#if the show says something’s been retconned or something is canon that is widely disliked… it simply isn’t anymore lmao. put it in the bin 🚮

[archersgaymerblog]

Very interesting to me seeing the difference in posts abt the Fallout show in the FO4 tag versus the FNV tag. Feel like I’m learning a lot for someone who’s not gonna watch the show LMAO

[a-student-out-of-time]

(Mod, can this anon just say I really appreciate how much self-control you have? When that Haiji defender showed up on your blog, you just said "get off my blog". This anon really appreciates how you didn't scream at them, accuse the person of secretly being a pedophile themself, tell them to kill themself or to choke on broken glass, encourage your followers to harass Haiji fans, etc. Today's generation of pop-culture-fandom could learn from your example.)

//Now that you bring this up, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to talk for a bit about fandom toxicity.

//There is, in a way, a feeling of entitlement and ownership when it comes to characters or properties. That, because these things hold a special place in our hearts, that they belong to us and that our interpretation of them is the correct one and that anyone who disagrees is wrong.

//So when there comes creative decisions or opinions made by others with those properties, even ones by the actual creator of the work, that don’t match up to our own, there can come a feeling that these are a direct attack against us as well. With that comes a lot of the worst parts of fan culture: harassment, insults, bullying, threats, and even actual attacks on these people.

//But the truth is, these people were probably just expressing their feelings and emotions about the same work, because they enjoy it too. They were never trying to directly or indirectly attack you, they just simply had a different opinion. It’s important to keep that in mind: the people you talk to online are human beings with thoughts and feelings of their own, and those feelings are rarely going to be the exact same as yours.

//An unfortunate part of the problem are the inherent psychological biases that we all have, and confirmation bias especially. Where we’ll focus on information we agree with (even if it’s factually wrong) and ignore anything that conflicts with that (even if it’s factually correct). This goes beyond just fandom, but I’m going to stay on topic.

//There is not a single human being at any point in history who hasn’t been guilty of these biases. You, me, everyone you’ve ever met, we’ve all done it at one point or another. The issue is when these biases get us to leap toward intolerant conclusions about those whose viewpoints we disagree with. “You don’t have the same opinion as me, so you must be stupid/evil/bigoted/brainwashed/etc.”

//It can be so easy to draw those conclusions about people, especially when the arguments aren’t well-structured and you’re in the heat of the moment. But let’s be real: we’re never all going to 100% agree on everything. And that’s okay. Hell, if we did, that sounds more like a dystopian nightmare scenario where free thinking has been suppressed.

//And thinking is an activity I’ve always encouraged. Toxicity is ultimately at odds with critical thinking, where any dissenting opinion is hunted down and suppressed and anyone who speaks up is bullied into silence. That is not what my blogs are about. It does kinda make me sad that I’m being praised for not being a toxic asshole, because I don’t really feel like that’s praiseworthy. I want that to be a normal thing.

//Here’s an experiment: take your favorite DR character and ask yourself why you like them. What is it about them that drew you to them? Their personality? Their backstory? Their role in the narrative of whichever game they were in? When you have those reasons in mind, consider the following: what about this character is flawed? What about them is inherently dark or troubling? Why might someone else dislike them?

//And then work backwards from there: take your least favorite DR character and ask yourself why you dislike them. Then find all the ways why someone else might like them without diving straight into intolerant conclusions. Look past the surface and dig a bit deeper to see what exactly makes them tick.

//That’s not me asking for essays, that’s something I want you all to consider for yourselves.

//I’ll be the first to admit I really disliked Junko. I didn’t consider her all that interesting of a character or a villain, and she just cames off as very annoying and overblown to me. I considered everything that she sets in motion to be far more interesting. 

//I have, however, seen a lot analyses and in-depth looks at her as a character and after going through those, I came away with a lot of insights I didn’t even consider before. My opinion hasn’t changed too much, but I can definitely see (DR3 notwithstanding) all the way she can and does make for a interesting villain.

//So the takeaway is, even if you don’t end up changing your opinion, you can at least say “I still disagree, but I’ve gained some perspective into why someone would feel this way and I’m better for it.” Critical thinking does not mean you have to give up your opinions, and there does exists a very wide middle ground between total agreement and toxic harassment.

//But critical thinking is at odds with the idea that it’s best to retcon, ignore, or fabricate details of canon that we disagree with to justify those opinions. This is why I got so mad at the anon who claimed Haiji was talking about fictional underage girls, something that is not at all substantiated by evidence in the game. You can’t simply ignore these details because you don’t like them.

//Critical thinking is about being able to either say, “Okay, I fully acknowledge that these details about this character I like are problematic and I understand why it might upset people, but they’re not the sole or central reason why I like this character”, or “Okay, after careful analysis, maybe I was wrong about what I originally thought about them.”

//Me personally, I look at these details and ask “Okay, but how can we build off of this? Can we tell a new story with it?” For example, while SDRA2 Chapter 0 left a bad taste in most everyone’s mouths, I didn’t want to just retcon it. Instead,  thought Kokoro being regretful over her actions and wanting to reconnect with her daughter would make for a very interesting story.

//But the most important part of this that I’d want anyone to take away is that it’s important to listen to others and consider their viewpoints as well, and again without immediately jumping toward conclusions and talking over them before they make their case. Listen to people, ask them questions, and remember that on the other end of the conversation is another human being with thoughts and feelings of their own.

//Now, there is that invisible fear that “understand that others have different opinions” is shorthand for “just accept that some people are into r*pe/inc*st/p*dophilia and let them make content of it.” I promise you that is not at all what I’m suggesting here. I hope my previous angry rant about Haiji cemented that fact.

//What I am saying is that we need to be acutely aware of both the thoughts and feelings of others and those of ourselves. That it’ll be better for us as well as others to apply critical thinking and careful insight into our opinions, not taking them as inherent fact simply because we hold them, and understand that others will not always enjoy the same content the same way we do.

//And most importantly, being able to separate those who are willing to listen vs. those who’ll prefer to stay toxic, bitter, and unmoving is a very important skill to learn. There is no shame in withdrawing yourself from any sort of talk with a person who upsets people for fun, and it will be better for your health in the long run.

//Finally, let’s be real, what’s gained from arguing with people online? People who you never have and probably never will meet? Not much. But if someone is not going to budge and only wants to share their toxicity with the world, it’s better for you to simply walk away, block them, cut yourself off, and move on. Their toxicity is their deal, and it doesn’t have to be yours.

//But I also think there are people who are willing to listen, who may simply not know that they’re engaging in things that are hurtful or toxic. And some frank but kind insight as to why can change their opinions. A willingness to listen, not to just defend their position, is what’s important.

//I’ll be completely honest here and say I was in that position once. I’ve said and thought some awful things before, and I feel so fortunate that I met the right people who stopped me from going down that road before I got too far. Not with hostility or arguments, but honest and kind discussions and insights.

//As fans and as people in general, we can, should, and need to be better. That’s why I don’t want my space to be full of hate and bullying, but just storytelling and creative discussions, where people are welcome to express their opinions, and even if we disagree, that’s alright. We’ve at least gained some insight into each others’ views ^^

//Compassion and wisdom are what I consider the most important virtues, and being more critical of ourselves is how I think we can solve the issue of fandom toxicity. That’s what I’ve tried to apply here. My goal is just to tell a good story for you all to enjoy here, and I appreciate each and every one of you who’ve followed, liked, reblogged, or even just considered any of my posts worthwhile to read

//And if you made it all the way through this, I hope you’ll consider everything I’ve said here as well. You can’t change every single toxic person out there, but you can change yourself for the better and encourage others to do the same.

[toaarcan]

Sonic X, Sonic Heroes, and IDW, or: How a bad anime from 2004 spoiled a comic from 2019.

Now, I haven’t been following IDW Sonic all that closely. I get regular updates from Nemesis via Discord, and additional info from some of the Tumblrs I follow that are invested in it, but I don’t really have a desire to touch it myself. Here’s why.

There’s a multitude of reasons for this. Starting with the background of Sonic Forces wasn’t really a good place to begin from, and being based on present-day game lore in general was always going to hurt it, mainly because SEGASonic canon is currently a confusing mess of retcons brought on by Iizuka taking the J.K. Rowling approach.

Wait, no, he’s just saying stupid shit that contradicts previous canon, not trying to score woke points and hoping nobody notices the frankly terrible stereotypes and TERF tweets. Iizuka is taking the Greg Farshtey approach.

Added, as anyone that’s had experience with my opinions will tell you, I started falling out of love with Ian Flynn’s writing somewhere around Issue 200, and moved to outright dislike during Mecha Sally, and to make matters worse I started noticing that some of the flaws in the 200-247 era were also present in the 160-199 era, retroactively making those harder to go back to.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I kept up with Archie for the SatAM cast. SatAM reruns back in 2004 were my Sonic, moreso than anything else, and even now I still have way more attachment to those two seasons of animation than I do to most other aspects of the franchise, warts and all. So Archie providing me with additional content for said characters was a major draw for me. I’d generally put up with a lot just to get myself more SatAM content.

That in itself is a large part of why I fell off the Archie train during Mecha Sally. The entirety of the SatAM cast were removed from the regular lineup, just leaving three SEGA characters with their personalities stunted, even if that didn’t make sense in-universe. But that’s a discussion for another day.

So being written by someone whom I no longer enjoyed the writing of, set in a mess of a canon with a thoroughly shite game as the main basis, without the cast I read the previous comics for gave me little reason to invest in IDW Sonic. It wasn’t for me, I’d just keep reading Transformers and move on.

Then MTMTE/LL ended with a heart-twister and Ex-RID ended with a giant Unicron-shaped fart, and the new comic is dull as fucking dishwater and started by killing off one of my favourites, who was also one of the franchise’s confirmed LGBT characters. So now IDW is getting none of my money. Which is good because I’m broke.

Tangents aside, my lack of interest wasn’t something set in stone. If it turned out that the comic was actually really good, then sure, I’d try it. I was up for being proven wrong. But so far, I haven’t felt compelled by the responses from the internet. If anything I’ve been more turned off.

I could talk about how zombies are really fucking boring. I could talk about how SEGA’s recent confusion over what to do with Amy has combined with Ian’s need to include a Sally-esque character to make IDW Amy into Sally Lite. I could talk about how Ian seemingly fundamentally misunderstood everything that was cool about Neo Metal Sonic and somehow managed to reduce him to a boring Eggman minion in an arc where Eggman was out of action due to amnesia… But I won’t.

Instead I’m going to talk about how the comic has done something that would legitimately make me think twice about picking it up even if the FF were to debut tomorrow.

Yeah, I would pass up a SatAM fix because of this, that’s how much this ticks me off.

Now, I presume that if you’re reading this, you have a favourite Sonic character. And you probably feel pretty strongly about how your favourite character is portrayed. If they get a bad run in a game or two then you probably get a little salty about that. Tails and Knuckles fans in particular, as of late, seem to be the ones getting the short end.

Well, my favourite character in the entire franchise is Emerl the Gizoid. I will take Gemerl as a worthy substitute, they’re basically the same character. And the comics have been doing them dirty since the Archie reboot.

(Sidenote: I will be referring to Emerl with male pronouns from this point on. The Maria-soul thing isn’t as widely known as I’d like it to be, so I’m going to compromise for the sake of keeping the focus on the actual point)

However, not everything about this can be laid at the feet of Ian Flynn. Arguably his portrayal of said character is merely a symptom of a long-running issue that has plagued Sonic storytelling for roughly 15-16 years now.

But before we get into that, let’s get into something important: Why Emerl is my favourite Sonic character.

Part 1: Emerl in Sonic Battle, or “How I learned to stop worrying and love the Gizoid”.

This game doesn’t get enough love.

Now, I totally understand why it doesn’t get enough love. There are game design choices, like the grinding and the repetitiveness of the story mode that really drag it down, and because of that, Battle can become a slow-going and tedious experience, and that’s a real shame, because the story that’s hidden in this game is a thing of beauty.

Like most Sonic games from the 2000s, this game introduces a new character to join Sonic’s list of friends. Unlike the games that aren’t SA2 and Sonic Rush, this new character is actually good (This is hyperbole, Omega, Silver, and Shade were fine too).

Emerl enters the story as a mute, barely-functional robot that doesn’t do much of anything for a while, and only seems to come to life when Sonic locates it and attacks it. However, as the robot absorbs more Chaos Emeralds, slowly a personality starts to form, largely pieced together from other characters’ traits.

Emerl, as he is dubbed, is initially childlike and naive, but as he grows he develops a sassy streak, and his speech becomes a lot more developed. Maturity sets in, as Emerl grapples with his own nature, particularly the legacy he carries from the ARK, and Shadow’s ongoing turmoil with regards to the whole “Living Weapon” deal. Ultimately he becomes a hero, following in the footsteps of his mentor, parental figure, and closest friend, Sonic.

That’s right, Sonic, not Cream, is Emerl’s closest friend. We’ll get to that.

But this heart-warming story of Sonic becoming a dad for a robot doesn’t have a happy ending. Despite Shadow and Rouge finding a way to neutralise Emerl’s destructive Gizoid programming, Eggman has a way to reactivate it anyway, driving Emerl into a berserk rampage. This is kind of the one sticking point I have with the game’s plot, Eggman shouldn’t have been able to do this after Shadow and Rouge neutralised Emerl.

Additionally, while Emerl was on the ARK getting Maria’s soul crammed into him, Gerald also added a self-destruct mechanism that would trigger if he ever went Ultimate again.

So with Emerl quite literally exploding with all the power of the Chaos Emeralds, but his destructive programming forcing him to turn Eggman’s latest Death Star knockoff on Mobius/Earth/Sonic’s World, Sonic races up to confront his mecha-child, and things take a turn for the Old Robot Yeller.

In a moment that really deserves more attention, Sonic confronts his own child on the bridge of a space station, while Emerl is running on the power of the Chaos Emeralds and outputting more energy than he can physically take, and they fight. In the space of thirty seconds, they have a ten-round knock-down, drag-out brawl, and at the end, Sonic stands triumphant. Without using a single transformation. Yeah, that’s how powerful this guy is, that’s not travel speed, that’s combat speed. Looking at you, Death Battle.

It’s not really clear whether Sonic outright defeats Ultimate Emerl, or just survives long enough for his opponent to reach his limit and self-destruct, but the end result is the same. Sonic cradles a robot that became his own child over the course of the past few weeks, someone he raised from a baby-like state into a mature and heroic individual, and Emerl looks up at him and asks “Sonic… am I going to die?” And despite Sonic desperately trying to get him to keep it together, Not only does Emerl die, but he’s aware that the end is coming, and bids farewell to all of his friends as Sonic pleads with him to hold on. Shadow is equally distraught, his only friend with a connection to the ARK, someone he can call a brother, someone who carries the soul of his deceased sister within him, is dead.

Emerl: “Sonic I don’t feel so good.”

Like it’s canon that Eggman basically murdered Sonic’s kid.

And goddamnit this ending hits me hard. It frustrates me that Eggman was able to pull a means to drive Emerl into his Ultimate freakout mode out of his arse, but other than that, it’s so gutwrenching, I love it.

Gamma’s story from SA1 gets a lot of praise on the Internet, but for me, this is even better. It’s like Gamma’s story, but if Gamma was actually central to the plot of the game and the characters other than Amy gave a shit about him, and gave a shit about him for longer than a single cutscene, after which they are never mentioned again. Hell, due to Chaos Gamma being a thing, Gamma gets more love from the other characters in Battle than he does in SA1.

But, unfortunately, it doesn’t end there.

Part 2: (Sonic) Anime was a Mistake, or: “Sonic X ruins everything.”

I’ve made my dislike of this anime quite clear in the past. The characters are flanderized, Sonic is a B-lister in his own damn show, the villains are weaksauce or boring or both, the plot is only remotely close to good when its cribbing from two videogames which told the stories in question better, and for the first two seasons the entire show actually revolves around not Sonic, but the least relatable audience surrogate ever made. The third season would continue to include him, but shove him (And everyone else) to the side in favour of a Pokemon whose only move was “Flashback”, making audiences the world over question why he was even there in the first place.

Oh, and it also near-singlehandedly destroyed the thin shreds of character development that Tails, Knuckles, Amy, and Eggman had received in Sonic Adventure 2.

All four of these characters had been significantly enriched by the then most recent console game. Eggman had been revealed to be motivated by an admiration for his grandfather, Gerald Robotnik, but in the same game learned that Gerald had lost his marbles and programmed the ARK to smash into the planet and kill everyone on it, probably including his surviving family, i.e. little baby Ivo Robotnik. Gerald betrayed Eggman posthumously, and it’s clear from Eggman’s interactions with Tails during the credits of the game that this is giving him a lot to think about.

Knuckles is a weird case because most of his characterisation in SA2 is conveyed via… the lyrics to his rap music. Yes, really. He gets minor growth through the cutscenes, most notably in his decision to shatter the Master Emerald early on. Having already reassembled it once after it was broken in SA1, he’s now confident that he can do it again, so is willing to break it to prevent Eggman or Rouge stealing it. Via the rap lyrics, however (Yes I just wrote that), we also learn that Knuckles is slowly warming up to Sonic, gaining a greater respect for him, that he is more in-touch with his history and ancestors after SA1 (Though fortunately not in a Ken Penders way), and that he’s also struggling with feelings for Rouge, a plot element that went completely out of the window after this game.

Tails and Amy, however, get it the worst, as both went through arcs in SA1 that are followed up on and expanded in SA2. Amy had come to the conclusion that she didn’t need to rely on Sonic for everything, and that she would make him respect her as a hero in her own right. And while Amy is clearly in way over her head throughout the events of SA2, she still makes a significant difference, not only freeing Sonic from his cell on Prison Island, allowing Tails’ invasion to be a distraction and stealing a keycard to facilitate it, but of course, she later saves the world by motivating Shadow to join the fight to stop the ARK drop.

Tails had a similar plot, about learning to believe in himself as a hero, without having to rely on Sonic, and in SA2 he gets to prove it, not only partaking in the same rescue operation as Amy and fighting Eggman on even footing, but effectively taking command of the heroes and becoming their new leader, and for the first time, Sonic defers to him.

And then Sonic X came along and fucked it all up.

Eggman became a clownish antagonist with no semblance of nuance, and he actually got off the easiest.

Knuckles became a loud, dimwitted loner who got tricked by Eggman constantly, which would go on to be his personality for the rest of the franchise, ultimately culminating in the travesty against all sense that was Boom Knuckles.

Tails was reduced to a wimpy taxi driver, incapable of doing anything without his giant mecha plane to sit in. This was largely exacerbated by the presence of Donut Steele, who usurped his role as Sonic’s best friend and sidekick for two seasons, a problem which only got worse in the third season when Donut Steele suddenly became a genius inventor too, encroaching even more into Tails’ territory. Tails did get himself some more focus in S3, but only to make googly eyes at the Pokemon, a role which frankly could’ve gone to literally anyone else and would have made no difference on the plot. I would say that Tails being involved in a romance story at all is weird, but given the comics and Boom the weirdest thing about this latest tragic love story for the kid is that the Pokemon was actually close to his own age, because outside of this it really does seem like Tails goes for older ladies. Though she did turn into an adult at the end so I guess that counts?

But Amy arguably got the worst of it. Not only was her crowning moment in SA2 taken away from her and given to Donut Steele, but the poor girl had her promising character arc cut short and replaced with an obsessive, unhealthy fixation on Sonic, combined with a violent temper and an eagerness to smash anything that displeased her, Sonic included, with a giant hammer. Her admiration and crush on Sonic were warped into her being a possessive, mean-spirited stalker, whom only got away with it because she was an anime girl and therefore it was cute rather than creepy.

I want to take the time at this point to stress that stalking is not okay, under any circumstances. A girl obsessively following an older guy and threatening him and everyone around him with violent assault if they ever so much as imply that he isn’t interested in her is not cute, it means it’s time for a restraining order. Sonamy is not cute.

Now that I’ve swatted that particular hornet’s nest with a cricket bat, let’s move on!

I’ve always found it ironic that, despite being the adaptation with the most oversight from SEGA and Sonic Team, and the most endorsement from them too, Sonic X had easily the worst characterisation of any of the shows at the time. But, for all its faults, I can’t blame everything that went down in the aftermath on it. It had a comrade-in-arms. Mediocrely-written arms.

Part 3: Partner in Crime, or “Sonic Heroes also ruins everything.”

Sonic Heroes has a lot to answer for. And I mean a lot. It was the beginning of the franchise’s obsession with references to the classic games, it codified the really awkward ages for certain characters, and it seemed to be dedicated to completely unpicking everything established in the Adventure duology.

Shadow’s sudden resurrection is one thing, at least they had the graces to include a means to preserve his sacrifice via having him be an android, the blame for that not taking should be laid at the feet of his own game.

But the rest of the cast? Ohhh boy. Sonic’s still fine, he didn’t change much in the Adventure games, but then there’s Tails. Despite all the development he went through in SA1, in this game he needs to turn to Sonic when Eggman returns, and honestly this whole setup could’ve been fixed if Tails sought Sonic out not for the sake of having him lead the charge, but rather simply to recruit him into the counterattack he was already planning. Nevertheless, throughout the rest of the game Tails is almost as wimpy as his X counterpart, not helped by the voicework he’s given. No offense to William Corkery, who was probably like six when he recorded his lines, but this what you get when you choose actors via nepotism, rather than talent. But at least he does something.

How about Knuckles? As the other side of his derailment, Knuckles just turns up in this game, buddy-buddy with the characters he was only just starting to warm up to before, and blatantly not caring about the Master Emerald until Rouge mentions she’s going to steal it at the end. This will combine with his becoming a dumbass in Sonic X and become basically his entire character for… ever. Even in Forces, where he’s supposed to be doing slightly better as the leader of the resistance… but he’s a dumbass, and even Ian Flynn, who kept Knuckles as competent and intelligent in the Archie comics (Making the best version of Knuckles we’ve had in forever), kept this ongoing in the IDW comic. The Forces prequel portrays him as deciding to become leader of the Resistance (To an empire that hasn’t actually formed yet) purely to be a glory hound, and then goes on to establish that he was basically a figurehead while the real work was done by Amy, of all people.

And speaking of Amy…

Yeah, poor Amy is basically her Sonic X counterpart. But worse. I didn’t think that was possible, but at least X’s Amy seems to care about her friends. In Heroes, we’re treated to an equally violent and stalkerish Amy, who ostensibly starts searching out Sonic because he’s implicated in the abduction of Cream and Big’s pets, but when they actually catch up to him, Amy clean forgets why she is looking for him in the first place and tries to force him to marry her. Despite being twelve.

Y’know when Amy said she wanted to marry Sonic in SA2, she was joking, right?

This is why I find the idea of Amy being the real leader of the Resistance frankly absurd: Because the only time she led anything, it was a team that consisted of herself, a small child, and a man less intelligent and aware of reality than said small child, and she completely forgot their actual objective the moment she set her eyes on Sonic. Add in an unfortunate stint of very poor eyesight that got less and less understandable with every instance, and we got Amy’s rough personality for the next decade.

While Knuckles mostly stagnated at the same level of stupidity during that time, Tails got worse and worse, losing all of his badass traits with every game, a factor only increased by the “Sonic only” mentality costing him playable status, until he reached his nadir in Forces, cowering in terror from Chaos 0, and crying out to Sonic to save him, despite knowing full-well that Sonic was captured already.  Amy, meanwhile, limped along at the same level until about 2014, where it seemed someone at SEGA finally realised that A) Having the only female character you regularly use be a pink-coloured gender-bent version of your male hero whose only function is lusting after said hero doesn’t and shouldn’t fly in this day and age, and B) violent stalkers aren’t cute, and dropped this trait. Unfortunately, this has been more of a lateral move than a fix, as, much like Antoine in the comics, they forgot to give her anything substantial or fitting after she lost her negative traits, leaving her a bland and dull character, and when you’ve had a character be consistent for ten years, even if they were consistently bad, then changing it without cause or warning is still going to be jarring and awkward.

Part 4: Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right, or “Why the fuck did this happen?”

As I said in Part 2, Sonic X was made under heavy oversight from Sonic Team, and was heavily endorsed by them at the same time. There were promos for the show inserted into Sonic Adventure DX, a few episodes were released on GBA cartridges, and it received a long-running comic from Archie that ran alongside the main book, even after the show had ended. Additionally, characters that debuted in games from 2002-2004 were restricted from appearing in Archie’s main book for years afterwards (Which will become relevant later). The third season was commissioned solely off of the response to the first two, and primarily overseas response, hence why the original sub was never aired in Japan.

Sonic X was huge. And with that in mind, it’s plain to see that the portrayals of the characters in Sonic X were intended by SEGA. Yeah, all that horrible characterisation was intended as the vision for the franchise going forwards, and subsequent games were adjusted to match it.

And unfortunately, not only did this have a serious impact on the main cast of the games, but it had an even worse effect on Emerl.

Part 5: Emerl in Sonic X, or “Emerl vs. ‘Emel’”

Sonic X’s original mission statement was to adapt Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2, and Sonic Battle. Why they skipped Sonic Heroes, despite Shadow being a major player in Battle’s story, I don’t know.

For whatever reason, the show took a full season to actually get to the first game adaptation, SA1, and instead spent the first 26 episodes on bland episodic “adventures”, in some kind of strange reverse-Isekai series. However, once it got there, the adaptation work was fairly faithful to the source material, which the exception of Donut Steele’s being crammed in to the plot. However, he mostly followed Big around, and since Big was the least involved in the game’s plot, he didn’t disrupt too much.

Sidenote, after 26 episodes of filler, the actual SA1 adaptation only lasted six episodes.

SA2 was likewise only six episodes, but with the exception of Amy’s big scene, it likewise wasn’t too bad. Tails suffered this time around too, which is somewhat surprising since he was mech-dependent in the anime anyway.  

After some more filler, which introduced the Chaotix and then did nothing with them, Emerl finally made an appearance, albeit they got his name wrong.

‘Emel’ looks like Emerl, and somewhat works like Emerl, but might as well be completely  different. ‘Emel’ stays completely mute for the entire time he’s around, never advancing much beyond Emerl’s initial silent, pre-first Emerald persona. He does get better at fighting, but he’s limited to only absorbing a single skill at once (Except for when he isn’t).

Dispensing with Battle’s interesting, rich, and heart-twisting plot, Sonic X instead has ‘Emel’ linger in ensemble for three episodes, before condensing the entire game’s premise into a two episodes of really bland tournament arc, where Sonic himself doesn’t actually fight and we get two rounds of Donut Steele being a dick to his friend and his father.

‘Emel’ wins the tournament, and is given a Chaos Emerald, and just when you think it might kickstart him becoming an actual character, instead it just drives him insane and he immediately becomes a pathetically weak version of Ultimate Emerl. After kicking the crap out of the entire cast, he is defeated by Cream and Cheese, because even though he can take on Sonic, Knuckles, and Rouge at the same time and win, along with Tails, Amy, Donut Steele and everyone else, he… can’t handle two opponents at once.

This is stupid.

You’ll notice that I haven’t talked about Sonic’s relationship with ‘Emel’, and that’s because he doesn’t have one. The wonderfully-written parental bond that these two characters share in the games is completely excised, and instead the focus is put on Cream. Bare in mind, Cream is so inconsequential to the actual game that she doesn’t even get mentioned individually in Emerl’s dying speech like Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Shadow do. Instead she’s just grouped in with Amy.

This is also stupid.

And as a result of this, it means that what is arguable base form Sonic’s most impressive feat just doesn’t happen in the anime, instead Emerl dies because he is lightly kicked a bit by Cream. Yeah, unlike the Advance games, Sonic X’s Cream is not an unstoppable engine of destruction, she’s basically just a small child who can sometimes fly.

Instead of Emerl’s tragic speech and Sonic’s desperate attempts to keep his son alive, we get treated to a prolonged scene of Cream crying over the death of her “friend”, something that is probably meant to tug at heartstrings but doesn’t because Cream’s voice sounds like nails on a chalkboard.

And Shadow isn’t even there! He doesn’t come back until a third of the way through Season 3, and never meets ‘Emel.’

This is really stupid. And, for those keeping track, that means of Sonic X’s originally commissioned 52 episodes, and the full series run of 78 episodes, a stunning total of seventeen of them were actually adaptations of the games that the series was supposed to focus on, leaving us with 61 episodes of what might as well be filler.

And, unfortunately, that franchise-wide initiative had damning consequences for Emerl.

Part 6: Gemerl and Sonic Advance 3, or: “An incomplete resurrection.”

So, Gemerl. I know his name is apparently G-Merl now but fuck that I’m calling him Gemerl. If the comics can do it then so will I.

Gemerl is the worst thing Eggman has ever done to Sonic. Like, there is no contest. Some of his other schemes might be more destructive and generally evil, but in terms of personal pain inflicted, nothing has topped this.

Eggman salvaged Emerl’s corpse, and brought him back to life as a mindless murderbot under his control. So not only did he kill Sonic’s robo-son, but he also brought him back as a weapon.

Come the conclusion of the game, Gemerl predictably betrays Eggman, steals the Chaos Emeralds from Sonic, and goes on another rampage. I have… headcanons about this fight, but that’s something to worry about later. What’s important is that, once again, Sonic is victorious, and Gemerl’s defeated body plunges into the atmosphere.

Fortunately, Tails is able to bring Emerl back properly this time, presumably using the Chaos shard that was left over at the end of Battle’s finale. So, it’s all a happy ending, right? Sonic has his child back, Shadow has his connection to his history restored, and Emerl is alive and well, right?

Wrong.

See, the vile spectre of Sonic X rears its ugly head once more, and sabotages this conclusion. Gemerl doesn’t return to Sonic, in fact we never see him reunite with his father. Instead, Sonic X’s version has enough clout now to take precedence, so Gemerl is now Cream’s playmate.

Bear in mind that Emerl’s idea of a fun game is all-out combat against his friends, and Cream doesn’t like fighting (Even if she’s really good at it in Advance 2 and 3).

And then he never shows up again. Even when Cream is part of the game’s plot, like in Rush or Generations, he’s not there, and most egregiously, in Sonic Chronicles, where Cream is not only an active player in the plot, but so are Gizoids, the creators of said Gizoids are the main antagonists, and Emerl himself is mentioned… Gemerl is not there.

But he did make it into the comics, for better or worse. Mostly worse.

Part 7: Embargos, knock-offs, and misused tropes, or: “Ian Flynn dun goofed.”

For a long while, Emerl/Gemerl was barred from the Archie comics, due to the Sonic X embargo, and when it was lifted, he didn’t appear until the reboot. We did, however, get a suspiciously similar substitute in the form of Shard.

Shard was the original Metal Sonic, but when he was brought back and rebuilt for the Secret Freedom arc, he was given a colour scheme ostensibly derived from Metal Sonic 3.0, but one shared with Gemerl, and a personality that was a lot like a watered-down version of Emerl’s own.

On some level I can understand Ian’s decision to bring back Metal Sonic v2.5, rather than use the character that seems to have been an inspiration for this new incarnation in some way. He’d need a fully-formed Emerl, necessitating a skip over the whole story, since there wasn’t room for an adaptation during the Mecha Sally arc that the Secret Freedom story was framed within. Heck, for all we know, the similarities between them may simply be a pretty sizeable coincidence.

But then the reboot happened and Gemerl finally joined the comic cast. And to say it was underwhelming would be an understatement.

You’ll notice that I said “Gemerl” rather than “Emerl”, because his entire story was indeed skipped. The events of Sonic Battle and Sonic Advance 3 had both happened already. This wasn’t Ian’s decision, as far as we know, his intention was for the comic to start over from the beginning. However, due to the interference of Paul Kaminski, who wanted a softer reboot, Ian was forced to fill the characters’ active histories with a large chunk of the games’ stories. Battle and Advance 3 were among those that had already happened, so Emerl made cameos in both incarnations via flashback… which unfortunately led to a plot hole.

See, Advance 3 and Sonic Unleashed are rather difficult to keep in the same continuity, because both share a common plot element: The world breaking into seven pieces.

For a long while, it was generally assumed that the handheld games and console titles were only semi-canon to each other. This avoided the awkward question of “If the Gaias were already there, why didn’t they emerge when Eggman broke the planet in Advance 3?”

Ian shoved them blatantly into the same continuity, and gave no attempt to explain what was different about the Advance 3 world-break compared to the Gaia incident, which served as the backbone to the reboot’s three year long Shattered World Arc. Why didn't the Gaias wake up during Advance 3? Because that's now a question we have to ask of the comics' world.

When Gemerl finally showed up doing something other than yard work for Vanilla (Despite allegedly being Cream’s friend, Cream spends all her time with the rest of the cast, and Gemerl is basically Vanilla’s maid), it was to get effortlessly dispatched by a brainwashed Mega Man with a terrible name in the extremely lacklustre Worlds Unite event.

This one was more than a little bit of a slap in the face, considering that Emerl and Mega Man are very similar in concept- robots that can copy the abilities of other characters- but Emerl is demonstrably more powerful. Now, if Ian had established that Gemerl had been nerfed when he was rebuilt, either by Eggman or by Tails, that would be fine. But he didn’t. In fact, Gemerl is given the title bubble “Super Gizoid”, implying that he’s stronger than a regular Gizoid.

Worlds Unite is generally pretty bad for having its corrupted heroes easily curbstomp every other character around, to the point that the only thing that can stop them is each other, but in Gemerl’s case it really serves no purpose.

This is the only thing that he actually does in Worlds Unite. He shows up to get beaten up and make Mega Man look stronger. That’s it.

This is something that TV Tropes refers to as “The Worf Effect”, a trope wherein an established powerful character is defeated easily by a new character, in order to demonstrate the latter’s power. Now, there’s nothing wrong with using this trope, but please note that I said establishedpowerful character, which Gemerl wasn’t.

At the point that this comic released, Gemerl’s last appearance in any Sonic media was over ten years prior. None of the comic’s intended target audience would remember him, and they wouldn’t know why defeating him was impressive. And this was, in addition, a terrible way to introduce him to new fans. Though the worst part is easily that this was unnecessary. Mega Man had already defeated everyone else, and had established his power pretty well just on them, and he was about to get removed from play permanently in the next issue. There was really no reason to throw Gemerl under the bus for this.

He made one more appearance in the event, getting controlled by the Zeti along with every other robot, and after that he got bopped on the head and just flew away.

Later, he’d make another appearance in the Panic in the Sky arc, and while his portrayal was far from the worst thing about Panic in the Sky, it only adds to the issues caused by the previous showing.

Gemerl makes one appearance, and promptly gets pinned down by the Witchcarters and Team Hooligan. Bear in that one of those groups are the joke villains who nobody takes seriously, and the other are a gang that was defeated by Tails before he met Sonic.

Archie Gemerl was a character who only existed to lose to villains in a vain attempt to make them look better, and that’s legitimately all Ian ever did with him, which makes me wonder whether he disliked the character. And it didn’t even make the villains look good, when you think about it. For anybody that was actually the intended audience for this book, Gemerl had no significance. He was just a robot that got beat up all the time. But for anyone like me, who does remember the games he appeared in, it stands out, not as good writing, but as a blatant narrative device and misused trope.

In this situation, I would simply rather Gemerl never appeared in Archie. At all. If Ian wasn’t going to give him time to shine, or at the very least be an adequate member of the supporting cast, he shouldn’t have used him at all.

Part 8: A Fresh False Start, or: “Wait, how did this get worse?!”

And now we arrive at IDW.

The one nice thing I can say about Archie Gemerl is that at least his personality was mostly on point. He read like a generally accurate take on the character that Emerl was at the end of Battle, which is what he’s supposed to be.

The same cannot be said for IDW.

In the pages of IDW, Gemerl acts like the most generic robot. He speaks in emotionless, stilted sentences with little in the way of actual grammar, leaving him to read like a poor man’s Soundwave, or Soundwave in one of those comics where the writer can’t decide whether they want him to speak normally or adopt his speech pattern from the G1 cartoon, so they just sort of do both.

Emerl pretty much never talked like this, as far as I can recall. His speech development is much more reminiscent of a child learning words, and the only time when he did adopt a more robotic speech pattern, it was a clue that he was slipping back into his destructive programming. He only spoke like a generic robot when he was in mindless destroyer mode.

He gets thrown for a loop by a simple logic flaw, unable to reconcile “Protect Cream and Vanilla” with “Don’t kill the zombots”, and has to be talked out of killing everything around him, when the entire point of Gerald’s modifications to the Gizoid was to make him a bringer of hope rather than destruction, and give him a compassionate heart.

The part of Battle’s story where Cream imparts a pacifistic mindset doesn’t frame her as being right. In that part of the game, they are cornered and under attack by hostile but ultimately mindless drones, and when she convinces Emerl to stop fighting, he almost dies. It’s Cream that learns the lesson there, that sometimes fighting is okay.

This character is already compassionate, he shouldn’t need to be talked into not killing the zombots by a small child, nor should he need her to point out that they’re innocent people who have been made this way by Eggman, because he was made into a killing machine by Eggman twice, and the first time he did die because of it. The character that lay dying in Sonic’s arms, scared and bidding his last goodbyes to his loved ones shouldn’t be the one experiencing this struggle when Omega is also in this arc.

That’s it, really. He’s not Gemerl. He’s a second, less goofy Omega. And it boggles my mind that, despite getting Gemerl’s character, if not his combat abilities, down almost perfectly in Archie, Ian is now subjecting us to this travesty.  

Like with the Archie example above, therein lies the crux of why the steady decline of Emerl/Gemerl that began with Sonic X is pushing me away from IDW: I don’t want to read Ian’s take on this character, because, to me, No Gemerl is better than Badly-Written Gemerl,

This isn’t the first time I’ve said this, either.  Way back in 2016, when I complained about Ian’s portrayal of Gemerl in Panic in the Sky, I said that the way he handled characters that I liked tended to make them the least likeable parts of the stories he wrote. As well as stating my dislike for his handling of Gemerl, I also stated that I used to really like Fiona Fox, moreso in concept than in execution, but under Ian’s pen she was largely an insufferable antagonist, little more than a trophy to make his pet recolour look better, and almost every story she was in only added to the “List of reasons she needs to stop lying to herself and just start the redemption arc already”. Additionally, I said that I didn’t want to see him bring back Neo Metal Sonic or Mephiles in any context, and we got the former, and it was exactly as bad as I thought it would be.

So, that’s basically why I don’t want to read IDW. That’s why, even if the aspect that was a big sticking point for me back when the comic launched was to be undone soon, I still probably wouldn’t pick it up. Because I don’t want to see my favourite Sonic character continue to be written badly by a guy that should know better, and has done better in the past.

If he were simply screwing up Gemerl’s personality the first time he wrote him, I would file it away under the same category as “Emel”, but the fact that he’s done better before, in a book where he had greater restrictions on what he could do with the characters, really settles this as an interest-killer for me.

Well done, Mr. Flynn. I legitimately didn’t think you could make me actually miss SEGA’s tighter control, but you somehow managed it. I would be impressed if it weren’t so sad.

[zerohourseraphim]

6/10 Role-Playing Game, JRPG Similar to – Star Ocean: ‘Til the End of Time or the earlier version(s) of The Last Hope $21 (PC and PS4), Varies (Xbox 360 and PS3)

          The Star Ocean series was, for a long time, in a small handful of titles that were uniquely my own. In my (relative) youth I did not differentiate between Western and Eastern RPGs. Looking back now I can see that JRPGs were my go-to genre. Legend of Legaia, Super Mario RPG, Breath of Fire, Final Fantasy, and Star Ocean laid the base for much of what I find comforting in gameplay. The PlayStation era gave me a lot of good memories. It was the first system I had at home and was able to play at length, to the chagrin of my mother.           Enix was a breed apart in game making. E.V.O.: Search for Eden, Illusion of Gaia, and Soul Blazer are standout in my memories. My issues of Nintendo Power containing walkthroughs of these games were read like bedtime story books. Star Ocean on the Super Famicom, never had an official release outside of Japan. From what I have been able to gather the mechanics were markedly different than the sequel. Star Ocean: The Second Story (SO2), made many improvements and is one of my favorite games of all time. I played it a LOT in my youth and was my first Enix title to play directly. The variety of characters, wholly real-time battles mixed with RPG elements, and Private Actions of the Star Ocean series were a welcome change of pace to all the turn-based titles I enjoyed. It is the first game that I played in which I fought in three dimensions (or perhaps 2.5 dimensions). I could watch for tells, manually evade some spells, and use tactics like pincer formations. Second Evolution, the PSP re-release, didn’t change much over the original. In fact, The Second Story was good enough to be the base template for both re-releases of the original and sequel.           When I first heard of the merger of Square and Enix I was excited. Admittedly my present views on the company’s products are mixed. Some games I loved. Kingdom Hearts has been charming. The new Tomb Raiders are well made. Heck, even some of the Final Fantasy titles have their charm. When it comes to Star Ocean however the Square-Enix offerings left me pining for my old favorite even more.

          My aim in buying this title is to help show there is a demand for the series on PC. Aside from that, there is much anguish in my future, even after having completed the game to review it.

          For those unfamiliar, I will be using these abbreviations rather than retyping the full titles each time.

          Star Ocean/:First Departure (SO1/PSP re-release)           Star Ocean: The Second Story/:Second Evolution (SO2/PSP re-release)           Star Ocean: ‘Til the End of Time (SO3)           Star Ocean: The Last Hope (SO4)           Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithfulness (SO5)

          There was a handheld title called Star Ocean: Blue Sphere, and a mobile title called Star Ocean: Anamnesis. But as I have not played these titles I will not be referencing them. The abbreviations I am using are widely held both to series die-hards and gamers-in-passing alike.

Story

          Humans have nearly annihilated themselves in World War III. The peoples of the nigh-uninhabitable Earth set their sights on the stars. During the maiden voyage of the Space Reconnaissance Force, the fleet is knocked out of warp by gravity eddies from a stray meteor. The resulting crash-landing still landed the expedition arrives on the target planet. Setting out from the Calnus, you are to meet up with the other crews and try to keep to your mission.

          Stakes are important to a story. Prequels don’t really have them because the story has to flow into a pre-established narrative. Retconning is a Sword of Damocles because if it is done once, it may happen again. I read a series of The Flash comics years ago. Much like the Flashpoint season on the CW series, there was an event that rewrote the world. And if it happens once, what is to stop it from some Deus Ex Machina being used again? To use another phrase from modern media, once something has jumped the shark and become too grandiose I lose interest.

          As such, you can imagine easily that I strongly dislike prequels. I am wary of reboots for similar reasons. I abhor the narrative of my fictions being invalidated. Star Ocean: ‘Til the End of Time (SO3) was a disappointing and infuriating insult. The fighting system was good. The music was, at times, the best in the series.

Star Ocean: ‘Til the End of Time (SO3) Spoiler Alert

          I know I play fiction. I know spending days or weeks with a single game is, to a degree, a waste. It doesn’t produce anything real in the world. It means a lot to me, or I wouldn’t spend so long with the medium. SO3 did exactly this. The big twist is that, Surprise! Our story takes place in a game played by Fourth Dimensional Beings. “The Ten Wise Men Incident”, the story behind SO2, is spoken about like it’s an MMO expansion. Some loved it. Some hated it. People ask “Where were you when the Lacuer Hope was fired?” Many people in the present age may appreciate the meta-commentary. I did not. In one fell swoop, it jarred me out of my suspension of disbelief and permanently lowered the stakes of the whole series. If an MMO gets deleted, will it ever be exactly the same? No. But can it be rebuilt? Indeed it can.

          As such the game goes from “Save the Universe” to “Stop the CEO from deleting your game/world.” If I make a game and my characters come out of the game with their powers intact, I think it would be insane to not delete the world. At the very least, I would opt for a Legacy Server of sorts and let it run itself. But the whole story spiraled out of control because the world was destroyed in the end. As such… no more Star Ocean. This has led The Last Hope and Integrity and Faithfulness to both be set before End of Time. But it is hard to be invested in The Last Hope. Why?

          Because I know I am playing a game.

          I knew, coming into Star Ocean: The Last Hope (SO4), I’d be dealing with a prequel by the nature of the previous game. If the practice of prequels existed pre-Star Wars it was not widespread. Since then nearly every franchise has found prequels acceptable, normally to incongruent result. As of yet, Star Ocean has not been backed into so much of a corner to require a full reboot. For that I am thankful. I have not had the fortune of being able to play Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithfulness (SO5). I know that SO4 is not the literal last hope of the franchise. Hopefully, some improvements have been made.

Characters

          Ordinarily, I do not touch on characters unless something stands out about them. Unfortunately, much like the story, the characters do not stand up well. There is only one I remember clearly, and he’s a bad guy.

          You meet Tamiel on Roak. Look at him. I do not think telling you he is a bad guy is much of a spoiler. He has passion, expression, and is almost instinctually motivated. He has a task he is to accomplish but gets caught up in the joys of life. He’s a jerk, and a tough fight without a doubt. He is, by far, the most driven character in the game.

          This title continues the tradition of what I would call “stellar misfits” being grouped together. However, the ties that bind this group lack vitality. The characters had flimsy motivations for setting off together. I am just going to go down the list of main characters and give you what pulls them along. Oddly, they are developed more via their battle personas. Oft times, the characters I like the most to play are the dreariest to deal with outside of combat.

Edge Maverick

          No, this is not a code name. He is not some elite soldier with a hidden past. He doesn’t have amnesia. He isn’t hiding from the government. He’s not some revolutionary. He’s just a kid who has trained to be a starship pilot. His father is Arnold Maverick, making Maverick a surname. Edge is named as such because his parents chose this (if we are thinking in-world).

          “That’s a little heavy-handed,” you may say. Well, it’s better than Fayt Leingod (pronounced Fate Line-God in canon voice acting). Yep. That is the actual name of SO3’s forerunning character. They’re even designed similarly.

Fayt Leingod – SO3

Edge Maverick – SO4

          Messy hair, strange bulky greaves, sword slung on the hip to be pulled out from the right side. Now, spoiler alert, protagonist Fayt is special. It makes sense to some degree to have such an ostentatious name. But Edge, however? With no indication that he would even survive his genetic manipulation? Who names their child Edge?

          Anime parents, that’s who. Apparently.

          Anyhow, this is your main character, and that is why he is a part of your party for the whole game. He’s not at all offensive. I suppose that keeps him being relatable. He is fairly well balanced on the combat front the whole way through, learning some basic magic. Emergency mending will help keep you Healer(s) in good condition from afar without dipping into your item stores.

  Reimi Saionji

          Childhood friend and adopted sister of Edge. Followed along when Edge joined the Space Reconnaissance Force (SRF). When Edge is sent out to explore Aeos, Reimi goes along of her own volition.

          Mechanically, she is my go-to fighter. With her move set, she can hit any enemy at any location in the field in a variety of ways. As a character, however, she is painful to watch. She is the love interest and eye candy. For instance, here is her first on-screen moment in the game.

          Edge and Reimi have the advantage of dressing like main characters. They get to be unique and pop. Everyone else in the SRF wears neck-to-toe white body armor. Edge’s attire looks pieced together from the armor. And, as a member of an exploratory force, it is sensible. Reimi, for whatever reason, is a Futuristic Schoolgirl In SPAAAAAAAAaaaaace Heels. She is a long range combatant. She is an archer. Why, when running on unknown planets, would you opt for heels? Because of fan service.

Obviously.

Faize Sheifa Beleth

          As the story picks up, you are met by an extraterrestrial. Even before the shock wears off you are thrust into your first boss battle. Faize has a fanboy level of admiration for Edge. While ordered by his superiors, he likely would have needed to be told to not follow Edge.

          I never use Faize. Edge is a better fighter, and better casters come along. I let the computer handle him.

          Character-wise, he’s exceedingly passive. I don’t know why. The other members of his race seem to have some personality. He is on the extreme side of the spectrum, a character that I dislike that is also useless more or less. He willingly plays second fiddle to Edge.

Lymle Lemuri Phi

          After you earn the revamped Calnus, you set off to the planet Lemuris. In the first village, you are mistaken for gods, your ship having landed from the skies a small jaunt away. Here, you are entreated to help cure a sickness turning people into stone. As you speak to a village elder his granddaughter bursts in, greets her grandfather, draws a rune, then heads out to find a Symbol to cure the sickness. Edge goes along with her. Later, when Edge and the crew leave the planet, Lymle comes with.

          I would call Lymle a combat mage. All of her battle skills are fire oriented and most use her familiar, Cerberus. That’s the creature in the above picture as she shows off how well behaved he is. Aside from this, she has some healing spells and a great many attack spells. She is wonderfully versatile.

          As a character, however, she is a little bland. This is explained in her backstory at one point. Lymle, by far, is the most endearing to me. As emotion is not fully expressed the graphics do well for this, her character coming through in the quality of the writing and voice acting. I have cared for children before, and some of their expressions remind me of Lymle. But, she may not sit so well with everyone.

          Blandness is a persistent condition with the characters that you haven’t seen the last of.  

Bacchus D-79

          After being captured and later jailed, Bacchus comes to the rescue. Through a wall. With an arm cannon.

          Bacchus gets points for style.

          He continues with the party after a jailbreak as they seem aligned with defeating the Grigori. His aim is to deliver Edge and his friends to En II.

          Bacchus has a large number of unique moves. His hit points are high, allowing him to tank through a number of instances if he has adequate healing. I have found more use for him in the post game.

          Again, we have a character that is a bit on the cold side emotionally. His dry and direct speech, at the very least, give the youngsters of the group something to chase down. He moves the story along, and I am thankful for that. In his current body, only his spine, brain, and bits of his face are what remains of his fleshy form. Still, I find him to be more emotive and earnest than Faize. That, and useful in a fight.

Meracle Chamlotte

          Crashing on an unknown world, you are charged with rescuing another alien. With no one having any idea who she is or where she comes from, she sticks with you.

          Meracle is a callback in and of herself to Pericci from the original Star Ocean. Both are Lesser Fellpool, able to turn into cats, and have a penchant for proficiency for ocarina piping. Both are fairly high energy and gregarious. She is by far the most expressive character in the cast. Whereas Tamiel is sadistic, Meracle is cheerful and playful. She is also the easiest to “read”. Having animal traits not only excuses some oddities but her tail and ears all for more visual cues to her emotions. Even though she is prone to a chipper perma-smirk, more information comes across when she is sad or dejected.As far as combat goes, I hear she is a powerful character. However, I have not used her much as of yet.

Myuria Tionysus

          Myuria bumps into the party a few times throughout the story. She is in pursuit of a man named Crowe. When she ascertains that Crowe, Reimi, and Edge all belong to the SRF (and are in fact childhood friends), she “joins” your party with the expressed purpose of killing Crowe.

          As a character, there is little I can say without actually spoiling her part of the story. She seems to be a callback to Celine Jules from Star Ocean 2. The overall archetype seems to be “Sexy Symbologist”.

Celine Jules – SO2

Myuria Tionysus – SO4

          Heels, symbological tattoos on the legs, floating ring decorations, and even the color schemes of the attire are similar. It wouldn’t be something I had much of a problem with if the cultures they hail from weren’t so different. I’m not even going to go into the fanservice light that shines onto Myuria. It’s just way to easy. Let it be said that too many serious screenshots I chose not to use due to digital side boob and upskirt shots.

          As said, Myuria is another Symbologist. I would say she is more specialized in the aggressive aspects. One of her strongest techniques rains lightning down over the entire field. Reminiscent of a particular Celestial I am not looking forward to dealing with again.

  Sarah Jerand

          After touching down on a nearby planet for repairs, a shout from an alley causes the party to investigate. After liberating Sarah from her captors, she does Edge and the gang a favorable turn. However, she is captured once more, and again rescued. Afterwards, she accompanies the party due to little more than idle curiosity.

          Sarah is absentminded and never expresses herself in any way except with a wistful sing-song. Her aforementioned call for help actually confuses the party because it lacks all panic and urgency. Her absent-mindedness leads her to emote critical disasters with the same worry as one would have if they didn’t pack extra socks in a travel bag. At one point Lymle and Meracle have to pull her aside and explain to her the gravity of a universe ending situation. For fans of the series, you will recognize that she is a Featherfolk and in fact the ancestor of two party members in the original title. Even so, she is not very compelling.

          That said, she is the poster child for useful characters. I find her to be unrivaled as a healer. Her AI keeps her away from enemies, she supports only when HP is near full, and attacks from afar only when everything else is taken care of. Her evasion is insanely effective, and can often keep foes from harming her until a more frontline member can make it to her.

Arumat P. Thanatos

          At one point, the Calnus is recalled to Aeos. Communication has been lost with the expedition base. You are charged to investigate. After exploring the newly opened territory, an ambush is thwarted with the help of Arumat. Knowing the location of the disturbances’ source, he joins your party.

          Arumat is a powerhouse, coming to the party with stats normally well above anything you possess at the time. He is the only character I have used as a replacement to Edge casually, though I normally have the both of them on the front line. He keeps to the trend of being hard to relate within the story. Why? Because, to borrow an internet colloquialism, Arumat is a bit of an edge lord.

          As you can see he is tall, pale, scantily clad for a man, and wields a laser scythe as his weapon of choice second only to his bad attitude. He is covered in scars. And he refers to himself in the third person as “Death Himself”. Thanatos, his supposedly alien surname, is Greek for “death”.  In scattered research for this review, I read that Arumat is an anagram for “trauma” in English of all languages.

          He simply reeks of effort. Additionally, he comes along so late in the game that his character development feels shoehorned in. As such, a character that should be brooding is oddly open and warms up to the crew fast.

          Oddly, with that exceedingly strained name, I’ve brought myself full circle. These are your playable characters. My problems with the characters are how wooden and sluggish they feel. They reside in a  weird spot in the Uncanny Valley. They are obviously stylized but are still fairly realistic in tone, proportion, presentation. The aim was to evoke humanity and this just makes what they missed off-putting, even though I can’t put my finger on what it is.

          Citing Square-Enix history again, many protagonists have had a “setting”. Take Final Fantasy XIII. Lightning is stoic, Snow is optimistic, and Sazh tends to be tired though he has an easy smile. They rarely fall out of these modes. The Kingdom Hearts series tends to work better with variation because the human characters have to work with Disney characters, so they are more cartoon-like. This causes the brain to excuse oddities as they need to fit stylistically with Mickey and the Gang which are obviously not human to begin with. There is not a kind way to say this. I watched a show called Thunderbolt Fantasy. This is a show done with puppets. I find the puppets to be more emotive and less wooden than the CGI of both SO3 and SO4. The characters in both games are, for the most part, two dimensional.

          I could go on. Really. I could. The short of it is, I do not come to this game for the engrossing characters.

          Dare I say it, the afore-threatened Crowe would have been a much more empowered protagonist, I think. Edge is more or less following in Crowe’s wake much of the game. And then he shows up like this.

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          If your hero is saved by a guy taking sniper shots with a laser rifle, dual wielding laser swords, and backed up by the guy wielding a custom laser scythe, you may not be following the right character around.

  Theming

          I have gone on and on about the elements of the recent titles that have irked me. I think I can boil down my qualms into two distinct salty grains.

Directly with this title, the pre-established elements of the Star Ocean franchise were not upheld.

Indirectly to this title, Star Ocean: ‘Til the End of Time did not leave much of a franchise to build off of.

          As much as I am knocking and spoiling it, Star Ocean: ‘Til the End of Time had a compelling story with some interesting points. However, some of the twists made me step back from the game in frustration. The story got too big and backed the franchise into a corner. Some might applaud the meta-commentary of the Fourth Dimension. I do not. I do find it strange that even though the universe was “freed”, we haven’t gotten any stories set after SO3. The stakes are reduced for me because I know that no matter how grand, the world is on strings.

          I digress. The only thing holding The Last Hope up story wise is the fact that it is a Star Ocean title. However, the tent poles it snatches from the other games in the numerous callbacks seem to me to only serve to bring down the rest of the series as a whole. At the end of the game, nothing is particularly added to the series. The characters saved Earth, yes. However, as with any prequel, they had to. Much of what goes on smacks the rest of the series in the face.

          To some degree, I can see some elements for what they are: Mirroring. Hearkening back to Star Wars, the movies follow beats culminating in an overarching “rhyme scheme”. Luke, Anakin, and Rey are all easily able to apply the use of the Force. A revered mentor has died in all the first movies as well. The problem with SO4 is that the mirroring was of future events, and proved problematic to the Star Ocean story overall.

          The first callback is more or less benign. The last three major titles in the series have all had an occurrence of a male, Earthborn protagonist finding themselves stranded on a less advanced world. At this point, it has become a bit of an in-series trope. I will be surprised if SO5 does not include it somehow.

          The next is a fairly major balk and echoes the whole of the Star Ocean series up until this point. This is the making of enhanced organisms. In the first game, the ambient villain and surprise endgame boss were both genetically enhanced superhumans. The Muah, your typical long-lost and highly intelligent proto-race, created Asmodeus and Jie Revorse as templates to survive on the inhospitable world called Fargett. In the sequel, The Ten Wise Men are living weapons and your primary antagonists. And for the third game Symbological Genetics ware a big taboo. Symbology is the term used for magic in the Star Ocean universe. By imprinting magical sigils in the correct ways onto and into DNA a trio of the protagonists gained multi- and trans-dimensional abilities. The troubles in much of the first half of the game were due to an advanced alien culture pursuing these characters and just about taking Earth hostage to do it. It culminated in, and I say this with no exaggeration, the targeted destruction of many advanced societies and the eventual deletion of all creation as it was known when prior methods failed.

Mark of the Muah

          As such, for the fourth game to have a trio of protagonists being infused with Muah (callbacks to Star Ocean and SO2’s spin-off Blue Sphere) genetic influence to survive an unlivable World War III ravaged Earth was incongruent. Genetic manipulation has been the core action that led to global, interplanetary, galactic, and universal genocide in every major title to this series up through the games I played. I will give a pass on not knowing if you’ll ever make a prequel when you write a story. The change of tone is still confusing.

          If you place the stories chronologically, it makes a little sense. Maybe Earthlings were okay with genetic manipulation, but it became taboo after the events of Star Oceans 1 and 2. That would be sensible. But that has not been the overarching tone in the series. And once Edge finds out he isn’t shocked, taken aback, or offended. He has no response. But in SO3, it was hashed out. This is why I think the story aspects of this game coast on being a Star Ocean game, and don’t rely on giving us any new information.

  Roak from space

            Moving on, Roak is the planet that the majority of the original Star Ocean title took part on. My memory of playing First Departure is not too good having only played it once. However, player character Ashlay Bernbeldt makes a “return” as the colosseum champion in SO4. Lias Warren, the father to another player character Cyrus Warren, is seen in this game as a leader of knights. Again, I will give a pass to not knowing about writing a prequel some fifteen years later. Even so, I am thinking that a second group of strangely armed, armored, and trained individuals would raise some suspicion especially amongst those who fought against and with the first group even if it happened decades apart. The timing of SO4 also places events of this game and the original dangerously close together.

          I have likened Star Ocean to Star Trek. Frame it as a long form “What If” story of an Away Mission that goes awry and I think you’ll understand what I mean. Star Ocean has The Pangalactic Federation touting The Underdeveloped Planet Preservation Pact (UP3). This is comparable to The Federation in Star Trek with their Prime Directive. Granted, in this story, there is no Pangalactic Federation and no UP3. Still, Edge has the Calnus land in plain sight of the village of Triom when you touch down on Lemuris. There is no sanctioning body to come down on him, and I might be influenced by a lifetime of science fiction, but that just seems foolish. He did learn and touched down further away the next time.

          Each world is dutifully crafted. Each area ties into the last creating the variation you’d expect from singular planets. Each individual section has its own vibrancy. The settings from planets, temples, and spaceships are all wonderful to look at. Square-Enix still makes wonderful digital vistas. However, much of the Magical Industry I came to enjoy regarding Star Ocean is absent because it is a prequel. Uses of Rune- and Symbol -ogies barely even exist yet. It leaves it in much more of a sci-fi with magic setting with little of the “own-ness” Star Ocean cultivated.

Mechanics

          Does this game have any redeeming qualities? Did I find anything enjoyable? I am happy to say “yes”. Otherwise, it would not have been worth purchasing a second time and replaying.

          I know. I’m just as surprised as you are at this point. Honestly, I didn’t know I had this much bile churning regarding this series. I guess I only like the earlier games.

Combat

          The combat is more fast-paced than it has ever been. The real-time battles are just as accessible with simple attacks as they were in SO2. Chain Combos are present, and introduced early, allowing you to link together your most powerful techniques in a number of strategic ways. Adding another layer of strategy, all characters have the ability to Blindside enemies. Doing so will give you an opportunity to get behind enemies and strike their weak points if any are available atop normal critical hits that open up. This is of massive import in boss battles.

          Additionally, a system known as BEAT (Battle Enhancement Attribute Type) has three variants providing different bonuses: Pure Stats (N – Neutral), Blindsides (S – Strike), and Rush Combos (B – Burst). Bonuses grow as each branch is leveled up, which happens as players are in the active party. Neutral only raises stats, and these are tied to the characters’ Strike and Burst levels.

Beat: N

          Strike focuses on improving the already formidable Blindsides. These are most useful for frontline fighters and perhaps any character you control.

Beat: S

          Burst tends to benefit your backline and AI controlled characters. Rush Mode allows characters to wade through many attacks unhindered, and Beat: B helps this mode last longer. Sometimes victory comes down to a healer out of Rush Mode or casting a critical curing spell while it is active.

Beat: B

          These aspects are all well designed. Depending upon your play style and the necessity of a particular battle, these elements can enhance your effectiveness. Many of these settings, including move load outs can be changed mid-battle to heighten effectiveness. There is yet another use of the Rush Gauge and Chain Combos.

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          Rush Combos combine these two innovations are a wholly different animal. They let your team unleash Chain Combo setups free of other resources. While you may lose any area of effect from your attacks, you can pump out major damage to even the mightiest of foes.

          While special moves and spells no longer gain power through repeated usage, they can be improved with SP. This is built up per person as they level up and for the whole party from opening chests, gathering materials, and completing quests. Do you keep skills primed for combat or do you focus on making enemy drops easier and more lucrative? That choice is yours.

          I am happy that the combat opened back up to allow four combatants again. Many challenges from the previous title came from using three rather than four people. Returning to this game in earnest after a four-year hiatus from the 360 version let me get right back into it, and it was satisfying.

Item Creation

          Square-Enix made an unpopular decision after the original release of The Last Hope. A crafting oversight known as “The Overflow Trick” was a well-documented exploit. This allowed weapons, armor, and accessories to be imbued with factors that made the post-game bosses much easier. A simple reversal of how Factors were set up rendered this Trick moot. I think this was solely done with Gabriel Celeste and the Ethereal Queen in mind. Still, they are no slouches. They both come with two amped up forms each. In spite of what even I thought this change doesn’t increase grinding as much as one would think. The techniques the player base cultivated still work, and all the boosts are good boosts. To their credit, the crafting system this go-round is much further in the realm of sanity than in SO3.

(I’ve harped on that game enough. I will not do so anymore. Today at least.)

          All crafted items come from recipes. Sometimes these are in chests, come as quest rewards, or are simply handed to you. The lions’ share of recipes need to be made by your party members. The in-game tutorial will tell you all you need to get started. If you max characters crafting to 10 before you start, all the possible recipes will be available per every character combination used. These two elements are about all you need to keep track of. Once discovered, the recipes are saved and can be used at any time. Crafting always succeeds, so don’t worry about losing materials from failures.

  The game is so kind that sometimes you get free goods.

            The battles and preparation for them are where this title shine. It’s all about the fights. It’s a shame the context is so lackluster.

Replay Value

          One of my biggest complaints with RPGs is that time is not respected or simply flat-out wasted. Chrono Trigger was one of the first games I remember having some form of New Game Plus functionality. It was satisfying to play the game once, set it down, and come back to relive the story with all the gear you collected. You could try fighting Lavos at each ending juncture fresh or wait until your party was more seasoned in additional playthroughs. Even with as popular as Chrono Trigger was, New Game Plus did not become a staple in Square’s games. Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy X-2, and Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII are the only Square and Square Enix titles I can think of with this design in mind. While not the most robust, there are a few ways in which your efforts can be permanently rewarded in Star Ocean: The Last Hope.

          The two biggest “rewards” from completing enough battle trophies are raising the level cap and granting extra CP. As many of the greatest equipment augments work via percentages, having another 55 levels added to you can mean an awful lot regarding base survivability. The extra CP, points which let you set skills for battle, may not be a large boon end game but will certainly make the going easier for new games. Three more points would have let you set the ultimate moves for “free”, so I am again a bit vexed at this design choice.

          Even these rewards are offset by the nature of the Trophies. For instance, two characters need to kill 30,000 enemies each. These kills must happen in a single playthrough. While you do keep Battle Trophies independently, kill counts are unique. Earning the 15,000 enemies killed trophy will not credit you that number on even a new game with persistent data. You will have to start that over again. Some battle trophies are just luck, such as ‘Leave an enemy with X HP’. And, since Synthesis was turned down the ‘Inflict 99,999 Damage’ trophies are that much more tricky to potentially obtain.

          Achievements/Trophies are ubiquitous with gaming these days. I would not say that this game has the hardest to earn, but they are certainly some of the most time-consuming. You’ll likely clock in hundreds of active hours if you aim to earn everything. Star Ocean: The Last Hope relies heavily on external save data for these processes. Whenever you use a save point (a key fact to remember) several Collections will update and will not have to be earned again. If you are achievement hunting you’ll want to be mindful of this, as some parts are missable. I have found this list comprehensive to single play through completion, outside of Private Actions/Endings. Guides abound on such an old title so you can find all the help you need. Aside from the achievements specifically requiring you to beat the game on higher difficulties, all the battle trophies and other collections can be gained even on the easiest level, much unlike the previous game. Still, you should play on the default difficulty level first to unlock the next one up. Earth difficulty is likely more for a final mop up of Battle Trophies and achievements.

          To end on a positive, also included in the external data is a section dedicated to Monsters. Attached to most every foe is a percentage bar. Reaching 100% will allow you to fill a “Monster Jewel” with the data. These can grant a shortcut to some very powerful bonuses, both to use and to migrate into other items. This progress is retained file to file and can be used anywhere once completed. For instance, killing the requisite number of Metal Scumbags post-game will let you make a Fol (currency) 25%+ even on new games.

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Closing

            If you are a fan of the combat in the Star Ocean series and have no other systems, you can’t go wrong with Star Ocean: The Last Hope. However, if you are looking for a good story or are highly attached to the ongoing narrative established in other games in the series, this title can be skipped. It pains me to say that. This game is kinder to players, in some ways than ‘Til the End of Time was. The sound quality holds up, and the visual quality is markedly better than the 360 version. On these points, Square-Enix did an excellent job. Even I, who genuinely cares little about graphical fidelity, am appreciating the difference in graphic presentation. It is with integrity and faithfulness that my last hope is met by Square-Enix and the rest of the Star Ocean franchise is brought to the PC.

A long-form review of the re-release of Star Ocean: The Last Hope. 6/10 Role-Playing Game, JRPG Similar to - Star Ocean: 'Til the End of Time or the earlier version(s) of The Last Hope…