arc regarding the Obscurus. And both story arcs became connected to Mrs. Barebone's anti-magic campaign when audiences learned that MACUSA Director of Magical Security Percival Graves had recruited Credence to help him locate the child who might be the Obscurus. Seeing how these individual story arcs formed to become part of one main narrative reminded me of the 2008 World War II Spike Lee drama, "MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA". Speaking of World War II, I was happily surprised to learn that a major plot twist near the end of "FANTASTIC BEASTS" promises to lead to the featured a major plot twist that will serve as part of this new series' main narrative about the upcoming Global wizarding war that will play out during the rise of fascism and the war. How clever of Rowling. What else did I like about the movie? Frankly, the production designs. I was very impressed by Stuart Craig and James Hambidge's re-creation of 1926 Manhattan. For me, among their best work proved to be their creation of a 1920s magical speakeasy operated by a goblin gangster named Gnarlack. Nor am I surprised that the pair managed to earn an Oscar nomination for their work. I was also impressed by Colleen Atwood's costume designs for the film. One, she did an excellent job in re-creating the fashion of the mid-1920s. More importantly, Atwood put an interesting fantasy twist for the costumes worn by the magical characters. For some reason, the clothes worn by the American wizarding community of the 1920s seemed to be more tasteful and elegant than those worn by the British wizarding community of the late 20th/early 21st century. And guess what? Ms. Atwood also earned an Oscar nomination for her work. The only problem I had with the movie's technical effects was Philippe Rousselot's photography. Mind you, I had no problems with the film's epic sweep. But I did not particularly care for the photography's brown tint - a color that I personally found unnecessary and rather disappointing. I realize that the story is set during the middle of autumn. But was it really necessary to photograph the movie with an unflattering brown tint to indicate the time of the year? I certainly had no problems with the movie's performances. Eddie Redmayne did a marvelous job in portraying the introverted wizard Newt Scamander, who seemed to have an easier job of interacting with the creatures in his care instead of his fellow humans. I also noticed that in one hilarious scene, which involved Newt's attempt to recapture an African Erumpent at the city zoo, Redmayne displayed a talent for physical comedy by engaging with a "mating dance" with the animal:

Katherine Waterston, whom I last saw in the 2015 drama "STEVE JOBS", gave a very intense, yet engaging performance as the demoted auror, Porpentina "Tina" Goldstein. I was impressed by how Waterston combined two aspects of Tina's personality - her driving ambition, which has come close to undermining her strong penchant for decency on a few occasions. Dan Fogler gave a very entertaining and funny performance as the No-Maj cannery worker and wannabe baker, Jacob Kowalski. Not only did I find his performance very funny, he also managed to create a strong screen chemistry with both Eddie Redmayne and Alison Sudol, who portrayed Tina's sister Quennie Goldstein. Sudol was an absolute delight as the carefree witch, who is not only proficient in Legilimens, but who also falls in love with Jacob. I never thought I would see Colin Farrell in a "HARRY POTTER" film. To be honest, he never struck me as the type. But he seemed to fit quite well in his excellent portrayal of the ruthless and intense Auror and Director of Magical Security for MACUSA, Percival Graves. I was especially impressed with his performance in scenes that featured Graves' interactions with Credence Barebone - scenes that seemed to hint some mild form of erotic manipulation. Speaking of Mr. Barebone, Ezra Miller was in fine form as the emotionally repressed Credence. The ironic thing about Miller's performance is that at first, his character seemed slightly creepy. In fact, one could label his Credence a "young American Severus Snape with a bad haircut and no wit". Thanks to Rowling's screenplay and Miller's performance, I came away with a portrait of a sad and abused young man, who hand channeled his anger at those who exploit him via magic. "FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM" marked the first time in which I can recall a magical person of color as a major supporting role - namely the MACUSA's elegant president Seraphina Picquery, portrayed by Carmen Ejogo. Unlike characters such as Dean Thomas or Kingsley Shacklebolt, President Picquery was not simply allowed to speak a few lines before being swept to the sidelines or off screen. Audiences received more than a glimpse of the glamorous Seraphina. I was also happy to discover that President Picquery was not portrayed as some one-dimensional character without any depth. Thanks to Ejogo's skillful performance, she portrayed the MACUSA as a pragmatic and ruthless woman who could be quite ambiguous in her efforts to maintain order within the American wizarding community. I found myself equally impressed by Samantha Morton's portrayal of the religious fanatic, Mary Lou Barebone. What really impressed me about Morton's performance is that she did not resort to excessive dramatics to convey Mrs. Barebone's fanatical . . . and abusive personality. Morton gave a subtle and intense performance that conveyed a portrait of a rather frightening woman - especially one who was not magical. The movie also featured solid performances from Jon Voight, Ronan Raftery, Josh Cowdery, Faith Wood-Blagrove and Ron Perlman's voice. The movie also featured a surprise cameo appearance from Johnny Depp, whose character will play an important role in the sequel films that will follow this one. I find it ironic that when I had first learned about the plans for "FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM", I was against it. I thought J.K. Rowling and Warner Brothers Studio had taken the Harry Potter franchise as far as it could go after seven novels and eight films. And yet . . . after seeing this film, I immediately fell in love with it. The movie had a few flaws. But I ended up enjoying it, thanks to the complex plot written by Rowling, David Yates' solid direction, the visual effects and the first-rate cast led by Eddie Redmayne. And now . . . I look forward to seeing more films about the different wizarding communities during the early 20th century.

[romaniassexdungeon]

LeoJidemic- gay and terror

Day two- social media

Pairing: LeoJi

Second fill for @rarepairsonice

I’m gonna be honest- most of these are LeoJi. This was the one that first gave me the idea to fill these prompts out as fics and not art, when I kept thinking of what Leo and Guang Hong would say watching a certain bad film together, and how they would probably make a habit out of watching awful films and laughing about it, so at least something good came out of me watching Birdemic. Not a lot, but something.

Unfortunately, it meant I had to watch the film again to write this and now I wanna die. You might want to have the film open in another tab to understand what’s going on.

Warnings: alcohol and some sexual humour

...

