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greysfall · 3 years ago

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My 4444-word review of NEO TWEWY (with personal illustration + heavy spoilers)

My overall critical score for the game is 7.5/10, while my personal enjoyment score is 8.5/10. This review is posted as I have 80% completed the game, got the secret ending and achieved the Angel psychic rank. I’ll first start with the main pros and cons as follows.

PROS:

- Enjoyable as a whole, still upholding the first game’s spirit in world building and sharing the same backbone - which was mostly revealed in the Secret Reports, it’s impossible to grasp the story without reading them.

- The new cast and new game is charming in their own way

- The old cast’s return is one of the biggest highlights for sure, it was fun and impactful. Everyone stays true to themselves and also had their own stories wrapped up nicely.

- Boss designs are cool, new pins are fun to use and collect

- The connection between the old and new cast is well written and executed, including but are not limited to the tension between the old and new protagonist, the weird but fun interaction between the 2 Composers, the new friendships revealed and formed

- Sho being in the main cast is something so uniquely TWEWY and uniquely Sho

- Still good music

- Still many fun side quests, some of them really uphold the same quirky spirit of the old game and some are surprisingly touching

- Many new nice stores and yummy looking foods to explore

- The map is really easy to memorize for me, it’s fun to travel around the “current” Shibuya to see all the differences compared to the past

- The social network is crazy and interesting to read through

- Has an anti-frustration system to help 100% complete the game more easily and earn money faster, so post-game is relatively managable.

- Overall, I really feel the efforts the team poured into making this as their passion project, not just during the development process but for all the last 14 years. They showed the vision of what they wanted to make, at the same time giving something to both the old as well as new fans.

CONS:

- The biggest problem with the game is scenario writing. The story is so heavily back-loaded. The director himself thought it would be better to balance out the tension flow by adding more at the beginning but gave in to the scenario writer in the end, probably due to time pressure. This results in an underwhelming execution of characterization and lots of wasted potentials for the first half of the game.

- I struggle to view it as a stand-alone game, since the backstory and the old cast both play such an important role in the core of the game. If someone plays this game without having played the OG, they can only enjoy it on surface value at best.

- The new cast is nice but most of them aren’t quite as intriguing as the old cast, maybe it’s cuz they’re all too nice deep down that they lack a little bit of an edge, of that batshit craziness that everyone in the OG used to have? I think some characters (Fret, Nagi) ended up weaker in terms of characterization because the writer is too afraid of making them unlikeable – which kind of backlashed cuz they only became likable in the most expectable way to cater for a specific group of fans. I would have wished for the other team leaders to be more crazy too, had they not suffered 30+ loops of the Game…

- The CAMERAWORK IS HELL.

- Gameplay does get tedious at certain points with all the time travels.

- Shiba is so badly written as a villain, some Shinjuku characters should be given more screentime cutting into Shiba’s– like Hishima or Kaie or even, Hazuki (though his limited presence also solidified his importance).

- Some of the main character designs, for example Beat’s hairstyle and his food reactions are hilariously bad. What’s the point of covering up most of his unique facial features?

- Some of the minor/side characters’ design are too cool for them to have such a small role (eg: Ayano, Eiru). Ryoji did get much screentime but is nowhere as fun as Makoto was.

- Overall the scope of this game is made a little too big for the team to handle as perfectly as the last game that was very compact, it felt somewhat rushed in development too so the missing pieces are clearly there in the final picture

The entry fee versus paying for it all in the end

An important difference between the Neo game and the original Shibuya game was that the Shibuya rule asked for an entry fee that is the Player’s most important asset, stated as a chance the Composer gives them to reexamine themselves. Meanwhile, the Shinjuku rule neither encourages nor allows personal growth and ultimately aims to erase as many Players as possible. It’s a pity we were never introduced to the full Shinjuku rulebook, as it seems like the system there focuses more on building up power and a grand government to compare with the individuality-driven system of Shibuya.

When you have to compare the new game and the original game (OG), this is an important factor to consider. Also, the OG has a serious storyline running through and through, locked with a different partner/GM creating unique atmosphere for each week and you don’t get to see your old partners again until the end. NEO’s team system does not allow such deep insight and communication between the Players. All of your teammates are always there throughout, the dynamic does change with each new addition but it is not as prominent as a partner change.

Another important factor is how the OG was built from scratch for a new platform as “something no one has ever seen before”, while Neo recycled a lot of old unused ideas from the previous development (check out this interview for more details). The development team for NEO lacks 2 key members and had a change of writer so the final product is not as strongly bound together as the last game.

The new cast is definitely inspired by today’s teenagers (from the view of creators), compared to the old cast they’re more sociable and always seem to take whatever works for them despite feeling unstable inside. They are all innocent and genuinely nice kids, avoiding to hurt each other to a degree that they end up keeping some sort of distance. They’re also unable to communicate at deeper levels, always stagnant at this half-baked stage of equilibrium without any motivation to get to the core of things. That is the cost of entering the game without an entry fee, without even dying or having a reason to be there/to fight seriously. These kids were stolen from the RG into a Game that was decidedly the worst environment for them to change or develop, just wandering around cluelessly to find a way “out” until tragedies started to unfold one by one and they ended up being charged the total sum of the price for their actions – ultimately losing everything in the end.

That is, I believe, a story arc which can resonate more to the youth of today rather than of my generation. If the message of the old game was to “listen”, enjoy life to the fullest and accept to trust others, the message of the new game is to “speak up” from the inside, trying to understand yourself and take actions instead of just going with the flow and finally, to take responsibility for such actions.

If Neku was handpicked by the Composer for being the special one with an all-dense soul to ensure victory of the game then Rindo was just a normal kid chosen out of random by Kubo to be his back-up plan, who just happened to have a high enough imagination to awaken the incredible power from his pin. Rindo was then officially chosen by the Composer as Josh picked up and handed the pin to him again, this time not as Josh’s personal Proxy – but as the Proxy to represent the normal people of Shibuya and via whom he could gamble if humans can fight for their own fate.

The underworld heroine and the hero with little of his own

Shoka is for me a refreshing and layered heroine. She’s the kind of character that took at least 3 trials of creators to form as a complete individual – that included Nomura who gave her the base design and Reaper background, Gen who gave a more cunning touch and the writers who made her English dialogues more punchy. Dishonesty equals “tsundere” is such a cliché, so the English writers tried really hard to avoid that trope in my opinion, while still letting her good intention come through.

She serves as the character who is informed of everything the players should have known, and there was almost nothing she could do about it. Almost. Until she met Rindo.

They were drawn to each other by sharing a state of “not having anything of their own”. They both started out with not being able to truly know themselves, Shoka even hated her RG life but also managed to mature from that stage before Rindo. She must have vibed with Shiki’s love and passion in the Gatto Nero threads, initiating her connection with Shibuya and understanding herself more. With Shoka as Swallow, they were able to open up to each other and offer mental support… but was still not getting to the centre of their problems because for all this time, Shoka could not tell Rindo the most important things about herself.

How did Shoka feel when she met Rindo at the UG? She probably didn’t want to hope that he would live the day until she witnessed the Twisters’ potentials. From the very beginning, they were both incredibly conscious of each other and also constantly frustrated that the person they happened to “notice” was such a condescending bitch/a clueless loser. The Shinjuku Reapers are overall quite drunk in power and uncompassionate to Players, Shoka included. She is also a master of dissociation, which results in her constant boredom, tone swings, haughtiness and subconsciously distancing herself from the friend – the boy she cares about – from false hope, as she judged from facts that it was a hopeless situation where nothing could ever be. Maybe she is naturally a bit of a chameleon just like her name suggests (Shoka 紫陽花 = hydrangea, the color-changing flower), so putting on an act and always dissociating herself from what’s important was easy, while hiding her contradiction was impossible. It was the ex-Reaper Beat who broke it out to her, that she should decide whether she really cared and wanted to do something for a change. He knew how it felt like to cross that line, and knew she wanted to too.

Shoka is endeared by many of the Shinjuku Reapers and has shown independent acts of kindness (the Shinjuku ghost), proving that her kind and truthful side is as real as her harsh and dishonest side – which makes her a nice mirror to the previous heroine Shiki, who also embraced a dichotomy of self-complex and self-love within her character. In the end, she was the first of the new cast to ultimately accept all that is important to her and independently made the decision to help save Shibuya despite all costs.

She was jealous at Rindo’s interaction with Tsugumi and Kanon but remained silent cuz she wasn’t at a place to have any say about it. She also didn’t reveal about Swallow because that would only add an awkward irrelevance to their current situation, as she was too ready to face erasure at the end of the Game. She only wished to “play a game” with him, be it FanGo or the Reapers’ Game. The tension that the team could only feel at the end, she’s felt it the entire time. The song “DIVIDE” is applicable to not just one bond in the game, but it always makes me think of theirs. There is always a “divide” between her and Rindo throughout the course of their journey, as the living and the dead, as a Player and Reaper, as someone who has a place to return to and someone who doesn’t, someone who knows little but wields too much power and someone who knows a lot despite not being able to do much.

“If only I had the chance to connect with you on the other side

But time goes on, and without us realizing it

The battle is getting heated

Time goes on, and without us realiazing it

Divided again”

To be honest, maybe I didn’t grow any affection for the new main cast from Rindo’s perspective but from Shoka’s. Since I started to sympathize with Shoka, I started to see the boy in a more “real” way. The real Rindo, behind his peaceful façade with others, would lash out on Shoka for her unfairly harsh attitude while none of the others cared. He could also subtly feel that mantle of unspoken secrets from her, her own contradictions, the unresolved chemistry between themselves – and not knowing what to do with it rather than to feel angry with all the unfairness he could not process. (As a Libra too, he’s triggered the most by unfairness!)

It is actually a positive development as he’s at least “reacting” to something strongly now rather than to keep evading his problems. During my replay, I clearly saw the difficult situation Shoka was in, her remaining harshness after the Motoi incident was due to her internal struggle with a mission to save her own life, versus a chance to really be with the team. Her decision was to do both at the risk of losing favour from both sides. Rindo started to accept her layer by layer, as the person who resonated the most to her contradicting nature from the start and knew that via learning her resolve, he has learnt his too.

Later into the game, she even got too much of his attention. Maybe even without knowing she’s Swallow, he’s familiar with her thinking direction and Swallow had always been closer to him than any other friend. It was only after she had to betray her important ones twice that she could start being truly honest. The scene when she died a 2nd time left a strong impression in me, the little reveal let Rindo know that he is also losing Swallow as he’s losing Shoka – and that only death could drive the last secret out of her. Her final “Later, loser” echoed through Rindo as it was the final truth, with only him remaining to hear it: they had actually, already lost everything.

Rindo was the boy who never dared to face all that matters to him until he lost it all, fighting an unfair battle in the faith that they would somehow still win. Shoka was the girl who always knew what was dear to her, but never dared to think she could be together with them ever after and still threw her all into a battle she knew was losing. I think they stir each other on naturally to fill out their gaps, similar to what the Shibuya game partner systerm would have aimed for. The end reward was a little divine intervention to help close up the divide between them once and for all.

During the game there was not enough space to process anything personal so at the ending when they officially became “friends”, it was an important affirmation of their bond. Some people complained it was friendzoning but it’s not, they just have arrived at the perfect place to start something more. “From now on, we will truly be together” – I read it as that kind of message.

The heroine from a lost battle, with her story taken away

After reading the secret reports and playing the game to be surprised of how small a role Tsugumi had in the main game despite being the “Hype-chan” thought to be a major character of the next TWEWY installment, many fans would feel sad at a missed opportunity to see the Shinjuku arc in full depiction.

