#it takes its insanely silly premise seriously in setting and doesn’t make it a parody

[casualarsonist]

Wolfenstein II, and the importance of tone.

B.J. Blaskowicz's pregnant lover, Anya, tears her burning shirt from her body as her grenades explode under the feet of the advancing Nazis. She straddles B.J's prone body and brandishes two machine guns aloft as blood showers her naked skin, and I roar with laughter. My girlfriend asks me what the f**k is happening. Hitler pisses into a bucket and vomits on the floor. B.J. rants against bourgeois pacifism in a drunken rage and passes out. And as the sword bites into his flesh, and his head falls into a pyre, only to be collected by a machine and reattached to a synthetic body, I rejoice at the moments wherein Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus has the balls to embrace the absolute madness of its setting and take everything up to 11. 

But something doesn't feel quite right. Its predecessor - The New Order - subverted and exceeded the expectations of everyone that awaited it; I don't think anyone could have imagined what Machine Games would do with the franchise rights of the world's first FPS. As a pitch, the idea of taking the inherently daft premise of a man fighting Nazi-zombie robots in a retro-futuristic 1960's and grounding it all in a real emotional place with characters that understand and communicate the gravity of their situation to one another and to the audience alike...well, it's mental. And yet it worked. It worked really, really well. The action was intense and bombastic, but when it was over and the game asked us to understand what was motivating these people to do what they were doing, the drama felt earned, and every enemy you defeated felt like a cathartic victory rather than an exercise in psychopathy. When a friendly character died, it hurt because you cared, and because the death felt like a genuine loss amongst all the well-written personalities. The New Order was dark and visceral and at times terrifying, but always a joy to play, and in the end, no matter which turn the story took, you were invested. 

So why does The New Colossus feel like such a mistake?

To be fair to the game, as I've already said, there were moments that I was literally rolling in my seat with laughter, and it is certainly at its best when it says 'fuck it' to the concept of restraint and goes mental. It is, at times, incredibly fun, and funny. The aforementioned scene in which an insane, addled, syphilitic Hitler pisses in a bucket whilst auditioning actors for a terrible, terrible film he has written is one of the best in the entire game, not just because it makes an absolute mockery of the long-feared icon of human evil, but also because it is rendered and animated so well that looking into his eyes is genuinely chilling for how lifelike it all appears. But moments like these are few and far between, and it's regrettably rare that, buried amongst long, long cutscenes that have nothing important to say, one feels like they are genuinely being surprised and entertained. 

I suppose it's all about on which end of the crazy scale you heap your content - balance is good, as is committing to one style and tone on either side, but to be indecisive, or to miscalculate and mistime and portion your moments improperly so as to leave your audience confused as to your intention can be fatal, and in the case of Wolfenstein 2, it very nearly is. Whereas The New Order balanced the silliness in its gunplay with sincerity and moments of genuine tenderness in its story, The New Colossus couples inappropriate moodiness and melodrama with the violent actions of its characters, and leaves them looking like hypocrites. After tearing through a gauntlet of soldiers leaving little but a hallway littered with bloody chunks of flesh, B.J. chooses to wax poetic about the loss of a friend's life and the loss of all her experiences with it, in turn completely ignoring the dozens of lives and thousands of experiences he just erased. The moment is timed so perfectly and the recitation of the lines so genuine that the juxtaposition almost feels intentional, as if the game wants you to scoff at his lack of self-awareness, and it might have been a nice subversive moment if this game’s immediate predecessor hadn’t pinned all its integrity on the fact that its characters and narrative were supposed to be relatable. Instead, B.J. comes off psychotic, annoying, and unlikeable, and the writers seem less like they’re in on the joke and more like they just don't know what their doing. 

Which is rather baffling, given that it's the exact same creative team behind the The New Order - the same two writers that created a masterpiece of action storytelling, and somehow married an impossibly absurd premise with a genuine, heartfelt narrative. They created a terrifying villain, complex and likeable sidekicks, and together with the ambitious and intense soundtrack crafted a world that lived and breathed despite exploring all manner of ridiculous scenarios (moonbase FTW). The New Colossus is this, but less well made. It repeats a lot of the same beats of its predecessor, and so they all feel forced, unearned, and inferior. It's as if the setting of Nazi-occupied America wasn't fertile-enough ground for the creative directors, so they needed to borrow directly from their previous game. They delve into B.J's childhood and fill his backstory with caricatures that overstate the point they're there to make, and yet at the same time expect us to invest in a depressing world that is directly at odds with the light-hearted insanity of the rest of the story, and I think moments like this come from a desire to leave the tone of their previous game behind in favour of something a bit more fun, while still feeling like they need to bridge the gap with some kind of drama. Unfortunately, they fail to find the balance, and the attempts at seriousness reek of try-hard melodrama and smash against the humour like two cars travelling opposite directions down a one-lane road.

I could be mistaken of course; perhaps I’m just too thick to ‘get it’ and they were trying to ironically deconstruct their own work, but the drama is so heavy, and heavy-handed, that I just can’t believe that this is the case, which is such a shame because there are all the makings of an amazing game under the hood - fantastic components have been assembled together in a confused and chaotic manner, leaving the follow-up to one of the greatest shooters ever made (and one of the most unexpected underdog releases) feeling like a victim of its own success. And this is exemplified in no better place that at in the ending of the game, which is in almost every way the antithesis of that of The New Order. 

A recap: in The New Order you must fight a super-robot implanted with the brain of one of your former comrades. After defeating it and ending the suffering of your friend, you’re attacked by the main villain - General Deathshead - as you fight amongst an increasingly unstable network of gas pipes and crumbling concrete. When you finish the desperate battle and kill Deathshead from within a conflagration of fire and flames, a short, poignant cutscene activates in which the game implies the end of one of the most important parts of the franchise. It’s a perfect example of why the game did best as a whole, offering the traditional trope of a boss fight with a new coat of paint, and then ending with a no-nonsense but impactful piece of genuine drama. 

So how does The New Colossus conduct itself? Well not only does it unravel the risk of the previous game’s ending within the first few seconds, but it ends by making the player’s last interaction with its Big Bad a single button-press that then triggers a five-minute-long cutscene in which the characters stand around and spout cliche ideological platitudes about America rising up. Then B.J. stares at the corpse of his enemy like a fucking nutcase, before getting down on his knees next to the wrecked carcass and proposing to his girlfriend, which would be funny if this wasn’t the same character we were supposed to be rallying behind and is now clearly insane. It’s anti-climactic, tonally unbalanced, and boring, and worse than all this is that it commits the cardinal sin of second acts in that it ends unsatisfyingly whilst promising a third installment that will be much more interesting. 

Fuck off. 

This could all have been avoided if the creative rudder of the production had steered it directly into the eye of the storm - the setting, its violence, and its cast of characters are all ripe for parody, so why the hell did they feel like they had to spend so much time exploring B.J’s tragic upbringing in which his racist, wife-beating dad makes him kill his own dog? What purpose does that serve in a story that opens with a wheelchair-bound protagonist machine-gunning Nazis in the face? It’s just madness. And in my opinion it ultimately undid a lot of the good will that The New Order worked so hard at creating. Even if the incoming third game commits completely to its craziness, we’re still stuck with this strange Frankenstein’s monster, and the fact that from about the half way mark I was just waiting for it to end is, for me, a nail in the coffin. It’s just...it’s such a shame. The New Colossus is a smooth, beautiful shooter, and also an trainwreck of mismatched tones, confused pacing, regurgitated story beats, and an unsatisfying ending. It tries to vary its gameplay and somehow ends up feeling more of a generic shooter than it’s predecessor - a game that actually set out to reboot the world’s first FPS. It has moments of absolute brilliance that it just fails to perpetuate because it doesn’t let them gather momentum, which leaves it feeling starkly weak specifically in the areas that The New Order excelled, and that makes it a much larger kick in the nuts to me than it ought to otherwise be.

Of course, if you’re not a whiny little baby like me, or are like a friend of mine who’d never played a Wolfenstein game in his life before this one, you might just enjoy it for what it is - a gorgeous, ambitious, and gratuitous FPS set in a strange and fun alternate history, but if you asked me to recommend it as a sequel to it’s fantastic predecessor, I just can’t do it. 

6.5/10

P.S. I think I’m going to remove the qualification titles of my ratings from this point onwards. I’m not 100% certain that I’m going to get rid of them forever, but between my poor attempts at thinking of ‘names’ for half-marked titles and the fact that I’m tied to classifying a 7/10 game as ‘good’ even though my subjective impression of the game might not agree with that, means that the more complex my feelings about a certain title, the harder it is to put a specific label on it. Wolfenstein II is a good example of this conundrum. I don’t think it’s objectively good at a lot of what it’s trying to do, and yet I don’t think it’s objectively ‘just okay’ across the board.   With this in mind, if you refer to my review scoring system you’ll get a better idea of what each ranking means, beyond what a single word can convey. You’ll see that Wolfenstein II gets a 6.5 because I think it is largely unsuccessful in the pursuit of its intentions regarding its narrative and tone for the reasons I’ve detailed above, and yet I can’t at all say that it offers a poor return-on-investment for the average gamer. Hell, you might think it’s an excellent game and disagree with me entirely - this is just my opinion, after all - but given that I will obviously weigh certain aspects of a work’s design more heavily than other aspects, I still think this is the best way to understand what each score means for me (and thus for you), and why I might have come any given conclusion.

[swipestream]

Action Comedies in Anime and what we can Learn from Them

A dire warning to sushi lovers everywhere!

Perhaps influenced by Anthony’s recent article and the ensuing discussion, I decided to watch anime for the first time in a few years, settling on the series One Punch Man.  It follows the exploits of heroic, dull-witted Saitama, who decides to become a costumed hero after failing a job interview and encountering a half human, half crab mutant in his underwear attacking people nearby.  Unfortunately, after three years of training, he has reached a point where he kills every opponent with a single punch, leading to a boring existence where no villain, no matter how terrifying or deadly, presents any challenge to him.  The series is very good, both action-packed and funny, and made me think about anime action comedies in general.

The genre (and this applies to Japanese live action movies, too) presents an interesting dichotomy right off the bat.  On the one hand, the Japanese are fantastic at action.  The choreography of the fights, the ebb and flow of the action, the way they build up villains as all-powerful, horrifying menaces, and protagonists as the ultimate, tough, stoic heroes is masterful and worth studying.

On the flipside, they are terrible at comedy.  With a small handful of exceptions, comedy anime lacks jokes, have poor “beats”, and are full of hokey, canned humor.  I don’t think this can simply be attributed to a difference in tastes between East and West, either.  Not only is one of the exceptions, Detroit Metal City, one of the funniest creative works I’ve ever seen and read, but this doesn’t apply to, say, Hong Kong movies, which are often uproariously funny.

Regardless, this combination of a strength and weakness is important to keep in mind.

Kenshiro was modeled after Bruce Lee, Mad Max, and Ogami Itto.

Before looking at the pure action comedies, let’s examine a few action series that benefit considerably from humor.  First up is the shounen classic Hokuto No Ken, or Fist of the North Star.  A favorite of little boys and girls alike in 1980’s Japan, it’s not a series one would imagine to be rife with laughs.  Taking place in a post-apocalyptic society heavily inspired by Mad Max, giant, evil punks brutally torture and murder innocent people simply trying to survive the hellish nuclear wasteland.  And yet, when the hero Kenshiro arrives to dispense justice on the evil-doers, the resulting comeuppance is often nothing short of hilarious.

Check out this scene.  Or this one.

While the major fights between Kenshiro and the other powerful martial artists in the series are kept serious, his disposal of sadistic flunkies, always ending with a deadpan omae wa mou shindeiru (“you are already dead”), is an important element in the show’s success.

If everything was kept serious, the series would quickly become monotonous and a tad depressing, with so many episodes featuring cruel punks victimizing helpless villagers.  However, thanks to the more humorous approach, one is constantly looking forward to the punishment Kenshiro will dole out to the villains, which is as gratifying as it is funny.  And it stays fresh and interesting, since they always change it up.

Lastly, while I love a good dub, Hokuto no Ken has to be watched with subs, to the point where it’s a far worse, even different show in the English translation.  The anime is a phenomenal voice-acting achievement, with Akira Kamiya perfectly encapsulating Kenshiro’s stoicism and coolness through the smallest tonal inflection, and the late, great Kenji Utsumi conveying the overwhelming power and ruthlessness of the main villain Raoh.  Credit the voice acting with much of the aforementioned humor, or how memorable the character’s toughness and emotions are.  In fact, I struggle to think of an anime where the voice acting had this much significance.  (Most times, it’s a non-factor for me in rating a series) Needless to say, the English translation is not up to the task, being poor even by regular anime standards, and making Kenshiro sound like a nebbish, dweebish schoolteacher.

Another good example of comedy being used in an action series is in Grappler Baki.  Here, the humor comes from a different source.  Namely, how ridiculously over-the-top everything is.  While it occurs in the manga, one scene perfectly crystallizes this.  The monstrous American convict Spec has escaped from a maximum security prison, killed countless guards, and made his way to Japan.  At one point, he comes across several generic Japanese delinquents, one of whom is holding a gun.  What does he do in this situation?  One might think he would beat them up or kill them, despite the firearm.  Or perhaps he would even take the gun and crush it in his hands.  That’s what one usually does to build up a big, scary villain, right?

Well, author Keisuke Itagaki takes it a step further.  See, Spec bemusedly takes the gun from the delinquents, and then, remarking that such little toys can’t hurt him, proceeds to shoot himself in the face, blowing off a portion of his cheek.  One can’t help but laugh at such a creatively absurd situation.  Yet again, this humor is vital in keeping the series fresh.  Any power fantasy, no matter how well-executed (and Grappler Baki does it better than anyone, in my view), can become monotonous self-parody if not spruced up with the occasional wink-and-nod from the creator.

Moving on to actual action comedies, one can learn much from 1988’s Sakigake!! Otokojuku.  With a main character who is a blatant rip-off of Kenshiro, it takes place in the world’s toughest and most brutal high school, a Japanese all-male institution where every student is a powerful fighter, teachers make the students go through insane physical challenges, and crazy duels to the death break out constantly.

A big hit during the late 80’s, it is largely forgotten nowadays. In this case, it’s perfectly just.

It starts off promisingly enough, with fun fights and the humor being a combination of how over-the-top the school is and the ways the main character humiliates the sadistic teachers.  Unfortunately, the series loses its path halfway through, completely abandoning the comedy and turning into a melodramatic series where a powerful student dies each episode, everyone cries and mourns him, only for him to come back later.  In this, it’s badly aping Hokuto No Ken.  The latter series had (genuine) character deaths and was meant to be occasionally emotional, but these moments were few and far between, so they actually meant something.  In Otokojuku, its regularity and meaninglessness makes it eye-rolling emotional miasma.

There is also a disconnect in settings.  Characters dying in the brutal nuclear wasteland of Hokuto No Ken makes sense.  Teens dying in modern-day Japan, under the full knowledge and participation of the school principal, who is portrayed as a positive hero, makes the series idiotic and perverse.

Lastly, Hokuto No Ken never abandons its humor, even near the very end.  Otokojuku does, and it becomes borderline unbearable when combined with the weepiness.

For another stark example of what not to do, consider Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo.  Set in a futuristic world where the protagonist, sporting a golden afro, must defeat an evil emperor, it’s supposed to be a parody of other anime.  Unfortunately, “parody” here means “make a reference to, without any actual jokes or commentary”.  For me, it simply reminded me how much better those other shows were.  And unlike the other examples we looked at, Bobo is downright silly, with characters constantly yelling in an exaggerated, silly manner, chibi animations, nonsensical fights and “random” events, etc.  This could potentially work in a pure comedy, but in an action comedy, it robs the fights of any stakes or interest a viewer has in them.  This is in start contrast to Grappler Baki or Hokuto No Ken, where the combatants and fights still maintain complete credibility.  Here, the bad comedy makes the fighting worse and irrelevant, leading to a series that is torture to sit through.

Better, more original character design than most anime leads.

Which brings us back to One Punch Man.  Despite being much sillier than Hokuto No Ken, and featuring ridiculous villains and heroes, (a sexy, buxom, insect-like villainness called “Mosquite Girl” and a hero who looks like Snidely Whiplash being a waiter called “Spring Mustachio” were particular highlights) the fights are always treated seriously.  They are animated and choreographed exceedingly well, far better than in most straight action series.  Some of the humor is based on parodies of other properties, but it has actual observations to make, and is not reliant upon it.  The premise itself is funny, and frequently exploited; a random guy attains ultimate power, but it only makes his life boring as he no longer finds combat exciting.  Furthermore, he still lives a standard, humdrum life in his modest apartment, watering his plants and getting excited for weekend sales.  The fight scenes would make for a good action anime by itself, and the humor would be enough for a decent comedy.  Together, it’s an excellent series, better than the sum of its parts.

We have only touched upon a small number of action comedies in anime, both among those I like and those I don’t.  Still, we have gleaned many important lessons from the ones we examined above.

Most importantly, humor is a vital element for most action series, not just action comedies, keeping it fresh and exciting, but it should never come at the expense of the fights.  And one shouldn’t abandon the humor halfway through, a lesson many Hollywood movies could also learn from.

Action Comedies in Anime and what we can Learn from Them published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames