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formula365 · 4 years ago

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Champions in the making - Emilia Romagna GP review

The breakthrough kid

It is not always possible to pinpoint the exact moment in which a driver goes from young promise to champion in the making. There can be breakthrough performances, in which a driver lays down a marker and announces himself to the world, but more often than not the progression is so gradual over a number of seasons that the driver eventually makes it to the top in slow steps, a sink filling up drop by drop from a leaky faucet.

But every once in a while, we get to witness a breakthrough moment, one of those weekends that, when looking back into a career, will be seen as a pivotal moment in which the promise has come good, which removes the doubt of whether that potential will be fulfilled. Moments like Sebastian Vettel winning in a Toro Rosso, or Max Verstappen becoming a Grand Prix winner on his Red Bull debut; we knew, there and then, what they would become.

It wasn’t his maiden win, but this is what we witnessed this weekend from Lando Norris.

Coming into this season, the young Brit knew this could be a make or break year for him. He had done really well to match his more experienced teammate in his first two seasons, but the challenge with his new partner was at a different level. No disrespect to Carlos Sainz, who is definitely a talented driver, but Daniel Ricciardo is a proven race winner, someone who had driven for Red Bull and been considered by Mercedes and Ferrari. The Aussie had spent the last two seasons destroying Nico Hulkenberg and Esteban Ocon, no slouches themselves, which meant there was a risk for Norris to be swallowed up by the Honey Badger’s performances.

His first two seasons had shown glimpses of his talent, but also a certain on-track shyness, in contrast to his expansive personality off it. He himself admitted during pre-season that he needed to improve on his aggressiveness and push harder on wheel to wheel battles; he had to drive the car ever closer to its limits. After a couple of seasons maturing and honing his skills, now was the time to be a more imposing figure behind the wheel, including within his own team.

Bahrain had already shown glimpses of that. He started the race behind his teammate, but passed him early on and never looked back. Imola, though, was something else. McLaren didn’t have the right set-up throughout Friday and both drivers seemed to be struggling, but on Saturday Norris looked to be one with his car. Bar a small mistake on his last run, he would have not only out-qualified his teammate, but also Verstappen in a much faster Red Bull. The track limits infringement left him P7 on the grid, but on Sunday he would more than make up for the mistake.

He had blistering pace from the get-go, to the point that he radioed his engineer when stuck behind his teammate to ask to be let through. In a moment that could be defining for the season, Ricciardo did let him through and then saw the youngster disappear down the road in the chase for the Ferraris. On the restart, he made light work of Leclerc (with much faster tyres, to be fair) and then fought Hamilton hard for several laps until the lack of grip on his rubber forced him to concede.

Overall, Norris showed a wide array of his skills at Imola: blistering one-lap pace, attacking, defending, tyre management, determination to come back after the mistake on Saturday, even authority in the team when he asked to be let through his teammate. A complete performance that leaves no doubt about his talent: he has the skills to be a future champion, the only question remaining is whether he will have the consistency to deliver over a full season. Given his mental approach - he is very open to speak about mental health - it seems he is addressing that side of his driving as well.

Until now, Norris had been the fun kid with a turn of pace, the meme-generator and half of a McLaren bromance. The end of the partnership with Sainz might have been a liberating factor for him: in order to be taken more seriously, the banter has to take second place to his driving, and with Ricciardo also looking to leave his more goofy side in the background, this can be the perfect time for Lando to do the same and let his driving do the talking. He certainly did that this weekend.

Talking points

* My oh my, do we have a fight on our hands. Verstappen v. Hamilton is already becoming such a compelling story it is hard not to make it the subject of every race review and preview; the feeling is that this will be a fight for the ages, that we will have a season to be remembered for many years to come. This time around it was the Dutchman who had the upper hand, with a superb start to go from P3 to P1 into Tamburello. He gave no quarters to Hamilton on the outside and then managed the race beautifully, although he was left unchallenged in the second half after Hamilton’s crash. The game is most definitely on.

* The reigning champion may have given some small signs of the pressure getting to him. Mostly unchallenged in recent years, Lewis made an uncharacteristic mistake when lapping back markers and then seemed to have had a scrambled brain moment as he struggled to get out of the run-off area. He is human, after all, some might have thought. The red flag gave him the opportunity to reset and come back to re-claim P2 and a podium place he would have certainly lost otherwise. He showed his mental resilience then, but it will be interesting to see how he (and Verstappen as well) will manage the pressure of a title fight (hopefully) over 23 races.

* One of the big talking points post-race was the massive crash between Bottas and Russell. Approaching Tamburello, drivers hit speeds above 300 kph, so it’s no surprise it was a nasty one, and that both drivers felt the other should have done more to avoid it. Controversy aside, the big question has to be why was Bottas defending P9 from a Williams. Like Monza, Turkey and Sakhir last year, when the Finn gets caught up in the midfield he struggles to move forward, and even manages to fall further back. To make matters worse, in all these races his teammate was caught in similar situations and had no problem cutting through the field. When the dust settles, Bottas will certainly have some soul searching to do.

* How good is it to see McLaren and Ferrari fighting each other for top spots? The two historic teams collected all positions from P3 to P6 and seem to be a step above the rest of the midfield contenders. This is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, rivalry in F1’s history, and it’s great for the sport to see it reignited.

* The only midfield team that seems to have the pace to challenge them is AlphaTauri, but they are struggling to convert their pace into points. Tsunoda ruined his weekend with two (very rookie) mistakes, while Gasly’s race was ruined by the decision to start on full wets. He still made a great recovery drive to finish P7, but this felt like another missed opportunity for AlphaTauri, specially at a track they know so well. They have a genuine shot at finishing in the top half of the table, which is Franz Tost’s goal for the team, but in order to achieve that they have to start using their pace to score points.

* If AlphaTauri will be left ruing their weekend, Williams will be doubly so. With two drivers qualifying in the top 14, they had genuine hope to score points for the first time since the crazy rain-soaked German GP in 2019, but two crashes negated their shot. Latifi barely got going so we will never know what he could have achieved, but Russell was clearly in the mix and will be left pondering how high he could have finished if he had been a bit more cautious. With scoring opportunities so limited, that might have been the wiser approach.

* The second Red Bull continues the saga of the topsy-turvy weekends. One of the narratives for Albon in 2020 was that he was not able to have a clean, incident-free weekend, and that was limiting his results. Perez is going down the same path, and although he did manage to salvage a P5 in Bahrain, here he was left empty-handed. It’s still very early, and the signs from the first race were positive, but for Red Bull to challenge Mercedes he needs to be up there consistently.

* Ahead of the season, very few people would have betted for Stroll and Ocon to be beating their teammates, either in qualifying or in the race. The two youngsters are showing that world titles (a combined 6 after all) aren’t a guarantee of continued success.

* On that topic, it is worth noting that most drivers that are newcomers to their respective teams are struggling at the moment. Sainz at Ferrari is the exception; Perez, Ricciardo, Alonso and Vettel are all underperforming, some more than others. This quartet is uber-talented, though, so expect them to get closer to their teammates as the season progresses and they become more accustomed to their new cars.

* Curb your enthusiasm, Yuki. We love to see his on-track flamboyance: he is one of the most exciting drivers to hit F1 in the last few years, but it can work against him too. He needs to find a balance but two races in these growing pains were to be expected. Once he finds that balance, he will be one hell of a driver.

Driver of the day: Lando Norris

Moment of the day

The battle between Hamilton and Norris. The young Brit managed to hold off the 7-times champion for a handful of laps, with tyres well past their expiry date and no DRS; Leclerc, for comparison, was on mediums and was passed by Hamilton on the first lap he didn’t have DRS. Norris’ positioning was perfect and he was brave on the brakes. Eventually the lack of grip and Hamilton’s bravery led to the inevitable, but Norris put up an excellent fight.

#imola gp #lando norris #lewis hamilton #max verstappen #mclaren #ferrari #valtteri bottas #george russell #alpha tauri #williams f1 #sergio perez #yuki tsunoda #lance stroll #esteban ocon

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scoutception · 4 years ago

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Final Fantasy II review

One of the most interesting parts of the Final Fantasy series, and a big reason why I’m so fond of it, is that every main series game takes its own approach to the gameplay. From the job systems of III and V, the Materia system of VII, the Junctioning system of VIII, or the straight up action combat of XV, every game has a different focus that makes them stand out, and while the results can certainly fall short at times, it’s still something worth commending. For example, take the subject of today’s review, Final Fantasy II. For the second game in the series, and a game that came out in 1988, it’s a huge step up from the original game in a lot of ways. A much more detailed plot, containing several defined playable and supporting characters, a much more experimental battle system, the introduction of many elements, gameplay and otherwise, that would establish a true identity for the series, away from just being a ripoff of Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition, it’s an impressive and critical step forward for the series. Unfortunately for the game, it hasn’t been 1988 in over 30 years, and it’s now easily the weakest game in the series in my opinion. As for why that is, well, that’s what we’re taking a look at today. As with the first game, I’m reviewing the PSP version. Note I’ll be pretty lax with spoilers, so take caution, if you actually care to avoid spoilers.

Story: Final Fantasy II takes place in an entirely different world than Final Fantasy I, a tradition that every main series game would follow. The peace of this world is shattered after the rise of Emperor Mateus of Palamecia, who, bent on world domination, raises a fearsome army and unleashes the denizens of Hell upon the land, conquering a large portion of the world. The city of Fynn organizes a large resistance effort, only to be attacked by the Emperor’s army, forcing a small remnant to flee to the town of Altair, establishing the Wild Rose Rebellion, led by Princess Hilda. During the fall of Fynn, four youths, Firion, Maria, Guy, and Leon, attempted to escape as well, only to be attacked and left for dead by the Emperor’s soldiers, with Leon going missing as well. Rescued by the rebellion, and healed by the white wizard Minwu, Firion, Maria, and Guy, having nothing left to return to, and wishing to search for the missing Leon, join the rebellion to fight back against Palamecia. Meanwhile, the Emperor, his army having taken heavy losses taking Fynn, takes to devising much less conventional methods of establishing his rule, starting with a massive airship called the Dreadnought, meant to scare the populace into obedience, on threat of total destruction.

Compared to the very light plot of Final Fantasy I, the story here is much more involved. Instead of wandering between locations more or less aimlessly, there’s always an explicit plot reason to go to new locations, the party being given tasks like finding mythril to supply the rebellion with better equipment, or trying to recruit potential allies. Compared to the party in the first game just being completely blank slates, the party consists of the more distinctive Firion, Maria, and Guy, with the fourth slot being filled by various guest characters that come and go as the story goes on, such as Gordon, the prince of the fallen kingdom of Kashuan, and Ricard Highwind, the last of the dragoons, and there’s actually an established side cast, including characters like Hilda, the leader of the rebellion and princess of Fynn, Paul, a noble thief assisting the rebellion, and Cid, a former knight who maintains the world’s only airship, with this notably being Cid’s first appearance in the series.

Final Fantasy II is also very noticeably darker than the first game. While the plot circumstances of the first game weren’t exactly cheerful, with the world falling apart due to the influence of the Fiends, outside of a select few towns, this wasn’t very obvious, and the game overall carried a bright, adventurous feel. Not so with Final Fantasy II, where the Emperor is a much more prominent and ruthless villain who’s already conquered or ruined a majority of the world, always keeping another plan on standby, and staying one step ahead of the heroes. Many characters die over the story, from random NPCs to even temporary party members, and the game overall carries a prominent melancholic, empty feel to it, one that’s very impressive considering the time it was made.

To be honest, however, it actually goes a bit too far in this regard. Almost everything the protagonists accomplish comes at the cost of allies dying, or something preventing them from fully completing their mission. Many NPCs are pessimistic about the chances of humanity being able to win against the Emperor, and so much destruction is wrought upon the world by the end that it seems there’s not even much left to save. From the very beginning of the game, which starts with your party instantly being destroyed in an unwinnable battle, the game is nothing but a constant stream of death and hollow victories, with plenty of characters you can find mourning their losses, and there’s very, very few points in the story that offer any sort of relief from it. Combined with the Emperor barely seeming bothered by anything the party accomplishes, and running circles around them more than a few times, it’s very easy to simply lose any investment in the story.

The characters unfortunately only add to this lack of investment. It’s hard to hold it against the game, but the main party of Firion, Maria, and Guy is still easily the least developed cast in the series. They have little dialogue to themselves to begin with, and have very minimal personality traits, especially Firion, who pretty much only exists to be the hero by default. Additionally, whereas in most RPGs, the cast’s varying personalities and skills tend to gain importance, here, the only skill any of them have is Guy being able to talk to beavers, which only comes up once in a way that doesn’t even affect the story, and, again, they have nearly no personality otherwise, which totals out to each of them having, at best, 1 moment each throughout the story where they’re not completely interchangeable with each other, which barely elevates them above the completely blank slate party of FF1.

The guest party members and NPCs fair a bit better, but not by much. The guests tend to be at least mildly interesting, like the fatalistic Minwu, the cowardly Gordon, who learns to be courageous as the story goes on, to the pirate girl Leila, but they’re still nothing special, and there’s surprisingly few other NPCs, most of which aren’t too memorable either. Even the Emperor himself is about one of the most stereotypical evil emperor characters you could have, not helped by the very few scenes he gets. That’s not to say he’s a bad villain, though. His successfulness does create a presence that looms over the entire story, and he pulls off one of the coolest plot twists in the series; after being killed by the party in a very easy battle late in the game, he simply returns as a demon himself, having become far, far stronger than he had ever been in life, to the point of taking over Hell itself. It’s such a unique and unexpected twist on the seemingly weak political villain that it alone cements the Emperor as one of the more memorable villains in the series. Overall, while the writing of the game is quite impressive for the time, and laid a good deal of groundwork for the improved writing of future entries, it’s just passable at best nowadays.

Gameplay: Here’s where things really start falling apart. On the surface, not much the combat doesn’t seem terribly different from Final Fantasy I, with it still being a standard turn based system with basic commands like attacking, using magic, and defending. The big differences in Final Fantasy II’s combat lie in the character progression. The first game had you simply selecting a party of 4 classes at the start of the game, gradually making them stronger across the game by leveling them up and acquiring specific equipment and spells for each, like pretty much every normal JRPG. FF2, on the other hand, uses a much more complex system. Every party member is capable of using every weapon and learning every spell, in the process abandoning the D&D system of set spell charges and instead introducing the traditional MP system, and characters are not set in specialized classes and roles. Instead, FF2 discards the usual EXP based leveling system, and instead uses a stat leveling system, where the individual stats of each character level up separately depending on the course of battle, and while each character starts with predetermined stats that favor a particular role for them, with enough grinding, you can still reshape them however you wish. This stat growth system would later be used and refined for the SaGa series, and it’s a very ambitious attempt at improving upon the party building system the first game established.

In total, there are 12 main stats that can be increased through battle: HP, your health points, which is raised in regular intervals, or losing HP in battle, MP, magic points that allow you to use spells, which is raised by having MP reduced in battle, Strength, which determines your physical attack, and is raised by using the attack command, Magic, which determines how much MP you get when it is gained, and is raised by having MP reduced in battle, Spirit, which determines the strength of white magic spells, and is raised by casting white magic in battle, Intelligence, which determines the strength of black magic spells, and is raised casting black magic in battle, Stamina, which determines how much HP you get when it is gained, and is increased by losing HP in battle, Evasion, which determines how likely a character can dodge physical attacks, and is raised by being targeted by attacks in battle, Agility, which factors into evasion calculation, and is raised by having high evasion, and Magic Defense, which determines how resilient a character is to offensive magic, and is raised by being targeted by offensive magic in battle.

However, it doesn’t stop there, as individual weapon types and spells also have levels that can be raised, which is done so by gaining skill points in them by attacking or casting them during battle. Once enough skill points are gained, they advance to the next level, with the hard cap being 16. Gaining weapon levels allows that character to be more accurate and attack more times at once with that type of weapon, and raising spell levels increases their power and makes them more accurate. Each weapon type, consisting of swords, spears, axes, staves, knives, bows, shields, and unarmed, have different attributes, such as spears being a relatively balanced type, with lower individual power than swords and axes, but higher accuracy, while bows are allow characters to attack from the newly introduced back row, which makes them immune to physical attacks, but prevents them from attacking with any other weapon type. While focusing on one weapon type with each character would seem the most efficient, the game only tends to give you one or two weapons of each type at a time, many of which have good boosts in power or added effects, making focusing on a few different types a decent idea.

Shields are unique in that, while equipping them doesn’t raise your defense as might be expected, and actually lower your attack, they give large evasion bonuses that makes dodging attacks much easier, and have the chance of blocking a physical attack completely even if something does connect, all of which increases as you gain levels in it. As for other defensive equipment, you have heavy and light types of armor, with light armor giving less defense bonuses than their heavier counterparts, but not weighing nearly as much, and thus leaving you much more evade. As for spells, they start out very underpowered, and have awful accuracy in the case of buff and debuff spells, but become much more effective after a few levels, with the downside of them costing more MP to cast with each level gained. Characters can learn up to 16 spells, and are free to remove them at any time, at the cost of having to level them again from scratch if they ever relearn them. Instead of simply learn spells by buying them in towns, spells are instead learned from tomes, which can be bought from shops, found in treasure chests, or dropped from enemies. Using them on the field teaches a character that spell, while using the tomes in battle instead casts a high level version of the spell, at the cost of losing that tome.

Unfortunately, as creative as this all is, this system has some serious issues. The main one, which you have already guessed, is that the game is incredibly, incredibly grindy because of these mechanics, and in a much worse way than most other RPGs. While not every stat is going to be important for each character, depending on how you build them, there’s still a lot of things it forces you to keep track of. Even if you want to make a dedicated mage, sticking in the back row with a bow for the whole game will leave them with so little vitality and HP that they’ll just be uncomfortably fragile, and with the magic attacks enemies have by the endgame, you really want to keep them in the front row for a good part of the game. Most spells, including important ones like Life and Esuna, for reviving party members and removing status effects respectively, while extremely useful, have such horrible accuracy to start that they’re completely useless before you level them up, and the weapon distribution is quite unbalanced, with swords having easily the best selection even in the midgame, essentially leaving most other types as stopgaps.

While you might level your important stats a good bit just naturally going through areas, trying to deliberately level any of them is a commitment. While HP, strength, spirit, intelligence, and magic defense tend to come easily enough, increasing stamina often only happens through the loss of a large chunk of their maximum HP, which, obviously, preferably doesn’t happen on a regular basis. This goes likewise for MP and magic, which is rather irritating, as not only do you need more and more MP as your spells level up, but ways to restore MP are extremely limited and costly. The bizarre loop of agility factoring in to evasion increasing, while itself only leveling up based on your current evasion, means that the only reliable way of increasing either is to equip the lightest equipment you have. While leveling up weapon levels is easy enough, especially since you can dual wield different types at once, leveling up spells is a much slower process, with casting low level spells during random encounters, even those that won’t actually help at the moment, often being one of the only feasible ways to get them leveled quick. You may even be tempted to ignore magic beyond simple spells like Cure because of the individual effort needed, but the game will quickly hammer the importance of magic into you; from the randomly encountered flans and bombs that either have absurd physical defense or tend to explode if not fully defeated in one turn, with magic being the only reasonable way to take them out, to mandatory bosses that hit quite hard, and also have enough physical defense to make physical attacks nearly worthless without absurd grinding, you’re not getting through the early game without dedicating some time to magic. On the flip side, another early dungeon has a boss that outright absorbs magic, making physical attacks the only way to beat it.

The game has quite a reputation for being brutal, and it’s not inaccurate, with most dungeons being more than glad to beat you down without remorse, and there’s tons of troublesome enemies to be found throughout the game, doubly so if you try to go for all the treasure chests in the area, as many of them are guarded by encounters called monster-in-a-box, which are often much more powerful than other encounters around. Most bosses are more than happy to make your life miserable too, especially the infamous Lamia Queen and Behemoth. However, this difficulty is in no way fair or well designed. While the growth system can easily leave you unsure as to whether or not you’re prepared for a dungeon, since you have no easy guideline to go off of compared to standard leveling, that’s not even the worst of it. The design of the dungeons, and even the world map, are horrible. There’s tons of doors scattered throughout pretty much every dungeon, and 90% of them lead to dead end rooms with raised encounter rates. There is absolutely no way to tell which doors are dead ends and which are necessary to progress, so you’re reduced to trial and error, which is extremely exhausting when there’s so many doors per dungeon, and you’re almost guaranteed to get into an encounter before you can leave each one, and if you’re tempted to ignore any doors when they don’t seem mandatory to progress, in many of those cases, there’s treasure rooms hidden among them, once again with no way to figure out other than guessing.

The world map, on the other hand, is one of the best arguments against open ended world design there is. Compared to the first game, there are almost no physical obstacles barring where you can go, other than a few rivers that are only crossable by canoe, something you get almost immediately, and a few areas only accessible by boat. Instead, you’re kept out of where you’re not supposed to be through the Dragon Quest 1 method of having the random encounters kill you horribly. The problems with this method are twofold: not only are the borders between where you’re supposed to be and where you’re not very thin, to the point of running into late game enemies just outside of the first town if you go just a biiit too far to the left, compared to Dragon Quest 1 often using bridges as visible borders between areas, but it just doesn’t really fit with how the game is designed. Dragon Quest 1′s pacing is rather relaxed, as while you do have plot objectives, the game doesn’t rush you to fulfill them. You’re meant to just hang around the areas you can survive in, grinding your way up and getting whatever equipment you need until you feel confident to move onto whichever area seems to be designed for next. In Final Fantasy II, you’re constantly being sent back and forth between areas to get new orders or do whatever the plot wants of you at that moment, but while the game loves telling where to go, it’s pretty bad at telling you how to get there, with its often vague directions being spread out between NPCs in multiple towns, to boot. While there is a map of the overworld you can access, it can still get pretty annoying having to meticulously check where you’re going, and you’re still liable to being decimated just because you wandered into a harmless seeming area. One nasty example comes after completing Kashuon Keep, not too far into the game. You’re expected to head back to Altair, which is on the other side of the world and is quite a bit of a walk, but heading south soon loops back to the Altair area, making for a much shorter walk. Trying to put this idea into practice, however, sends you across the large Palamecian desert, full of enemies more than eager to tell you that this area is still a few dungeons away from being accessed. It’s not completely unsurvivable, and can be safely traversed by finding the nearby hidden Chocobo, but it’s still a nasty situation after a very irritating dungeon.

The biggest, and most frustrating, source of difficulty, however, is that the game stubbornly refuses to tell you anything about what’s going on behind the scenes. There’s so many mechanics left unexplained that cause a lot of difficulty if you don’t understand them. For example, every enemy has a stat called rank, which determines how many skill points for your weapons and magic you’ll actually get by using them on said foes. Essentially, if your weapon or magic levels are higher than the enemy’s rank, you need to use that weapon or spell more times in that battle based on the difference between the numbers to actually get any skill points. Not an unreasonable system, and you can view every enemy’s rank in the bestiary, but the game never directly addresses this, and even the most powerful enemies only go up to rank 10, effectively softcapping your skills and spells at 10, which often leads into having your party attack each other to bypass the entire mechanic, a depressingly efficient solution most of the time. Other stats the game never cares to explain are evasion and magic defense, which both display both numbers and percentages. For evasion, the number represents the number of attacks that character is capable of dodging, as physical attacks strike multiple times per round, and the likeliness of evading each attack. With magic defense, the number represents the number of attempts at avoiding a status effect can be made, and the percentage represents the chance of successfully doing so. Despite the name, the stat does not reduce damage taken from magic attacks.

On the subject of magic, the spells available to you are also plagued with unneeded complexity and vagueness. First off, the descriptions for many spells tend to only give you the barest idea of what they actually do; Aura “Enhances effectiveness against various foes.” It never tells you what enemy types count, or that it only becomes effective against certain types as its level increases, you just have to hope that it’s working whenever you use it. Barrier “Raises a barrier to defend against special attacks.”, again giving you no indication as to what it’s actually protecting against. Shell and Wall both claim to raise magic defense, but give no obvious indication how they’re actually different from each other, and Dispel claims to remove protective magical barriers, which lowers the target’s magic defense, even though you may infer that it removes buffs, like in later games. Other spells tend to be redundant or very situational. Basuna removes temporary status effects, compared to Esuna removing permanent status effects, which is near worthless since not only do temporary effects wear off after a number of turns, but they go away after battle regardless, and are rarely effective enough to waste a turn removing. Fear increases the likelyhood of enemies fleeing battle, which is not only rare to actually work, but is worthless, since you don’t get any credit for defeating any enemies that do flee. Sap reduces the MP of the target, which is not only rarely likely to work, but counterintuitive if you have the infamous Osmose spell, which saps large amounts of MP while restoring the same amount for the user. Status effects also have different elements to them, namely body, mind, and matter, with most enemies having different resistances. Some spells, like Stop and Paralysis, have the same effect, but different elements, and keeping track is both difficult, both remembering which spell is which element, and what enemies are actually affected by each element, and nearly pointless, since the effects are rarely worth bothering with in favor of just attacking. Matter elemental spells, however, are rarely resisted by most enemies, even bosses, and mostly comprise of instant death spells like Mini, Break, Teleport, and most infamously, Toad. Not only does this game make instant death spells effective, it makes them downright overpowered, with almost every encounter being capable of being solved through judicious application of Toad.

But the peak of all this is a special property that some enemies, like ghosts and the final boss, have applied to their physical attacks: a draining effect that not only restores their HP by the amount of damage inflicted, but specifically inflicts 1/16th of the target’s maximum HP per hit, with them eventually attacking 8 times per turn by the final dungeon. To sum this up simply, this makes heavier equipment worse than worthless. Not only will the defensive power do nothing to protect from this damage, but it actively weighs you down and destroys your evasion, guaranteeing you’ll take all those possible hits unless your did some extreme evasion grinding. You’d be protected better by not wearing anything at all, because at least then you’ll make use of all your natural evasion. Unless you want to constantly heal your characters for half their health everytime you run into specific encounters, you have to dedicate a lot of your time, or most of your run through the game, to getting their evasion leveled enough that this isn’t a problem. Knowing this can be the difference between fruitlessly blowing all your resources and breezing through effortlessly, and there is a certain weapon, the Blood Sword, that has this same draining effect, which can singlehandedly annihilate the final boss once you’ve figured this out. While there’s a few other smaller issues, like several encounter formations that cannot be ran from for no apparent reason, other than possibly being formations used in certain monster-in-a-box encounters, those are the main issues, and being aware of them, and having the information to circumvent them, makes the game much, much easier. If anything, it makes the game extremely breakable. From physical attackers that dodge everything thrown at them, to spellcasters that can wipe out encounters with a single cast, it doesn’t take much to erase the difficulty once you know what you’re doing.

As for bonus content, there’s Soul of Rebirth, a bonus mode unlocked after completing the main game, first added in the GBA version, which focuses on several characters who die in the course of the story finding themselves in what they think is the Jade Passage, the path to Hell. While a cool concept that has a really neat final boss of its own, namely the light side of the Emperor, who split off from his dark half after death and instead took over Heaven, it still has issues of its own, namely that most of the party are guest characters in the main game, and carry over the stats, equipment, and spells they had when they left the party, meaning if you didn’t bother training them and stripped them of all equipment before they departed, you’re in an absurd time. The mode is also quite short, and only consists of two dungeons that are just mirrored versions of the final two dungeons of the main game and a town. A neat addition, but not much more than that. Other than that, the only optional content to find in the main game is the Arcane Labyrinth, a bonus dungeon added specifically for the PSP release. The game uses a keyword system where you can learn important terms from NPCs, and ask about those terms to get directions or a bit more plot. It’s sort of neat in concept, but in practice it doesn’t amount to much other than make it slightly more annoying to find out what to do, especially if you manage to miss a keyword. The Arcane Labyrinth, however, revolves around its use. In order to progress past the entrance, you must select a keyword at the portal to the next floor, which then takes you to a specific floor based around the keyword you chose. Almost every floor has a little sidequest to solve, like defeating specific enemies or giving items to NPCs, which give you new keywords exclusive to the labyrinth, or hints for some of the trickier floors. While they can be kinda annoying to do, you only ever have to complete them once for their reward, and can otherwise run straight to the exit on subsequent visits.

Every floor requires you to select keywords for the next, with 45 different floors being available in total, and the Arcane Labyrinth is actually split into 3 sections, with the northwest section requiring four floors to be visited, the northeast seven floors, and the south ten floors, though while you can’t visit the same floor twice in the same section, you can choose repeats in separate sections. There is much more strategy than simply randomly selecting floors, however. Each keyword belongs to a different category, which cause different reactions depending on your next choice. Picking keywords in the same category in a row cause better treasure to spawn and lower the encounter rate, while picking something in a category that opposes it, such as a matter and materials floor after going through a magic and spirits floor, has the opposite effect. Even more importantly, each playable character has a set of keywords that resonate with them, to varying degrees. This becomes important after finishing all three sections, which unlocks the Arcane Sanctuary. Within is Deumion, the master of the Labyrinth, who summons a superboss, Phrekyos, to test you, with its strength varying depending on how many keywords you’ve gotten through the story, making it beatable even in earlier parts of the game. Beating Phrekyos allows you to get a reward from Deumion; if you picked enough keywords that resonate with a certain party member, you will be able to get their ultimate weapon, which not only have tons of power, but confer massive stat boosts when equipped. If your keywords didn’t resonate enough, you only get an elixir, something that you can buy, albeit with absurd amounts of money. The optimal keywords for the main party are only unlocked in the endgame, but it can actually be worth visiting early for the party members that are used in Soul of Rebirth, as the weapons make it much more manageable, though visiting too early can end with you being much too powerful compared to how you should be. A special set of keywords also allow you to see Deumion’s past, leaving you able to either peacefully receive from him the Revive spell, or fight him as the ultimate superboss for the Destroy spell. Both are disgustingly impractical, but it’s a neat idea nonetheless. Overall, the Arcane Labyrinth, though still rife with its own set of frustrations, is actually one of the more enjoyable bonus dungeons I’ve come across, with a very creative concept that actually leaves you curious as to what the next floor could hold.

Overall, while the gameplay of Final Fantasy II has some interesting ideas, it’s held back by an irritating lack of explanation as to how it works, the overly grindy design, and just plain poor design and execution. It’s a miserable experience that makes even other early JRPGs seem appealing, just because their grinding is so much simpler to handle, and I need to note, this is the most polished version of the game. Between bugs, a horribly limited inventory, and even more absurd design decisions, like stats sometimes decreasing instead of increasing, or weapons massively decreasing magic accuracy, and increasing skills taking even longer, any version earlier than the GBA version is even more infuriating and even less playable.

Graphics: Final Fantasy II is actually a quite nice looking game, as with the rest of the Final Fantasy releases on PSP. Locations have a lot of detail to them, like ambient effects like rolling fog, and noticeable lighting effects, with a few areas like Pandemonium having pretty fascinating designs, and there’s some pretty good looking cutscenes for bigger story events. Spell animations are pretty neat, and attack spells have a nice detail where their animations become more elaborate as you level them up more. Characters even finally look accurate to their original art by Yoshitaka Amano, unlike earlier versions, though that’s not necessarily a positive: between Firion’s random mishmash of materials and colors, Maria and Guy’s awkward, half complete outfits, and the terrifyingly gaudy Emperor, this is possibly the tackiest looking cast in the series. The monster designs, on the other hand, are top notch. After Final Fantasy I’s bestiary was lifted almost entirely out of D&D, this game introduced a lot of original and iconic enemies, like the coeurls, the bombs, the malboros, the adamantoises, and the behemoths. It even introduced chocobos, though it’s easy to miss their existence, as their confined to one spot on the world map that’s decently hidden. While there are still a lot of oddities like vampires and giant mantises, it’s still one of the biggest advancements in the series in this regard. The enemy designs also excel in that they look much more threatening than in the first game. These enemies literally come from Hell, and look the part. I’d even go so far as to say that this is the best looking Final Fantasy game on the PSP, and has some of the coolest enemy designs in the series.

Sound: Final Fantasy II’s soundtrack was composed by Nobuo Uematsu, as usual, and remixed by Tsuyoshi Sekito for the remakes. All things considered, it’s my least favorite soundtrack in the main series. That’s not to say it’s bad at all, and there are some great tracks like the Rebel Army Theme, the somber main theme which plains on the overworld, Ancient Castle, the Tower of the Magi, Battle Theme A, typically used for major boss encounters, and Battle Theme 2, the final boss theme. However, as an overall, it’s just not quite as good as the soundtracks for the rest of the main series, to me. It also contains my least favorite version of the Prelude, being just a bit too high pitched for my liking, and my least favorite battle theme, sounding way too intense just for regular encounters, and quickly becoming grating not too far into the game. The soundtrack is good in its own right, and is worth a listen, it just doesn’t quite reach the heights that some of the others do.

Conclusion: Overall, I give Final Fantasy II a firm not recommended. Though very ambitious and important for its day, its story, design, and mechanics have aged like milk compared to the other Final Fantasy games on the NES. While technically still perfectly playable, especially with deeper knowledge as to how the mechanics work, it doesn’t make for much fun at all. You’re better off keeping your distance from this entry. Now, with this absurdly long review finally done, finishing this game, and the subject of my next review, hopefully to be soon, have convinced me I need a break from older RPGs for a while. Till next time. -Scout

#final fantasy #game review #long post #jrpg #final fantasy ii #square enix

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duhragonball · 4 years ago

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Potpourri

I’ve been thinking about various storytelling things, not really Dragon Ball related, but I figured I could write them all down here and make something out of it. Yeah, like an old school Livejournal post, except I can’t write a sassy message in the read-more cut.

Okay, first, I’ve been watching a lot of AEW Dark episodes on YouTube, because AEW puts out a new one every Tuesday and it’s easy to fall behind on them. So it’s like reliving wrestling angles that I watched on AEW Dynamite back in June and July. One of these angles was a world title match between champion Jon Moxley, and “The Machine” Brian Cage, who debuted by winning a ladder match in dramatic fashion, along with his new manager, Taz.

Taz does a lot of the color commentary for these episodes of Dark, and Cage debuted around the release of Episode 35, so after that, Taz started using his announcing job to promote the upcoming title match and gloat about how his guy Cage was going to destroy Jon Moxley and win the title. Taz’s main argument was that Cage is absolutely jacked, which made him a success before, but now he’s got Taz coaching him in all the cool stuff Taz used to do in ECW: suplexes, submission holds, etc. Taz sells you Brian Cage’s world title victory like a lawyer presenting a case to a jury. At the center of Taz’s argument was his claim that Cage was simply too big, too strong, and too prepared for Jon Moxley’s finishing move, the Paradigm Shift. Taz predicted that Mox wouldn’t be able to apply the Paradigm Shift properly, and even if he could hit it, it wouldn’t be enough to stop Cage.

The plot twist came from real life, when Moxley had to stay home because his wife contracted COVID-19. There was a lot of speculation that he might get sick, and even if he didn’t, that he wouldn’t be able to appear for the title match. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that, and the match was simply postponed an extra week. During that time, Taz accused Moxley of ducking Brian Cage, which I wasn’t crazy about, since I didn’t like coronavirus being used in a wrestling angle. On the other hand, it did give Taz a couple of weeks to run down the champion unopposed. At one point he reintroduced his old FTW title belt and gave it to Cage because the world title match had been postponed. Good stuff.

So finally, Moxley comes back, and he did one promo before the title match, and this was his chance to respond to all the shittalking Taz had been doing. It was brilliant, because for weeks, Taz had been declaring victory, and he shut it all down in one quick segment. He brought up Taz’s claim that the Paradigm Shift wouldn’t work on Cage, and Moxley just said “well maybe I won’t try to use my finisher on him. No, instead, I’m going to target his left bicep, which was surgically repaired last year, putting Cage out of action for several months.”

And just like that, the tone of the show changed, where suddenly it looked like Cage might be in trouble, because his camp only seemed to have a perfect game plan, and here was the champion announcing his own counter-strategy in advance. “You talked shit about my wife being sick, so I will reinjure your arm.”

And it was awesome. At one point Moxley went for a pin, and Cage kicked out, only for Moxley to reverse the pin into a submission move on the arm. There were points where it seemed like he couldn’t decide which arm to target, and eventually I realized he was going after both of them, switching from one to the other as needed. It’s smart, because if you go after the good arm, he’s gotta use the vulnerable one to fight you off, and by doing that Cage basically handed it to Mox for his next hold.

Finally, Moxley had Cage trapped in an arm hold, and the whole time he was looking Taz in the eye, basically waiting for a submission or a ref stoppage, and Taz had no choice but to throw in the towel to save Brian Cage’s career. It was a beautiful finish because it sewed up the whole story. Cage never tapped out, so he still looks like a relentless badass, but Taz had to let discretion be the better part of valor. He mocked Moxley for playing it safe when his wife got sick, so Moxley forced Taz to make the same choice. Great stuff.

Second. I’ve been reading Darth Vader comics since Marvel started publishing new Star Wars stuff again. Disney bought Marvel and Star Wars, so it was only a matter of time before the comics began to reflect this. The smart thing they did was to give Vader his own title, which I like because I’m not that into the adventures of Luke and Han.

The first Vader series was twenty-odd issues featuring his fall from grace after the Death Star’s destruction, and his rise to command of the Imperial Fleet. Basically it charts Vader’s career between Episodes IV and V, though there’s plenty of room for other side-stories.

The second series flashed back to the final scenes of Revenge of the Sith, and tracks Vader’s actions before A New Hope. It doesn’t cover the entire period, but it hits a lot of the important notes. How he got his red lightsaber, how he trained the Inquisitors and hunted down the surviving Jedi, and how he built the castle on Mustafar seen in Rogue One. So it handles everything important Vader was known to have done between Episodes III and IV.

The third series, currently ongoing, starts right after Vader’s final scene in Empire Strikes Back, and I would assume it’s going to lead him right up to his arrival at Death Star II in Return of the Jedi. I’m really into this, because I feel like this is an especially overlooked stage of Vader’s career. Starting out, it seems to be mostly about Vader investigating how his son survived Padme’s death, as he seeks revenge against anyone who hid the boy from him. Of course, nearly everyone involved in that cover-up is already dead, so I’m not sure where this is going to lead.

All three volumes of the Vader title focus on the utter futility of Vader’s quests for power and revenge. His hunts for Jedi survivors was just something for him to do in his spare time, since the Jedi were no longer a threat to him. His castle on Mustafar was designed to give him special knowledge of the Force, but it only revealed truths that he already knew, or had long since rejected. His plot to regain the Emperor’s favor after Yavin was very satisfying to watch, but also pointless: The Emperor needed him too badly to dispose of him, and Vader’s still a patsy whether he’s the #2 guy in the Empire or the #5 guy in the Empire. And now this new series sees him chasing ghosts, trying to make sense of Luke’s refusal to join him. He wants some sort of answer to his dilemma, but the only answer he’s ever going to find is the one in ROTJ, where he sacrifices himself to kill the Emperor, the one thing he cannot bring himself to contemplate until the time comes.

What saddens me, a little, is the realization that there doesn’t seem to be anywhere else for Marvel to go with the guy. We’ve got an arc of Vader between Episodes III and IV, an arc between IV and V, and now V and VI, and that’s it. The only way to do another Darth Vader series after this would be to go back and cover one of those three periods of his career. And I’d be up for that, but the three series Marvel has done seem a little too decisive for this. Like they purposely planned these comics because they weren’t going to revisit the character again for a while. At least, not as the star of his own feature.

I guess I could deal with that. Maybe Marvel could finally get around to exploring the Sith career of Count Dooku between Episodes I and II, or work out some loose ends with the Emperor between Episodes VI and IX. The main thing that’s been on my mind about Vader, though, is this idea that the character could just be done, and laid aside.

This is something I’ve often observed about Cell and Frieza in DBZ. I still think it’s dumb how they brought back Frieza after Trunks killed him, because there really wasn’t anything left to do with the character after he got turned into a cyborg and instakilled. There’s nowhere to go after that. His character arc was to start as the Final Boss of the entire Universe and then to get reduced to a pathetic, minor threat. You can bring him back, but your only choice, dramatically speaking, is to reset the character, which means putting him back on the same track he’s already covered. There’s no way to bring back Frieza and not have it be a retread of stuff he’s already done once before.

Cell might have some interesting applications beyond his original story, but he’s too much of a slave to his purpose. His job was to carry on Dr. Gero’s revenge scheme, and that all ended when the saga ended, so he just seems out of place whenever he appears after that. This is why I’m glad Toei and Toriyama haven’t brought Cell back, although at this rate it feels like it’s only a matter of time. The thing is, if they brought him back, what else could they do with him?

With Darth Vader, all of his most important moments have already been covered in the movies, so all that’s left is to produce some side-story content. The old Expanded Universe tended to steer clear of Darth Vader, probably out of respect for George Lucas’ prequel plans. Later, the Clone Wars projects gave us more Anakin Skywalker than anyone knew what to do with, which is basically Darth Vader content, but not quite. That’s why I dig these Marvel books so much, because there’s never been such a sustained effort to tell a Darth Vader story like this. But once it’s run its course, the only way to keep using the character would basically be to start over. I have a hard time seeing Marvel do that. They’d have to get a new writer to retell those years like the first set of comics didn’t happen. That could be very entertaining, but it doesn’t sound likely to happen.

I’m not terribly worried about getting my Darth Vader fix in the future. They’ll keep making stories about him long after I’m dead. It’s just that I’ve been thinking about the limits of what you can do with one character. I’ve long thought that you can always find gaps in the narrative that can be filled in with new stories, but maybe that isn’t true. Maybe at some point, for some characters, there’s a finite amount of things to do with them. You look at all of the Anakin Skywalker Clone Wars stories, and I��m sure someone could write a few hundred more, but would it really accomplish anything that hasn’t already been covered? Is it possible to “use up” a character? I probably won’t know for sure anytime soon.

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adins-bejoty · 7 years ago

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Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Before we begin let me shock everyone reading this by proclaiming that there will be spoilers. Do we really need to keep doing this? It's 2017, it's the internet. There's always going to be spoilers. Anyway, this is a long post (surprise!) and mostly about Luke, but there's other stuff down at the bottom. First, however, please set your opinions and emotions aside for a moment and let us give thanks for the one unimpeachable truth that all Star Wars fans should be able to unanimously agree on: This is a badass fucking land speeder.

So, I love Star Wars. I've read (listened to Audible on my daily 3-hour commute) about a dozen of the new canon books, I've read all the new comics, and I've seen every episode of The Clone Wars and Rebels multiple times. Yes I've had some issues with creative decisions, yes I'm kind of bummed that the old EU is now "Legends" and that my absolute favorite Star Wars content (Knights of the Old Republic, huge suprise I know...) is currently non-canon, but overall I've been 100% on board with the direction everything has been going.

My premiere showing of The Force Awakens is one of my all-time favorite movie-going memories. The first showing on opening night with fans in costume, lines wrapping around the block, and a highly reactive audience made for an amazing experience. The manager of the theater even came out and gave a little speech about how important Star Wars is to people before the lights went down. Then we were in it, no trailers, and the audience went wild as soon as that John Williams fanfare erupted. People don't cheer at the Marvel logo when it appears. Hell, I don't remember people cheering for the Enterprise in any of JJ Abrams' Trek movies, but one shot of the Millennium Falcon brings grown men to tears. And fucking BB-8 is the best. Can droids win best supporting actor awards?

I saw The Last Jedi at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh last Friday, so I was a day behind opening night. My audience was a little more subdued, possibly because some of them were already on their second showing, but we had the same cheers at the opening crawl and applause at the end so the experience was similar, but it will never be the same. And in general I think that's part of the message that this movie is trying to send: whatever your memories and emotions surrounding this franchise are, it can never be exactly the same as that one moment that made you a true fan. And that's okay, because the same isn't always the best.

And now spoilers...

But first! How about the backlash to this thing? It seems like there is an even split between people who really like this movie, and those who really hate it. I've yet to see a convincing argument as to why this film is as terrible as people claim, though. Just a lot of "it sucks" without much substance. A lot of the vitriol seems aimed at the perceived lack of payoff to some of the "mysteries" introduced by the last film including Snoke's backstory, Rey's origins, the Knights of Ren, and Luke's reason for exile. I've also seen quite a few claims that this movie does unspeakable, everlasting damage to the character of Luke Skywalker. (I don't agree, see below.) My absolute favorite reactions to read are from the people who bemoan the ruination of their childhood based on Luke's actions in this movie. As if years or decades of human social and behavioral development can be undone in an instant because a fictional character did a fictional thing or said fictional words that they didn't like.

Allow me to quote my thoughts on this subject from my recap of Sailor Moon Crystal:

Even more so is the utterly baffling prevalence of the notion of Crystal somehow “ruining” Sailor Moon for you? ... It cannot by virtue of its existence invalidate your affection for any other version of the story.

Slightly different circumstance, but the central thesis is the same: how does one thing totally destroy your enjoyment of another thing? You have the ability to ignore the thing you don't like. Stick with Legends, or if you never got into the old EU, just watch the original six films. Or just the original trilogy. Or just Empire Strikes Back since Star Wars content can never ascend beyond that lofty realm... Star wars isn't the sort of franchise where one big (perceived) fuck-up is going to drive away half of the fandom. I guarantee 98% of the internet pundits proclaiming that they're done with Disney and Star Wars forever will be back on opening day for Episode 9. We survived the Holiday Special, we survived midi-chlorians, hell we survived a whole rather poorly received prequel trilogy. We can survive one more bad movie.

Except this isn't a bad movie. It's a great movie in which bad things happen to good people. Kind of like real life! Now, I know there's an immediate rebuttal to be made there: I don't want movies to be like real life; I go to the movies to escape real life. True, but if we want our entertainment to be completely unrealistic, how can we derive anything more from them than simple escapism? People hold Star Wars as a source of inspiration in their childhood and have taken moral lessons from the series. Yes, most of the motivational posters would feature Yoda, but the simplest stuff comes from Luke: help your friends, look for the best in people, reject temptation, and aspire to greatness. Even a simple farm boy from Tatooine can become a great Jedi and save the galaxy. He is rightly every child's hero, including mine.

You want to know what I think about Luke dying? I fucking hate it. Luke Skywalker was a badass Jedi master who failed hard, but still had a lot of tread on the tires. I, like Mark Hamill,thought the scene in The Force Awakens where the Skywalker lightsaber is pulled past Kylo Ren's face was going to pan over to reveal the saber in Luke's hand, not Rey's. How fucking cool would that have been? In The Last Jedi I was expecting crusty, angry old hermit Luke to eventually realize "You know what, the galaxy really does need me for one last roundup" and fly off with Rey to face Snoke and Kylo together. How fucking cool would THAT have been? The two literal last Jedi going up against the two powerful not-Sith? So yeah, I hate that Luke is dead and that we won't get any grand master badassery like we saw in the EU, but OH MY FUCKING GOD I don't care because what we got was amazing and honestly the best possible way it could have happened. Did we as fans really want to see Luke Skywalker cut down by his nephew, or even worse by Snoke? Did we really want to see a possible turn to the Dark Side from the man who told the Emperor "Never!" and won by throwing his lightsaber away? No, we wanted Luke to survive the sequel trilogy and live forever happily training Jedi until the end of time because we want our heroes to have happy endings.

Except all heroes have to die sometime, and heroes, unfortunately, aren't perfect. That's what I can't wrap my head around when people say this movie was a character assassination of their childhood hero. Yes, Luke did heroic things, but he's still a flawed person who is often wrong. Becoming a hero doesn't mean your less desirable traits suddenly disappear. There are no perfect heroes, but we tend to deify all the good and forgive much of the bad. Luke has plenty of flaws: he's reckless and acts on emotion way too often. He's arrogant (see Return of the Jedi for all the proof you need) but thankfully nowhere near Anakin's level. He's fairly judgemental, especially in A New Hope. And while this isn't necessarily a flaw, he does whine a lot. It makes sense that in his old age the youthful whining has evolved into antisocial grouchiness. Also, remember that Star Wars is a space soap opera about a tragically fucked up family of drama queens who gratuitously overreact to their problems. A lot of Anakin's issues seem to have skipped over Luke straight to Kylo, but the big one that remains is his tendency to act on emotion first, and think later.

So the big bad moment in this movie has Luke at his Jedi temple suddenly feeling the dark side rising in Ben Solo. He stands over his nephew and sees the death and darkness he will unleash and for one split seconds he ignites the green lightsaber and thinks there's only one way to stop this. Then he immediately regrets it and feels (rightfully) ashamed. Unfortunately Ben wakes up, thinks he's about to be murdered and, predictably because he's part Skywalker, overreacts. Now, does Luke's action follow his character from the previous films as a guy who is prone to acting on instinct and emotion? Here are three big examples, one from each movie:

A New Hope - Sees Obi-Wan killed by Vader and immediately starts shooting at stormtroopers heedless of the danger around him.

Empire Strikes Back - Ignores Yoda's warning and jumps in an X-Wing to try and save his friends, losing a hand for his trouble.

Return of the Jedi - Completely loses control and starts wailing mercilessly on Vader after just mentioning Leia.

So yes, I do believe Luke could have a split-second moment where he considers a really bad decision but ultimately doesn't follow through. I don't understand why people think that throwing away his lightsaber and telling the Emperor he'll never turn to the dark side somehow means that Luke will also never make a bad decision or have a moment of inner conflict for the rest of his life. And to the bigger question of why Luke would just give up and go into exile after Kylo destroys the temple, well... everyone has a breaking point. Luke overcame huge hurdles and kept pushing himself and he blew up the Death Star, became a Jedi Knight, saved the galaxy, and redeemed his father. He was on his way to rebuilding the Jedi Order until that one bad decision (with outside influence from Snoke muddying the water) proved to be the last straw. It's sad to see a hero fail, but that's what makes them human and relatable. And since this is an ongoing saga,

you can have peaks and valleys of achievement and failure. For all his courage and heroic intent, Luke failed in Empire Strikes Back. He failed his training and he failed to save his friends. Then in Return of the Jedi he was the hero again, bringing Anakin back to the light. He rode that wave for almost 30 years until in a moment of conflict he failed again, but was then back in the heroic saddle by the end of this movie. It would have been unbearably tragic for Luke to die in disgrace with his last act being to turn his back on everything, but thankfully he and the audience had our cake and got to eat it too!

Luke straight up asks Rey what she though was going to happen, if he was going to face down the entire First Order with a (tee-hee) laser sword? That's the Luke we were expecting. It's the Luke I was expecting, anyway. What amazing things can Master Luke Skywalker do after 30 years immersed in studying the Force? Well, he can face down the entire First Order with a laser sword. He totally fucking does it, just not in the way we expected. I don't have a problem with the Force projection because it accomplishes so many things at once. We as an audience wanted to see Luke be a badass and he is, even if he's not bodily present. The Resistance needs to see Luke be the legend they've all heard about to restore a little bit of hope. Kylo Ren needs to see Luke to cement once and for all that he's not coming back to the light. And Luke needs to redeem himself after being cut off from the galaxy for so long by playing all of this as a distraction so Rey can rescue the remains of the Resistance.

And then Luke dies. We're made to believe it's because of the exertion of projecting himself across the galaxy, but I don't buy that shit for one minute. Obviously it was a strain on him, but after he turns off the projection and collapses he gets back up. I fully believe Luke could have fully recovered, but to what end? He's an old man now and for all the wonderful angsty frustration it's caused Kylo Ren, the Force projection is a one-trick pony. He can't pull that stunt a second time, so the only option is a direct confrontation which, as awesome as it would be, Luke would probably lose. He's made the symbolic sacrifice; there's no need for him to throw his life away on a no-win scenario. Much like Poe Dameron has to learn that being a suicide flyboy isn't the way to lead a resistance, Luke knows that falling on a lightsaber for no reason is no way to inspire a rebellion, or set an example for the next Jedi in line to carry on your legacy. To do that you project a badass immortal Jedi master to utterly humiliate your opponents while your allies escape. So Luke decides to let his legend live on and he goes out on his own terms, at peace, and having fulfilled his last noble purpose. For a farm boy who has lived through so much awful shit, it's really the best way for him to go.

Okay, enough about Luke. What about the rest of the movie? Bullet points FTW!

Loved everything with Poe Dameron. He's my favorite new character to come out of these sequels and if he's inheriting the Resistance from Leia, I'm all about General Poe doing some badass shit. "where's my droid?" The fact that he treats BB-8 like a beloved pet (and calls him "Buddy!") is so god damned endearing. Hopefully once he's dealt with the First Order he can go back to his old job as a champion for droid rights.

Leia was great in this although the Mary Poppins Force save in space was a little off. I get that the intention here is that she's reacting instinctively, like parents who get Hulk strong when their kids are trapped under a collapsed building, but I don't think we necessarily needed to see super-Leia flying through space. The hand motion, the eyes, maybe just a hint of movement would have been enough and we could have cut to the shocked faces of Poe & company before cutting to the airlock. I don't know how they're going to handle Leia's absence in Episode 9, but as a final appearance on film I'm happy with what we got.

Vice Admiral Holdo. While I have no real qualms with her function in this film and her lightspeed sacrifice was one of the greatest things I've ever seen with my own two eyeballs, I was kind of left unfulfilled by her character. That's probably because I read (Audible'd) the Princess of Alderaan book in which Holdo is introduced so I had expectations of what her character would be like going into the movie. Obviously she's several decades older than she was in the book so she would have evolved, but the younger Holdo was quirky and weird and has been described as similar to Luna Lovegood. She was fond of speaking in metaphor which Leia nicknamed "Holdo-speak" and I would've appreciated seeing at least one instance of that. But still, Laura Dern was great and I'm glad she did actually like Poe despite their head-butting.

Okay, one more thing about Luke: Nothing in this movie made me that emotional, but there was one moment that nearly wrecked me. Not "Where's Han?" or Luke and R2-D2 or Luke reuniting with Leia or even Luke dying with the majestic score and the binary sunset. No, it was C-3PO's delivery of the line "Master Luke..." and that fucking wink. Luke is (with the possible exception of Padme) the only character in the whole of Star Wars who doesn't lose his shit with Threepio. Even Leia tells him to shut up in this episode if memory serves. Luke was always calm and patient with him.

Yoda once again delivers some all-time great wisdom. "The greatest teacher, failure is." deserves to be up there with the rest of his sage advice. I've seen people complain about his "happy dance" after he blows up the Force Tree and... I don't understand why? Yoda has always been a giggly little muppet plus he's dead now, so what does he care if he lets his guard down and has some fun? I personally like the idea that one of the most powerful Jedi in history is a bit goofy and mischevious. "Lost a planet Master Obi-Wan has; how embarassing!"

Captain Phasma, oh how they continue to let you down. Her fight with Finn was great, but she literally just showed up for that one brawl. She had no presence in the film until that moment and the movie did nothing to develop her character beyond what it already was in The Force Awakens: a cool suit of armor. She got a novel and a comic book to build up her character and this is the best we could do? You know how much better TFA would have been if Finn fought Phasma on Takodana instead of the no-name stormtrooper? (His name is TR-8R. It just is.) Well, how much better would TLJ be if instead of having to escape Canto Bight police Finn and Rose have to escape Phasma, who has been dogging them the entire time? Then that last fight would have felt suitably epic. Also, she's not dead. Not if you don't see the body. RIGHT STANNIS?

Rose is a fun new character, fits the universe, and I like her. Not too much more to say. She has good chemistry with Finn and it'll be interesting to see what they do with her in the next film.

Rey being a nobody is perfect. Greatness from humble nothingness. I know Star Wars fans are conditioned to expect familial connections and for the movies to adhere to certain traditions (they rhyme!) but not everyone needs to have “that mighty Skywalker blood” to be a great Jedi. I really hope JJ doesn’t walk this one back. The only acceptable retcon would be if she were actually Han and Leia’s daughter, but at this point I don’t think you can make that work. Poor Jaina Rey.

One of the more common complaints I've seen of the movie is that the humor doesn't land as well as it should. To my memory the only humor that didn't really work with me was the first gag of Poe & Hux going back and forth like a bad phone call. It felt a little too goofy even though it's 100% in-character for Poe to be fucking around like that with a guy who only a short time before blew up an entire star system and ended a galactic government.

And while we're on the subject, let's talk about General Armitage Hux. I love with every fiber of my being how much Hux gets shit on in this film. Not because he's a badly written character or because I don't like him, quite the contrary. I think he's extremely effective at being a villain you can truly hate, especially if you know his backstory. He's like every upper-class rich little shit that you love to see knocked down a peg, and on top of that he's a backstabbing lunatic Nazi. So yeah, I love how cartoonishly evil he is, but I also love when Snoke literally mops the floor with him and when Kylo Ren knocks his ass across the cockpit of his shuttle. Considering how instrumental Hux's father was to creating the First Order I'm hoping he's a big part of the reason why it eventually falls apart. Maybe he'll try to lead an internal coup (which is totally something he would do) and it happens at the moment when Kylo Ren is about to claim his final victory, possibly by killing/turning Rey, and then Hux waltzes in and the whole thing goes to shit.

The Ships. Not the Supremacy or Kylor Ren's TIE Silencer or those badass new bombers, no you know what ships I'm talking about. Now, I've made it fairly clear in the past that "shipping" is not an activity I engage in, but this is Tumblr so here are my extremely meager thoughts: Finn and Rose isn't a thing. It's fairly obvious that she was in sort-of shock when she kissed Finn, he doesn't reciprocate, and he's totally still hung up on Rey. Finn and Poe probably should be a thing, but I think Disney is still hesitant to go all-in. I've heard some people claim that one of the final scenes where they meet for the first time is setting up Rey and Poe and... what? Finally, Reylo. Yeah they have a Force bond and shared some pretty intimate moments, but I think it's pretty clear from their final Skype call that she's literally closed the door on him.

So the legendary Skywalker lightsaber is broken now, but Rey kept the pieces. So... she's totally going to rebuild it, right? Jedi have to build their own lightsabers as part of their training and all, so that makes sense to me. It would also make sense for her to modify it into a double blade since she's obviously way more comfortable swinging her staff around.

Need to see it a few more times, but I wasn't particularly wowed by the soundtrack. I know John Williams doesn't have to prove anything to anyone (and the themes from The Force Awakens get dialed up to 11 here) but I don't remember any stand-out new pieces of music. I do love that March of the Resistance theme though. Oh my.

So those are my scattered thoughts, probably missed a few things but, yeah. Overall I enjoyed the movie. One curious thing I walked away with was a lack of any desire to immediately start theorycrafting over where Episode 9 is going to go. This movie definitely expanded the lore of the series, dashed a few people’s hopes and elevated others, but I really didn’t feel the need to start examining frames and looking for the hidden connections that might foreshadow the next big twist. For once I was happy just to experience a film on its own and not worry about its relationship to the rest of the series. I think that’s a pretty impressive feat for a Star Wars movie.

Possibly more later. MTFBWY.

#star wars #the last jedi #star wars episode 8 #review #star wars spoilers #Luke Skywalker

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chicagoindiecritics · 5 years ago

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New from Every Movie Has a Lesson by Don Shanahan: OSCAR PREDICTIONS 2020: The visual and artistic categories

(Image: hypable.com)

PART 3: THE VISUAL AND ARTISTIC CATEGORIES

The short turnaround 92nd Academy Awards arrive host-free for the second consecutive year on Sunday, February 9th, barely a month after nominations were announced. The pace has added excitement and urgency right on down to my website’s 2020 Awards Tracker. Let’s start calling some winners. As always, that prognostication data is cited in these predictions. This column examines the visual and artistic categories of designs, editing, effects, and more. As I say every year, stick with me and I will win you your Oscar pool!

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

The nominees: The Irishman, Joker, The Lighthouse, 1917, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood

Who should be here: I’ve got two picks for you where one is indie and one is mainstream. On the big end, I thought Hoyte van Hotema’s work in Ad Astra deserved recognition. On the smaller end, Claire Mathon’s dazzling natural beauty for Portrait of a Lady on Fire has won the second most cinematographer awards this season and did not get a nod.

Who should feel lucky to be there: Like much of the talent involved with The Irishman, Robert Richardson is a rightful legend in his field, but other than a few Scorsese specialty long tracks and slo-mo moves, nothing about his camera work is special in the crime epic. His inclusion feels, again like just about all of the The Irishman nominations, like a token resume inclusion.

Who should win and will win: This one is not even close and it’s going to Roger Deakins for 1917. His long takes combining monstrous crane, tracking, drone, and Steadicam work is beyond comparison and some of the insane best in history. That entire movie is a jaw-dropping “how did they do that” reel and it starts with Deakins’ open lenses.

BEST EDITING

The nominees: Ford v Ferrari, The Irishman, Jojo Rabbit, Joker, Parasite

Who should be here: Even if the single-take fakery is a gimmick for 1917, it’s a pretty damn well executed one in terms of economy and hidden smoothness from editor Lee Smith. Less is more and he should be there. More in the “more” department, the massive work it took to take thousands of hours of footage and hone the perfect documentary Apollo 11 also deserved consideration. It’s hard for documentaries to crack this category and I’ll never understand why because editing is everything in that medium.

Who should feel lucky to be there: Take all the things I said about Robert Richardson in cinematography for The Irishman and repeat it here for Thelma Schoonmaker. We get it. She’s a legend working for a legend on a big deal film, but, goodness gracious, that movie is night tight, taut, or sharp in editing. There’s a lot of fat on steak, no matter what truck it fell off of.

Who should win: Much like the sound categories, I think this is a spot where Ford v Ferrari should prevail. The work to merge the second unit shots, stunt performances, and acting inserts with practical sets and props over CGI is incredible. It deserves this outlier consideration for the win.

Who will win: I’m going to be daring here and say this one is going to Parasite. Many people love to point to Best Editing as being married to the Best Picture winner, but that only happens about 60% of the time (including last year with Green Book). A Parasite win here could rile some TV viewers up about Parasite’s Best Picture chances, and rightfully so. However, with no 1917 in here, this award goes to the next best and that’s Parasite and, luckily, the craft of the reveals of its thriller match the award itself in a fair way.

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN

The nominees: The Irishman, Jojo Rabbit, 1917, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Parasite

Who should be here: Even if 80% of the film takes place in a single location, that macabre mansion in Knives Out created by production designer David Crank and his team would have been a fun and eclectic addition to this field. For the single location vote, it looks like Parasite got that spot.

Who should feel lucky to be there: I don’t think any of these five finalists are inferior to the craft and category. Any of them would be excellent winners, even with the Knives Out wish.

Who should win: If my jaw was dropping from the camera work of Roger Deakins in 1917, the trait that dropped it even lower was the towering desolation and created destruction of the outdoor locations and sets for 1917 by Dennis Gassner. He wowed us with Blade Runner 2049 and 1917 is just as good from the guy who cut his teeth carving a baseball field in the corn for Field of Dreams. He’s got an Oscar in his living room from Bugsy but has deserved two or three more.

Who will win: Barbara Ling is a first-time nominee in this category for crafting Quentin Tarantino’s 1969 for Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. The industry loves celebrating its golden past and this award is a perfect bouquet thrown to Tarantino’s fairy tale to go with Brad Pitt’s future win. From the cars to the ashtrays, the look of the movie was positively dreamy. This is a worthy winner.

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

The nominees: The Irishman, Jojo Rabbit, Joker, Little Women, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood

Who should be here: There is no question Black Panther Oscar winner should be there to defend her title, so to speak, with her flamboyant work on Dolemite is My Name. Her work has won more costuming awards this season than any other film. This counts as a slight.

Who should feel lucky to be there: Here’s one more for The Irishman and its parade of resumes. Three-time Oscar winner Sandy Powell soaked up the era beautifully for Scorsese’s film, but we’ve seen this work before. Solid as it may be, it’s not a standout. That’s where a swap for Carter would have fit.

Who should win: Movies are a chance to really play with changing looks and characterization. The double volume of on-screen show-within-the-show roles and off-screen main characters in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was outstanding. Like the production design, not a stitch was out of place and always just garish enough to let the actors have fun. It could still win, but we know older period pieces get more love.

Who will win: .That’s why, and it’s not a bad thing, that Little Women finally wins an Oscar during this ceremony and party. Jacqueline Durran is a veteran with solid work who won back in 2012 for Anna Karenina. This is where finery gets its due.

BEST MAKEUP AND HAIR-STYLING

The nominees: Bombshell, Joker, Judy, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, 1917

Who should be here: If I were to ask you to close your eyes and picture Elton John, the eyebrows would raise and the wild looks being remembered would be a hoot. That flashy variety in Rocketman should have earned a nomination.

Who should feel lucky to be there: Angelina Jolie and her enhanced cheekbones were enough to get Maleficent: Mistress of Evil a spot in the final five as the weakest of the bunch.

Who should win: It’s not massive, but I really want to put Joker here and not just for Joaquin Phoenix’s frightening look. I think the dinge and class warfare of the movie looked incredible for this award. Give me the daring over the attractive.

Who will win: That’s because attractive is going to win. All you need to do is show a picture of Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly and this category is wrapped up for Bombshell. If you needed a second dose to convince you, try to find John Lithgow inside of that Roger Ailes facade. Game, blouses.

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

The nominees: Avengers Endgame, The Irishman, 1917, The Lion King, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Who should be here: I’ve dropped this title before and here’s another. Ad Astra has won the second most visual effects awards of the year and it was omitted from the finalists.

Who should feel lucky to be there: So help me God, if The Irishman and its crappy de-aging effects actually win, I’m going to break something. When free software fit for YouTube can do a better job that a nine-figure budget, your work shouldn’t be here to win.

Who should win: Call it lifeless all you want, but when you realize that every shot but one (the opening sunrise, in fact) in The Lion King is completely created from a marriage of CGI and cinematography innovations, you have to bow to that newfangled royalty. Their work and detail is staggering.

Who will win: I’d love to see the 1917 train keep going (and it could), but I’m going to push wishful thinking that the saga-capping effects of Avengers: Endgame take the statuette. I think there’s something worth rewarding with the volume and culmination that is its big ending. I’ve been burned here before in this category when I constantly thought the Planet of the Apes reboot effects would and should win. I think with Marvel it’s different. If it wins, I need ABC to cut to Martin Scorsese for a reaction shot of his magnum opus being beaten by the non-cinema MCU “roller coaster.” Take that, you old coot.

NEXT: The writing and directing awards

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punkscowardschampions · 6 years ago

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Jimmy & Janis

Jimmy: How'd I do? Your nan gonna give me another slap or shout me a drink next I see her? 😂 Janis: Well, I personally reckon you did alright but she's a harder woman to please Janis: I think you're outta the attack on sight group though so 👍 not bad for a night's work, lad Janis: How are you faring, I lost you in the crowd at several points so I'm dreading thinking who said what tbh Jimmy: 💪🏆😎🍻 Jimmy: Glad I had my bad boy shades, don't think I've been snapped so much in my life Jimmy: And at one point we basically had paps being so #goals Jimmy: but the insults were too slurred and 🇮🇪 to pack as much punch as you or your nan like Janis: mmblockoutthehaters Janis: not a fan of being the other side of the lens then, no? 😜 now you see my struggle, in all the ways 🙄 Janis: Yeah, they were on fine form, like Janis: Not Grace though, don't you think? Something's up and its not just date envy Jimmy: shut up you're sooooooooooo about being my muse Jimmy: yeah it was a good night all round, cheers Jimmy: it'll be drama with the flat whites or fuck boy. Lot of dumping done, wasn't it? Jimmy: Mia alone is a lot to get out of your mind 🎻 Janis: Suuuuure 😏 well, all the extra exercise with Twix is no doubt benefitting my grade in Sports so Janis: Owe ya one, don't I? Janis: Though reckon you just settlin' cos my actual model sister would charge you a fee, like Janis: More fucking fool me, ay? 😕😉 Janis: 👍 not too bruised? Janis: not just chattin' 'bout ya ego Janis: Probably right, yeah, it'll be Mia...I don't think she was that arsed about Harry, though she acted it Jimmy: I'd have to get in line, Twix'd never let me have first dibs collecting that debt Jimmy: I don't know what's more of a headwrecker that your sister is a proper model or that she's the only one #geneticsgamestronginyourgaff Jimmy: Still angling to get a pair of kicks off me? Take it up with 🎅 I did my bit on the 🎁 front 🤞 Jimmy: You better not be chatting that 😎 selectively remembering only your wins again, are you? Jimmy: Bet she's devo about Tammy #relatable 😂 Jimmy: what a giant hole in our lives Janis: She's 🥇 Janis: No matter what hype you're on Janis: True we're #blessed but don't let me catch you commenting on it again, IRL or on the 'gram Janis: I'll have to become that bitch and I don't think I've got the time tbh Janis: 🤐 nope, no complaints here, for the big man or yourself, like Janis: Hmm? I suddenly can't recall, maybe 'cos that useless bint next to us practically brained me when her club flew away from her Janis: Looks like you'll have to schedule a rematch if you wanna be covered in glory 🤷 Janis: Poor Lurch...who's the real loser here? Being such with bulllyimia Jimmy: Done and done Jimmy: Can't win 'em all...oh Tammy I thought we had something proper special babe Jimmy: what you doing today? Ready to take on the challenge any time you wanna lay it down Janis: So did she! But you will insist on bouncin' onto the next one, like 😉 Janis: make up your mind, Jimothy Janis: I'm wallowing in my pit currently...avoiding any fad diets and weird exercise regimes being implemented and spring cleaning and yet more leftovers curry Janis: 🤢 Jimmy: 😎💪 Jimmy: I envy that Jimmy: any suggestions for a film that me, Bobbin and Cass can sit through? I'm drawing a blank on an animated musical with violent themes rn like Janis: You wouldn't if you could smell me Janis: Sexayyy Janis: Hmm Janis: There's that one where all the dinosaurs die at the end? Right, they probably throw out the odd tune too Janis: I'd say Lion King fits the spec actually but don't wanna start their year off with a heaping dose of trauma Jimmy: With you there Jimmy: Fuck it I'm sticking Mulan on and shutting their gobs with sweets Janis: That'll do it 👍 no one gives a shit if the bad guy gets it in the neck Janis: especially not from a sassy lady #feminism101withgracieguru Jimmy: 😂 Jimmy: she was really cracking out the nye vids #content Jimmy: silver lining of the 💔 a good GRWT Janis: Gotta show 'em what they're missing, or whatever Janis: Think Mia had a party at hers, purely so Grace couldn't come Janis: hostess with the mostest she ain't Janis: Devvo there wasn't another shit party for us to ruin tho, obvs Jimmy: school is still days away we've got time Janis: don't tempt fate, mate Janis: you've not got the 🍀 Janis: don't think my bro or the garda can handle it Janis: fuck knows where he is, still a no-show Janis: s'my job, like Jimmy: Maybe he's with my MIA pops Jimmy: weird one that'd be Jimmy: I did think he might have a new missus, but that's going a bit far like Janis: Both in the drunk tank, for their sins Janis: Maybe, Christmas wishes and all that Janis: Could find the time to give you a bell still Jimmy: 🎻 Jimmy: Wanna come over and walk the 🐶 ? Cass and Bobby'll be as 🤢 as I imagine you are polishing off this lot Jimmy: Can't count it as weird fad often as we're out Janis: Alright, save 'em from themselves Janis: and you from losing your mind 😵 Janis: not long 'til school now, save your wishes for that like the other single mums Jimmy: Done. Jimmy: Bring Gracie if you can find her, she'll have no secrets after 10 mins with them two Janis: I have the distinct impression she's avoiding me, which is weird, 'cos pretty sure I've said worse and been forgiven quicker, like... Janis: but maybe if I tell her her fave barista boy is there she'll come out to play? Janis: we've got a load of leftover sparklers, I'll bring 'em, so make sure they've got their gloves on Jimmy: 😮 maybe its her ny resolution Jimmy: 💪😎 guaranteed Jimmy: They'll be your besties then at least Janis: Yeah, guess she's sticking to all her promises this time, she's done with me forreal, at least 'til midway through the month, like Janis: 🎻 Janis: I'll bell her but no promises you'll get your fave twin Janis: who doesn't love shiny things? bet there's some bones for Twix too, what a 🏆 I am Janis: if there was any doubt left in your mind Jimmy: 😍 Jimmy: 💕 Janis: Oh, looks like she's at the gym Janis: thanks insta Janis: I'll leave it then Jimmy: Yeah, can't promise a decent work out, hyped as Twix is Jimmy: make do with you then, won't I Janis: Looks like it, pal Janis: Unlucky Jimmy: I'm well gutted, mate Janis: Better take it up with someone who gives a fuck 😜 Jimmy: 👌 Jimmy: the dog is enraptured, thanks for the tip Janis: Stop yapping and get to moving then! Janis: I've gotta shower, its that serious Janis: let me live, boy, ugh Jimmy: [Sends a pic of him being kissed to death by Twix] Jimmy: you ain't that special, mate Janis: Ouch Janis: 🔪💔 Janis: double betrayal Jimmy: #hookedherwithmysobstory Jimmy: you did yourself over with the good advice Janis: always the way Janis: too smart for me own good Janis: i'll get back on the shelf, like Jimmy: speaking of should we take the oldies dog for them? I'd naturally be buzzing to see your nan again Janis: see, knew you loved it really Janis: worse than my sister Janis: but it is a point Janis: probably chewing through the walls as we speak Jimmy: #relatable Cass is much the same Jimmy: I better start penning my pops a note, more pages for him to have to read the better 😜 Jimmy: might stop at 5 sides if he bothers to reply to my texts like Janis: wondered what bit you was referring to there...like surely she's not wasting her time with boys already?! but gotcha Janis: phew Janis: that'd be a whole saga to try and put on a post-it Jimmy: Dad would love that, two of us out from under his feet Jimmy: Marry Bobs off if he could 😂 Jimmy: but nah she's only 😍 for Twix same as you Janis: its a real shame the gov ain't on his side for that one Janis: the travellers do it, and they all turn out FINE, geez Janis: think your Da would be obligated to at least provide you all with your own caravan though Janis: no escaping fatherhood, eh? Jimmy: 👍 stuff of dreams there Jimmy: I am about a decent caravan though Jimmy: same goes for the others, always asking me when we going back Skerries Jimmy: steady on kids that shit's still #raw Janis: Awks..that's a holiday romance for you, lads, gotta make it a one-way ticket, no returns 😂 Janis: Maybe by Easter hols you'll be able to show your face 'round there again Janis: Weather would be better too Jimmy: Funny Jimmy: But yeah #fullofgoodideasyou Janis: full of something, has been said 😎 Janis: gotta gee myself up to see that bath again 'neway, been strictly cold showers since, like 😉 Jimmy: 😏 new year, new you though so Jimmy: #yougotthis Janis: can't say 'make more of a prick of yaself in 2039' was high on my resolution list, soz about it Janis: know how much you enjoy it 🙈 Jimmy: Damn Jimmy: I was down for the challenge if you were 😜 Janis: 😳 Janis: always a fool for you, boo Jimmy: 💕 cute Janis: 🖕 do it all for the 'gram Janis: still hate u Jimmy: 💋 Jimmy: same mate, same Janis: i feel it Janis: how long can we keep this charade going, like? 🤔 Jimmy: Gotta stretch it out 'til v-day naturally Jimmy: in it for the 🎁 Jimmy: in that spirit you want me to pick you up or you gonna walk to ours when you're ready? Janis: or the next, steak and blowjob day Janis: I see you boy Janis: that said, if we eating steak and all the love-heart shaped confectionery, I better walk it 💪 Janis: this is clearly why people always get fat when they're loved up Janis: not saying weigh your Dad for proof when he finally arrives but Janis was timed out 18 hours ago Jimmy: not saying we've got one realistically Jimmy: How good's your guestimation skills? Could feel another 🏆 coming on Janis: FUCCCCCCCCCCCK Jimmy: ???? Jimmy: you okay mate?

#still worth having even tho cut short

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fluffi · 3 years ago

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so should i reply in tiny font or just regular font?

hybe should do better in spreading out the comebacks of the groups under them :/ they're already at a huge advantage, might as well use it strategically. AHA streaming mvs is so convenient for a multi. the filler vids i could use in between could be mvs from the other groups that i stan. also you know what, i still haven't watched a single final performance bc im waiting for a friend to watch with me :D

i have a chinese movie recommendation in case you want something to cry over. i still love its ost and it's been months since i watched it. i'm not sure if you watched it already but more than blue. i've never cried over a movie as much as i cried for that one. the angst *chef's kiss*. i'd do anything to wipe my memory of it and watch it again for the first time.

also sungchan is mc-ing in inkigayo every sunday! and honestly, what the hell is nct hollywood :D but a part of me thinks it's just going to be a bunch of asians living in america like johnny that'll be a part of it. just a hunch tho. imagine having all 4 units coming back in a year with like 1 unit per quarter of the year. i'm not sure if sm even has the money to do this, especially when they filed bankruptcy recently.

and i've seen a lot of twitter memes saying taro's ghosted stans T_T alexa play ghosting by txt T_T sm come on give him smth to do, you're wasting talent.

the mall didn't burn down entirely (like from the outside it looked fine). the ventilation system caught fire so it was more internal—ceilings and all that. covered things with soot(?) and ashes so the entire mall was closed for nearly 2 years. and hey, i've experienced a school fire too back when i was younger. i, too, thought it was nothing but a fire drill until i saw the charred remains of the buildings behind our school : D thankfully, no one died.

the new nct track is for a samsung commercial AHAHA it's funny because nearly everyone uses apple TT_TT and the mv screams neo culture tech tho (well as it should lmao). yes, i was talking about that part in hot sauce but yes, it grew on me too.

ateez really know how to do a performance. they put the standard so high for me when it came to performing. their facial expressions and overall stage presence just impresses me. it's been a while since i've seen idols draw me to them by those standards.

ah, the long stan list! good luck in getting through it and i hope you do have fun as you go :] (also you can check out aurora by ateez and whiplash by tbz. the songs popped up in my head as i was typing this reply, you might like them)

ohhhh, what was the pd48 scandal? i don't watch survival shows so i don't know any of the stuff going on. would you care to elaborate? about their disbandment :(( i hope you're okay now tho! are the other girls still debuting in new groups? anyone eyeing an acting career instead of being an idol?

YES, A PATTERN IN THE BIASES (if you count an analysis of two ppl as a pattern, that is.) because it's the same pattern i have for my biaswreckers :D jake & seungmin, not only do they have the same animal to represent them, they have the same 'golden retriever' type of personality that just makes you go all soft. ygwim ;n; i wish i could elaborate but both boys just devastate me in the same level and my friends pointed out that they were quite similar in some aspects.

jaemin used to send really long bbl messages :< like if there was anything he loved most it was nctzens and it was obv in his messages. speaking of dream, album repackage news today! idk what to feel bc my hot sauce albums haven't even arrived yet :D + i'm dead br0ke.

how do you even manage to read 30k TT__TT i cant handle long fics bc of my attention span :D also, yes, i found the user now, i'll check if i'll like their works soon. <33

YES YOU SHOULDVE BEEN THERE T_T what a day that was. i think seungmin is still sweet and active in bbl. not a single cent goes to waste with him. also i think i'll post the drabble some time this month.

and oml seungmin vs jake :o let's see how that goes O.O XDD

clickity-clackity AHAH do you have a mechanical keyboard? :c i wanted one too but i haven't got around to saving up for one. but yes indeed, typing asmr v relaxing \m/

sunny hyuck day, fullsun sunday, fullsunday T_T feels were very strong that day. i kept seeing edits on my twt tl and i would just s o b : D i've only stanned nct for a year but i've seen him grow so much i just wanted to crie i love him sm :') yk my mom didn't cook spaghetti for my birthday, but she cooked for hyuck's? : D

and i checked ur recs blog and indeed, full of nct T_T

also have i mentioned that your desktop thing amuses me so much HAHAH i got confused for a sec if i had twt opened or tumblr. plus, i've been wanting to mention that i noticed that our mobile themes are opposites. black and red, white and blue. it's cute XDD <3

help, people have been telling me that our asks are long but i highkey love it. i added a ‘keep reading’ for the mobile users though, sorry in advance hh.

honestly, both works. tiny font saves space but regular font does more justice for my poor eyes haha. its your call!

hybe comebacks :( yeah enhypen got lucky because they came back right before cb season so they got three wins (yay)! on the bright side, txt just got their first win and bts has six wins, so it all works out i guess. omg yes, the streaming thing is perfect. i stan like 20 groups so i have a never-ending cycle of filler mvs and its always so helpful. ooh for the final performances - you wont regret watching any of them! literally wild, kingdom's budget and talent are wild.

ooh, I don't watch any cdramas lmao. i want to but i can barely finish kdramas. if its a movie ill watch it! ive never heard of more than blue but ill check it out <3 where can i watch it?

yes yes i have just realized that sungchan is yujin's co-mc! i watched their special stage (which is literally adorable) and was today years old when i realized that the dude is sungchan pls. nct hollywood was so unexpected and i still have mixed feelings about it now. LMAO JUST ASIANS LIVING IN AMERICA...help. that would be interesting (?) but the concept reminds me of those horrendous awesomeness tv shows. lets hope sm pulls this off well and proves me wrong. lmao all 4 units coming back would probably happen, but i hope none of them get overworked :( i constantly feel like mork lee has four clones :'( also...sm filed bankcruptcy??? dang, what happened?

ugh omg yeah shotaros talent is seriously being wasted in the basement right now. as for fires, scary T-T i wasnt that fazed by them until the australia wildfires happened, and i learned about the consequences of fire and got really scared. its good that the entire mall didnt burn down though! although its weird that no one is opening it :( schools really need to tell us the difference between drills though, it might be dangerous for those rebellious kids.

yeah i just realized that the nct track is an endorsement which partly explains why i cant listen to it. the mv's visuals are stunning!! the set and people are so gorgeous aa i cant

oh yeah im not an atiny but i have acknowledged since 2020 that they have one of the best, if not the best stage presence and expressions on stage for 4th gen. i think their only worthy competitor would be stray kids actually. theyre truly one of a kind and all of them are cute especially that yeosang guy. i will definitely check out your song recommendations though!

oof the pd48 scandal is extremely complicated. to condense it in a few statements: all of the girls' rankings have been rigged since the very beginning and it was rumored that they already had their end group before the show even started. it was like this for pf48 and pdx101 (group x1) which was why x1 disbanded within a month of debuting, and izone were on hiatus for like 4 months. im not the best at explaining stuff like this haha, but i think you get it. you can check out yt or search up 'pd48 scandal', a ton of articles and videos. as for new groups, nothing has been made clear yet. theyve only made instagram handles for now and appeared on variety shows haha. as for acting career, hyewon was supposed to do acting but was forced to join pd48 so maybe she'll continue acting afterwards? nothing is confirmed yet!

lmao two similarities, its okay it counts. ah, true, i can see their similarities now that youve mentioned it, as well as how jeno is kind of like that. however, i am currently attached to jaemin so we'll see what happens from there hehe. i swerve easily.

jaemin on bubble grr, that would be a whole experience. from the bare minimum of vidoes ive seen for him wbk jaemin is so whipped for czennies. ah yes repackage! i saw the post on instagram and went to the comments to see everything screaming ‘iM bROke!’ and it was lowkey hilarious lmao. kpop is really trying to suck our money T-T.

ope the longest fic ive read is like...40k words i think? and it was by jeonginks. ill read anything eiko produces lmao, theres always so much substance in her work. ooh, tell me what you think of luvdsc’s stuff, i just finished binging their entire masterlist lmao.

seungmin vs jake yeah, i havent been catching up on skz enha content because im still obsessing over the dreamies but when that saga is over then im going to focus on my ults lmao (which might include dream soon, hehe).

yes yes i have a mechanical bluetooth keyboard that i use to connect to my computer! it literally sounds amazing lmao, its only 10am here but i feel like im going to doze off from the clickity clackitys already. i cant wait for you to get one! tell me when you do, we can match hehe.

hyuck is an aodrable brat please. hes like the best comedian of nct at this point, so hilarious and filled with variety i love him. he rose up my bias list pretty fast too. LMAO YOUR MOM IS SO COOL I LOVE HER ALREADY. if only my mom would cook for my ults’ borndays.

yes my rec blog is a mess right now, ill organize it soon haha.

omg thank you and yes my website theme is one-of-a-kind. even i get confused when i open it or edit it, and i constantly get comments about it. also i just realized our opposing theme colors and i love it! its adorable.

#long post #also im listening to love song right now haha i love it so much #also sorry for not answering yesterday hhh i got busy last night #「 asks 」#moots — [♡] ;#toffee — [♡] ;#neo-shitty

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esonetwork · 5 years ago

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Best of 2019: Entertainment year in review

New Post has been published on https://esonetwork.com/best-of-2019-entertainment-year-in-review/

Best of 2019: Entertainment year in review

It may have gotten off to a bit of a slow start, but 2019 really was a great year for movies and TV. When I was compiling my list of personal favorites, I had to limit myself to 10, because this list could have easily gotten out of hand. It was tough to decide what to cut!

This year I made an effort to try to watch a wider variety of movies than I maybe have in the past. I’ve always been drawn to the big blockbusters, but I really wanted to start supporting some smaller movies too. I’m excited because my list of 2019 favorites ended up containing a little bit of everything — movies, TV, traditional theatrical releases, streaming service content, big-budget blockbusters, and smaller-scale dramas.

I won’t argue that every item on this list is flawless, but these are the 10 movies and TV shows that brought me the most joy this year. I also decided not to rank them, because it’s difficult to compare the experiences I had while watching them.

So, in chronological order of their release, here are my 10 favorites from the year:

The Umbrella Academy

The Umbrella Academy is a weird, wild, and wonderful show. It pulls you in with an intriguing mystery, and then it’s impossible to stop watching because the characters are so complex and compelling.

The best way I can think of describing this show is that it’s a delightfully eccentric combination of the X-Men movies, “Stranger Things,” “Harry Potter,” and “The X-Files,” with a dash of “Arrested Development.” I can’t wait for the next chapter of the story.

Full review: https://esonetwork.com/tv-review-you-really-should-be-watching-the-umbrella-academy-on-netflix/

Avengers: Endgame

How do you bring approximately 10 years and 20 films worth of storytelling to a satisfying end? Exactly like this.

“Avengers: Endgame” is an epic conclusion to this stage of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Sure, some of the time-travel stuff is a little confusing, and the threads in the narrative might start to unravel if you pull on them too hard. But this movie succeeds where it matters the most: wrapping up these beloved characters’ storylines in an emotional and heartfelt way.

Full review: https://esonetwork.com/till-the-end-of-the-line-avengers-endgame-wraps-up-a-decade-of-superhero-storytelling/

Aladdin

For reasons that are beyond the scope of this blog, 2019 wasn’t the best year for me personally. I had some really low moments, and “Aladdin” happened to come out during one of those times. For whatever reason, this movie made me smile and laugh and feel better about life.

Sure, it’s not perfect, but the characters and the music were just so much fun. I don’t buy as many hard copies of movies anymore, but I definitely bought this one on Blu-ray.

Full review: https://esonetwork.com/movie-review-disneys-live-action-aladdin-a-colorful-confection-thats-more-entertaining-than-amazing/

Toy Story 4

I was really skeptical about “Toy Story 4.” Could Pixar really do it again? Did we really need another one? Was there a compelling story left to tell?

At least for me, the answer to all those questions turned out to be “yes.” Not only was this movie entertaining — at one moment I was laughing so hard I could barely breathe — but I loved the message about letting go and moving on.

Full review: https://esonetwork.com/learning-to-let-go-quick-movie-reviews-for-yesterday-and-toy-story-4/

Downton Abbey

“Downton Abbey” is one of my all time-favorite TV shows, and while I was satisfied with the original ending, I wasn’t going to say no to another story with these characters.

The “Downton Abbey” movie is just as delightful and charming as the original TV show, and when the film started, I immediately felt as if I’d never left Downton.

Full review: https://esonetwork.com/movie-review-returning-to-downton-abbey/

The Mandalorian

This show is the reason I took the plunge and signed up for Disney+, and I wasn’t disappointed. The show really leans into its Western vibe, and while it offers a new perspective on Star Wars it still feels very much at home in the universe.

Plus, Baby Yoda may very well be the best thing that’s happened to pop culture this year.

Full review: https://esonetwork.com/tv-review-star-wars-finds-a-western-vibe-with-new-disney-series-the-mandalorian/

Ford v Ferrari

Normally a movie about car racing wouldn’t necessarily draw my interest, but the preview for this movie was so good that I decided I had to see it.

The performances were outstanding, and even though I’m not a fan of car racing, I was transfixed by this film from start to stop. It’s a movie about dreamers and daredevils, and a love for a sport that goes beyond winning or losing.

Full review: https://esonetwork.com/movie-review-ford-v-ferrari-tells-a-true-story-with-style/

Knives Out

There’s nothing like a good old-fashioned murder mystery, and “Knives Out” was most definitely the must-see movie of the fall.

Even after you know how the mystery ends, the movie is still incredibly entertaining to watch based on its ensemble cast and masterful storytelling from writer/director Rian Johnson.

Full review: https://esonetwork.com/movie-review-knives-out-a-sharply-witty-whodunnit/

Marriage Story

Yes, I’ll admit it: I watched this movie just because it had Adam Driver in it (a.k.a. Kylo Ren from the Star Wars sequel trilogy).

However, regardless of my initial motivation for watching, I was blown away by how finely crafted and authentically emotional this movie was. It tells the story of a couple falling out of love, with all the nuance and complexity and heartbreak that entails. Dear Hollywood, please give this movie all the Oscars.

Full review: https://esonetwork.com/movie-review-netflixs-marriage-story-deserves-its-oscar-buzz/

Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker

If you know me, you probably guessed that this film would be wrapping up my best of the year list. I just really love Star Wars — it’s been my favorite franchise for about as long as I can remember, and the stories and characters have come to mean so much to me.

“The Rise of Skywalker” has inspired quite a bit of debate and discussion. If you didn’t love it, that’s okay, and I respect that. For me, it was an emotional and satisfying end to a 40-year story. Rey has been an inspiration to me, especially through some of the challenges I’ve faced this year. TROS will always have a special place in my heart for that reason alone. I can’t wait to see what the future of Star Wars will bring.

Full review: https://esonetwork.com/movie-review-star-wars-episode-ix-brings-an-epic-emotional-end-to-the-skywalker-saga/

#2019 #entertainment #Movies #TV #Year in Review

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maxwell-n-blog · 7 years ago

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MGSV: Let It Be Game Over

(Originally written for The Snake Soup, published on November 3, 2015)

(NOTE: The following may contain spoilers for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.)

Since when have we started taking Liquid’s advice?

After years of hype, anticipation and worries, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain has come and gone, in the same kind of flash that most games these days seem to. There was more interest in The Phantom Pain than possibly any other Metal Gear, with fresh new players jumping in for a taste of Hideo Kojima’s Tactical Espionage Action/Operations than ever before. This can be thanked to the fact that there are simply a lot more people playing video games than they were when Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of The Patriot came out, as well as the press, whether positive or negative, as the days led up to the release of The Phantom Pain. Kojima leaving Konami might have one of the best things that happened to the series, from a marketing point of view.

However, a good number of us grew up with Hideo Kojima’s long-winded storyline, or “saga” as the marketers at Konami like to call it. Metal Gear brought us many years of joy, and depending on the game, sorrow. Still, for some of us, it was just a game series with a goofy yet charming over-arching storyline, and most importantly fun gameplay, while for others it seemed to have been the most important piece of work since the Bible, with every single piece of plot and dialogue forming a sort of canon only understood by a few.

With that in mind, it’s no surprise that the first-rumors-then-news about Kojima leaving Konami, the Metal Gear franchise and the Silent Hills project (a collaboration with film director Guillermo Del Toro, for the uninitiated) caused an uproar, with or without all the facts available to the general public—but that’s another subject for another time. This uproar was to be expected, but what many did not expect, though I dare say some did, was that letting go of Metal Gear would be harder for some than for others.

Try to have a conversation or look up anything about Metal Gear, and The Phantom Pain in particular, and you are likely come across several nutty, totally-out-there conspiracy theories that’re grasping at straws and making all kinds of unfounded, silly associations about how there is something more to the game than the obvious, more than what meets the eye, and that the truth is out there, or in the game, or wherever. That the game isn’t “over” yet, that there is hidden content within the game ranging from a secret mission to a whole “act” of the game, depending on which conspiracy theory you prescribe to. Some would even argue that the cut content within the game is intentionally supposed to give you some sort of “phantom” feeling, a feeling that would usually and rationally be reserved for “disappointment”.

CUT AT WILL

Kingdom of the Flies: YouTube Exclusive Mission

Yes, it’s very true that there is more than what the naked eye sees when it comes to The Phantom Pain. This is because the game’s overall story, and arguably certain elements of the gameplay, were left incomplete upon the game’s release.

We don’t know why, but one can assume that this game had a troubled development, especially with the supposed but possibly, very likely, stressful conditions that Kojima and his team had to work under as a result of Konami’s actions. Or maybe the game just had a troubled development because the team was spread too thin trying to come up with too many different and diverse ideas that couldn’t fit the overall game that they were trying to piece together.

Content is cut all the time during video game development; it’s standard practice, a part of really any creative process. Rarely, though, is to the degree seen in The Phantom Pain, where a whole segment of the story is left untold and simply hanging (or levitating), at least within the game itself. This piece of the story was later revealed to be part of a cut mission, Kingdom of the Flies, assumed by some fans to be part of a missing “third” chapter of the game, and the rough CG and concept art of the game was released as a way to provide closure to the story. Other cut content has been noticed or discovered since release, including dialogue, information regarding guard dog enemies, decoys that look like Lisa from P.T. (the “playable teaser” for the Silent Hills project) and so on.

ATOMS FOR PEACE

Nuclear Abolition.

Then there is content that is in the game but hasn’t been unlocked or triggered yet. The biggest examples are scenes, or an event altogether if you’d like, regarding global nuclear disarmament and/or armament, which you can find on YouTube if you’d like to take a look. This event was discovered via data-mining by fans, and was not officially confirmed until recently by Famitsu. The complete and full steps necessary to trigger the event are still a mystery, though some still think the key lies in “Peace”.

Such hidden content and Easter eggs are great, and absolutely welcome. They bring players together as a community, to try and figure things out, and also create an atmosphere of mystery and intrigue around the game. It’s the kind of depth that isn’t present in many games these days, which want to be more like plain movies than interactive video games. There is a place for movie-oriented games, but very rarely these days does a game take advantage of the video game medium to an extent such as this.

The discovery of the legitimate cut content is great, as well. There’s a reason why the discovery of cut content in video games became such a phenomenon of interest, especially on the internet. There are great websites that archive cut content from video games ranging from the trivial to the momentous, such as The Cutting Room Floor and Unseen 64. Shadow of the Colossus is easily one of my favorite games, and after that game originally came out for the PlayStation 2, there was a lot of mystery revolving around the cut content for that game, though many believed that this content was still accessible and playable in the game but simply hidden, with the most popular one being a secret 17th colossus. This obviously was not the case but The Cutting Room has a neat page that details everything that has been uncovered about the cut content from the game so far. It’s really cool.

I WANT TO BELIEVE

“I was hoping you could help me solve the mystery of the horny beast.” - FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder

However, there is a fine line between healthy curiosity and batshit absurdity. Many Shadow of the Colossus fans still believe that there is a hidden colossus still lurking within the game, waiting to be found. While conceptually a beautiful idea, it is ultimately false, as it has been proven by data-mining (even though it was very obvious that this was simply a myth without the need for data-mining). Then why does this digital legend still live on and why do people take solid facts to not be true, but see it as misinformation or easy answers to complicated ruses, plots and conspiracies?

This might be an example of a game’s ideas and themes working against its audience. Shadow of the Colossus (spoilers, if you haven’t played the game and care about exploring its themes and story as a first-hand experience) is all about exploring the unknown and taking on seemingly impossible challenges. The landscapes are mysterious and the world around you seems to hide more than what you can see. You are also led to believe things that are not true; you are just a puppet or a pawn, directed to fulfill a purpose that you did not knowingly sign up for. By the end, you feel used and misled.

Similarly, Metal Gear stories are always deceptive. Your boss might actually be an evil asshole, your whole life might be part of an orchestrated plan by a faceless organization, you might not who you think you are etc. It’s also easy to see why people would obsess over the “truth”; these games have taught them that nothing is as it seems, to trust no one. The difference here, however, is the same difference between fantasy and reality.

In reality, sometimes shit happens. Things don’t go according to plan. People leave and move on with their lives, or their lives end. These are the realities of life, and life is not easy. You have to deal with real loss, real tragedy and real heartache. Letting go is a very difficult but crucial part of human life. Life is uncaring and the solutions are easy, it’s the “doing them” part that’s difficult.

Fantasy, however, does not play by reality’s rules. In fantasy, Harry Potter was not left to rot under his horrible foster family’s staircase as a meekly, lonely orphan. His parents were actually killed as part of a conspiracy orchestrated by an evil organization and their leader, and he was a special son chosen to be part of a magical world that took him away from his Muggle worries. In The X-Files, Fox Mulder was not a crazy nut babbling about aliens, demons and government conspiracies; he was right about most everything but his want for the truth was being suppressed by those who did not want him to succeed; it asks the question: what if that tinfoil hat wearing weirdo who goes on about supernatural mumbo jumbo was actually right the whole time?

It’s easier to escape than to face the truth, which is unhealthy. It’s like nostalgia, eating away at self-confidence and drowning a person’s ability to become bigger than they used to be.

There is a reason why even after countless demonstrations done to prove that the United States was indeed able to land Man on the Moon, many still believe that the landing was staged in Hollywood. It’s easier to believe the American government would lie to win the space race, because the idea of Man making it to the moon, previously considered a fantasy-place, is too hard to accept. Ultimately, it’s insulting and immensely ignorant to think that man cannot achieve such goals. That’s why Ancient Aliens thinks that when Einstein was simply chilling in his study, thinking to himself, he was actually in contact with aliens, who were uploading information to his brain (I’m not joking, that’s in an actual episode).

t’s also easy to believe that a man who created “Joakim Mogren” as a fake identity when promoting The Phantom Pain and created a secret free, cryptic-as-fuck playable teaser for what was then an upcoming game, and used Solid Snake for promotional trailers of a game where you would not be playing as him for the bulk of it, would lie and conceive a conspiracy to hide a crucial part of the game within The Phantom Pain. As a result, we have a huge amount of fans that are cooking up theories that would make even Fox Mulder’s head spin.

It’s hard to believe that a developer, highly regarded by fans to be untouchable and flawless, would make mistakes, fall below expectations or simply would not be able to finish MGSV’s development properly due to very real issues within Konami and his life.

LETTING GO

Listen to Good Guy John instead. Ironic, I know.

Mystery is healthy. However, blind but willful ignorance often leads to hysteria, which is the enemy of rational thought. More cut content from The Phantom Pain will be found eventually, and maybe the truth behind what happened between Kojima and Konami will be known. In order to enjoy ourselves for the future, we have to let it be game over. Not as a collectivist mob, but as individuals. Clinging on to a corpse is unhealthy. This is why as a society we have burials and why we keep ashes of those incinerated. Letting go does not mean forgetting, it means enjoying what you had and appreciating the memories. To honor Metal Gear, let it go. Enjoy Metal Gear Online, if that’s your thing, or help uncover the actual steps needed to be taken within the game to trigger that nuclear event. Enjoy Kojima’s other works, such as Policenauts (a fan translation for English is available) or Snatcher. Play Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake on MSX; I’m sure most of you haven’t. Enjoy the great spin-offs the franchise inspired, like the AC!D games or Ghost Babel. Hell, make fun of and morbidly enjoy Metal Gear for NES, Snake’s Revenge, Metal Gear Touch, Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops or Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance But don’t lose sight of who you are, and the reality you are a part of. Open your horizons, and you might find something worthwhile that completes you, or at least something sets you aside from the mob.

#video game editorials #metal gear #metal gear solid #mg #mgs #mgsv #metal gear solid 5 #the phantom pain #video game #hideo kojima #kojima #konami #editorial #thesnakesoup #vg #solid snake #big boss #boss #snake

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ratherhavetheblues · 8 years ago

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ABBAS KIAROSTAMI’S CLOSE-UP “This is a case of petty fraud…”

We live in one of those eras where whole nations (or nation-links) have been widely regarded as irredeemably perverse and evil. Over the years, Catholics, Jews, Communists, gays, Japanese, Germans, etc. have been subjected to fierce and massive opposition. Therefore, when approaching a film notable like, Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016), a rare artist refusing to cut ties with (though not a supporter of) militant Islam (within Iran), there is a special preparatory requirement to make very clear that our stalwart is, first and foremost, a citizen of the contemporary world, which is to say, the secular, cosmopolitan world.

In view of this, we’ll put forward a glimpse of the heart of Kiarostami’s work, a glimpse which Michelangelo Antonioni would be touched by, not to mention many other modern filmmakers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh9-uKavbu0

Only an artist alerted to an imperative of dynamics brooking no capitulation to ancient enthusiasms would find necessary that those enveloping thrusts comprising Roads of Kiarostami take the spotlight. Kiarostami’s eventual semi-exile (the regime being happy about his festival winnings, but increasingly suspicious about the content of the material and therefore suspending any further financing), whereby his final two films—Certified Copy (2010) and Like Someone in Love (2012) were produced in, severally, Italy and Japan—comprised a distress that the oddity (uncanniness) he had romanced from the days when Persian Iran was Muslim-Lite had been targeted by a stream of volcanic, though tempered, spleen. But in our film today, Close-Up (1990), that ingredient of nausea is abated. Our special investigation of this surreal saga, then, has to do with those winning roadways and their comedic (Jarmuschian) whimsy remaining a viable navigation even where Paterson-like thought-police pose challenging roadblocks.

Therefore, we put into abeyance the convolutions of this narrative, in favor of that spectacular jigger of mirth which constitutes, in flash-back, the onset of the bemusing difficulties hogging most of the attention. In Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise (1984), Eva, bored with snowy Cleveland (and, before that, bored with antiquated Hungary), can’t resist getting taken for a ride to exotic Florida by her deadpan and big-talking cousin, Willie. In Kiarostami’s delighted reinvention of that sputtering shot for the stars, he brings to our consideration the lady of a bourgeois house in Tehran, Mrs. Ahankhah, boarding a local bus on her way to a very predictable home, and—bus experience lacking the heights of Persian excitement—she’s more than merely tolerant of a fellow-swarm (Hossein Sabzian), reading in the seat next to her, from a book he’s just bought, pertaining to the hot auteur, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and his hit, The Cyclist, and going on to tell her that he is the golden globe who wrote the screenplay in question and directed the film and (with the lady urging, “I hope we [particularly herself and her film-arts-avid two sons] meet again) soon declaring that he’d love to put her and the rest of her family into a new creation. (Herewith we have not only the useful precedent of Jarmusch; but also Federico Fellini’s The White Sheik (1952), where a bored honeymooner, Wanda, runs off (as against a visit to the Vatican, with her far less volatile groom) to play a part in a photo-comic shoot starring a big-talking celebrity the romantic aspects of whom she has been crazy about for years.) Though Mrs. Ahankhah does not take her marching orders, as Eva does, from Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and his “I Put a Spell on You,” she does, in the presence of the rough-edged fellow-passenger, come into a realm of fantasy. (“Please take it. I wrote it… If you like, I’ll autograph it,” the big talker proceeds. She, like Wanda, cues up her windfall to settle her mind about the implausibility: “Famous directors have their own cars…” (He’s researching new scenarios.) She also rushes his way, due to her sons’ having graduated as engineers but only having found less impressive work, the notion, “My boys will be thrilled!”

Exaggerated thrills do in fact constitute a veritable implosion defining one of the two phenomena which Kiarostami sends our way with sensuous panache and thematic wit. The film begins with a sensationalist/ journalist, Farazmad, accompanying two military police, in order to cover the fraud’s arrest at the home of Mrs. Ahankhah (more accurately known, in line with customs confusing to us—as is a local police force run by the federal government—as Mrs. Mohensie) and her quasi cinema pre-production family artists, roped in by way of Hossein having obtained the phone number of the thrilled boys, from which the troupe forms up at a theatre showing The Cyclist, as a first step to more magic. The SWAT trip has been made in a taxi for the sake of not alerting the supposed hardened criminal, another nod to big-deal, Willie, and his excursion to supposed wild things. (Kiarostami’s trade-mark setting of the interior and immediate exterior of cars having much to do with Jarmusch’s motif as to automotive [mis-] adventures.) “Things might be tricky,” the sensationalist hopes, not having a clue about how really tricky this matter is. We would soon be privy to the law and order timbre of Tehran, by way of Kiarostami’s interviewing the police captain and hearing the latter maintain, “As you can see, we’re very busy here…” We can see, as the interview proceeds, more than a dozen officers standing about, eavesdropping on the welcome novelty the interview represents. That picture of drift includes a trooper re-lacing his boots, and thereby providing another bemusing diversion.

Unimpressive sensationalism hits the jackpot, though, in one area we might overlook, namely, Hossein, the sputtering powder keg, whom the judge, in hearing him defend his bizarre trespassing, declares his reality to be “a case of petty fraud.” Before casting some light on the defendant’s erudite sophistry, it does, I think, make a lot of sense to hear from his mother (in a hijab, but still revealing her vigorous rural roots), who petitions the court to “forgive” him. She cites his unemployment, forcing her to support them all. (“The first seven years were peaceful; then his wife began complaining about the poor housing, and she left with one of their two children.”) Perhaps, like Mrs. Ahankhah’s college grads, he does some odd jobs; but, like them, his heart is not there (though Mrs. Ahankhah does at one juncture point out that the mechanical engineer has become a going concern in his bakery sideline). Hossein derives from a far more modest socioeconomic strata; but he lacks not only certification but a will to forego that fantasy fixation upon his entitlement to crafting “thrilling” cinematic discoveries. During his long-winded moment in a court being, from his perspective, a more sombre jumbotron usually touching off any number of well-rehearsed, orgasmic ingratiation, he insists that as sublime as it could get would be his showing, as an actor, his pain as elicited by an unforthcoming horde of public enemies. The filmmaker he impersonates, Mohsen Makhmalbaf (b. 1957), was an ardent supporter of the populist theocracy coming to power in 1979. He was an outspoken enemy of those, like Kiarostami, who had produced something other than hurtin’ sagas, when the Shah was nudging the country into the modern world. Kiarostami, then (almost miraculously fending off that tsunami—but a tsunami comprising those finding diversion in watching someone tying his shoe-lace), would find in his coverage of the trial itself and the more or less bombastic self-dramatists being part of that “petty” blip, a way to, while seemingly giving a break to the pains of marginal energies, quietly disclose that second phenomenon transcending the farcical first—that first which Jarmusch pinpoints as “jerking off.”

Hossein, after a lenient imprisonment of a few days, tearfully meets his hero, good old Mohsen (invited by Kiarostami to bring his celebrated skills to the architectonic of who walks and who talks), and heads off behind the auteur of The Cyclist’s moto (under the other than teary camera of the master of ceremonies, who tracks the ride under the auspices of a deliberately sputtering sound-system). The salt of the earth stop at a flower market, where the one who was told by his hero, “Stop that!” [blubbering] has chosen a bouquet of yellow blossoms, setting off a stern demand, “Not yellow!” At the now-familiar locked gates of the victims of the scam, the latter part of the ride being restored to unhindered kinetic possibility of a world without excuses, the celestial figure chirps into the security phone, “You’ll see him in a different light!”

You’ll definitely never see him in a different light—that incipient light which Mrs. Ahankhah displayed in the bus. From Kiarostami’s perspective, the only different light that matters has to be light-years distant from moralist caretakers. Close-Up brims with multi-layering, self-serving verbosity. Its Antipode, which, in the best of all worlds, would be its salient antithesis, is a phenomenon of sensuous dynamics absolutely or nearly silent. The way this latter sphere comes to bear confirms the film as part of an agile reflective task to convene a full-scale consideration of what has not, to date, been taken into account. (During the trial, the defendant pleads, “My love of art should be taken into account.”) After the journalist’s non-stop gabbing in the taxi— “It’s a hot news item!” [as hot as all those wonderful YouTubes keeping people up all night]—the taxi driver, waiting for the arrest to take place, has some quiet time. He had mentioned being a former air force pilot, on which the populist newsman rattled off a dopey formula which carries a sense far beyond populism: “Air forces on the ground; ground forces in the air…” (The latter also, on seeing the location of the scene of the crime, poses the unintentional wisdom implicit in, “How strange, my greatest story should take place on a dead-end!”) The cabby steps out to the deserted road and soon his eye catches the long-range presence of jet-streams coming from each wing of a big jet, against a deep-blue sky. Dynamic cogency that requires no hype. From a pile of rubble by the curb, he finds a discarded bouquet of tiny flowers (by contrast with the huge spray ferried by the two revolutionaries to the family more or less dreaming the Persian Dream). His final bit of free-time involves nudging with his foot an aerosol cylinder having lost its jet. It jauntily rattles downhill, a reminder that air forces on the ground can stage a kinetic rally of ground forces in the air. (This Heraclitean dialectic comprising another aspect of the Persian Dream. Kiarostami has found an actor who resembles the Shah of Iran to play the part of a grounded high-flyer.) Farazmad, the dispenser of smallish dreams—his headline off the presses in deliberate cliché-style reading, “Bogus Makhmalbaf Arrested”—scrambles door-to-door along the street where the Ahankhahs live, trying to find a tape recorder to use in covering the official incarceration. As he enacts this let-it-all-hang-out idiom, he, in his frenzy, kicks into the air that aerosol can, sending it along that trajectory as before; and the promise therewith of some improvement revisits us at a level of wit and wisdom only one of the greatest filmmakers could manage. (One later rare shining moment occurs during the police raid, as seen from inside the comfortable home. There are a few graceful trees in the yard, their golden autumnal leaves being a relief from the virtually non-stop gracelessly calculated opportunism. We learn that Hossein—dead to anything living—moots cutting them down during the “pre-production.”)

A frequently floated interpretation of this subtle filmic disclosure is to enthuse about the methodology of filming an actual event by including those who lived it. (“Based on a true story,” the credits point out.) The nub of this insistence is to construct, in the Makhmalbaf style, a great heart stirring in the midst of marginalization, having become a slam-dunk for the patrons of hot docs. In Kiarostami’s interview at the jail with Hossein, pertaining to filming the trial, he asks, “Is there anything I can do for you?” “You could make a film about my suffering,” he quickly replies, failing to have well perceived or cared that that is not the kind of film Kiarostami wants to make. (During that interview, our helmsman asks if the prisoner knows his body of works. Hossein’s affirmative lacks any enthusiasm for a mode of production clearly intent on energies he does not wish to experience. Solidifying this impasse is the filmmaker’s reply to the request to construct a vanity vehicle. “I can’t promise anything…” The gulf separating the two figures captured by Kiarostami’s camera in the visitor’s area of the prison could be said to center upon the ego-drenched melodrama of The Cyclist, wherein an Afghan refugee in Iran stages a sensationally self-destructive 7-day marathon bicycle exhibition with a view to gaining funding for the sake of his critically ill wife. So sold on the ultimacy of that intent, Hossein insists the lesser-in-his-eyes obscurantist convey to his superior that “The Cyclist is part of my life!”

What does soon transpire (due to Kiarostami’s intervention with the court to expedite a court date) is the product of Hossein’s many years of portraying himself as, first of all, a directorial genius—on the basis of a deluge of saccharin films from many sources (Makhmalbaf’s The Cyclist being a recent craze, released in 1989)—and, in a whimsical pivot, an even more gifted actor. The Ahankhah family spokesman for the plaintiff is the (double-threat) arts-enthusiast-civil-engineer who describes incidents where the pious charismatic very much harbors monetary predations upon the star-struck affluent, by which his long purgatory could be ended. With “rehearsals” underway, there comes a moment when Hossein, leaving for home, asks the now-accuser for a ride on the youngster’s motorcycle, a gambit drawing from the fantasy-auteur a threat that, were the kid to get into a crash, thirty or forty of his cronies would ransack the tidy home. This quip engenders a chuckle; but then the opportunist asks for and receives 2000 tomans for travel expenses and contingencies he’s not inclined to describe. “I needed it,” he maintains to the judge. His argument that the fraud (from the perspective of others) is essentially a failure to understand that he is indeed at the heart of cinematic verity— “I really was him” [Makhmalbaf]—is delivered with soap opera keening and self-pity. After a day with the star struck family, during which he feels their “respect,” including their still vague consideration to fund the scenario for the up-coming hit, The House of the Spider, he describes himself being “confident” on the basis of the multiple “trust.” But, every melodrama needing a shot of conflict, he tells the assembly (at one point he tells Kiarostami that he’s his audience), “I had to shed that role” [on leaving the “set”] … I was still the same poor guy… I developed a complex” [about living the hero of Makhmalbaf’s The Cyclist and not being able to thrill the world with rare skill], which “audience” Kiarostami would describe as bathetic, if he were not making his statement in film action.

Within Hossein’s desperate obsessions, there may obtain jets of sterling possession having nothing to do with Makhmalbaf’s plodding and occasionally murderous self-importance. Just as kicking an aerosol can can hardly be understood as engaging a cycle of creative sensibility, the predatory quagmire Hussein has chosen to settle for has virtually nothing to do with art as an elicitation to a lifetime of vigorous daring and buoyant joy, which (given the fondness for antiquity) must always seem strangely new. At the beginning of the interview with the family of unwelcome notoriety, Mr. Ahankhah tells Kiarostami, “I don’t know what your intentions are…” We, having been given the opportunity to contemplate a case of pettiness far outstripping the con man who would maintain he is above jerking off, can come to terms with the vast outrage darkening world history while still, as with the lady of the house, keeping options open, such as they are.

We’re left thinking not of the presumptuous pest, but the far more nuanced maturity of Mrs. Ahankhah. After her first coming aboard Hossein’s vision of 1001 Nights—from her purchase, forestalling the deadly boredom of her family and circle—she fades into the background. Sitting, silently, in the court, she seems to have startlingly aged (with far more grey hair apparent than on the day when she first saw some daylight in the situation of Hossein). Within the domestic scene visited by Kiarostami, the stilted and phoney self-promotion by the men relegates her to the function of servant. Her husband brags, “I knew from the start exactly what was going on. And I always had the situation well under control. I led Mr. Sabzian along, as a lesson to my children…” The prissy civil engineer reams off a river of excuses and others’ faults to impress upon the notable that he’s an overlooked treasure. He denounces the lack of “raw material” as a factor of the poor employment picture. (The irony of a dearth of “raw material” far more appreciated by the interviewer than the interviewee.) He slaps down the only remark that day his mother finds to hold promise, concerning his brother’s beginning to find value in his bakery management work, with the vacuous snobbery, “I prefer artistic work to selling bread… My brother didn’t study all those years to sell bread…” He finds outrageous that the reporter (getting something right for a change) has portrayed them as simple folk. And that brings us back to the lady of the house and her apparent dead-end.

Kiarostami, like Jarmusch, knows that the gift he can generate with his films is as much about the alert viewer than the dazzling architectonic Hossein being, in addition to his fixity of primitivism, near [close-up] and yet so far. The taxi driver, being brought up to speed by the reporter about the identity theft of the filmmaker, declares, “I don’t have time for movies. I’m too busy with life…” And yet his readiness to track dynamics far surpasses the cinephile’s going nowhere, within the purview of what a movie means to Kiarostami. Asking for directions to that dead-end which may not be entirely a dead-end, they come to a couple of pointed conclusions: “Ask an adult.” And, confronted by a farmer taking his livestock to market, “We’re off to see a turkey of our own.” Mrs. Ahankhah mentioned enjoying The Cyclist. She didn’t add that it was a highlight of her life. Where would such superior judgment go, in a place like Tehran? Houdini-like Kiarostami had his ways. The already straitjacked lady might decide, after the farcical fling with Hossein, to cut back on her viewing (migraines being so useful). Were she ever to encounter a Kiarostami film, would she become intrigued? Were she never to see another film, her being on the spot would not be over.

#abbas kiarostami

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notanotherbookreview · 8 years ago

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Paradise Gardens, Dystopian Business Proposal?

Paradise Gardens, ultimate real estate project 2250s (4/20/17 New Edition published by Pelekinesis Publishing Group, www.pelekinesis.com)

"If Madge Chilton wasn’t sure she was alive, it was clear she wasn’t dead. The problem was a matter of personal style and professional necessity. Being pleasant and agreeable was the stock and trade of public relations. Who cared about the emotional burn-out after decades of calculated pleasantness—her real personality mourned like a memory? Eject self-pity, she thought, crossing the eerily deserted lobby of the crumbling New York Sheraton. You can’t afford it. Wasn’t it her reputation for equanimity that helped her win Paradise Gardens?

Madge reached the peeling brown and gold enameled elevator doors and hit the Up button. Where was Security at 9:30 Sunday morning? The conference was at ten. Greenfield was expecting her to deliver his guests in good condition. No easy teleconference for this job, the content was too sensitive. Why they needed outside PR and Greenfield had chosen her when he could have had anyone. “Cracker-jack,” he said. Big agency quality yet small enough for the personal touch. Small is right, she thought, examining herself in a mirror beyond re-silvering. She pressed the elevator button and took a last professional look."

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” TALE OF TWO CITIES

“What’s creativity but the instinct to destroy in order to start over? We are starting over, but this time we won’t destroy ourselves.”

“To that inspiring idea,” said Nate. “I look forward to seeing you all in Paradise Gardens?”

Paradise Gardens New Edition by the author of The Anarchist’s Girlfriend.

The world pf PARADISE GARDEN is controlled byThe United Business Estates, after the Old Fed’s dissolved. The Unconnected, outside corporate enclaves,exist on the entirely polluted surface. In 2055, the U.B.E. flees for the last great real estate project, PARADISE GARDENS.

Advance review of PARADISE GARDENS New Edition. This definitive edition has significant new material, original illustrations, preface w/historical context, Reader's guide.

Feb 20, 2017 Carla Sarett on GoodReads

Upton Sinclair meets Philip Dick in Susan Weinstein's dark, dystopian novel, which is illustrated by the author. In it, a quasi-messianic real estate mogul creates an underground "paradise" from which to escape an ecologically damaged world. There's not much joy here-- predictably, even sex is sanitized (but it's still around) and life is organized through a database. The novel spans centuries, shifting back and forth; as characters appear and re-appear, no happier or wiser than when we last met them. Personalities are bleached out, in this grim, corporatized future in which a "lucky" few get to live in a joyless Paradise, and the rest are left to fend for themselves or fight. It's no secret who seems worse off. A timely, ambitious novel

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

PELEKINESIS TO PUBLISH PRESCIENT PARADISE GARDENS, AN ORWELLIAN NOVEL

“From the infinitely imaginative mind of Susan Weinstein, Paradise Gardens spins a fabulous web. Clever, funny, serious, and prescient. Lovers of Aldous Huxley's and Margaret Atwood's dystopias are in for a satisfying treat."

—Sonia Taitz, award-winning author of The Watchmaker’s Daughter and Great with Child.

"One of the most disturbing yet oddly funny science fiction/dystopian sagas I've ever read. When corporations have wrung every drop out of nature and mankind has no other option but to build entire communities underground, how do you spin it to make it seem like a dream destination? You call it PARADISE GARDENS of course and you sell it like everything else. When we have no natural water, no natural food, and even the wind and the sunlight has been poisoned you will still have hucksters selling whatever is left for top of the line prices. A thought provoking story well conceived and brilliantly executed."

--Patrick King, author of the Shane Cullaine detective series

In the 1980s of Reagan’s America, Susan I. Weinstein wrote PARADISE GARDENS, an Orwellian speculative fiction that imagined a corporate feudal world, the United Business Estates, after the Federal government dissolved amid ecological breakdown. In the 2250s, Nate Greenfield, real estate visionary, with the help of P.R. maven Madge Chilton, sells corporate business on his “eden underground.” Left behind are the Unconnected, people outside corporate protection. Capitalism has devolved into feudalism so total, that employees are conceived to fit the needs of business.

Suspended between the settings of 2250s on the Earth’s surface and 3011s underground, chapters alternate with a revolving cast of characters. Fates are determined by the Psychologicians, who manage the civilization’s data base. Yet, when model employee Janet McCarthy finds herself caught in a web of alternate identities, only her lover Michael can attempt to cut her loose. At stake, is the reset of the planet. In this cautionary near-future, Upton Sinclair’s classic It Can’t Happen Here, has already happened. It is a vision at once strange and familiar. For instance, though written pre- Internet, there are Information Pirates dedicated to keeping facts free.

“It may look like a vintage filing cabinet on wheels, but it’s a supercomputer capable of retaining the genetic information of the human race and the requirements of your corporation. Not just projections of how many individuals will be needed for your work, but the qualities of those individuals and the number of people essential to consume your products"

PARADISE GARDENS is the second of three groundbreaking novels by Susan I. Weinstein to be released by independent publishing house Pelekinesis. The Anarchist’s Girlfriend (Dec.) and Tales of the Mer Family Onyx (June) complete her definitive new editions. Each includes a beautiful new layout, preface, visual material and other expanded content.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Susan I. Weinstein is a writer, playwright, and painter. Paradise Gardens was read in-progress, at the original Dixon Place and at Darinka, whose archive is now part of NYU’s Fales Library and Special Collections. Pelekinesis published the new definitive editions of The Anarchist’s Girlfriend (2016) and Paradise Gardens (2017), previously serialized by maglomaniac.com. Susan’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in literary magazines, such as The Metric and The Portable Lower East Side. Currently, she is at work on a WWII novel based on blacked out V-mail. NEW EDITION of Paradise Gardens by Susan I. Weinstein Publication Date: April 20, 2017 ISBN: 978-1-938349-50-8 Suggested Retail Price: $21.95

Pelekinesis full catalog and ordering information available at www.pelekinesis.com

To pre-order book directly: https://squareup.com/store/pelekinesis/item/paradise-gardens-by-susan-i

weinstein

WHY THIS BOOK NOW? Read preface if so inclined.

Excerpts from Preface to Paradise Gardens

It was the age of Reagan, 1980s, when I began Paradise Gardens. I had just read a book on how capitalism evolved from feudalism and was living in "Morning in America." I began to imagine capitalism devolving into a modern corporatized feudalism, as a conservative ideal of America. Originally entitled Inside the U.R.S. (The United Religious System), the novel was written as a cautionary tale, since this was a time of ascendancy for far-right religious groups. Some were believers in the rapture, the apocalypse and rise to heaven of the faithful--after the 4 horsemen did their work. It seemed those in power were doing all they could to accelerate the end times.

Whether messianic or fiscal ideals, they manifested in actions, such as closing mental hospitals and having patients on the streets with no treatment. A vague plan for patients being integrated into "the community" never occurred. Benefiting corporations, stockholders and generally wealthy individuals was the higher objective. They had risen, because they were superior beings. It was a point of government to serve the elite doing the deity's work. Ayn Rand was again in vogue, along with a social Darwinism.

This attitude trickled down, not any financial benefit to average people, from huge tax breaks and unfettered business. I remember a casual conversation at a bar with a Wall Street investment banker. He told me, quite earnestly, that I should leave my rent-controlled apartment. I was preventing the real estate from achieving its market destiny. I was impeding the greater good of business. So before 1984, in this environment (an ethos culminating in 1987's "Greed is Good" in Wall Street), I began to dream Paradise Gardens.

The novel began with an image of a young woman in a corporate office, who was a model employee. In that time, I worked temp jobs in corporations and had a publishing job in the devilishly numbered 666 Fifth Ave building, which had a lush red carpet. I also was a publicist for Bluejay Books, which focused on science fiction classics in beautiful hard covers.

I was a literary person, who had an interest in utopias, from Thomas More's to America's Utopian experiments, from the Shakers to communes in the 1960s. Writing press kits and talking to people like Harlan Ellison, Vernor Vinge (whose True Names anticipated the Internet), and most of all Theodore Sturgeon, widened my idea of classics.

Sturgeon, who started out wanting to be a fiction writer for The New Yorker, fairly invented in the '50s the genre of something weird in the suburbs. Spielberg once acknowledged that if he hadn't read Sturgeon in his youth, he would not have made his suburban movies (his E.T. is a direct cousin of Sturgeon's story, "It!") Sturgeon also inspired Vonnegut's janitor Kilgore Trout (one of his various roles in Vonnegut novels). Science fiction could be literary and down to earth. I read Philip K. Dick and remember how Time Out of Joint blasted the complacency of day-to-day life. I could see the direct line from Kafka's Penal Colony to Dick's Man in the High Castle.

But my roots are in social realists, Zola and the Americans, Dreiser, Dos Passos, and Sinclair Lewis. Lewis' It Can't Happen Here is a cautionary tale about fascism, through America's Jaycees and Lions Clubs. Patriotism is flacked by a president, an Ad Man selling America a bill of goods. It was written in the thirties and I considered it a period piece, though a very plausible one. Paradise Gardens has an edge of satire and Dick's wide-ranging freedom of invention. This story grew, was improvised, cut back and redrafted for about ten years.

Paradise Gardens is a dark book. It begins when the Earth's surface is too polluted to support human life. In the wake of the dissolution of the Old Federal government, corporations flee underground to the ultimate real estate project Paradise Gardens.

I have been haunted by what occurs, because it is lived by characters who became real to me. And as the story was always present, in the back of my mind, I dreamed segments, as well as imagined them awake. The characters evolved their world in my consciousness. Before it was serialized, I found I had to update things that had already occurred in my book, before they happened in reality. The World Trade Center is partially destroyed, the Information Pirates, their billboards and missions to preserve facts, operated before there was an Internet. Some things had to be updated for our time.

Now we find ourselves at what to the apocalyptic seems the beginning of the end of our democracy, with a president-elect who has sold angry voters what appears to be another bill of dubious goods. To the more pragmatic, this presidency just means four years of a regressive agenda--yet it's crucial for the international climate crisis, which can't be undone. Like all dystopians, I hope that reality does not continue to merge with my fiction.

If a cautionary tale has a function, it raises consciousness of what can happen--to ward it off. This novel may be the equivalent of shamanic practices, where a tribe wards off a disaster by transferring negative energy to an object. Some also use earth to cleanse negative energy, water or fire to change its nature. Knowledge for any society is the best protection. And in our time, perhaps negative visualization has a function. This novel can purge our fear, allow a passage for changing dark "unthinkable" visualization to a positive future. Paradise Gardens is a passage and at the end, there is unity--of people, place, and nature.

S.W.

#dystopia #Paradise Gardens New Edition #Susan I #Weinstein #Pelekinesis

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