It was shown clearly that, a Shinjuku arc was very carefully planned out and is a vital part of the whole story, yet it could not be made due to various circumstances behind the development scene. I would assume, that the team were not able to make a TWEWY game that ended on a despairing note, but it already happened in their mind, thus becoming a mental burden that forced them to break away from it and started the game anew with NEO. A significant part of NEO became the healing arc for the Shinjuku characters, especially for Tsugumi though I really wished more emphasis should have been placed on her rather than Shiba. We didn’t even get to see her brother – Shinjuku’s Conductor who had a vital role and instead was given the clueless Shiba, who had absolutely no idea what’s going on all the way until the last day in NEO. It’s as if Tsugumi has had her story stolen away from her, because her own battle ended with a saddening loss.

I think every time the game creators look at Tsugumi, they would feel that sadness too. Maybe to them, she is a bigger character than what is seen by the fans, as despite their failed effort to depict her story, she’s lived in their mind for all these years through periods of destruction, healing and rebuild. Though it is a pity we could not get to experience the full scope of the Shinjuku story, the creators was clear about the place they wished for it to arrive at.

Individuality, connection and the social network

The team system adapted from Shinjuku rulebook does not allow much room for personal development, as the team dynamic is closer to a work relationship forced to bear results, than a spiritual bond to max out all corners of understanding as found in the partnership system. The old Shibuya system allowed only 1 winner and 1 week limit per game, while the new rule declares for a 1 winning team and only the team at last place will be erased – the other teams will enter another loop. Furthermore, whichever team to challenge the unwinnable Ruinbringers will face the risk of ending up dead last followed by erasure. As a result, the longest-standing teams are most likely not the strongest ever recorded, but the ones who have figured out a strategy to simply survive until something changes, enjoying their newly found social constructs while they are at it. Basically, it is a system to hypnotise players into the illusion that they are still “living”.

Therefore, we as players would not get to the core of each Player individually as fast and directly as we did in the last game. The Twisters were able to stand out not because they’re powerful, they only started to have a real chance after growing enough to each form a meaningful and personal connection to another teammate. It did not come as a team, nor did it intiate from the existing friendship between Rindo and Fret. In fact, I did not find much solidity or anything truly note-worthy about the main team and new characters within themselves until they started clashing with other team members, Reapers and new recruits from week 2 onwards. Rindo found his personal development with Shoka (via a clash with Motoi and pretty much a mini dating sim between them), then via the confrontation of his role with Neku; Fret found his with Kanon then Nagi, the team learned about the real Neku via Beat, Neku entered the UG via Coco’s wish to save Tsugumi… it was not the team but their personal links that empowered them to fight and solve each of their problems.

The other team leaders may have failed because they did not form such personal links, after 30+ hopeless loops Fuya’s team all fell apart to pursue their own interest even at the cost of erasure, Motoi quit his KOL façade to work like a dog for the Reapers (probably to save just his own ass not his team), while Kanon dropped her tricks to find changes via honest cooperation in acceptance of a fair loss. The despairing note in that is huge without making much of a scene because their failure didn’t happen at their best effort to “win”, but in their last attempt to find a way “out”. Even Shiba got his way “out” in the end thanked to his personal friendship with Hishima and Tsugumi.

Something has shifted in the mindset of the game creators in the last 14 years, as both games are about “connection vs individuality” but the last game focuses more on connection between just individuals and this one on the overall network that is formed out of those individual connections.

The introduction of Beat into the main cast was truly the bridge between old and new, they helped each other out in several turns before officially recruiting him. Beat is a character whom a lot of fans including myself have felt somewhat concerned about after Neku disappeared from the RG, so when the new kids welcomed Beat with warm and organic interaction and Beat seemed happy, I started to feel like I wanted to help them out too! I think the overall team chemistry is enjoyable enough for new players, but I could warm up to the new kids more from the pov of a returning character – whom I’m glad to be Beat, as the older brother figure who is genuinely kind, fun, serious and upbeat at the same time; who is needed and needs the kids in return.

The social network is a fun and refreshing feature. You can read all of the crazy tidbits about Shibuya and the links each character have formed with the town people, it’s also fun to visualize how the characters act off screen. Characters’ profiles provide extra insight into their background too, like how it reveals Tsugumi has been friend with Coco during her time in the RG. During the game when not all characters have showed up, you can sometimes guess which empty spot will belong to whom. For example there is a 1 character linking to Neky that is not linked to anyone else, so I could guess that was Joshua, and that another character linking only to Joshua was probably Hazuki, hinting that the 2 Composers are related before either of them even showed up.

Hazuki only showed up for 5 minutes, but his presence is so vital and true to the game that I think he is the most memorable out of the new cast. The two Composers have such an intriguing bond, with their yin/yang or phoenix/dragon themes, opposite color design, the sempai/kouhai tone and the way they keep some sort of distance/work relationship as if it’s mandatory between Higher beings, yet at the same time they can talk so casually because they are truly equal – and different from one another. I have written a separate meta on them here.

Some people pointed out, that all Shinjuku characters’ names and themes are based off Hanafuda cards and the Phoenix in Hanafuda belongs to the Paulownia suit – which is Joshua’s name flower. This is so interesting because it feels like the creators somehow saw it as a sign to interweave the Shibuya and Shinjuku storylines together. Though it doesn’t come out much on the surface, it’s fascinating nonetheless considering both Josh and Haz had at some point interfered with the other town’s affairs.

“Shibuya tour with Haz” was such a special scene, as it happened between 2 characters who do not/no longer have a reason to care about Shibuya, on the subject of what is worth saving about Shibuya. Hazuki carried out the purification of Shinjuku and stepped in to restore Shibuya just as part of his job and unlike Hanekoma or Joshua who both possess profound understanding of humanity, he really didn’t know humans at all. Rindo’s irrational wish invoked in him a sense of curiosity, to try gambling on something irrationally and learning a bit of what his senior have experienced. With all the pieces put together, it provides an overview on Higher beings as a whole, and that Joshua and Hanekoma are really the odd ones out with Hazuki being somewhere in between them and the rest.

The old friends

It’s easy to have returning characters overshadow the new cast as they have already matured out of their personal story arc and stayed in our hearts for all this time. In the end, I have managed to enjoy both the old and new cast separately and altogether, and they will both find their own place in our memory of this game for the long term.

Sho is truly as crazy as ever, the game wouldn’t be the same if Sho is any less of what he is. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like Neky or Beat is younger than Nagi at all, with moments when it seems like Neky has aged 14 years instead of 3 years. His friendship with Coco surprised me pleasantly, and their interaction together with Beat was fun to watch. Rhyme’s found a new dream and her friendship with Kaie is precious too, especially considering that she can still talk to him online after the game ended. Josh and Neku’s interaction suggested that they have resolved the past and are on equal terms now, they even parted ways in good spirit and I don’t feel any worry about them like I did before.

Neku and Shiki’s reunion scene was beautiful, theirs is such a special bond that it has grown and supported them even without being able to see each other. I am so happy to see them all again and that they stay true to who they are, albeit looking more grown up, cooler and happier than ever before.

Overall, NEO can’t become a classic on par with the OG, but is definitely a good sequel and a good game in its own rights. I’m happy with whether or not there will be a 3rd game to complete the 3 monkeys theme, but if there will be – I hope the creators can really find the time to learn from the last 2 games and start over with a fresh mindset and strong core.

#neotwewy #neotwewyspoilers #ntwewy #ntwewy spoilers #neo the world ends with you #twewy #review #meta #neo twewy #shoka sakurane #rindo kanade #tsugumi matsunae

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mobius-prime · 5 years ago

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145. Sonic the Hedgehog #80

If Wishes Were Acorns

Writer: Karl Bollers Pencils: James Fry Colors: Frank Gagliardo

So, what exactly has happened to Amy? What did she use the mystical, wish-granting Ring of Acorns to wish for? Why, to become older of course - because if she's older then people will take her more seriously!

So this is essentially how the comics resolved the issue of Amy originally being very young, but now suddenly needing a redesign and an excuse to act older - they literally just magicked her older. Specifically, she's physically about sixteen now, despite being ten years old in actual age. Of course this is kind of an insane decision for the reasons Sonic points out above, but then again, ten year olds aren't known for their stellar decision-making skills. Despite the fact that by all accounts she should be mentally still ten, the comic actually treats her like a full teenager from now on aside from small references to her true age here and there. I guess her maturity is just assumed to follow the same rules as OoT Link's or something - perhaps the ring also gave her that extra six years of mental maturation or something, I dunno. Regardless, she's gotten her wish and is now allowed to come along on the mission, though perhaps not for the reasons she initially wanted.

As everyone prepares to leave, Sally steps into her mother's storage room to say her goodbyes, hoping that her mother can hear her speak even though she's still in a coma. Outside, Sonic's own parents try to say goodbye to him as well, but he refuses to actually say the word "goodbye," seeming downcast.

Nice to see Mina again - she's not getting a lot of screentime these first few issues, but she'll become a bigger character as time goes on. Everyone groups up on Knothole's makeshift airfield, and Nate explains that the Hidden City of the Ancients is inhabited by five-fingered Overlanders instead of the usual four-fingered ones like himself. Wait, what? So this is a weird plot detail that hasn't been touched on at all yet, but if anyone has been paying attention, all Overlanders, including the original Robotnik (but not the current one), have usually been portrayed with four fingers. I say usually because it varies wildly between issues - both for Overlanders, and for Mobians. For example, lately Sally has often been portrayed with four fingers, but later on in the series she gains a fifth, and it's entirely inconsistent between issues due to changing artists and canons. For now, just take the comic's word for it that Overlanders usually have four fingers, while these other ones apparently have five. As the king, watching over the departure, reassures Elias that they'll still be able to find a cure for the queen even without the Ring of Acorns, the group takes off, Sonic and Tails in the newly-rebuilt Tornado, and everyone else in the shuttle the Freedom Fighters always use. Soon they find themselves coming up on a strange mountain in the distance…

It's hard to imagine how this city has apparently remained so hidden that many think it's a myth - that thing looks like a siren's call to any intrepid explorer. Apparently somehow this thousands-of-years-old airplane managed to survive the ravages of time and nature, paint and all, with nary a scratch to be seen. Nate suspects that the survivors of the ancient crash took shelter inside the mountain's caves, discovering they went very deep. Everyone takes a mine cart further inside, and at the end of it, they find themselves bedazzled by the sigh of an entire metropolitan city underground…

Land Fall

Writer: Ken Penders Pencils: Steven Butler Colors: Frank Gagliardo

Knuckles has rushed to Haven to find out why the other members of the Brotherhood didn't see Robotnik's assault coming. Thunderhawk was apparently the one on duty when it happened, and blames Hunter's sabotage of their systems for disabling any early warning they may have gotten. However, they did capture images of Robotnik during the attack, and in fact still have him on their video feed.

No, you know what, shut up Locke. And Knuckles, good on you! It's about time you stood up to the Brotherhood and your father and told them what ignorant idiots they were being. This is the biggest case of "I told you so" in the entire comic. They refuse to help Sally and her kingdom fight against Robotnik, and not even a week later he comes in, blasts apart the Chaos Chamber, shatters the only thing keeping their island aloft, and releases Mammoth Mogul back into the world to boot. Locke gives me strong vibes of that type of middle-aged asshole who refuses to let someone younger than them tell them off because they don’t want to admit to being wrong. Knuckles has every right to be angry and shame the entire Brotherhood into rethinking their stupid isolationist policies, despite Locke's insistence that they did what they did "for the greater good." Thunderhawk tries to agree, but Knuckles ignores them and heads out to trail Robotnik and hopefully find out what he's planning next.

Meanwhile, outside, Vector, Mighty and Julie-Su are examining the crater left behind by Robotnik's drilling venture. They don't know it's him yet, so they spend some time speculating, wondering if it's perhaps the work of the Dark Legion.

They race to find Espio and are first shocked by the fact that the island is floating in the water (did you guys completely not notice the eight mile drop earlier or something?). They then notice Espio, handcuffed and being led along by some very large and vicious-looking kitties, who he nervously introduces as their new "neighbors." I'm sure this bodes well…

Swallowing Trouble

Writer: Ken Penders Pencils: Jim Valentino Colors: Frank Gagliardo

Have you ever lain awake at night and thought to yourself, "Gee, there's nothing more I want out of life than to see the story of Big the Cat and Froggy as told by Ken Penders"? Well boy oh boy, you're in luck, because that's exactly what you're getting! Unlike in the games and anime, where Froggy is literally just an ordinary frog, apparently in this universe he's a fully sapient being in his own right, thinking in complex thought to himself throughout the story. Froggy wakes up in the middle of the night to some strange noises, and tries to rouse Big, who carries on snoring. Thus, Froggy leaps away to investigate for himself, finding a moving puddle of water and deciding he needs to drink it immediately in perhaps the most uncomfortable series of panels imaginable.

Big awakens shocked to find that his friend now has a tail and is acting strange and ignoring him, and before he can move closer to investigate, a red and yellow robot appears from amongst the trees and scoops Froggy up. This alarms Big, who moves closer to demand his friend's release, and proceeds to blame the robot for his hand hurting after he punches it.

Bro, I'm sorry, but you punched a freaking robot! What did you expect, a gentle caress on the knuckles? The robot scurries off with its new prize, and Big picks himself up and lumbers after it, determined to get his friend back. And thus, the stage is (halfway) set for our upcoming adventure! How much weirder can this adaption get, you ask? Tune in for the next issue to find out!

#nala reads archie sonic preboot #archie sonic #archie sonic preboot #sonic the hedgehog #sth 80 #writer: karl bollers #writer: ken penders #pencils: james fry #pencils: steven butler #pencils: jim valentino #colors: frank gagliardo

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savrenim · 7 years ago

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I'm so jealous of your gay elf murder bachelorette campaign that I now desperately want my own. Any recommendations on how to find people to play D&D with? I have several friends who are interested, but none of us have any questions experience (between my secondhand experience of reading about your adventures) so we don't know how to get started

oh gods so apparently I have A Lot Of Opinions and it got really long, so under the cut, also thank you for reminding me that I should probably properly type up the finale of Gay Murder Elf Bachelorette Campaign Book 1 because it was freaking epic and this is the one campaign that I can properly rant about on tumblr without worrying about spoilers

(I’m in three campaigns right now) (by complete accident) (on the one hand it’s a bad life decision in that I have zero free time anyways with grad school, but on the other hand it has become my sole social interaction with anyone ever and also coping mechanism for the stress and one good thing I do for me and, like, they’re not all weekly campaigns, so hours-per-week I’m devoting isn’t ridiculous) (and I miss my friends and it’s re-connected me with them and also has introduced me to upperclassmen in the department) (but sometimes there are character secrets and people who potentially follow me on tumblr so I can’t post the super long dramatic things about a character that I really want to)

OKAY SO HOW TO GET INTO PLAYING

I will be real, the three campaigns that I am in right now are the first time I’ve played DnD for anything that lasted longer than a week and a half at a summer camp type deal, like, arguably, this is my real first time playing DnD….ever. That being said, I’ve worked at gay theater camp for….six years now? And they do super intense super in-character LARPing that is far more roleplaying-heavy than mechanics heavy and has trained me to both have very good story instincts of, like, “this is how you make decisions that both fit with your character and support the narrative instead of oppose it, and either do not tear the party apart, or tear the party apart but for a very good and fitting narrative reason (i.e. if there’s going to be strife, make it mean something)” and in my opinion it is when you bring those sorts of instincts to a DnD game that you get the most satisfying story out of it. Character creation, team cohesion, and story and world development are all things that I do feel super comfortable speaking about because that is my literal jam outside of my math jam which is paying for me to be alive and stuff. So here we go.

There are a couple of questions that you need to immediately answer, the first being, “do you want to play Dungeons and Dragons, or do you want to start with a mechanically less complicated system?” Because there are a lot of pretty good systems out there that are high fantasy even (i.e. Dungeon World) that are a lot more streamlined in terms of “you don’t need to be as familiar with a set of rules in order to play.” That being said, Dungeons and Dragons is classic and is fantastic and I freaking adore it. (I will be completely honest, the only other two systems I know right now are Dungeon World, which is fantasy, and Mech Noir, which holy shit you are playing noir style detectives except in a SCI FI SETTING WHERE YOU PILOT MECHAS and the entire game system is around applying “adjectives” to people like, if you successfully roll against an enemy, you get to pick any adjective you can think of ever from “grappled” to “trusting” to “confused” to “located” and it just makes for such interesting storytelling)

which vaguely brings me to my first piece of real advice: you learn how to play best by witnessing playing happening. if you are a podcast person, I highly recommend either The Adventure Zone or Friends At The Table (or, honestly, if you have the time, both). The Adventure Zone plays DnD, 5th Edition, and it is a super quality family who are goofing off and having fun together and then the plot that arises is like “oh shit I am crying about a wizard named Taako, pronounced taco, how did this happen to me” and it’s great. The Adventure Zone is 100% the reason why I reached out to friends and was like “yoooo is anyone starting a campaign because TAZ has made me want to play again.” Friends at the Table starts with Dungeon World and it is some of the best storytelling and worldbuilding I’ve ever heard? And you will learn so much about how to set things up and go with the flow and the DM talks a lot about his process as offhand comments and you will learn so much. I’ve heard good things about Critical Role, but haven’t listened myself. But get out there, listen, and then don’t be afraid of copying things that you admire. Best way to learn.

If you’re going with Dungeons and Dragons, start with 5th Edition. 0th, 1st, and 2nd are all ridiculously unbalanced, 3 is “actually everyone uses 3.5,” or a combo 3.5/Pathfinder. While 3.5/Pathfinder is a great system and is what we’re playing both in gay murder elf bachelorette campaign and in the math grad departmental campaign, and was the game that I learned on, 5e is a lot more streamlined and they’re aren’t super picky exact rules for every tiny thing you could think of doing, which means you don’t need to be familiar with a vast system full of loopholes and counters and counter-counters to know how to effectively play the game. we don’t talk about 4th edition

Decide who is going to be the DM. There are sometimes comic stores that’ll run weekly or biweekly or monthly games of DnD, but those are almost definitely going to be less story-based and usually are one-shots? And if you’ve got a good group of friends, I recommend just playing with them and not trying to find an external group that you don’t know. I’m vaguely assuming that you’re volunteering to be DM because you’re asking? But if there’s someone in your group of friends who likes writing things or likes managing things or is interested, or if people want to take turns trying stuff out, go for that. The department group rotates DMs (and rotates games) just based on who has something written that they’re excited to try out.

You also might want to ask around to see if there are any people that you vaguely know, or that are friends of friends, who play. You’d be surprised how many people do. I’ve also seen blogs on tumblr sometimes going “hey, I’m running a Skype campaign and I need two or three more players, if people are interested fill out this survey and then depending mostly on times people are free but also what you say about what you’re looking for from a game I’ll pick the players?” or if y’all are in college there is almost always a DnD club somewhere, hidden semi-secret on campus, on the register to get club funding but under the radar because nerds. But you and your friends who are semi-interested will work just fine, as long as semi-interested means they’re actually willing to commit for a bit. So how do you get started?

Get the Player’s Handbook, and the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and read them cover to cover. If you’re playing and not DMing, eh, skip this step, and have the DM do it instead, but the Dungeon Master’s Guide especially will walk you through how to set up things mechanically very well and if you’re going in blind it will be good to have gone through and read it all once. I’ve read the 3.5 DMG cover to cover several times, haven’t read 5e yet, I know that I didn’t like their storytelling tips, but read through it once to get an idea of what mechanics might look like, it gives very good starting mechanical advice.

1. Speed and smoothness of playing are important, which means that sometimes, if you don’t know a rule, you want to make something up on the fly and deliver it with a completely straight face. Everybody does homebrew. Rules are great because they keep things from devolving into chaos and they can settle disputes, but also, sometimes you’ve just got to make a call, and if you make it while looking like you know what you’re doing, everyone will believe you. Similarly, don’t make the same rolls, or the same number of rolls, for NPC characters as you would for PCs. For example, in gay murder elf bachelorette campaign, when Iria was both directing a full assault on a hobgoblin fortress as well as had put herself on the special strike team that was going to sneak in and open the portcullis, the DM made ~one or two rolls~ to see how successful the Caedic units were at each of the points of Iria’s plan, instead of rolling a full battle between ~40 hobgoblins and ~80 elves. screentime is important; if you’re spending too much time on not-the-players, it gets boring for the players, so roll enough dice to decide what’s going on with a tad bit of luck and so it seems like other characters have rules that they have to follow, but you don’t have to let the rules dictate every single thing that happens in-world. you dictate that.

2. Character creation is how you set yourself up for success. Do not underestimate the importance of party dynamics. You don’t all have to be playing best friends or even people who get along–in Spelljammer, Marian and Djin had the character backstory of “ten years ago we were captain and co-captain of a vessel and for Reasons got into a huge fight over nothing and split and Marian took half the ship with her and she thought she’d never see him again but now oops they’ve both ended up jobless on the same station and Marian was already pooling as many resources as she could to try to put together a new ship and Djin arrived a couple months into this and needed the work so joined this ragtag democratic crew, but there’s a shit ton of tension.” This worked because we were snippy to each other in dialogue, when push came to shove, Marian is professional enough such that her whole deal is putting personal feelings aside always no matter what, and Djin takes the passive in passive-aggressive super seriously, so it never meant that the party was sitting around arguing for hours or refusing to cooperate. Meanwhile, I’ve seen and heard of campaigns falling apart because “there are two thieves and one really wants to get to do all the sneaking so they argue all the time over who gets to do cool stuff” or “the evil fighter literally just wants to murder everyone which means everyone else can’t get stuff done.” You can have intra-party strife and have it be interesting, but only if players are doing it cooperatively instead of being at each other’s throats irl. Rule of thumb: if the party dynamics are frustrating the other players, you are doing something wrong.

2.5 That being said, if a party starts to develop into bad dynamics, it is fixable without betraying character! For example, in the department campaign, I’ve been playing a super sheltered youngest child elf wizard from a super established Elvin wizard family (of, like, oh the arcanic postlines that let mail be sent around the continent? Grandpa came up with that theory. Schools of magic identified and classified originally? That was the Maewels) so Seraph is a tad bit privileged and a tad bit sheltered and is uppity sometimes. There was a fighter in the party who liked his alcohol, once missed a huge battle that the rest of us had to cover for him because he’d seduced two women at the inn we were hanging out at before the town was attacked, and typically did things like walk around in the morning with no pants on. And he proceeded to interpret Seraph’s increasing shock and disdain for him (or rather specifically, how upset she was the first time she saw him pantless) as “yeah all women go for me.” The party was vaguely splitting into “Seraph’s side and Silas’s side” so I decided to aggressively interpret one of the battles we went through together as a bonding experience and lo and behold Seraph’s feelings started to change over the next couple of weeks to “you might be an inconsiderate asshole but you’re OUR inconsiderate asshole so only we are allowed to rag on you” and she became one of his biggest supporters esp when they got to his hometown. All you really need is one super solid, proactive player in a party to make sure that things are resolved in a solid manner, so if you’re not the one DMing? Be that player.

2.75 Okay but if you’re DMing, have the conversation with your players as they’re designing their characters about point (2) because good party dynamics are easiest when you get it from the start.

3. Design encounters around the party. You don’t need a traditional setup of “a tank, a mage, a healer, and a thief” to have an effective and fun party. Maybe everyone wants to play a thief, great, design the scenario to be “you have all been contracted by the thieves’ guild to sneak into this party and assassinate this noble, you have three days to prepare and these resources, make a plan” instead of “this is a traditional dungeon crawl where you are fighting big scary monsters despite the fact that none of you are melee fighters.” Similarly, figure out what sort of stories and settings and aesthetics your players are interested in, and then play that game.

4. Make it personal. Ask people about their backstory and then incorporate stuff in. Notice what they become invested in and adjust your plans to include more of that. Give characters individual arcs that fit vaguely into the overall story, but also that they are the semi-protagonist of. Right now in Spelljammer, we’re all dealing with “so there are weird tears in the universe that Password, this Extinct AI we found and befriended, says are reminiscent of literally the entire universe ripping apart at the seams and are possibly why the Extinct went extinct, oh and some random lady gave us this artifact called the Eye and told us to hide it from the Blind King? And now his servants are hunting us? We are literally scav elves this is so above our pay grade.” Except going on as subplots, Algol is being hunted down by this evil overseer of whatever place in Echoside he originally escaped from, Leif got a stone that gives her prophetic dreams, Kimi has been super close to Password and Leif dreamed about them stitching the universe together, and Marian is dealing with an "oh shit I’ve accidentally adopted these three kids even though I don’t do personal” along with “oh god have I literally become the captain of this ship because I AM THE ONLY ADULT LEFT” along with some old friends from her past trying to reconnect just after we got a prophecy about how the last thing the Blind King would send to steal the Eye was someone we loved turned against us. So yeah, sure, there are big Adventure Plotlines going down that involve the entire party, but we’re not doing things just to do them, everyone is personally invested in this for their own reasons. So when you plan a big adventure, both plan places where individual party members get to start both for who they are and what they can do, as well as along the way keep an eye out for things that you can tie in for them.

5. Consequences matter. And not just stuff like “Iria got stabbed really bad first session and nearly died, now every time she goes into rage at the end needs to roll a fortitude save to not fall unconscious, and whenever she rolls a one same deal.” But also consequences like “you were really rude to this person and now they don’t like you and they are friends with the owner of the apothecary, who now also doesn’t like you and marks up prices behind your back” or "you let one of the patrol escape and now the whole army knows that you’re coming” or “you saved this kid’s life even though you were in enemy territory and now five years later he recognizes you even though you’ve been captured and is making sure that the party is taken prisoner instead of killed.” Make NPCs (non-player characters, ie characters the DM controls) recurring characters instead of people that you meet once, and have the way that the NPCs feel and then interact with the players change based on how prior interactions go. Have them care about things and have them remember. It makes the world feel a lot more real.

6. Preparing for a session goes petty much "how much do you like improv”. If you’re chill improvising, you want written down the stats of the monsters/enemies your players are potentially going to encounter, and probably a vague idea of goals, and then just play it by ear. Jeremy (the person running gay murder elf bachelorette and spelljammer) has I think at this point 13 “Books” written for gay murder elf bachelorette campaign, will write long descriptions of characters, settings, has maps drawn, has customized his own random encounter tables, has made his own homebrew system for how spaceship mechanics works specifically so that we could better piece together our spaceship with fantasy duct tape during the Death Races, and overplans every last detail all the way down to “has different musical themes that he’ll swap out and play at different times.” like, Iria has a Trauma theme that is played every time her wound starts acting up. He has collected music for books in advance. He has multiple different theme songs for each of the players in spelljammer. He writes notes about what NPCs are thinking so that he can reference it later. But that’s because he knows that he prefers the things he comes up with when he has time to plan things out, instead of when he’s surprised. He knows his own storytelling style. “eh, an outline and some monster stats” would not work for him the same way that I’ve seen it work for other people. You don’t have to put a ridiculous amount of prep work and writing time into being a DM, you need to figure out how much prepared material you need to run something comfortably, and then prepare that much.

6.5 Understand no matter what you plan, bits and pieces will probably be derailed, and be okay with that. Nothing is more upsetting than when a DM does not respect player autonomy and invalidates the clever things they think of, because it goes against their own plans. I think being a DM/running a story is sort of halfway “you’re writing a novel” and halfway “oh shit except this time the characters ACTUALLY have minds of their own” and striking a balance instead of dominating the narrative makes it fun. Also, it means you can throw in problems that you have no solutions for. During the Death Races in spelljammer, our battery started running out of plasma, which meant that the pressurization was getting all wonky, Leif immediately goes over and says “I have a spell called Reduce Object, can I cast it on the internal casing to try to up the pressure of what little plasma we have left” and Jeremy goes “uummmm sure if Kimi is over there to help you rewire the rest of the battery on the fly because you are SHRINKING HALF OF ITS PARTS” and then that held for three minutes until oh shit it was still low on plasma and Marian ran over and went “wait a second guys I have a Flaming Sphere spell except Jeremy, Jeeeeremy, I’m technically a plasma variety of Light Cleric, my ~god~ that ~gives me my divine magic~ is the collective of star dryads which live in balls of plasma, we’ve established prior in this setting that some of my fire spells are actually plasma spells, not fire, Jeeeeeremly can shove my hand into the empty battery casing and cast a flaming, 10-foot in diameter ball of plasma to try to give us a fuel boost” and Jeremy went “okay fuck it, stick your hand in the battery and cast a flaming sphere of plasma to give the ship a fuel boost, Leif, make another concentration check to hold the pressure.” and it did and we won the race the end we’re the coolest space elves ever. moral of the story: your players will come up with clever things. Sometimes clever things that mess up your plans. Let it happen, it’s more fun that way.

(Iris has come up with a truly heinous but potentially really effective military tactic that gay murder elf bachelorette campaign is actually a bit more delicate because it’s set in a larger world that Jeremy is running multiple other campaigns in and I’m still not sure if Iria is legit going to be a villain that I face off as a good PC one day, or if she’s a historical figure, or even whether or not this campaign is set in the past, but either way the history of this world matters? and the idea that I came up with has the potential to re-shape history? and I told it to Jeremy and he was quiet for a very long time and then thanked me for telling him and so Iria told Talvus in-character and we’re going to see whether or not in a couple of books this ends up changing the entire history of the world that he runs multiple campaigns in or something drastic like that, but hey, player wants to do something you haven’t thought of, “I didn’t think of that” is not a good enough reason to not let them do it.)

7. Decide if you want to write your own adventure, buy/find online a pre-written one, or vaguely do something in the middle. If you’re going for something pre-written, edits bits and pieces as you go to personalize it to your characters. I have a friend who just wrote and published something for DnD 2nd Edition? And it looks great? http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/229248/War-Wizards-of-the-Wasteland Even if you don’t play a pre-written adventure, reading a bunch of them will give you an idea of what preparing for sessions is like and what sort of information you should have on hand.

8. Don’t be afraid to make up home-brew mechanics, either for the whole party or for an individual player. Jeremy ran a vignette session called “Flight of the Kalla Tukal” in which we were playing a trio of orcs that had fallen through a tear in space and had just managed to get back and were searching for our tribe, which left without us. Except in his setting, orcs are a super psionic almost hivemind race? You meet orcs outside of radiation space sometimes, but they’re usually Not Coping Very Well with the fact that they’ve been cut off from their community. But the Kalla Tukal were still all linked together so we weren’t all going mad. then the other part of being psychic orcs meant that we could at any point attempt to do telekinesis or mind-control something, and the way that it was determined whether or not that worked is roll a d20, except we’re not trying to get 20, we’re trying to roll as close to each other in number as possible. There was one dramatic moment when two of us rolled 4’s or something and it was a critical success. but it was so cool to have that weird drift-comparability mechanic, and, like, the more people in our group that wanted to contribute, the more likely two people were to roll the same number. it was just?????? so cool??????? so if you want your party to all be psychically connected and be able to throw stuff with their minds I totally recommend that.

on a more personal/one-player level, in the department campaign, it has developed that Seraph really wants to be a research wizard like her family before her, and so the DM and I had a long conversation about the topics that she would want to research and a particular narrative impetus for her to start researching, and he came up with five or six new spells that Seraph will be able to invent over the course of the campaign, except because it’s experimental magic it’s going to start out with a 40% partial-to-total failure rate that will go down the more she tries to cast the spells, because hey, she’s working out the kinks. to me, it’s more than “oh this is a cool new mechanic,” it’s the DM cared enough to take the time to work with me and put what I thought was interesting into the campaign. and you have a lot of room to do that by adding your own rules and conventions and what-not. don’t be afraid to experiment, see what works, and then keep those mechanics around.

9. Start small. Don’t try to start with a whole huge epic campaign, you want to start by running a bunch of mini-arcs in different settings so that you get a feel for how to play and how to run things. This also gives you a chance to figure out how your group of friends plays, who is going to be the person that gives you the most scheduling problems, some of them might like the fighting parts more than the “come up with clever plans” or “interact with NPCs” parts, and this will give you an idea of who you actually want in a long-term campaign. Because long-term campaigns go on for years. Like, gay murder elf bachelorette is probably going to be a year and a half if Jeremy and I keep going at this pace? and that’s vaguely on the short side for something that Jeremy runs. A proper full epic campaign can be a huge time commitment, so start out with mini-arcs just to have fun and get used to stuff and because that is something that people will actually be able to commit time to.

I interrupt this long list of advice for another list of advice of potential ideas for miniature campaigns you could run for your friends. or one of your friends could run, if they’re interested in DMing:

COOL IDEAS FOR ONE-TO-FOUR SESSION MINI-CAMPAIGNS THAT I CAME UP WITH RIGHT NOW OR STOLE FROM FRIENDS WHO CAME UP WITH SUPER COOL THINGS

—as mentioned in a previous bullet point, “you’re a group of thieves planning an assassination. this is how much money you have. each of your characters has one character connection in the city who can help you get items or forge a document etc etc. this is what the castle looks like. this is what you’ve figured out about guard shifts and security for the party. you have a week to plan. go” and then, like. somebody wants to try to pretend to be a noble to get in? fantastic. someone wants to try to seduce a guard? fantastic. sneaking in the traditional way? fantastic. all three at the same time. faaaantastic. it’s fun, it’s short, the way that you would prepare this is you would think about guards, defenses, patrols, maybe some of the nobles at the party are trained in magic or have weird special teams of guards and maybe have agendas of their own, and then what the actual ball itself would look like and maybe make a castle map, but the fun part of this scenario is the players get to be as creative as possible and I guarantee they will think of the coolest things and then you get to figure out how to react to those things in interesting ways to figure out whether or not they work.

—okay this is a one-shot I have only heard legends about but everyone was playing a rock band of monsters who were about to give a super huge concert in monster city and I think someone had stolen a drum set or a guitar or something and they were trying to dodge paparazzi and get their instruments back but it was also ridiculous sex drugs rock & roll culture and a comedy one-shot that apparently was the coolest thing in the world, but you can’t go wrong if you start with “crazy monster rock band superstars”. during the sequel they went on tour to the human lands and I think wrecked a couple of cities.

—this one is stolen from TAZ but fantasy WWE, the intro plot setup that is exposition in the first 10 minutes was “a friend of yours who is a famous wrestler just had her partner assassinated before the biggest match of the year, one of you has been asked to fill in for the match, another as the manager, and then the rest of you are trying to solve this murder mystery super quick because your friend is worried she’s the next target”

—honestly any sort of “huge gladiator/fighting tournament but there’s drama and foul play going down behind the scenes” makes for a really good short arc. there’s a game that actually Jeremy invented that is played irl at gay theater camp called “bloodrush” which is such a ridiculous game, it’s….vaguely fantasy football except everyone also has daggers and swords and stuff and you are allowed to stab members of the other team but only when they’re holding the ball, although cheating is basically a requirement when the refs’ backs are turned, oh, by the way, the refs are vampires. there have been cases at camp where teams waiting in the bleachers for the next match enemy teams have crept up behind them and slit all their throats with foam daggers while the refs were watching the game, or poisonings, or just. anything you can think of, it’s gone down. my little brother once jumped on the biggest baddest counselor’s back, stabbed him in the shoulder, snatched the ball from him, did a front roll, and ran off, and scored a goal and that is one of his proudest moments of his life to this day, basically what I’m saying is you can’t go wrong with “bloodrush tournament” or whatever your own crazy fantasy sportsball game you want to make up and play.

—“we are a bunch of archeologists who have a little bit of combat or magic training but not too much because mostly we’re archeologists and someone poked a button in a pyramid and oh god we’ve accidentally summoned an ancient race on monsters that feed on human souls, which also apparently there’s a secret military conspiracy that has been watching this site to try to stop these monsters and have come here to contain them but oops also are ready to murder ALL OF US because WE have human souls, now we’re trying to run and hide from both groups and figure out if we can find anything to banish the monsters again” (this is 100% stolen from a LARP written by a friend of mine) (I’m pretty sure same one who wrote the monster band one-shot, actually) (they’re a really good writer, okay)

—PRISON ESCAPE. Think Guardians of the Galaxy 1. You can’t go wrong with a prison break game. character design will be so fun. I swear I thought of stuff like this separate from Jeremy. Jeremy’s writing a prison break game and has promised that I get to play Captain Jennijack, a genderfluid space pirate who totally woke up in this prison a week or so ago and doesn’t for the life of them know why they are here, there are, like, eight or ten possible things they could think of but they’re not sure which one they’ve technically been convicted of, and I am holding him to that.

—Honestly, you have a book that you like? A movie? A TV show? One that you haven’t convinced your friends to watch yet? (or one that you have and they will recognize halfway through.) STEAL THAT, write and run a fanfiction game, it’ll be fun.

ADVICE PART 2: PREPARING FOR A LONGER CAMPAIGN ONCE YOU’RE COMFORTABLE DMING AND HAVE FIGURED OUT THE GROUP OF PEOPLE THAT HAVE GOOD CHEMISTRY AND DYNAMICS AND WANT TO STICK AROUND. I’m assuming you want advice for getting something vaguely like gay murder elf bachelorette to run, so I’m going to talk about broad story-based things that I think are important for setting up good stories?

10. Scheduling is key and what is most likely to mess you up. Pick your players carefully, pick people who are invested and who will turn up. If there are people who didn’t get along during your mini arcs, or who just had very different expectations of what the game should be like re fighting/mechanics and roleplaying balance, don’t put them in the same party. Picking a party isn’t about picking your friends, it’s about picking people who work well together as players, and whose playing style matches your storytelling style. You’re better off with less people but who are super quality players and share a vision with you and get along, than letting someone into the game that’s going to mess stuff up for everyone because of outside-of-game social politics. It’s just not worth it. Not when this might go on for years.

11. There’s something really powerful about a story that isn’t about the Chosen Ones, but instead you’re just a group of people who were at the wrong place at the wrong time and now oh shit it’s on you to save the world. Epic campaigns generally become epic, like, you invest that much time and energy into something and by the finale you usually are saving the universe, but be willing to start out not special. Let specialness develop.

11.5 There is also something really powerful about there sometimes being problems that magic can’t fix. Or that just aren’t fixable. If you haven’t read the Young Wizards series go read it and cry.

12. Write in arcs. This goes along very well with starting small, but have there be different parts of the campaign that are semi self-contained as you slowly build up to something bigger, this is also where you start dropping in personal arcs. Arcs also allow you to change up the feel of the game and keep things interesting and keep people on their toes. The Adventure Zone does maybe the best example of how to have self-contained plot-driven arcs that build to something eventually cohesive, all arcs with their own unique setup and flavor. (The Adventure Zone: Balance is a really great game and I really do advise you listen to it, it’s ~70 episodes but it will get you used to the mechanics of 5e, and holy fuck is it a story.)

13. Don’t be afraid to steal plot points from your favorite things. Hell, don’t be afraid to steal the entire plots of your favorite things. Especially if you’re worried about your own writing skills or creativity or whatever? Fanfiction is freaking great, and it’s fun; some of the best games I’ve ever played have been fanfiction of super obscure things that the writer has afterwards told me what it was fanfiction of and it was so freaking fun to go read/watch the original after I’d already played an even cooler version???? It’s also pretty easy to start out fanfiction and then through developing personal arcs and following party interest, ending up with a story by the end that is entirely original and you. So write fanfiction if you don’t have any ideas, or honestly, if your fanfiction ideas excite you more than when you sit down and try to write with a blank slate.

14. You’re not limited to a high fantasy setting. Honestly, standard high fantasy/dungeon crawl stuff has gotten pretty boring for me? (although the department campaign is pretty cool, but that’s only because it’s high fantasy but we slip in jokes like “Seraph marches downstairs in her pajamas and channels her mother to start yelling at the innkeeper about the utterly terrible customer service of getting poisoned, non-consensually, and that she would like to speak to the manager of the local thieves’ guild to lodge a complaint” because even though it’s high fantasy, it’s funny. TAZ does really good high fantasy too because of how they weave a whole bunch of other stuff in.) but, like, YOU CAN DO DND IN SPACE. you can do modern urban fantasy. you can go post-apocalypse. you can go post-high-fantasy-apocalypse. you can play a supernatural style game. it’s your world, make it whatever you want.

14.5 It is possible to play things that are mechanically the class in the book, but have a different interpretation in the setting. Or just to works differently in the setting. in spelljammer, elves don’t have gods, and I vaguely developed over the course of a couple of months an old belief system that was pretty old even when Marian was a kid that she just pseudo-learned and didn’t quite believe but is now revisiting, and the difference between divine casters and arcane casters is actually just “magic is vaguely a part of physics and most arcane casters are tinkerers who are doing it via weird cool gadgets or are pseudo-scientists/engineers in their training and approach to magic, while for divine casters it’s more of an internal, feelings-based thing.” I’m also very very excited because I have developed a super intense and specific lore that is canonically what elves used to believe and what Marian believes, but might not actually be how the world and death specifically works at all, so I’m bouncing up and down on my feet waiting to discover what’s going down behind the scenes with gods in that campaign, instead of it just being “oh yeah choose your gods from the gods in the book.” in the department campaign, Seraph is from a family of wizards and thinks that she is a wizard even though she is actually an arcanist, because the world doesn’t have words different types of casters esp niche types of casters yet. the DM and I are planning for it to be a huuuuge surprise now that she’s leveled up enough to have access to “arcanic exploits” which are at-will abilities that wizards don’t have, and it is going to be an in-character process of her discovering that she can do something that according to the known laws of magic she shouldn’t be able to do, and now oh shit she has to research it. even though mechanically, we’re going pretty much entirely by the book, the book doesn’t exist in the world! characters don’t know what players know! make it interesting to discover things that you as a player might otherwise take for granted!

14.75 make magic and fighting sound cool, and design how you describe it to be specific to the setting or the culture. in gay murder elf bachelorette campaign, the way that Caedic casting works is you first have to draw a rune in the air that then hovers there all glowy, and then you “thread the needle” which is projecting power through it in a very specific manner, I’m pretty sure that Surrians cast differently, magic works different in different parts of the world. having a melee fight scene? describe how people exchange blows back and forth or let them choose how their killing blows will look or just make them feel like badasses whenever they try to do a cool thing because it’s cool. I am used to playing magic/caster characters just because I generally am more familiar with magical mechanics than fighting mechanics and magic has always been more interesting to me but holy crud I have never had a fight scene so fun as the one when Iria had led a researcher from the Black Lotus Labs to a fae font that she’d found scouting in the woods and this seaweed creature eventually attacked them and she did a badass holding it off with her scimitar an then Vennikus, the researcher, tried to throw a cold iron knife at it but missed, and so Iria, who had been training in two-weapon fighting, saw the knife, did a front roll underneath the monster’s next swing, picked up the knife, exchanged a flurry of blows with the thing now two-handed fighting which eventually ended with her doing this super badass throwing both weapons in the air and catching them to switch hands, leaping on the things back, slashing so deep with her scimitar that it finally got through all of the seaweed and cleared it before it could get back to a weird, pulsating green heart, which then she drove the cold iron blade into all the way up to its hilt. which was so much cooler than “oh shit I rolled a crit on my scimitar hand and confirmed it and I guess that deals enough damage for this thing to die,” nah, I drove a cold iron knife into that thing’s pulsating heart and so that’ll be a scene that I never forget. Even when I miss Jeremy makes me sound cool because then when the enemies miss he talks about how good my footwork is or how well I’ve drilled to block these exact kinds of blows so the Surrian had no chance because my training kicked in type deal. it makes fight scenes more than just rolling dice, and thus easier to get engaged in.

14.8725 I swear I didn’t start out this essay as an “I’m going to sing the praises of Jeremy for several thousand words”

15. It’s always interesting when you have mechanical reasons for players leveling up. Or for what their classes are. That’s always a tricky one to balance, and it’s one that I’ve been doing aggressively as a player? And to be fair, if your players start out with young and fairly inexperienced characters, “I am gaining experience at doing a thing” is a perfectly good narrative reason to level up. You want to play an older character? One of my friends is playing a 150-year-old orc who was a Great Adventurer back in the day and retired to take care of great-great grandkids and is back in an adventuring party now but wheeee is starting at level 1 because they’re out of practice oh, and they have bad knees. There’s also always the option of “I hurt myself real bad and I’ve been recovering,” leveling up isn’t ~gaining new experience~, it’s slowly getting better through whatever your injury is. or just you can write this off as an unavoidable mechanical aspect of the game, eh, not that important, I just love it when tiny details match up. This isn’t actually an important point, I’ve kind of moved on to the “picky details that I care about” second of this advice rant.

16. Make the unexpected important. JEREMY GAVE ME THE MOST ADORABLE PET SPACE OCTOPUS AS A FAMILIAR AND I HAVE BEEN ASSUMING THAT VELO IS JUST VELO AND THEN JEREMY MADE SOME SORT OF A SIDE COMMENT ABOUT “YEAH VELO IS NOTHING LIKE YOU’D EVER HEARD OF BEFORE” AND YEAH DUH BECAUSE THE LIL’ BUDDY WAS SUMMONED THROUGH A MYSTERY SPELL IN A MYSTERY PIECE OF EXTINCT TECH BUT NOW I’M FREAKING PARANOID OUT OF CHARACTER THAT VELO IS SECRETLY AN EMISSARY OF RAT JESUS OR SOMETHING. but also just, like, nothing is cooler than “oh that tiny thing that happened when you were level 1 that you didn’t really think much of and it’s just been vaguely a thing you’ve carried with you for the adventure? turns out it was the most important thing in the world!!!!!” just. good foreshadowing. unexpected foreshadowing. it’s great.

17. Your players will invent stuff, either as a part of their backstory or as something that they’re interested in. Let them, especially if you don’t have a previously established canon opinion on the thing. This is 100% a self-serving thing of what I wants DMs to do when I’m a player of, like. I really love getting to write stuff into the setting, but also it’s because good improv means go with the flow. Someone says something? Work it in, oops, it’s canon now. This can be both on-purpose or accident; in the department campaign, I wanted to write in-character letters to an NPC in my backstory from the beginning, except goddamnit I didn’t want to have to deal with “and it’ll take a couple of months for the mail to travel across the country to get to them,” so I made an offhand reference in the email that I was sending the DM the letters of “can we say I just threw them in the arcanic postlines,” which then, like. After doing this about five times I sat down and wrote out the exact magical theory about how arcanic postlines should work considering how we’d said that they function in-game and the DM went “okay, sounds great, that’s consistent with how we’ve been dealing with these letters for the last two months” and that is why the fantasy world of the departmental campaign has a highly functional postage system. On the improv end of things, there is a beautiful moment in The Adventure Zone where the wizard just, in-character, teases another wizard about “ooooh, don’t want to burn your spell slots,” and the DM just went with it and suddenly it became canon that instead of spell slots being a behind-the-scenes mechanical thing that doesn’t exist in-world, it was a legitimate way that wizards referred to how much magic they could cast a day. Which I love so much, that’s so interesting for a high fantasy setting. Letting players add to the setting will bring in cool new things that you didn’t think of, and you should be open to it.

18. First priority is everyone should be having fun, and communication is key for that to work. Debrief sometimes after sessions. Ask people what their favorite parts are. listen to them chat about their theories. follow up on actively developing framework for the things that people think are fun. ultimately DnD is as much about friends getting together and having a good time as it is about telling a huge, epic, intricate, interconnected story, and the huge epic stories are a lot more fun if you’ve been having fun the whole way along.

All that all being said.

Don’t expect your campaign to look like gay elf murder bachelorette campaign, the way that I am playing in gay murder elf campaign is…..a bad way to play in a party? Being a conscientious player means being aware that the overall story arc isn’t just about you, it’s weaving together about everyone and there is always a part of me that is thinking about “is everyone getting equal screentime” and going “I AM IN LOVE WITH THIS NPC JEREMY SHE’S SO GOOD AT FIGHTING OH MY GODS THAT MURDEROUS LOOK SHE GETS WHEN SHE’S FACING OFF AGAINST SURRIANS AND SHE DOESN’T THINK ANYONE IS WATCHING JEREMY I AM IN LOVE” and, like, actively going over to try to talk with her any time I had the chance to ever and insisting on sparring with her any time we had free time and insisting on having a bunch of scenes with Talvus of “oh my god Talvus help she said three whole words to me what does it mean” which made all this the gay mess that it was would have been something that I wouldn’t have done if there were other people in the party with other agendas; gay elf murder bachelorette campaign gets to be gay elf murder bachelorette campaign specifically because Jeremy and I realized “….wait, there are only the two of us, we can get as ridiculous with this as we want” and have decided to commit. Fully. But that’s not the sort of shit you want to pull if there’s a whole other group of people who just kind of have to sit and watch every time you want to go over and flirt with your murder-rival-who-will-maybe-one-day-be-your-murder-girlfriend before they can do the stuff they want to do.

(As a secondary warning note if you’re doing any sort of roleplaying and are playing a fictional character in love with another fictional character being played by a friend of yours, you better be on the same page as your friend as, like, one of you not having a secret crush on the other in real life because shit gets messy and then real life and character stuff starts to blend and it’s just. I have been there and done that when I was a 17-year-old Gay Mess and I feel like it is my responsibility as a 22-year-old Slightly More Responsible Gay Mess to warn you against that. Jeremy and I know each other very well and have for years and know each other’s boundaries and talked about triggers and boundaries before starting this campaign, which to be fair was more because as a villain campaign dark stuff is probs going to happen but we have talked about fictional romance too , but I would not play this intimately with someone I didn’t trust intimately. So keep that in mind when designing things?)

ALSO THAT BEING SAID

if you want a gay elf murder bachelorette campaign, there is a game called Monsterhearts that I have never played but heard about friends playing and they all freaking love it and there are a lot of undertones about dealing with mental illness and being queer and in the closet and the entire setup of the game is y’all are monsters in high school having love life drama and everything I have heard about this game is how remarkable it is combined with stories about the most ridiculous teenage drama, sooooo possibly after I have ranted for 8000 words about how to set up a functional Dungeons and Dragons campaign which the party and DMing advice still I think applies to any game Monsterhearts might be the game that you want to start with.

BONUS: ADVICE FROM JEREMY.

#jeremy believes in you #so do I #wheeee that got long #dungeons and dragons #storytelling advice #gay murder elf bachelorette #if you stuck around through this whole thing wow congratulations I hope I wasn't too boring #I have a lot of friends who are very good at mechanics and who can speak a lot about good game design #this is what I can offer though

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wonderfulworldofmichaelford · 7 years ago

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It review

27 years ago, a horrific event happened, one that disturbed and disgusted people everywhere and changed the course of human history… that event was the release of the godawful miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s massive doorstopper horror tale It, a miniseries that was lighter on scares than a Care Bears movie and had precisely one adult actor who was even trying… that actor being Tim Curry, who as Pennywise was delightfully, deliciously hammy. Tim Curry was the one sole redeeming element though, because between butchering the book, leaving out a lot of good stuff, and having the best effects a cheap TV budget can afford, this series just fucking blows. With how horrendously unscary this is (despite what people who were five when they saw this will tell you) and how piss-poor the adaptation was, is there any conceivable way to get It adapted properly into something that will impress audiences instead of make them laugh at how crappy and rushed it is?

I think the box office numbers of the latest attempt to adapt the novel should give you a good idea of the answer.

It, the 2017 movie, is easily one of the best Stephen King adaptations ever made. It makes changes here and there, but still manages to keep all the elements of the book – the unnerving atmosphere, the feeling of helplessness, the camaraderie between the Losers – and make a novel that just seems so dauntingly unfilmable come to life. Well, half of the novel anyway; this only covers the time the Losers encounter Pennywise as children in the 80s.

So how does this tale of terror unfold? It begins with little Georgie, out playing in the rain with a paper sailboat… a sailboat that slips down a storm drain and into the sewers. Thankfully for Georgie, a nice clown named Pennywise was in the sewer and got the boat for him! Yay! Not-so-thankfully for Georgie, Pennywise rips his arm off and drags him down into the sewer as he screams for his brother! Not yay! Of course, his brother Bill doesn’t know this, and so when summer comes he and his group of pals – the awkward Jewish boy Stan, the nervous and panicky Eddie, and the loudmouthed joker Richie – decide to start investigating. Along the way, the Losers get the help of the tough-as-nails girl Beverly, the chubby Ben, and the black kid Mike, and together the Losers start looking in to the disappearing children… only to come across their worst fears, and sometimes a very creepy clown. Can these kids survive their summer and get to the bottom of the mystery… or will they float too?

The most important part of It is not the killer clown (though I cannot stress how important he is, and we’ll get to him shortly), the most important part is the rapport and camaraderie of the Losers. And here, in this movie… these kids really sell it to you that they’re friends, that they love each other, and that they’re always gonna do the right thing even if they’re scared. Bill and Bev especially get plenty of focus and development, with Bev even being the first kid to really face her fears and Bill, being Georgie’s brother, driving the plot and acting as the leader of the bunch. But most of the other kids are well-done as well, with Ben being entertainingly charming, Eddie being amusingly energetic and paranoid (think Double D from Ed, Edd n Eddy), and especially Richie with his constant joking and lewd comments; he was easily the funniest character in the movie. The weak links are, sadly, Stan and Mike. Stan barely does anything except be kind of cowardly, and it seems a lot of his hesitant moments are foreshadowing his likely eventual fate of suicide (which is how he died in the book and miniseries, though maybe things can go better for him here). Mike, on the other hand, has a lot of his role usurped by Ben, who takes up his role of telling the Losers about Old Derry and the town’s history. Mike’s not bad or anything, but he doesn’t contribute much overall, though thankfully the director has said this will be rectified in the sequel. Even with those issues, you never really doubt all these kids are friends and have a special bond with one another.

Now, for the other big element of this story: Pennywise. Expectations were high; the one thing everyone can agree upon is that Tim Curry did a fantastic job bringing life to an otherwise shitty miniseries. He had some pretty big clown shoes to fill, so how did Bill Skarsgard do? He fucking NAILED IT. Pennywise is as creepy and unsettling as he should be, at times his feral, animalistic nature shining through the thin facade of niceness he puts on. Really though, this Pennywise doesn’t bother much with any pretense of being nice and friendly as far as we see; sure, he’s nice at first to Georgie, but even Georgie is creeped out. Pennywise here is a sick, twisted tormentor who spends every waking moment filling the kids with paranoia and fear, fattening them up so he can devour them. Skarsgard being 6’4” makes Pennywise all the more horrifying and intimidating, as does his eerie ability to swivel his eyes in two different directions… meaning Pennywise is not only watching the kids, but YOU as well. He is the Heath Ledger Joker to Tim Curry’s Jack Nicholson Joker, a terrifying monster compared to the violent jester. Somehow, they even made one of the most absurd aspects of the story, the Deadlights, into something truly horrifying… and it comes right after the funny dance from all those memes! Talk about mood whiplash! My only issue is that aside from jumpscares, good jumpscares mind you, Pennywise doesn’t get to show off his personality as much as I’d have liked. He does get a few really good scenes, particularly the one with Georgie, the one in the old house, and the final confrontation, but other than that he’s mostly just preying on the kids and being disturbing. This isn’t a huge issue I take with the film or Skarsgard’s portrayal or anything, so don’t misunderstand, and there’s gonna be backstory for Pennywise in the sequel, so as it stands this is some very good setup for what’s to come.

There is one other element that actually was well done against all odds: Georgie. Georgie establishes so well from the opening scene just how much he loves his brother, and it makes what you know will happen to him all the more tragic… and when it does, it’s a punch in the gut. But he pops up throughout the film as something Pennywise uses to torment Bill. This would be corny in the hands of anyone else, but goddamn did Jackson Robert Scott do a great job. He’s one of the best child actors I’ve ever seen, changing so well to suit the scene, be it his sweet charming little boy of the opening to the monstrous, decaying illusion crafted by Pennywise to torment Bill. Scott has a good career ahead of him with an acting job this good on his resume.

As for the story, they did a good job of updating it and editing it so that it maintains the spirit of the original and keeps the atmosphere and characterization intact while cutting out some unnecessary shit. For instance, Patrick Hockstetter’s role is even more minor here than in the book, and we don’t have to see him give Henry a handjob in the junkyard after lighting farts on fire, so there’s a plus. The updating of the setting to the 80s was a good choice, as it also freshens up the characters to make them more tolerable, particularly Richie who here makes actual funny comments instead of doing racist caricature voices. And obviously, I would be a fool to not point out just how much I do not miss the “Sewergy” scene that happens at the end of the book, where the Losers run a train on Bev in the sewer so they can all escape the lair of It. I love Stephen King, but I think he went a bit too far at some points in the coked-up haze that was his time in the 80s.

This film is, shockingly, a good horror film in this day and age. Out of every King adaptation involving the supernatural, this is probably my favorite, as well as the one that stays closest to the source material in the ways that matter. The kids are all excellent, there’s great humor, mostly great scares, and a Pennywise that truly lives up to the terror of King’s novel. It’s about damn time this book got this sort of treatment… and we only had to wait 27 years for it to happen after the really lame first adaptation. 27 years… what a nice in-joke.

The bar is set pretty high for the sequel; it has high expectations for it, especially with what little we know so far. But the fact Mike is gonna get more characterization and Pennywise is gonna get more screentime and there’s going to be backstory for the eponymous monster gives me hope; if they can just get a cast of adults who can showcase the same level of friendship as the kids in the first film, things will be perfect. I have faith, something I never thought I’d say about a Stephen King adaptation’s sequel in this day and age. Hell, the fact a Stephen King adaptation is this popular just warms my heart.

Let’s just hope we don’t have to wait another 27 years for another good one after part two is done.

#Review #movie review #It #Stephen King's It #Pennywise #Pennywise the Dancing Clown #horror #clown

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theselectfewblog · 7 years ago

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THOR: RAGNAROK

USA • 2017

DIRECTOR: Taika Waititi

GENRE: Superhero, Action, Adventure, Comedy

FEATURING: Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Mark Ruffalo, Tessa Thompson, Cate Blanchett, Jeff Goldblum, Idris Elba, Benedict Cumberbatch, Anthony Hopkins

MUSIC: Mark Mothersbaugh

RUNNING TIME: 130 mins

Coming after what seems to feel like an onslaught of Marvel films these past few years, it would have been easy for Thor: Ragnarok to fall under the radar as yet another mindless superhero movie. And yet it didn’t. Despite what may be an overdone premise of a plot - good guy gets into a bad situation, bad guy (in this case girl) appears, makes situation worse, good guy teams up with some other cool people and saves the day just in time - it was invigorating and a thoroughly enjoyable film.

Right from the offset, the dialogue was witty, sharp and humourous. There were moments where many laughed out loud at the sheer comedic genius of certain lines and characteristics, such as the sinde comments between Thor and Loki. A special mention must go to Jeff Goldblum, who brought so much vivacity and thrill to his character, it was a delight to seem him light up the screen. For me though, the stand-out character was Korg, a blue rock-monster forced to be a gladiator by The Grand Master (Goldblum), voiced by none other than Waititi himself. The light-hearted humour he brought to the screen was a delight to watch and ironically he shone as the stand out character in the whole film.

Waititi also excelled himself in casting; it is well-known that Hollywood is not exactly at the forefront of representation when it comes to films, and yet Waititi not only increased the role of long-time Thor cast-member Idris Elba (playing Heimdall, the fugitive guardian of the Bifrost) into a much more crucial role, he also cast Tessa Thompson in the role of Valkryie. Not only did he incorporate the concept of the Valkryie, a legion of kick-ass women warriors, into his film, but he made the only surviving one a black woman, something so important in this current climate. Thomspon excels in this role, showing how a woman can be just as powerful as a man, even someone like Thor, but she also plays against typical gender stereotypes. The first time we see her she falls drunk off her spaceship, already creating the impression that this is no ‘ordinary’ (for lack of better term) woman. But then she single-handedly wipes out a group of scavengers and successfully manages to take a god into capture, hinting at the fact that maybe there is more to her that meets the eye. This is skilfully developed throughout the film, until it culminates in her fulfilling her duty as a female warrior and sets an astonishing example to girls watching that regardless of gender or race, you can still be just as powerful and even just as cool as any man or white person. However, my only issue with her character is the fact that it was hinted there would be a budding romance between her and Thor (played by Hemsworth). It seems unnecessary to add this in, especially after the disaster of Thor’ s relationship with Jane in the first two Thor films (played by Natalie Portman), even if only to create an emotional connection to her character for when she is (inevitably) killed off in Infinity War. The film and her character would have been just as spectacular without this indication, and it fails to add anything to the plot. It seems to be just a simple character development used to fill up screentime, and it would have been better if not included. Another bonus point for Waititi was the fact that he took such a bold move in wiping out all of Asgaard at the end, allegedly because it “looked like quite a privileged place” (Empire Podcast) - many of the extras cast as Asgaardians were white. Ultimately this shows how he is a director aware of inequality, and one who is not afraid to call it out, even if in a made-up realm in a fantasy universe. The message still stands though, and without a doubt, Waititi is a director to watch.

Hemsworth, Ruffalo and Hiddleston all outshine themselves from their previous performances for the MCU in this film. Hemsworth is much more charismatic and the old, bland, dutiful Thor has gone to be replaced with one who is funny and entertaining to watch, especially with his reunion with Hulk (Ruffalo), a scene which in itself was a masterpiece, if not overdrawn slightly. The chemistry between Hemsworth and Ruffalo is a delight to watch as Thor tries and fails to play into the role of caring for Banner and stopping him turning back into Hulk. Similarly, Hulk’s role is so much more enjoyable than in any other film we have seen of him, and it is such a joy to finally be able to watch Ruffalo play with his character and develop him even more. On top of this relationship, the one between Thor and Loki is just as amusing, with both actors bouncing off each other wonderfully. Loki himself is such a unique character, one we all love to hate, and his character arc, even form his very first introduction into the MCU, finally feels complete and Hiddleston exceeds expectations of his character, remaining as acidic in wit and humour throughout. A favourite scene was the ‘Need Help’ scene in which Hemsworth and Hiddleston so perfectly work together and reveal the intertwined childhood’s behind both their characters, even if the ending feels somewhat predictable, showcasing their create chemistry between them.

Cate Blanchett too plays a wonderful villain in Hela, and brings such a wicked sense of evil to the screen it is completely fascinating and enticing to watch. Similarly, the cameos throughout the film, especially Cumberbatch resuming his role as Dr Strange, are a compelling plateau from the drama of the main plot. A special mention must go to Matt Damon, Luke Hemsworth and Sam Neill, all of whom are hilarious on screen playing thespian versions of Loki, Thor and Odin at the start. A surprising, but not unwelcome cameo by all three, their humour is charming despite being brief. However, the role of Skurge (played by Karl Urban) fails to add much to the overall plot and seems to be a typical lone-wolf resolution arc where they heroically try and save the day to show how “good” they really are deep down, but ultimately end up dying in a “hero’s sacrifice”. Skurge was a rather cliché and dull character, despite Urban’s best efforts to make him compelling, he fell short of the rest of the film.

An accurate and fantastic way of describing this film would be “Avengers meets Guardians of the Galaxy”. This is helped dramatically by the wonderful soundtrack; a mix of 80s music combined with typical cinematic orchestration creates a sonic masterpiece which only enriches the action of the screen, and it feels like a fantastic bridge between the intense action we have come to expect from the Avengers franchise and the exuberant entertainment from the Guardians of the Galaxy.

All in all, Thor is arguably the best Marvel films in years, and not only helped in finally showing Thor as an interesting character (something which the first two Thor films failed to do, rendering him a dull monotonous character) but in also bringing some life back into a franchise which felt overworked and overdone before this, despite the upcoming release of Black Panther this year and Avengers: Infinity War parts 1 & 2 in the next few years. Hopefully Marvel can take some hints from this masterpiece and continue to inject the comedy and entertainment seen here in these upcoming films too. I certainly hope they do.

RATING: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

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hawk-in-a-jazzy-hat · 8 years ago

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Anime Review: Eureka Seven, and Why Anime was Better in the Olden Days

In a constantly shifting world, people are clinging to life as best they can, despite tectonic shifts and mysterious Desperation Disease making life hard. Still, the people cling to hope in this weird world; hope for the military, for the rebel group Gekko-State, and hope brought about by the hero of the people, Adroc Thurston. Hope that the world will someday be healed.

So we meet Adroc’s son, Renton Thurston, who lives with his mechanic grandfather and dreams of a life where he can freely lift through the sky. Then his life changes as a giant robot crashes through his roof, and he meets a mysterious young girl named Eureka, as well as the Gekko-State leader himself, Holland. Given a powerful device called the Amita Drive by his grandfather, which is able to power a famous robot known as the Nirvash, or Type/Zero, Renton rushes off in pursuit of Eureka, and a new life aboard the Gekko-State. But ominous rumblings are brewing in the military and the very core of the world itself, and the carefree life that Renton thought he was getting into may just be the greatest test he’s ever faced...

Oh yeah, I’m going there. And I’m finally gonna explain why.

The golden age of anime, or of media in general, is an incredibly subjective thing. It depends on your tastes, the things you grew up with, and the things thrust at you as you stumble through life. As such, I cannot in any way say “anime was better at this time that it has ever been since”, because that’s just my opinion. And I would always respect otherwise. But still, for me, film, music and anime were all better in the olden days.

Of course, “the olden days” itself is relative. In my case the golden generation would be the one before me; say the mid-80s to the mid-90s for music and film. Anime is slightly more recent, given that the industry is actually slightly behind western animation on the timeline (so much so that the first ‘anime’ series, as it were, Astro Boy, was based off of classic Disney cartoons). That means the ‘golden age’ of anime for me actually spans from the late 90s to exactly 2007. And yes, as with everything, of course there was a load of crap that came out in that time period, and yes there have been better shows come out since (two of my favourite shows are from 2010 and 2011 respectively). But, in general, I feel anime was at its best during that period, for a few reasons.

So where does that leave Eureka Seven? It came out in 2006 as an original story from Bones, and is now considered one of the classic mech shows along with Evangelion and Gurren Lagann. So how exactly is it? And what is it that makes it so firmly a product of the golden age of anime?

Let’s start with the animation. The absolutely phenomenally awesome animation. Oh yeah, Studio Bones, baby. Immediately that puts this in the classic category; I know nowadays there are a tonne of awesome studios out there, both veterans and newcomers, but back in the day when you saw the Bones logo you knew that the show was going to look stunning. Wolf’s Rain, both FullMetal Alchemists, Soul Eater, Darker than Black, and even in the recent years they haven’t let up with shows like Blood Battlefront Blockade, My Hero Academia and Mob Psycho 100. For the longest time they were the epitamy of quality animation, and they don’t drop the ball here. Eureka Seven looks absolutely wonderful. The character animation is amazing and never devolves into emoticon slapstick, the backgrounds are wonderful, as are the colours, and the show has probably some of the best aerial battles I’ve ever seen. Eureka Seven has the unique style of having giant robots surfing through the sky, and whether or not it’s a silly concept, you can totally buy it with some of the most wonderful flying and falling moments I’ve ever seen. The only time Eureka Seven looks less than stellar is just on occasion, where they’re obviously holding back a little budget and some of the faces get a little squash-and-stretchy. But honestly, it doesn’t matter one bit. Having every frame be perfect is nowhere near as important as having the truly important moments be special.

The animation truly is excellent, but honestly I was far more blown away by the score to this show. The composer was Naoki Satō, and honestly I’ve only heard his work once before in Assassination Classroom, although for the life of me I can’t really remember a single track. Here is a different story though, as the entire score to Eureka Seven just blew me away. From wonderfully emotional opening themes to bittersweet endings to great sweeping strings and horns to some actually epic trance and techno pieces; the whole score is full of standouts both long and short, and it’s probably the only anime soundtrack I’ve listened to in full while I’ve been working (aside from Baccano). The music belongs to the show, and it is the show. Without it, it wouldn’t be the same. I’ve heard some people say over the years that soundtracks aren’t really important, and there seems to be a rising case of that in many modern blockbusters. But as these old series, and heck, even older films can testify, the soundtrack is important. In fact, essential. Decisive Battle. Goodnight Julia. The friggin’ Team Rocket theme. And among films, The Raider’s March. He’s a Pirate. Binary Sunset. I don’t even need to have the music clips and you’re probably already humming them in your head. The music of your favourite things will stick with you until the very end of time. That is how important the soundtrack is. Again, anime was better in the olden days.

While I can’t lavish as much praise onto the dub as I can the music, I can say it grew on me an awful lot. This is, I believe, an early Bang Zoom! effort, a company who would later go on to do good work with Madoka and Kill la Kill. It still has the old dub flavours though, with a few very recognisable actors and a few actors who don’t really act very well? I don’t know; as older dubs go it’s not as fluently fitting as GTO but it’s nowhere near as flat as Elfen Lied or Soul Eater so it sort of balances out. And for the most part the actors do a great job; Johnny Young Bosch and Crispin Freeman perform really nicely as Renton and Holland respectively, as you’d expect; Kate Higgins is a standout as Talho, and while Stephanie Sheh as Eureka takes some time to get into the role, she’s definitely nailing it by the end. In fact most of the Gekko-State, the recurring villains and even a few one-off characters really nail the voices, with the exception of Woz’s actor, who always sounds like he’s questioning everything he says, and Ken-Goh’s VA in the second half of the series, Kyle Hebert. He isn’t terrible, but after the original actor Bob Papenbrook sadly passed away in 2007, the change is very noticeable.

If there is a problem with the dub it lies a little more with the script than the actors. While most of it is very well handled and feels natural, there are definitely a few monologue-y moments where the actors are clearly just standing on a soapbox. But still, as a dub it works well. Very well. And I’m not convinced that the monologue-y moments are really the fault of the ADR team, at least, not completely. But I’ll get to that a little bit later.

You may have been slightly confused with the plot synopsis, and all the weird and wonderful terms and things going on. This is understandable; this is not a simple series, with alien worlds, political and military turmoil, and a huge cast of characters. There is a lot of lore, and a lot of stuff going on in the background that even I couldn’t always follow. Much like Outlaw Star, this is a world of...well...worldbuilding. And yet despite not being simple, it is far from inaccessible. I’d even go so far as to see this would be a very good introductory series for anime newcomers; certainly a better introductory mecha series than either Evangelion or Gurren Lagann.

(Partly because it’s kinda not really a mecha series. I mean, it is, and the mechas are a very important part, but halfway through it sorta turns out to be Trigun in disguise, in more ways than one).

There’s a reason for this, and again it goes into why I prefer the older style of series; despite the fact that all this stuff is going on, the focus is constantly on the main characters. The central point of the series, for the whole 50 episodes, are the relationships aboard the Gekko-State. Romantic, platonic, and familial. Renton’s growing relationship with Eureka and Hollands strained relationship with Talho. And the characters interact with each other, and no interaction is the same. There’s no simple ‘oh I respect this guy and I’m utterly loyal to him’. There’s a lot of back talking, and a lot of abuse being flung around. There’s blood, there’re tears, and fights, and some of it can be downright unpleasant to watch. But guess what; that’s a family! Even when Renton is being at his most annoying-teenager, or Holland is at his most annoying-manchild, or heck, the three kids who are constantly annoying, it still feels natural. They are inherently relatable characters, even if we don’t always like them.

And that’s just the main four; the rest of the Gekko-State are wonderful to watch as well, and heck, even members of the military. Despite the fact that not all of them go through a character arc, even the less prominent ones like Woz and Joves still feel like real people. And I say that not all of them go through an arc, but there’s a lot of really sneaky development here across the board. The shouty military commander Jurgens spends the beginning as a shouty commander, but he reveals a few hidden depths later in the series. Moondoggie (yeah, I know, but just roll with the names) is constantly fighting against feelings of his own inadequacy. Stoner is trying to find his own way to fight, being very pacifistic. Ray and Charles, despite a limited screentime, still manage to be some of the best written characters in the cast. Even among the children, there is Maurice, whose story I found utterly heartbreaking, not just for the obvious reasons, but for the build-up throughout the series and how much the final...reveal...hit close to home. These are real people. We spend the series following real people making real decisions, and some of them are very bad decisions. They make mistakes, they scream and shout. Some of them never recover, whereas others must try to deal with the consequences. And occasionally...just occasionally...some of them find their redemption. And let me tell you, they may make for the most glorious scenes of the show.

That’s the thing. Not every character needs to go through a deep epiphany, or come out on top, or even have a real purpose in the story. You could easily write out half the members of Gekko-State, but the show would suffer greatly for it. In most modern shows of this kind, every character needs a purpose. They must have their moment in the spotlight, and their own character arc. But the thing is, we already have a story, that being, Renton and Eureka’s relationship. Some of the other characters will have stories tying into it, but this is their show. We are seeing things unravel through their eyes, and sometimes, the main character needs a constant they can lean on. That’s when you need the Winrys, the Meryl Stryfes, and the Gekko-States. Back in the day, characters were exactly that. Characters. Characters in their own right, whose paths would cross with those of the mains. Not constructs. As wonderfully crafted as shows like Hunter X Hunter and FMA Brotherhood can be, the side characters too often steal the focus away from where it needs to be. The show does not need to pull you out of the main character arc to show you another one; it should be able to just show you through the eyes of the main. I don’t need to know Shoot’s or Ikalgo’s or Ling’s motivations absolutely word-for-word; I should be able to work it out for myself.

And that’s the point (which I’ve finally gotten back round to); when I see a good modern anime, or a good modern film, or hear a good modern song, I see and hear something that is perfect. Something that has been crafted beautifully and exquisitely to be utterly flawless. And, as weird as it sounds...that’s not how art works. Art needs to have flaws; that is one of the fundamental aspects. You cannot have art that is objectively perfect, since part of the reason it exists as it does is the fact that it is subjective to the creator. It cannot be objectively perfect, therefore, it must have flaws. Every show, every film, every song out there has flaws. And that’s what makes things beautiful.

Eureka Seven has flaws. Oh boy, does it have flaws. Way too much technobabble and monologuing in parts. Some of the dialogue feels incredibly forced and preachy. Some really, really unpleasant scenes in places where even if it fits with the characters it’s just not nice to watch. The pacing can be very off, especially in parts where there are multiple things going on at once. Little things scattered throughout the series, and heck, I like it. There are people out there who are going to hate this show for the choices it makes.

But the flaws make Eureka Seven what it is, just as they do for every show. But more and more nowadays, I see films and shows that have to be utterly perfect in everything they do. The plot has to have the right timing and the right number of twists, and be split into nice neat little arcs. The characters need to have a distinct character arc that finishes in the correct place, and heaven forbid we let any characters make mistakes. Nothing is allowed to be their fault. As technically great as things such as Civil War or Frozen are, I hate the fact that there has to be a villain. There has to be somebody you can point at and say “I can support the good guys in everything because it’s all their fault.” Direction and music fit everything to a tee, to the point where the soundtrack can just be plucked from a massive backlog in order to fit the mood perfectly. In songs, it’s always the same beats, and the same chord structures, and the same computed synthetic backings, in order to show how the singer has such perfect control over their voice even though they’re not saying anything. And NOTHING is allowed to have flaws anymore. The moment a show goes into the very slightest of heavier material, suddenly it’s problematic and sending a bad message. The general public are far too critical of everything nowadays, constantly pointing out plot-holes and every single mistake a film makes, so much so that you fail to see the good. We live in a culture that will judge everything we see before we’ve even seen it, and we will praise the technically flawless as the very best without accepting that people could possibly, possibly like something else more. And believe me, I’m among them. I went through a period of being so critical that I was willing to criticise the technicals of a joke in a kid’s play. It’s not a good look, and it’s not a good feeling when you look back and realise that sometimes you just need to sit back and enjoy something for a change.

Does it go for everything nowadays? Of course it doesn’t, and of course not everything in the olden days was better. We’ve kept the good stuff and wisely decided to leave the crap behind. Even in anime. Too much studio meddling, too little effort going into the story or animation, often way too much filler, and sometimes so needlessly dark that you end up with a Berserk or an Elfen Lied.

And the very reason that so much modern anime is so technically great is that the industry is in a fantastic place. More series are being made every season, with a variety of lengths, new techniques and new studios. Just last year Studio Mappa made a massive hit with Yuri!! On Ice; a unique sports show that was funny, charming, had some gorgeous skating scenes and finally gave a great representation of a gay couple in an anime, in a mainstream hit. It had its issues with the animation and the ending (and I’ll admit, I haven’t seen the whole show so I can’t give my own opinion) but honestly that’s what made it such a hit. It’s going to stick, whether people love it, hate it, think it’s over or underrated or just think it’s meh.

And in every medium, that is the art that will stick. I can think of two areas which are better now than have ever been before. One is kids’ shows and films, which are finally being taken seriously as a legitimate art form and are having more effort put into them than ever before (Lego Movie, Zootopia, Gravity Falls, Steven Universe, Inside Out, and every Laika film, among many). The other is things that are entirely creator-driven, which was what made the classics what they were. More and more people have more freedom to create the thing they want to make. Over in the west, people like Guillermo del Toro, George Miller and Neil Gaiman, or again with the kids shows, people like Rebecca Sugar, Pendleton Ward, Daron Nefcy, Ben Bocquelet and Alex Hirsch. Netflix and Amazon are bringing more unique and wonderful shows and adaptations to more and more people. And in the anime world, there are creators like Gen Urobuchi, Kunihiko Ikuhara, Jun Maeda and ONE, as well as new and upcoming studios like Shuka, 3Hz and of course Studio Mappa. The talent is out there. The people who care are out there. And I have no doubt that in another few years we’re going to see a new renaissance of media as people like this – people like you and me - take the technology and the dedication we now have, sit down, and make the story they want to make. Flaws and all.

Anime was better in the olden days. Film was better in the olden days. Music was better in the olden days. Not because it had more talent or technique behind it, though we have sadly lost several geniuses over the past few years. It was better, because the people who made it cared. They didn’t care about it being perfect, or being good for people. The things that were good were so good because people picked up the camera, or the pen, or the instrument, and they wanted to make something. They wanted to make their very own piece of art, and nobody was going to stop them.

And we got Empire Strikes Back, and Blues Brothers, and Terminator 2, Labyrinth, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ghostbusters, Lion King, Gremlins, Jurassic Park and Beetlejuice. We got Take On Me, Living On a Prayer, I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That), Heaven is a Place On Earth, Under Pressure, Tunnel of Love and Dry County. And we got Cowboy Bebop, FullMetal Alchemist, Wolf’s Rain, Gunslinger Girl, Baccano, Bokurano, Clannad, Princess Tutu and Welcome to the NHK.

And we got so, so many wonderful things. Not one of them perfect. But all of them forever wonderful.

Eureka Seven is a deeply flawed show, and yet I absolutely love it. It impressed me in all the right ways, with relatable characters, an exciting world, an inspiring story and an absolutely gorgeous presentation. It is every bit a product of the heart and love of Dai Satō, Naoki Satō, and every member of Studio Bones who worked on it. Not everybody will like everything about it, but personally, I found it a true classic. It made my top 20 in an instant and I would recommend it to anybody interested, and in fact, if you live in the good old UK like myself, the whole series is available completely free and legally on Viewster. Go for it. See the stories that came out over a decade ago. Because let me tell you, it’s going to be a little while before we see anything like their kind again.

My score: 9/10

#eureka seven #studio bones #anime 2006 #sorry not sorry

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