#some final fantasy cat designs are SO OBVIOUSLY final fantasy. it's endearing

[cats-in-video-games]

Coco from Cid and Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon: Labyrinth of Forgotten Time DS+

[entamewitchlulu]

lulu does flash reviews again

hey it’s been a while since i did one of these, anyway i just finished Princess Connect and I have some Thoughts so this is genuinely just me rambling about it

So, Princess Connect Re:Dive. It’s essentially a 12 episode long commercial for the associated role playing mobile game.  It follows the adventures of the Gourmet Guild, a group of four adventurers whose goal is to investigate and enjoy the various foods of their fantasy world. 

The Guild is made up of Yuuki, ostensibly our protagonist: a somewhat blank-slate sort of character who’s obviously supposed to be whoever your face character in the mobile game is, but who is actually, surprisingly, rather charming. He has lost his memories after some unknown battle he participated in with a bunch of former party members, and tends to respond to things in monosyllables, preferring instead to communicate with thumb’s ups and “mn!” in most cases. Despite this, he seems to be a very sweet boy who cares about his friends and is eager to do his best.  Personally, I found him to be kind of a breath of fresh air in terms of male protagonists of fantasy shows otherwise populated by women.  There’s not a single bit of “lucky pervert” tropes, he doesn’t seem at all interested in pursuing or flirting with any of the other girls, and only one of the girls is interested in him romantically. He’s generally pretty straightforward and good-hearted, so at worst I could call him boring - but even so, again, I found him charming.

Next is Kokkoro, an elf from a small village sent by someone who appears to be a goddess of some kind to find Yuuki and assist him as he recovers his memories. Kokkoro is, in a word, cute. She’s the only member of the cast who is interested in Yuuki romantically.  Despite this happening immediately after she meets him, it sort of makes some sense to me, since she’s clearly been taught that he’s a special and important person whom she is duty-bound to serve, so it makes sense to me that she would hold him in high regard - and since he’s just genuinely so...genuine, it makes sense that it wouldn’t take long for a more sheltered girl to develop feelings for him. And, happily, she has a personality outside of this attraction as well: she’s reliable, patient, and good at sewing, and she enjoys spending time with the rest of the guild.  Her silly faces she makes every time Yuuki gets chewed on by a wolf are hilarious, too.

Third up is Pecorine, who, while Yuuki is supposedly the protagonist, is pretty much set up to be the real protagonist of the show. Pecorine is not-so-subtly secretly the princess of this fantasy world, Landosol, however, it appears for some reason someone else is acting as ruler. Pecorine is ridiculously strong, ridiculously peppy, and always hungry. She’s literally made of nothing but love, joy, and excitement for whatever the next day will bring. She’s always helping people and seems to consider making others happy to be her life goal, alongside eating lots of yummy food. Everyone she encounters eventually becomes her best friend, even when they start off by trying to steal from her. She’s straightforward, doesn’t seem to notice when people don’t have her best interests in mind, and yet, beneath that, she is extremely lonely and vulnerable. If you couldn’t tell, she’s far and away my favorite character of the show.

And finally, there’s Karyl: a cat girl who is, in my opinion, the perfect example of a cat girl. She’s initially a loner who doesn’t see the need for friends, and is, apparently, supposed to assassinate Pecorine. As Pecorine doesn’t notice, she quickly inducts Karyl as her new girlfriend best friend, and Karyl, for all of her tsundere, don’t-touch-me cat vibes, absolutely starts falling for Pecorine’s kindness back.  While she’s the one to call out the guild’s stupid plans and ideas, she generally ends up joining in on the shenanigans, much to her eternal chagrin.

So, I don’t mean to make this just a description of the show, because I do have thoughts and opinions, but I felt like setting up my feelings on the main cast was important before I got into the details of the show itself.  From this point forward, there will be spoilers.

So, what this show does right:

As I mentioned in my talk about Yuuki, in terms of “1 male protagonist surrounded by girls”, it’s a relief to watch a show where the main cast is just all a bunch of good friends and they’re not just all hanging on the bland main character.  Each of the cast is given their own time to develop their own personalities both with each other and outside of each other, and they’re all, genuinely, rather endearing.  There are two characters who show up later who are a bit annoying about their care over Yuuki (calling themselves his big and little sister respectively), but since they aren’t main cast members and connect the show to a larger “what happened before this?” narrative, I didn’t mind it so much.  Plus, despite a cast of all girls in a mobile game, outside of a few skimpy outfits and Pecorine’s occasional boob jiggle, there wasn’t a SINGLE bit of fanservice, which shocked me for this genre. No upskirts, no accidental boob touches, no lewd comments or innuendos.  I was floored, and in a good way.

The character design really isn’t bad for a show based on a mobile game. Characters are distinct in design and personality. The best design is, of course, the girl who is Just a Llama. 

I actually really liked being thrown into this world where it was very obvious that something had already happened Before, but you were only given pieces of it.  It built a very intriguing premise by starting us off seemingly after the climactic battle goes wrong, and adds a sense of unease here or there about knowing that something is a little bit off, but you don’t quite know what.  Not getting all of the answers at the end of the show wasn’t a dealbreaker, either, because I knew I wouldn’t going in - it’s a mobile game show. The story is still going in the mobile game, so they won’t play all their cards in the adaptation.

Karyl and Pecorine are definitely the main characters of the show, and while I’m sure it wasn’t intentional, their story very much feels like a love story, and I just really, really enjoyed that for what I expected to see going in, I instead got two girls who were allowed to have a complicated and yet very sweet relationship that developed slowly over the series into a truly beautiful climax.  Speaking of Pecorine, as well, I have to give some props to the plot twist about her character. It was obvious to me for a while that she was the princess of Landosol, and I assumed that her parents were dead.  I kept wondering why she was leaving her people to the whims of her impersonator instead of taking back her throne, and it was something that sort of bothered me throughout her seemingly cheerfully ignoring what her usurper was doing to her kingdom.  Finding out that the fake princess had, in fact, simply replaced Pecorine with herself in everyone’s memories, leaving Pecorine with no idea what to do and deciding to disappear knowing that even her own parents didn’t remember her as their daughter was a shocking, and powerful, plot twist.

When it’s good, it’s really good.  There are some genuinely heartfelt and powerful moments.  The animation is surprisingly good, beautiful to watch especially during fight scenes.  The final scene especially with its emphasis on Karyl and Pecorine really touched me, as it was clear they put a lot of effort into just the last few frames to make it really touching.

And here’s what this show does wrong:

When I said that when it’s good, it’s really good, the same can be said that when it’s bad, it’s bad.  The main problem with this show is that it wants to be everything.  It wants to be a comedy.  It wants to be a drama.  It wants to have deep character drama and heartfelt moments.  It wants to have intense battles and evil villains alongside a story about four friends making sandwiches out of monster meat.  The comedy bits and drama bits are both solid enough on their own, but smushed together, it makes for a tonally dissonant show that cheapens some of the more heartfelt moments.

The show takes way too long to even get into its main conceit, too.  I think it wasn’t until episode 4 that they started their Gourmet Guild - and then even after that, the food hunting sort of disappeared in a lot of episodes so that you kind of forgot what their goals even were.  And even when the food episodes happened, they almost felt like filler.  Because of the show’s lack of focus, it was hard to truly enjoy any part of it.

And I cannot forget to mention that though I praised the character design in the good stuff section, there were some...concerns.  Episode 3 introduces a fatphobic, borderline racist design. He is shown as cruel, violent, gleefully mean, and morbidly obese in a cast that is otherwise made up of skinny characters.  And worse, he’s the only brown character in a sea of pale, white-coded characters.  His appearance in episode 3 almost made me stop watching.  He showed up briefly in several more episodes after this, and it sucked every single time.  Despite a lot of the other things I loved about this show, I really cannot recommend it to anyone with a clean conscience just because of this character. He’s distressing and uncomfortable to me, so I can’t imagine how a POC might feel while watching it.

Genuinely, if even one or two of their “here’s a cute girl” designs had been Black or brown, I would have felt way better.  But the juxtaposition of this guy being the only dark skinned character in the show combined with his abhorrent personality just really, really distresses me, and I think it’s a warning that people should be aware of before giving it a try.

That being said, overall, I don’t think Princess Connect Re:Dive was a bad show.  As I said, there was a lot of elements I enjoyed, and I will probably go look and see if there’s any Karyl/Pecorine art out there, and since the app is Japanese only, I might even go and read the continued plot somewhere.

So this wasn’t much of a “flash review”, I had a lot to say, I guess lol.  Anyway, if anyone else watched it, please let me know what you thought~ I’d be interested to hear anyone else’s take.  For my part, I’ll give Princess Connect a solid 6/10.

[avaantares]

FFVII:REMAKE - A Review

So I beat the game two weeks ago and started writing down my thoughts while they were fresh in my mind, but I didn’t post anything then because my one IRL friend who is also playing it hadn’t finished it yet and I didn’t want to risk posting anything spoiler-y. But the extra time has allowed me to play through the game again on Hard difficulty, which has allowed me to reconsider and elaborate on some of my thoughts. And frankly at this point I just need to dump my Very Big Opinions somewhere, so... here ya go.

I discuss visuals, gameplay, character and story below. I’ve tried to keep spoilers minimal up front, though obviously if you want to go into the game totally cold, don’t read this. All major spoilers are clearly tagged. All of it is below a cut to spare your dash.

Also, there are pretty pictures, because why not?

First, my background with this franchise: I played through the original FFVII multiple times; I’ve watched and rewatched Advent Children and Last Order, played Crisis Core, gave up on Dirge of Cerberus despite my deep love for Vincent Valentine (sorry, VV, but your game was just a mess), and lamented that Before Crisis wasn’t available in my country. I even played (and own!) Ehrgeiz, the obscure fighting game that featured the main cast. (Still bitter that they didn’t keep Miki Shinichirou as the voice of Sephiroth. He’s one of my faves.)

^ Ehrgeiz, a mediocre fighting game that forever endeared itself to me by including Turks!Vincent Valentine as a playable character. 💖

In short, I’ve been waiting for this game for DECADES.

So. Here we go. My thoughts on Final Fantasy VII: REMAKE.

The good:

The character models are very pretty. With individual pores, threads and scuffs visible, they’re so detailed that it’s almost impossible to reconcile them with the mouthless sprites from the original game – even more so than Advent Children (and dear goodness, that was over a decade ago now, wasn’t it?). Still, they’ve kept the costume details and absurd proportions largely intact (Barret’s fists are literally larger than Tifa’s entire head, yet somehow it works visually), so it’s not too much of a departure from the familiar.

They’ve kept the aesthetic. I was afraid the game would try to update the iconic world of Midgar, but by and large, it’s full of visually-arresting designs that preserve the gritty-industrial look and feel of the original.

Japanese version is included. BLESS YOU, Square Enix, for including the Japanese voices and character animations. Not only is it impossible for me to hear Cloud in anything other than Sakurai Takahiro’s voice, but the Japanese script is a bit nicer to the characters. I’m not really keen on the English dub… but more on that below.

They fixed the spelling of Aerith’s name. This may seem like a minor point, but considering it’s been 20 years and I’m still bitter that Devil May Cry still hasn’t corrected “Nelo Angelo,” it’s a small victory.

Improved combat. Admittedly, I wasn’t sold on the new combat system at first, but after playing through the game twice, I’ve come to really like it. It has a few rough edges and can get chaotic in some battles, but it does a decent job of blending the feel of an action game with turn-based strategy. The fact that you can switch to a more traditional turn-based system if you prefer is also nice. (I haven’t tried Classic mode yet, though.)

Weapon customization. The Skill Points system allows you to upgrade your loadout instead of acquiring new gear. The tutorial was somewhat lacking (I didn’t quite figure out the multiple-core-unlock thing right away), but I appreciated the ability to add materia slots or stat buffs rather than just cycling through a dozen swords that Cloud apparently keeps in his back pocket.

Background dialogue management. On the whole, the conversations as you run through town enhance the story without slogging down the gameplay; you don’t have to stop and talk to every single resident, because snatches of their conversation reach you (and your on-screen chatlog) as you pass. You can stop and listen for more detail if you want, or you can just keep moving. The extra worldbuilding is really nice.

The music. The orchestrated versions of the original themes are excellent (and some of those music cues gave me goosebumps… Did I spend way too many hours immersed in the original game? Probably). I can take or leave some of the collectible jukebox tunes, but the background music in general is good. (But did I earn that Disc Jockey trophy? Yes, yes I did.)

Supporting character development. Jessie, Biggs and Wedge actually have characters! And personalities! Clichéd ones, admittedly, but it’s an improvement over the original game killing them all off within the first few minutes. The game also does justice to the Turks, and actually surprised me with how much depth of character it gave Reno and Rude in particular (perhaps setting them up for a mini redemption arc so players forgive them for dropping a plate on tens of thousands of slum residents?). Their moments of concern for each other and (brief) crises of conscience made them more than the stock villains they were in the original game, more in line with their temporarily good-aligned characters in Advent Children. Tseng, likewise, was on point. However, I do have to qualify all this with one irate question: Where the heck is Elena?! Seems like the female characters are always getting left out… /sigh/

Improved plot devices. REMAKE cleans up some of the more questionable and outdated content from the original. As you likely already know from the demo, the new game somewhat exonerates the protagonists by having Shinra blow up their own mako reactor to turn public opinion against AVALANCHE (possibly because someone finally realized that it’s hard to sympathize with characters who are willing to melt down an entire reactor and kill a bunch of innocent civilians). AVALANCHE are still eco-terrorists, but they’re… terrorists with a conscience? I dunno, at least they feel bad when people die now… Likewise, the weird and uncomfortable Honey Bee Inn segment of the original game has been reborn as an amazing dance extravaganza. Less voyeurism/prostitution, more Vegas floor show (complete with minigame choreography) and makeover. The whole Don Corneo scenario is still hella creepy, but frankly, there’s nothing that can fix that.

Series references. Fans of the original will appreciate all the inside jokes and direct references to the original game and other franchise entries: One-off comments about Chocobo racing; a broken console in Wall Market that shoots at you; a framed picture of the original 32-bit Seventh Heaven; ads for Banora apple juice; side mentions of characters and plot devices from spinoff games; PHS communication… The game definitely pays tribute to its history. They even recreate the original loading screen and several of Cloud’s iconic poses/animations throughout the game:

The neutral:

Recycled gags. Look, I know Advent Children was the ultimate evolution of FFVII for a while, and admittedly, it did some things very well. The running gag with Rude’s sunglasses and the victory fanfare being used as a ringtone are some of the best moments in the film, in part because they were so unexpected. But as much as I enjoyed the repeated nods to AC in this game, they felt a little desperate, like there were no new jokes to insert so they had to double down on the ones they’d used the last time this franchise had a renaissance. (See Rude’s broken sunglasses, below.) And fitting into the series as a whole, it feels a little weird. Why is Rude’s ringtone the same as the clones’ from Advent Children? Does Barret really need to sing the victory fanfare over and over when he defeats an enemy? Is there supposed to be some history behind that song that was left out of the worldbuilding? It just feels too meta.

Arbitrary localization of names. I don’t really grasp why it was necessary to rename so many items and characters for the English market. Some changes make sense for localization (e.g. Whack-a-Box certainly works better for an American audience than Crash Box), but others seem arbitrary, like changing Aniyan Kunyan to Andrea Rhodea or Mugi to Oates (a play on the meaning of his name in Japanese, but... does it matter?). And then… well, I don’t want to spoil A Major Plot Element, but there’s another thing that changes names from one English word (in the Japanese track) to a different English word. Why? No idea. It doesn’t affect gameplay, and it’s not really a problem, but listening to the Japanese track, I found it jarring to have the subtitles contradict what I was hearing.

Underutilized characters. While the whole gamut of original FFVII characters make appearances, several of them aren’t used to full effect, or aren’t used at all to advance the story. Rufus Shinra’s bossfight is a decent challenge, but while his character was vital to both the original FFVII and Advent Children, his presence in this game is little more than a cameo. His fight could be cut or swapped out with any other boss, and it would have zero effect on the plot. Similarly, while Hojo is a key player in the full story (which this game doesn’t cover, since it’s only a fraction of the original timeline), he’s largely wasted here, except as a means of extending play time by making you wander through corridors and fight a bunch of monsters for “research.” (I have no idea what his motivation is; you’d think he’d be more interested in recapturing Aerith or Cloud, but instead he just... opens an elevator and lets them leave? after they beat up some midbosses.) Reeve Tuesti actually has a solid presence in this game, but since he’s ONLY ever active as himself, there’s no explanation for the random Cait Sith cameo in one scene (players new to the franchise probably have no idea why a random cartoon cat showed up for a few seconds and was never mentioned again). Obviously the plot arcs have to change when the game is covering only a few days’ time in a much longer story, and the major players need to be introduced at some point if they’re going to feature in later games in the series, but from a narrative standpoint, there are an awful lot of superfluous characters doing things for no reason in this installment.

The bad:

THE PADDING. Dear goodness, there is so much padding to make this a standalone game instead of just the first chapter of a longer adventure. I got really, really sick of running literally from one end of the map to the other on side quests – and that’s me, an avowed trophy hunter who spends hours scouring dark corners for collectible items in other games, saying that. So much of this game felt like time fill that didn’t really advance the story. It’s also full of unnecessary new characters with improbable Squeenix hair, like Roche the super-annoying motorcycle SOLDIER (below), or Leslie, Don Corneo’s doorman who somehow merits his own backstory and side quest. (Though in fairness, every FFVII sequel has added superfluous characters, with Crisis Core possibly being the worst offender.) But it just felt really drawn-out and bloated for a game of this generation. If this game had been as compact and tightly-written as the other games I typically play, it probably only would have taken me 15 hours to beat instead of 50. (I don’t actually know how many hours I spent on it the first time through, as I didn’t check the play clock before restarting on Hard difficulty. I do know it took me over 110 hours total to complete the game on both modes, though much of the second run was spent dying repeatedly on a handful of nasty fights. Hard mode removes items and MP replenishment, and if you run out of MP at any point during a chapter, you’re going to die. A lot.)

The pacing. Related to the above... the Midgar portion of the original game was just the setup for a larger story. It wasn’t meant to have its own complete dramatic arc so much as to introduce you to the world and the major players. Consequently, there are some really odd beats in this story, as well as a total lack of urgency in your mission. There are no natural places to slot in the side quests and minigames, so they’re shoehorned awkwardly between plot sequences. “Quick, our friend is in mortal peril and needs our help!” "Okay, cool, we’ll go rescue her after we spend ten hours running around town doing random errands for townspeople and playing games with the local kids.” Uh... what?

The graphics just aren’t as good as they should be. While the character models are gorgeous, there are a lot of low-res background textures and weird polygons that don’t quite match up with other components. Most egregious are the Shinra logos, which frequently get close-ups as part of the fixed camera work and, frankly, look like lossy JPEGs. (See image below, screencapped from a PS4 Pro. Those jagged edges on the logo are present throughout the entire game.) There are weird clipping errors and artifacted images and reflective surfaces that don’t reflect, making the game look more like something from the PS3 era than a 4K late-gen PS4 game. (And it’s not that we don’t have the technology: Uncharted 4 was released back in 2016, and the rendering of its vast world was twice as pretty. Devil May Cry 5, released in early 2019, has far more realistic textures and object interaction. Granted, those are different types of games with fewer NPCs to render, but I feel like there’s no excuse for a game this big to look this mediocre.)

The HUD could be better. The lower-corners concept is okay, though it took me a while to train my eyes to travel between both sides of the screen and track the fight action. But for a long time, I didn’t even notice the commands in the upper left corner of the screen, and after playing through the game twice I still have no idea what they say because I couldn’t focus on the tiny text long enough to read them while trying not to die in combat. (I just looked it up; apparently they’re combat control shortcuts? Huh, that would have been useful to know.) It wasn’t until my second time through that I realized there even WERE separate controls on screen during the motorcycle minigames; I had resorted to panicked button mashing to figure it out the first time through because there was no tutorial (you’re just dropped into the action) and, having ignored the small text for the previous hundred combats, I had no reason to look for on-screen instructions there. Not that it would have helped, since on many backgrounds the text in the upper left is really difficult to read (see below). It’s worth noting that I have better than 20/20 vision and played this game on a large TV screen and still had trouble reading some things; on a smaller TV, or for someone with less acute vision (like my sister, who is blind in one eye), I think even the basic menu controls would be difficult to see. While you can resize the font for subtitles, my cursory glance through the menu did not uncover an option to increase the size of the HUD. 

Inter-fight menu mechanics. Specifically, the inability to save (or save loadout settings) between fights in a multi-part sequence. There are several back-to-back fights in which it is necessary to switch characters or change gear between bosses. The game treats them as one continuous fight, though it does allows you to access the equipment menu by holding square during key cutscenes. Which is good, if you only have one of a particular materia or accessory that you need to switch between characters, and in most cases when you die the game lets you restart just before your current fight instead of restarting the whole sequence -- also good, since some multi-stage bosses can easily take 20-30 minutes to beat, and if several of those are strung together in sequence, you’re in for a long play session to get past them. But since it’s treated as one fight, you can’t save between bosses (more than once, I had to leave my PS4 running in Rest Mode overnight and just hoped we didn’t have a power glitch), and if you happen to get killed and need to restart the fight, your loadouts reset. Which means if you’re, say, fighting the end boss on Hard difficulty and get killed in the first two minutes -- which happened to me a lot -- by the time you restart the fight, sit through the unskippable cutscene, access the menu and rearrange all the materia and accessories you need, you’re spending five or six minutes gearing up for two minutes of play, and then doing that over and over again every time you die. It gets really old.

The English dub script. *deep breath* Okay, look, I know I can be a bit elitist about translations, but I really do not like the English adaptation of this game. It makes Cloud come across as less socially-awkward and far more of a deliberate jerk, Aerith is mouthy and even swears (which is not accurate to her original character), and it downplays some of the symbolism that’s more obvious in the Japanese script. One quick example: When Aerith gives Cloud a flower, she says (in Japanese), “In the language of flowers, this means ‘reunion.’” It’s subbed/dubbed in English, “Lovers used to give these when they were reunited.” That’s a subtle difference, but since the concept of “reunion” is a freakin’ huge part of the FFVII plot, and since Sephiroth was on screen literally seconds before that line is delivered, my brain automatically went, “OMG REUNION!!!” while I’m guessing people listening in English only picked up on the romantic subtext. It’s a pretty minor thing, and of course translation is always a complex balancing act between literal meaning and local market understanding, but the English version just seemed to me to have a different vibe overall. (Unfortunately, the English subtitles are the same as the dub, so unless you can understand the Japanese audio you’re kind of stuck with that dialogue.)

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[WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW THIS POINT]

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- …And my #1 complaint about Final Fantasy VII: REMAKE is…

…it’s not actually a remake.

Sure, the game starts out the same way and covers a lot of the same events, but fundamentally, it’s a sequel, not a retelling. It’s evident from Cloud’s future-oriented visions throughout the game that something else is going on, and the ending MAKES NO SENSE if you don’t already know the story. Heck, even the rest of the game doesn’t really make sense if you don’t know the story -- Sephiroth’s presence is never explained; Zack isn’t even introduced, just shows up randomly at the end; Cloud’s flashbacks of Tifa and her dead father in Nibelheim are left as a complete mystery (and since she evidently remembers the burning of her town, judging by her dialogue outside Aerith’s house, why doesn’t she even react when Sephiroth shows up?).

The core elements of the plot – the Feelers (Whispers) preserving a specific fate; the three entities from the future (whose weapon types just happen to correspond to certain named characters) defending their timeline; the return of post-Advent Children Sephiroth (the only time we’ve seen him in human form with one black wing), who has inhabited the Lifestream since his death and promised that he would never truly disappear, who in the end appeals to Cloud directly for an alliance rather than attempting to control him, because he knows now that Cloud is strong enough to defy the Reunion instinct; the change in the outcome of story events in which Biggs (and, unconfirmed as to which timeline he’s actually in, but quite possibly Zack) now survives his intended death -- all point toward Sephiroth trying to manipulate destiny into an alternate outcome in which he is victorious, and using this naive version of Cloud to facilitate it. That means this game is taking place in an alternate or splinter universe, created at some point after the events of the original Final Fantasy VII, and possibly even after the events of Advent Children.

All of that is fine from an overall continuing-story perspective – it opens up a lot of interesting possibilities, like the fact that Aerith might survive now that Cloud has seen prescient flashes of her death (among other events), and there are opportunities for more story twists and changes from what players might expect. But touting this as a remake of the original game has the potential to confuse players who are new to the franchise. FFVII was groundbreaking back in 1997, and it defined JRPGs for an entire generation of Western gamers. But that was more than two decades ago, and a lot of current gamers weren’t even born then, so while they’ve probably heard of the classic game, they aren’t necessarily steeped in its lore. FFVII:R relies heavily on prior knowledge of the series to carry its twist ending, so it largely fails as a standalone game.

Also, speaking as a longtime fan of the franchise… I honestly found the ending rather lackluster. It was a twist, of sorts, but not the sort of shocking, mind-bending revelation that made the first game so iconic. Granted, it’s hard to follow an act like revealing that your protagonist’s entire identity is a lie, not to mention killing off one of your main characters a third of the way into the story! But when the surprise ending is just, Surprise! We’re going to change things up a bit this time around so you aren’t entirely sure what’s coming! Also, here’s a gratuitous Sephiroth fight because everyone expects that, even though it doesn’t serve the main story at all nor resolve any conflicts previously established within this game! it smacks of Different for the sake of Being Different, not for the sake of a really amazing storyline they’re hiding up their sleeve. It’s a bit of a let-down, and I find that I... just... don’t really care that much. Which, for someone who’s been a fan of the series for nearly a quarter of a century, means there’s a Big Freaking Problem somewhere. If you’re not keeping the attention of your die-hard fans, how do you hope to build a fanbase of players new to the franchise?

Given the pacing and story issues inherent in this game, I’m not convinced that the following game(s) in the franchise are going to be structured any better. Considering the amount of pure side-quest padding they did in Midgar, I have no idea how they’ll maintain that same tone on something the scale of the World Map portion of the original game, unless they just completely eliminate things like Fort Condor and the submarine and the spaceship side quests. I have a feeling the Gold Saucer is going to be reduced to a Jessie flashback, a Chocobo race (probably to win a key item), and a battle arena run like the coliseum in Wall Market in this game. If they include all the story elements and side characters from the original, this series is going to be a dozen games long.

Still, on the whole this game was enjoyable, and I’m glad I played it. It wasn’t as good as I’d hoped, but they haven’t completely killed off my interest, so I’ll probably continue with the series whenever the next game comes out. Though I’m not really sure if the higher-priced edition I pre-ordered was worth the extra money, so I may wait and see how the next game is shaping up before deciding which version to get...

But if they don’t give me a really pretty (playable) Vincent Valentine in the next installment, I may riot. I do have priorities.

[deltaengineering]

Winter Anime 2017 Part 3: The one where I get lazy

It’s that time of the season where I didn’t get around to doing these posts for a couple of days, which at least gives me an excuse to go through a lot of shows very quickly. I’ll start with the especially worthless shorts.

Nyanko Days

Nyanko Days is 2 minutes of a friendless highschooler cat-lady-in-training hanging out with her moe archetype cats. Can’t say it isn’t cute, but... yeaaah.

One Room

It’s pretty incredible that One Room is apparently an original, since it’s essentially the final boss Dark Souls Male Gaze Simulator 2017 of VN adaptations: Four minutes of your moeblob neighbor asking the viewer to study with her, presented in first person. And man, that guy just can’t keep his eyes from wandering. I’m not going to lie, compared to the usual dumb comedy short this is at least something else, even though it’s obviously terrible. The funniest thing is that the already have Female Gaze Simulator 2017 lined up for next season.

Piace - Watashi no Italian

Back to things you’ve seen before, this is Working in an Italian restaurant. It being so short prevents any character stuff from occurring so it’s just manzai comedy, moeblobs and boobs with a slightly weird character design. Unlike the last few seasons bishoujo shows are not rare in this one, so I don’t see why you’d take this over any of the others.

Chiruran - Nibun no Ichi

I have no idea what this is supposed to be, since it’s apparently a spinoff of something else? In any case it’s some vaguely Touken Ranbu-ish thing where chibi boys with swords are cute. Whatever.

Kemono Friends

We’re done with the shorts now, but this is the one show that I can’t believe isn’t one. Not only is it classic short material (cheap and badly animated CG, gijinka hangout concept, based on a mobile game), it also has about enough content to fill 2 minutes. But it’s not two minutes. This isn’t the worst show I’ve watched this season, but it has to be the most boring: a girl who is a girl and a girl who is a serval walk around for 24 minutes and talk about... well, nothing, unless you count dropping properly capitalized jargon words like “Friend” a lot. Oh, and there’s a few instances of completely laughable “action”. Suffice it to say that the barebones personalities on display here can’t sustain this, and the only other Friend who shows up briefly is a hippo who doesn’t manage to add much variety. So it doesn’t even do a good job of showing off the game’s character designs, which was clearly the intention here. The studio must have been very surprised that Nexon paid for 12x24m of this, and their struggle to fill that may be amusing to think about but doesn’t make this any more watchable.

ACCA - 13-ku Kansatsu-ka

Someone sure likes their handsome guys in uniforms. ACCA is shameless styleservice: Apart from the pretty boys (and girls) in broad-shouldered suits and ties, this features great art direction, a very pretty setting and cool jazz music. It’s just that the content is almost gleefully anti-interesting: What we have here is basically Rolling Girls, but about a guy with bedroom eyes who travels around looking cool while smoking, eating cake and... auditing. Yes, looking at spreadsheets has never been this stylish. Somehow this entire thing seems like the result of a dare, but I can’t help being intrigued nonetheless. The style can carry it for a bit, and maybe the plot will pick up. And if it doesn’t, it’s still possible that I can get used to it being mainly about its own presentation - Non Non Biyori for hepcats and male tailoring afficionados, essentially. Gonna keep an eye on this.

Chain Chronicle - Haecceitas no Hikari

It turns out that Chain Chronicle had some movies previously, and while I can’t say if those help with understanding it, it’s never a good idea to drop the viewer right into a huge brawl involving about 30 characters with no introduction whatsoever. I get the appeal of opening your series with everyone getting spanked by the final boss right at the start, but come on. After that’s over, Chain Chronicle turns out to be, well.. a serious mobile fantasy game adaptation. Which means all your favorite rare cards show up for a second and then some generic plot about saving the world from the Dark Lord starts. It seems to have quite a bit of money behind it, but if it has any amount of originality or ambition, I'm not seeing it in the first episode and that’s where it needs to be for me to give this a second thought.

elDLIVE

eIDLIVE is a Weekly Shounen Jump manga by Akira Amano, whose main work is Hitman Reborn, but is mainly known to the more discerning crowd for the Psycho-Pass character designs; my first impression is that the main character looks a whole lot like Akane. But unlike Butcher-brand grimdarkness, eIDLIVE is a silly action comedy that seems to trend young even for the Jump crowd - read, it’s a bunch of random nonsense with outrageous faces. It splits the difference between juvenile humor ala Heybot and a standard shounen superhero plot, and that’s pretty painful both ways. The only thing it has going for it is that it has a colorful, stylized presentation, but looking like a more stylish HeroAca doesn’t sufficiently endear it to me either, especially since a Jump adaptation by Pierrot is likely to be rather... long, both in runtime and in slow plot bullshit.

Gabriel DropOut

Guess what, Dogakobo is adapting an ostensibly funny manga about cute girls again. And of course it looks pretty nice as usual; so let’s talk about the source material. Gabriel DropOut is about angels (and demons) that visit a regular high school for some reason. Its one joke is that the angels range from lazy slobs to outright rotten, and the demons range from responsible and nice to being too stupid to be evil. What a twist! The astute watcher may notice that this is essentially Sansha Sanyou with the conceit much more clearly pushed to the forefront, and this doesn’t even have the occasional crazy sakuga outbursts of Sansha Sanyou while not being any more interesting. In a season where this type of show is making a strong comeback, I see no reason to bother with it unless you need to watch all of the bishoujo anime.

Hand Shakers

If you told me that Hand Shakers is a subversive art piece from the fringes of the superflat movement, I would be inclined to believe you. Of course, that’s probably not the intention here: this is GoHands, and making eye-searingly ugly and garish anime is just what they do. And they’ve outdone themselves this time, their trademark Instagram color gradient filter is only the start here. An out-of-control camera that highlights the Google Sketchup-tier 3D backgrounds (with the added benefit of the 2D foregrounds often not quite matching up, to nauseating effect), the CG “special” effects that Gonzo did better in 2004, the outright use of photo cutouts for anything too complicated to model, the bizarre character work that resembles a cheap mid-2000s eroge, the random wandering highlights on shiny objects; if this was Takashi Murakami or Inu Curry, we’d all be scrambling to see the hidden meaning in this dumpster fire that could easily double as a scathing parody of KyoAni’s recent love of postprocessing. And ironically that meaning wouldn’t even be hard to find, since the story (as far as I was able to follow it, reading the subs is hard when your eyes are bleeding) could also double as a satire of shitty shounen plots: A guy gets superpowers by holding hands with his waifu and has to fight other pairs in ridiculous relationships; clearly someone thought this was very meaningful indeed, especially when the enemy pair is an asshole and his BDSM sub (incidentally a plot point last seen in none other than Valkyrie Drive). On top of this, the script does the impressive double whammy of only blatantly expositing via lots of jargon without actually explaining anything.

So yeah, Hand Shakers is absolutely, stupefyingly horrible, to the point where I’m totally down to watch it. It’s probably not meant to be a genre sendup like Mayoiga was, but with a bit of Death of the Author it can easily double as one. And hey, it’s still easier to digest than Occultic;Nine.

Idol Jihen

You know, an anime about a version of Japan where politics are run via idol competitions really has no business being this fucking boring. With that setup, you’d at least expect it to be a comedy (or better yet a satire - just read the above sentence again, it basically writes itself), but somehow it only manages to be a slightly above-average regular idol show, with as little as you can say about those as usual. Usual characters, usual music, usual ganbaru. Seriously, it’s pretty amazing how little the politics aspect ends up mattering, that must have taken some effort. I didn’t really feel Macross Delta, but that at least did a better job making its “idols where they don’t belong” subject matter work. It’s possible that this show discovers its potential somewhere along the way, but if the beginning was a fakeout intended to show that this is run-of-the-mill idol shenanigans, it may have done a little too well at that; my takeaway was mainly that silly universe aside, yes, I’ve seen this before, and no, I don’t need to see more of it.

Kobayashi-san Chi no Maid Dragon

So after years of “Dogakobo is the new KyoAni while KyoAni is off doing their own thing”, KyoAni is back in the game of adapting ostensibly funny manga about cute girls. I’m not shocked that the results are pretty much identical, this is what happens if you adapt 4koma humor in a flat, colorful style and put some effort in it. Maidragon (the manga) is, if nothing else, better than Gabriel DropOut, but not decidedly so. Production values aside (and while nice, Maidragon is no Nichijou and not even a Sansha Sanyou), it’s just the standard magical girlfriend shit of yore; that the main character lucking into a magical maid is female here makes very little difference in practice. Kobayashi as a character is at least a bigger draw than the usual nothings in something like this (and definitely bigger than zany boob dragon maid Tohru); she’s moody, somewhat acerbic and a maid fundamentalist - i.e., anti-fanservice/cosplay maids. If I’m going to watch one of these shows, it might as well be the one that has me as the main character... but it’s entirely possible that I get tired of this very quickly.

Kuzu no Honkai

Kuzu no Honkai (aka Scum’s Wish) is based on a hyped drama manga, so I expected to see the next 3-gatsu, and I’m still not convinced by 3-gatsu a whole season in. But where 3-gatsu is overall still mostly a warm iyashikei blanket where even Rei’s depression due to hilariously tragic backstory seems mostly intended to elicit wanting to give him a hug, Scum’s Wish is, for better or for worse, the real deal: A sexually charged story about awful, not even remotely likeable characters, most closely related to something like Aku no Hana. As of episode one it pulls no punches with the horny kisses and it’s noitaminA, so it’s a looker too - it’s cool how everything is in shoujo sparklevision except when it comes to the making out, which comes across as pretty grimy. In theory I’m all for something like this, but well... watching a girl fuck some other guy because she can’t fuck her brother, who is fucking some other girl, who is the one that the guy fucking the first girl can’t fuck, is just not what I’m into, especially if I’m not even supposed to like the characters. Pity Fuck: The Animation is something that I feel like I shouldn’t disregard on its first episode alone, but I felt the same way about Aku no Hana and didn’t end up finishing that either.

Little Witch Academia

So here we go, the other big name of the season. Unsurprisingly, the LWA TV reboot is still LWA, so it’s pretty good. The animation remains pleasantly cartoony and expressive and it’s generally made with a lot of care. I still can’t help feeling slightly let down by it though: The basic concept of LWA already got threadbare halfway through the second movie, and since this just starts from the beginning again, there definitely isn’t anything new. The best I can come up with is that it’s even more of a Harry Potter clone than it was before (yes, that is actually possible), but that’s not winning it any points. Another weird thing is that the action, while hard to criticize on a technical level, comes across as strangely unengaging - I usually blame the editing in these cases. In any case, LWA is entertaining to watch for now but it has to go somewhere with its story and characters really soon if it wants to fill 24 episodes of TV anime. I can only forgive it treading water again for so long, no matter how well it’s put together.

Marginal#4 - Kiss kara Tsukuru Big Bang

And finally, here’s the idol boyband anime of the season. The only one, if I’m counting correctly. We used to get more even half a year ago, and to be quite honest I can’t really tell the difference anymore. It’s like all of those with all the characters one of those always has and comes in the variety without the self-insert main girl, if you want the finer details ask your local UtaPri specialist. Really the only thing that raises an eyebrow is that this is about four guys who try to start a school club while already being in an idol group, which seems slightly backwards? Having your cake and eating it too, maybe? Apart from that incredible innovation, possibly the most forgettable show in a forgettable genre.