There were moments in Guang Hong’s life when he knew the best course of action would be to say a firm ‘no, that sounds like a terrible idea and something I’ll regret’ but deep in his heart, he knew the only thing he’d be saying was ‘let’s do this Leo. That’s a great idea, Leo’. ...I’m in love with you, Leo and would do anything for you down to watching the worst films in existence.

At this point, Leo didn’t even need ‘Viktor Nikiforov will be there’ to convince Guang Hong to do the reckless and ridiculous. He could do it with his own charm. Nothing Leo suggested they did was something Guang Hong would be genuinely uncomfortable with, or either illegal or immoral, just things that made him question what exactly his heart was doing here. It was now thanks to Leo that he’d taken Viktor Nikiforov’s actual real life boxers to the face; had stayed up til four in the morning swapping local memes when he had an exam the next day, purely because it was fun; prank-called half their friends; both dressed up as playboy bunnies last halloween to go trick-or-treating, which ended up in them receiving more money than candy; and end up buying a whole horde of stuffed animals every time they met up without fail.

Still, this would be a laugh. Sure, he’d hate himself, his life and worry for the future of cinema, but there would be a few laughs along the way, right?

Right?

Movie ‘dates’ between them were commonplace now, squeezed into whatever time they both had together that wasn’t interrupted by school, college, practice or much-needed sleep. First thing on the agenda was both their top favourites, get that squared out of the way, then films that had been banned or censored in each other’s countries and new releases neither had seen yet. When the pool of possible films to watch started becoming a little underwhelming, Leo suggested they go all out with finding films so bad they were an adventure. As something of a film snob, Guang Hong wasn’t sure he could see where the humour was there. Even when Leo put on ‘the Room’, Guang Hong had mostly been terrified. For humanity and every film industry in the world. It was agony. Torture. Only the start of a string of terrible ideas.

Over time, Guang Hong did find these late nights all the more enjoyable, no school or practice the next day, curled under his bedsheets in his and Leo’s own little world. Well, maybe Leo couldn’t be there in person, but Guang Hong could cuddle up to his tablet. Between Leo’s jokes and some genuinely unbelievable moments, Guang Hong found himself having to stifle laughter more often. He still felt bad for the world though.

There was no way one could not laugh in mild terror at the poorly animated Titanic musical with the rapping dog, though Leo’s laughter seemed to turn to sobbing at the singing mice. The other Titanic musical, the one where no one ended up dying, created more confusion than humour though, but even they had to laugh at the ridiculous plot. Foodfight was just straight up disgusting though, same with the bee-human relationship in Bee Movie.

And now, all Guang Hong had to do was read the title of the youtube video on their shared screen to know he was in for a long night.

Birdemic.

Birdemic…

Bird… demic...

BIRD-FUCKING-DEMIC?

Or to give it it’s proper title: Birdemic: shock and terror.

Shock and terror seemed to be pretty apt words here.

“Where do you find these?” he groaned.

On a webcam in the corner, Leo just shrugged. “Internet.”

“Why can’t you watch hentai like a normal person?”

“We can watch some of that together if it floats your boat, babe,” Leo told him slyly.

“Nah, my parents might walk in. Not that I’d want them to walk in and see me watching this either.”

“Shall we start then? I’m in the mood for some self-loathing.”

Guang Hong chuckled. “I’m not but play away.”

“Let’s do this.” Leo hit the play button, and after some poorly animated company logos, Guang Hong was greeted with a car scene. Not a car chase, but a guy driving his car along a country lane. For the first four minutes of the film. That was it. There were credits, of course, and some calming music; an overture? Really? Didn’t that go out of style in the sixties or something? Okay, not a terrible start, but it was a little dull.

“My favourite bit so far is the Portuguese subtitles,” Leo commented. “I think whoever wrote them’s brain broke from this.”

“I don’t speak Portuguese,” replied Guang Hong sadly.

“Neither can I, technically, but you don’t really have to to understand a sarcastic ‘Ator 10/10’,” he gave a slightly worried smile, “I should warn you, I’ve only seen one scene from this beforehand and… we’re in for a treat, let me tell you.”

“Yay,” Guang Hong groaned, “camera’s a bit… lopsided.”

“So’s his parking,” replied Leo once the overture had finally stopped and what was presumably the main character got out of his car.

“He looks lost.”

“And confused.”

When the main character finally entered a cafe, the waitress greeted him… or what Guang Hong thought was meant to be a greeting. It seemed more like a threat. Who edited this? “What the-”

“I’m gonna need to replay that.” Yup, the waitress definitely seemed to shout ‘hi’ at the protagonist. What did he ever do to her? Was it going to cut to a ‘one month earlier’ scene of him leaving a lousy tip?

“Why does the audio keep cutting out?” he asked.

“Because someone apparently got their cinematography degree free in a cereal box.”

“I wish those were really a thing.”

“I wish this wasn’t a thing.”

I wish we were a thing, Guang Hong’s brain slyly told him. He hoped he’d not said that out loud. It was hard to tell this late at night.

“Hot girl alert!” cried Leo, breaking Guang Hong’s heart ever so slightly. “What’s she doing in a movie like this?”

“Probably can’t act.”

“Yeah...”

“Did he just get up without ordering anything to chase after her? Who does that?”

“Yeah, wake up and smell the restraining order already!”

“He’s so creepy,” Guang Hong whined.

“And you were right, she can’t act,” replied Leo, “I mean, he’s still the worst, but-”

“Lee Seung Gil trying to be sexy is less wooden than him,” the boy finished helpfully.

“He’s creeping me out too,” Leo wrinkled his nose.

“I’m a fashion model.” “And a beautiful one too.”

“Ever seen an ugly model?” asked Leo.

“He’s running after her again?”

Leo burst out laughing. “She looks so uncomfortable leave her alone!”

“So are we just watching his day now?” asked Guang Hong after a few minutes, “like, his whole boring day?”

“Seems so.”

“Give this film all the awards. All of them.”

“Oh good, now he’s at work. Fucking riveting.” Leo flopped back in his chair, giving a groan like a dying buffalo.

“At least it’s going well from him.” The protagonist had started cheering, but even that sounded fake and half-assed. “I hope his office is more than fifty feet away from any modelling studios.”

“Speaking of which,” Leo nodded at a shot of said studio, “let’s see how she’s getting on.”

“Are we just watching her have photos taken in different clothes now? Yay.”

