#There's also something to playing the original and then making the technological and story leap to 2 that I'm looking forward to :)

[sysig]

I haven't played the original Half-Life all the way through, but I played Black Mesa (the fan remake with updated graphics and whatnot) and apparently they cut the tedious parts of On A Rail down by quite a bit. It might be worth looking into if that's what made the game hard to get through! I really enjoyed it, personally ^^ I'm super excited to potentially see more Stanley Parable posts as well, since I got TSPUD recently and loved it! Congrats on the achievement!!

Oohh, sounds interesting :0 I'm a bit of a stubborn SOB when it comes to Games-I've-Already-Got haha, so I'll probably still try to see this version through, but thank you for the tip! Likely I'll need it if I ever want to subject myself to going back through to look for specific level details that YouTube videos simply will not pause long enough on lol

Congrats to you as well on getting to play Ultra! I still can't swing the price just yet, but I also refuse to engage in spoilers aside from quickly glancing away from thumbnails, darn algorithms knowing what I'm interested in, not giving a care about spoilers! Lol

But you can be sure to expect Stanley stuff, it's a game I love <3

[avboni]

Sci-Fi in Video Games

Keywords: Video games, Sci-Fi, genre, media, Information Technology, Info Tech, IT, Cyberpunk, Futuristic, tech, technology, online privacy, Destiny, Star Fox, Ready Player One, media, VR, virtual reality, oculus, meta quest, quest, Apple, Apple Vision Pro, Steam, SteamDeck, SteamVR, Meta, Metaverse, Facebook, affordable, market, entertainment, remote work, Alexa, Google Home, Star Trek, Star Wars

Abstract: A summary of the personal influence of Sci-Fi that has affected both media and real life and the way we create and use technology.

My topic for the semester will cover Sci-Fi in video games and its influence over the years. This topic will also include the real-life impacts of making fiction into a reality. I'll also be making sure to explain as best as I can and provide sources for any in-depth analysis. If there are certain subjects I go over within the sci-fi category that you don't understand, you'll have more resources at your disposal. However, do keep in mind that this post is written for an audience that has some backstory in the Sci-Fi genre.

My love for the Sci-Fi genre stems back to my childhood. Technology was starting to take massive leaps into the future, and the media was quick to follow the hype to profit from it. Video games certainly played a key role in my first introduction to the genre with a game that is very important to me, Star Fox. It involves human-like animals that have adventures in space in aircraft and scenarios that defy space and time with plenty of Sci-Fi elements in there such as planetary travel, cybernetic enhancements, and futuristic weaponry. While not the first sci-fi game to exist, it was certainly one of the more technically important games.

A video interview with Dylan Cuthbert, a lead programmer on the original SNES Star Fox game, mentions that the game itself was the first of its kind in many ways.

“… Basically, it was one of the first scripted languages in a game really, I think. It was multi threaded in a way as well.” (Hagues, 2023 at 7:46)

Another interview explains that this was one of the first 3D games that could be played on home consoles, something that has never been done before. The early iterations of the game helped advanced games coming into a more 3D world rather than a flat side scroller or top down view of the environment due to its innovative technical skills of the programmers behind the game. This was made possible by a chip called the Super FX which allows cartridges to render items in 3D.

“To be honest, I don���t think it had much of an impact on the industry,” he admits. “As a genre, it had already been done in the arcades with Star Wars and Starblade. The timing, of course, was important; it was the first time 3D could be played on a home console. So that was new.” (Developer, 2023)

Another game that uses Sci-Fi in its storytelling is Destiny. It blends the wonderful world of magic, science, and endless elements of futuristic destinations, weaponry, and storytelling. The story of fighting in space is nothing new in the gaming industry, so something different had to be presented to their audience. The Destiny universe was made to allow players to have a free roam of the worlds and explore the sandbox (a term used for game development and player interaction) which has not been explored in Sci-Fi games as they were often written to be linear storytelling and gameplay rather than exploration.

“What these people are waiting for is the launch of the epic online sci-fi adventure Destiny, the biggest, most costly to make video game, the most preordered piece of entertainment software in history.” (Stuart, 2020)

Other games that came in development after Destiny’s release in order to publish their own works of art in the same combination of different elements in space, found it difficult to maintain a long connection with players and were cut short due to its unfortunate shortcomings.

Anthem‘s demise comes not from one fatal blow as much as it bled to death from a thousand small, inconsequential cuts. It failed because it took so much from its live-service peers that it neglected to craft an identity all of its own. In its desperation to be all things for all players its become nothing for no-one, failing to stand out in any meaningful way in an already grossly over-saturated market. (Blake, 2021)

Be it through their advancements on pushing home consoles past their limitations or artistically combining multiple genres to create something unique, video games such as Star Fox and Destiny have helped shape and redefine the genre within the game industry.

The interest in Sci-Fi in media has always been a special interest of mine. There are thousands of stories told while using this subject and while many do follow the same formula of a post-apocalyptic world setting, there is always an outlier that makes them different from the rest. Some stories include in their Sci-Fi works elements of magic, science that we could never even dream of, or even something unique and simple to the narrative.

Sci-fi has a wonderfully rich history that spans multiple cultures and tells in their time, what their future is. One example is Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

“… Verne and his enduringly popular Voyages extraordinaires continue to remind us that “What one man can imagine, another will someday be able to achieve.” (Evans, 2024)

This take on sci-fi combines the genre with adventure, thus creating a new subgenre of it. This adaptation of an already fascinating topic only fuels future authors to create and mix other genres to craft fantastic new worlds. Some of these worlds have even been created and are the foundation of early pop culture such as Star Trek and Star Wars.

However, there needs to be a reminder of the first official novel of science fiction: The Chemical Wedding - by Johann Valentin Andreae. His work alone thrust fiction into an entirely new light.

Published in 1616, The Chemical Wedding predates Johannes Kepler’s novel Somnium, which was written in 1608 but not published until 1634 and “which usually gets the nod” as the first science fiction story. (Flood, 2016)

Interacting with these stories that have elements of technology that were once things of fiction become a reality is both fascinating and terrifying. As someone who works within IT, seeing and working with certain tech tools has drastically changed my viewpoint on personal privacy as well as online privacy. Some of these changes have become so mainstream that people who are unaware of the potential dangers of implementing smart devices into their homes can have major downsides.

I have seen a few people who refuse to have devices such as a Google Home or an Alexa in their own homes due to the fear of seeing the negative impact shown in media dealing with at-home monitoring devices. There are even memes in regard to the rapid technological advancement because of this.

Of course, it's not always doom and gloom. Some people even take their evolving tech out with them in public! With this fast change in the way we use technology in public or at home, there have been countless ways to improve upon its quality for the devices we use.

Virtual Reality (VR) has taken Sci-Fi to the next level for humanity and our relationship to technology. Companies such as Meta, Apple, and Steam have all been creating equipment and programs that are affordable to the public market. There is a headset for each person and their desired use of it. If one wants to focus primarily on entertainment, then using a headset from Meta is your best option due to its price and ease of access. Because of the mass availability of this product, Steam has created software to work with this headset and others to pair with their Steam accounts to play VR-compatible games at the highest resolution their computer can run.

However, it is not only limited to just entertainment. One can use them for other means of being in the Metaverse like taking calls or meeting in virtual spaces to communicate with others. If being in a virtual space sounds better as both a playground and a workplace with endless possibilities, then the newest Apple product called Apple Vision Pro is the way to go. This product has reinvented the way VR spaces function.

“Apple Vision Pro can transform any room into your own personal theater. Expand your movies, shows, and games up to the perfect size while feeling like you’re part of the action with Spatial Audio. And with more pixels than a 4K TV for each eye, you can enjoy stunning content wherever you are — whether that’s a long flight or the couch at home.” (Apple, 2024)

It has eliminated the need for a television and even a computer by being able to handle all of those processes in a sleek, lightweight eyepiece. The future of technology is growing ever closer and closer to resemble the film Ready Player One.

Apple. (n.d.). Apple Vision Pro. https://www.apple.com/apple-vision-pro/

Blake, V. (2021, April 12). It’s official: ‘Anthem’ is shutting down. So what went wrong? NME. https://www.nme.com/features/gaming-features/adieu-anthem-2916293

Developer, G. (2023, November 19). 25 years on, devs reflect on the influence and impact of Star Fox. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/25-years-on-devs-reflect-on-the-influence-and-impact-of-i-star-fox-i-#close-modal

Evans, A. B. (2024, January 24). Jules Verne. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jules-Verne

Flood, A. (2018, February 22). Work from 1616 is “the first ever science fiction novel.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/23/work-from-1616-is-the-first-ever-science-fiction-novel

Hagues, A. (2023, February 17). Video: Star Fox Dev Gets Nostalgic Ahead Of SNES Game’s 30th Anniversary. Nintendo Life. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2023/02/video-star-fox-dev-gets-nostalgic-ahead-of-snes-games-30th-anniversary

Stuart, K. (2020, April 17). Destiny: behind the scenes of the world’s most expensive video game. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/sep/01/destiny-behind-scenes-most-expensive-video-game-ever

[angstmongertina]

The Vision of Lachesis

Spoilers for Artem’s Entwined Fates SSR card story! Also, warning for angst and implied/mentioned character death, because I can only write so much fluff before things get angsty.

I had this idea almost as soon as I played the Entwined Fates card story because I am a sucker for outside POV fics, though the idea for the last scene came later lol. Incidentally, if you want to skip the angst, just stop before the little warning I put in there. Everything before it should be perfectly fluffy.

Cross-posted to AO3.

In his years living at Cloudbreak Temple, Master Lu has already seen many visitors pass through its gate, all with various different hopes and dreams and stories filling their souls. He has seen everyone, from new babies to old grandmothers, from shy young couples to blissful newlyweds and bickering old spouses. And still, the pair he spies entering the temple catch his attention.

He is, as is always the case during the busy festival days, pulled in all directions at once, guiding petitioners through the rituals of prayer and interpreting fortune, but even so, he cannot help but keep an eye on them. A man in front, tall and middle-aged, wearing a solemn expression that does not quite suit the laugh lines on his face, and a boy, not yet fully grown and quiet, shying away slightly from the noise and bustle around him but watching the proceedings with a bright, piercing gaze. The man says something, a gentle hand clapping the boy’s shoulder in a warm, fatherly gesture that brings a faint smile to the small face, before they dive into the crowd, and he turns his attention back to the couple before him.

Thankfully, they do not comment on his preoccupation and he puts the others out of mind as he helps them determine their fortunes.

The next time he sees the pair, they are with old Master Wang, which comes as no great surprise to him. Although Cloudbreak Temple may be most well-known for petitions to the star of wisdom, they accommodate many types of prayers, and while the boy may be of the age where success in learning and exams is important, one glance at the youthful face is enough to tell him that the boy has both intelligence and diligence to spare, and furthermore, a concrete attitude that would likely dismiss the thought of appealing to prayers for school out of hand. No, there is no need for prayers for success. But for safety, on the other hand…

He moves a little closer, still not yet so close as to be truly spying, but near enough to get a better look at the pair. The man is dressed casually, long brown hair pulled out of his face, and stands almost at a slouch, but the eyes that observe the world around him through thin-rimmed glasses are far from relaxed. Instead, their grey depths are cautious, sharp, clearly accustomed to seeking out the truth behind every person, every choice and interaction. It is only when they fall on the young man beside him do they soften with affection and concern. A man of action, of justice and strong morals, though perhaps of some impetuousness and with a fragility under it all.

A man, in short, who likely puts himself into the path of danger for the good of the people around him, but who also might shatter should he be pushed to the brink, should the lives of those he cares about be on the line.

And the boy…

Master Lu frowns, brushing a thoughtful hand over his chin and the faint beginnings of a thick beard as the man ruffles the boy’s hair and he looks up at his companion with a small but adoring smile.

The boy still has a whole entire life in store for him, of that he is certain. And one that will no doubt intersect with the temple again.

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When the couple steps through the gates of the temple, the man sheltering the girl beside him from the crowds, he notices them immediately. Though many years have passed, he has learned to trust his instincts, even beyond what his mind may tell him, and his gut recognizes the man long before his eyes do. The boy has grown, of course, in the ensuing two decades, but the bright intelligence, the thoughtfulness and care, all harken back to the shy child of so long ago.

But rather than his old friend and mentor, this time, the man brings with him a companion of his own. At first glance, she is just as bright-eyed and curious as he once was, though perhaps with more anxiety than he had, focusing immensely on the tasks before her. And the way he watches her…

Before he knows it, he is approaching the pair, standing at a table for the star of wisdom, and offers his assistance. He sees her attention flit away as her partner leaves for his own prayer, following him through the crowd with her eyes and her mind; though she appears to be unaware of it herself, her partner knows, and he knows, that even apart, their hearts, their very lives themselves, are irrevocably entwined, two souls pulled together by an inescapable gravity that he had not seen in decades, if ever.

He cannot help his curiosity about them, about this pair that seems to confirm the very existence of fate itself. These two lawyers, partners, these two halves of a single whole, that the universe has brought together, in an act of perfect balance.

Their marriage fortunes, an offer he makes that is part personal interest, part guiding hand, come as a surprise, though perhaps it should not have been wholly unexpected. He has never been wrong before, not about the couples who have captured his attention, but this…

This is less of a gentle nudge from fate and more of a flashing neon sign.

She reacts to her fortune tag first and he cannot help but smile at the curiosity, at the innocence, in her eyes. “I cannot keep my heart, as it longs to be with you…” A straightforward fortune, as befitting the girl who watches her partner with subconscious adoration, who still does not see his unconditional tenderness, who still does not understand her own constant preoccupation, for what they are. In time, she will realize.

But her partner…

He knows from the moment he sees the man’s face that the meaning of his own fortune is not lost on him. “It is better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.” And it is fitting for him, for the way he turns away from this, his hesitant heart, cautiously hopeful for a sign that the undying flame he carries will not be snuffed out, bruised from this heavy blow from fate, determined to carry its burden alone, to push his feelings aside and pretend that all is well, as he has always done.

It is a cautionary tale, this particular fortune, and he can say nothing, can only look on in weighty silence, as its recipient takes his companion and continues down his ill-fated and forewarned path.

Or, at least, attempts to, but for the efforts of the girl by his side. He does not listen to the conversation not meant for his ears but he does not need to, not when her thoughts are written clear across her face, not when she tugs her partner back to hear his explanation.

Not when she, despite being still oblivious to the depth of their connection, to the direction of her heart, immediately moves to petition, to help, to find some way of reversing the luck, propelled by outward concern and hidden affection.

He gives them directions both to the wishing tree and for the method to improve one’s luck and watches as she leaps at each opportunity, apparently unaware of the implications, in her quest to lessen her companion’s misfortune. But the man, now wearing a near constant smile of stunned helplessness, knows, even if he cannot, or perhaps more likely, will not, let himself, discern the cause of her concern.

Not even when it involves her suggesting that they bind their fortunes together on the wishing tree.

He chuckles, running his fingers over his beard as he watches them, their gentle discussion and animated features, both conveying so much to the world that they are too close, too farsighted, to see. But in this moment, it is not his place to say anything, to interfere any further, and so he doesn’t. Fate has already shown her own interest in their future, one that they have accepted and furthered, without, apparently, even realizing it.

Ah, to be young and in love.

Waving off their thanks, he watches as they leave before shaking his head and letting out the full-bellied laugh that he has been holding back since he first met them. In all of his years working at the temple, he has never been wrong before, and he is certain that he will not be wrong this time.

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The first day of the festival dawns early and bright, with that telltale warmth that foretells another hot August day. Even before the temple is open for visitors, anticipation hums through the air, the faint buzz as everyone prepares for the inevitable rush of petitioners.

Standing before the steps to the main temple, Master Lu looks out over the entire grounds with a smile. While the outside world has changed drastically in the past decades, within the temple, it is like being transported back in time; the same old tables from years past have already been set up, and the decorations, while not entirely the exact same as those used in centuries past, have all been remade in the original style.

In the fast-paced and ever-changing world, it is almost a sanctuary from time itself, where the tags of decades of visitors remain for an eternity and the history and traditions of the ancestors are preserved for future generations.

Well, at least in some ways more than others, if the influx of technology, and not just from forgetful visitors, is any indication.

He shakes his head, chuckling at his own preoccupation as he dodges young Master Zhao, juggling his attention between the pile of fortunes carried in his arms and the phone jammed under his ear. Clearly, he has begun to get overly sentimental in his old age.

Alas, yet another reminder of the inevitability of the passage of time.

The entry of visitors, a veritable tsunami of petitioners all looking to arrive early, interrupts his thoughts and he turns his attention to them, casting an experienced eye over the crowd. As usual, the vast majority make a beeline straight for the table for the star of wisdom, drawn as ever to the promise of good scores and success. Young couples make their way to the table for marriage fortunes, fresh-eyed and smitten with each other. And others still filter towards the other tables, for peace and wealth and…

And safety.

He spots the small family almost as soon as they pass through the gates, though they are admittedly hard to miss. The man and woman walk arm in arm, slow and cautious against the crush of the people around them, his form shifting to act as a barrier to shield her against the worst of the crowd. The height of the man alone would have been enough to catch his attention, but it is accentuated by the tiny pigtailed girl riding on his shoulders, adding another head to their overall height. From her perch, she looks around with bright, curious eyes, a small hand pointing towards the main temple, and him.

Even across the distance, he can see the surprise and recognition flicker in the bright blue eyes that meet his, and he would not have been able to hide his grin even if he had tried. As it is, though, he does not try, instead stepping forward to meet them with a greeting.

“I don’t know if you remember us, but…”

He shakes his head, waving off the woman’s comment with a laugh. “I do.”

And of course he does. How could he not? They have matured, naturally, settling into one combined force rather than two beings still tumbling in each other’s orbits; her hair is longer now, pulled into a neat bun, and his more disheveled than he’s ever seen under the ministrations of toddler hands; but the same spirit, the same keen eyes and entwined fates, shine out from the pair, unique amongst the crowd of other visitors.

He grins. “Of course I do. After all, it’s not every day I draw two fortunes quite so complementary, and even more rare to have them be hung up together on the wishing tree like that.”

At that, she laughs as well, her cheeks reddening slightly, and pauses to shake her bangs out of her face. “Yes, well, you were right, and it all worked out in the end.” She turns to her husband with a playful look, elbowing him gently in the ribs. “Even if it did take the better part of another year.”

“That is on you just as much as it is on me. After all, it took you just as long to realize,” the man retorts, though, to his amusement, his ears flush a faint red, which only deepens when their daughter points them out in a chipper voice, one loud enough that several visitors nearby turn to glance at them.

From the mouth of babes…

“What brings you back? Not just to check on your old tags, no?”

Shooting him a grateful look for the subject change, the man shakes his head, a faint smile curling the edges of his mouth. “No, though it is an added bonus. We’ve come for a new prayer for safety.”

His wife nudges him again, though gentler this time, and with less vigor. “Two, remember?”

He laughs openly, an expression that makes him look years younger, as he drops a hand to the gentle swell of her abdomen. “It may be a little early for that, still. I think he at least needs to have an official name first.”

She wrinkles her nose at him before laughing in turn. “Fine, fine. We will just have to come back again in a year or two.”

“Of course. Anything for you.”

“Daddy!”

A comically dramatic wince flashes across the man’s face when his daughter leans over, her voice projecting with unerring precision directly into his ear, and his wife is left hiding her amusement with some difficulty.

“Too loud, baobei.”

The bright blue eyes widen in distress. “Sorry, Daddy!”

He chuckles, reaching up to clasp her small fist in his hand. “It’s okay, baobei. What is it?”

Squirming from her perch on his shoulders, she points towards the back of the temple, where a few decorated branches of the wishing tree can be seen hanging over the roof. “Big tree! ‘S pretty! Go see?”

He shakes his head. “Later, maybe. First we have to—”

“No! Go see!” She leans over until she is hanging directly in front of his eyes. “Daddy, please?”

The man glances at his wife, who shrugs, mouthing the word “softie” while still wearing that same huge grin, and he finds that he has to struggle to choke back his laugh before anyone notices.

Given the soft snort that reaches his ears, he only partly succeeds.

“All right, then. Let’s go. We can come back for a prayer of safety”—the man glances back down at his wife, a faint but wondering smile dancing on his lips—“or even two, later.” With a solemn expression, the man offers him a deep, respectful nod, one that he is not quick enough to wave away. “Thank you, Master.”

“Bye-bye!”

Laughing, he waves at the trio, watching as they slowly weave their way through the crowd towards the back of the temple. Even across that distance, he can feel the affection and respect they hold for each other, can see the connection they share, which have managed to catch his attention time and time again.

When they finally move out of sight, he turns back to the temple and the flood of other guests, making a mental note to keep an eye out for the little family in future years. Maybe he can take a small break from drawing marriage fortunes in favor of overseeing prayers for safety for a few years…

STOP NOW IF YOU DON’T WANT ANGST.

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The sky is still dark with storm clouds when they first dare venture back outside to examine the state of the temple. In some ways, it is almost a miracle; despite the weeks of heavy storms, accompanied by shrieking gales and large hail, Cloudbreak Temple and its inhabitants have been mostly unharmed, save for superficial damages, just in time for the summer festival. Still, the mood is quiet, solemn, as everyone sets to work, clearing away the fallen branches, discarding the broken shingles, and making room for the stations as best they can in the limited time they have.

Wandering over the grounds, Master Lu shakes his head. Summer storms are not uncommon in the mountains, but even in the many decades that he has spent at Cloudbreak Temple, he has never seen a storm like that one, lightning seeming to rent the sky in two and thunder shaking the foundations of the temple itself, where there was naught to do but to stay indoors and safe. They were truly fortunate that nobody was injured and that most of the damages can be repaired.

Unfortunately, not all of the temple has remained quite so intact.

Stopping at the edge of the courtyard, he sighs, casting his gaze over the mess. It does not come as a complete surprise, given the lashing of the rain or the howling of the wind, but that does not change the sorrow he feels at the destruction that greets his eyes. Where there was once a majestic, venerable camphor tree is now a tired, wizened old thing, bowing under its own weight in the weak hints of daylight. Fortune tags lay strewn amongst the branches that had once held them aloft, once vivid symbols of the future now simply dark red and brown patches against muddy green, that he has to pick his way around as he wanders further in, taking in all of the damage.

But there is no time to clean up the mess, not in his old age and with everything else that will be happening for the day, and the visitors will understand, have to understand. He shakes his head, feeling all of his many years pressing down on his shoulders, almost as though he is fighting the weight of all the fallen wishes themselves.

“Master Lu?”

He looks up at the familiar voice and smiles. Master Chen, arms full of red cords, stands in the entryway of the courtyard, his bright eyes filled with concern, and he suddenly finds himself wondering when they all got so young.

“What is it? Do you need my help with anything?”

The boy shakes his head. “No, we are almost finished. There are enough of us to finish and handle the visitors, since there likely will not be many so soon after the storm. If you want, I could help clean this area…”

He shakes his head again, this time with a more genuine smile. “No, you go on. They’ll be needing you in the main temple, I’m sure. I can work here.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

Chen nods, putting the new cords on the nearby table before giving him a small, formal bow. “Thank you. Then I leave this to you.”

He waves the kid away, chuckling slightly as he watches him turn and walk back to the main temple before turning his attention back to the courtyard and the scattered fortunes, the remembrances of years, or decades even, of hopes and dreams.

With another heavy sigh, he squats down, tossing some fallen branches aside before picking up the wooden fortune at his feet. It is old, the carved text worn down by the elements, and he runs his fingers over the inscription, a brief statement on the virtues of hard work. A student had hung it there, once upon a time, and he closes his eyes for a moment, hoping that they achieved their goals, before tucking it into his robes and continuing forward.

In some ways, it is almost a walk down memory lane. Prayers to the star of wisdom from students that have long since graduated, who may even be teachers and professors now. Prayers for safety for people who have moved beyond that point, who may have even already passed. Marriage fortunes, ones that he helped distribute and interpret, for young couples that are now parents or even grandparents of their own…

He stumbles to a stop, staring down at the ground by his feet. Lying in the grass, so hidden by mud that he almost missed them, are two wooden cards. Their surfaces are almost entirely obscured by the dirt, but he still recognizes them instantly, the pair of fortunes so opposite to each other, so perfectly complementary. Held to the branch and each other by a red cord that has split and frayed under the years, no doubt hastened by the tempest.

Heaving another sigh, he leans over and…

“Master?”

Caught off-guard he snaps upright, turning around with a polite refusal on the tip of his tongue, but his instincts, ever reliable, stay his reply as the appearance of the visitor sinks in.

Dressed in dark, muted colors, he is easy to overlook, blending into his surroundings, into any crowd, with little effort. His face is drawn, haggard, lines of exhaustion etched into his skin, making him look years older, while his dark hair is disheveled, streaked with gray. Altogether, the man in the entryway, tired and worn, is almost unrecognizable from the young, joyous father of his memory. In just the few years since he last visited, he has aged a decade, his strong, confident form now frail, once bright azure eyes now dimmed, haunted.

And the man approaches, moving forward with slow, hesitant steps, eyes fixed on the tags he holds in his hand.

“That… Is that…?”

The voice nearly breaks around those few words, hoarse and almost inaudible, but he doesn’t need to hear the rest of the question, doesn’t need an explanation to know what the man wants, to know what must have happened.

Closing his eyes, he bows his head. “Yes. It is. They must have fallen during the storm.”

He hears a labored, shuddering breath, one that makes his own chest tighten in sympathy. “I… May I?”

“Of course.” He steps forward, gently placing the tags into his outstretched hands, watching as trembling fingers brush over the faded markings, the broken cord, as the pale face twists with fresh pain. “I…” He clears his throat. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

“Daddy?”

They both turn at the same time, where a small girl stands in the entryway of the courtyard, holding the hand of an older woman as she cradles a bundle in her other arm. Pulling free of the restraining grasp, she runs forward to join them, grabbing her father’s free hand. “Daddy?”

Something resembling a smile tugs at the corners of the man’s lips as he squats to his daughter’s eye level. “What is it, baobei?”

“Are you sad?”

The sound that leaves the man’s throat is more of a rasp than a chuckle, but neither of them seem to notice. “Yes.” He wraps an arm around the girl, lifting her into the air as he stands back up. “Yes, I am.”

To his surprise, the girl only nods solemnly before looking at the tags in his hand. “What is that?”

The man sighs, holding it up so she can examine it more closely, running her small fingers over the wood as he wipes away the mud. “Mama and I came here years ago and hung it up when we were here. Before you were even born.”

“Oh. It’s pretty.” A slight frown on her face, she studies the fortunes and the cord linking them before raising her gaze. “Do you miss Mama?”

He has to shift his gaze away as the smile on the man’s face crumbles, turning his attention back to the mess of branches and fortune tags, but even so, he cannot escape hearing the slight hitch in the quiet voice. “Every day.”

She sniffles, wrapping her arms around his neck and burying her face against his shoulder. “Me too.”

“Anthea!” The older woman reaches them, her face a mix of concern and frustration, and he can’t help but turn his attention back to the family. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think she would be so quick.”

The man shakes his head as she reaches for the girl, instead shifting her position in his arms. “It’s fine, Ma. Besides, you have enough on your hands. And you’ve done more than enough for us now.”

“Still…”

“Ma.” The man closes his eyes, gently shaking his head, before meeting her gaze with a determination that even he can feel, that makes him tear his gaze away once more, feeling vaguely like he is eavesdropping. “It’s okay. I’m okay. I…” A sigh that hangs in the air between them. “I need to do this. For her. But thank you for… for everything. And…”

A hand suddenly appears in his vision and he looks up to find the man before him, standing up straighter with a mix of sorrow and resolve dancing on his features. “I don’t know if you remember me, but…”

He shakes his head. “I do. Still.”

“Of course.” A small but genuine smile cracks his mouth as the man draws a deep breath. “I… I remember you said once that fortunes should be returned to the temple once they’ve come true and…” He swallows once, hard. “Can you put these back for me?”

“Yes, certainly.” He reaches for them, hand closing back around the fortunes that the man holds out.

Two little wooden tags have never felt so heavy in his palm before.

For a moment, the man stares at them, as though in his hands, in these fragile pieces of wood, he carries all the weight of the world, before tearing his gaze away to meet his. “Thank you.”

Oddly enough, when he opens his mouth, he finds a sudden lump in his throat and instead of trying to speak, he only inclines his head, but it is enough. The man smiles again, a soft, ephemeral expression, before turning and walking away, still carrying his daughter while his mother paces alongside him with his son in her arms.

As he watches them leave, he brushes his thumb over the worn fortunes he cradles, gently tracing the text that he still remembers like it had been drawn yesterday.

It is better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.

Leaving the courtyard, he silently enters the main temple, ignoring the questioning looks from his fellow masters and visitors alike as he sets the tag, still tied to its partner with muddy red cord, down amongst the various other fortunes of years past, and sits back on his heels, reading it over one last time.

And so it is.

[rpgsandbox]

                    Mock up of the book. Cover design not finalized.

Coyote and Crow is a tabletop role playing game set in an alternate future of the Americas where colonization never occurred. Instead, advanced civilizations arose over hundreds of years after a massive climate disaster changed the history of the planet. You'll play as adventurers starting out in the city of Cahokia, a bustling, diverse metropolis along the Mississippi River. It's a world of science and spirituality where the future of technology and legends of the past will collide.

The game is created and led by a team of Native Americans representing more than a dozen tribes and we've built a game that both Natives and non-Natives will thrill to explore and build upon.

More than 700 years ago, a bright purple streak shot across the night sky. Over the coming weeks, the Earth fell into a deep winter, the seas raged and ash rained from the sky. The event became known as the Awis. As resources dwindled, winter became longer and summer shorter, people struggled to survive. Wars erupted, people starved, some fleeing their ancestral homes before creeping ice sheets.

But people survived. Tribes adapted. And in the wake, people began to notice a strange purple mark appearing on people, plants and animals alike. It became known as the Adahnehdi, the Gift, and many took it as a sign that the Great Spirit had not given up on them.

Eventually, the weather began to ease, the Earth began to heal, and new nations arose. New sciences and technologies, born out of necessity, led to a discovery about the Adahnehdi. It wasn't just a mark, it was a path to abilities and powers, beyond normal human limits.

                       The long walk home. Art by Jennifer Lange

Now, 700 years after the world was brought to the brink, a new chapter has begun. Your characters enter a world that is healing but is no less dangerous. The ice sheets are retreating and the seas are calming, but what lay out beyond your borders? The treaties and alliances that made so much sense during the long winters are now eroding and old grudges between nations are not so easily forgotten. New technologies arise almost every day and the rate of change is frightening for some. And then there are the stories. Talk of spirits, monsters, beings of legend. For so many they were just tales to be told around the fire. But now there is talk that these legends may be far more literal than you may have previously believed. Has something awakened them?

                                the northern continent of Makasing.

Coyote and Crow is an original role playing system built around the exclusive use of D12 dice. Outside of the core rule book, all you'll need to play the game is some pencil and paper and some twelve-sided dice. While there is some complexity to the game, we are striving to present a system that will allow players to refer to the rule book during play as little as possible, keeping most or all of the critical information on your character sheet.

           Mock up of the front of a character sheet. Design not finalized.

The basic rule system is centered around collecting a Dice Pool, usually around 5-7 D12s and rolling them to determine either Success or Failure and degree of effect. For example "8" might be the number your Character needs to attempt to do something and every 8 or higher they rolled would be a Success. The more 8's, the more successful they are.

While combat is a part of Coyote and Crow, the game is actually built around the idea of fighting being only one road to story resolution. The game encourages dialogue, building bridges and finding unique solutions to problems that are not always clearly defined by good and evil.

Your Characters have Stats like Strength and Spirit and Skills like Investigation and Charm that are modified by their Stats. In addition, when you create your Character, you choose a Path. That Path determines both certain Stat bonuses you receive as well as which Abilities you have access to. Abilities are powers beyond normal human capability, but not at a level where characters would be comparable to superheroes. There are 15 Paths in the core rule book available. In addition, you'll choose an Archetype (Whisperer, Healer, Scout, among others) that will give you Stat and Skill bonuses and a general idea of your character's profession, but will not force your Character too deeply down a specific progression.

Then you'll choose Gifts and Burdens. These allow you to give your Characters specific bonuses or drawbacks and will help you flesh them out in a way that is flavorful and realistic. It's important to note that the rulebook does not dictate whether something is a burden or a gift for a Player. For example, a Player might choose to give their Character a sister. That might be a Burden or a Gift (or both!) depending on how the Player wants their Character to see that relationship.

Sample pages from the equipment chapter. Layouts and content not finalized.

There are no experience points in Coyote and Crow. Instead, it is built on the Legends system. Your Character will have Short Term Goals, which will increase various numbers on your Character sheets or give them new Skills. But you and your group will also have Long Term Goals. When those are completed your legend will grow. You'll write a short story about your adventures, the kind that can be told around the fire for generations to come. These can change your Gifts and Burdens, give you access to new Abilities and more. As you complete more Long Term Goals, your Character's legend will precede them and your stories will spread.

ARCHETYPES

There are six Archetypes in the game, each acting as a starting point for Character development but not constricting their possibilities. Each Archetype has its own symbol. Here are a few of them.

            The icons for the Tinkerer, Warrior and Whisperer Archetypes

PATHS

In addition to Archetypes, Players choose Paths for their Characters, which are permanent associations they make with an animal and help define what extra human Abilities they'll be able to choose from, among other effects. There are fifteen basic Paths in the core rulebook.

                       The Path of the Badger, the Stag and the Spider

While this game was created by a Native-led team, this game is for everyone. We've taken great care to craft a game that Natives and non-Natives alike will be able to engage in and find themselves immersed in.

For Natives, we've crafted both story and game mechanics that will allow you to integrate your own tribal customs into your play. For those who aren't Native, you'll have a wealth of options to choose from as well as clear guidelines for understanding the differences between this world and our real one.

The game is designed to be your first role playing game or your latest. The core rule book will walk players through every step of how to play Coyote and Crow, but also how to play role playing games in general, including advice on safety and inclusion as well as suggestions on where to find tools outside of the rule book to make your game both easier and more enjoyable.

Everyone involved in Coyote and Crow is deeply passionate about our game and we felt that it was time for Indigenous folks to have a game that didn't see them as secondary, as adversaries, or intertwined with colonialism.

Coyote and Crow is not set in a dystopia. The world went through a dark chapter, but the people of these nations rose to the challenge. There's good food and water, education and meaningful work for almost everyone in Makasing.

But this world isn't a utopia either. It's place that's growing, where old alliances are strained and past slights are not always forgotten. New technology is putting pressure on old traditions. And with the climate becoming milder, there is a whole world of unknowns out there. On top of all of that, there are rumors that some of the old stories about monsters and spirits might just be a little more real than some originally believed. This is a game where science and the unexplained live side by side and sometimes clash.

                              The Wanderer. Art by Kyle Charles.

THE CORE RULE BOOK

We are producing a beautiful 300+ page hardbound book, loaded with illustrations and containing all of the rules you'll need to play Coyote and Crow. Included in the book (and PDF) will be:

Detailed history of this alternate world

Descriptions of daily life and culture in Cahokia, the capital of the Free Lands

Rules for creating and advancing your characters, including 6 Archetypes, 15 Paths and 27 Abilities for a massive variety of options

Descriptions and stats for mythical creatures, infamous spirits, shadowy organizations and dangerous cults that can challenge players endlessly

A group of pre-generated characters if you want to jump right into playing the game

A starter adventure, Encounter at Station 54, that can act as a stand alone adventure or as the start of a larger campaign

So much more!

                              It still hungers. Art by Jeffrey Veregge

We have a diverse team of folks working on this game, most of whom are Native. Additionally, we are striving to bring in other marginalized voices whenever possible. Our team features people from across the LGBTQIA spectrum, including two spirit folks. It's not even a question that this game is political. If you have a problem with a game where there are no people of European descent represented, than this game is probably not for you. That said, we've truly built this game to be played by everyone. It might seem like a big leap, but don't worry, we're going to hold your hand the whole way through and you'll be so happy you stepped off the edge into this vibrant fresh world.

===============================================

Kickstarter campaign ends: Fri, April 2 2021 3:00 AM BST

Website: [Coyote and Crow] [instagram]

[dappercritter]

Godzilla vs Kong: Brutally Honest Thoughts

(Took me long enough, eh? Depending on home video releases be like that.)

So first things first, I have a confession to make: I spoiled the movie before I watched it. I was impatient and they had only announced an HBO Max premiere in the states and a theatrical run in Canada at the time. Afterward, I got heads-up from a friend and immersed myself in the opinions of those lucky enough to see it early. I’m just saying that I have some preconceived opinions that I’m sticking to.

That said, Godzilla vs Kong turned out to be more fun than I expected! But you already knew that. Everyone did. The two kings of movie monsters had their rematch and this time it was with glorious Hollywood SFX powering it this time.

The human story was fun but it’s clear they stopped trying at this point. Team Kong stole my heart, especially Jia. Team Godzilla (although the Conspiracy Crew would be a more fitting term since they spend more time chasing down mysteries than trying to back or understand Godzilla) was more fun than I expected and their dynamic was surprisingly enjoyable. Bernie is actually kind of funny, it's nice to see Madison acting more assertive, and Josh was fine--he was the only sane man of the bunch but he was also the butt of the jokes. Still, all the hardcore conspiracy jokes got old fast and it feels off seeing the daughter of two scientists turn into an edgy conspiracy crackpot. Why not an edgy science major?

Team Apex are fun villains, especially Walter Simmons who's a great megalomaniacal CEO type, but Ren Serizawa is a joke. I like his actor's performance but he's just another footnote. Nobody bats an eye at his last name, although the only heroes he interacts with are Nathan Lind and he just misses Team Godzilla. He really could have just been any other villain, but instead, they had to sully Serizawa’s legacy further while robbing a good actor of some interesting material. (As is, it turns out he was just an egotistical jerk with daddy issues--an easy puzzle to solve on day one--after all...)

However, I still cannot and will not approve of the fact that somebody thought it would be a good idea to make the heroes of a sci-fi story into hardcore conspiracy theorists in this day and age. Likewise, I’m not a huge fan of how they essentially made the Hollow Earth into its own universe complete with a crazy portal and an environment with its own laws of physics, nor am I totally crazy about the huge leap in technology that was made between this and KOTM, or G’14 for that matter.

The monsters as awesome as they are, are the biggest mixed bag in the show.

Kong is at his best in ages, and while I am all for the new heroic warrior character that Legendary have crafted and I acknowledge that making him a worthy opponent for their god-tier Godzilla was going to be a hurdle, I think they did a splendid job. Seeing Kong using agility and acrobatics was a glorious sight to behold, and something about Kong becoming a tool-user and weapon wielder just feels right. It’s a far better demonstration of Kong as a “thinking animal” (*wink, wink*).

I’m much less thrilled about their treatment of his greatest opponent ever. After everything they’ve done to build up Godzilla as the incredible force of neutral good fighting to maintain balance and all the build up to ancient rivalry debating back to a great Titan war--even going as far as putting his name in front Kong’s this time!-- they’ve reduced Godzilla back to glorified bully for Kong. He only gets the minimum amount of sympathy from the cast of his movie before they go off to deal with the conspiracy plot or focus on Kong and the Hollow Earth. Worse still, he is somehow more powerful and more aggressive than ever for a good chunk of the movie which leads to an outcome I’m sorry to say we all saw coming. Somehow, I suspect that the reason behind this was how Wingard cited Godzilla vs. Mothra, vs. Destoryah, and Shin-Godzilla as influences for the monsters scale and story, which while cool and all, are all movies where he was played up as a mostly stoic antagonist rather than a three-dimensional character like Kong. (Though ironically vs. Destoroyah and Shin did a better job of making Godzilla feel more sympathetic and in both of them he was a walking nuclear reactor meltdown.)

Due to the unfortunate time constraints of the three-way deal between Toho, WB, and Universal at the time this was in production, Kong was unable to secure a proper sequel that could develop his skillset like Godzilla’s did. Nevermind the fact the filmmakers completely surrendered to the “nothing matters but the monsters” mentality that a chunk of the fanbase has been spouting since this universe unofficially kicked off almost 10 years ago. (Sidenote: Oh god, I’m turning in an old fart already.) As a result, the movie trips over itself trying to set up Godzilla and Kong’s rivalry as well as building up Kong as a worthy opponent to Godzilla while expanding on their shared lore, and as a result countless plot points set up in in the previous movie and tie-in movie are thrown out the window. I’m sorry to say but in spite of all hopes and illusions of grandeur, it’s safe to this damn thing is a Kong movie with Godzilla as the bad guy.

...at least until HE shows up. Yup, Mechagodzilla. The biggest spoiled twist of the centuries steals the show so the movie can pull a Dawn of Justice. But! It does it much better than the fractured DCEU’s most controversial entry ever could. Mechagodzilla’s inclusion gets a decent amount of build up thanks to Team Godzilla/the Conspiracy Crew, and when he shows up, does he make an impression! At first, I wasn’t sure how to feel about his inclusion or his design, but I’ve come to like this one. He’s basically a kaiju terminator built in Godzilla’s image made purely out of heavy machinery piloted by the best Ghidorah head. It’s a jarring change of pace compared to previous MechaG’s but it grows on you after a while. With the abundance of weaponry stuffed into him, he feels like a fitting update of the original killing machine, and even if his inclusion feels like an easy way out of the big showdown, it’s fun to see him played as a literal colossal heel for the kings to team up against. Not to mention he looks shockingly good with those red highlights. However, one still can’t help but wonder how and why he was made in this universe, or how he feels like pure heavy machinery one minute and then an extra-large Ultron unit the next.

As for the the big throwdowns we’ve all been waiting for... well, we’re still in the mixed bag deparment. While the fights are all exciting and excellently choreographed, and benefit from some more eclectic lighting and cinematograph, I’m sorry to say that as far as the rematch of the century goes they dropped the ball on this one.

Don’t get me wrong, the fights are all great in their own ways, but there’s a drastic change in the feeling of weight and power with the monsters. Godzilla, Kong, and even Mechagodzilla all feel strangely floaty in most of their fights. One moments they feel like true behemoths shaking the very earth with every movement and then it’s like they’re in Godzilla Unleashed, running, jumping, and throwing each other around with speed that feels that almost makes you wonder if the Hollow Earth’s gravity inversion stuff is leaking out into the world. While it’s all perfectly cool, you can’t help but wonder how Kong is able to leap between aircraft carriers and buildings, when Godzilla got the ability to blow a hole through the Earth itself, or how a colossal machine is able to move so nimbly or why it has to be flashing blue all the time.

It’s fascinating and fun but you just can’t help but wonder how we got from almost posthuman disaster and war movies exploring how we’re at the mercy of the ancient almost mythical forces beyond our comprehension, we’ve found ourselves smack dab in the middle of Bayformers meets Jurassic World levels of Hollywood absurdity where anything and everything can and will happen in the name of getting to the monster fights. Although I can’t say I’m surprised given the director’s take on Death Note made some questionable choices with it’s take on the infamous cast while still coming up with some genuinely inspired choices. Still, all things considered we could have gotten worse compared to ther cinematic universes made by WB and Universal.

As for some misc. thoughts to close up this rambling mess:

-The soundtrack is fantastic. A great continuation of the feel of Skull Island’s mixtape with some truly wonderful picks. Special mention goes to the opening and ending songs, and they GOT AN ELVIS PRESLEY SONG IN HERE! YES!!! The three kings of pop culture together at last!

-While this movie didn’t need to be any more overstuffed, it would have been nice if the rest of the Titans didn’t disappear entirely from this movie. I get that Godzilla: Dominion already explained what happened to them all more or less, but it really is a missed oppurtunity that we never got to see another Titan war. Or Rodan attacking Kong to avenge his pterosaur bretheren from days long past. Speaking of which...

-“Save Mothra” jokes be damned, Mothra would have been a welcome gues star, not just to help break up the big fight, but to show off Godzilla’s softer, more protective side. And yes, I want more Mothzilla. Shut up, we deserve it.

-Boy, Monarch sure does a whole lot of nothing up-top, huh?

-The cinematography is a great update but there’s a little too much neon lighting, especially in the Apex HQ and the Hollow Earth throne room. It feels like they’re trying just a little too hard to sell the more futuristic, Hollywood sci-fi feel.

-The score is... great but not that great. Of course, I’ve always had mixed feelings about Tom Holkenburg (AKA Junkie XL)’s music. I liked Kong’s themes, but they REALLY dropped the ball with Godzilla’s theme. Mechagodzilla’s works really well as long you ignore that it’s just Godzilla’s theme in this movie with an ominious choir added in.

-The new Hollow Earth creatures are all perfectly fine. Actually, I thought they were another highlight! Especially the Warbats, Hellhawks, and Doug the Titanus Foetodon Man.

-I want to do a release the extended cut campaign but I don’t think any of us have the energy for that s**t anymore.

[disneylanddilettante]

You are now tasked with launching and designing a new Disneyland-modeled castle park. Each realm needs a new E-ticket, as well as a B-C ticket attraction, not based on a film (except Fantasyland, where movie basis is fine). What rides do you dream up to meet this goal? Same core lands as DL: Tomorrow, Fantasy, Adventure, Frontier, plus two new more specific themed lands to replace NoS and Critter Country.

*cracks knuckles* You asked for it...

Adventureland

E-ticket: Fire Mountain, a roller coaster set in a volcanic area. The effects include actual pyrotechnics (a safe distance from the track). It's mostly in the open, spiraling around an active cinder cone, but for a portion of the ride, the track dips into a “crevice” to visit a fantastic cavern filled with olivine crystals, basalt formations, and glowing lava flows.

B-ticket: Castaway's Treehouse. The Adventureland treehouse is a good idea, but would be even better if it didn't lean on someone else's shipwreck story to be exciting. In this version, you get to pretend that you are the castaway! A bank of touch-screens in the ground area let you take a quick quiz to figure out what kind of castaway you are—are you taming the jungle or running with the monkeys? Are you taking advantage of your impromptu vacation or are you eager to be rescued?

Frontierland

E-ticket: A good old-fashioned Wild West stunt show! Gunplay! Rooftop chases and fistfights! Dramatic falls and somersaults! A cast of original characters who also appear in caricature form on a unique line of merchandise!

B-ticket: Grab a pan and pick a trough. We've shipped some mud from the actual gold-bearing streams of the Sierra Nevada, and whatever you find, you can keep! Take all the time we need (we don't anticipate this one being all that popular despite the potential to find literal treasure).

Fantasyland

E-ticket: If I may borrow someone else's idea (it's okay, she's my sister), this would have to be Rapunzel's Tangled Quest, a flume ride that takes the “animated film dark ride” concept to the next level...more or less literally, as the flume rises and falls in concert with the beats of the story.

B-ticket: Enchanted Fairy Forest Maze, a walk-through attraction with many branching paths to explore and magical effects that activate when you approach them.

Tomorrowland

E-ticket: Adventure Thru Inner Space Redux! (If you didn't see this coming...you're lying. This is me here.) The limitations of 1960s technology made it hard to depict the shrinking process very well. This version of the ride, like Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, would combine fully dimensional sets and props, representing microscopic objects, with screens and motion-sim effects to indicate shrinking from one scale to another. And I'm thinking it would use the original ATIS concept, of visiting a drop of pond water and the microorganisms within, to provide more visual interest and an extra hint of danger.

C-ticket: I don't have a name for it, but it's a dark ride/shooting gallery ride where you play exobiologists in a manned rover on a newly discovered planet that might harbor life. Only instead of a laser gun, you have a camera and you are recording the alien creatures that pop up unexpectedly out of the fantastic landscape. Image-recognition technology allows the ride to rate your pictures and calculate your score.

BONUS LAND #1: ANTIQUELAND

In this land, ancient civilizations and their legends come to life! Who doesn't love the art, architecture, and mythology of the peoples that flourished B.C.E.?

E-ticket: The Night Voyage of Ra, as described in this post.

C-ticket: Deus Ex MOCKina. A “4D” movie show, depicting an attempt at classical Greek theatre that goes comically wrong. Actors grab the wrong masks, things catch on fire, the stagehand with the bucket trips on the way to put it out and splatters the audience, and even the machine to lower the “gods” onto the stage breaks down and sends cogwheels bouncing everywhere.

BONUS LAND #2: SYMPHONYLAND

Imagine a world made of music! Elevated walkways dip and curl like musical staves leaping off a page of sheet music, and even the buildings resemble musical instruments. Whatever your taste in tunes, you'll find something here to enthrall you.

E-ticket: Our Musical Journey—a slow but grand ride in the mold of Epcot 1.0, tracing the history of music through the log drums and auroch horns of our prehistoric ancestors through Pythagoras's discovery of the octave, the invention of musical notation, and the constant evolution of musical genres all the way up to the electronic rave-club sounds of the 21st Century. You know how those rides like to maintain continuity through the scenes by having a theme tune that evolves through different eras? This ride is about that theme tune.

B-Ticket: The Orchestracycle—it only looks like a Dumbo clone with individual ride cars shaped like different instruments. There are two control sticks in the vehicle...one for altitude like you'd expect, and one for volume—pull back harder to make it louder, and ease up to make it softer...and what's this? Your altitude is also your pitch! Coordinate with your seatmate to play a tune, any tune! It's a challenge! Try to harmonize with the other instruments or create a stand-out solo!

Whew. I hope you're happy, OP! @_@

[aros001]

Read through light novel vol. 7. Random thoughts.

I swear Goblin Slayer looks like he's blushing through his armor on that cover. I don't blame him, given it's Cow Girl, but that's what it looks like.

I always get a laugh out of Goblin Slayer's completely unwillingness or inability to remember any type of monster outside of goblins. I think he only knows what vampires and dragon are because they're the most popular monster adventurers want to beat and thus the ones he'd hear about the most. He repeatedly can't remember what an ogre is despite dropping an ocean on one, nor the dark elf or troll, and I think last volume he needed a long minute to remember what giant rats are. No surprise he can't remember what the Loch Ness Monster's name was in this book, or what an elephant is. Mokele Mubenbe. It's hard for me to even pronounce that.

Lizard Priest was in the process of bringing each of the nuns upstairs into the chapel from the basement storehouse. “Stay strong, now. When dawn breaks, we can take you somewhere less upsetting.” “Thank you... Truly...” “Think nothing of it. We may revere different deities, but monkeys came from lizards, in the end. That makes us cousins.” “Heh-heh... You lizardmen...say the strangest...things...”

I don't say this often enough but Lizard Priest is just kind of the best, you know? He's like a big, scaly, green teddy bear. He's a very comforting presence and such an easy person for everyone, including those of different faiths like Priestess and the elves, to be friends with.

At first I was disappointed Priestess didn't get a cure poison miracle, given how often goblins come at the party using poisoned weapons, but her Purify miracle has certainly proved its usefulness, both for cleaning water and air as well as helping psychologically by cleaning up the victims of the goblins. Doesn't restore their stolen virginity but at least leaves less marks and filth for them to be constantly reminded what the goblins did to them. Plus, Goblin Slayer is no stranger to using smoke or poison gas, so Purify is probably good to have on hand to keep such methods from harming the party themselves.

In the middle of this flood of stories, Goblin Slayer said, “So this is your home.” “That’s right.” “That’s good.” “Well—” High Elf Archer’s eyes narrowed like a smiling cat’s. “It’s where my heart is.” Goblin Slayer nodded. Cow Girl blinked at him for a moment. Then he said, “And there are goblins near it.” The note of anger in his voice was unmistakable.

I love all the members of the party, so naturally I'm enjoying all the bonding moments between Goblin Slayer and High Elf Archer in this book, as well as the parallels he keeps drawing between them, especially in regards to their sisters. Their interactions are fun because their personalities contrast so much but in a different way than his and Priestess' or her and Dwarf Shaman's.

Then she went on, “Actually, even a lot of elvish adventurers act like that, especially if they’ve just left the forest.” It’s not that they have no sense of danger, just a poor grasp of scale.

That last bit is a good way of describing a lot of this series. There are people ignorant of how truly dangerous the goblins can be but outside of porcelain ranks it's usually not deliberately so. They just live in a world of other insanely large threats that don't like being ignored, with the elves in particular having members of their species whom lived through the old battles of the gods. Goblins are basically pests and goblin slaying pest control. They're a problem but barely a blip on the radar when you're comparing them to freaking Sauron, whom it feels like you just recently finally got rid of.

There is something absolutely hilarious to me that this man in dirty leather and steel armor, coated in faded red stains, who refuses to ever take his helmet off, barely talks, frequently walks in a manner that's described as violent, and who's sole obsession it is to wipe out every last goblin in existence, is known as The Kindest Man on the Frontier. But I still love it because it makes sense. Most villages on the frontier can't get help with their goblin problems because there's not a lot of fame or money in killing goblins and bigger threats are given more the priority, so they're just left on their own. But then Goblin Slayer comes in, doing the job without any thought to reward or praise. He's saved god knows how many kidnapped women prevented the destruction of countless villages. From the outside, yeah, it looks like just simple kindness. Get to know him a little better and you see that it's obsession. And when you get as close as Priestess and Cow Girl, you agree that it's kindness.

It's so cool that the elf adventurer the party saved on their first quest together made a reappearance, even if it's a small one. Like with Wizard's little brother wanting to avenge her, it's good to show that the people brutalized by the goblins aren't just props to show how serious the situation is. They're real (albeit fictional) people, who had their own lives and people who loved them, so having them still matter later in the story and them trying to get at least some closure is good writing.

I was talking with someone before in my vol. 6 post that something I really like about Goblin Slayer's character is his immaturity. Not that he's whiny and bratty like a kid but rather his trauma stunted him in a few ways. He likely had nothing to do with his village being attacked by goblins but to this day he blames himself for what happened to his sister, from him hiding and doing nothing to save her to in this volume believing she would have long moved on from their village if she didn't have to take care of him. Taking on all that blame and guilt, it's such a childish way of thinking and his trauma (and Burgler's training) meant he never was able to grow out of it. I can just see that little boy under the floorboards, thinking everything that's happening around him is some divine punishment from the gods for something bad he did, like not listening to his sister or getting mad at Cow Girl or literally anything else a kid would normally do.

This world has freaking elevators?! What?! When they first mentioned it I thought it was going to be something involving water or magic or gears, but no! Control panels, keypad, entering a code. It even goes bong when it arrives at its destination. I mean, they say it's not clear whether it operates magically or mechanically but this still feels like a big jump in this world's technology level, considering the most high tech thing I remember prior was ice cream making, and that was a chemical process. I just love the image of Goblin Slayer's party patiently waiting in the elevator as it's going up and soft muzak is playing.

By the time he noticed the change, it was too late. The goblin shaman’s blood had been turned to pure water.

WHOA! Priestess! What the f**k?! Was this her version of strangling the goblin champion with a bundle of hair?! That was awesome!

Also not good for her, given her beliefs. It's a good little conflict for her character and sets up some worry about what'll happen if she does something like this again. The Earth Mother spoke directly to her to warn this was a one-time deal. Would Priestess lose the ability to use Miracles or would the goddess outright smite her for such gross abuse of the powers she gave her? There's also the added conflict that Goblin Slayer praised her for what she did. He's not as important as the Earth Mother but he's still someone Priestess respects and is attached to more than anyone else, so she's going to be conflicted if his life is on the line again.

I've never played DOOM. Still love the reference with Hero.

...Is that why there was an elevator? Is this world some odd combination of DnD, Lord of the Rings, and DOOM?

Even though they showed his image, with everyone else all dressed up for the wedding I'm enjoying imagining Goblin Slayer in his normal armor, just with the addition of a bow tie.

Damn that bouquet tease. Who caught it?! Priestess?! Cow Girl?! Sword Maiden leaping in through the window?!

Original Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/GoblinSlayer/comments/fzwykz/read_through_light_novel_vol_7_random_thoughts/

[marginalgloss]

I turn 35 tomorrow. How better to celebrate that than with some notes on the handful of video games I have managed to finish over the last ten months. In no particular order:

Judgment (PS4)

Something I think about often is that there aren’t many games which are set in the real world. By this I man the world in which we live today. You can travel through ancient Egypt or take a trip through the stars in the far future, but it’s relatively rare to be shown a glimpse of something familiar. Hence the unexpected popularity of the new release of Microsoft Flight Simulator, which lets you fly over a virtual representation of your front porch, as well as the Grand Canyon, and so on.

I found something like the same appeal in Judgment, a game which took me longer than anything else listed here to finish — seven or eight months, on and off. Like the Yakuza games to which it is a cousin, it’s set in Kamurocho, a fictional district of a real-world Tokyo; unlike other open-world games, it renders a space of perhaps half a square mile in intense detail. I spent a long time in this game wandering around slowly in first-person view, looking at menus and in the windows of shops and restaurants. The attention to detail is unlike everything I have ever seen, from the style of an air conditioning unit to the range of Japanese whiskies on sale in a cosy backstreet bar. And this was a thing of value at a time when the thought of going anywhere else at all, let alone abroad, seemed like it was going to be very difficult for a very long time.

It’s a game of at least three discrete parts. One of them is a fairly cold-blooded police procedural/buddy cop story: you play an ex-lawyer turned private eye investigating a series of grisly murders that, inevitably, link back to your own murky past. In another part you run around the town getting into hilarious martial arts escapades, battering lowlifes with bicycles and street furniture. In another, you can while away your hours playing meticulous mini-games that include darts, baseball, poker, Mahjong and Shogi — and that’s before we even get to the video game arcades.

All these parts are really quite fun, and if you want to focus on one to the exclusion of the others, the game is totally fine with that. The sudden tonal shifts brought about by these crazy and abrupt shifts in format are, I think, essentially unique to video games. But the scope of Judgment is a thing all its own. As a crafted spectacle of escapist fiction it’s comprehensive, and in its own way utterly definitive.  

Mafia: Definitive Edition (PS4)

I was amazed when I found out they were doing a complete remake of Mafia, a game I must have finished at least three or four times in the years after its release back in 2002. Games from this era don’t often receive the same treatment as something like Resident Evil, where players might be distracted by the controls and low-poly graphics of the original. 

A quality remake makes it easier for all kinds of reasons to appreciate what was going on there. (Not least because they have a lot of new games in the same series to sell.) But in the early 00s PC games like this one had started to get really big and ambitious, and had (mostly) fixed issues with controls; so there’s a hell of a lot more stuff going on in Mafia than in most games of that era. It was also a very hard game, with all kinds of eccentricities that most big titles don’t attempt today. Really I have no idea how this remake got made at all. 

But I was so fond of the original I had to play it. The obvious: it looks fantastic, and the orchestral soundtrack is warm and evocative. The story is basic, but for the era it seemed epic, and it’s still an entertaining spectacle. The original game got the balance of cinematic cutscenes, driving and action right the first time, even while Rockstar were still struggling to break out of the pastiche-led GTA III and Vice City. 

They have made it easier. You’re still reliant on a handful of medical boxes in each level for healing, but you get a small amount of regenerating health as well. You no longer have to struggle to keep your AI companions alive. Most of the cars are still heavy and sluggish, but I feel like they’re not quite as slow as they once were. They’ve changed some missions, and made some systems a little more comfortable — with sneaking and combat indicators and so on — but there aren’t any really significant additions.

The end result of all this is that it plays less like an awkward 3D game from 2002, and more like a standard third-person shooter from the PS3/360 era. Next to virtually any other game in a similar genre from today, it feels a bit lacking. There’s no skill tree, no XP, no levelling-up, no crafting, no side-missions, no unusual weapons or equipment, no alternative routes through the game. And often all of that stuff is tedious to the extreme in new titles, but here, you really feel the absence of anything noteworthy in the way of systems. 

My options might have been more limited in 2002 but back then the shooting and driving felt unique and fun enough that I could spend endless hours just romping around in Free Ride mode. Here, it felt flat by comparison; it felt not much different to Mafia III, which I couldn’t finish because of how baggy it felt and how poorly it played, in spite of it having one of the most interesting settings of any game in recent years. But games have come a long way in twenty years.    

Hypnospace Outlaw (Nintendo Switch)

If this game is basically a single joke worked until it almost snaps then it is worked extremely well. 

It seems to set itself up for an obvious riff on the way in which elements of the web which used to be considered obnoxious malware (intrusive popups and so on) have since become commonplace, and sometimes indispensable, parts of the online browsing experience. But it doesn’t really do that, and I think that’s because it’s a game which ends up becoming a little too fascinated by its own lore. 

The extra science fiction patina over everything is that technically this isn’t the internet but a sort of psychic metaverse delivered over via a mid-90s technology involving a direct-to-brain headset link. I don’t know that this adds very much to the game, since the early days of the internet were strange enough without actually threatening to melt the brains of its users. 

(This goes back to what I said about Judgment - I sometimes wonder if it feels easier to make a game within a complete fiction like this, rather than simply placing it in the context of the nascent internet as it really was. Because this way you don’t have to worry too much about authenticity or realism; this way the game can be as outlandish as it needs to be.) 

But, you know. It’s a fun conceit. A clever little world to romp around in for a while. 

Horace (Nintendo Switch)

I don’t know quite where to begin with describing this. One of the oddest, most idiosyncratic games I’ve played in recent years. 

As I understand it this platformer is basically the creation of two people, and took about six years to make. You start out thinking this is going to be a relatively straightforward retro run-and-jump game — and for a while, it is — but then the cutscenes start coming. And they keep coming. You do a lot of watching relative to playing in this game, but it’s forgivable because they are deeply, endearingly odd. 

It’s probably one of the most British games I’ve ever played in terms of the density and quality of its cultural references. And that goes for playing as well as watching; there’s a dream sequence which plays out like Space Harrier and driving sequences that play out like Outrun. There are references to everything from 2001 to the My Dinner with Abed episode of Community. And it never leans into any of it with a ‘remember that?’ knowing nod — it’s all just happening in the background, littered like so much cultural detritus. 

A lot of it feels like something that’s laser-targeted to appeal to a certain kind of gamer in their mid-40s. And, not being quite there myself, a lot of it passed me by. Horace is not especially interested in a mass appeal — it’s not interested in explaining itself, and it doesn’t care if you don’t like the sudden shifts in tone between heartfelt sincerity and straight-faced silliness. But as a work of singular creativity and ambition it’s simply a joyous riot. 

Horizon: Zero Dawn (PS4)

I stopped playing this after perhaps twelve or fifteen hours. There is a lot to like about it; it still looks stunning on the PS4 Pro; Aloy is endearing; the world is beautiful to plod around. But other parts of it seem downright quaint. It isn’t really sure whether it should be a RPG or an action game. And I’m surprised I’ve never heard anyone else mention the game’s peculiar dedication to maintaining a shot/reverse shot style throughout dialogue sequences, which is never more than tedious and stagey.

The combat isn’t particularly fun. Once discovered most enemies simply become enraged and blunder towards you, in some way or another; your job is to evade them, ensnare them or otherwise trip them up, then either pummel them into submission or chip away at their armour till they become weak enough to fall. I know enemy AI hasn’t come on in leaps and bounds in recent years but it’s not enough to dress up your enemies as robot dinosaurs and then expect a player to feel impressed when they feel like the simplest kind of enrageable automata. Oh, and then you have to fight human enemies too, which feels like either an admission of failure or an insistence that a game of this scale couldn’t happen without including some level of human murder. 

I don’t have a great deal more to say about it. It’s interesting to me that Death Stranding, which was built on the same Decima engine, kept the frantic and haphazard combat style from Horizon, but went to great lengths to actively discourage players from getting into fights at all. (It also fixed the other big flaw in Horizon — the flat, inflexible traversal system — and turned that into the centrepiece of the game.) 

Disco Elysium (PS4)

In 2019 I played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons. I’m talking about the actual tabletop roleplaying game, not any kind of video game equivalent. For week after week a group of us from work got together and sort of figured it out, and eventually developed not one but two sprawling campaigns of the never-ending sort. We continued for a while throughout the 2020 lockdown, holding our sessions online via Roll20, but it was never quite the same. After a while, as our life circumstances changed further, it sort of just petered out.

I mention all this because Disco Elysium is quite clearly based around the concept of a computerised tabletop roleplaying game (aka CRPG). My experience of that genre is limited to the likes of Baldurs Gate, the first Pillars of Eternity and the old Fallout games, so I was expecting to have to contend with combat and inventory management. What I wasn’t expecting was to be confronted with the best novel I’ve read this year.

To clarify: I have not read many other novels this year, by my standards. But, declarations of relative quality aside, what I really mean is that this game is, clearly and self-consciously, a literary artefact above all. It is written in the style of one of those monolithic nineteenth century novels that cuts a tranche through a society, a whole world — you could show it to any novelist from at least the past hundred years and they would understand pretty well what is going on. It is also wordy in every sense of that term: there’s a lot of reading to do, and the text is prolix in the extreme. 

You could argue it’s less a game than a very large and fairly sophisticated piece of interactive fiction. The most game-like aspects of it are not especially interesting. It has some of the stats and the dice-rolling from table-top roleplaying games, but this doesn’t sit comfortably with the overtly literary style elsewhere. Health and morale points mostly become meaningless when you can instantly heal at any time and easily stockpile the equivalent of health potions. And late on in the game, when you find yourself frantically changing clothes in order to increase your chances of passing some tricky dice roll, the systems behind the game start to feel somewhat disposable. 

Disco Elysium is, I think, a game that is basically indifferent to its own status as a game. Nothing about it exists to complement its technological limitations, and nor is it especially interested in the type of unique possibilities that are only available in games. You couldn’t experience Quake or Civilisation or the latest FIFA in any other format; but a version of Disco Elysium could have existed on more or less any home computer in about the last thirty years. And, if we were to lose the elegant art and beautiful score, and add an incredibly capable human DM, it could certainly be played out as an old-fashioned tabletop game not a million miles from Dungeons and Dragons.

All of the above is one of the overriding thoughts I have about this game. But it doesn’t come close to explaining what it is that makes Disco Elysium great.

[sammysdewysensitiveeyes]

"Ten out of ten for originality. Zero for any chance of success."

“There’s no reason for it not to work, Father!” Shinobi protested. “It makes a perfect loop, see?” He gestured at the two TVs, duct-taped together with the screens facing each other in a bizarre kind of electronic kiss.

“She’ll crawl out of one screen and right into the next one. It’s impossible to escape!” Shinobi continued.

“Well, I admit you’re probably the first to try that particular tactic, no one else could possibly be so stupid.”

“Wouldn’t make more sense to avoid any kind of technology?” asked Maddie. “Get them in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, with no phones, no laptops, no TV screens to be found.”

“Fraid not,” Pyro interjected. “Previous victims did try that, but the ghost managed to get them anyway. One was on a motorcycle, a couple of others were parked in a car by the side of the road. Maybe she comes out of any reflective surface? We certainly could have learned more if someonehad been willing to do a little more translating of Japanese newspaper articles.”

“Ugh, you can’t expect me to do research.” Shinobi rolled his eyes. “So boring.”

“Perhaps there’s no escape, then, and you two morons will just drop dead,” Sebastian mused.

“Kindly stop smirking, Father.”

“Am I?”

“I wish you’d let me separate them,” Claudine said, frowning. “We could have Shinobi try his….idea….here-“ The pause was almost diplomatic. “-and I could take Pyro off to that remote cabin and observe the results.”

“No!” Haven insisted. “We’re going to face this together, whatever happens.”

“Even if these two were the only ones dumb enough to knowingly watch a cursed video tape,” Sebastian said. “There’s a very basic lesson here about curiosity and cats that they seem to have forgotten.”

“I’m telling you, we should have gone to Japan,” Pyro cut in. “I’ve been digging into the history of this poor girl…..seems like she had psychic powers or something, and then she disappeared under mysterious circumstances. I’ll bet we could lay her to rest properly if we uncover the whole story. Maybe she’d be willing to talk tonight, even!” He was remarkably chipper for someone under a death curse, and Sebastian could practically see the stars in his overly-excited eyes.

“Yes, Allerdyce, she’s killed everyone else who fell under this curse, but I’m sure she’ll talk to you, and then you’ll get a lucrative book deal.”

“I just want to help her find peace,” Pyro said unconvincingly. The notepad and tape recorder he was clutching to his chest didn’t really help matters.

“Maybe she’s not really a ghost. Maybe she’s a mutant who doesn’t understand her powers,” Haven suggested.

“That possibility does seem more likely than a ghost,” Sebastian said. “Admittedly, I’ve seen many strange things over years, but the very idea of ghosts is so…..juvenile.”

“Well, we know demons exist,” Maddie put in, with a grim smile.

“Whatever she is, she needs our help! I’m sure she doesn’t mean to harm anyone!” Haven said. “If Pyro’s research is correct, she’s probably hurt and traumatized. If we can get through to her, we can break the cycle.”

“It’s starting!” Claudine exclaimed, pointing at the double TVs. One of them was glowing with an eerie light, and as the group watched, dark water began dripping out of the bottom of the screen and pooling on the floor.

“Yeah, just try climbing out of that, you –“ Shinobi began, and was interrupted as the second TV was flung across the room and shattered against the far wall.

As the group watched in horrified amazement, a corpse-white hand, with blackened wounds where fingernails ought to be, reached out of the TV screen. It was followed by another, then a tangled mass of dark hair, and a stained, ragged dress that had once been white. The thing crawled along the floor with jerky, unnatural movements, almost insect-like, leaving a trail of water that smelled like mold and old stone and decay.

“Shinobi, try to talk to her!” Pyro exclaimed eagerly, holding out a tape recorder.

Shinobi was backing away, looking pale. “Uh…you guys can handle this, right? I’ll just stay out of the way. Good luck, Pyro!” And with that, Shinobi fled, intangible, though the wall.

“Come back here, test subject!” Claudine called after him. “At least wear a body cam so I can see how she kills you!”

“Damn, maybe Maddie can translate,” Pyro said, as the creature shambled it’s way to it’s feet. “You can use telepathy to understand Japanese, right? How do you say, ‘Tell me your story, I promise we’ll give you justice and a generous cut of the profits on book sales and any future movie deals.’”

But Maddie was also starring at the creature with horror, her face contorted.

“She’s not…..not a person,” Madelyne whispered. “There’s no mind in there to reach. Just….pure hate.”

“No!” Haven exclaimed. “There must be something in there that we can save. We’re going to save her!” Haven strode forward, her arms spread wide.

“It’s alright, you’re safe now,” she said. “We’ll help you.” The creature reached for Haven, and under the matted, dripping hair, Sebastian could see a mouth twisting open in malicious glee.

Sebastian could see how the next moments would play out very clearly. Haven, in her unbelievable foolishness, would attempt to hug this creature – mutant, demon or “ghost.” The creature would rip out Haven’s very human, non-ressurrectable heart, and then Sebastian would have to explain matters to the Quiet Council, and probably get “punished” with some crap assignment counting inventory or greeting new arrivals on Krakoa.

Sebastian leaped into action. He bodily shoved Haven across the room – a tad hard, perhaps, but away from danger, and towards the safety of Maddie and Claudine. With his other hand, he punched the “ghost” square in the face. There was a nasty squelch, and he found himself shaking slime off his fist. The thing lay in a dazed pile on the floor. It started to move again, and Sebastian simply picked it up, a clammy ball of skeletal limbs and filthy water and hair, and stuffed it back through the TV screen. After a moment’s thought, he grabbed the cursed tape that had started this whole mess, crushed it with one hand, and tossed it in as well. With a flick of his fingers, the screen shattered and went dark, and everything was quiet again.

Off to one side, Maddie and Pyro were helping Haven to her feet. She looked at the shattered TV screen, then looked at Sebastian. It was a familiar expression of wide-eyed, innocent surprise and self-righteous reproach, like an offended kitten.

“It’s okay, Haven,” Maddie was saying. “I’m not sure that….thing was really her anymore. I couldn’t find a sentient mind, just constant anger and hate. Like a curse brought to life. But not really alive.”

“A self-replicating curse,” Claudine mused. “Like a virus!”

Eventually, Haven would come to him with tea, and they would have a long discussion about the nature of life, and humanity, and redemption, and whether it was possible to truly save everyone. But at the moment, Sebastian just wanted a shower and a drink. He calmly wiped his brackish hands on Pyro’s uniform, and headed off to his cabin.

(Once again, I took your idea, namely Sebastian fighting the Ring ghost, in the stupidest direction possible. I guess the Ring movie/books don't exist in AU Marauders. Sadako's story is actually very sympathetic, I think Haven and Maddie would both probably be on her side, but Sebastian doesn't care, he's just gonna punch the ghost in the face.)

[silver-wield]

I’m sorry in advance. This is a long rant. I think the main reason I can't accept this "SOLDIER!Cloud loves A” thing is because I've always felt that the whole love triangle nonsense was introduced solely to make the players invested in A. Let's face it, the biggest reason people were devastated when she died is because they were invested in her potential romance with Cloud. It was the easiest and cheapest way to make sure the devs achieved their goal. (1/5)

But in their desperation to reach that goal at any cost, the devs ended up damaging other things along the way. Having Tifa in the background until A was out of the picture was such a dumb move. It’s obvious they didn’t want any other character to outshine her. Creating this illusion of Cloud loving A served no purpose in the story. And Aerith herself didn’t bond with anyone save for Cloud. These among many other things. To me, all that wavering thing was so unnecessary to the narrative. (2/5)

Things felt rushed, and A was put on a pedestal and shoved in the players’ faces along with the potential romance with her. It was clear to me that the devs just wanted people to like her so that they’d be devastated when she died. But I guess you can’t ask for too much of games/stories back in 1997. I’m sorry, but I just can’t accept people saying that SOLDIER!Cloud loved A. They hadn’t known each other that long, and 95% of the time, they had other things on their plate than romance. (3/5)

It’s not like they were dating or getting to know each other during the brief time they spent together. Also, I don’t mean to offend anyone, but saying the LTD is now ending because A is stepping out and pushing Cloud onto Tifa sounds so insulting. Like Tifa can’t win unless her competition steps out and hands her the man on a silver platter. This time around, I feel that the devs are trying to do things properly. A is finally taking the time to bond with other characters, especially Tifa. (4/5)

Her world doesn’t revolve around Cloud only anymore. Tifa is not in the background anymore, so now people can get to know her and get attached to her even early on. The romance with Tifa isn’t something that feels like it’s come out of the left field about 2/3 of the way in. There might’ve been hints but they were too subtle. Among many other improvements. Whatever the devs do, I just hope they give us the best version possible of the story this time around. Thanks for listening to my rant.(5/5)

Death to the LTD 1

Death to the LTD 2 (dialogue evolution)

Death to the LTD 3 (soldier Cloud’s acceptance)

Cloud’s hyper vigilance

That would be because the concept absolutely was introduced to make the players more invested in Aerith, so her death had a harder hit when it happened. It was a new thing back in 97 to have a love triangle and pretty much everybody was starting to do it. There’s tons of movies, tv series and books out during that time that showcase the trope.

And having 2 heroines, Aerith and Tifa, and having the hero waver between them, at the time that was something new. ~Kitase,  FFVII 10th Anniversary Ultimania pg. 11

I think everyone forgets the difference in technology between FF6 and FF7, not just graphically, but narratively, too. Back then, everything was new and everyone was still trying to find their feet and figure out evolving technology. I mean, it’s still evolving now, but those building blocks that form the base are still the same. Just because there’s now millions of polygons involved doesn’t take away the fact they’re still polygons. 

FF7 was Square’s first foray into using more sophisticated methods of game development and that impacted how the story came across. In previous games, the optional content or hidden story arcs that had to be found to be appreciated made the game more fun. The player had to wander around more and talk to everyone to get the full picture and since it worked before, they thought it’d work again. That people would replay and swap party members around to trigger the other scenes and gather the rest of the puzzle pieces for the fuller picture.

But, they forgot they were trying to make everyone love one specific character, which meant the best way to do that was to keep her in the party over everyone else. Which meant people cared less about the others until the point she leaves the party for good. And by that point, when these people replay they just want to spend even more time with her, so they still miss the other dialogues and scenes with other characters that build their storyline alongside this other character they’ve pressed everyone to care about.

And that’s how the LTD got started because they chose not to play the game fully and only focus on one character, they didn’t see the entire picture. And the guides out at the time didn’t help much on that side of things because they didn’t give narrative canon party suggestions so that players got the most out of the story in each location. 

Soldier Cloud loved Aerith?

Really? When they’ve been saying for years that soldier Cloud didn’t even exist or that we said he was really Zack and that’s why he’s into Aerith? It’s funny how the moment the devs confirm that real Cloud emerged to embrace Tifa they decided they could claim the dominant persona for their own, even though they also said that it was soldier Cloud who complimented Tifa, despite real Cloud not being the dominant persona. We even see visible evidence of the two aspects at war with each other in the honeybee inn scene before Cloud dances. That eye movement back and forth and expression of “fine, for Tifa” is an internal argument with the two aspects that soldier Cloud isn’t aware enough of to realise that’s what it is. If we take Soldier Cloud as the only personality then there’s no way he’d do that because it’s not cool, and soldier Cloud is always cool. He’s being made to dance because of real Cloud’s desire to rescue Tifa. 

Aerith steps out...

Yeah, I wouldn’t phrase it like that, but the overall sentiment is that Aerith is refusing to do what happened in OG.

More importantly, though, and the thing I focused on in my death to the LTD, is Cloud’s behaviour and reaction and feelings. Because he’s soldier Cloud. Real Cloud isn’t part of the LTD because he already chose Tifa. Soldier Cloud is the focus of the LTD because he’s the one who misinterpreted real Cloud’s feelings and focused them on the wrong girl. This time, we see clear evidence throughout all of his interactions that he is also choosing Tifa.

In the train tunnel, while it’s real Cloud’s motivation to protect Tifa, Soldier Cloud is the one who carries out the roll. Then, it’s Soldier Cloud who kisses her cheek, the same as it’s Soldier Cloud who calls her beautiful. Because he’s the one flirting. Real Cloud’s desire is the motivator for him to do it, but it’s Soldier Cloud doing the thing.  Same with every single flirty interaction. Real Cloud’s emergence is only confirmed by the devs twice in the game and both times relate to Tifa. Real Cloud’s hand twitches with the urge to comfort her and then real Cloud hugs her. 

Everything else is only motivated by his love and desire for her, which means everything else is Soldier Cloud acting on those feelings.

The single moment of wavering from him is literally within the LTD nod scene in the train graveyard when Aerith grabs his arm. He doesn’t react when she does it, stays silent, leans away. He’s not showing her a preference. Then, he looks at and agrees with Tifa, which is showing a clear bias towards her. 

Then right before Tifa grabs Cloud’s arm, his eyes start to shift towards Aerith. This is the reference to OG Cloud wavering, but then before he can even look at Aerith, he spots Tifa’s hands in his peripheral vision, gasps, then looks at and smiles at her. 

That’s the result of Cloud’s wavering. He chose Tifa. After that, there’s zero LTD scenes and in fact, there’s a humorous shot of Tifa looking towards the camera after Cloud leaps on her to save her from the falling train carriage and Aerith thanks him for saving both of them. He didn’t save both of them. Didn’t even try. 

I don’t think there’s gonna be anything to worry about going forward because one thing Nojima learned from letting things be “open for interpretation” is that his work gets butchered. 

Since FF7, other FF titles he’s worked on -

FF8: Squall and Rinoa kiss.

FF10: Yuna and Tidus kiss.

FFCC: Aerith and Zack hug

FF13: Snow and Serah kiss and get engaged.

FF15 (when it was originally vs): Noctis and Luna kiss.

If anyone learned their lesson from this LTD mess, it’s Nojima, but he’s been restricted when it comes to 7 by the suits - which is one of the hidden graffiti meta messages in the train tunnel that refers to why Cloti was never made more explicit. 

“They tell you to go with the flow so they can keep the status quo.”

Since this is the last of the FF7 compilation the suits have relaxed the reins on the LTD, so that Nojima can write the story as he sees fit, which I would guess is down to the fact they did sales projections and figured out that FF7 would be massively successful and has in fact also boosted sales of PS4 consoles because people specifically bought the console to play FF7R. With the new mysteries and twists to keep fans talking about the game until the next installment is out, they don’t need to hold onto this outdated LTD concept that everyone hates and isn’t anything the company wants to associate with because of how toxic and nasty it is. They’re a Japanese company having to hear these so called fans talking about how Tifa is a “typical Asian girl” or whatever tf they call her. It’s disgusting. Square yeeted the guys behind Genesis because of the controversy around them, so to have fans like this associated with one of their most popular and iconic titles? Yeah, that ain’t happening. 

[watusichris]

Betty Davis: They Say She’s Different

It appears that everything anyone has written for the old Music Aficionado site has now disappeared from the web. A random Facebook post has prompted me to re-purpose this story, written in 2016, about my favorite funketress. **********

To this day, the name Betty Davis – Betty with a “y,” that is – remains best known to connoisseurs of Miles Davis minutiae and ‘70s funk obsessives. While it’s true that Betty played an important off-stage role in the career of the jazz trumpeter, to whom she was married for just a year, and she undoubtedly made some of the best hardcore funk records of her era, she deserves to be recognized beyond the relatively narrow provinces of the jazzbo and the crate-digger.

Uncompromising, intelligent, brazen, aggressive, and not incidentally gorgeous, sexually provocative, and a fashion plate always ahead of the curve, Betty was a prophetic figure. Spawned by the explosion of music, fashion, and alternative culture of the late ‘60s, and by concurrent leaps in black consciousness and feminism, she was a take-no-prisoners singer and writer who presented herself as something new, rich, and strange with her self-titled debut album in 1973.

There were some badass contemporaries working the soul and funk trenches– gutter-tongued diva Millie Jackson and one-time James Brown paramour Yvonne Fair leap to mind immediately – but they seemed to be adapting tropes previously worked by male singers in the genres. Betty still sounds like something new: a tough, smart, demanding woman who reveled in pleasure and insisted on satisfaction, unafraid to claim what she wanted.

Despite the fact that she was associated with some high-profile male musician friends and lovers – beyond Davis, the roll call included Hugh Masekela, Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, Mike Carabello, Eric Clapton, and Robert Palmer – she was no groupie or bed-hopping climber. Possessed of her own self-defining vision, she was producing her own records and leading a tight, flexible little band by the end of her brief run.

In 1976, after completing four splendid albums (only three of which were released at the time), she disappeared, not only from the music business but from the public eye entirely. What happened? It’s an old story that many women in the industry will recognize: Her record company didn’t know what to do with her, and wanted her to tone down her act. Betty Davis wasn’t having any of that, thank you, and she hit the damn road.

She was born Betty Mabry in Durham, NC, in 1945. She grew up country, and was exposed to down-home, get-down music early. On the title track of her second album, They Say I’m Different, she runs down the artists who served as inspirations: Big Mama Thornton, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Howlin’ Wolf, Albert King, Chuck Berry. The blues, in one form or another, is the backbone of her style.

Her family relocated to Pittsburgh when she was young, but at 16 she left home for the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. There she was hurtled into the roiling cultural vortex of the Village. She took up modeling, working for the toney Wilhelmina agency, and began running with a posse of similarly disposed, equally beautiful women who called themselves the “Electric Ladies.” Sound familiar? One of her closest cohorts was Devon Wilson, for many years a notorious consort of Jimi Hendrix known for her freewheeling, outré sex- and drug-saturated lifestyle.

Mabry began to try her hand at singing, and cut a few self-penned singles. They were in an old-school mold in terms of structure, but her very first 45 hints at things to come. “Get Ready For Betty,” a 1964 track released by Don Costa (discoverer of Paul Anka and Trini Lopez and a key arranger for Frank Sinatra), is stodgy early-‘60s NYC R&B to its core, but its message is pointed: “Get out my way, girl, ‘cause I’m comin’ to take your man.”

She also made a stolid romantic duet ballad with singer Roy Arlington and, produced by cult soul man Lou Courtney, a homage to the Cellar, the New York club where she DJed. But she didn’t start reaching the upper echelon of the music biz until one of her songs, a hymn to Harlem called “Uptown,” was cut by the Chambers Brothers for their smash 1968 album The Time Has Come, which also included the psychedelic soul workout “Time Has Come Today.”

The Chambers association probably secured a singles deal for her at Columbia Records, and her first session for the major label was produced by her former live-in boyfriend, South African trumpeter Masekela, in October 1968. By that time, she had split with him: A month earlier, she had married a far more famous horn player, Miles Davis, whom she had met in 1967. Davis and his regular producer Teo Macero would head her second session for Columbia in May 1969.

Those two dates were released for the first time as The Columbia Years 1968-1969 earlier this month by Light in the Attic, the independent label that has restored Betty’s entire catalog to print over the last decade. While devoted fans can be grateful that the work is finally seeing the light of day, it does not make for easy listening, for it was clearly made by people groping in the dark.

Betty’s artistic persona was at that point completely unformed, and so her male Svengalis did their best to mold the clay in their hands, with feeble results. Masekela evidently completed just three tracks, two of which, “It’s My Life” and “Live, Love, Learn,” were issued as a flop single. The homiletic song titles give the game away; the music, straight-up commercial soul backed by a large group (which included Wilton Felder and Wayne Henderson of the Jazz Crusaders and Masekela), has nothing original to say.

The date with Miles is a bigger waste, if a more spectacular one. The personnel couldn’t have been more glittering: Hendrix sidemen Billy Cox and Mitch Mitchell; ex-Detroit Wheels guitarist Jim McCarty; bassist Harvey Brooks, studio familiar of Bob Dylan and former member of the Electric Flag; and Davis’ then-current or future band mates Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, John McLaughlin, and Larry Young.

But nothing jells. The material is either weak (Betty’s directionless original “Hangin’ Out” is the best of a bad lot) or incongruous (lumbering covers of Cream’s “Politician” and Creedence’s “Born On the Bayou”). Worse, the jazzers are unable to lay down anything resembling a solid soul-rock foundation, and even reliable timekeeper Mitchell blows the groove on more than one occasion. Miles gets impatient with his spouse at one point, rasping over the talk-back, “Sing it just like that, with the gum in your mouth and all, bitch.”

Apparently intended as demos, the failed tracks were consigned to the tape library. By late ’69, Miles and Betty’s marriage was history. She left her mark on his music: She appeared on the cover of his cover of his 1968 album Filles de Kilimanjaro and inspired its extended track “Mademoiselle Mabry” (based on the chords that opens Hendrix’s “The Wind Cries Mary”) and “Back Seat Betty” from his 1981 comeback album The Man With the Horn.

Moreover, she moved him toward the flash style that would dominate his music through the mid-‘70s, by exposing him to the slamming music of Hendrix and Sly and exchanging his continental suits for psychedelic pimp togs. Would we know Bitches Brew, On the Corner, and Agharta without Betty Davis? Maybe, maybe not.

For her part, Betty remained in the wings for a while. She collaborated on demos for the Commodores; in London, she modeled, worked on songs for Marc Bolan of T. Rex, and declined a production offer from her then-paramour Clapton. Drifting back to New York, she met Santana percussionist Carabello. They became involved romantically, and in 1972 she relocated to the San Francisco Bay area, where Carabello’s local connections led to the formation of a stellar band to back her on a debut album.

One reads the credits for Betty Davis in awe. The rhythm section was the Family Stone’s dissident, puissant rhythm section, bassist Larry Graham and drummer Greg Errico (who also produced). Original Santana guitarist Neal Schon, future Mandrill axe man Doug Rodrigues, founding Graham Central Station organist Hershall Kennedy, and keyboardist and ace Jerry Garcia collaborator Merl Saunders filled out the instrumentation. The Pointer Sisters, Sylvester, and Kathi McDonald were among a large platoon of backup vocalists.

Issued in 1973 by Just Sunshine Records, an independent label owned by Woodstock Festival promoter Michael Lang (who also released a set by another unique woman, folk singer-guitarist Karen Dalton), Betty Davis was one hell of a coming-out party. Since her abortive Columbia dates, she had developed a unique vocal attack that could leap from a velvety croon to a Tina Turner-like shriek in a nanosecond. The stomping funk of the studio band backed her up to the hilt.

Like Turner, she was one Bold Soul Sister. The lust-filled opening invitation “If I’m in Luck I Might Get Picked Up” announces that a new game was afoot. The statement of romantic/sexual independence “Anti Love Song,” the lovers’ chess match “Your Man My Man,” and the self-explanatory “Game is My Middle Name” offer up a startling, hard-edged new model of a hard-funking female vocalist.

The album’s most affecting track may be “Steppin in Her I. Miller Shoes,” Davis’ level-headed elegy for her sybaritic friend Devon Wilson, who sailed out a window at the Chelsea Hotel in 1971. “She coulda been anything that she wanted…Instead she chose to be nothing,” Davis sings, implying that route wouldn’t be one she would take herself.

“If I’m in Luck” grazed the lower reaches of the R&B singles chart and the album failed to reach the LP rolls at all, but Davis was undaunted. For 1974’s They Say I’m Different, she took the producer’s reins, which she would hold for the rest of her career. While the backup lineup is less glitzy (though Saunders, Pete Escovedo, and Buddy Miles, on guitar no less, appear), the support is still sizzling; crackling drums and burbling clavinet put over a set of songs that may have been even stronger than those heard on her debut.

No one who hears “He Was a Big Freak” is likely to ever forget it; it’s a startling dissection of a masochistic relationship -- inspired by Jimi Hendrix, and not, as many have assumed, by Miles Davis (“Everyone knows that Miles is a sadist,” Betty remarked later). Almost as notable are “Don’t Call Her No Tramp,” a prescient condemnation of what we now call slut-shaming, and the autobiographical title track, with slicing slide guitar work by Cordell Dudley.

Different and its attendant singles tanked, but Betty managed to maintain her profile with live gigs noteworthy for their uninhibited bawdiness, on-stage abandon, and the star’s Egyptian-princess-from-outer-space wardrobe sense. By early 1974 she had assembled a hot, lean road band that included her cousins Nickey Neal and Larry Johnson on drums and bass, respectively, plus keyboardist Fred Mills and guitarist Carlos Morales. This lineup would back her on her last two albums.

The end of Just Sunshine’s distribution deal liberated Davis, who, at the suggestion of then-boyfriend Robert Palmer, inked with Palmer’s label Island Records. The company released Nasty Gal in 1975, and it may be Davis’ best-executed work. The pared-down backing lets the songs shine, and there are good ones here: The shameless title song, the vituperative blast at the critics “Dedicated to the Press,” and the out-front ultimatum for sexual satisfaction “Feelins” get right up in the listener’s face. The most surprising track is the ballad “You and I,” an unexpected songwriting reunion with Miles, orchestrated by the trumpeter’s famed arranger Gil Evans.

It’s a tremendous album, and Betty supported it with live shows that ate the funk competition alive. A bootleg of an especially out-there set recorded at a festival on the French Riviera in 1976 literally climaxes with Nasty Gal’s “The Lone Ranger,” an in-the-saddle heavy breather that Davis wraps up by feigning a loud orgasm.

One should remember that at this particular juncture, Madonna was studying dance at the University of Michigan.

But Nasty Gal faded with hardly a trace, and Davis’ relationship with Island swiftly became fractious. It’s easy to see why the label declined to issue her final album, originally called Crashin’ From Passion and ultimately released, after years as a bootleg, by Light in the Attic in 2009 as Is It Love or Desire. The collection, which leans heavily on songs about sex, doping, and heavy drinking, includes “Stars Starve, You Know,” an outright condemnation of the games record companies play:

They said if I wanted to make some money

I’d have to change my style

Put a paper bag over my face

Sing soft and wear tight fitting gowns

 They don’t like the way I’m lookin’

So it’s hard for my agent to get me bookin’s

Unless I cover up my legs and drop my pen

And commit one of those commercial sins…

 Oh hey hey Island

And that was all she wrote. Until writers began to seek her out in the new millennium as her records became available again, Betty Davis was an invisible woman, one who had blazed a trail that other talents, such as Prince and Madonna, would blaze more profitably after her. She was definitively ahead of her time.

Asked by one writer what she had done since leaving music, Davis, who turns 71 on July 26, responded with the most tragic thing one can imagine any artist saying: “Nothing really.”

[theliterateape]

Wonder Woman 1984 Couldn’t Save the Story

By David Himmel

I’ve been looking forward to the sequel to 2017’s Wonder Woman since the film ended with Wonder Woman herself leaping from the top of a building and soaring into the credits. So when it was announced that Wonder Woman 1984 was going to be available on HBO Max Christmas Day, I went to bed each night with visions of indestructible bracelets dancing in my head.

Then it finally arrived. Christmas. WW84. 

My wife and I settled into the couch with a bucket of Cherry Coke, a cornucopia of candy, and two obnoxious bowls of fresh popped popcorn soaked in butter. It was the movie-going experience I had been missing this year.

I love Wonder Woman. I didn’t grow up on the source material. I grew up on Lynda Carter. Reruns of the campy Wonder Woman TV show, which originally ran from 1975–1979 were a favorite of mine as a little kid. Not only was it an entertaining show for a preschooler in the eighties with the jumping and bullet-blocking and running, but I was also in love with Lynda Carter both as Diana Prince and Wonder Woman. 

You see—sounding all Freudian alarms—my mother is a brunette and, from what I could tell at that young age, she could do anything and everything, so I grew up likening my mom to the Amazonian goddess. I also thought any pretty lady with brown hair was my mom including the woman on the Sun-Maid raisins box. (Despite my mother being a beauty queen and model—just like Lynda Carter—the real Sun-Maid Girl died at age 90 two months before I turned four.) From my vantage point, my mom was completely capable of saving the day and harvesting yummy raisins. A true wonder woman. 

I wasn’t a big reader of the Wonder Woman comics. Blame that on my time as a boy in 1984. Wonder Woman comics didn’t make their way to me and by the time I was old enough to choose my own reads, I was too deep into graphic novels about the Vietnam War, X-Men comics, and other Marvel titles. But I always knew Diana’s story and powers, and recognized her as one of the most powerful characters to grace the pages of comic books.

Settled into the couch, we hit play and HBO Max glowed to life to give me the Christmas gift I’d been waiting months for.

The opening scene set the tone. A thrilling action scene showcasing the abilities of Diana’s people back on Themyscira. It dropped a few hints of what challenges Diana/Wonder Woman might face and the lessons she will learn or be reminded of. Good opening. And then the film fell apart and Christmas was ruined.

Nah, Christmas was fine, but Wonder Woman 1984 was a disappointment. And not as much for me as for Diana and Wonder Woman. And for actor Gal Gadot. She was robbed of an interesting story. There is no character development in WW84 for our hero. Diana is in the exact same place as she was at the end of the first film. She picks up a few new abilities along the way, but one, like flying in an invisible jet felt like director/writer/producer Patty Jenkins was force feeding me a MacGuffin only to throw it away after I agreed to swallow it. Flight is a big thing in this film but Wonder Woman learning to master it seemed wasteful as I was convinced she was learning to fly based on the way the first film ended. That’s on me.

When we left Wonder Woman in the first film, she was heartbroken for Steve Trevor (Chris Pine). When we meet her again in 1984, some seventy years after his death, she still pines for him. (See what I did there?) By the end, she’s the same. Closed off, unwilling or unable to open herself up to people, most notably to people who could love her and she could love in return. This, despite that Steve tells her that’s a stupid thing to do—remain closed off. When he comes back to life through a wish, he is filled with a zest for life, a chance to experience something again. Pine plays Steve with an almost childlike wonder and it’s fun to watch.

They missed an incredible opportunity to build an interesting story tying in time, the struggle and pain of being ageless—timeless. Maybe that’s how Steve comes back. He exists in a tear in time. What is the hardship of a god living among men? Not her challenging duty but her struggle.

And why 1984? For the fashion jokes? The nukes? Missed opportunity there. Especially since the year is in the title.

Kristin Wiig is great. She’s surprising as she anchors her Ghostbusters (2016) character into Barbara Minerva/Cheetah. But I wanted more form her relationship with Diana. When Barbara wishes to be like Diana, “Sexy, cool… special,” there’s a chance for her to also face the backlash of being an ageless goddess. That opportunity was dampened when Barbara cartoonishly chooses to become a full baddy. But you can’t blame Barbara, she was written that way.

Everything was written as a MacGuffin. One little thing to get us to the big moment with the big baddy—a Donald Trump-ish huckster played by Pedro Pascal. Pascal as Max Lord at first is a slimey but sympathetic character. That quickly devolves into him being a super-duper bad guy bent on world domination that overcorrects in heightening the stakes. The manner in which he goes about dominating the world is trite but also is based on a lazy Orwellian approach to what technology would be like in 1984. It gives the sense that the film was written during Lynda Carter’s heyday where 1984 still seemed futuristic.

There’s so much opportunity squandered. Diana/Wonder Woman is an ageless goddess with a lonely heart and incredible powers. How does one live like that? In the first film, Diana is learning what it means to be human. This film could have had her learning what it means to be a god among humans. Instead, the character is a pawn. She’s not driven by anything. And that’s what gets me.

Diana could be relatable. Make her the troubled messiah. She lives among us so long, she longs or struggles to be like us. And maybe losing her power—the unknown risk she takes when Steve comes back—is attractive to her so she can live and love. And if they had to bring back Chris Cline, the could have dipped into the mystique and magic of Diana’s world. Something more than a silly wish. Something more interesting that pushes Diana to face new internal struggles while working to defeat the external forces of evil.

The film sets itself up as movie that’ll deal with time. There’s a date in the title. But why 1984? For the nukes? For the broadcast Max Lord needs to tap into? For the fanny pack jokes? Jenkins and Co. could have given the theme a little more oompf by leaning into their own ideas of time and address the hardships a an ageless, nearly all powerful goddess faces. Instead, we get a joke about modern public art being trash and a WWI watch coming to life because… because the ghost of the man who owned it has come back from the beyond. Two completely unrelated things. But they didn’t have to be.

The film takes its time with the wrong beats. There are many big moments, often in the middle of the action, where Wonder Woman’s face is the focus. The only takeaway from these slowed down moments of intensity are for the sake of empowerment. And, okay, fine. That’s cool. I get it. Wonder Woman is empowering. The movie, however, is not empowering. It’s a vehicle that reduces Wonder Woman to a physically strong woman who does not develop as an individual. She’s the most dimensional inspiring cinematic female character since the offensive Captain Marvel.

Time proves to be a major influencer in the film in the way it’s wasted. When they have to fly to Cairo, they do so by stealing a jet that Diana has access to thanks to her job at the museum, and allegedly will face no consequences for hoarking a fighter jet for personal reasons. Regardless… They have to get from Washington D.C. to Cairo, a trip of just over 5,000 nautical miles. A modern Boeing 747 can fly 8,255 nautical miles on a full tank of gas. A fighter jet with a smaller tank would likely need every last drop and the wind at their backs the entire time to make the tip without refueling or plummeting into the ocean. Instead of being concerned with that, Steve and Diana choose that time to have their romantic scene. Flips and tricks and dawdling through a Fourth of July fireworks show. And why was Steve surprised by the fireworks and it being July 4th? He just arrived in a new body the day before. He certainly checked the date on a newspaper or heard something on the radio or a TV. And the Fourth of July was already a holiday before he was killed in World War I.

These gripes would be nitpicking if they weren’t so easily remedied by giving the main character an actual story arc.

Wonder Woman 1984 was a fine superhero movie. Far from the best (Captain America: Civil War). Better than the worst (Justice League). It had its share of fun action moments, but even in an action film, the action must be secondary to the story.

After watching the film, we turned on the old TV show. There’s not much character development there either. But it’s a 1970s network television procedural. It’s meant to be campy. And it was more than enough.

Following the three-hour Lynda Carter bender, I realized that you could totally edit scenes in WW84 to make a trailer about a woman who takes care of, then falls in love with, a mentally handicapped man. And that would be a great story to tell. Wonder Woman with Hollywood blockbuster money behind her deserves something interesting.

[meem-didi]

Journal: Final Reflection

The fashion industry has complex links to many other sectors, including manufacturing, advertising, raw material processing, transport, and retailing. The immense profits to be gained in the retail industry give rise to the desire to engage in unethical practices. When suppliers, distributors, designers, or customers are exploited or treated unfairly, fashion industry executives have an ethical duty to improve the situation.  

Within Fashion Ethics and Culture course, we were given the opportunity to explore the breadth of creative, aesthetic, and social/cultural expression of design through the lens of ethical and historic considerations – as it is and how it needs to change, the role of the MENA region and its relationship to fashion media.  

As a student of DIDI, I felt the same link and inspiration between the Fashion Ethics and Culture course and my vision of how I want to be as a future designer and how I should change the current fashion industry status quo with my future career path. The course creates a creative paradigm for learning ethical fashion design through the lens of ethical and historic considerations. Students are introduced to fashion history, cultural criticism, contemporary culture, and the diversity of representation including ethical considerations and perspectives.

In my opinion, this course plays as a moderator between all other fashion courses we study and extend to other courses with depth like sociology and design histories and theories to link and emphasis all courses material in a dynamic way. We covered various subjects relating to Body Image Problems, Fur Trade Issues, Cultural Hegemony and Appropriation, Consumer Over-consumption, Environmental Effects, and Concerns, Advertisement Conflicts, Brand Name Forgery, Sweat Shop Working Conditions, and Exclusiveness and Injustice Issues; that simultaneously vary from micro to macro scale through lectures, group activities, open discussions in class, and individual presentations.

The True Cost Formula 

Investigate your Wardrobe

Doughnut Economics

ATCAC-Disrupting the Fashion System

Earth Logic: the turning point

Careers in the Fashion Industry

The future of Garment Technology in Circular Fashion

Market Segmentation

Fashion for Good: Virtual Tour

Fashion & Society

Made in America

“Luxury: Behind the mirror of high-end fashion”

Empathic Design Process

SOKO Kenya - A people first company

Innovative Fashion Marketing

Key trends innovating Fashion Marketing

Fashion for Good: Virtual Tour

Untangled Egyptian Beauty Standards

The Fashion & Race database

The Modist- Modest Fashion Dream

About Time: Fashion and Duration

The It Girl: Ashley Al Busmait

I enjoyed the above-listed topics and guest lecture discussions we had this semester, but certain to a whole new way of perceiving the world. I would love to deepen and expand my knowledge on the technology and circularity of the fashion industry future as well as focus on modest fashion and ethical practices and success and failure aspects of the Modist business experience. Whether through merging my learning outcome within this semester to my nest fashion studio or final thesis.

Here's my list of the most meaningful subjects for me and some of the highlights of my recent blogs on these topics:

ATCAC-Disrupting the Fashion System

ORIGIN AND HISTORY

Atacac is a Swedish fashion studio that Jimmy Herdberg and Rickard Lindqvist created in 2016. Atacac is designed to disrupt the current fashion system. Atacac is like a laboratory for developing ideas and principles. Then they work as consultants sharing that with other brands to improve their design. The other way they work with other designers is what they call Share-wear. When they release a new product in their online store, they also offer the 2D pattern and the 3D model of the garment for free download. This builds a community of home sellers and independent brands that use their patterns and designs. In certain terms, you can do whatever you want. There is a Credit Common Licence connected to the Share-wear which means you can use it commercially in any way you like, and you can make improvements to it, But you need to give credit back to Atacac if you use it commercially and market the product. You also need to make your development available for other people to keep developing further.

For me ATCAC is a brilliant business module example that is trying to blow the entire system to the ground, I loved how I saw ATCAC embodying every principle, I have been learning for the past 3 years. This blog post and the investigation behind it gave me hope that I can succeed in doing something different with my future dream brand.

Innovative Fashion Marketing

Stretchy Kids’ Clothes Petit Pli gets a growing identity

A sustainable fashion design example that offers apparel that evolves as the wearer grows older has an innovative branding that sounds like “more human” and “less professional." The idea is to reduce the waste of apparel and save parents’ money as children progress up a range of sizes in the first three years of their lives.

It needs time and education to promote meaningful behavioral change. We assume that we are too late for much of our generation. We assume, though, that we are just in time for the next era of LittleHumans. The brilliance of the brand strategy is in anchoring on the opportunity where new parents and young children are more open to improvement and learning than any other part of our community. They do everything not only to promote constructive behavioral improvement but also to make it as seamless as possible.

Marketing as a term became cliché of how much brands are using it without actually making the right –positive impact on their users, within this blog post example of how marketing approach could be current, supportive and extending the brand value to further stage where the client loyalty will be granted due to that extended value, this reminded me of applying the product-service systems methodology, where it's not only the brand responsibility to produce and market a product but they innovate different approaches to extended their after-sale services and product value to emotionally engage their clients.

Empathic Design Process

Empathy is the core of the entire process of Design Thinking. Putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes reinforces our ability to interpret information, and lets us understand how other humans perceive the world around us.

 The realm of fashion design is shifting from an external focus on the industry, or an internal focus on integrating technology, to an empathetic focus on people. While it’s not too difficult to rally people around this general idea, it can be hard at first to understand how to translate it into tactics.

I ask myself as a designer, how do we make a good connection between a fashion worker and a customer? My solution to this question is to make fashion employees the hero of the story, create brand ideals around them. Plan company modules to be a win-win for staff and stakeholders. As designers, we should reconfigure how the framework is giving back to the societies through which we work. I expect, as a future fashion designer, to build a secure working environment that will help better the lives of single mothers in Egypt. By offering comprehensive educational opportunities and curating future working talents. The Empathy Concept process will be incorporated not only to understand the consumers but also most critically, to understand the true needs of the heroes behind my future brand.

Technology & future of Circular Fashion

Fashion has always been a major hub for innovation — from the invention of the sewing machine to the rise of e-commerce. As technology, fashion is both forward-looking and cyclical. At $2.2 T, the apparel industry is now one of the top sectors in the global economy. Nowadays, apparel technology is rising more than ever. From robots that sew and cut clothing to AI algorithms that anticipate style patterns, to VR mirrors in dressing rooms, technology automates, customizes, and speeds up every aspect of fashion.

In the optimistic scenario, the future will be led by innovators and collaborators, the industry will leap forward in developing digital passports for clothing that carries an internationally recognized digital asset trigger that could be accessed by designers, retailers, recyclers, and customers alike. This type of standardized infrastructure and labeling approach means that not every brand or approach provider has its own patented approaches, leaving customers stuck in the sea of things to consider. In this way, the future of fashion technologies could truly unify the industry around common practices that would make circularity more visible to everyone.

Reference list

Accenture and H&M Foundation (2018). Circular x Fashion Tech. [online] Available at: https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/PDF-74/Accenture-GCA-Circular-FashionTech-Trend-Report-2018.pdf [Accessed 3 Oct. 2020].

By Insider Trends (2019). Why does Swedish clothing brand Atacac give its patterns away for free? - Insider Trends. [online] Insider Trends. Available at: https://www.insider-trends.com/why-does-swedish-clothing-brand-atacac-give-its-patterns-away-for-free/ [Accessed 14 Sep. 2020].

CB Insights (2020). The Future Of Fashion: From Design To Merchandising, How Tech Is Reshaping The Industry. [online] CB Insights Research. Available at: https://www.cbinsights.com/research/fashion-tech-future-trends/ [Accessed 26 Oct. 2020].

CHANGE, W. (2020). THE WARDROBE CRISIS. [online] THE WARDROBE CRISIS. Available at: https://thewardrobecrisis.com/the-magazine/2020/8/26/4-tech-innovations-that-will-change-the-future-of-sustainable-fashion [Accessed 26 Oct. 2020].

CLO (2020). Live Q + A with Fashion Studio Atacac. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHpiD5u0e1w&feature=youtu.be [Accessed 14 Sep. 2020].

Dawood, S. (2019). Stretchy kids’ clothing Petit Pli gets an identity that grows. [online] Design Week. Available at: https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/1-7-april-2019/stretchy-kids-clothing-petit-pli-gets-an-identity-that-grows/ [Accessed 31 Oct. 2020].

Design Indaba (2013). Data Dress: A tangible representation of your online movements | Design Indaba. [online] Design Indaba. Available at: https://www.designindaba.com/articles/creative-work/data-dress-tangible-representation-your-online-movements [Accessed 26 Oct. 2020].

Dezeen (2017). Ryan Mario Yasin’s Petit Pli kids clothing expands to fit as children grow. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ8VSvkz_4w [Accessed 31 Oct. 2020].

Dubai Design Week (2019). GGS Success Story: Featuring Petit Pli by Ryan Mario Yasin. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a2eIix1rUI [Accessed 31 Oct. 2020].

Dyson on (2019). Petit Pli: The unlikely fashion brand that wants to end industry waste by making clothes that grow. [online] Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/dyson-on/meet-the-inventors-fabric-fantastic-c5f18d7639bf [Accessed 31 Oct. 2020].

Fashion United (2020). The future of garment technology in circular fashion. [online] Fashionunited.uk. Available at: https://fashionunited.uk/news/business/the-future-of-garment-technology-in-circular-fashion/2020091750927 [Accessed 26 Oct. 2020].

Givens, D. (2020). ASOS Unveils Its Made In Kenya Collection Collaboration With Soko Kenya. [online] Black Enterprise. Available at: https://www.blackenterprise.com/asos-unveils-its-made-in-kenya-collection-collaboration-with-soko-kenya/ [Accessed 27 Oct. 2020].

GLOBAL FASHION AGENDA (2020). Design for Longevity. [online] Designforlongevity.com. Available at: https://designforlongevity.com/page/about [Accessed 14 Sep. 2020].

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Krantz, J. (2017). Atacac uses game tech to disrupt the fashion system - MAGIC FABRIC. [online] MAGIC FABRIC. Available at: https://magicfabricblog.com/atacac-uses-game-technology-change-fashion-system/ [Accessed 14 Sep. 2020].

LeVine, S. (2018). Automated fashion is now a reality in new Chinese store. [online] Axios. Available at: https://www.axios.com/fashion-automated-alibaba-china-store-d476b4a4-d74d-410e-9518-bea2449203da.html [Accessed 26 Oct. 2020].

Morrison, H., Petherick, L. and Ley, K. (2019). THE FUTURE OF CIRCULAR FASHION A COLLABORATIVE REPORT BY ACCENTURE STRATEGY AND FASHION FOR GOOD ASSESSING THE VIABILITY OF CIRCULAR BUSINESS MODELS. [online] ACCENTURE STRATEGY AND FASHION FOR GOOD. Available at: https://d2be5ept72nvlo.cloudfront.net/2019/05/The-Future-of-Circular-Fashion-Report.pdf [Accessed 2 Oct. 2020].

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[letterboxd]

Drawing Closer.

Animation lovers: watchlists at the ready. From action capers to Irish folk tales, in 3DCG or the humble pencil, by manga legends and raucous newcomers, Letterboxd’s animation correspondent Kambole Campbell picks ten new feature films we’re excited to see.

When the gears of the live-action film industry ground to a near-halt earlier this year, animators were still at work. As a medium that, at its most fundamental level, is controlled fully by the imaginations of its creators, this might be the one element of the screen industry that has some kind of ability to operate throughout the pandemic.

Based on previews from this year’s online edition of the annual Annecy International Animation Film Festival, there’s a lot to look forward to that’s still in the works, even now. With everything from blockbuster capers and fantastical alternate histories, explorations of folklore and real human stories alike, we can expect a spoil of boundless and endlessly creative films limited only by the imaginations of those drawing them.

Here are ten animated features I’m specifically excited for, in no particular order (except for the first—fight me if you like, Masaaki Yuasa will always win).

Inu-Oh Directed by Masaaki Yuasa / Due to release in 2021

If there’s one new animated film to watch in the next year, make it Inu-Oh (but also, don’t limit yourself to one). Masaaki Yuasa has proven himself time and again to be one of the most exciting and versatile animation directors alive, as well as potentially the busiest. With his studio, Science Saru, this year alone he directed two television series—the fantastic ode to animators, Keep Your Hands off Eizouken!!, and the intense Netflix disaster series Japan Sinks: 2020—as well as the melancholy, romantic feature film Ride Your Wave.

Inu-Oh looks to be just as imaginative and wild as anything else Yuasa-san has made, based on the work-in-progress glimpse at Annecy. Set in fourteenth-century Japan, the film is based on Hideo Furukama’s novel about the legendary masked Noh theater performer Inu-Oh, born with “unique characteristics”, which lead them to cover their entire body. Both novel and film focus on their close friendship with the blind biwa hōshi (lute priest) Tomona, and the success they find together.

“We often think of history as moving in one straight line, but it actually branches off, and people and events in those branches have been forgotten or disappeared,” Yuasa-san said during the Annecy preview. Inu-Oh explores those hidden branches through an anachronistic reimagining of the roots of traditional Japanese entertainment. The main idea: what if the performers of Noh theater were treated like Japan’s pop idols of today? Yuasa-san described the main characters as “kind of like The Beatles” of 1300s Japan.

On credits alone there’s a lot of promise, with the legendary Taiyō Matsumoto— the mangaka who created Tekkonkinkreet and Ping Pong (and collaborated with Yuasa-san on the latter’s fantastic anime adaptation)—lending his eccentric yet elegant designs to the film. The preview opened with minute movements comprised of rough, wide almost painterly brushstrokes, an art style almost completely unlike anything Yuasa-san has done previously.

As it turns out, this is but one way of representing the world of Inu-Oh, through the perspective of Tomona, a Notes on Blindness-esque way of representing how Tomona perceives things. From those small glimpses, Inu-Oh looks to be a beautiful, anthropological piece built with both the same free-form style that characterizes the rest of his work, and perhaps something more classical as well.

Wolfwalkers Directed by Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart / Coming to theaters and Apple TV+ in late 2020 after a September 12 premiere at TIFF

Made and set in Kilkenny, home to the acclaimed animation studio Cartoon Saloon, the much-anticipated Wolfwalkers is inspired by animation’s past, Celtic legend, and the local area’s history. Set in 1650, Wolfwalkers takes place amidst attempts by the English (Cromwell, specifically) to pacify and tame Ireland. Representative of those wild elements the English are seeking to eradicate are the ‘wolfwalkers’—people blessed by Saint Patrick with the power to leave their bodies at night and become wolves during their sleep (Irish werewolves, essentially). The story follows an English girl, Robyn Goodfellowe (Honor Kneafsey), who moves to Ireland with her father Bill (Sean Bean), to help carry out Cromwell’s plan to kill the wolves.

Like his previous film, Song of the Sea (2014), co-director Tomm Moore says this new film is based upon a childhood story common amongst those living in Kilkenny. And like his previous films (including 2009’s The Secret of Kells), it looks to be a visual feast, with a mixture of dynamic camera styles, pre-viz work and hand-drawn animation for moments like its ‘wolf-vision’. Moore draws the ideological divide between the English and the Irish into every scratch of pencil, the occupied cities comprised of rigid lines and angular designs, while the forest and its inhabitants are more free-flowing and unkempt.

Moore cited the rough charcoal lines of Isao Takahata’s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya as one influence on the Cartoon Saloon animators’ approach; the way that Robin is drawn gradually changing along with her worldview. Cartoon Saloon is yet to make a bad film, and Wolfwalkers looks like it might be the company’s most beautiful myth yet.

Stay tuned to The Letterboxd Show for an interview with Tomm Moore.

Over The Moon Directed by Glen Keane / Due on Netflix, late 2020

The feature directorial debut of animation legend Glen Keane, early glimpses of Over The Moon look utterly bonkers. A long-time character animator for Disney, having worked on almost all of the studio’s animation output since Pete’s Dragon in 1977, Keane looks to be bringing his vast array of talents to his first feature film. The trailer alone shows off a vast blend of styles, from the 3DCG (three-dimensional computer graphics) and more realistic lighting that we’ve come to expect from Disney animation, as well as the more textured, hand-drawn work the director cut his teeth on.

The story itself sounds wild, though it starts out simple enough: Fei Fei (Cathy Ang) is enraptured by her parents’ stories of a goddess living on the moon. After her mother passes away, Fei Fei begins to believe the story is true, and decides to build a rocket to get there. There’s also a hint of something living there. Whatever the answer is, I’m curious to see it, and with a star-studded cast that includes the likes of John Cho and Sandra Oh, how could I turn it down?

Lupin III: The First Directed by Takashi Yamazaki / Released in select territories; wider release due late 2020

Takashi Yamazaki’s Lupin III: The First, the first 3DCG-animated Lupin III feature film, looks rather incredible. It’s the latest in a vast, 50-year history of anime based on the manga from the late Kazuhiko Katō (known by the pen name Monkey Punch). Despite that long history, the Lupin III franchise has always managed to resist being made obsolete; part of its ongoing appeal is its ability to continuously adapt to new contexts and styles while retaining its simple charms, and The First is no different.

The film announces itself in the same way as ever, the iconic ‘Lupin III’ theme blaring over a flashy title sequence that builds off familiar iconography, as well as moments from the franchise’s history. It revels in the style of old-school caper the show continues to embrace, taking delight in the exploits of a modern-day gentleman thief who announces his robberies with calling cards.

Even with the new and unfamiliar animation style, Lupin III: The First feels like a classic Lupin III tale, taking the story back to the 1960s (the decade during which the character was created), and even putting its main character back in his classic red suit. Each character design translates surprisingly well to this mode of animation—Lupin’s gangly frame, as well as the unique appearances of his compatriots Goemon, Fujiko, Zenigata and Jigen (who looks bizarrely attractive in this—although, to be fair, “everyone in this movie is f—king sexy” according to Letterboxd member London. Accurate).

Yamazaki does well to avoid the often sterile feeling of 3DCG animation by having these characters all move like the cartoons they’re based on (for starters, a long-running visual gag of Lupin leaping straight out of his clothes). It might take some adjustment (which for me, only really lasted up to the opening credits) before it becomes fully dazzling. Lupin III: The First might be the most exciting action caper of 2020, in any medium.

The Legend of Hei Directed by Mtjj / Released in China late 2019; international release TBA

Rivalling Lupin III: The First for most flamboyant animation on show at Annecy was The Legend of Hei, a feature-length prequel to the Flash web cartoon The Legend of Luo Xiaohei by Chinese artist Mtjj (real name Zhang Ping).

The series tells the story of the spirit Luo Xiaohei, who takes the appearance of a small black cat before being adopted by a young girl. The film’s story focuses more squarely on the cat, Xiaohei, who transforms into a man and goes on to live in the forest, his carefree existence soon interrupted by the discovery that humans are beginning to encroach on that territory as their cities expand, and technological progress puts the two worlds increasingly at odds.

As the film explores more of Xiaohei’s origins, the thick, clean line-work and cute art style disguises a much grander, epic conflict at play, realized in some wildly animated fight scenes. (“Starts off small and adorable, then expands into an epic conflict on an Akira scale,” writes Tasha Robinson.) The 2D-animated film allegedly took five years to produce, Mtjj saying in an interview that the complete film, at 100 minutes, required more than 70,000 drawings—or around twelve per second.

With its gentle score and clash of the spiritual world with the modern, the environmentally conscious work of Studio Ghibli comes to mind, as does the Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last Airbender (perhaps the most popular consideration of East Asian spirituality in the West, especially with its resurgence of popularity thanks to Netflix). The Legend of Hei enjoyed an extremely lucrative run in China in late 2019 thanks to the original cartoon’s sizeable fanbase at home. No news yet on who will pick the film up in the West.

ON-GAKU: Our Sound Directed by Kenji Iwaisawa / Expected to release late 2020

Rotoscoped by hand over a period of seven years, the independently produced anime ON-GAKU: Our Sound has a rather appropriate match of creator and subject: a film about amateur musicians made by amateur animators.

Director Kenji Iwaisawa adapted the film from Hiroyuki Ohashi’s cult manga, and there’s a charm to the rudimentary style of its art, the plain faces of its characters resembling the designs of something like ONE’s Mob Psycho 100, while also matching that show’s deadpan, oddball sense of humor. The laid-back voice acting only adds to that effect, as main character Kenji and his cohort’s obvious excitement flattened into a consistently amusing monotone.

It’s not quite a classic tale of underdog artistry, as the group never really gets better, but the film embraces the primordial noise that emerges whenever they pick up an instrument. Iwaisawa takes the characters seriously, showing their raucous and unconventional performances with complete sincerity. “Loved the deadpan humor and appreciated the message about how art can act as an impetus for positive change in our lives,” writes Dan.

Passion, companionship and collaboration is what’s most important to Our Sound. It’s a deeply weird film, but one filled with great ambition and visual wonder, increasing in boldness as it goes. The different styles of coloring and expression that emerge beyond its initial palettes are radical enough to catch anyone off guard.

Connected Directed by Michael Rianda / Releasing in most territories in October 2020 (October 23 in the US)

Connected is the next step for Sony Animation as it moves in an exciting new direction (the studio recently stated that it would be green-lighting more animation aimed at adults). Produced by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, off the back of their immensely popular film Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, Connected is imbued with the same kind of idiosyncrasy and innovation that made Spider-Verse a mega-hit.

From first-time feature director Michael Rianda, best known for his work on TV’s Gravity Falls, Connected is a family-road-trip-AI-apocalypse movie, based on the bizarre chemistry of Rianda’s own family. Formerly known as The Mitchells vs The Machines, the film looks at the push and pull between technology and human relationships, and how different generations respond to the ongoing changes in how we interact online and personally.

While this isn’t animated “on twos” (where each frame of character animation holds for two frames of background movement) as Spider-Verse often was, Connected also attempts to maintain a ‘drawn’ quality in its art. Characters move fluidly, but with clear outlines drawn from simple shapes. There’s also a strong contrast between the lived-in detail of human habitats versus the stark minimalism of the domain of the robots.

Thankfully the clips from the film don’t look nearly as finger-wavy and luddite as the trailers might suggest. (They appear to take the Boomer point of view that technology unequivocally ruins everything, but we know it’s more complicated than “screens bad”). In any case, it looks like the beginning of an interesting run for Sony Animation, and I’m keen to see how it turns out.

The Summit of the Gods (Le Sommet des Dieux) Directed by Patrick Imbert / Due to release 2021

Le Sommet des Dieux distinguishes itself in this list by being the one most firmly grounded in reality, but it’s by no means less wondrous. Based on Jirô Taniguchi’s five-volume manga Le Sommet des Dieux—itself based on the 1998 novel by Baku Yumemakura—the story starts with the question of whether George Mallory died going up or coming down the summit of Mount Everest on June 8, 1924. 70 years later, Fukamachi, a young Japanese reporter, stumbles across a camera potentially belonging to Mallory, and embarks on an adventure of his own with his friend Hasu Joji.

In close collaboration with the mangaka Taniguchi-san, who passed away during development, director Patrick Imbert seeks to replicate his art style, which was more aligned with that of European comics than traditional manga, with less exaggerated and highly detailed line-work. The team also looked outward from Taniguchi-san’s art, to the character designs of works such as Hiroyuki Okiura’s Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, as well as his 2011 film A Letter To Momo, and the films of the late, great Satoshi Kon.

From what I saw at Annecy, there’s something of a mix between what Imbert calls the “documented detail” of Taniguchi-san’s work and simpler design for the larger urban spaces. To accomplish this, the studio draws its traditional 2D using modern techniques, such as “movie-style” framing—locations and interiors created in 3D software and then overpainted for detail, identity and authenticity.

The Summit of the Gods also seeks to recapture the detailed and subtle realism of Yumemakura-san’s depiction of George Mallory, with low-key voice performances conducted in shared sessions; recording movements and hiring a boom operator to make the sound more akin to live action, perhaps even more natural. Though production has already been long, the studio had thankfully pre-empted the long delays of Covid-19, so let’s hope we get to see the film with our own eyes, soon.

Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds Directed by Benoît Chieux / Scheduled for 2022

An original fable from animation director Benoît Chieux, Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds is still very much in the midst of production, with an expected release in 2022. It looks captivating; a surreal tale set in an imaginary kingdom with delicate and clearly defined artwork, about a being named Sirocco, a despised figure with the power to control the wind, who is forced into solitude by the denizens of this world.

The dream kingdom resembles a Spirited Away-esque land, with its own hierarchy and bizarre set of rules, mundanity mixed in with visual wonder. Flying crocodiles, living houses and strange humanoids populate it, and the main characters, a pair of girls named Carmen and Juliette, turn into cats themselves. All are drawn with wavy lines, soft colours and fluid movement, the surreal presented with an inviting rather than foreboding air.

Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0 Directed by Hideaki Anno and others / 2020 release delayed; keep an eye on the official Twitter account for a new date

Hideaki Anno is set to bring his earth-shaking Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise to a close, again, with the fourth instalment of his ‘Rebuild’ series of films, Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0. Delayed for almost a decade now (the previous instalment came out in 2012!), and delayed again by Covid-19, the film looks to close out a grand rewriting of the original series that shot Anno-san and former studio Gainax to fame—“Bye Bye, All of Evangelion” the tagline reads. But we’re gonna have to wait a while longer to bid this final farewell.

Made with co-director Kazuya Tsurumaki (who has served as director with Anno-san since the original series), the first ‘Rebuild’ film, Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone, seemed to be a fairly conventional remake, updating the visuals and score with more modern techniques. The story starts the same: the isolated, depressed and self-loathing teenager Shinji Ikari is forced by his absentee father to help fight the mysterious, giant, alien ‘Angels’ by getting in an equally mysterious big robot called an Evangelion (“Eva” for short). He finds no self-fulfilment in this, and if anything, the close contact with other people only seems to push him further into himself. So far, so familiar.

However, the second film, Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance, veered completely off the rails in the best way possible, destroying audience preconceptions. The line between sequel and remake was fascinatingly blurred, and only continued to get weirder with Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo, as the story landed in completely unfamiliar territory, altering its characters beyond recognition while adding entirely new characters in the process. It’s now almost impossible to predict what 3.0 + 1.0 will be. The only footage available so far was a wild ten-minute clip in which the Eiffel Tower is wielded as a weapon by an Eva. We were this close.

Ayumu Watanabe’s ‘Children of the Sea’ (2019).

There are almost too many gifts, even just from Annecy alone, to describe at length. A couple more worth mentioning: Anja Daiman’s musical comedy The Island looks fascinating for its reclamation of the colonialist story of Robinson Crusoe; and Yuta Murano’s first anime feature Our Seven-Day War promises plenty of plot twists amidst the actions of rebellious youth. A range of beguiling short films were also on display—a selection helpfully compiled here by Letterboxd member Iknow.

Outside of Annecy, other films are finally arriving, virtually or otherwise—such as Gints Zilbalodis’s peculiar and quiet Away, and Ayumu Watanabe’s beautiful and surreal Children of the Sea (with music from none other than Joe Hisaishi!). Though not all animation is comfort food by default—it is simply a medium, after all—it’s reassuring knowing that animated films are able to continue, in some form, through the pandemic.

Related content

Maxine the Movie Person’s excellent animation list

The 100 Highest Rated Animated Films of the 2010s according to our members

Revchu’s lists of the Top 100 Japanese Animated Films on Letterboxd, and the Top 100 Best-Rated Japanese Animated Films from the Anime News Network

Kambole’s selections in a Letterboxd list

Follow Kambole on Letterboxd

[shadowbanki]

I’m gonna start writing my fanfic about my Animal Crossing island 🤔

Here’s the summary I have

———

—PREMISE AND PLOT—

Moondrop Island is a tiny uncharted island somewhere in the northern Caribbean Sea, originally inhabited by only furries—two-legged talking animal creatures! Furries are not found anywhere else on Earth, aside from tiny uncharted islands. A long time ago, furries and humans coexisted. But furries eventually were mistreated. An elder furry with magical powers erased all humans’ memory of them, and they all fled to small uncharted islands, hidden by mystic forces. There were no humans who knew of the existence of these furries, or of these seemingly mystical islands, until a small boat sailing from an island in the Bahamas in got into a shipwreck during what was supposed to be a three-hour whale-watching tour. Everyone on the boat survived, and miraculously washed up on the gently moonlit shores of Moondrop Island 2:00 that morning. Tom Nook takes in the castaways, gives them homes on the island, and lets them pay with a spontaneous form of currency he comes up with—Nook Miles. He offers the Nook Miles as a reward for improving the island. In the meantime, he and everyone else are putting together all their knowledge and trying to build a GPS that can track the island’s location in the world to lead the castaways back home. However, since the furries cannot go back to the human world and show themselves to people, that would mean... they’d have to say goodbye forever...

—CHARACTERS—

Pastell Sugar (Original character (self-insert) Age- 22 Birthday- February 4 Favorite song- My Place Very naive and expressive, animated, eccentric. Can be quite moody. Some may say Pastell is annoying. Pastell’s moods can come in as many “colors” as the rainbow. Pastell is creative and likes to make the mundane things exciting. She also likes to exaggerate things. Pastell likes to create things such as art or decorations, and pretend she’s doing magic in the process. Pastell gets along well with Haku, and Pekoe. Rodeo is her snack buddy. Haku Yowane (Vocaloid) Age- 24 Birthday- November 21 Favorite song- Stale Cupcakes Haku is wistful and emotional, and at times dreary. A bit of a crybaby. Likes music, but is too shy to perform in front of others. She has a plush cat named Snowbell that she carries around everywhere. She gets along quite well with Pastell and Goldie. Haku is a very caring person who likes to help with her friends’ problems. However, she can be hard on herself a lot. She also likes writing stories and poems. Before ending up on Moondrop, Haku’s friends back at home were Miku, Neru, Luka, Kaito, Akaito, and her older brother Dell. Rhona Aequor (Original character) Age- 24 Birthday- March 10 Favorite song- K.K. Bossa Stoic and mysterious. Appears strict, but is misunderstood. Actually a very kind person. A lover of all things related to water and the ocean. A marine biologist. Loves fish and marine creatures. She is very fascinated with Flo and Sly, who are both marine creatures... but as furries. Rhona loves to swim, and is a free-diver. Rhona is calm and collected... usually. She can go nuts about fish and can spend hours at the museum, either looking at fish exhibits, or chattering with Blathers. Back at home, she has a girlfriend, Nagisa. Rhona often thinks and worries about Nagisa, longing to see her again and to let her know she’s safe. Nico Yazawa (Love Live!) Age- 22 Birthday- July 22 Favorite song- K.K. Bubblegum Nico is a dweeb. But she still thinks she’s better than you. Nico is quite self-centered and troublesome. She’s usually the one causing the most drama out of the group. She especially doesn’t get along with Luana... at first, anyway. Nico wants to be the biggest pop-star on the island! (Sorry, Audie.) And soon, the world! But Nico has very bad luck and things keep on getting in her way! Such as tarantulas! Nico actually gets along well with Vladimir, because they’re both too short to be taken seriously. She ends up keeping a talking pet tarantula in her house named Terry. Back at home, Nico’s friends are Maki, Eli, and Nozomi. Rin Hoshizora (Love Live!) Age- 20 Birthday- November 1 Favorite song- Rockin’ K.K. Rin is cheerful, energetic, and the life of the party. She is spontaneous and likes animals a lot. She even has her own catchphrase, much like a furry... it’s “nya!” When Rin discovers furries, and the fact humans mistreated them, she feels angry at humanity. Rin gets along great with Audie. Rin is usually the one throwing all the parties on the island, and organizing the fun sport and game events. She is usually filled with energy. But deep inside, she can be quite emotional. Back at home, Rin’s best friend is Hanayo. Her other friends are Kotori, Umi, and Honoka. Luana Kai (Original character) Age- 23 Birthday- July 7 Favorite song- K.K. Adventure Luana is a fearless, impulsive daredevil. She leaps before she looks, and she’s brave to a fault. She can be obnoxiously brash. She’s also the one who got everyone into this mess... Luana was the captain of the small boat, When the storm came, she refused to turn the boat back. Luana is a huge tomboy and has always dreamed of being a pirate. She likes the ocean as well, and has a intriguing fascination with geography and geology. She doesn’t know a thing about technology, but her knowledge goes to good use with making the GPS. Nico and Luana are rivals. Back at home, her friends she left behind are Umiko, and her older sister Oliana. Teto Kasane (Vocaloid) Age- 21 Birthday- April 1 Favorite song- K.K. Stroll Teto comes off as weird and hyperactive. She likes memes and uses them a lot in conversation. She is often called annoying. However, Teto is an awkward and modest girl who just isn’t that good at making friends. She is often cheerful and likes to help people. She can be clumsy and sometimes doesn’t know what to say and is awkward. Teto has a big appetite and likes to bake and cook, especially sweets. Teto gets along well with Bettina, who understands her well. Back at home, her friends were Gumi, Gakupo, Meiko, Rin, and Len. Octavia Scherzando (Original character) Age- 25 Birthday- October 30 Favorite song- K.K. Fusion Outgoing and charismatic, yet sentimental. The most mature one of the human group. Also the responsible one. The fun “mom friend.” Her hobby is music. She plays the electric bass and piano. She also dances. Rumor has it that she once was a school idol back in high school, but she won’t talk about it. Apparently she also used to sing. But something must have happened, because nobody has really heard her sing either. Can her mysterious past ever be revealed? Octavia gets along well with Shep. She keeps a talking black bass in her house. The fish, not the instrument. Back at home, she leaves behind her close friend Aria, and friends from high school, Hibiki, Ursula, Santana, and Ruya. Animal Residents Furries have the same lifespans as humans, meaning they age the same in years. 18 in human years is 18 in furry years, regardless of the species of the furry. Flo the penguin Age- 23 Birthday- September 2 Flo is a mostly laid-back penguin, though she can have quite a temper when it comes to people being unfair. Her hobby is music, and her style is mostly punk. Pekoe the cub Age- 19 Birthday- May 18 Pekoe is a very kind and sweet bear. She can be a bit timid, and sometimes worries she isn’t that interesting. She is a great listener and sometimes can be quirky. Audie the wolf Age- 26 Birthday- August 31 Audie is a very outgoing and expressive wolf. She can be excitable, and uses a lot of language like “fabulous.” She is unexpectedly very tough and can be a “mama bear,” fiercely protecting her friends in need. Shep the sheepdog Age- 24 Birthday- November 24 Shep is a fashionista, and a bit of a hipster. He’s always on top of what’s cool and unique. He talks in a way that’s almost hard to decipher for people who are unfamiliar to his “brand” of “lingo.” Portia the dalmatian Age- 25 Birthday- October 25 Portia is a glamorous and stylish young lady who loves fashion, and may seem a little self-absorbed at times. She doesn’t judge other people based on looks, however, Sly the alligator Age- 20 Birthday- November 15 Sly is an alligator who loves to play and work out. His favorite sport is football (the kind where you throw the ball and tackle.) He also likes to swim. He is always enthusiastic and raring to go, but is very patient and understanding towards those who can’t keep up with him. Vladimir the cub Age- 28 Birthday- August 2 Vladimir is a grumpy little bubblegum pink bear who is never taken seriously because he is small and cute. He is therefore always angry and annoyed with people. He gets along with Nico because of similar problems. He can be kind when not angered... just don’t call him adorable. Goldie the golden retriever Age- 21 Birthday- December 27 Goldie loves flowers and nature, and loves to be outdoors. She is calm, humble, and polite, but can be angered easily by people who think they’re better than others. She doesn’t really get along well with Shep... Rodeo the bull Age- 22 Birthday- October 29 Rodeo is a laid-back, gentle bull who loves things like flowers, snacks, watching the clouds drift by, and taking naps. He gets along well with Pastell for these reasons. He is very relaxed, but sometimes he likes to work out, at the prompt of Audie. Bettina the mouse Age- 20 Birthday- June 12 Bettina is a chipper, kind mouse who likes cooking. Her favorite foods are pasta dishes with cheese in them. She likes to read books, and her favorites are usually mystery novels or classic children’s literature.

—CHAPTERS AND SUMMARIES— (so far)

Pilot Episode- Luana, working part time as a resort in the Bahamas, was the captain of a small tour boat. Rhona was the assistant captain and tour guide for what was supposed to only be a three-hour whale-watching tour... When they headed for a storm out in the open sea, Luana was reckless and refused to turn back, even though Rhona warily advised her to retreat. All the passengers had a bad feeling about it. Pastell was sitting next to Haku, whom she had just met, and had been having a conversation with her. Nico and Rin had just met, and were sitting next to each other as well. Teto was meanwhile trying to make friends with Octavia, the “mysterious pretty lady” sitting in the shade. Her bouncy and hyper personality repelled most people, but Octavia found it endearing... Now everyone was panicking. The intense storm grew stronger, and eventually flipped over and wrecked the boat once it was out in the open sea. The strong current swept away the parts and passengers to a nearby mysterious island… Looking for Snowbell Shortly after everyone is conscious and brought to safety, there is relief that everyone on the boat had survived. However, thoughts in Haku’s mind are racing, and she’s too ashamed to tell the others why. Haku’s plush cat, Snowbell, which she took everywhere, is missing. When Haku came to, Snowbell was nowhere to be found. Snowbell is extremely precious to Haku, and she cannot be without her. Haku breaks down and tells everyone that she is missing her plush cat, and surprisingly, the she is responded to nicely and is offered help. However, Luana thinks Haku is being a crybaby. At one point Haku is about to give up, crying as she imagines Snowbell floating all alone in the ocean, lost forever. But Luana, who initially said Haku was overreacting, spots Snowbell behind some rocks on the beach. Just then, the tide begins to carry Snowbell away. Luana jumps straight into the rough tide and retrieves Snowbell for Haku, even getting scraped knees in the process. Haku concludes that Luana isn’t so harsh after all. Island Improvement and Nook Miles Tom Nook feels there is a predicament, there are 8 new members of the island ad they have nowhere to go, and they need housing, at least temporarily. They have no money to offer, so as leader of the island, he decides to make up a brand-new system of currency on the spot—Nook Miles. They will be rewarded for decorating and improving the island. In the meanwhile, Nook and everyone have to work hard building houses for the castaways. Meeting Everyone An episode where everyone interacts with each other, and everyone gets to know each other. The story of Furries An episode that tells the backstory of the furries, and lore of the furries. Pastell and Haku’s Mystery Island Tour Pastell and Haku win a Tour on a Mystery Island, and meet Audie, a stray wolf furry alone on an island. Pastell and Haku decide to invite Audie to Moondrop Island. Blathers and the Museum Blathers opens up his museum. Rhona’s marine life account of the island The chapter is told by Rhona’s point of view, as she converses with Blathers, dives in the ocean, fishes, is curious about Sly and Flo (an alligator and penguin furry respectively), and observes the rest of the characters going about their day. Luana’s chaotic account of the island Luana and Rhona decide to hang out. Rhona is down-to-earth and calm and collected. Luana is chaotic, wild, and a loose cannon. Luana always runs and scares the fish when Rhona is trying to catch it. Every. Single. Time. The Mysterious Mia Okuda Nico is a fan of Mia Okuda, the mysterious retired school idol with a frilly-gothic image, long black hair, and a deep, velvety voice. When Octavia first comes into Nico’s room, she sees a poster of Mia Okuda hanging on the wall. (Don’t ask why that was being sold in Nook’s Cranny. I know it makes no sense.) “This is one of my favorite idols.” Nico says. “She’s pretty obscure. You probably don’t know of her.” But what Nico doesn’t know that Mia Okuda is actually Octavia back in high school! Nico and drama Nico causes some drama. Teto thinks Octavia is a vampire Self-explanatory title. Bettina and Rodeo’s cooking show Bettina tries to put on a cooking show. Rodeo eats the ingredients. Shooting Stars There is a meteor shower one night. Everyone meets Celeste and watches shooting stars with her. The next morning, mysterious star fragments wash up on the beach. One fragment starts glowing and goes inside of Snowbell, Haku’s plush cat. Snowbell then comes to life, as a real cat. This is because Haku had wished that Snowbell could come alive. From then on, Snowbell is Haku’s pet. Teto’s birthday Teto celebrates her birthday on the island. The Tarantula Incident Nico is terrified of tarantulas. However, tarantulas unfortunately love her. Nico Yazawa has a huge cult following of tarantulas, as she is the most popular school idol in tarantula society... Nico and Luana also don’t get along at all at first. Nico is a total diva, and Luana is a total slob. Nico uses her Nook Mikes ticket at the same time as Luana, and they have to go to the same island. The island is infested with tarantulas everywhere. (Also, please don’t ask how they can do mystery island tours without a GPS, lol) Nico is terrified. The tarantulas however, adore Nico and want to get her autograph, so they climb on her. Nico screams for Luana to help her. Luana fearlessly pulls out her net and attempts to rescue Nico from the tarantulas by just catching all of them. However, the tarantulas see Luana as a threat and run up to her, biting her simultaneously and knocking her out with their poison. Nico faints from the shock (again), leaving her terrrifying tarantula fans to climb over her and steal her belongings as souvenirs. Nico and Luana are rescued and they go back home. Nico apologizes to Luana and thanks her for trying to save her, and they form a friendship from them on. However, Nico accidentally takes one tarantula back with her. She eventually ends up keeping him as a pet. His name is Terry and he can talk. He becomes like Nico’s sidekick and partner in crime. Nico looks to Terry for advice. Bunny Day Madness Zipper T. Bunny comes to the island and hides eggs everywhere. Madness ensues. Grumpy Vladimir Vladimir is grumpy because he’s small, cute, and pink, and nobody takes him seriously. Dreams of home Everyone becomes wistful and starts dreaming and reminiscing of home during a slow, rainy day. A somber, psychological episode to break the pace. Also we get to see Rhona cry. But not Luana, because she (allegedly) never cries. Octavia goes fishing Octavia is taken fishing by Rhona. Octavia only catches bass. (Gee, wonder why.) Wisp the ghost Everyone is doing a test of courage, when they stumble across a real ghost! However, the ghost is much more afraid of them than they are of it... The town tune panic Everyone fights over what the town tune should be. To compromise, everyone puts two notes of their favorite song and make a brand new song out of all their songs altogether. The end result song ends up sounding like a disaster. It gets stuck in the heads of everyone on the island and drives the population crazy. Bonus: Octavia’s backstory The first of the Bonus backstory chapters. We get to see Octavia in high school as Mia Okuda, and finally find out what event made her stop singing... (SPOILERS: It was because she was publically criticized and humiliated because “her voice was too deep for a teen idol’s.” Then she saw all the memes people made about her voice and became too ashamed to sing, or even listen to herself again for a long time.) Finding my voice again The black bass Octavia keeps in her house begins to talk one morning. It tells Octavia that it’s time. With a little help and guidance, the fish is determined to help Octavia find her voice and start singing again. Octavia is a mess at first, and at one point she becomes even more discouraged than before she started, convinced she lost the ability to sing forever, and now there’s even proof. She runs out of her house and sits on a bench, distraught. Flo comes up to her, in a good mood, offering half of her corn dog. Octavia can no longer hide her emotions and starts sobbing. When Flo asks what’s wrong, Octavia tells her everything. Flo ends up giving Octavia sage advice. “Each song is kinda like a journey. When you sing, just pretend you’re the heroine.” Octavia returns to her house, with a new determination inside her. She starts singing again, for the first time in eight years. Nico is walking outside. She’s feeling glum because her ice cream dropped in the pond, when she hears a powerful singing voice that’s undeniably the voice of one of her favorite idols... She runs straight into Octavia’s nearby house to tell her, “Oh my gosh! Mia Okuda is on the island! I hear her singing!” When Nico realizes Octavia was singing, the pieces finally click... Octavia was Mia Okuda all along! Nico faints dramatically and theatrically. Idol Madness With Nico realizing one of her favorite idols was on the island, she feels so tingly, but also overshadowed. Audie also wants to be an idol, so Nico already has competition. Not only that, but Haku is aiming to be some sort of musician of some kind. But she’s so shy that she doesn’t show her face much anyway. But with all the talent on the island, Tom Nook suggests everyone should share their talents in an upcoming talent show and dance party night! The Island’s Talent Show Dance Party Night! All day, everyone is getting ready and looking forward to the island’s big shiny event. Haku’s stage fright Haku has stage fright about performing her music. What is Pastell’s talent? Everyone on the island has such talent. Everyone has their music, Bettina can cook, and Sly can lift weights. Even Rodeo can eat five ice cream cones in under a minute... without getting brain freeze! It seems everyone on the island has some sort of talent... except for Pastell. Just what is Pastell’s hidden talent? Moondrop Fame With all the talent and recent development on Moondrop, word got out to K.K. Slider that the island was one to look out for... to the point where he called, scheduling an appearance! K.K. Slider’s Grand Appearance! K.K. Slider finally appears and gives a performance. Goodbye, Pekoe? Pekoe plans to move away from the island, back to her home with her old family...

[ranger-report]

Thoughts On: HERETIC II (1998)

Just over one year after the release of Hexen II, Raven Software published the final game in their dark fantasy series. Set apart from the Serpent Rider Trilogy of Heretic./Hexen/Hexen II, Heretic II told the tale of Corvus Corax, the elven hero of the first Heretic, and his journey to return home after years of wandering the Outer Worlds. See, defeating one of the Serpent Riders resulted in his being thrown far far away from his origin world of Parthoris, and left to his own devices, he had a bit of a time attempting to make his way back. Marking the first time in the series that id Software had no involvement in the release of the game save for providing the modified id tech 2 engine (AKA the Quake 2 engine), this release was published by Activision under their purview. Moving in the direction of a third-person adventure with first-person shooter mechanics, Raven made it clear that they were going to take inspiration from wherever they could, including a popular little title called Tomb Raider. While garnering favorable reviews, Heretic II would ultimately be lost in the holiday shuffle of PC gaming as it had the unfortunate circumstance to be released one week after a particularly groundbreaking first-person shooter from Valve Software. You may have heard of it: Half-Life. As a result of the unfortunate coincidence and the lackluster response from fans due to the series changes, Heretic II was a commercial flop. But, with all that said, how does Heretic II stack in the lineup of the series it brings to a conclusion? And why has there been no further entries in the series since?

To begin with, the decision to make Heretic II a third person adventure was controversial amongst fans of the series. Yes, the style was popular and gaining traction, and Raven was nothing if not innovators, so the decision to a degree made sense. Why not take their dark fantasy world and put it through the wringer, especially since the main plot of the first three games was now over? Going into this title, I knew I was in for an adjustment period, but I had no idea it would be as shocking as it was. Slow, unintuitive camera movement coupled with clunky, lackluster controls make the game much more of a chore to play than the original games. Gone is the fast-paced combat, replaced with deliberately paced enemy encounters. Picking up heavily on the Tomb Raider inspiration, Corvus can leap, flip, roll, and somersault his way around the maps. Points for inspiration. But man’s -- er, elf’s -- reach exceeds his grasp, and while this sounds well and good on paper, molasses-like reaction times feel more like directing Corvus through waist-high water instead of the nimble acrobatics the game shoots for. Animations, graphics, sound design, everything on a technical level is top notch stuff. Corvus himself has a modeled backbone to allow for more fluid animations, shown off in his running, fighting, and even idle cycles. It’s impressive stuff that the gameplay just can’t seem to live up to on an engaging level. Heretic II feels like an attempt to return to the form of the first Heretic, but through the lens of a team who’s never played the first one. Rather than using different types of mana for ammunition, green mana is reserved for offensive spells, blue mana for defensive spells, and most weapons have unique ammunition types. Gone, too, is the inventory system of carrying items and objects for future use; instead, Corvus automatically uses any health or magic pickups he comes across, something which is bolstered by shrines which either completely refill mana, health, or armor points. When it comes to story, one must wonder which direction the intent was headed. Perhaps the original vision of Hecatomb was to come full circle with Corvus and face the final Serpent Rider after being outcast from the realms. The scattershot nature of the plot here doesn’t seem to suggest it, however.

As Corvus progresses, he returns to his home of Parthoris to discover a strange disease has taken over the land, changing the elves into diseased, violent versions of themselves. After being attacked, Corvus himself is infected, initiating his quest to discover a cure, and stop the mad magus Morcalavin. On an interesting note, it turns out that Morcalavin has collected the Seven Tomes of Power to aid him in magic use, but one of the Tomes is a fake and is the cause of the infection -- Corvus has been carrying the seventh Tome with him since Heretic. A bit of revisionist history considering that Tomes of Power have been consumable items since Heretic, and there were many more than seven. Noting this change to lore, Corvus simply needs to replace the fake Tome with the true one, and that should reverse Morcalavin’s corrupted power. Another noteworthy change is that the hub system of the previous games is also gone, replaced with a similar map progression to Heretic. Some maps are linear exercises in traveling from start to finish, others require moving about the many layers of the map to collect and bring together keys and objects. This is one of the largest departures from the previous games -- this story is far more intimate, more structured, more character-driven with cutscenes, dialogue, worldbuilding not seen in prior entries. Before, we were simply nameless warriors moving through dark fantasy worlds, kicking ass, taking names, killing gods and monsters alike. Here, we get to know one of said warriors by name and history. Yes, before now, Corvus was never actually named in his first appearance. He was simply “The Heretic” which was FAR more badass, although Corvus Corax is up there on the list of great fantasy names with ease. But, rather than a ride, this game wants to tell a story, watering down the experience. Whether Raven can tell a good story in other games is besides the point; here, the slipshod nature of the shoestring story attempting to provide a bit more theatricality feels tacked on, an oddity. Sure, perhaps the evolutionary nature of progression is where Raven felt the need to provide an actual factual story with their action game, also again from the inspiration of Tomb Raider slipping in, but it doesn’t hit the mark, nor age well in particular. Here we can see the beginnings of action games moving forward out of simple exercises in running and shooting, but telling stories with cinematic flair. Half-Life did the same, but with striking results, and far less awkward dialogue. And then, furthering the frustratingly bland story is the abrupt ending, in which the villain is cleansed of his corruption and ascends to godhood the way he intended, but leaving behind his power to Corvus in order to protect the world. So the bad guy....wins? But has become a good guy?

So, the question must be asked: what happened? Where Hexen II showed little of the changes that Raven were forced to make when new owner Activision mandated that they split the Heretic and Hexen series into separate entities, this game bears the unfortunate weight of that departure. As previously mentioned, the planned third game in the Serpent Rider Trilogy, Hecatomb, was divided into two games post-mandate, the ideas of which also went in two separate directions. John Romero has made frequent commentary in the past about the separation of the games as products vs a proper trilogy. He’d been involved with Hecatomb until his departure from id Software, which was also around the time that Raven was purchased by Activision. The publishing giant, he notes, split up the Raven team who had worked on the Heretic/Hexen games, further increasing the divide of the products. According to one of his accounts, one team worked on all three Serpent Rider games before the split, at which point that team was divided amongst the three in-house developing teams that already existed. While Brian Raffel, the mind behind the game series, was present and active on Heretic II, not everyone who’d put their passion into the rest of the series was there for the creation of this game. This shows in the final product. 

With that in mind, it seems a little unfair to judge this game as harshly as I am. Perhaps we should be examining it, looking at the interesting bit of gaming history it represents. It marks a point in time where Raven, having experienced fair success on their own through working with technology giant id Software and other publishers, has become a corporate-owned entity. This is, in fact, the first game by Raven to be published exclusively by Activision. Eventually, Raven Software would be conscripted by Activision into the Holy Trinity of Call of Duty developers, rotating in and out making new COD games so they can come out yearly. What legacy, then, does this particular game leave? There is a mark here, a brand, a scar, a sign of things to come. Mandates from above demanding two franchises instead of one, an ironic analogy of the division of Raven from id Software -- Heretic II may have been published and distributed exclusively by Activision, but id Software published the previous games, and held publishing rights to those games. Meanwhile, the transfer of copyright went to Activision, putting future games into a pickle. Activision no doubt has little interest in creating new games in a series when they can’t make money from previous entries. Furthering problems is that Heretic II does not exist in digital format, probably again due to Activision unable to profit from sales of the prior games; a casual copyright search for Heretic II in the public record comes up with zero results, effectively placing the game as abandonware. With Raven owned by Activision, and id owned by Bethesda (formerly Zenimax), establishing cooperation between the two giants may seem difficult to impossible at this point.

What a shame for the final entry in what began as such a promising series to end limping across the finish line. In my research I found quite a few people who were glowing with nostalgic praise for Heretic II, and why not? In the opening level of Silverspring, we’re greeted with a run down town disparaged by the rampant virus. Flies zip back and forth and Corvus slaps his neck to be rid of them; children cry in the distance, dripping water echoing reminds of the empty nature of this place. All the environments in the game are rife with audio and visual treats that literally drip with atmosphere and character. There is a strange amount of life here, in a living world that feels interesting and worth exploring. But the controls and story fall flat, alongside the abysmal decision to make the game a third person adventure instead of the first person shooters of the previous entries. Whether or not we’ll ever see a proper new entry into the Heretic/Hexen world is, unfortunately, something that remains to be seen. Spiritual successors, such as AMID EVIL and the upcoming Graven reap the fields which were sown of Hexen’s seeds. Activision and Bethesda may never see eye to eye on the subject of reviving Heretic or Hexen or maybe even the fabled Hecatomb, but one thing is clear: regardless of the corporate greed which aborted the lifespan of this wonderful series, the first three games of this series live on as passionate exercises in dark fantasy, examples of how to push the FPS genre forward while remaining firmly grounded in what makes it work. Heretic II is the Crystal Skull of this series -- many will find themselves better off forgetting it ever happened. Activision certainly has. And again, how ironic is it, that the very mandate which they laid down in order to spawn new sequels and twin franchises led to the death of them.