“Oooh, she got signed by Victoria’s Secret.”

“That easy, huh?”

“So they’re letting everyone’s dreams come true before they’re killed in the Birdemic? That’s nice of them.”

A few moments later, and Leo burst out laughing. “She has a flip phone? What the hell? Even my grandma has a smart phone.”

“This conversation’s so fake I’m surprised Phichit isn’t using it as makeup.” He didn’t know why he said that; Phichit was lovely. He’d probably have laughed at that anyway.

“That’s mean,” Leo chided, “they’re not very good at splicing each shot together though. Wow.”

And a few moments even later, Guang Hong was watching a basketball scene, for some reason. Or two guys giving up playing basketball because of a heatwave… in winter? Okay. “‘A day without sex is a day wasted man’? What on earth-”

“A day watching this film is a day wasted.”

“I had cake today; I wouldn’t consider that a day wasted.”

“I wish I had cake.”

“I wish we were watching something else.”

The next scene, however, was even more absurd.

“This guy’s installing a solar panel… is that all there was to that scene?”

“Seems so,” Leo gave a shrug.

“Where are the birds anyway? You promised me a birdemic, de la Iglesia.”

“Give it some time. There’s the bad romance plot to get out of the way first.”

And bad romance plot there was, complete with dates devoid of all chemistry. Really, it was the characters repeating pretty much what had happened in the movie already, with bad audio. It was so boring, in fact, that Leo left halfway through to make himself a Margarita. The cocktail, not the pizza. Guang Hong didn’t blame him, but it also meant Leo missed an actual moment with some chemistry involving the love interest talk about her cat.

“If I could afford it, I’d have at least ten of them.”

It was then that Guang Hong wondered, in horror, if this was actually a webcam filming one of Yuri and Otabek’s dates. He was going to throw up.

When Leo came back, complete with alcoholic drink, Guang Hong requested he pause the movie so he could sneak into the kitchen and grab a milkshake. Maybe they could make a drinking game out of it. The next scene involved Love Interest [he couldn’t remember any of their names] summarizing to her mother everything that happened. Leo downed his cocktail and went to make another.

“Did her mom suggest she get herself a sugar daddy?” he asked when they’d resumed watching.

“Best character in the whole damn film.” Guang Hong wondered if that’s what Yuuri’s mom had told him at some point.

“Please don’t let the two friends do it,” whined Leo, “I’m not sure I could take the weirdness.”

“Why does she have one plain white poster with ‘imagine peace’ on it? Who has that in their room?”

“She’s hot too,” Leo mumbled.

“If only she could act… if only any of them could...”

The next scene almost broke Guang Hong. “Are they just gonna… keep clapping… this whole time?”

“Whilst the audio keeps cutting out? Oh God.”

“Your God cannot help you anymore,” Guang Hong moaned.

“No really, that was the whole meeting? Them all clapping? Who made this?”

“Oh no wait, the guy’s friend has a remote controlled car. Think that was in his briefcase?” Guang Hong giggled, “it’s what I would take to a meeting.” Oh boy, did he just love Perpetually Horny Friend.

“-Chicks love cars, if you wanna get into their pants you better have a nice, hot ferrari.” “She’s my hot ferrari.”

“You’re my hot ferrari, Jiji,” said Leo with a lopsided grin, now on his third Margarita. Guang Hong really needed to have a word with him about that nickname...

“You’re mine, treasure.” Sometimes Guang Hong didn’t know if what they had was bromance or just straight up romance. That was also something he needed to talk to Leo about at some point, and was looking forward to it less than explaining Leo kept affectionately referring to him as ‘penis’. It was funny when they were alone, less so when walking down a busy street in Shanghai.

“Wow, a double date to see ‘an inconvenient truth’, how romantic.” Leo rolled his eyes. “And is that girl wearing an ‘imagine peace’ t-shirt?”

“Of course, guy who wants ferrari how wants an environmentally friendly car. This by any chance trying to push a clean energy agenda?”

“Maybe. Though to be fair, when I saw ‘an inconvenient truth’ I wanted to live in a cave.”

“If they wanted to make more of an impact with their global warming message, they should’ve set it here instead.”

“Is that guy’s friend talking about sex again?” Leo pulled a face, “he makes Chris look like a nun.”

“Funny image. Wish there were birds in this.”

“Give it time.”

So Guang Hong did. What he got instead was more stiff, lifeless romance right up to a drawn out dance scene in an incredibly empty bar. Seriously, just the main couple and the guy singing. Not to mention the dancing was less than impressive. Or was it impressive in how bad it is? It was like watching his parents, or a drunk Yuuri. No wait, drunk Yuuri was way more entertaining.

“I know what my next short programme music will be,” Leo commented with a laugh.

“Not if I do it first,” replied Guang Hong, grinning stupidly. He’d even steal the couple’s crap dance moves.

That scene, as long winded as it was, ended all too soon for them, and now they were faced with what could be the most awkward, wooden sex scene in the history of film. No really, it just looked like someone was filming to random people making out in their underwear. It was just unedited kissing on a bed… Oh God, was Leo showing him porn? He wished it was them in that motel. Was that what Leo was trying to say?

He didn’t have time to dwell on it though because, at last, he was greeted with the birdemic. And boy was that worth the wait. He’d almost jumped out of bed at the sudden onslaught of screeching from what he assumed was poorly-animated birds.

“Holy fuck,” whispered Leo.

“Are those birds… dive bombing into houses and exploding… whilst making plane noises?” Guang Hong’s brain was on the verge of melting at this point. Oh, and the explosion effects were just as bad as the birds themselves. This was hell for him, but at the same time there was something glorious about it.

No wait, the animations of the birds hovering in the air was the worst special effect. He was going to cry.

“They’re just floating in front of those houses,” hissed Leo in disbelief, peeking out between his fingers, “there’s no attacking animation.”

“I know this is probably not what needs to be focused on,” said Guang Hong, “the couple are wearing the exact same clothes from the night before. They’re not even rumpled or anything, not even their hair.”

“Must’ve got tired from sucking face and not done anything else. Just gone straight to sleep.”

“Weak.”

Leo’s eyebrows shot up. “Christ. I’m almost scared to find out what it would be like to make lo-”

“Oh I’d cover you like a birthday cake. I would condition your hair with my jizz.”

“Dude, same,” Leo drew out the last word, grinning stupidly. “I’d bend you over like a car seat.” No wonder Phichit- along with everyone else- had no idea if they were dating or not.

“It’s late and I’m being silly,” Guang Hong tried to explain.

Leo wiggled his eyebrows and held up his glass, “don’t worry about it; I’ve not been adding lime juice to the last five of these.”

“You’ve had five...”

“Have you been watching this damn film?”

“Not recently, we’ve been talking.”

“Well the best scene’s about to come up,” Leo rubbed his hands in anticipation.

Guang Hong’s eyes flickered back to the video on screen. “Who’s this dude and why is he collecting coat hangers?”

“To fight the birds.”

“...Coat hangers?”

“I know right? They’re birds, not abortions.”

“Leo!”

Leo held up his glass again. “Five! Remember?”

“Bloody hell...”

“Here we go,” Leo grinned with glee and Guang Hong’s brain finally melted.

They were swatting at birds… with coat hangers. If that wasn’t enough, the birds were just poor animations, barely moving on the top layer of the shot. They weren’t hitting them, and the birds kept flapping, stationary. This was it, this was what was going to kill him.

“What the fuck,” he whispered, covering his face with his hands and keeping the tablet propped on his knees.

“Told you!” Leo had actually fallen off his chair laughing. He was purple in the face by the time he’d managed to climb back up.

“How long of this crap is there left to go?” he moaned.

“About forty minutes. Why?”

“I’m not sure I can make it,” Guang Hong wiped his forehead, “the birds got me… go on… without me… tell my wife I love her...”

“Babe please, hold on for me!”

“I… can’t...” And Guang Hong collapsed on his pillow, eyes shut and tongue lolling.

“Come on man stop fucking around we still have forty minutes of this shit to go.”

[terryblount]

Code Vein – Review

If you are reading this, chances are that you have played Dark Souls, or at least know about FromSoftware’s legendary series. How could you avoid it, really? Throughout three incarnations Dark Souls produced an experience so revolutionary that it carved out an entire sub-genre of action RPG’s. Nothing says you’ve shaken things up like having a suffix attached to your game’s name: Souls-like.

However, something unexpected happened on the 22nd of March. The gaming community could once again bask in the brilliance of Hidetaka Miyzaki’s design philosophy, but it was Seikiro and not Dark Souls 4 that landed on shelves. Seikiro looked, played, sounded and felt like Dark Souls, and rumour told that it even tasted the same if you licked your monitor.

Still, many felt something was missing. Many longed for the days when they could once again light bonfires amidst the ruins of a godforsaken castle. Their withdrawal symptoms did not go unnoticed by publishers eager to capitalise on the Dark Souls-shaped hole in our Steam libraries (that even the re-release of Dark Souls couldn’t really fill).

This is Io, one of the central characters in the plot. You can unlock new levels in your blood code by bringing her artifacts.

Some interesting attempts have therefore crawled out of the woodwork in recent times. There was an Irishman fighting Yokai in Japan, dudes in exo-suits wielding chainsaws on polearms, and even a game where developers couldn’t be bothered to give their characters faces. Now we have Code Vein, the latest game that looks at all the Souls clones and says: “Step aside folks! Let anime show you how its done.”

If you can’t beat ‘em… use a bigger sword?

It is seriously difficult to review Code Vein and not make it sound like I am writing about a FromSoftware game. Bandai Namco even used the catchphrase from Dark Souls “Prepare to die” and changed it to “Prepare to dine,” so you have an idea just how eagerly this game borrows from its pedigree.

As it turns out, this is only the tip of the iceberg. The characters in Code Vein also exhibit that same, floaty movement. There is a heavy focus on stats and the maintenance of your stamina bar. Enemies will likewise attack based on proximity triggers. The bonfires have now been replaced with ‘mistle’. The twisty, curvy paths are designed to curve in on themselves…

I could do this all day. Frankly, I almost got disappointed when I didn’t see the words “YOU DEFEATED” every time I destroyed a boss, and no “YOU DIED” when the last dregs of my health bar left the screen.

That’s the guy I made! They wear gas masks due to a poisonous miasma that has spread everywhere in the apocalypse.

However, there is something unashamed and deliberate about this ride on Miyazaki’s coattails because it is precisely in moments when Code Vein is most loyal to the Souls formula that the experience is at its best. The devs have replicated the FromSoftware formula with surprising accuracy, and as such, Code Vein feels more like a homage to the genre rather than a money-snatching knockoff disguised in anime.

As you would expect, this is a game that wants to make you feel vulnerable. Like the majority of its cousins, the gameplay involves exploring an extremely hostile, open world with environments that carry a persistent sense of death and destruction. Danger is everywhere, with enemies around every turn that can disintegrate the player in one or two swift swipes.

Why on earth go outside then? Well, this is all in pursuit of a central currency in this game called ‘Haze’ (which is Code Vein for ‘Souls’). Haze gets you the good stuff which could be anything from sword upgrades, maximising the efficiency of spells and leveling up.

My favourite weapon. You also get ranged bayonets to shoot from a distance.

As you’d expect the game will snatch all that Haze away from you if you die, but at least they will be floating patiently at the last spot you kicked the bucket. Make sure you do not die on the way to retrieve them though, as you will instantly loose all that sweet moola FOREVER… and ever… and ever…

Bloody good and bloody awful

One of the areas where Code Vein’s gameplay is perhaps superior to other entries in this genre is the emphasis on flexibility. When you look at the stats screen for your character, the abundance of numbers makes you feel like accidentally walking into a seminar on theoretical physics.

All of those stats are there for the player to manipulate as they see fit in order to turn themselves into their own best version of a vampiric fighting machine. You have access to a really staggering array of offensive perks and buffs which you can manipulate with numerous weapons, spells, armour (‘Blood Veils’), special items or by altering your entire character class (Blood Code) on the fly.

Basic stats screen. The icons on the left are all the different blood codes you can collect which change the gameplay in subtle yet perceptible ways.

The combat may be rather clumsy and the levels often smack of being designed so that enemies can jump out from behind objects, or drop from the ceiling at the player. However, using this impressive arrangement of variables, perks and play styles always made the combat so damn interesting.

It really surprised me how soon I could be turned into chopped liver being dependent on one particular character build, only to emerge victorious by swapping around a few things. In this way, the gameplay always felt like it presented a consistent difficulty and that I was being pushed to play smarter rather than easier.

This customization even stretches to your companion, which is perhaps one of Code Vein’s biggest idiosyncrasies. For players that prefer a little companionship while they slaughter, you have the option to to string along a constant co-op partner to bully monsters. You get to choose your partner in case you prefer more help with spells, or if you would like an extra sword beside you.

Okay, you got me. For all the complexity to be found in the character builds, Code Vein does not quite match this with the same levels of sadistic difficulty as Souls games. For veteran players, I would advise tapering your expectations. To the working gamer struggling to find time to git gud at a single game, the more forgiving difficulty might be far less jarring.

I have been putting off discussing the central plot in Code Vein because I still don’t really get what the hell is going on here even after Steam has just ticked over to 26 hours. Something about the miasma causing people to die who were brought back to life by viruses, and then trees stopped giving off blood beads because of the zombies everywhere, so the strong vampires enslaved the weak ones, and then the humans became enslaved. Your character can make the trees bleed again because they are all connected by arteries underground and your job is to kill the queen vampire… wait what??

I am no stranger to the convoluted narratives of anime, but in Code Vein I had no idea what my character was supposed to be involved in. This is because of the game’s tendency to overload you with plot details at every chance, which didn’t so much build up the lore as making me feel lost.

Also, many female characters like Io sport excellent boobs (more on that below!) so I was… uhm… a little distracted perhaps when they were discussing important plot points. Naughty Pieter!

Yet another visual triumph

The Unreal Engine 4 is now officially my favourite game engine of all time. Every single title I have played over the last year looks freakin’ awesome on this platform, and Code Vein firmly joins the ranks.

While the enemy designs feel awfully generic, this is definitely the most colourful and flashy game I have ever played in this genre. It is a refreshing change from the washed out greys and browns we have been inundated with in Soulsborne games.

The frantic particle effects are one of several layers of icing on the game’s visual design, and there are also some striking animations for finishing moves as well. However, the biggest award in aesthetics must go to Code Vein’s character creator.

Dramatic and beautiful

As noted by Jim Sterling, the greatest achievement by Code Vein is the fact that players have been given customisation options to rival even The Sims, and Bandai Namco have not asked for a single cent extra in microtransactions. Whether you want to spend hours making your perfect waifu, or trying to recreate the leading characters of your favourite anime, chances are you will have a blast with all the options available here.

Better than when my sister asked me to play Barbie with her.

I have been reading quite a few objections to the opulent cleavage in this game,  but I kind of like it because it takes me back to when anime games were allowed to be sexy. Rather than seeing this as rampant sexism, it is nice to see a game being a little more daring in terms of depicting sexuality.

This kind of audacity is just rare in games nowadays, and I prefer to see this as the game affirming it is not for kids. If anything, this just shows I am an aging gamer from a bygone era. If you are offended, don’t worry: we are a dwindling breed.

Stories around the bonfires

Whenever you have a genre that begins filling up with copycats, it always makes the whole thing feel like a fad the industry needs to get over. This is particularly the case with battle royal games where it seems like studios are more eager to stick a finger in the pie made of money rather than taking risks with their own ideas. The market is more competitive than ever, yes, but even highly-populated scenes should still reward originality, right?

Made you look…

I almost do not want to like Code Vein as such. For all its visual fanfare, Code Vein is far from original in its basic formula which makes it hard to recommend for veterans of this genre. If you play this stuff all the time, I cannot guarantee that this game will not just end up feeling like more of the same once the novelty wears off.

Then again, it is precisely Code Vein’s surprisingly meticulous adherence to the blueprints of FromSoftware that may appeal to you, and it is what I liked most about it. There is a rock-solid Soulsborne experience lying underneath all the anime hullabaloo, and the versatility in the gameplay makes this game an excellent point of entry for the newbies and pro’s alike.

Diverse character builds

Gorgeous visuals

Amazing character creator

True Souls-like title

Bland enemy design

Convoluted narrative

Information overload

          Playtime: 26 hours total. Includes substantial amount of… uhm… dying

Computer Specs: Windows 10 64-bit computer using Nvidia GTX 1070, i5 4690K CPU, 16GB RAM – Played using an Xbox One Controller

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Code Vein – Review published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

[techdomes]

  At its core, Insomniac Games’ new adventure strives to make you feel like Spider-Man. And, thankfully, Marvel’s Spider-Man on PS4 succeeds at nearly every swing across Manhattan’s rooftops. I was left delighted at nearly every step of its 15-hour adventure thanks to a surprisingly deep tale that mines the plights of both Spider-Man and Peter Parker to great emotional success. Underpinning that engrossing narrative is an excellent set of webswinging mechanics, which — combined with fun gadgets and plenty of puns — makes for thrilling action in both the massive setpieces and in the quiet, confined corridors of tense sequences. Insomniac’s first foray into the realm of Marvel superheroes is a continually exciting adventure whose open world and combat are only occasionally caught up in a web of overly familiar trappings. Swinging around feels, quite simply, spectacular. There’s a small learning curve, but after getting comfortable with the basics, it’s nearly effortless to make Spider-Man look graceful in every swing, leap, and lunge. And man does it feel good to find the right mix of jumping, crawling, web zipping, and wall running.

I’ve spent hours just soaring around the skyscrapers of New York City, testing the momentum of my swings to find just the right point to gain an extra boost of speed, or leaping off the Avengers Tower to test how close to the ground I could fall, just to swing out in the nick of time. Similar to how God of War’s Leviathan Axe felt so good to throw around, Insomniac has found web-spun gold with Spider-Man’s swinging mechanic, enhancing it with additional moves like a focal point webzip that allowed me to turn any ledge, beam, or satellite tower into a jumping off point to continue my non-stop movement. Open-world traversal hasn’t been this smooth since Sunset Overdrive (which, not coincidentally, Insomniac also developed).

Doing What a Spider Can

And, happily, no aspect of New York’s architecture can really stop Spider-Man. Discovering how a powerful, but nimble, Spider-Man tackles fire escapes, both vertically and horizontally, or watching him slip through the metal grating of a water tower is endlessly entertaining. His animations are so detailed that no matter the obstacle, I got the sense that I could truly do whatever a Spider-Man could.

That was surprisingly true of indoor locations, too. The main story missions often took me into large-scale interiors, sometimes for light puzzle solving, and occasionally for stealthy takedown scenarios. For anyone who’s played the Batman: Arkham franchise, the framework is largely the same: enter a room, avoid being detected, and use a mix of gadgets and (relatively) quiet web takedowns to take down the crowd.

Insomniac has found web-spun gold with Spider-Man’s wonderful webswinging.

These stealth scenarios perfectly highlight Spider-Man’s talents — especially his love for designing gadgets. There’s a methodical thrill to plotting out the order I wanted to web up enemies, whether luring an enemy out toward me for a stealth takedown or by firing off a web trap that would stick them to a wall. There’s enough enemy variety (some react differently to your webbing than others, like big brutes that can’t be taken down as easily) that I always enjoyed the light bit of strategy these sections demanded, and would happily work my way through a dozen more.

Of course, Spidey gets up close and personal with foes a lot of the time, too, making for combat that’s equally fun, if a little slow to show its true depth. At first, I found myself pretty much just punching and dodging, occasionally webbing up a foe so I could focus on a more powerful baddie. But as I unlocked more skills from Spider-Man’s skill trees and gadgets, combat became an improvisational delight. After some leveling, I could pull an enemy’s gun away and smack him in the head with it, while a previously planted web trip mine strung two other enemies together. I’d then web-zip my way to a floor above me to smack an enemy off a railing while simultaneously sending a spider drone after two more foes. That balancing act consistently delivered on the powerful and fun fantasy of being Spider-Man. To be fair, Spider-Man’s combat owes a lot to the aforementioned Arkham franchise, right down to the slow-motion crunch when you take out the last baddie in a bunch, but that template is sped up dramatically in order to take advantage of Spidey’s nimble nature.

That feeling of fluid movement only falters during boss battles. Insomniac throws in some big and exciting boss fights full of tense action. They’re sparingly involved, as many of the more fascinating setpieces of the story don’t involve one-on-one fights. But because the adventure is both front and back-loaded with boss fights, there’s an odd lull devoid of huge bouts right in the middle of the story. That’s not inherently bad, especially as a lot of great character work is done in the second act alongside those blockbuster action sequences. But because the first couple of bosses boil down to round-based pattern recognition, they felt a bit simple and rote. Unfortunately, that becomes pretty noticeable with the huge gap in major villain encounters. Still, there are some smart and fun twists in boss battles toward the end of the campaign to look forward to.

The combat and gadgets fulfill the fun and powerful fantasy of being Spider-Man.

The variation in Spider-Man’s fighting style and inventive gadget arsenal — which is hardly a surprise given Insomniac’s knack for wacky weapon wheels in series like Ratchet & Clank — is also extended to Spider-Man’s wardrobe. His portable closet of unlockable Spidey suits all come with their own powers. Each power can be used independently of the outfit once unlocked, which is a godsend. It’s a joy to swap among some of the unexpected late-game duds, though I’ve become quite fond of this Spider-Man’s new main suit. That said, I largely relied on the first couple of powers for almost the entire campaign. The singular power to fill out your focus meter for special finishers or to restore health from Peter’s white-spider costume was so consistently useful that I didn’t want to give it up, and I never felt like the world encouraged me to use the others. Swapping between mods to adapt to specific side challenges — like one that could prevent my combo counter from immediately resetting with each hit — was always more useful than swapping between different abilities.

  Concrete Jungle

Spider-Man’s New York is an absolute blast to swing around, in part thanks to how gorgeous the shiny skyscrapers of the city look. Spider-Man does have its graphical hiccups — for example, the faces of Peter and other key characters are spectacularly animated while less notable characters are flat and often out of sync with dialogue. But its New York City is undeniably gorgeous, particularly on a PS4 Pro. Swinging around at dusk as the calm oranges of the setting sun hit the reflective glass of New York’s skyscrapers at just the right angle evoked some of the most calming, zen-like gameplay sessions I’ve experienced in awhile.

Marvel’s Spider-Man doesn’t offer a a 1:1 recreation of New York City, but most of the key landmarks — including my old apartment — are recreated faithfully. Neighborhoods have distinct enough character to be discernible as I swung from one to the next. Yes, certain aspects of the city, like water towers or certain building fronts, can start to feel repetitive. But Insomniac has done a pretty great job of capturing the city’s look with the sheen I’d expect for a world full of superheroes and super science.

That feeling is only magnified by the score. Spider-Man’s main theme recalls the triumphant horns of the MCU Avengers score, rising at just the right moments as I raced to stop a crime or to save some locale from a villain’s evil plot. Outside of the main campaign, there are dozens of other side objectives scattered throughout the city, which add another 15-20 hours of exploring, though my enjoyment of them varied greatly. I was never outright bored by any task, but some were reused so often that I found myself running through the motions of scenarios I once found exciting. The fourth or fifth time you figure out how to take on a horde of enemies committing a crime or fend off waves of enemies at an outpost is still entertaining — the fortieth is much less so. It dilutes what starts as a fun, heroic act into a repetitive, going-through-the-motions activity that often had a knack for popping up just as I was making my way to a major story mission. Outside of stopping those optional crimes, Taskmaster’s tough combat, race, and stealth challenges kept me coming back for better scores. And though finding landmarks and backpacks encouraged me to hit every corner of the city, the activity itself was pretty easy. Peter outside of his suit can also engage in a couple science minigames, one of which is essentially the pipe challenge from the original BioShock. I have a soft spot for that type of puzzle activity, but their inclusion contributes to some of the campaign’s odd pacing issues. They’re introduced just after your first real taste of being Spider-Man, and then interrupt the action anytime Spider-Man needs to do something science-related within the story.

The brilliance of what the world could have been can be seen in a handful of brilliant side missions. One tied nicely into the main story, culminating in an optional boss fight. Another suite of tasks forced me to actually have a good sense of New York’s neighborhoods. These sidequests helped bring the world of Spider-Man and its open New York City to life — I just wish a few more of them cleverly gave the world and my actions more significance.

Update: A day-one patch for Spider-Man has introduced a wonderful photo mode to the experience. It feels like the next evolution of photo modes before it, being so bespoke to Spidey himself. Being able to create comic book covers or panels is a delightful twist, and effectively allows you to create your own Spider-Man comic books should you want to.

Slow-Spinning Redemption

Thankfully, the story consistently delivers that sense of weight and impact, albeit after a somewhat slow start. Insomniac’s Spider-Man is one who has a history in this world, and it feels earned thanks to smart integration of familiar villains rather than throwing them at the screen for the sake of fan service. The script allows time for the central villains (and Peter’s relationship to them) to believably develop, making for some emotionally powerful scenes toward the end that definitely had me misty eyed on a couple of occasions.

I appreciated Insomniac’s surprising amount of restraint when it came to villains, but I loved the focus it put on Peter Parker and his relationships even more. I played Spider-Man to be Spider-Man, but I’m so happy I got to be Peter, too.

I played Spider-Man to be Spider-Man, but I’m so happy I got to be Peter, too.

Peter’s story is one of mentorship, smartly showing how he can simultaneously look up to one mentor, while becoming one, too. That dichotomy offers Spider-Man voice actor Yuri Lowenthal a chance to convey Peter’s various facets, and he does so with an emotional honesty that made this version of the Spider-Man one of my favorites on screen. Peter is someone who can succeed while he makes mistakes, and that juxtaposition offers a wealth of relatable material that carried me through much of Spider-Man’s story.

I won’t spoil Miles’ part in the adventure, but I enjoyed his inclusion and, thanks to a charming performance, I was as endeared to him as I was to Peter.

Spider-Man’s story is as captivating as anything the MCU has offered

Perhaps most of all, though, I loved Peter and Mary-Jane’s relationship. It’s well-trod territory, but Insomniac injects new life into it, in part thanks to Spidey and MJ actors Lowenthal and Laura Bailey’s performances. These are two people who have a history together, and watching them try to figure out what future they have, if any — as friends, coworkers, or more — is an absolute joy to watch.

A number of Peter and MJ’s scenes feel instantly relatable, from the two having their first dinner in months together, navigating whether they’re comfortable with one another, to Peter trying not to lose his cool over a misinterpreted text. It’s one of my favorite romances in a game ever, and contributes to a story with personal stakes as captivating — and often much more — as anything the MCU (and most superhero movies) has delivered.

The Verdict

I wanted Marvel’s Spider-Man on PS4 to make me feel like Spider-Man: To sail between the highrises of New York City, to nimbly web up hordes of enemies, and tussle with familiar, animal-themed villains. Insomniac Games’ first foray into the world of Marvel handily delivers on all of that. But what I didn’t expect from Spider-Man was to come away feeling just as fulfilled to have inhabited the life of Peter Parker. Aside from a few odd pacing issues, which momentarily took me out of the experience of being a superhero, and a world of optional missions that don’t always quite live up to the heft of the main story, Insomniac has delivered a Spider-Man story that both surprised and delighted me, coupled with gameplay that made me feel like Spider-Man nearly every step of the way. The Wall Crawler’s open world doesn’t consistently deliver the thrilling moments of its main campaign, but the foundation laid here is undoubtedly a spectacular one.

                         TechDomes Score: 10

  #TechDomes2018

Marvel’s Spider-Man PS4 Review

[doctorwhonews]

The Second Doctor Volume 2

Latest Review: Writers: Julian Richards, Rob Nisbet, John Pritchard, Tony Jones Directors: Helen Goldwyn, Lisa Bowerman Featuring: Anneke Wills, Elliot Chapman, Frazer Hines, Daphne Ashbrook, Louise Jameson Released by Big Finish Productions - June 2018 Order from Amazon UK What with Big Finish’s ever-accelerating expansion into new realms of the Doctor Who universe, from boxsets chronicling the exploits of underserved New Series allies to their ambitious work reviving axed spin-offs like Torchwood, it’s often all too easy to forget that the studio’s roots lie in offering classic incarnations of the titular Time Lord a bold new lease of life. How better to remind us of this noble goal, then, than by transporting us back to the 1960s with the latest Companion Chronicles boxset, showcasing Patrick Troughton’s tenure at the helm of the TARDIS in all its monochromatic, bowtie-donning and frequently base-sieging splendour? Whereas those content to explore Troughton’s televised adventures alone can only – barring telesnaps or the painfully gradual drip-feed of animated reconstructions from BBC Studios – experience but a minute fraction of those serials in their entirety at present, our lives are different to anyone else’s: we’ve got The Second Doctor Volume 2. So without further ado, let’s dive straight into this nostalgia-laced new collection and discover whether there’s life in a bygone era yet or whether, much like the ancient Cyber Tombs of Mondas, some artefacts are better left buried… “The Curate’s Egg”: “I’ve walked on the moon. I’ve faced down the Confederates of Brilpoor. But there is nothing, nothing in the universe as exhilarating as riding a dinosaur!” Had soon-to-be showrunner Chris Chibnall’s 2012 Eleventh Doctor odyssey “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” aired in the Troughton era rather than the dying days of Matt Smith’s, then Julian Richards’ charming opening salvo offers perhaps the perfect approximation of how the story might’ve played out under such circumstances. Dropping the newly-regenerated Doctor, Ben and Polly within spitting distance of a castle populated by cybernetic dinosaurs, “Curate’s Egg” throws caution to the wind, embracing Doctor Who’s frequent flirtations with the fantasy genre through elements as unashamedly ridiculous as mind-swapping gizmos, talking T-Rexes as well as arguably the best canine-themed visual gag of the year so far. Will it all seem too far-fetched for some listeners? Quite possibly, although Anneke Wills and Elliot Chapman – working on double duties here, albeit with Ben only featuring in proceedings for 10-15 minutes at most – do a fine job of keeping events grounded with their heartfelt exchanges as Polly and underappreciated scientist Andrew Clarkson respectively, their joint irritation at society’s efforts to side-line them at every turn adding a welcome emotional core amidst all the prehistoric hi-jinks. Indeed, so brimming is “Egg” with potent concepts – not least the Doctor’s underlying efforts to regain his companions’ trust in the wake of his recent “renewal” – that this reviewer couldn’t help but wish at times that Richards had explored some of them in greater detail over the course of his jam-packed hour, for instance by saving one or two ideas for future scripts instead. Food for thought next time around, perhaps. “Dumb Waiter”: “Die, false Doctor!” Anyone well-versed in the increasingly popular art of the meme will doubtless recall one such trending gag which did the rounds on social media in April, come the release of Marvel Studios’ long-awaited cinematic superhero epic Avengers: Infinity War: Marvel: “Infinity War is the most ambitious crossover in history.” Me: “[Insert award-worthy viral response here.]” Apologies if the experience of reading the last 55 words felt akin to learning a foreign language for the first time, but put simply, Infinity War might’ve just met its match in the eyes of Doctor Who fans worldwide with Volume 2’s sophomore instalment. Just as we’ve seen multiple Doctors cross paths in anniversary specials from “The Three Doctors” to Big Finish’s own The Light at the End in 2013, so too does the audio behemoth’s wide-ranging Who license allow them to bring together companions from differing eras of the show at times, and in this case it’s the turn of James McCrimmon to shine alongside one Leela of the Sevateem. In other words: cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war. Thankfully – not that this should come as any surprise given the levels of acclaim which both stars continue to court with their audio portrayals – neither Frazer Hines nor Louise Jameson disappoint, their hallowed characters’ clash of primal wits so ferociously unpredictable and regularly hilarious that you’ll soon wonder how it’s taken so damn long for this heavenly pairing to occur. That’s for the best too, since the core plot of “Waiter” leaves something to be desired in comparison, its rapid barrage of reality-warping setpieces and convoluted technobabble rendering the TARDIS team’s trip to a deeply sinister garden party, even more, overwhelming for the audience than it is for the Doctor as his present and future collide before his eyes. Scribe Rob Nisbet has his character drama down to a tee, then, but he’ll still need to work on balancing this with comprehensible plotting in order to craft the next Big Finish masterpiece. “The Iron Maiden”: “I suppose that time makes legends of us all…” It’s worth noting from the outset that Volume 2’s penultimate chapter, John Pritchard’s “The Iron Maiden”, houses all the components of a great Doctor Who serial – intriguing temporal anachronisms by the dozen, an extremely sympathetic central supporting character with whose mind these anomalies predictably play havoc and quite possibly the finest companion of the Troughton years, Wendy Padbury’s Zoe Heriot, taking the initiative as our de facto protagonist this time around. Upon sitting through the credits one hour later, then, imagine this listener’s disbelief at only being left with the following inescapable question: just what went wrong here? Despite her touching struggle to endure the seemingly endless conflicts of 14th century France, all while realizing that the worst is yet to come thanks to the suspect arrival of First World War technology on the scene, Jo Woodcock’s fascinating prophet-of-sorts Marie is criminally underserved here, lacking much to do beyond trigger the plot with her mysterious visions and prompt Zoe’s occasional epiphanies as she gets to the bottom of the situation. Throw in the disappointing absence of any real suspense – in spite of the deadly weaponry in our heroes’ vicinity – as well as what should’ve been a hugely poignant denouement falling surprisingly flat due to our minimal emotional investment in the ensemble, and “Maiden” unfortunately ranks as the boxset’s weakest link by some distance. “The Tactics of Defeat”: “We’re on the clock, Zoe.” Volume 2, in stark contrast to prior Companion Chronicles collections, opts out of binding its four serials with any ongoing plot threads or recurring thematic beats, such that “Tactics of Defeat” isn’t nearly as burdened with tying up loose ends as The First Doctor Volume 2’s “The Plague of Dreams”, wherein Guy Adams faced the intimidating task of endowing the First Doctor with a more fitting send-off than his abrupt departure in “The Tenth Planet”. If the benefits of this procedural structural approach weren’t already obvious to Big Finish upon commissioning the set, then they’re downright unmissable here, with Tony Jones’ refreshingly understated quasi-season finale proving all the more satisfying as a result. Not dissimilar to “Curate’s Egg”, “Tactics” pairs Zoe with her supposed Foe from the Future – better known to us as UNIT captain Ruth Matheson. Why the change of moral allegiances on Ruth’s part? Is everything as it seems? Both fair questions, but you won’t find us spoiling the answers here; much of the piece’s appeal lies in the constant twists and turns which Ruth’s mission to recover plague-emitting extra-terrestrial technology from a decaying temple take, not least Zoe’s supposed oncoming demise at the vicious hands of unknown assailants. The latter plot element might appear unthinkable given our foreknowledge of events to come in “The War Games”, yet we’re also well aware by now that “time can be re-written”, and indeed future Doctor Who scribes should keep in mind Pritchard’s tense work here as a prime example of how to put gripping new spins on the well-worn paradox-driven story format. Come for Daphne Ashbrook’s still-endearing work as the constantly resourceful, inspiringly courageous Ruth; stay for one of the more innovative scripts that we’ve seen enter classic Who’s audio pantheon for quite some time. The Verdict: How much you’ll get out of Volume 2 depends largely on what you expect from Big Finish’s Second Doctor productions – if you’re looking for authentic reprisals of the Troughton era’s unashamedly outrageous jaunts into fantasy territory or surreal mind-trips into worlds hell bent on distorting their visitors’ perceptions, then the fifth Companion Chronicles boxset since the range ceased its monthly output will fall right up your alley. If, however, you’re hoping to see the scribes involved push narrative / creative boundaries given their lack of 1960s budgetary limitations, then barring the basic set-up of “Curate’s” and the brilliant “Tactics” in its entirety, the end product mightn’t offer quite as much bang for your buck. But while we can’t afford the collection with quite the same glowing recommendation as its Chronicles predecessors, rest assured that there’s still plenty of entertainment in store for any Second Doctor fans craving further sustenance after last year’s "The Power of the Daleks" animated rejuvenation. And who knows – if Matt Smith consulted Troughton’s work in “The Tomb of the Cybermen” as part of the inspiration for his portrayal of the Eleventh Doctor, perhaps future stars lucky enough to portray the Time Lord’s allies might follow suit by picking up Volume 2, thereby starting the cycle of legacy anew… http://reviews.doctorwhonews.net/2018/08/the_second_doctor_volume_2.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr